She thought she was dreaming.
Disoriented and confused, her eyes fluttered wildly—
She searched for any source of light but there was only darkness. It was a strange darkness that did not hesitate to snake its icy tendrils around her and envelope her entire soul in doubt. She could see nothing, at first, save for the impenetrable blackness that surrounded her, and tried to move, to breathe, but it seemed as though something—or someone—had rendered her completely helpless.
Her heart hammered in her chest, like a frantic bird locked in a cage, and she was unable to mimic its fierce cries of bitterness, as loud and piercing to her ears as her own heartbeat.
The darkness held her close, so frightfully close, and she writhed and twisted in its embrace, a look of repulsion lining her features as she began to wonder just where she was.
Whatever was happening, whatever would happen—she knew it was beyond her control—
She gasped as the shadows curled around her neck and caressed her pale throat with invisible fingers. She abandoned any positive thought she had had before and frantically glanced around, attempting to decipher the images locked within the shades of blackness about her.
As the darkness began to slowly lift, she saw that there were shapes—dull gray shapes, standing in front of her, beside her, all around her. Some were short and others were unimaginably tall, and she cringed at the sight of them as they filled her with dread.
A graveyard—she was in a graveyard—
In any other circumstance she would have felt safe, had she been alone.
But she didn't feel quite alone. Something, someone, perhaps Death itself, must've been waiting for her here. She could sense it, as real as it had been depicted in her paintings that sang of life beyond the world's existence. Although in her own imagery, Death seemed so much more merciful in escaping the constant pains and difficulties the world had to offer, so subtly different than the eerie peace that hovered in the land of the dead—which, she assumed, was not as incoherent as the place she was in now—this seemed, rather, like a cruel purgatory, like a violent demon that had raided her heart of peace and had subsequently been sacrificed to it, to endure a lifetime of tragedies yet without being truly alive.
Stealing a wayward glance down at herself, she noticed that she wore black. It was a dress that was full and layered, elegantly beaded and breathtaking. It flowed in silken ripples past her feet and the lace sleeves stretched like inky spider webs along her arms.
She tried to swallow but her throat was blocked by the tightening grip of the shadows. The black, slithering shapes drew close to her ear and whispered to her, imitating voices she used to be familiar with—voices that had encouraged her, changed her, advised her, loved her— voices of people from her past.
She could hear the gently uplifting tone of her mother's laughter, the unimpressed smirk of her father when he had chosen to leave. But the most defining of all the voices was Shelly's—and hers did not echo catch phrases or something she would commonly say when she had been alive, but one sentence: "to die is gain."
She clenched her eyes as the words echoed in her mind, trying as hard as she could to twist her head away from the shadows' forms that smoothly whispered in the voice that weren't their own, that encouraged her to do the exact opposite of what she wanted to do at this moment—to live. She didn't want to live in such a place that offered nothing but the impending cold.
The memories of Shelly, of Eric—of them— blazed behind her eyes in a cluster of macabre art.
"Tell him to take care of Sarah…"
"Thirty hours of pain, all at once, all for you…"
"Sarah… I do care."
It was too much.
Too much, too much—
She shook her head wildly and she soon found her own voice among all the others and exhaled a thousand breathless, raucous screams, knowing full well that no one would hear. No one would mourn the sound of a girl screaming in the middle of a graveyard that was millions of miles away, in the depths of the cosmos, beyond the stars and in a land that didn't qualify as real, just a sad, inconsequential dream.
Her voice wavered as her breath was suddenly cut short as she felt trickles of water drip from her mouth and down her forehead— at first she thought they were tears, permeating her cheeks like rain, until she looked down.
She looked down and saw the drops as they fell onto her black mourning dress, red as crimson—
Blood.
It was blood that rained down her face, pooled at her chin, fell in sporadic drops along her neck, the length of her torso.
An expression of utter horror marred her pale features and she cried out, loudly, over and over again, as the shadows crept up along her legs, through her flesh, overtaking her entire soul in harsh obscurity. It felt as though a hundred pairs of hands were grabbing at her from every angle, whispering those solemn words in Shelly's sweet, amiable voice—although deep down in the core of her spirit, Sarah knew it couldn't be true. The dead could not live to speak, and Shelly had been long dead, for nearly five years now, and Sarah knew that in spite of Eric's resurrection and retribution some time ago, the dead could not live to tell the dying, for she was sure that's what she was; a dying soul preparing for her flight into the afterlife.
