Hello, gentle listener, and welcome to nocturnal transmissions, the fortnightly podcast that brings you dark tales performed by voice artist Kristen Holland.

As regular consumers of the show will know, we make it a practice to feature horrific tales of dread and unease from both classic long-reveered masters and fresh, exciting, contemporary wordsmiths.

This episode, we're very pleased to be sharing with you an offering from one of our esteemed listeners, who certainly falls within the latter category.

Nocturnal transmissions is proud to present a work from our new friend, Joe Palombo,

The Gravesman.

No one could have known or even guessed that the most important person in Stern, Texas, was the man who lived in a small broken-down house adjacent to the Stern Cemetery.

To the citizens of this small Texas town, he was simply a quiet old man who spent his days grooming and maintaining the long-forgotten necropolis.

Every morning he would open the large metal gates and then go about his business of pulling weeds, adjusting the faded headstones, and fixing even the smallest issues with the iron fence that surrounded the property.

With clockwork timing, he would then shut and securely lock the gates at dusk every day without fail.

No one really understood why he was so committed to this task. There hadn't been a burial in the cemetery since the death of Sheriff Hargrove in 1952, and most of the people

who were even related to any of the dead there had either died themselves and been buried elsewhere

or left Stern long ago.

However, none of the people seemed to mind, and why would they? He wasn't hurting anything,

and he had been taking care of the place for over 60 years. Occasionally, someone would see him in Bull's hardware or maybe at the Chowline diner and

ask him why.

Oh, you know, Andy Morris would say with a chuckle, even the dead deserve a nice place to be.

He would then smile and walk away, leaving the inquirer puzzled.

So everyone just left the old man alone,

and he quickly acquired a reputation for being a kind and quiet man,

although a little odd.

So Andy kept to himself, with one exception,

Sam Keaton, the owner and operator of the local bar, aptly named Sam's.

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