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Atop a small butte at the edge of Aberdale, in the exhale of October's last, unseasonably warm breath, sat a quiet truck, its uncanopied bed open to the sky, lined on the inside with wooly blankets and a foam camping pad. Upon it lay two bodies side-by-side, breathing deeply, their eyes on the stars above.

"You were right," Wirt said after a minute. "That was way better than going to the Halloween dance."

Sara rolled over onto her side to look at him and smile. "Yeah," she said, laying her hand on his chest, which was still a little bit sweaty. "I told you."

"I just want to make sure you're… You're happy?" he said, turning his head, eyes wide. "Like… you're good?"

"Me? 'Course. It was my idea, Wirt," she said, giving him a little bit of a look, but she really thought it was sweet. "Are you happy?"

"Yeah," said Wirt, and he smiled finally. "Yeah, I am." She leaned in to kiss him and then sat up, making the vehicle rock backward ever so slightly with the characteristic squeak they'd gotten very familiar with for the last ten minutes. Wirt followed her cue and placed a hand on the wheelhouse as she went digging through the blankets for her shirt.

"We might have messed up your truck's alignment," he said to her, and she laughed as she wiggled back into her ribcage-printed black turtleneck.

"You're worried about that?" she said, and nudged him. "Worth it." The teenager at her elbow blushed, but he laughed too. She tossed him his jeans and laid back down with a thump while he wriggled to put them on.

She said, "It's beautiful," as he laid down next to her, extending his arm over her head and placing a hand on her far shoulder. The stars above shone like little pinpricks cut out of a black sheet held up over the day.

Wirt agreed. "It is beautiful."

"And what are stars if not lanterns, hung on the boughs of the tree of the world, to light the path forward?" Sara intoned, and felt Wirt stiffen next to her.

"Saraa, you can't," he said despairingly, but she nuzzled into his side for a moment and then poked his ribs.

"Don't tell me I can't. I love your poetry," she said, and sat back up again. She slipped on her leggings and sneakers, crawled atop the wheelhouse, and then jumped down to the ground. Gravel crunched beneath her feet.

"You going somewhere?" Wirt asked, and she could hear him copying her actions as she approached the edge of the hill. The truck gave a creek and his shoes, too, hit the gravel.

Sara said, "Just enjoying the view," and leaned up against the bare tree at the drop-off of the butte. Long dry grass tickled her ankles as Wirt walked up next to her and put an arm around her shoulders. Their little hometown spread out several hundred feet below them, glowing brightly, a perfect Halloween-orange hue. You could see the bowling alley from here, and the high school, and the flashing lights on the hospital roof. Somewhere far away, they heard the happy screams of children. The hills on the eastern horizon cut hard black shapes against the purplish sky.

"Way better than going to the Halloween dance," Sara said aloud, agreeing with her own sentiment.

"Do you think we should drop by?" Wirt asked. "It's senior year. This is our last chance."

"I would totally agree with you if the after-party wasn't going to be so much better," Sara said, rolling her head in toward his shoulder. "That, I think we should drop by. It's where everyone's going to actually be, anyway."

"Mm," Wirt said, and by way of responding leaned in to place a peck in her thick black hair. He was tall enough that it landed right on the crown of her head.

"You sure we can't just stay up here tonight?" Sara asked, wrapping an arm around his waist and looking to the east. "I want to be here to see the sun rise."

Wirt smiled, but shook his head. "Nah. I have to go to Greg's dress rehearsal in the morning and Mom will notice if I'm not in the house."

"Oh yeah, you said something about that. What's he in?"

"Adventures of Huck Finn. It's just like the real book, but without all that downer racism stuff." Sara laughed. "Anyway, he's Tom Sawyer, which is kind of a big part, and he pretty much told me I'm coming, so…"

"Your brother is so cute that it kills me," Sara said, very sincerely.

"Yeahh, kills me too," said Wirt with the tone of one who has suffered long hard years, but Sara knew he didn't mean it. The brothers were close. Every time she went over for dinner, seven-year-old Greg had new stories to regale her with about the make-believe games Wirt used to play with him; it was sweet.

They stood together at the crest of the hill for a long time, taking in the little details of the town below. Cars moved slowly on every street as children's almost-invisible shapes dashed beneath the streetlights. Sara looked up at her boyfriend, clad in denim and cotton and a leather vest with a plastic star pinned on; "Hey, Cowboy," she said, and reached up to brush his hair from his face. "You forgot your hat."

