Among the Fallen: Resurrection

by Ross Shortall

  I look into the sky, my pulse racing and my heart banging like a drum, the dead trees hanging over me like witches in the night. Suddenly, I hear movement; something grinding, like stone. I look around me, but I see nothing, nothing living at least. I approach my statue, curious and drawn to it as if it looks into my soul, staring into its featureless eyes trying to see its thoughts.

  Suddenly, it moves, its head leaning towards mine; I fall back in fright, watching as it steps from its pedestal, angrily stomping through the dead glass towards me, flipping my casket into the air. It leans over me, my soul terrified, and my heart pounding in fear. I shut my eyes as it looms in close, I can feel it next to my face, its breath as cold as ice. Suddenly, it speaks.

  “Play the game, Alex!” its voice growls without moving its stone lips. Suddenly I open my eyes and I am back in the darkness, the weightlessness, the emotions, now gone again; I have no body, and my thoughts are dying again. I scream but no sound comes from my mouth, I can feel myself falling, back into the void, the abyss, the darkness.

  Chapter Six: Resurrection

  July 31, 2012: Three Months Later

  Alex’s eyes suddenly opened, the whites and the colours of her iris’s gone, replaced with lifeless eyes and black mirrored lenses; cold, bleak and emotionless. Her face was streaked in dirt and black tide marks, her eyes blackened in thick running mascara and grime. Her hair was profuse and dark, matted in mud and rain; slopping heavily over her shoulders and down her back as it sent shivers down her spine.

  She looked down at her body and saw a tar like textured body suit which appeared to be stapled and hooked to her flesh. It seemed to look like an all in one cat suit but with high cut legs and arms, moving and rippling like oil at the slightest touch. She gently ran her hand over its smooth, almost latex feel and it purred like a cat, her mind suddenly full of whispers and inaudible chatter.

  She held out her hands and looked at her feet; her skin was as white as snow, full of scared tissue and smeared in blood and dirt. The nails on her hands and feet were varnished black and chewed down, the tips were red raw and full of splinters of wood and bone extruded painfully. Her tiny frame ached like never before and her limbs were sore, her muscles throbbed and she could hardly stand as she held her arms merely swaying in the rain. Her mind was totally blank, devoid of thought through severe shock; her teeth chattering as the weather battered her scarred pale skin.

  She turned her head looking around slowly at the surroundings, the rain beating around her as the strange red sky bleached every surface with a red dull light. The wind whipped the rain around her ferociously and without mercy, the distance shrouded in an unknown and un-adventured darkness.

  At her feet an empty grave slowly filling with muddy water, its sides gradually falling away and huge lumps of clay slid down the sides and vanished into the wet darkness. The coffin was smashed and rotten with claw marks on the lid, the fine silk inlay ripped, soaked and ruined; slowly it sat at the bottom the hole as it little by little, disappeared in water and filth.

  All around the graveyard hundreds of bright red paper lanterns floated without actually drifting anywhere, almost as if they had an invisible anchor holding them still; their long black tassels blowing in the wind and their candlelight flickering as the rain beat down. Trees reached up into the sky, branches baron and bare, their skeletal frames casting long creepy shadows around the meek horizon. Tall stone pillars that stood around twenty feet high were littered sparingly around, their surfaces covered and embedded with skulls, mortified and frozen with horror. Chains and creaking rope hung from the trees and went from branch to branch, silhouetted against the red sky as they cast long frightful shadows over the cemetery.

  She glared back into the hole as her brain slowly pieced together the missing parts; mentally she began to come round as her brain slowly reformed after such a long period of nothingness. She stared at the shattered coffin, its silk inlay ripped and sodden with dirt and blood. Holding out her hands and glaring at the big splinters of wood buried deep within her fingers and skin, a few of her fingers were painfully threadbare leaving white ivory bone sticking out of the ends. She slowly looked up as she wiped the rainwater from her face, throwing her wet sodden hair over her shoulder, slapping it to her back. She continued to look over the bleak cemetery as the wind howled around the meek horizon, her thoughts lost and her barren mind looking over the haunted land with growing fear and dejection.

