Category : Stories

Sub Category : Horror

A brisk breeze caught Sara’s shoulders and oozed to her pale fingertips and toes. Autumn was late and colours of orange, red, and brown adorned the podzol grounds of the cemetery. Starting for the gates and clenching a pale flowery wreath, she peered through the foreboding cast iron gates, aged in time and dying like the leaves which laid beyond.

     Advancing through the menacing gates, the cemetery was a peaceful yet depressing place where thoughts, hope, and life go to rest their weary heads; Stagnant like a black lake and commanding silence from all. Inside, tall thin trunks of silvery trees stood in rows like soldiers or even dryads of dread. The graves were scattered hither and there and broke the uniformity of the trees which obscured what invisible poltergeists could have hidden behind.

     Much was blinded by a steadily descending thick mist that eerily approached and bequeath it lapped upon the mossy tombstones and dryad-soldier trees. The tips of graves pointed above the mist like sea buoys in a white, motionless ocean. Beneath the mist, who knows what lurked beneath. Though Sara was a rationalist who didn’t believe in superstition it still didn’t feel right. The ground could barely be seen because of the mist and Sara imagined what evil black shapes swim beneath.

     Of the graves inside, some were marble arch-shaped, others stone crosses and some were peaceful yet unnerving statues which overlooked all who stand near. Sara was a little unsettled about graveyards but pulled herself together and creeped between graves as not to disturb the resting place of people long gone. Leaving mist trails behind her, she thought every now and again if something brushed her leg beneath the mist. Perhaps it was a cat. Or perhaps not. The mind can play tricks on itself.

     Trailing through, surveying her surroundings she came to a pale marble gravestone not too far from the centre of the cemetery which was her late husband’s grave. It read:

Daragh Brydon
Beloved husband
Born 2nd December 1967,
Died 12th September 2018
Rest In Peace

     Respectfully, Sara laid her wreath upon the grave. She steadily paid respect to her late other half with a silent tear rolling beside her nose.  An angel statue stared at her from a distance, sending a shiver down her spine. It was an otherwise ordinary statue, completely peaceful and beautiful in any other setting but in a graveyard, perhaps, it was watching. 

     Sara made sure to hastily retreat out of the creepy cemetery. She didn’t believe there was a supernatural presence but a gut instinct was telling her otherwise. An almost nauseating, constricting anxiety. It was as if unseen eyes bored into the back of her head. Cemeteries are places of death and death is something Sara feared. The thought of ending up here in the black stillness of afterlife or what we living beings know as the afterlife is uneasy for most.

     By now, even her wooly blue hat and red double breasted jacket were freezing up and as it was time to leave she slowly turned. To her dismay she could not see nor sense her way out of this dreadful maze. ‘How could she have gotten herself into such a muddle?’ She thought. What was left? What was right? South? North? Thoughts raced in her mind but she focused herself solely on getting back to the comfort of her car.

     Sara backtracked and trod the route from whence she came but if only, if only she could retrace her footsteps. Alas the mist had obscured any remnants of her previous trail and all to be seen was white void below and the black tree canopies and darkening sky above. Stars became visible between the branches and leaves and now Sara was feeling more insecure and alone.

     On and on she carefully trod, podzol crunching crisply beneath the soles of her boots and the air getting thicker by the minute. With nary a torch to shine the way she attempted to use her mobile phone, a pin sized light in an expanse of darkness to light the way. She started in her panicked state and struggled to breathe as the anxiety turned to being deeply perturbed.

     As Sara traced her path back a confusing dilemma unfurled. The cast iron gated which was once there was no more and all that she saw was an old red brick wall menacingly halting her departure. Reflecting back, she thought “this surely isn’t right. Perhaps...” Thinking that she took a wrong turn, Sara decided to walk a different path as maybe it was likely she took a wrong path. 

Sara’s rationality started to slip and she tried to calm her nerves with repetitive but positive thoughts. There was something queer about the air, something she noted before but left it in the back of her mind. The invisible eyes of the darkness stared down her neck with breath so chill. Could she see stalky hands and eyes peering out from the sides of the trees or were they just mere hallucinations? Either thought was unnerving.

