Friday 24 August 2012

Unexpected Repercussion

What would you do if you came across an unknown cemetery, say Matthew's Cemetery, and against all intuitive warnings and subconscious admonitions, you walk right in, pumped full of adventurous adrenaline. The cemetery is belly filled with shadows, all  jerking, kicking, trying to get off the ground-- or just your imagination. The full moon looms in the sky, bedded by heavy lumps of large, dark clouds. The kind of night that favors the darkest creatures fashioned from nightmares, revivified by fear.
And then you fall upon a figure, dark, squat, resting, hunched upon the thin side of a tombstone. Its legs are drawn up at a sharp angle to meet its face so that you imagine that if there'd been but as little as a shred of paper hanging between its legs and its face, you would've unsafely assumed it was deeply studying.
You walk right over, daring, audacious, defying all of your timid emotions and you try to push it over.
And suddenly the veil of darkness is blown away, as if by a cold wind, and your hands come in contact with white, creaking white and you instantly pull away and fall back.
Your heart beats as fast as bee's wings and as loud as claps of roaring thunder as you stare at the body, hypnotically fascinated. Lifeless, black sockets glare at you from this moon-white skull. The hole formed from its vomer appears to be sniffing you and the air you bring in with you absently. And ragged, uncomely teeth grin wickedly, accentuated by a liquid widening of the cheekbones. Your eyes meet bones, bones wrapped in black tattered clothes. Claw-like metacarpals are sticking out from its sleeves. Black shoes riddled with grime rests firmly upon the ground.
You shut your eyes tightly. You try to get the grim vision out of your head, try to dispel the image away from your thoughts, pinch yourself for good measure. But you open your eyes and you find its no vision. The cloaked bones are there, right there, waiting for your eyes to open so it can feed you the image once more. At that point you draw back, a lot of back. You turn. You head for outside, as far away from the cemetery as immediately possible. Now you're completely overcome by fear and you feel your conscience taunting you - I told you so. You spit back - "Shut up!" in anger.
But both you and your conscience are forced to shut up when you hear the sound of clicking rising behind you, a continuous scratching sound. Like a set of nails made to run over burnished hollow metal.
You turn sharply. Your stomach tighten convulsively. And your eyes meet an animation that surpasses your darkest visions.
For the cloaked bones begin to rise slowly, taking its time to get its bones into proper, or at least near proper erectness. The moon-white skull is bent low, meeting the chest, looking downward absently. Body, blacker than the moving darknesses of the graveyard, coiling, trembling, rise slowly through every chilling second. Joints squeak raspingly. Tearing morsels of clothing flaps, slithering like puny tentacles of snakes in the slow-moving mist-filled breeze.
And then its black sockets lift and you're spotted. And then its head tilts and bends as if trying to understand what breed of creature you are, might be. Its grin is ceaseless.
You are utterly terrified. But you get a grip of yourself. What do you do next?

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