My sister died eight months ago, but last night she asked me through a delivery app to bring a large black candle to the occult market at 2:13 in the morning. It wasn’t a joke: when I accepted the trip, the client info showed her full name, her profile picture… and the exact address of the cemetery where we buried her.
I didn’t take a single step closer. I stayed exactly where I was, the paper bag in one hand, my phone trembling in the other, and the gate still open behind me in case I had to bolt. The caretaker stood under the yellow lamp, motionless, with his arm extended and palm upward, as if he were offering me a hand to step down from a ledge I couldn’t see.
Then he smiled.
It wasn’t a normal smile. It was minimal, barely a line on his face, but it was enough to make my teeth ache with cold. Because he didn’t smile at the sight of me. He smiled as if he had already been waiting for me. As if I were a repetition.
I took a step back.
My phone vibrated again.
Ximena:
Don’t run. If you run, he follows. If he talks sweet to you, it’s worse.
I looked up from the screen, and the caretaker no longer had his hand extended. Now he was walking toward me over the gravel, slowly, dragging his left foot slightly. The keys jingled at his waist with a hollow tinkling, as if he carried too many. As he got closer, I realized the dark stains on his chest weren’t dampness.
They were finger marks.
Blackened finger marks, as if someone had gripped him with hands full of wet earth.
—“Son,” he said from several yards away, in an incredibly kind voice. —“We’re closed. Are you looking for a grave?”
I didn’t answer.
I remembered the message: If he smiles at you, you’re already too late. And the worse one: Don’t accept his hand. The problem with real fear is that it doesn’t look like the movies. It doesn’t make you run away screaming. It makes you very obedient. Very careful. As if any misplaced word would break something that was already fractured.
—“I was sent for a delivery,” I finally said, slightly lifting the bag.
The caretaker looked down at the candle, the matches, the alcohol. Then he looked back at me with a strange patience.
—“Ah, yes,” he said. —“The girl.”
My throat tightened.
—“What girl?”
—“The one in the black sneakers.”
I felt a tug inside me, as if something invisible were pulling my stomach forward. The Converse. The ones in the photo. The ones in the casket.
—“Where is she?” I asked.
He raised his right hand and pointed toward the interior of the cemetery—not toward the main path, but toward a narrower trail between old mausoleums, twisted trees, and sunken headstones. A part with no clear light, where the yellow lamp couldn’t reach.
—“I’ll take you,” he said.
I didn’t move.
His smile grew just a bit wider.
—“Don’t be afraid. They come to leave things often.”
They come.
Not she came. Not she came once. They come often.
My phone vibrated with such force I almost dropped it.
Ximena:
If he’s already seen your face, don’t use the wide path. Get in where the hearse can’t fit.
I looked up. The caretaker was still waiting for me with that unbearable politeness. And in that moment, I understood something that made my skin crawl: maybe he didn’t want me to follow him. Maybe he wanted me to decide to follow him, which is different. As if the permission had to come from me.
—“I’m going alone,” I said.
His expression didn’t change, but the jingling of his keys did. They sounded louder, as if he had squeezed the key ring inside his fist.
—“That isn’t wise,” he replied. —“There are restricted areas.”
—“That’s exactly why.”
He stood still for two seconds. Then he tilted his head with the kind of friendliness you see in a bank commercial.
—“As you wish.”
And he stepped aside.
I didn’t like how easily he let me pass at all.
I turned into the trail the map pointed to—not because I trusted the map, but because I didn’t want to give him my back completely. The gravel quickly changed to packed dirt. The graves began to crowd together, some so old they no longer had names, others with headless angels or rusted crosses leaning as if they were tired. Green-Wood Cemetery is huge by day; at night, it feels as if it’s growing. As if the further you walk, the more ground it invents.
I moved forward with the phone barely lighting my way and the bag pressed to my chest. The red bracelet was tight on my wrist. At every turn, I thought I heard the caretaker’s keys behind me, but when I turned, no one was there. Only the trees and the mausoleums breathing dampness.
A few minutes later, I saw Ximena’s name for the first time.
Not on a grave of her own. On someone else’s.
It was a cracked marble headstone, covered in moss. The original name had been erased by the years, but someone had written over it, with something dark and thick, like wax or mud:
XIMENA
Beneath it was another line of text.