     An idea flashed in her head to pursue the red brick wall until the gates reappeared and she could be free, never to come again to this hideous place but the constricting air was foul and putrid was the podzol beneath her feet. The shrill shrieks of crows jolted her spine in surprise as they took flight from the treetops and branches in tandem, leaving the twigs and dead leaves to fall harshly, disappearing underneath the mist. At every minute she followed the wall Sara turned her gaze to keep watch for listeners or, dare she say it, ghosts. Of course, she was a rational woman but even the most rational of people can have irrational thoughts at times; She reassured herself.

     Round and round she followed but to her dismay the wall stretched as an eternity of red brick turning to grey in the distance. She turned one corner, then another, and another in tedious repetition but no sign of escape. Clasping at rough bricks and cement she began to desperately pant, hoping one brick would come loose and break down the barrier and allow sweet, sweet light to pour through and take the darkness away. Heart restricting, veins bursting, her adrenaline kicked in because at that moment a breathy, chill sigh of a wight whispered her name to her right ear in a disconcerting male voice.

     Sara shamefully swore from her tongue, darted upright and sprinted hurriedly around the cemetery walls ensuring to dodge the gravestones. The walls felt constricting as if closing in. It was deadly silent save for her own footsteps echoing. Sara stumbled on bare tree roots, rocks, boughs, podzol nooks and crannies, trying to escape an unseen agent of her mind. Again she turned corner after corner, searched wall after wall but there was nothing. 

Nothing!

     Sara knew the last resort for escape was, to her discontent, to clamber the shoulder-high walls rather than chance the full night. There had to be a way out. There must be. Sara straddled beside the wall for five minutes, examining the wall until she came across a suitable location where part of the wall had eroded into a crevice for her boot to barely grip into. Jamming the sole of her shoe into the crevice she hoisted the other leg and launched her arms overhead, grappling the wall. She fell, at least six times before she finally managed to heave her body over the wall and crash down to the suspiciously familiar podzol ground on the other side, and suspicious it was, indeed. 

     As she patted down her clothes and muddy tight jeans she gawked and gasped at the sight she had seen. Another cemetery. Sara muttered under her breath “crap, crap, crap” as the realisation hit her that something was severely wrong with the situation and that it was not rational but supernatural. Sara walked deeper inside at the expense of her sanity but it soon hit her that these were the same trees, the same tombstones, the same mist. Even her husband’s grave was in the same place; She could see the wreath she had laid earlier just metres away. The exact same wreath at the exact same marble stone that was her husband’s grave. Now she was beginning to see, or at least think she could see black shapes in the corner of her eyes.

     A great gushing of tears burst forth as she fell to her knees and wailed to the heavens in one long screech, “Please!”. She struggled to pull herself together, wept and wrangled, she screamed at the trees but dead silence answered, except, in the distance behind her something crunched repeatedly as if another person were approaching. Now Sara was truly, and I mean truly panicking. 

    She stopped her weeping immediately, a shock jilted her brain. Her eyes were wide circles when she slowly swivelled round, only to see that not only the footsteps stopped but the mist was completely settled and all that stared at her was the trees and graves. Nothing else except a creepy graveyard statue in the corner of her eye. She daren’t stare back. She was sure it was watching her. Dead sure.

     Then, footsteps riled again, emanating from behind but closer and louder this time. There was nothing else to it but to dart forward, lurch left, leap right, and avoid the hidden boughs beneath the pale. She was sure, this time, that slithery entities were definitely brushing against her feet, like slithery eels. Fast following footsteps drew closer the more she sprinted. The crunches echoed her own and Sara’s chest became tighter and tighter until it was like a tonne of weights bearing down upon her chest, almost crushing her ribs.

     Another wall, the same as the last. Same bricks, same eroded crevice, same everything. Sara, however, did not hesitate to leap towards the wall and launch herself over again, optimistically hoping that this would be the last of this tortuous nightmare. Sara had never felt so disturbed and agitated in all her life. Such was the despair she braced to the floor and howled to the night in a distressed wolf-like call “Make it stop! Make it stop! Make it stop!”. Her voice echoed indefinitely.
That’s when the whisperer from earlier  spoke again, “No one escapes”
“Stop it, stop the voices!” Sara’s voice shrieked and pierced the night.

