It was Hallowe'en night, and I sat alone in the graveyard. This was a tradition of mine, one I'd engaged in ever since it was revealed to me that I was far too old for apple-bobbing, sugary extortion and other such innocent trappings of the holiday. I told myself I did it because I had no fear of the gruesome, but every time I heard the cawing of an ambient crow or the haunting laughter of small trick-or-treaters up far past their bed time echoing towards me from blocks away, my heart skipped a beat and I was reminded of just how much of my fearlessness was a charade.

Thankfully there were usually a few others lurking about the graveyard as well. I'd never bothered to ask any friends if they wanted to come along, since every year I was bound to encounter enough drunken teenagers or particularly kinky parents who had decided to relive their "Goth" years while their spawn were out rotting their teeth and they usually provided enough of a reminder of the mundane world to keep me from getting more spooked than I could handle.

This year was strangely different. For some reason, the drunken teenagers and the proto-necrophiliacs were nowhere to be seen, likely because they'd gotten together and warned any of their kind that there was a creepy young person with an apparently overly romanticized view of death hanging about to watch them fuck. Whatever the explanation, on this dark night (dark in spirit, not in illumination, as a full moon was hung appropriately enough against the sky) I was completely alone 6 feet above a sea of rotting corpses.

Or at least, I certainly hoped I was alone, because just as I had started to consider heading home I heard the loud scraping of the rusted iron entry gate swinging open and slamming against the brick wall surrounding the cemetery. I told myself that it was probably just the wind, though I still slowly descended from my perch on a steady looking tombstone. Just before my feet touched the ground, I heard a soft crunching coming from somewhere in the cemetery.

I could see no one else in the pale moonlight, though that did not mean they weren't hiding somewhere in the shadows. Visions of roving predators with knives and ominous white vans transitioned to less plausible but more seasonal fears of hockey-mask clad maniacs and even further into slobbering and hideous beasts covered in blood and fur. The various imagined possibilities twisted and shifted about inside my minds eye, forming an amorphous and thoroughly frightening boogey man that had all the reality of the rapist and all of the unnatural horror of the werewolf. The boogey man thoroughly real to me now, I ran as fast as I could in the obstacle-laden field for the exit.

In my hysteria, I realized that I could no longer remember where the gate out was. Spinning about in search of the exit from a graveyard that seemed to go on forever in all sides, a dark figure manifested itself right in front of me and I immediately let out a loud scream.

The figure quickly placed an appendage over my mouth that was all at once a flesh-rending claw, a meaty bloodstained fist, and a hand holding a rag soaked in chloroform. Its appendage stifled my screams sharply, and as it did so it let out a low hiss that was a beastly roar, a mad gibbering and a silent dedication to committing acts most heinous. As the hiss filled my ears and my lungs lost the breath to scream, however, reality reasserted itself in my eyes.

The graveyard was not never-ending; I had simply gotten turned around. The hiss that I heard from the figure was just it shushing me, telling me to be quiet. And the figure itself was not a composite of every boogeyman my heart had to offer, but a tiny older man with a lumpy head.

I did not know the older man, though his presence was calming. He had ridiculous protruding ears, and a long nose that curved just below his upper lip. His mouth was stressed out in a slightly unsettling but still seemingly genuine toothy smile, and spectacles so thick as to be completely opaque concealed his eyes. He wore a black tuxedo as well as immaculate white gloves that adorned skillful, nimble hands.

"Are you quite finished?" He asked, sounding polite yet still slightly agitated.

"Er... Yes. I think so. Assuming you're not planning to kill me or abduct me or tie me up with duct tape and cut out my tongue and lock me away in a room in your attic where you'll feed me through a tear dropper and every few hours you'll come by with a car battery and-"

"No, no. I wasn't planning anything like that," he said nonchalantly. "Actually, I was thinking we could have a little chat."

"A little chat? About... about what?" I asked, very frightened again. As calming as the man's aura was, it still did lickety-split when combined with his tendency to say very vague and unnerving things.

"Why don't you sit down, first? I've some work to do while we talk, and I don't want you getting your feet in the way." I complied, reasoning that the man was far too decrepit to actually harm me, and sat down on a headstone. As I did so, the man reached behind another grave marker and pulled out a burlap sack, and from it a small garden cultivator. He began to work the ground with it, not in straight lines but in odd and mystic looking runes and sigils.

"Now, Bailey, I was noticing-"

"How did you know my name?!" I asked, understandably startled. I began to get into a defensive stance. The old man sighed.

"I was afraid you'd ask that. That's the problem with you young people, these days. You never want to take any good advice without knowing where it came from first. If you must know, I'm a Grave Shaman."

I proceeded to give him a very blank look.