I remembered the audio: If you see my name written on the graves, don’t read the one that’s underneath…
I locked my eyes on the word at the top. I forced myself not to look down. I rounded the headstone with my neck stiff, as if the simple act of reading could open a door. I kept walking.
Three graves later, another XIMENA appeared.
And then another.
On a cement cross.
On a low niche.
On the base of a faceless sculpture.
Always on top. Always added. Always fresh.
My breath was already short when I understood the pattern: they weren’t marking where she was. They were marking a trajectory. A trail of rotted breadcrumbs.
I followed the marks.
The cemetery seemed to sink into silence around me. The city, which until a while ago still existed with its distant murmur, vanished completely. No engine. No dog. No wind. Even my boots sounded muffled in the dirt. As if everything inside were listening.
I reached an old section with large mausoleums, some open, others sealed with new chains over century-old doors. There, the cell signal went crazy. The map spun, the blue dot jumped from one side to another, and the delivery app kept flashing: Deliver to hand.
Then I saw the door from the photo.
The same stone frame.
The same unlit candle at the base.
The same inner gate.
And, at the bottom, half-buried in dry mud, the tip of a black sneaker.
I didn’t rush toward it. The light from my phone was shaking so much it barely illuminated anything. At first, I thought the sneaker was loose. Then I saw the ankle. Then the leg.
Someone was sitting on the other side of the gate.
I couldn’t see their face because they were hunched over, knees pulled to their chest, hair falling forward in dark strands. They wore an oversized hoodie. Black. Covered in dirt.
I didn’t breathe. I couldn’t.
—“Ximena?” I said, and my voice came out so low it was barely a whisper.
The figure slowly raised its head.
It wasn’t her.
It was a girl about her age, pale to the point of looking grey under the phone light. She had dirt caught in her eyelashes. Cracked lips. And that wasn’t the worst part. The worst part was recognizing her.
It was the neighbor from The Bronx.
The same one who, months ago, told my mom she had seen Ximena fighting with someone dressed in white before she fell. The same one who later backed out and said she didn’t want to get involved in trouble. Her name was Fabiola. I had seen her once in person, outside the wake, crying as if she wanted to tell something but didn’t dare.
Now she was there, on the other side of a gate locked from the outside.
Her eyes moved from the phone to the bag I was carrying.
—“I’m glad it was you who came,” she whispered.
I took a step.
—“What the hell are you doing here?”
She moistened her lips, or tried to.
—“Don’t raise your voice.”
—“Where is my sister?”
Her eyes went to my back, not my face. She looked behind me with a terror so pure that I felt an icy current crawl up my neck.
—“Don’t turn around yet,” she said.
I turned to stone.
The red bracelet began to burn me. It’s not just a figure of speech. I felt the string get hot, truly hot, digging into my skin. On my phone, without me touching anything, another message opened.
Ximena:
That one did see me fall. If you get her out, remember to ask her about the white clothes. But first, turn off the light.
I didn’t understand why I had to turn off the light until I raised the phone slightly and saw, reflected in the dirty glass of the mausoleum, that I was no longer alone.
Something tall was standing behind me.
Not the caretaker.
This was thinner. Longer. Like a person wrapped from head to toe in light-colored cloth, so still that at first the eye doesn’t catch it. I couldn’t see the face. Only the shape. And a hand, too white, resting on the shoulder of a grave.
I turned off the phone flashlight.
Darkness fell over me completely—heavy, damp, smelling of wet stone and alcohol. On the other side of the gate, I heard Fabiola swallow a sob. I didn’t dare even move my eyelids.
Then, very close to my left ear, a voice identical to my sister’s said:
—“I’m not the only one they buried wrong.”
My legs went weak.
Because the voice came from outside the gate.
And because, at the same time, from inside the mausoleum, the phone vibrated in my hand with a new photo that barely lit the darkness for a second: an image taken from above, as if from a rooftop, showing Ximena struggling with someone dressed in white… and another person watching from the edge.
A person with a delivery helmet.
My helmet.
I looked up blindly, my heart trying to leap out, just as the caretaker’s keys jingled behind the mausoleum door and Fabiola, now crying, murmured:
—“Don’t open it until I tell you which of the two is you.”
I didn’t move.
Fabiola was breathing on the other side of the gate with that suppressed sobbing that sounds louder than actual crying. The caretaker’s keys jingled again, but not like a man walking—it sounded as if they were being shaken slowly from behind several walls. And to my left, so close I could feel the chill of its presence before I even heard it, my sister’s voice spoke to me again with a tenderness that left me worse off than if she had screamed.
