Moonlight lay like a silver quilt over the stillness of the graveyard. It was six minutes past three in the morning, when the crickets went quiet.

The air grew a few degrees colder, and even the wispy gusts of the summer night dissipated.

Below many somber feet of loose soil, inside the moderately expensive coffin, the corpse shuddered and then grew taut. In death, he was born again... a creature of the night. An unholy creature, cursed to sate eternal craving.

His dry, yellow eyes rolled back out with deep red pupils that shone fierce. Cracked lips pulled back to bare sharp fangs. No cries escaped his parched throat. He merely lay still, focusing his senses and trying to recognise what it was that he felt.

There was a gaping void where his humanity once was. And deep from within that pitch black hole, there came the howling call. The call to feed.

Yes. Hunger. That's all he was now.

He would climb out of this pit of mourning and feed from life.

With unnatural strength he pushed up against the lid of his coffin, to find his way to the freedom of the night.

It did not budge. He tried again.

Nothing.

In an instant, he felt something new.

Fear.

Profound fear that reached its tendrils out from within and wrapped around him.

It was a new decision by the church committee to start using concrete in the burial procedure. Half a feet of concrete poured, that would encase the coffin, to prevent any unseemly leakage into the surrounding soil in the future.

Eternal waking hunger can be bothersome, to say the least, when you are entombed in hard concrete...

...forever.


© Artisancta