Chapter 4: Tough Cemetery

Tough Cemetery

The inside of Chloe’s trailer was a stark contrast to the decay outside. It was cluttered but clean, smelling of old paper and coffee. Books were stacked on every available surface, and local maps, yellowed with age, were pinned to the walls with colored thumbtacks. It was the den of a researcher, an archivist. For the first time since returning to Hogeye, the tension in my shoulders eased a fraction.

“So, the Hogeye hum,” I began, taking the cup of black coffee she offered. “It’s more than just a hum for me.”

I told her everything. Not the war, not Dr. Evans, but the part that mattered. Derrick. The dare. The suffocating silence inside the Esther trailer. And the three knocks from under the floor. I watched her face as I spoke, expecting to see a polite mask of disbelief, but her expression only grew more intense, more focused. When I finished with the story of the identical knock in my apartment closet, she didn’t flinch.

“So it’s not just the lot,” she murmured, more to herself than to me. She tapped a pen against her teeth, a quick, rhythmic beat. “It’s you. It’s tied to you.”

“It’s tied to the story,” I corrected. “When I went looking for answers, it’s like the story started looking back.” I told her about the dead ends online, the complete digital void where the Esther family and Derrick Hayes should have been.

A wry, frustrated smile touched her lips. “Tell me about it.” She gestured to a large binder on her small dining table. “I’m the town clerk and the unofficial librarian. My job is records. When the ‘quirks’ in this place started getting to be more than just quirks, I did what I do best. I started digging.”

She flipped the binder open. It was filled with photocopied documents, newspaper clippings, and handwritten notes. “The Esther family massacre should be Hogeye’s dark centerpiece. A local legend grounded in a gruesome, verifiable event. But it isn’t. There’s no police report in the county archive. No death certificates on file with the state under those names for that year. The old local paper, the Lincoln County Ledger, has its entire archive from that summer missing. It’s not just forgotten, Jordan. It’s been surgically removed.”

The confirmation sent a chill through me that had nothing to do with the trailer’s rattling air conditioner. My mother’s fearful voice echoed in my head. You don’t go back there. This wasn’t just a haunting; it was a cover-up. Someone, at some point, had gone to great lengths to erase this family from history.

“So what’s left?” I asked, my voice tight.

“Whispers. Ghost stories told by kids.” She looked at me. “And you. You’re the only primary source I’ve ever met.” She closed the binder with a decisive slap. “And there’s one other thing. They can’t erase the ground. They can’t unbury the dead.”

“The cemetery,” I said.

“Tough Cemetery,” she confirmed, grabbing a set of keys from a hook by the door. “It’s the oldest one in the county. Most of the people buried there don’t have families left to tend the graves. If the Esthers are anywhere, they’re there.”

Tough Cemetery was less a cemetery and more a collection of stone teeth jutting from an overgrown field. It was situated a few miles out of town, down a dirt road that scraped the undercarriage of my truck. The iron gate had rusted open long ago, and the whole place was tilted, as if the land were trying to shrug the headstones off its back. The air was thick and still, the only sound the whisper of dry grass in the wind. Long, skeletal shadows from the surrounding pines stretched across the graves as the afternoon sun began its slow descent.

“They’ll be in the back,” Chloe said, her voice low. “The older, poorer section.”

We walked through the crooked rows of sun-bleached marble and granite. Names and dates were worn smooth by a century of Texas weather. We found them near the dark edge of the woods, in a small, neglected plot.

Three simple, weathered stones.

MARY ESTHER. Beloved Wife & Mother. 1958-1994. SARAH ESTHER. Beloved Daughter. 1986-1994. DAVID ESTHER. Beloved Son. 1988-1994.

I stared at the children’s names. Sarah and David. For the first time, they were real. Not just props in a ghost story, but kids. Kids who died in that mustard-colored trailer. A wave of cold fury washed over me. For them. For Derrick.

“Look,” Chloe said, pointing to the ground beside the graves. “There should be four.”

She was right. The wife and two children were here. But Harland Esther, the man who supposedly butchered them, was missing. There was no fourth stone. No grave for the monster of the story. It didn't make sense. Why bury the victims but not the killer?

“Maybe they never found his body,” I suggested, repeating the old legend. “Maybe he really did just walk into the woods.”

“Maybe,” Chloe said, but she sounded unconvinced. Her sharp eyes scanned the ground around the plot. “Or maybe he’s not part of this story. Not in the way we think.”

My gaze followed hers. I scanned the area with a soldier’s discipline, looking for anything out of place. A depression in the soil. A disturbance in the pattern of weeds. And then I saw it. Tucked under the gnarled roots of an old oak tree just a few feet from the Esther plot was a patch of bare earth where the grass refused to grow. In the center, nearly swallowed by dirt and moss, was a sliver of grey stone.

I knelt, my knees cracking, and dug at the soil with my bare hands. The earth was cold and strangely dense. I pulled the stone free. It wasn’t a fragment of a larger headstone. It was a small, flat river rock, about the size of my palm, deliberately placed. And carved into its surface was a symbol.

It was a spiral, but it was wrong. Instead of coiling neatly inward, the line seemed to jag and turn back on itself, creating a disorienting, almost predatory pattern. It felt ancient, primal. I traced the deep groove with my thumb. The stone felt cold, unnaturally so, a pocket of winter in the humid afternoon.

“What is that?” Chloe whispered, leaning over my shoulder to see.

“I have no idea,” I said. But I knew, with a certainty that settled deep in my gut, that this was important. This was a clue. A piece of the real story, not the one the grown-ups told.

We stared at the strange symbol, the silence of the cemetery wrapping around us. The sun had finally dipped below the treeline, plunging the woods into a deep, impenetrable black. The shadows of the headstones dissolved into a uniform twilight grey.

That’s when we heard it.

KNOCK.

It came from the wall of darkness that was the woods. A deep, percussive sound. Not a branch breaking. It was solid. Intentional. My blood turned to ice. My hand tightened on the spiral stone.

Chloe gasped, her head snapping up towards the sound. Her pragmatic skepticism was gone, replaced by the same pure, animal terror I’d seen on Derrick’s face all those years ago.

KNOCK.

Slower this time. Heavier. It echoed through the trees, a sound that had no right to exist in the open air. It was the sound of a giant rapping its knuckles on the hollow trunk of the world. It wasn't in the trailer. It wasn't in my apartment. It was here. It had followed us.

KNOCK.

The third and final knock was a flat, dead punctuation mark. It vibrated in my chest, a physical impact that seemed to suck the warmth from the air.

Silence descended again, but it was different now. It was the silence of a predator that has just announced its presence. The waiting silence. We were no longer investigating a memory. We were standing in its hunting ground. I looked from the symbol in my hand to the suffocating darkness of the woods, and I understood. That sound wasn't a remnant of the past. It was the sound of a promise.