Chapter 3
The windy, somber weather that night — uncharacteristically cold, even as the fall season reached its peak — had caught everyone in Sherwood by surprise. For a single person in the town, though, that night and the haunting silence that came with it were just perfect.
Despite leaving her home with the warmest clothes she had, shivers still managed to run down her back every once in a while, as she made her way to cemetery. Every time she heard any kind of noise, be it the chirp of a cricket, the wind shaking the branches of a tree, or what sounded an awful lot like steps, the girl’s body would immediately stiffen, as if it would somehow prevent her from being noticed. She tried to calm herself many times. After all, that jumpiness was not only a delay to her plans, as she would stop dead in her tracks at the sign of any noise, but it also didn't help keeping her nerves intact. Still, no noise coming from outside could be more unnerving than the one stuck inside her head.
Veronica, what the hell are you doing?
The words looped in her mind over and over. What started as a tiny voice, now was a loud scream as she stood in front of the cemetery. Veronica wished she knew the answer, but from the moment she left her home with candles, a scrunchie, and a bunch of other items that she intended to use on her 'mission', her body moved on its own, as if it found itself completely lost in a daze. A flood of deafening thoughts rushed and confused her, even though Veronica tried her best to ‘wake up’ every once in a while.
Breaking into the cemetery was too easy, almost to the point of concern. There was a massive hole in the fence — probably from the time Kurt, Ram and the Heathers went to pour thunderbird on Chandler’s grave — and the gravekeeper was nowhere to be seen. Not counting the fact that her bag did get stuck when she passed through the fence, Kurt and Ram’s dumb shenanigans were actually working in her favor for once.
The cemetery was morbidly silent. Veronica paced through the place, looking at grave after similar grave, barely being able to read the names engraved in the tombstones.After walking for a short time, she was finally able to find a shovel, stuck upright near some guy's grave. Now she had to find Heather.
The Chandler’s family-plot was a huge space on land for very few graves. Heather’s gravestone stood out the smallest of them all — nothing like the grandiose, pompous Heather that Veronica knew in life. It was Veronica’s fault. Surely that small, minimalistic gravestone was what her parents felt the “new” Heather would want. It read:
Heather Chandler
May she achieve in the afterlife what her generosity provided others
Corny as hell. Heather would have cursed Veronica from beyond the grave if she could.
Veronica rummaged through her bag for a moment before finding a small sledgehammer. There was no turning back now.
Closing her eyes, she firmly grabbed the sledgehammer with both hands, positioning her arms slightly above her own head. With her eyes still closed shut, she brought the sledgehammer to Heather’s gravestone with full force, trying to imagine in her mind hitting the ball in a pleasant game of cricket instead. A loud crashing sound, followed by a heavy object hitting the soft grass was heard.
Veronica opened her eyes. The gravestone had broken just under Heather’s name.
***
Setting the sledgehammer and the broken gravestone aside, she picked up the shovel instead. As Veronica started to dig, her mind busied itself with the task of making up an alibi, in case someone caught her. Maybe, just maybe, she could blame it on guilt and grief and get away with a lighter sentence, probably a month or two in a psych ward. Maybe guilt and grief really were the reasons she was doing that, who knew.
In the course of the few next hours, Veronica would come to learn something the worst way possible: digging a hole was hard. She dug and dug, until her arms were sore, and then she kept digging. To say Veronica was struggling was an understatement, even though she considered herself a strong girl — She couldn’t imagine someone like Heather Duke or Martha being able to do something like that. Thinking about it, if it weren't for the fact that what she was doing was completely creepy and a crime, she might've asked McNamara for help. God knows a cheerleader’s strength would have been very much appreciated.
Despite her tiredness, she put even more intensity into the task at hand. She didn’t have any way to check the time, and staying there until morning came and people started leaving their homes for work would be...not very good. Thankfully, just as she started to wonder whether sunrise was near, a solid clunk coming from the shovel indicated she had reached her objective.
Veronica pushed the broken gravestone into a more ample place, somewhere where she could comfortably sit on the ground. On top of the stone piece, seven candles were laid in a near-perfect circle, the red scrunchie standing exactly in the middle. It was time for the final step.
The last part was easy, in theory at least. The exact words on the book were “You are to convince Him —whoever that was — that the person you are trying to bring back belongs in the world of the living. Make them a good plea and they shall listen.”. She didn't even need to write that part down — these exact words were engraved in her memory, just as they had been since the first time she read them.
She tried her best to conjure up in her mind…why did she want so hard to believe that some unreal-sounding necromancy ritual would be able to bring Heather back? Why go as far as actually putting a colossal effort into it, just for the smallest chance of undoing the mistake she made? Was it really just guilt or grief?
No. It was because Heather had been someone special to her.
Most people would laugh if Veronica actually said it out loud given how often the two girls clashed, but Heather and Veronica were friends. She knew that her ability to fake absence notes wasn’t really the reason – or at least the only reason – that Heather Chandler, the mythic bitch herself, had invited her to their group. The school’s demon queen could have very much just kept Veronica as another one of her paws, someone who would do favors for her just for a chance to sit at the Heathers’ lunch table, but she wanted Veronica by her side. In her own weird way, Heather respected Veronica and saw her as someone worthy of being her friend.
Veronica in turn, had seen another face of the her personality, one that very few people were lucky enough to see. The Heather that Veronica knew was the one that would always get Veronica home safe after having a few too many drinks at a party, the one that showed a surprisingly soft side, every now and then when they were alone. She was the Heather that — as Veronica found out after a small dose of snooping through Heather’s locker before the school cleaned it — secretly kept pictures of them both in her locker room.
Heather Chandler might've been a mythic bitch, but she wasn’t a monster. She was at worst just some self-centered teenager that worried way too much about social standing in high school, as they all were one way or the other. She didn’t deserve her fate.
That last sentence clung onto her thoughts as her focus deepened. Shutting her eyes even tighter, she could vividly see one specific part of Heather’s last moments running through her head over and over again: the moment when, after choking on the mug’s content, Heather firmly grabbed Veronica’s shoulders, before falling to the ground. Just before her last breath.
What finally disturbed her concentration was a loud, seemingly feminine shriek. Veronica felt once again a shiver run down her spine as she opened her eyes, hastily looking in every direction, desperately seeking the source. The unknown voice shrieked one more time. This time, there was no mistaking it. The scream was coming from inside the coffin.