  There are certain things a person is never meant to see or experience. Outliving your children, the death of relatives, the affliction of friends and misery of strangers; people that have never crossed our paths thrown into a world of torment and pain. Somewhere in the list of pain is seeing your own grave, which is probably unheard of for good reason; it just doesn’t happen, not in a normal world with normal rules and theoretically it’s impossible; well that is what Alex was telling herself over and over, but if she’s seeing, hearing, smelling and feeling, then surely she must be alive?

  Maybe she survived and they accidentally buried her? Maybe this dark land was the afterlife that she longed to cross into so desperately. She wiped her thick hair from her face and rubbed her painful eyes as the skull covered columns watched her silently. The lightening flashed above her casting her own shadow on the monuments around her, startling her cruelly as she stood shivering in the cold. Alex simply stared down as the macabre image sunk into her conscience mind slowly, the thought of being buried alive was enough to kill anyone through fear, but to actually experience it would be psychiatrist’s career. She glared at her huge towering monument, her stomach sick with fear, anger and grief. A stone reminder of what has been taken from her and etched with words she will never forget.

  Alexandra Louise Beaumont, Gone are the days we used to share, But in our hearts you are always there. The gates of memory will never close, we miss you more than anyone knows, with tender love and deep regret, we who love you will never forget. 1991 – 2012.

  Alex stumbled back as her insides turned over; her stomach heaving and her eyes weeping in torturous guilt and sorrow. Dropping uncontrollably to her knees in the water logged earth, she threw up congealed blood and dirt as the verse tormented her over and over. Her eyes were scorched and her nostrils burned as she cried and begged it not to be true. As the rain soaked her curled up body she clawed at the soil crying into the ground, pleading for a father that despised her and a God she never believed in to help her.

  The winds lashed and blew the rain around her viciously, her damaged and almost war-ravaged, ice cold body curled up in the mud as she sobbed for her stolen life. She closed her eyes suddenly, mumbling and preying, muttering pleas and begging with profound desperation as the ghostly world howled around her. Suddenly, she opened her eyes and stared through the tormented graveyard, her prayers ignored and her pleas coldly rejected. As her tears began to wither, she looked out through her heavy matted hair, her teeth chattering and her soil clogged eyes blinking erratically.

  She wiped her mouth slowly, leaving a dirty smear up her face as the bare wounds on her hands began to tingle and move. She stretched out her hand, watching curiously as the muscles and blood began to regenerate over the bones that crudely protruded. Her muscles and flesh weaved and gelled, arteries and veins started to mysteriously rebuild and restore her fingers. She looked on in bewilderment at her hands, her wounds slowly vanishing and her fingers becoming somewhat normal. She turned away as her eyes filled with more tears, her black lips quivering uncontrollably as she clasped her new hands to her chest.

  Alex stood up painfully and turned her head towards a marble angel to the left of her monument; a tall and graceful angel on a pedestal with a wing of finely detailed feathers and a face of sorrow. As the angel stared out into the dark world it clearly had no place being in, Alex approached it cautiously, her heart mysteriously drawn to it. The name on the plaque said Sarah Beaumont.

  Her emotions suddenly became overwhelming and too much for her to bare, sobbing
at the angel’s unsympathetic feet, crying and weeping under the ruthless barrage of rain. She knew there was nothing she could have done, which in some respects made it unendurably worse. All Alex could think about was ways she could have done that day different, some action that could have altered what happened. As mental images flashed before her of Sarah laying twisted in the road, she felt her heart collapse within her chest; drowned within guilt and torturous agony as she bawled into the night, alone, terrified and with nobody to comfort her.

  “I’m so sorry, Baby” She whispered as she stroked the stone angel’s flawless face. “I miss you so much” she whimpered desperately. “I failed us, I failed you!” she cried, her words snatched heartlessly by the lump in her throat.

