Part 15

There was no answer.

"Hello?" he whispered. His intention was to whisper louder, but mounting nervousness made that difficult.

The result was the same, however.

The voice that had spoken to him in the barn and again at his house was gone.

It had been suspiciously absent during the long (to David) walk from his house, but he always assumed that once he reached the top of the Hill the mysterious voice would return with explanations and instructions.

And magic.

Perhaps this was all he was supposed to do? Walk to the top of The Hill and... go back home? Was it that simple?

No... no, he was supposed to find something. A name. The voice's name. He was supposed to find it.

So David looked.

The flat place at the top of the hill was large and mostly featureless. There were footprints and rocks, patches of grass and a few stunted shrubs that would never be any larger than their present size. None of these could hide much. But then, how big could a name be?

Happy to have something to do other than stare at the looming cemetery, David began the search. He ran his foot carefully... but not as quietly as he thought... through the patches of grass. He knelt down and stared into the darkness beneath the tiny shrubs. He kicked over a few promising-looking rocks... all while making an overt effort to not look toward either side of the Hill. One way lay the scary cemetery, and the other... no one talked about the other.

There was just enough light from the moon to convince David that he was making a thorough search, thus making his disappointment greater when he found nothing.

No names. Nothing that looked like a name, or that had a name written on it. Nothing that could be opened to reveal a name. No magical animals that could whisper a name in his ear.

Nothing.

And now the ghosts were sure to be on their way. David shivered.

The cursory search did, however, accomplish two things:

First, it kept him from noticing the sudden explosion of activity in the town. Lights appeared in darkened windows, and some of those same lights poured out into the roads as the search the search was joined. David was too far away to hear the shouts, but he would have taken interest in the two small crowds that left the town in the direction of the cemetery. He would have taken slightly more interest when one of those crowds broke away and began to circle around toward the same steep path that he himself had taken.

The second effect of David's search was to make more noise than he realized. Far more. The sounds of rustling shrubs and swishing grass carried far... not as far as the cemetery below, but then, the ears that heard them were significantly closer than the supposed home of the imaginary ghosts.

"Okay," David sighed wearily. He was feeling foolish and tired. Thoughts of hungry ghosts had never entirely vacated his mind, but now, without the distraction of the search, they'd begun to creep back into prominence. "There's no name here; I'm going home."

He did not expect an answer.

He got one anyway.