Midnight Grinding Read Online Free Page A

Flanders Drive and Pear Tree Road at a quarter after three. Together, they walked the two blocks to the Milburne Baptist Church. The building had stood there for nearly one hundred and fifty years, always virgin white and immaculate, the lofty steeple rising in a pinnacle that could be seen throughout the entire township. Milburne, Tennessee was located on the very buckle of the Southern bible belt and the little church was a picturesque example of how very prominent religion was in that region of the country.
    There were five in the youthful procession that walked quietly down the sidewalk, then crossed the well-mown lawn that separated the church property from the adjoining graveyard. There was Deanna, Jimmy Thompson, Butch Spence, and the Waller twins, Vickie and Veronica. They made their way through the cramped cemetery, past marble headstones and a scattering of lonely trees, their backpacks slung over their shoulders. Thunder rumbled overhead. The day had begun cheerfully enough, but by afternoon dark storm clouds had rolled in from the west, promising the threat of spring showers and perhaps a thunderstorm before the night ended.
    “Well, there it is…just like I told you,” said Butch with a sneer of triumph. “Can’t call me a liar now, can you?”
    Deanna said nothing. With the others, she slowly approached the little half-acre lot that was fenced in ornate wrought iron. An unlocked gate sported a couple of trumpet-playing angels overhead and a poetic inscription: Those who are called to the Lord in innocence shall be, forever, angels.
    “Come on,” urged Jimmy, pushing the iron gate open with a rusty squeal. Deanna followed the others inside, trying hard to suppress a shiver of cold uneasiness. Yes, it was exactly what it appeared to be; exactly what Butch and Jimmy had described so masterfully on the elementary school playground. It was a miniature graveyard.
    A graveyard for children.
    They began to walk among the rows of tiny tombstones, each a quarter of the size of their adult counterparts in the next lot over. “Don’t be such a scaredy-cat!” Butch shot back in disgust when the fair-haired girl hesitated near the gate. Finally, she drew up her courage and followed her schoolmates onto the gently sloping hill of the small graveyard.
    At first the stones seemed fairly new, chiseled from pastel granite of pink and blue, bearing cryptic names like “Little Tommy” or “Baby Linda.” Unlike the headstones out in the big graveyard, these seemed devoid of flower arrangements. Instead, long forgotten toys were scattered upon the short mounds: rubber balls, pacifiers, and rattles, their colors bleached by sun and rain, the plastic cracked and broken. A teddy bear lay on its side before the grave of “Sweet Andy Wilson,” its eyes blank and unseeing. The stuffing had been burrowed from the fur of its matted tummy, strewn across the grass by some wild animal that had come foraging for food with no luck.
    Further into the cemetery, as the little hill reached its peak and began to descend to the edge of a thick forest, the headstones grew older and the rows were choked with weeds.
    The inscriptions were more difficult to read, the names sanded clear down to the bare stone by decades of wind and harsh weather. “My dad says these have been here since the 1800s,” said Butch. “Said there was a big diphtheria epidemic back then that killed half the babies in Glover County. Most of them are buried right here…beneath our feet.”
    They stood there in reverent silence for a moment. The gentle breeze had grown blustery, stripping the leathery leaves off the cemetery’s only tree, a huge blossoming magnolia at the very heart of the grassy knoll. Deanna began to back away, a creepy feeling threatening to overcome her. “I’ve got to get home,” she said, her voice barely a whisper.
    “Go on home, if you want,” said Butch with a shrug. “But you ain’t gonna be able to escape them, you know. Not as