Chapter 1: The Two Rules

Chapter 1: The Two Rules

The iron gate of Blackwood Hollow Cemetery groaned shut behind Leo Vance, the sound a final, metallic sigh cutting through the twilight. The lock, a heavy, ancient piece of worked iron, clicked into place with a definitive thud that felt less like securing a property and more like sealing a tomb. For the next eight hours, this was his world. Fourteen years, and the feeling had never changed. He wasn't a guard. He was a warden.

The air inside was different—colder, heavier. It clung to the skin like damp silk and tasted of wet earth and something else, something acrid and old, like forgotten memories turned to dust. Leo’s slight limp, a phantom ache from a life before this one, was more pronounced on the gravel path. He swept the beam of his heavy-duty flashlight across the first row of tombstones, their marble faces pale and weeping in the humid air. The light was for his benefit, a flimsy shield against the encroaching dark. They didn't need light to see him.

Leo’s boots crunched a steady, rhythmic beat on the path, a deliberate tempo he’d perfected over thousands of nights. It was a sound of purpose, a sound that said, I am here, I am walking, I am not stopping. It was his only permitted communication.

Rule One: Never speak. Not a word, not a whisper, not even a curse under his breath when a branch snagged his uniform. Sound was a hook, and they were always fishing.

A soft giggle echoed from behind a weeping angel statue to his left. It was the sound of a young girl, innocent and playful. A decade ago, it would have sent a spear of ice through his heart. Now, it was just… Tuesday. He kept his eyes forward, his jaw tight. The giggle followed him for twenty paces, then dissolved into a frustrated hiss that slithered back into the shadows.

He continued his patrol, a slow, winding circuit through the sprawling city of the dead. His senses were honed to a razor’s edge, not for intruders of the living variety, but for the subtle shifts in the night’s fabric. The sudden drop in temperature by the old mausoleum, the scent of phantom lavender near the Oakhaven family plot, the feeling of a thousand unseen eyes tracking his every move.

His flashlight beam caught a glint on the path ahead. A small, silver locket, lying open. Inside, the cherubic face of a baby smiled up at him. It hadn't been there on his last pass. Leo’s steps didn’t falter. He carefully altered his course, giving the object a wide berth, his gaze fixed on the path beyond it.

Rule Two: Never touch. Not the trinkets they left as bait, not the cold spots they manifested, and certainly not them. Touch was a bridge, an invitation to be crossed.

He couldn't help but let his mind drift to the last boy, the one before the long, blessed period of solitude. Mark. A college kid, barely twenty, thought the job was an easy paycheck for sitting in a shack all night. Leo had tried to impress upon him the importance of the rules, using only hand gestures and grim, pointed looks. He’d thought the kid understood.

But one night, near the crumbling wall of the oldest section, Mark had frozen. He’d cocked his head, his face a mask of confusion, then disbelief, then a terrible, dawning joy. “Mom?” he’d whispered, the single word a gunshot in the oppressive silence.

Leo had turned, his own flashlight beam catching the shimmering outline of a woman standing beneath a withered oak. She had Mark’s mother’s face, her smile, but her eyes were pits of hungry darkness. Leo had lunged, not to save Mark, but to drag him away, to break the connection.

He was too late.

Mark took a single, hesitant step forward, his hand outstretched. “Mom, is it really you?”

The moment his fingers brushed against the apparition's shimmering arm, it solidified. The loving smile twisted into a gaping maw of needle-like teeth. The form of his mother melted away like hot wax, revealing something skeletal and insectile beneath. It didn't just take Mark. It unraveled him, pulling him apart into screaming strands of light and memory that it greedily devoured. The only thing left when the sun rose was his flashlight, its battery dead.

The memory still tasted like bile in Leo’s throat. He shook his head, forcing the image from his mind as he approached the source of the cemetery’s deepest unease. A constant, heartbreaking sobbing drifted from the shadows, a sound of pure, undiluted misery that promised madness to any who listened too closely. The Weeping Bride. Tonight, her cries were laced with a new, venomous edge.

Leo… a whisper, soft as cobwebs, brushed against the inside of his skull. It wasn't a sound he heard with his ears, but a thought that wasn’t his own. She never forgave you for being late, did she? For the flowers you forgot?

He flinched, his knuckles white on the flashlight. The whisper used his late wife’s voice. It was a new trick, a nasty one. He pushed the voice down, burying it under the ironclad discipline of his rules, and kept walking. Let it whisper. Words were only hooks if you let them catch.

Further on, by the North Gate, he felt a deeper, more primal dread. The air grew thick, charged with static electricity. He didn't need to look directly to know something was there. In the periphery of his vision, a shadow detached itself from the other shadows, coalescing into a form of impossible size. It was a chaotic silhouette of twisted wood and bone, crowned with a jagged rack of antlers that tore at the moonlight. The Horned King. It didn’t play games. It didn’t whisper. It was a battering ram of pure rage, constantly testing the strength of the gates, waiting for a moment of weakness. Tonight, it just watched, its presence a physical weight pressing down on the world.

Leo completed his circuit, the first gray hints of dawn staining the eastern sky. The oppressive atmosphere began to recede, the whispers fading, the shadows losing their malevolent depth. It was the slow, welcome exhalation at the end of a held breath. Survival. Another night’s paycheck earned. Another night keeping the locks on the prison held fast.

He made his way back to the small, spartan guard shack just inside the main gate. The fluorescent light inside hummed, a jarringly mundane sound after a night of supernatural silence. He was about to start on the nightly log—a document filled with lies for a company that didn’t want the truth—when he saw the note taped to the small monitor.

It was a single, typed sentence on company letterhead.

New hire, Thomas Finch, starts his first shift tomorrow. You’re training him.

Leo stared at the words, his blood running cold. The relief of the coming dawn evaporated, replaced by a familiar, chilling dread. He saw Mark’s face, full of a cocky, reckless curiosity that had gotten him erased from existence. He saw the locket on the path, the shimmering lure of a familiar face, the hungry darkness waiting behind the mask.

A new trainee. A new lamb for the slaughter.

And he, Leo Vance, was being handed the leash.