     Immediately, a thought occurred. She rifled through her jacket pockets to reach her phone. Her keys and sweet wrappers rustled and the sound emanated out into the expanse. Even though she had emptied the contents of her pockets unto the ground she realised that in all the chaos of running and adrenaline that her phone must have gotten lost under the mist. At that moment she was encompassed only with only dread and hopelessness. 

     Unable to reason, unable to fight, she could only take flight. Across the cemetery she sprinted, viewing the same trees, same graves, same footsteps, same wall in which she leapt up again into yet another graveyard of the same kind. Again. It was a monotonous torture chamber where every way out led to the same destination. It was hell on Earth, if not hell itself. Sara’s logical mind was crushed.

     Sara kept running with only a glimmer of hope that the next leap over the wall could be her last until the bleakness of her situation hit her. There was no way out and as the realisation hit her she hatched another plan. Grabbing onto the top of the wall which was rough brick and cement, she tiptoed up and peeked over the brick wall to see what entity was following her, if indeed it was an entity.

     Apprehensively, she focused her view into the dark to see the trees lined uniformly as they had before and beyond the pale, beyond the creepy tombstones, beyond the far wall she caught a glimpse of a figure. Not sinister but familiar. Faintly, the figure had a red jacket, dark jeans, brown boots, and a wooly blue hat and was tiptoeing against the wall on the opposite side of the cemetery. Almost like...herself. The realization hit that this was no ghost but an image of herself, peering over the opposite wall just as she was.

     Sara gawped and fell back. An unsettling thought in her head told her that these unseen eyes that she felt were actually her own. As she slowly twisted her head, behind, in the distance, another wooly blue-hatted woman looking backwards, peering over the wall just as she. Her own eyes bored into the back of her own head. What trickery, what hideous trickery! How could it be possible? Sarah panted with thoughts racing. What was unnerving before was now frightening and surreal to the point she considered letting sweet mother insanity take her away and mangling her own body to escape this foul game.

     A breeze approached her and forced off her wooly hat to reveal her long bedraggled brunette hair. The same voice whispered in the air 
“Look at the graves”
“Stop it, stop it now!” she shrieked impatiently. Sara shot up and roared across to the nearest grave, complying with the voice if not for herself but for the voice for which she did so fear. Diving in and wafting the mist away with jittery hands she uneasily and suspiciously read from what was inscribed…

Here lies Sara Brydon
Born 12th August 1979, 
Died 31st October 2019
Rest In Peace

To the horror of her mind she realised that the grave she despised was dated today, 31st October! ‘What cruel, sick joke was this!’ she pondered with a million horrid ideas whirling in her head, all dreadful.
“This cannot be!” Sara murmured as she started for another gravestone...

Here lies Sara Brydon
Born 12th August 1979, 
Died 31st October 2019
Rest In Peace

And another grave…

Here lies Sara Brydon
Born 12th August 1979, 
Died 31st October 2019
Rest In Peace

     Every grave had the exact same inscription. Each beckoning her to fall asleep under the canopies and into the mist. Even Sara started to question whether she had died. Words cannot describe the ghastly fear of the situation and a mixture of agoraphobia of the open cemetery and claustrophobia of being trapped in an eternity of cemeteries.

     A sudden moment, she felt the slithery eel-like creatures under the mist again but stronger than before. They slithered across her toes and upon her body. They felt icky, icey cold and rotten like the smell of decayed seafood. Without notice, from behind Sara, a slender-fingered hand black as the void of night gradually arose from the mist, suddenly clasping with great force to Sara’s ankle forcing her to release the loudest and most foulest scream known to man. Sara gazed down at what she saw.

     The hand dragged her down, slowly but with force, into the now slimy quicksand soil. Slender, boney fingers wrapped the entirety of her ankle and Sara resisted with every ounce of might but alas the force of the spidery hand pulled harder the more she struggled. Sara dropped to the floor and felt her whole body squelch into the tar-like ground beneath. No matter how much she struggled, she sank until the last that was seen of her was her horrific petrified facial expression as she had gradually become consumed by the hand and the mist. Another hand shot out and suffocated her mouth to muffle the screams, so much so that her face turned blue.

 Eventually she disappeared. She had become one of them...