In the Grave
Copyright © 1994 Morticia Raven
Sanity is a fragile thing. I implore you not to judge mine too harshly, for I have always taken pride in my normality. I have never been one to grasp at strangeness in order to escape reality. Indeed, everyday life for me has been rather pleasant, especially when, at the spring of my retirement, I came to the town of White Oak to reside in peaceful mountain solitude, and to wander in the valleys and through the orchards.
Walking, my well-meaning friends advised me, is such an excellent way to retain good health, and insure longevity. During such excursions, I often happened upon small, private family graveyards nestled behind old farmhouses, perched on hills behind dilapidated shacks, or laying isolated past dead-end dirt roads.
It was on a quiet summer day that I came upon Apple Ridge, a lone place of slumbering death. Like most of the other family cemeteries around White Oak, there were only a handful of monuments surrounded by a split-rail fence that had no gate.
The sweet scent of apple blossoms softly enticed me around the perimeter of the miniature necropolis, toward the far corner where an ancient, knotted apple tree stood like a guardian. I shuddered slightly as I thought of the nourishment the roots must have taken when the funerary grounds were still fresh. I supposed the fruit to be of a deep, dark carmine, as the young blossoms were even now a rich cerise. To the left of the gnarled old tree, I saw a jagged headstone with rough nick marks, as though it had been chiseled from the rocky mountainside with wedge and mallet.
I cannot remember climbing over that splintered old fence, but somehow I found myself at the foot of a grave, trying to decipher the illegible inscription on the hand-hewn marker. The most disturbing aspect of this sepulchral plot of earth was the way the ground sunk in about six inches or so in a perfect casket-like depression that seemed to breathe with anticipation. I was anathematized, beckoned by some sunken horror, and felt myself irresistibly drawn to lie down in the coffin shaped hollow in the same manner as the occupant below me must surely have lain. As I eased down, my eyes closed; the atmosphere became thick and heavy. The soft ground became hard as wood and took on a putrid smell. As the heaviness pressed down upon me and the nauseating stench engulfed me, I felt claustrophobia take hold of my heart and shake it till it rattled. I opened my eyes, and I knew then beyond a shadow of a doubt that I was, in fact, the new occupant of the antiquated pine box - a living corpse, interred six feet below the ordinary world.
Fear found its voice, and I screamed and shrieked, till finally I realized that I was wasting precious breath. There was no one to hear me anyway. And so I lay, silent and still, waiting for someone to come along, perchance to see my walking stick and pack, and to deliver me from this god forsaken abyss.
I waited and waited. Time ceased to exist in my wretched, rotten box, and I wasn't completely sure that I was really alive anymore. For a long while, I reflected on my past - people I had known, things I had done. I wondered how long it would take me to completely lose my sanity. Then I wondered whether I had already lost it. Perhaps I had fallen on the trail and injured my head on a rock. Perhaps I had fallen down the side of the mountain. Perhaps I was in a coma in some nice, clean hospital. Or perhaps I had simply died and gone to hell.
But no, I wasn't dead - not really. After all, life and death are naught but illusion. So it must follow that burial is an illusion as well. And so I lay in my illusion, unable to move more than an inch, unable to see, with stench, oppression, and worms for companions.
Thus I lay for an eternity. My mind ceased all function other than a silent call to anyone who might come near - anyone at all. At long last, someone did come. I sensed the presence and willed it to come closer, my mind devoid of all else but sheer desperation, and an utterly intense determination to escape this horrid tomb.
Indeed, the same macabre curiosity that first drew me to closely examine the apple scented necropolis seduced that pathetic passer-by as well. When the poor creature laid down upon the sunken sepulchre of mother earth, I knew that I would soon be free again. Relentlessly, I willed that presence toward me until, finally, the doomed soul entered the death chamber. I paused only briefly to cluck my tongue with pity at the unfortunate new resident who provided me ascent from that depraved pine box of horror.
Although I re-entered the world of the living, I was indeed never fully extricated. I couldn't help but think of the wretched one who now lay in waiting, as I had for so long. For the years since my dubious release, I have been perplexed as to the origin of this gruesome phenomenon, and I wonder how many others have lain on that unwelcome bed. Moreover, I have been tortured, due to the fact that in our modern society, had I dared speak of this before, I would have been promptly incarcerated in the nearest mental ward.
Now, however, I feel free to set forth this journal. I have been examined by many doctors who cannot explain the strange fungus that is consuming me, and they tell me I probably don't have much longer to live. But live I shall - or somewhat so. I am going back to Apple Ridge to take the place of whoever presently awaits escape. Mortal I am, and have never been free from death; so now I shall return to death, embrace it, and know it intimately. I leave this journal as a warning to whoever may find it, even though it is doubtful that anyone will believe it.
If you happen perchance upon a small, lone cemetery perched high on a ridge, and the perfume of apple blossoms compels you to enter, best run away and never look back, for I am locked in death, yet not consumed by it. And with this key of ever changing places - life for death, death for life - I might thus attain immortality.
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