by Bridget Webber

Created on: October 13, 2009   Last Updated: October 04, 2011

The granite stone was cold and rough to the touch. Lara's fingers lightly trailed across its mossy surface until they reached an indentation, hardly visible to the eye, but there none the less. She traced a finger inside, sweeping it down one vertical line, and then working back upwards into two curves that made the letter B.

After fifteen minutes searching in this way, Lara was confident that the name carved into the gravestone was Bartholomew Fortescue, and that the year of this young mans untimely demise, when taking into account the year of his birth, would put him at the age of seventeen, which was her age too.

"Lara, what are you doing out here in the cold?" shouted her grandmother from the doorway to their home.

"I've found some letters in the rock gran, it's a gravestone!" exclaimed Lara excitedly.

"Oh that, yes I know," said her grandmother, in a voice that lacked enthusiasm or surprise.

With a confused look upon her face, Lara made her way through the back garden to the door, and stepped inside where her grandmother had resumed cooking dinner in the old vicarage Aga.

"You knew about it gran?" Lara asked inquisitively. "But you've never mentioned it before. I thought it was just an old rock. How long have you lived here at the vicarage?"

"Questions, questions!" said her grandmother, as-though Lara's asking was too much. "That old gravestone is probably just one put there by a family who buried a child's pet or something."

"No gran, it's the resting place of Bartholomew Fortescue. Aren't you even interested?"

"No Lara, I'm not. This Bartholomew is long dead and gone, where-as your grandfather is alive and will be arriving home soon hungry, so if you could just lay the table..."

Lara did as she was told, but that evening kept glancing out of the window at the stone, wondering who this man was and why he died, and what’s more, why he wasn't over the little wall in the proper graveyard.

During the night a storm began to brew. The skeletal branches of a rowan tree kept tap, tapping on her bedroom window, and the wind howled, keeping her awake.

Lara went to the window where she parted the curtains and glanced down into the garden. The trees looked black as soot silhouetted by the night sky, where dark clouds raced and tumbled.

Down where the gravestone lent against a great oak, Lara could swear she saw a dark figure of a man in a cape, looking up at her window. She automatically flinched backwards, and let go of her hold on the curtains which fell

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