It should only take an hour. Only one hour. It’s an empty graveyard. Just plant the rose, turn around, and leave.
Maxwell kept repeating those facts to himself. He looked down at the simple rose laying peacefully in his passengers seat. After a moment, he looked towards the entrance of dark cemetery. The cars headlamps shone brightly on the gated cemetery entrance. Maxwell looked back down at the rose.
* * *
It had almost been a year since Maxwell’s sister had died. One year since the horrible hauntings began. Ever since her death, Maxwell was awaken at night by terrible screams in the middle of the night. Cries for help and loud screams that resembled that of his sister’s.
He also heard dark, evil voices threatening his life.
The screams and cries began as occasional, faint noises in the night. As the days and months passed, the screams grew louder. They grew more powerful. More real.
Maxwell tried to move apartments, switch jobs. But the voices followed him everywhere. He learned to deal with, and ignore the voices. Eight months had finally passed when he finally saw her. While brushing his teeth one evening, he saw her in the reflection of his bathroom mirror. Startled, he turned around, thinking the vision would disappear. When he turned back to the mirror, he saw that she didn’t disappear. She was very real.
Maxwell’s sister quickly reached out of the reflection and grasped his shoulders firmly. She brought herself closer to Maxwell, staring into his eyes. “It wasn’t suicide,” she whispered. “Save me Maxey..”
Before Maxwell could say anything, his sister had faded into nothing. No traces of her were left behind. He thought it was a hallucination, that he was perhaps losing his mind. He finished up in the bathroom, and headed to bed.
For the first time in those first eight months, there were no screams, no threats. Only silence. The silence allowed Maxwell’s mind to wander. To think, and to ask questions. Not suicide? Save her?
Maxwell tried to remember details of her death that he had locked away in his mind. Nobody besides Maxwell’s mother saw the scene of his sister’s death. Maxwell’s mother said that the event had traumatized her so badly that she had simply forgotten everything about it, except for the death itself. Maxwell tried to remember how, exactly, his sister had gone about taking her life. But no matter how hard he tried, he could not remember. The police never explained it, no photos of the scene were ever taken, nor sketches. Almost like someone was trying to hide something, or cover something up. Something wasn’t right about it.
It had been 3 months since he saw her. There were still no screams or threats. No visions of his sister. And every night since the vision, Maxwell would think about his sister, but this night, something finally came to him. Just before Maxwell drifted to sleep, he suddenly remembered something. Something his sister had told him two weeks before the death. He couldn’t believe he had forgotten it. Maxwell’s sister had come to him, rather shaken up, talking about demons chasing her and attacking her in her dreams. The dreams seemed very real to her. He brushed it off as being simple nightmares. As Maxwell thought, something else about his sister came to mind. When she told him about the nightmares, he noticed some scratch marks on her neck. He assumed she had done it to herself while having the nightmares. Now, when he thought about it, those scratch marks couldn’t have come from her hands. In fact, they looked rather inhuman.
There was more. Something he had to have been missing. Something he was overlooking. Maxwell had a gut feeling about it. In the morning, he was going to look for answers. He would start with his sisters room. The very room where she had taken her life.