The Gravekeeper's System

The cold hits me like a car. I'm off my feet and into a headstone before I see him move. The lantern skids across the path and the flame gutters. Warning. Hostile Restless. Grade three. Host health: low. I'm level two. I don't need a maths degree for this one. "Is Kade still captain?" Brannock is over me now. Frost is crawling up my sleeves. "Yes." He hits the stone beside my head and it cracks straight down the middle. "Why can you hear me?"

Three days earlier, I still have a job, a girlfriend, and no voice in my head.

"Zero," Dorian Kade says, loud enough for the whole hall. "Three years, Varga. Zero Mark."

He holds the reader up so everyone can see it. Flat grey screen. Forty hunters in black guild jackets, and half of them laugh. The other half check their phones, which is worse.

"Probation's over," he says. "So's the job."

He unclips my lanyard without asking and drops it in the bin by the salt crates I've hauled for three years.

I'm a porter. Was. I carry the iron, the salt, the flares, and I hold the door while people with real powers walk through it and get paid.

"Mara," Dorian calls. "Your boyfriend needs a lift home."

She catches me outside. By the bins, obviously.

"Eli, I can't do this."

"Do what? Stand next to me?"

"Be the hunter whose boyfriend carries the bags." She says it fast, like she practised it on the bus. "Dorian's putting me on first squad. People need to take me seriously."

"And they won't if I'm there."

"I'm sorry." She is, a bit. That's the worst part.

Mara got her Mark six weeks ago. Binder. She can pin a ghost to the floor with one look. She can't manage one at me.

By six I've applied for nine jobs. Eight say no. The ninth says yes in under a minute. Night gravekeeper, Hollow Hill Cemetery, cash, start tonight.

Agnes Okafor is seventy-something and five foot nothing. She meets me at the iron gate holding an oil lantern that looks older than the cemetery.

"Three rules," she says. "Lock the gate at midnight. Keep this lit. And if anyone asks you a question after midnight, you answer it honestly."

"Anyone. In a cemetery."

"You'll see." She hands me the lantern. "There were two of these. My husband lost the other one. Don't lose this."

"What happens after midnight?"

"Nothing comes through that gate unless the keeper lets it." She turns for the lodge. "Hunters hate this place. That's why it's yours."

I lock up at midnight exactly. Chain, padlock the size of a fist.

At twelve forty, a man asks me the time.

He's standing under the yew trees in a grey overcoat, dark at the shoulders like he's been out in the rain, except it hasn't rained all week. He's old. He's polite. And he's see-through from the knees down.

Porters see ghosts as smudges. Cold lights at the edge of a flare. Not like this. Not close enough to spot the reading glasses in a man's top pocket.

It's the lantern. When it swings toward him, he sharpens.

"Twelve forty," I say. Rule three.

"Thank you, son. I'm looking for Ruth. Ruth Pell. She's meant to be by the yews, and she's not by the yews."

The guild would burn him. That's the whole trade. Find it, pin it, burn it, bill the city. Nobody asks a ghost what it wants.

So I ask.

"How long have you been looking?"

He thinks about it. "What year is it?"

I tell him. His face goes very still.

The lodge has the burial ledgers. Damp leather, ninety years of handwriting.

Pell, Ruth. Row eleven, by the yews. Then a red line through it. Moved, nineteen eighty-seven. Section F. Drainage works.

"They moved her," I tell him. "Down the hill. Nobody told you."

Section F is the bottom of the slope, where the grass is longest. Her stone is small and clean. He stands over it with his hat in his hands, though a second ago he wasn't holding a hat.

"Hello, love," he says. "Sorry. Took me a while."

He looks back at me. "What's your name?"

"Eli."

"Thank you, Eli."

Then he goes out like a candle, and the cold goes with him.

A voice speaks inside my skull. Flat, clean, nothing like a person.

*Restless laid to rest.*

*Gravekeeper System online.*

*Host: Eli Varga. Level one.*

I sit down in the wet grass. Hard.

"Okay. Who said that?"

*Restless remaining in your grounds: two hundred and eleven.*

Mara. "you ok?"

I type it all out. The ghost, the grave, the voice in my head. I look at it for a long time. Then I delete it, one letter at a time.

Up the hill, at the top of the steps, there's a stone mausoleum with a chain across the door. Something knocks on that door. From the inside. Three slow knocks.

The lantern flame turns blue.

*Warning. Restless of unknown grade.*

*It has noticed you.*