—“Don’t open it yet,” she said. —“First, look at the ground.”
I obeyed.
The only light was my phone screen, flickering on and off on its own at its lowest brightness, as if it were breathing. I managed to see my boots sunk in black dirt, stones, thin roots, the crooked base of the mausoleum… and two shadows.
Mine.
And another.
The second one wasn’t behind me or to my side. It came out from my feet, attached to mine, as if the two were born from the same body and only separated slightly at chest height.
I felt a void in my stomach.
—“What does that mean?” I whispered.
—“It means one of you already entered before,” Ximena’s voice said. —“And the cemetery doesn’t like to let go of what it recognizes.”
I snapped my head up, even though she’d told me not to look yet. I saw no face. Only the stark white shape, motionless among the graves, taller than it should be, with the fabric hanging smooth until it almost touched the ground. It didn’t move, but it felt attentive. Like an animal that knows you’ve already seen it and therefore is no longer in a hurry.
Fabiola let out a moan.
—“Don’t look at it too long,” she whispered. —“If you look too long, it rearranges your memory.”
—“What are you talking about?”
—“About him,” she said, and then corrected herself, desperate. —“About you. I don’t know. I don’t know anymore.”
I pressed the paper bag against my chest. The candle, the alcohol, the matches. A delivery app order for the dead, for witnesses, for things buried wrong. The phone vibrated again, and a new message appeared from no name:
OPEN AND IT TELLS YOU WHO YOU ARE
Below it, almost at the same time, one came from Ximena:
If they tell you who you are, you won’t leave with your name.
My hands were sweating so much I thought the phone was going to slip.
—“Fabiola,” I said, without taking my eyes off the white figure. —“Tell me what you saw the day my sister fell.”
There was silence on the other side of the gate. Then I heard her crawl closer.
—“She didn’t fall alone.”
My throat closed up. —“I already know that.”
—“No, you don’t know. No one knows for sure because no one saw the whole thing. I saw the whole thing, and that’s why they brought me here.”
The white figure took a step.
It made no sound.
That was the worst part. I saw it closer, but I heard no dirt, no fabric, no stone, nothing. It was as if the cemetery stripped away its sound so you couldn’t measure the distance.
—“Fabiola,” I said, now actually trembling. —“Talk to me.”
—“Your sister was fighting with someone on the roof of that old building. I thought it was a woman because of the white clothes. A robe, a dress, I don’t know. Something long. But when they got close to the edge, I saw that under the fabric, it didn’t walk like a woman or a man. It walked strange. Like its knees bent too late.”
The thing among the graves took another step.
—“Ximena hit first,” Fabiola continued, her words tumbling out. —“She screamed that she already knew about the deliveries. The packages. The names. I didn’t understand anything. Then that thing grabbed her by the arm, and then another one arrived. Someone with a helmet. A delivery guy. I thought it was you.”
My fingers went limp.
—“I wasn’t there.”
—“I realized that later. But at the moment, I really thought it was you. Because he had your bag. Your helmet. He moved just like you do from a distance. And he didn’t help Ximena. He watched her. He just watched her. Like he was waiting for something.”
The white figure took another step. It was only a few yards away now. The fabric didn’t have normal folds. At times it looked like a sheet, at times a uniform, at times like skin stretched too thin.
—“What was he waiting for?” I asked.
—“For her to choose.”
—“Choose what?”
Fabiola took a second.
—“Which of the two versions she was going to keep believing in.”
I didn’t understand until the phone lit up again on its own, and on the glass of the mausoleum, in the reflection, I saw my own body… but it wasn’t doing the same thing I was.
I was standing still, with the bag against my chest.
My reflection was not.
My reflection slowly raised its right hand and touched the gate.
I felt my arm motionless at my side. I hadn’t moved it.
A stupid, muffled sound escaped me, the sound of a terrified animal.
In the reflection, the other me tilted his head as if he were studying me from inside the glass.
—“It’s already started,” Ximena said, very close to me, without me being able to see her. —“When the place confuses you with yourself, it wants to see which version feeds it better.”
—“Where are you?” I managed to say.
—“Where they left me. But not whole.”
The white figure kept approaching. It no longer seemed to be coming from the path but from everywhere at once, because the corner of my eye found it among the crosses, behind a statue, inside the door of an open niche. A single thing multiplying in my sight.