"I don't have to wear my whole costume when there aren't other people around," Wirt said defensively.

"Well, you should get it, because it's –" she checked her watch "— ten oh-three, and there are going to be other people around when we get to that after-party. So saddle up, pardner." Wirt gave her a half-smile. Sara pulled her arm away and began shuffling back toward the truck to bundle up the blankets, but Wirt stopped her when he asked, "Hey, Sara?"

She turned around. "Yeah?"

"You wouldn't mind if we… stopped by the cemetery first, would you?" He sounded kind of nervous.

Again? Sara didn't say so, but she was surprised. She would have thought he'd gotten it out of his system by now. "Yeah, I suppose so," she said, and Wirt looked visibly relieved – whether because she hadn't said no, or because she hadn't asked why, she wasn't sure. She jabbed a thumb at the car. "But help me put the love nest away first, huh?"

"Ma'am." Wirt tipped an invisible hat, jogged up toward her with a bounce in his step, gave her a kiss in passing, and continued toward the car. Sara crossed her arms and watched after him. He was a romantic fool even while he pretended to be a cynical old man. She got that, and she loved him for it. But she wouldn't ever get his thing with the cemetery.

This marked the third year in a row that involved some interaction between Wirt, Sara, and the Eternal Garden on Halloween night. The first, during their sophomore year of high school, had infamously ended with her friend Trisha running a half-mile in three minutes to find a phone and call an ambulance so that Wirt and his little brother didn't die from hypoxia on the ground next to the lake on the other side of the cemetery wall; that had been fun. Wirt seemed different afterward, too, as you might expect of someone who'd had a near-death experience. He got a little more confident. Easier to talk to. They'd started hanging out a lot more after that.

The following year, Jason Funderberker (the human, not the frog) had hosted a party at his parents' house, the big estate on Montresor Street, and Wirt and Sara had gone to an event as a 'thing' for the first time, sort of. She was a bloody nurse and he was a pirate who looked uncomfortable in his own beard; there'd been age-inappropriate beverages available at the wet bar, but neither of them were really into it. When the rest of their peers were too out of it to be interesting conversation anymore, she and Wirt had gone for a walk together, enjoying some of the last autumn colors they'd see before the snow rolled in. As they turned the corner they came face-to-face with the looming gates of the Eternal Garden before them, and Wirt had stopped clear in his tracks.

"You okay?" Sara asked.

Wirt didn't answer for a minute. "I'm fine," he finally said, but he'd had a really odd look on his face when he did. Sara felt like she got it; facing the place where you almost died is pretty heavy stuff. But he'd just looked so strange to her – not sad or scared, like you'd think, but wistful, like he was missing something, or wanted to say something but couldn't. Wirt had taken off his pirate hat almost reverently, and taken a step toward the gates, but then changed his mind and turned around.

"Wirt…" Sara said as he passed her by.

Wirt had looked up at her, and then a funny look crossed his face, and all of a sudden he took her by the shoulders and kissed her for the very first time, which she was fine with, even if his pirate beard tickled her, because she'd been pretty sure if she didn't initiate it soon it would never happen at all.

And now here they were a year a later, at the entrance to the bone garden once again. She hadn't been back since – she had little enough reason to see the place even on Halloween – but Greg said that he and Wirt went to visit sometimes, and in those exact words. When she asked Greg who they visited, he threw up his hands. "All the great friends of ours!" Which was adorable, but didn't make it any less weird. Sara didn't care what Wirt's actions looked like to anyone else; she worried about what they meant to Wirt. Why was he haunting the graveyard, and was he okay? But the last time she'd heard about him doing it had been months ago now, and she'd kind of thought his thing with it had passed. Clearly she'd been wrong.

She and Wirt approached the gates side-by-side, an odd duo of small glow-in-the-dark skeleton and freakishly tall cowboy. Unlike the last time she'd been here, Wirt didn't hesitate to enter, but walked in quite comfortably and looked around, as if browsing a bookstore. Somewhere to the south, she could see bobbing flashlight beams, and knew that some kids were probably doing as she'd done a few years past and telling less-than-spooky stories between the gravestones. She smiled a little. Wirt was meandering toward the far corner of the cemetery, where the oldest graves sat backed up against the wall. She raised the flashlight that she'd pulled from the glove compartment and clicked it on. "Aren't you forgetting something, Wirt?" she called, gesturing with it at his back, and he turned around.