  She looked away swiftly, an attempt at hiding her cries from the sad angel, gazing out into the darkness her tears stifled her. She lowered her head solemnly and stared at the monument with her blackened eyes, her tears instantly stolen by the rain. Suddenly, she turned away from the statue and stared down at the waterlogged ground. The angel’s stone eyes suddenly welled up, releasing a single tear of blood down its cold face which was quickly snatched from its cheek. Alex walked away stricken in grief; the angel’s face suddenly turning behind her. The statues sad eye sockets sobbed and its long screaming mouth cried as its sister walked away and abandoned her once more. Alex turned and looked over the stone face one more time, its expression now back as it once was, its grief hidden from Alex’s saddened gaze.

  “Goodbye Baby, see you soon.” she said tormented in growing grief and heart-wrenching guilt.

  Alex walked away choked and sick, beleaguered and haunted as she strolled through the nightmare landscape lost and traumatized, the weather battering her tiny frame. As the wind screamed around her, the bare trees creaked with desolation, the rain randomly switching directions as Alex battled against it, pushing her mortal frame through the sick and twisted landscape as the monuments and stone figures all around her wept in agony. Lightning cracked silently in the distance as her tiny silhouette walked through the graveyard, the skyline ruined with ghostly trees and stone shapes as her teeth chattered through her weeping eyes.

  Alone and hurting, she continued across the land without a goal, her heart and soul tormented and hopeless, ravaged by solitude and loneliness. She walked over to a puddle that rippled on a tomb and looked at her distorted reflection, her face white and lifeless, her lips and eyes black and featureless, her dark hair hanging in the head beating rain.

  “What the hell has happened to me?!” She whispered softly.

  She sat down under a tree as is it pathetically shielded her from some of the downpour. Her thoughts casting back to a father that hated her, friends that she left behind; a string attention seeking one night stands and life that seemed long gone; set upon her to forever punish her for sins that eluded her. Then she thought about Sarah, a beacon of happiness and symbol of love in a life that was pretty shit to say the least. She picked a handful of wet grass and slowly tore it to pieces, the rain thrashing at her head as she thought about how she wasted her life doing nothing, maybe this was the point being made; maybe she would realize that she was a money wasting, self-loathing bitch and wake up, like in a bad dream.

  She looked up into the red sky, her hand shielding the rain from her black eyes. The air smelt of burning wood and chemicals, the horizon almost glowing in the distance. She stood up throwing the grass to the wind and rolled her head, her neck cracking as she stretched. The wet soil squeezed grossly through her toes as she wandered the dreary and gloomy graveyard with nowhere to go. As the lanterns floated, they flickered and blurred in the rain and cast ugly long shadows all around the granite littered cemetery.

  Alex painfully began to recall the joy her little sister brought to her life, dunking for apples at Halloween and letting her win. Watching her trying to eat a bag of sweets like there was no tomorrow, their cuddles in bed on a Saturday morning while watching cartoons. As each loving memory came back to haunt her, she began to see the cardinal rule of the core of life’s happiness, the rule being you don’t actually know or realize happiness until your confronted with unbearable despair. With life being nothing more than a collection of moments, it’s those moments that she will remember from this day on; the moments she will miss and regret forever. At this present instant in a macabre time of this life, existence or whatever it may be; memories of moments were all she had left to hold on to. Memory after memory, no matter how small, how irrelevant or time lost, came back to her; each with its very own tear. Even the toys she played with and books she read as a child, she could now suddenly see in her mind, remembering all the fine details she had long forgot in her arrogance, a cold and tormenting lesson of just how special moments are.

  Chapter Seven: Darkness Falls

  “A day of darkness and gloom, a day of clouds and blackness. Like dawn spreading across the mountains a large and mighty army comes, such as never was of old nor ever will be in ages to come” - Joe 2:2

  Alex stood for a few moments just collecting her thoughts, the rain pelting down and blinding her as she looked into the red seared skies. She held her arms trying to warm her aching body, walking further into the graveyard, her tired vision tainted by the blackness that seemed to surround her in every direction. All she could see were the lanterns that bizarrely stayed alight, almost supernaturally in such intense weather. Suddenly the rain stopped, frozen mid-air. Alex took a step back and looked around as the droplets of rain hovered still, frozen in time and yet, when she touched them they were still wet and cold, flowing freely over her hand.