—“Do something,” Fabiola whispered.
And then I understood what the objects in the bag were for.
It wasn’t an offering.
It was a procedure.
I pulled out the candle with clumsy fingers, the small bottle of alcohol, the matches. The red bracelet was burning my wrist more forcefully, almost branding me. My phone showed one last message from Ximena:
Don’t light the candle. Just soak the wick and mark the door.
I uncapped the alcohol. The smell hit my nose. I wetted the tip of the candle and traced a line with the damp wax over the mausoleum gate, from top to bottom, as best I could. Just as I finished, the caretaker’s keys jingled right behind the stone door, on the side where Fabiola was.
Not outside.
Inside with her.
The girl stifled a scream.
—“You heard him, didn’t you?” she said, hysterical. —“He never comes alone. He is always where they lock him in.”
—“The caretaker?”
—“I don’t know if he started out as a caretaker.”
The mausoleum door thudded once from the inside, softly. Then again. As if someone on the other side were testing how old the hinge was. The gate didn’t open, but my line of alcohol and wax began to dry with a strange, dark, almost black color.
The white figure stopped suddenly.
For the first time, I felt it hesitate.
—“Now ask her,” Ximena’s voice said, urgent. —“Before the resemblance catches you.”
—“Ask her what?”
—“About the white clothes.”
I stepped closer to the gate, enough to see Fabiola better. Her face was dirty, one eye swollen, her nails broken. She didn’t look like a ghost. She looked like someone who had gone too many days without sleep and no longer knew if she was still alive.
—“What was the white clothing?” I asked her.
Fabiola looked at me as if she had been waiting for that question for months.
—“It wasn’t clothes,” she said. —“It was bags.”
My tongue felt frozen. —“What?”
—“Delivery bags. Many of them. Cut and sewn together from the inside. That’s why it shined like that. That’s why it sounded like plastic when the air moved. Ximena discovered it because she saw one just like it in the warehouse of a ghost app. An app that doesn’t show up in the store. Someone in the building downloaded it. There, they requested deliveries in the names of the recently deceased. Simple things. A candle, water, alcohol, threads, dirt from a certain place. We thought it was a sick joke. But then the delivery drivers started losing days. Pieces of memory. Entire streets. And some… some returned to places where they swore they had never been.”
The gate vibrated again, harder this time. On the other side, from the darkness of the mausoleum, something breathed with a dry hiss.
—“Ximena followed the route,” Fabiola continued quickly. —“She thought if she found the one collecting the deliveries, she could report them. But it wasn’t a ‘someone.’ It was a way. A suit. They put it on whoever has already opened enough doors for the cemetery to recognize them. The caretaker only makes sure no one interrupts the change.”
I looked at the white figure. In the gloom, for the first time, I distinguished shapes under the fabric. There wasn’t a face. There were many crushed forms, like objects or hands pressing from within.
—“And the one in the helmet?” I asked.
Fabiola’s eyes filled with water.
—“I don’t know if it was you or if it was already the other version of you. But he was there before Ximena arrived. As if he had called her there. As if he knew what was going to happen.”
Behind me, the jingle of keys sounded.
This time, truly outside.
I spun around.
The caretaker was just a few steps away, between two sunken graves, with the same smile as before and his hands crossed at his belt. He looked cleaner than before. More proper. As if the cemetery had ironed him.
—“Son,” he said in that kind voice that made me want to vomit. —“Don’t open what isn’t yours to open.”
—“Then you get her out,” I said, pointing at the gate without moving away.
His smile barely tightened.
—“The young lady is not registered for exit.”
—“My sister wasn’t registered to die like that either.”
I don’t know if it was fear or rage, but the words came out on their own. And as I said them, the air changed. The white figure behind me took another step. The caretaker’s eyes drifted toward it for a second, and for the first time, I saw something human in his face: annoyance.
—“You’d best choose quickly,” he said. —“When two versions claim the same life, the place collects one.”
The mausoleum door hammered from the inside with such force that the gate vibrated in my hands. Fabiola screamed. The line of black wax lit up on its own—not with fire, but with a very low red light, like an ember trapped underneath.
And then I saw him.
Through the bars, behind Fabiola, standing at the back of the mausoleum, was me.
With my helmet.
With my jacket.
With the delivery bag on my back.
He had his visor up, so I saw his face. It was mine. Not similar. Mine. My eyes, my crooked nose, the scar on my eyebrow. Only he smiled differently. He smiled exactly like the caretaker.