That was when the memories swirled around her mind, and faces she had forbidden herself from missing painted themselves in the blood that ran through the trail of the graveyard, around her aching body, her shrieks rising in sober defeat. She saw, all at once, Eric's handsome face—before his death— pristine as ever and undeniably whole. She recognized Shelly's face as it passed over her mind, with her soft eyes and welcoming smile, soon followed by a face that she had never seen before.
This face didn't even look human, she thought. It resembled a skull, and it was painted red—red for the blood of the thousands of souls it had ferried and guided throughout the afterlife—and it seemed as though it now came for her. And, quite ironically, the skull face donned a wispy, cowboy hat, its skeletal body revealed to be covered by a trench coat that blew in the wind. She stared at its horrifying figure for a moment, watching it outstretch its hand, as if in greeting, and she closed her eyes, fully ready to die yet unprepared to accept why.
Until, overheard, she heard a Crow call out—and this distracted her from even taking a single step forward, and the strange skull man vanished within the blink of an eye.
Perplexed, she glanced up, and saw a pair of fluttering, black wings as the bird flew across the sky—if it could really be called a sky, that is, since it didn't resemble the sky she had remembered seeing on Earth. As the moonlight struck the bird's soaring form, she saw the briefest sparkle of gold, and realized that the Crow was clutching a gold ring in its beak, a ring she would've recognized had it not been for the profuse amount of blood that dripped from it.
The Crow suddenly cried again, and this time, its cry was like a haunting, strange and sad song that had been echoed by previous torment to reveal the ultimate expression of sorrow, as if the souls it had carried throughout the centuries were suddenly weighed upon the bird's wings and threatened its flight back to the world above.
The bird called out again, but the sound was more distant, as if the bird had flown a ways and was far from where she stood.
And soon the silence began to soak the air in a spellbinding fog, and she could do nothing but stand motionless, her own blood pooling at her feet, wondering if the threatening voices and faces would return.
She looked up at the sky, gray and clouded, and heard the delicate trace of thunder, a herald to an upcoming storm. The cemetery was bathed in a solemn fog that cast a gloom over the nearby mausoleum that stood tall and still with a solitary candle burning on the steps.
She waited to see if the crow would return, if the shadows would come back and dissipate into her flesh as she had feared, overtake her soul to the boundless lengths of eternity.
But the air remained free of the Crow's cry, and she could feel the pulsating heat of blood flowing through her veins and escaping out her pores, painless yet sickening, the recurring images of the faces she'd known reflected in the patterns of blood that ran across the stone work of the cemetery. Suddenly she felt terribly alone, her spirit withdrawing from the hope that she would ever see her mother or David again, live to tell them that Death was not as she had imagined it. It was a stark contrast to the gloomy purgatory she found herself encased in, with small but fatal glimpses of the light of the afterlife in her distant, far away gaze, leaving her with no means to pursue. She could hear David's kind voice echoing in the depths, their years together entwining in her memory like the wind did when it blew snowflakes through the air, all at once, and it was impossible to tell the difference between them.
With that thought, she sighed, slowly falling to her knees, her dress billowing all about her like black waves. The lace escaped down her back and rested on the blood-stained ground, flaying out, like wings.
She cried silently, and without tears.
Until, suddenly, she heard a sound.
It was unlike the loud, blaring noises she had heard before— unlike the shadow's voices or the Crow's call. This sound was smoother, quieter, flowing over her like silk—
"Sarah."
Her name.
She started. She lifted her head and looked around breathlessly, peering in between the trees and around the gravestones. Yet she saw no human presence, no physical embodiment of the voice that was so agonizingly familiar she was afraid to acknowledge it.
The voice—his voice—whispered her name, and it swept around her like echoes of a lost violin.
"Sarah."
His voice sounded so close to her. He spoke in a tone of sorrow, almost like the same sorrow that his heart had been engulfed in so many years ago, which now beat in tattered remnants of a life that had once known love only to have lost it so quickly.
She arose from her sitting position and stepped through the crimson puddles, noticing the candle to the mausoleum had been snuffed out, quite possibly, by the wind, although the candle carried no coldness to it when she delicately touched the wick.
She wrinkled her brow in confusion, glancing around her, behind her, through the stillness of the graveyard. "Eric?"
Silence.
She remained breathless as nothing but the quiet gloom of the cemetery loomed around her, overtaking her, smothering her, leaving her with little blood and a motionless heart, encompassed in a terrifying blackness that threatened to drown her—
And it was only when Sarah awoke moments later, chest heaving, tears running down her cheeks, with no comfort but the delicate sound of rain, that his voice continued to echo in her mind, again and again, surpassing the gate of Life and Death—
He was coming for her.