I've never liked funerals. There's a weight to the air around the dead, like the room is still holding the shape of everything they were. Standing over a casket, I always think about how much one person carries - every memory, every bad night, every small stupid joy - and how all of it just stops.

I wish I could say I felt that for Uncle Victor. I didn't.

I expected to be alone at the graveside. He'd made sure of that. But halfway through, I realized someone was standing a few yards away. An old woman, her face so lined it looked carved. I couldn't tell if she was mourning or gloating.

When it was over, she told me he was a good man.

I lost it. I'm not proud of what I said. Something about him being a miserable, paranoid bastard who died exactly the way he lived. She didn't flinch. She laughed - a dry, papery sound - and said things about protection, and bloodlines, and how I owed him more than I knew.

Then she slapped me. Hard enough to put me on my knees in the wet grass. While my ears were ringing, she muttered something about stubbornness, and about my father, and pushed a book into my hands.

When I looked up, she was gone. No footsteps. No car pulling away. A flat, open cemetery, and nobody in it but me.

The book is a journal, so old the leather has gone soft and cracked. It smells like a basement and a fistful of pennies. There are markings on the cover that make my eyes ache if I look at them too long.

I worked the clasp open long enough to feel the pages, thin as moth wings, and then I shoved it in my backpack. I haven't read it.