"Thanks," he said as she caught up with him. He turned his gaze to the far cemetery wall and looked, suddenly, sad.

"Hey," she said, putting a hand on his elbow. "You gonna tell me what's up?"

He said, "Just thinking," which was clearly true, but it wasn't a real answer either. Sara frowned. Wirt started trudging forward, looking at the gravestones he passed in the dull glow from the streetlights outside the fence. Sara made her own easy way through the slabs, glancing at dates here and there out of curiosity to who had died most long ago. Wirt stopped in front of a particularly large stone and then didn't move again, not until Sara had made a full round of the corner on her own. She came up next to him and took his hand.

"What's this?" she asked. The gravestone announced the man and woman who were buried in the plot together – a Rose and Harold Miller – but beneath, it also listed what looked like full tens of other names. Vernon, George, Bethany, Walter, Beatrice, Mary, Harold Jr. – all of them had birthdays between twenty and forty years after those of Rose and Harold, but every single name on the slab shared the same year of death. Beneath it all was the epitaph, "Gone from the world, not from the heart".

"Is this a whole family?" Sara asked after a minute.

"Yeah," Wirt said. He sounded kind of choked up.

"Wow," she said. She ran her fingers gently along the engraving and then pulled back. "That's… terrible. It must have been a disease. Or a house fire." Wirt kind of tightened his jaw, and Sara had the feeling she maybe shouldn't have said anything.

"Greg found it," he said miserably. "He was really, uh… really proud of himself for being able to read the names." Sara didn't get it. Wirt looked positively heartbroken, but these people had died more than a hundred years ago.

"Are you related to them?" she asked.

Wirt shook his head and scratched his face, an action that looked like it might have been meant to conceal a whisk at his eyes. "No," he said. "No." And he slowly walked away again, leaving Sara by herself to hold the flashlight up to the old names of strangers. She took a deep breath.

"So you're really not going to tell me what's going on with you?" she asked, jogging to catch up with her boyfriend yet again. "I'm fine with being here, but it's making you act really weird, Wirt. Are you really okay?"

Wirt finally turned to look at her. "Sorry," he said, a little slumped over. "I've just got a lot in my head and it's kind of hard to talk about." His eyes were deeply sorrowful.

Sara thought about it. "That's too bad," she said, and gave him a hug. "I thought we were having a nice night earlier."

"Oh, we were!" Wirt insisted, throwing up his hands as if in surrender. "No, yeah, Sara, it was – it was wonderful. Really." She grinned a little at that. "This doesn't have anything to do with that. I promise." Wirt's face was lit all gold in the autumn night's light.

"It's got to do with when you pretty much drowned," she said. "I know."

"Yeah," he said. She saw him look back at the big tombstone, engraved with more names than she could count at a glance. "I guess it's, uh… hard not to feel a little sympathy for the dead now. Tonight." Sara supposed she could understand that.

They stood close by each other as a little gust of wind pushed a puff of leaves against their feet. "That's the only place I haven't gone back to yet," Wirt said, and Sara followed his gaze to the portion of the cemetery wall over which arched an enormous oak. She'd climbed it a few times. "I've been back since that night to see the rest, but the other side…" He shook his head.

"Will it make you feel better if you try?" Sara asked.

"I don't know," Wirt said. "Maybe."

"Well, come on, then," Sara urged, and placed her foot in the first low divot of the brick wall.

"Ahh, Sara, no, maybe we shouldn't…" Wirt tried to protest, but Sara was already on her way up. She hoisted herself past the first load-bearing branches and then shimmied out onto the top of the wall and sat down.

"Come on, Wirt!" she called, and she heard a defeated sigh down below. While she waited for him, she looked out to the landscape visible from her vantage point, but there wasn't that much landscape to be seen on a moonless night. Grassy train tracks ran along the outside edge of the wall at the top of a steep hillside, with a small lake and a copse of trees at the bottom. This was the edge of town, and beyond them the only things to see were low black mountains and the vast starry sky.

"Now, this is a pretty nice view too," she said as Wirt finally joined her on the top of the wall.