The old man sighed again. "A Grave Shaman. It's like a... a... well for God's sake child, the name is pretty damned self explanatory! You know what a shaman is, correct? Someone who communes with the spirits of the rocks and the trees of nature and all of that piddly little nonsense?" I nodded vaguely. I noticed that he was chewing on something as he spoke, and he pulled a water can out of his burlap sack. "Well, a Grave Shaman is more or less the same thing. At least, I believe so. I've never met any others so I suppose I could be doing my job quite incorrectly. The main difference being that I happen to specialize in this here graveyard. I can speak to the tombstones and the crows and the hedges and even the corpses, and sometimes they teach me things."

I snorted. "Listen, if you've been stalking me, then at least try to be honest about it. Or believable. You could have said you used to work at my elementary school, or you were a friend's grandpa, or something." As I spoke, I nervously groped about for something large and heavy to protect myself with. My hands brushed against a discarded tree branch, and I wrapped my fingers around it.

"I'm being serious here, you petulant brat! You've been here so many times, the cemetery knows your name, and it told me. If you don't believe me, then look at this. The water can's empty, correct?" I nodded cautiously. Then, the man spat whatever he was chewing into the watering can and it plopped wetly against the inside. Peering in, I briefly saw what appeared to be a masticated severed human finger before the can filled with a frothing deep-red liquid that was quite unmistakably blood. For the second time that night, I screamed.

I swung my branch fiercely, knocking the "Grave Shaman" square on the head and then tossing the piece of wood aside. I turned tail and ran, still screaming, in hopes of evading his obviously unholy magic. I was halted when a headstone that I could have sworn had been a few feet to the left earlier unexpectedly appeared right where my legs were headed, and I toppled over it, stunned. As I did, I heard the man approaching, rubbing his head and muttering "God dammit, this is what I wanted to talk to you about! You're so skittish! It's not like the blood actually came from anyone you know..."

I was breathing heavily when he appeared over me, and offered his hand. I tried again to run away, but he quickly grabbed me with a surprising strength and pinned me down. "Relax." He said, in a mystical voice that was not a suggestion but a command, and I felt my muscles slacken and my mind enter a sort of vague haze. While I was fairly sure I had wanted to escape the man earlier, I suddenly couldn't remember why, and felt quite certain that I was safe with him at the moment. Drunkenly, I followed him back to where he'd been toying with the dirt. He picked up the watering can, and began to pour the blood down over the grave.

"Now, Bailey. I tend this graveyard, and every year I noticed that you'd been coming in here and scaring yourself witless over mostly nothing. I know we've never actually met, but I still feel like we've got a bit of a... well, a bit of a bond. After all, I take care of this cemetery and do everything I can to make sure it has the proper macabre ambience, and you scare yourself shitless soaking it in every year. In a way, it's like you're my best customer."

I nodded dumbly. "Graveyard spooky, yeah..." As I did so, I felt the ground rumble below me. The Grave Shaman sat down on the stone next to me, and grabbed me tightly in one arm.

"Be warned, things may get a bit-" He was cut off by the thunderous roar of a mass of headstones and dead trees flooding to the point where they were sitting, and the earth itself shooting upward in a titanic pillar. Marble, wood and soil snaked and wrapped around each other in a shaft that stretched to the heavens before gigantic lengths of bone exploded out from it, forming a web of branches. From the branches of this "tree", cadaverous hands and large, vein-filled fleshy sacks sprouted in a bizarre attempt at leaves and fruit. The Grave Shaman and I sat at the very edge of one of these firm branches, looking out over the entire town below. It was at this time that my state of artificial relaxation broke down, only to be replaced by mind-rending terror. I sat, paralyzed, as I looked at the twisted situation I was in.

"-Bumpy." The Grave Shaman continued. "As I was saying, the problem is that you seem frightened of the wrong things. Certainly you're frightened of death, and that's understandable. But it seems that you're not nearly as frightened of death as you are just frightened of frightening things that really aren't that scary. The graveyard, after all, is really just a place where the evidence of death happens to roam, and it's silly to be afraid of it. I'd bet you anything that right now, you're more frightened of this tree than you are of the fact that you could fall to your doom at any time."

I nodded shakily.

"However, the tree really can't hurt you. Yes, it's gruesome- it's made of bone and dead things, after all. But you really oughtn't fear the gruesome. A lot of the time, it's where the fun lies." And as if to illustrate the point, two of the hands on the branch we were sitting on had begun playing catch with what I hoped was a rubber eyeball.

Strangely, as he said those words, I realized that he was right. I felt myself relax immensely, and then immediately tense up again when I realized just how high up we were. "I... Yes, I think you're right. You definitely have a point. Now, can we get down?" I squeaked.

The Grave Shaman smiled slightly. "Yes, but he has to be the one to take us down." He said, motioning to a bat sitting nearby that was at that very moment becoming very, very large and very, very grotesque.

I looked it up and down for a moment, and finally said "You know... I think that might actually be alright..."

And down we flew.