  Suddenly, the ground went dark and a light mist flowed along the land, swallowing the grass and granite slabs effortlessly. The lanterns glared brighter and brighter, lighting up the meek horizon; the tombstones sinking into the Earth as the angels and monuments bled. The chains in the trees rattled and the columns of skulls began to move, the skulls looking up into the sky; their blind and empty eye sockets coldly looking away. Suddenly, a few tombstones shot into the air, shattering into a thousand pieces and abruptly pausing; the air around her floating with droplets of water and pieces of stone. All of sudden, there was a fabric, shiny and blood-stained, its texture of leather but strangely, it were as light as the air itself; covered in buckles, straps and stitches; flowing around her randomly and enigmatically. As her fear deepened, the strange cloth just leapt around her playfully and harmlessly, haunting yet surreal, more or less ghostlike. On the horizon stood three dark shadows, all human looking and still, one in front and two behind her. Alex turned fearfully as they gazed upon her with intimidating silence.

  “Alexandra Beaumont!” a dank putrid echoing voice whispered behind her. She turned in fright and stared across the dark miserable horizon as a tall dark shape with a massive cloak adrift in the rain stood staring at her, perched upon a concrete angel like a chilling gargoyle on a church roof. The creature’s cloak just continued to dance around her, snatching the paused water droplets from the air, its scorched and leather like texture creaking as it twisted around the head stones and bleeding monuments weightlessly. The figures eyes glowed in an evil hazy red as the cloak waved and weaved in all directions around it, as if it moved freely like flowing water. Its body clad in black leather, straps and chains and strange Baphomet symbols were embedded and burnt into the body, eerily similar to the suit that was clamped to her aching body. Patches of revealed flesh and weeping wounds were held open with hooks and wire, painfully and indiscriminately all over its body as they wept in the open air. Suddenly, the other three figures stepped into the light revealing different tortured faces, leather symbolic attire and their flesh carved with wires, bloodless wounds and skin artistically arranged and altered almost demonically.

  “Alexandra!” the caped figure mumbled from the shadows, its voice rumbling and rasping as it gasped at the air around it.

  “Who are you people?” she said meekly as she lowered her head unnervingly. The creature slid off the sto
ne pedestal like elegant water, standing tall like an eight-foot giant over the horizon as its cape writhed and followed loyally behind. It floated towards her as the lanterns gracefully parted and drifted away without it even touching them, creating a breath-taking glowing path of fierce red candlelight. Alex turned and looked at one of the other figures as it just stared at her quietly without sound, its face pulled tight with wires and hooks to the back of its head to what appeared to be a metal symbolic halo, its eyes stretched to a permanent squint and its mouth taut and flawed into a undying straight smile. Wounds on its body wept and its pale skin glistened in the light, chains dangling silently from its belt as did an arrangement of knives and cleavers. Alex bowed her head as the creatures twisted gaze unsettled her, its silence hinting at more horror than she could ever imagine.

  Suddenly, the second figure appeared behind her, grunting and puffing in the darkness as its equally twisted and tormented body slowly walked through the frozen rain. His skin and face moulded and stitched like putty, red and sore as its jaw constantly chewed into the leather strap that gagged him cruelly, the flesh around his mouth stretched open revealing bleeding and decaying gums.

  Alex stepped away cautiously and frightened as the third approached from behind, a female disfigured and tortured, eyes bound with a leather strap hooked to the sides of her head, her black hair pulled tight and interwoven with a chain that disappeared into the back of her skull. Her black lips graced with a faint frown as she moved gracefully through her surroundings, the leather tightly hugging her tortured and decaying body as her lesions wept. Suddenly, the caped creature raised itself and its companions stood as still as stone. Alex looked over her shoulder and watched as the Gagged quietly looked into the eyes of a stone angel inquisitively.

  “You have been given a second chance, Alexandra, a chance that is rare and a chance that is honourable!” the creature hissed creepily as it towered above her, its blazing skull-like eyes peering over its thick leather collar.