"Yeah," he said, kind of quietly, and Sara wondered whether she was doing him any good in asking him to be here. His eyes were on the still lake at the bottom of the hill. She bit her lip a little and decided to pat his shoulder.

"Hey," she said, smiling, trying to make it really clear she did want to help. "What's going through your weird Wirtful head?"

The kind of smile that she liked to see flicked across his face for a minute. "Heh," he said. "That's, uh…" He didn't finish the sentence, but faded away into apparently deep thought, eyes still on the shimmering water below. "Sara," he said after a minute. "What's the most important thing that ever happened to you?"

"Important like good?"

"Important like… significant. Something big."

She thought about it for a moment. "I dunno," she said. "Maybe when my parents got divorced." The other contenders were when her Granna died and when her mother made her quit ballet, but they didn't really compare in terms of long-reaching consequence. "What about you?"

Wirt didn't need time to think about his answer. "Falling into that lake," he said, pointing as if she could have missed it. "Nearly getting hit by the train, and falling into that lake." Sara smirked at him a little, and he caught her look. "What?"

"Wrong answer," she teased, and bumped him with her hip. "The right one was, 'The moment I met you.'" They laughed for a minute, and then Sara thought about what he'd said. "I don't know, Wirt. I can't tell you how to feel, and I know what happened to you was horrible. But how does that night compare to the permanent stuff? Like when Greg was born? Or when your dad…" She trailed off and stopped, and then looked away. Wirt wasn't looking at her either.

She took a minute before continuing, softly, "…Unless, you know, what happened a couple years ago on Halloween is still having a really big effect on you. In which case I hope you'll talk to me about it." If that wasn't a clear enough invitation, she didn't know what was.

"I, uh, saw a lot of things, that night," Wirt said, scratching his head. "While I was in the water."

This was new information to Sara, but it wasn't too strange to hear. "Yeah, it happens." she said. "Your brain almost shut down from lack of oxygen."

"Heh. Yeah, it did." His tone was light, but she could see his face a little in the darkness, and he looked worried. "It was just… It was really grand, you know? There were whole towns and rivers and a forest that was autumn forever. And people! Just, tons of people. I made friends." Wirt stopped and looked up at her, clearly trying to gauge her reaction.

"That's really cool," Sara said. "I wish I could have seen this stuff."

"You believe me?" he asked.

"Yeah," she said, raising an eyebrow. "Why would you lie about it?"

He didn't answer, but she could see him smile. "It was so strange," he said, and he picked at the moss atop the wall with the hand closer to her. "And then ever since I woke up, it seems like everything else has been strange too. I mean, look at me. I have friends. My stepdad and I went fishing last weekend and I didn't totally hate it. And, you know, you and me…" She liked to hear that, and took his hand. "I even got my acceptance letter to audition for the conservatory yesterday."

Sara said, "You did? That's great, Wirt!" He squeezed her hand back. She didn't say any of the things they were both thinking, about how far away the conservatory was from the state school where she had been offered a chemistry scholarship. This wasn't the time for that.

"Thanks," he said. "Everything's kind of great. And sometimes it makes me wonder if, I don't know, I never really made it out of that lake. Maybe I'm making all of this up in my head while I drown."

"Hey now," she said. "You're fine, Wirt. You're right here, with me."

He said, "Yeah. I think I know that." Sara pondered this. She couldn't very well succeed in reassuring him she wasn't a figment of his imagination, in a world where an objective view of reality is impossible from any standpoint. So she did the next best thing, and leaned in to kiss him instead.

"And you know what else?" Wirt continued when they were done, pointing down at the train tracks ten feet below their dangling shoes. "That thing I said about getting hit by the train? That's impossible, because these tracks haven't been connected to any railway for forty years. But it happened anyway." He threw up his hands. "I just don't know anymore, Sara."

Sara said, "Wow," squinting at the overgrown tracks. "That's…" And now it was her turn to pause uncertainly, because she thought for sure that she'd heard the whistle of a train in the distance, that Halloween two years ago, as she climbed the tree to follow Wirt and Greg across the wall and was confronted with the sight of them plunging into the water. She'd never really thought about it before. "That's really weird, Wirt."

