Hallowed Ground by David Niall Wilson, Steven & Wilson Savile

  The woman had leaned over his shoulder as he wept, drunk and alone, on the porch of his home.   He hadn't seen or heard her, but she was there.   He cried out, and she laughed, mocking his tears and his pain.   Then, again, she asked her question.
    And he gave his answer:
    "Anything.   Everything.   I want her back.   I want it to be last month, before she got sick.   I want the future that should have been ours.   I want, I want, I want, but I can’t have any of it."
    "Perhaps," she'd said, "it is not too late.   There are ways, for those willing to tread a dark path."
    "What do you mean . . ?" he asked.
    He didn't really need to be told what she meant, but he didn't want to believe her; to do so was terrifying.   To believe she had command over life and death was as obscene as it was unnatural.   There were limits in his world, things that he believed he understood, and that needed to be true.   The veil between this world and the next could not simply be torn asunder without consequences.   The dead did not return to the land of the living – they moved on to a blessed afterlife, or perpetual torment.   That was how the mechanisms of his faith worked.   Elizabeth was in a better place, free of the suffering that had killed her.
    "There are ways," she said again, as though that explained everything he wanted to ask.
    "But the price is high.   Higher than most are prepared to pay.   Would you truly give anything to buy her back?"
    "Of course," he said.
    "Then meet me in the old church grounds when the sunlight dies."   She left him then, alone with a sudden and stupid hope that he might get his second chance at love.   He knew he should have stayed at home.   She was either a witch, corrupt to her withered heart, or more realistically judging by her words, a common liar.   Perhaps, he thought, she had arranged an ambush in some secluded place and planned to make off with his riches.   He laughed at that.   His trousers were threadbare and his pockets filled with lint.   If she wanted riches he was not the man for her schemes.   She'd set her price, and he had it with him, but it wasn’t about money.   It never was.   She wanted something else, something that she knew he could offer.   The question was, what would he get in return?   Visions?   Hallucinations?   A dream of one last night with Elizabeth, banished with the sun?   Or worse, nothing?   Ridicule?   Her question should have been how desperate was he, not what did he want.
    He thought about her strength as she caught and held him from tumbling into the gorge, and he shivered.   Had her hand been cold?
    The twilight gave way to deeper darkness as they passed the first line of trees and disappeared into their shadows.
    Benjamin picked up his pace slightly.   His heart raced, beating hard against the ridge of bone in his chest.   Every shadow seemed to his rattled mind to have eyes of its own.   Twice he thought – imagined – he saw something, just out of sight, skittering away.   The sounds of small animals and the susurrus of the breeze teasing the leaves overhead were magnified by the empty, vacant silence.   His footsteps echoed loudly – the woman moved as though she were another of the shadows.   Insubstantial, like a ghost, her passing made no sound.
    That absence of sound placed a chill in his heart.
    Ahead, the trees thinned, and a patch of brighter moonlight beckoned with its dabble of silver coins on the ground.   Jeanne Dubois entered the clearing, and as he stepped from the trees, Benjamin saw that in the center of that open space, two trails crossed.   He turned and glanced back the way they'd come, but could make out no landmarks.   He tried to retrace his journey from the church in his mind, but could only place vague details, and found that he'd lost all sense of direction.   The roads could