Story One · A Strangewoven story
The first scream came before he reached the microphone.
This was disappointing. He had prepared an opening line.
By the time he climbed onto the little platform beside the cemetery gate, the woman dressed as a witch had abandoned her folding chair, the man in the pumpkin sweater had overturned his, and someone had shouted, “THAT ONE ISN’T A COSTUME.”
Which was accurate, but hardly constructive.
“Good evening,” said the skeleton.
The remaining audience fled.
He stood beneath the crooked banner that read HALLOWEEN OPEN MIC, one bony hand raised in greeting.
“Everyone,” he finished.
A folding chair slowly collapsed.
He lowered his hand.
“Lovely. Physical comedy.”
He had come out of the ground three nights earlier.
He remembered very little about it beyond rain, the weight of earth, and the embarrassing discovery that his left foot had gone through the lining of his trousers.
His name was missing. So were most of the details of his life.
But he remembered laughter.
Not whose. Not where. Only a room full of it, and the feeling that he had somehow helped put it there.
In his coat pocket, beneath a clot of damp soil, he had found a little notebook.
Most of its pages were ruined. The surviving ones held fragments of jokes, crossed-out lines, and a stern instruction in handwriting he thought might be his own:
Pause. Let them laugh.
He had found that especially encouraging.
Apparently, he had once needed to allow time for it.
His first attempt had been with the cemetery caretaker.
“Excuse me,” he had said, emerging politely from behind a mausoleum. “Do you know how to get to the town hall?”
The caretaker dropped his rake.
“Practice,” the skeleton added.
The caretaker cleared the gate without opening it.
Since then, there had been seven similar encounters, one dropped shopping bag, and a cyclist whose speed the skeleton sincerely admired.
Nevertheless, he had kept trying.
Then he found the open-mic poster pinned outside the cemetery.
BRING YOUR BEST MATERIAL.
He looked down at his disintegrating coat.
He hoped they meant jokes.
Now the chairs stood empty beneath the moon.
The skeleton adjusted the microphone. It gave a shriek of feedback.
“Yes,” he told it. “That seems to be the general response.”
He opened his notebook.
Beyond the gate, the last footsteps faded down the hill. The festival continued in the town square, comfortably distant: music, laughter, someone announcing a pumpkin-carving winner.
He brushed a root from his sleeve and tried his opening line anyway.
“Thank you for coming. Those of you who left, thank you for making such excellent time.”
Wind moved through the chairs.
He paused.
Let them laugh.
Nothing happened.
“Difficult crowd,” he murmured.
“You haven’t got a crowd.”
The voice came from behind the cemetery wall.
The skeleton straightened.
“That would explain the acoustics.”
A woman in a caretaker’s coat stood just beyond the gate. She held a ring of keys in one hand and a long-handled litter picker in the other.
She was watching him very carefully.
“Are you going to chase me?” she asked.
“Certainly not.”
“Good.”
“I’m already having trouble keeping my trousers up.”
Her eyes dropped to his waist. A length of ancient cord was doing heroic work there.
One corner of her mouth moved.
He noticed.
He tried very hard not to lean forward.
“I’m Ada,” she said. “I lock up.”
“Of course. I’ll go.”
He closed the notebook at once.
That seemed to surprise her more than his appearance had.
“You put all these chairs out?”
He nodded.
“And the platform?”
“It was already here. I swept it.”
She glanced at the earth falling steadily from his coat.
“Before I stood on it,” he admitted.
Ada made a small sound through her nose.
The skeleton gripped his notebook with both hands.
“Was that—”
“Don’t make a fuss.”
“Of course.”
She came through the gate, keeping several chairs between them.
He stayed exactly where he was.
Ada began gathering abandoned sweet wrappers with the litter picker.
“What do they call you?” she asked.
“Most of them haven’t been very specific.”
She waited.
“‘That thing,’ once. ‘Behind you,’ quite often.”
“Your name.”
He rubbed a thumb along the notebook’s warped cover.
“I don’t remember.”
Ada stopped picking up wrappers.
From the town square came a bright burst of applause.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“I remember these.” He lifted the notebook. “Some of them, anyway. There’s one about a baker, but the punchline’s mostly mildew.”
She looked at the empty chairs, then back at him.
“The graveborn,” she said quietly. “That’s what people were saying in the square. Something graveborn had come up the hill.”
He considered it.
“Sounds rather grand for an unpaid engagement.”
“Could be a stage name.”
He looked at the microphone.
“The Graveborn,” he tried.
Ada nodded toward the platform.
“Well? You’ve got a microphone. Use it.”
He opened his notebook so quickly that a loose page fell out.
He caught it against his knee.
“Sorry. Just gathering my material.”
“I can see that.”
He faced the chairs, although his only listener was beside them.
“I asked a tailor whether he could save my coat.”
Ada worked the litter picker around a chair leg.
“He said, ‘From what?’”
She smiled.
Encouraged, he turned a page.
“I’ve been trying to improve my appearance. Started with a good night’s sleep. Apparently, I overdid it.”
Ada gave a short, surprised laugh.
The Graveborn stopped.
It was a small laugh. Barely enough to reach the back row.
He could have heard it across the cemetery.
“Next one,” Ada said.
He looked down at the notebook, then up again.
“Yes. Certainly.”
He adjusted his cravat. A button dropped off his waistcoat and bounced twice on the platform.
“I do apologise. I’m coming apart under pressure.”
Ada laughed again.
This time he remembered to pause.
Halfway through the next joke, two festivalgoers appeared at the gate.
“Ada?” one called. “They said there was something—”
The Graveborn turned.
Both men froze.
He lifted one hand.
“Good evening.”
They ran.
He watched them disappear around the corner.
“Well,” he said into the microphone. “I’m getting much better at clearing my throat.”
Ada bent over her litter picker, laughing hard enough that she had to set it down.
For a moment, he forgot the men entirely.
When she could speak, she pointed at him.
“That one. Write that one down.”
He did.
His pencil was a stub, and his fingers were stiff, but he wrote carefully in the margin of a surviving page.
Below it, in smaller letters, he added:
Ada laughed.
They put the chairs away together.
Ada showed him where they belonged in the shed. He stacked them gently, taking care not to catch his sleeves on their hinges.
“Same time tomorrow?” he asked when the last chair was in.
“The festival’s only tonight.”
“Ah.”
He looked toward the platform.
Ada turned the shed key.
“I still have to work tomorrow.”
He looked back at her.
“And there are benches,” she added. “You don’t need to put out twenty chairs for one person.”
“No,” he said. “I suppose I don’t.”
At the gate, Ada paused.
“You might want to lead with the talking. Give people a bit of warning before you step into the light.”
He nodded seriously.
“And don’t follow anyone.”
“Even if they drop something?”
“Especially then. Leave it with me.”
“That explains the shopping bag.”
Ada shook her head, smiling, and started down the hill.
The Graveborn stood beneath the open-mic banner until her footsteps faded.
Then he returned to the platform, retrieved his fallen button, and opened his notebook.
For three nights, he had been searching its damaged pages for the joke that would make someone stay.
Now he turned to a blank one.
At the top he wrote:
Tomorrow. One person. New material.
He sat on the edge of the platform to think.
After a while, a beetle emerged from his cuff.
“You missed the show,” he told it.
The beetle stopped.
The Graveborn sat a little straighter.
“Unless you’ve got a minute.”