Fabiola saw him too and shrunk against the wall.
—“That was him,” she sobbed. —“That was the one on the roof.”
My other me raised a hand and touched the exact spot on the gate from the inside where I had my palm on the outside. The cold pierced through me to my shoulder.
—“Don’t open it,” Ximena whispered by my ear. —“If you open it, one comes out and one stays. But you no longer decide which one.”
—“Then how do I get her out?”
Silence for a second.
Then her voice, for the first time, sounded tired. Not like a dead person’s voice. Tired from repeating the same thing many times.
—“Don’t get her out. Move her.”
I understood suddenly from the marks on the graves. They didn’t mark Ximena. They marked routes. Transitions. Places where a name could pass from one stone to another, from one body to another, from one memory to another.
—“Fabiola,” I said quickly. —“Can you walk?”
—“I don’t know.”
—“You’re going to be able to. As soon as it opens, don’t go to the wide path. Follow Ximena’s names. Don’t read the ones below. Don’t turn around if they talk to you.”
The caretaker took a step forward.
—“Son, don’t do anything foolish.”
I pulled out the matches.
I saw in his eyes that this did matter to him.
—“Didn’t your sister say not to light the candle?” my other self asked from inside, with my exact voice. —“Watch out, you’re mixing up the instructions.”
I almost broke inside hearing it. My own voice used as a lockpick.
I didn’t answer him. I broke the box, pulled out all the matches, and emptied them with the remaining alcohol over the dry wood base of the side door of the mausoleum, not over the gate. The caretaker stopped smiling.
—“You can’t burn government property,” he said, and in any other context, it would have seemed absurd. Here, it only confirmed he was afraid.
I struck one.
The flame was small, ridiculous, trembling.
—“Don’t burn it all,” Ximena said. —“Just wake it up.”
I touched the flame to the dampened wood. The fire ran quickly over the old surface and immediately raised a horrific smell—plastic, dampness, hair, things kept too long. The white figure let out a dry sound, like a hundred bags crumpling at once.
The entire cemetery seemed to inhale.
The mausoleum door burst outward.
It didn’t open; it spat.
A blast of black air threw me back, and Fabiola came crawling out through smoke and ash, crying, while my other self stayed inside without trying to chase us, just watching me with that unbearable calm. Behind him, a pile of white bags hanging like skins began to writhe in the heat.
The caretaker threw the keys to the ground. Not to let them go, but to make them ring. As soon as they touched the dirt, the graves around responded with an echo, as if under each one there was another key ring waiting for him.
—“Run!” Ximena shouted, no longer just beside me but from all along the path.
I grabbed Fabiola by the arm and pulled her. I didn’t check if she was hurt. She stood halfway up and started running with me, stumbling, following the XIMENA marks written on crosses, headstones, and niches. Behind us, we heard the caretaker, but not as a single person: he seemed to be closing invisible doors in our path. And among those sounds, my own voice mixed in, screaming things at me from different sides.
Stop.
You are the wrong one.
The real Ximena is with me.
The fake one is the one talking from the trees.
If you cross the main gate, you won’t remember your mother anymore.
If you leave the cemetery, you’ll be stuck using someone else’s name.
I didn’t answer any of them.
Fabiola did.
Twice she said “no,” once she screamed “shut up,” and the second time I knew it was a bad idea because one of the graves to our right opened just like a mouth of earth, and a white hand with a very long nail reached out from it, almost catching her ankle. I pulled her with everything I had and we kept going.
The XIMENA marks started to look fresher and fresher, as if they had just been put there. On one, something dark was even still dripping. And then, a different one appeared.
It didn’t say XIMENA.
It said my name.
I stopped in my tracks.
Fabiola crashed into me.
The word was written over a low, crooked grave with no date. Beneath it, for the first time, was a second line completely visible because they wrote it in large letters, impossible not to read:
THEY WERE ALREADY WAITING FOR YOU
My breath left me.
Everything around went still. No keys. No bags. No footsteps.
And in front of us, coming out of the darkness of the narrow path where the hearse can’t fit, appeared a girl with a black hoodie and dirty sneakers, her hair falling in strands over her face.
Ximena.
Or the shape of Ximena.
She slowly raised her head. She had my eyes. Not hers: mine.
She smiled slightly, like someone who recognizes a repetition.
And she held out her hand.