Gran was a real witch. She was also a bitch much of the time and liked to play with her granddaughter’s head. That was why Chloe wasn’t real sure about how to interpret her current dream.

This one was bad though. Interpret any way she could, it kept coming out nasty. Walking in a garden was usually relaxing, but not in this shadowy place where her mind had taken to wandering. Beds of blood red Adonis flowers had become feral. The blooms lost all sense of their formerly neat borders until they overgrew most of the stony path that led to the rusted iron gates. Their falling petals were like clots of gore coagulating on the stony ground—evil’s secret garden.

Beyond the metal portal where she stood there were more overgrown gravel walks that zigzagged across the cemetery in random fashion, resembling nothing so much as a floral crazy quilt that had its various beds stitched one to the other with thorny cane stocks and creeping vines. This was not so unusual in her line of work, but this was not some delightful, secret plot where children played. The odor wasn't verdant, not what one would expect of a flower patch; it was rank and musty, tinged with a nastier smell than mere rotting vegetation.

Her goal, the Patrick family monument—what people in her trade would call a real resurrection-defier made of darkest, hardest granite-- brooded at the heart of the boscage. It seemed very far away from the gate where she stood, but that was what she had come to photograph so she would have to find a way past the carnivorous foliage.

She looked up once to see if there were some marker that might tell her that she was in the wrong place-—that she needn’t go on—-but the old iron rose arrow straight to its arched sign: Patrick. Mental sirens went off, but only in the distance and their tone was stale, muted. It wasn’t that she thought her senses were crying wolf, but she had been living in a state of almost perpetual worry since accepting this assignment and her nerves were dull.

Unhappily, she put a hand on one of the gates. They were cold to the touch, frozen even, but unlike something made of ice, they opened easily.

Chloe looked for a moment at her chilled fingers. They were striped with bloody red.