"Don't I know it," he said, hunching over his lap with his arms crossed. Starlight glinted off his sheriff's badge. "There's a point where the weird gets so big you can't tell where it ends anymore."

Sara closed her eyes as the wind stirred, pushing her hair across her face and serenading them both with the rattle of grass and the smell of sweet earth. She tried to put herself in the place that Wirt talked about, in an endless autumn forest with sunlight pouring down through the branches. It was beautiful, and she smiled.

"I can kinda imagine it," she said. "Your fall forest. I love it already."

"Yeah?" Wirt asked, and scooted toward her a little. He put his hand back over hers and she could hear him lean back, closing his eyes as well. "And can you imagine the schoolhouse by the pond?"

A 'schoolhouse' was only ever old-fashioned, so what Sara thought of was apples by the chalkboard, and wooden desks neatly in a row, bleached by the sun through dusty windows. "Yeah."

"And the mill by the river?"

Easily. A modest grist mill churned evening waters slowly as bluebirds nestled in the nook of the chimney. "Mm-hmm."

"And the frog steamboat?"

"Pfft. Wirt," she laughed.

He waved her down, though. "No, really! Imagine it. A great big red-and-white steamboat, peddling slowly through the marshes, and every one of the passengers is a singing frog dressed to the nines."

"Wow. Yeah, I can imagine that." She opened her eyes finally, and they sparkled in the starlight. "I couldn't ever come up with most of this stuff, Wirt." She leaned into his arm and pressed her cheek to his shoulder. "I really wish I could have seen all these things."

"Well, it wasn't all nice," he said.

"I don't care," she said. "I'd like to be there with you." In her mind, they were two dark happy shapes almost disappeared against the splendid shadows of fall, walking together on a path made for pilgrims.

And somewhere far away, there came the small, but definite sound of a steam engine's whistle.

They jumped at the same time and stared down the tracks for a full minute, half expecting a black train to arrive beneath their feet, but it never did. Wirt turned to look at her finally. "Uh… Man, it's getting late," he said with a nervous laugh. "That… after-party, huh?"

"Oh." Sara checked her watch. "Yeah. I guess we should go to that."

"Yeah," Wirt agreed. "Senior year's our last chance." And they sat a little awkwardly for a minute before Wirt gave her a grin and they started to descend the tree, one after the other.

At the bottom, everything was silent. The kids who'd been popping around the graveyard before seemed to have left. Sara turned her head as they walked away and cast her eyes back again over the Garden's wall.

"I'd like to hear more about it," she said to Wirt, and he looked down at her. "Didn't you say something about people, too?"

"Oh man," he said, and smiled, and wrapped his arm around her shoulder while they walked side-by-side. "Yeah. Some of them are right over there." He was pointing toward the old plots by the wall.

Sara gave him a look. "Come on, Wirt."

"No, really! Let me tell you, Sara, you should have been there. You would have loved Beatrice."

Before the dress rehearsal at the auditorium the following morning, while Wirt was away looking for a cup of coffee, Greg bounced up to Sara in the front row of seats and placed a drawing in her lap.

"Hey Greg," she said. He was dressed in overalls and a straw hat, with Jason Funderburker strapped to his back like an avocado baby. "What's this?"

"I drew you a picture!" Greg said proudly. It was a crude rendering of a sailboat, with what looked like himself and Wirt aboard among many green people in nice dresses. The brothers were only recognizable for their headwear distinctive to two Halloweens ago. "It's a frog boat. I kinda forget, but me and Wirt visited waay back-a-day." He hoisted himself up between the armrests of the seat next to hers and swung his feet back and forth.

"Yeah?" she asked.

"Yeah! It was a nice day, and Jason Funderburker shared his beautiful tenor." The frog croaked. Greg dropped to the ground as the director made a call to begin rounding up children backstage. "You should have come, Sara! Jason says to invite you for the next time. Anyway, I gots-to-go!" And he scampered off, leaving Sara holding the paper by herself.

Wirt came back as the lights were beginning to go down, and offered her a Styrofoam coffee cup. "What's that?" he asked as she folded up the paper and tucked it into her bomber jacket.

"Present from Greg," she said. They quieted down as the curtains began to draw open on a late summer pastoral scene and didn't speak again for a long time. Sara never stopped smiling even once.

I love to hear feedback, so if you have any thoughts, I hope you'll take the time to comment. :)