Newly Risen

The cat slipped into the funeral hall, it was chasing mice. Its scraggy grey fur caught the light of the moon in coloured shades, dappling it in muti-coloured, weak light, through the stained glass. It sauntered a long watching for potential prey. It leapt up next to an open coffin; it didn’t care much for the contents. This human was dead, what concern was that to a cat that would soon be dead too, if it didn’t catch a meal? It caught sight of a mouse the other side. Despite its ungainly appearance, it leaped elegantly and easily across the coffin and snapped up the mouse before it had chance to get away. The mouse gave the briefest of squeaks before its life was ended. The cat slunk off in search of more mice, leaving the dead girl alone once more.

Annette’s pale eyes caught the moonlight, flashing silver for an instant, like solid coins had been placed in her head. She sat up slowly, still a little shaken. She whipped her head back and forth nervously, her short black hair swung just above her shoulders. She knew where she was, but she couldn’t remember getting there. The wood of her open casket felt smooth under her bare hands, and the satin was padded to a comfort that she was never meant to feel. She stretched her aching arms above her head then shook her head confused, the last thing she remembered was the cold embrace as death had taken her, a fatal stab wound to her chest and neck had seen to that. She remembered her blood sliding away from her, she remembered being alone, left to die in the street. She couldn’t remember her attacker, or her thoughts before death, they’d been lost in a sort of haze that belonged somewhere between the thoughts of the living and the dead. However it appeared that someone had found her body and returned it to her family for burial. Well she wouldn’t be buried now. She stood up slowly, but determinedly, her legs still shaky and her long black dress cumbersome. She climbed out of her coffin carefully. Standing in the hall beside a coffin she was never meant to see, she was unsure what to do now. She was sure she had died. She was sure she’d felt her heart stopping and her breath fading, but she was standing here now. But if she had survived, why had they intended to bury her? She bit her lower lip and felt the sharp stab of her teeth like a pin in the soft cushion of her lip. She jumped, surprised at her teethes sudden sharpness. She was disorientated and confused. She should wait until morning, wait for some to arrive and explain that she had been locked away in a coffin awaiting burial, by mistake, it wasn’t the first time that had happened. She shuddered at the thought of all that smelly wet earth piled onto of her. Of waking up, sealed in a tomb, her screams muffled until she finally would die from suffocation…she should wait…but the idea of sunlight suddenly felt repulsive, almost feared. She crept between the rows of benches, tomorrow they would be filled with mourners, but what would they be mourning if she was not dead? Her black shoes clipped across the floor under the long layers of her dress. The pendant around her neck sparkled and her bracelets tinkled. She was rather shocked that they hadn’t been stolen by a greedy undertaker, but perhaps it was the undertakers intension to steal them after the main ceremony, just before her condemned her to the earth. It didn’t matter now though, because she was leaving. She tried the heavy wooden door, only to find it locked. She’d half suspected that it would be. She scoured the hall, but there appeared to be no visible way out. Angry she grabbed a candle stick that had been standing at the edge of her coffin and smashed the only clear glass in the room, the glass behind her own coffin. She made a gap wide enough for her to escape through. She cast one last glance across the room crouching like a deformed animal in the whole she had created and disappeared, her dress snagging and ripping on a shard of glass and her hand slicing on the sharp edge she had used for balance, but leaving no trace of blood.

The cat had watched her as she rose from her coffin. It had been instantly on edge. There was something disgusting and repellent about her. She’d been dead just before it had jumped over her open coffin, but it was more then that, there was something unnatural about her movements, the hunger in her eyes. It had stayed well hidden as she had moped about like a giant slug, leaving a trail of the grave behind her that only the animals could see. The cat had no doubt that she would have drained it of its life as easily as she had smashed the window, and what a racket she had made when doing it. Still she was gone now, but others would be arriving soon and most of the mice would have been scared away by now. There was no point staying here any longer, it slipped away through a crack behind on of the benches and ran off in the opposite direction to the strange un-dead human.

Annette crept between gravestones, treading on the beds of the dead without a second thought of respect for them. She knocked over an urn holding dying roses; it rolled and smashed at her feet, spilling its contents of a little rain water and the darkened blooms. Annette leant down and picked one of the fragile flowers in her hand, the thrones were still sharp and one stabbed her in her finger. In her pain and frustration she threw it to the ground again, stamping and rubbing it into the stone in a childish tantrum, despite her being well past that stage of her life. She sucked her finger with a hurt expression on her face, and moved on, leaving the mess she had created behind her.

Although she had no sense of time, she found that as the night draw on her energy began to ebb away more rapidly, even though she had only been a wake for a few hours. She instinctively looked for a quite and place to rest during the day light hours. She settled for a mausoleum, the door was rusting on its hinges, and the grass and thorns around the edge showed that the family it had belonged to must have died out a very long time ago. She shoved open the heavy door, the grinding of metal on stone setting her teeth on edge. She shoved a skeleton out of her way and lay down in the rat eaten tomb in it’s place, completely unaware of how strange it was that she was lying in a dead persons grave without even consciously thinking about it.

When night time fell again she woke up with a strange hunger in her belly. It gnawed at her stomach and the edge of her mind like an irritating itch she couldn’t quite reach, her teeth ached with anticipation. She couldn’t quite work out what her craving was for, but it was in full force. She was desperate to eat something…her mind felt sluggish and numb, a deeper instinct seemed to have awakened and was taking form inside her body, something beyond thought of any kind. She slipped out of the stone tomb and into the night, following the beat of her primal impulse.