The Weird Destiny of Loren Rosencrance
The moonless sky was dark when Loren got to the last grave in the cemetery, the one belonging to a two-year-old girl named Desdemona. She’d been buried only the day before, and she was frightened. She didn’t understand what had happened to her, or why she suddenly found herself in such a dark place.
Loren knelt before the child’s tombstone. “Don’t be scared, little one,” he said.
This was how he’d spent the last twenty-six years of his life, ever since he was fourteen and had an epiphany while cutting across the cemetery between home and the school house.
On that day so many years ago he’d heard thousands and thousands of voices sobbing all around him–the wailing of the dead.
Then, through the cacophony came the mantra, clear as diamond, “If you’ve found your rest, then rest, but if you wander lost, than hear my voice and know that you are not alone.”
He’d been soothing the pains of the dead with that mantra ever since, and he said it now to Desdemona. “If you’ve found your rest, then rest, but if you wander lost, than hear my voice and know that you are not alone.”
He’d say other things, too, unique to that dead person and that time. Often he’d just chat with them and listen to their stories, consoling them for the mistakes they’d made and couldn’t…
