Tomb

It was humid out. The kind of humid that sticks to your skin amongst the sweat and pollen. Uncomfortable really but much preferred to the brutal Massachusetts winters. Yellow-jackets buzzed around front porch lights and the laughter of little kids floated from back-yards.

My blue Nike’s were looking a little more grey at this point as they hit the sidewalk in soft rhythmic thumps. It was afternoon and people were beginning to come home from work, I was on my afternoon run. In those days I worked from home so I could pretty much go whenever I wanted.

I rounded a bend in the road and stumbled (quite literally as the sidewalk was very uneven) onto a path marked with a particularly ornate fence. The fence was wide open and looked as though it had been for a very long time. The spireled metal practically grown into the surrounding trees. The path was very overgrown, but definitely visible. Weeds and little flowers poked up through the gravel, and mosses inched off of roots. I felt a strange calling to go down it. As if there were someone gently taking my hand and leading me. I glanced back at the familiar Weymouth sidewalks, the little cottage style houses with their white picket fences and orderly front lawns looked back at me.

I stepped past the metal fence and was immediately surrounded by thick forest. Trees that didn’t seem to have been there before now bowed towards me, their branches reaching out like arms. I kept going along the path still feeling the strange calling for me to move forward. I looked around not necessarily feeling scared, but cautious nonetheless. Sunlight dripped through the trees creating dancing shadows that illuminated headstones. I was in the middle of a well populated town. Graveyards were normal but this felt so secret. So alone in between such normalcy. I bent down to read a stone that caught my eye. I ran my fingers along the weather-worn letters, just barely making out the words For My Mother, Edith Enslow, Died 1824, aged 58 years. I still felt the sensation of being guided to something as I got up from Edith’s grave.

I kept looking around between the headstones and the mossy oak trees, beginning to feel more and more like there were eyes on me. I figured I was just freaking myself out when I came upon a door in a concrete portion of the hill. It was black metal and badly rusted, and as soon as I saw it the feeling of being guided stopped. All at once I felt as though I had found what I was looking for, even though I wasn’t looking for anything.

I stared at the door’s rusted metal knob, the cobwebs filling the keyhole and the ivy stretching up the concrete barrier. I looked back down the path I came from and though I really had only walked a few yards, I could no longer see the road. I couldn’t hear the laughing kids or the engines of cars that were, to my knowledge, very close by. I ignored my inhibitions and reached forward to pull on the handle.

I’m not too sure what I was expecting but it opened quite easily despite its weight. As if it wanted me to open it. It creaked and moaned and I felt as if the earth below me were shaking under the power of the door. I was met with a blast of cold rotten air. It filled my lungs and dust poured out into my eyes.

Everything was suddenly so loud, like screaming, crying, awful sounds of what sounded like thousands of people in pain. The air kept blowing out and I could hardly see or breath. And the smell. Oh god, the smell. Like death but worse. So pungent and old. My eyes watered heavily, partially from the smell and partially from the dust and wind pulsing out of the doorway.

I was trying so hard to push the door back closed but someone was holding my hand. I couldn’t see it. But I could feel it. I was being pushed into the deep black hole full of screams. I tried to scream but no air came out. Only flies, I choked and spit but flies just kept pouring out of my mouth. My eyes were too cloudy to make out whose hands were on me but it felt like a team of people. Pushing and pushing me towards the door while I clung desperately to anything I could find. My hands scraped on broken glass and nails as I ran them over the ground. Something I touched felt like metal and I grabbed it with everything I had and as soon as I felt blood pouring from my palm everything stopped.

The pushing from invisible hands, the screaming and moaning, the smell and even the flies that poured from my mouth. Everything was gone.

I laid on the ground shaking and coughing and gasping for breath. I looked back up at the door. Only I wasn’t looking from the gravel path. As I reached out, to my absolute horror, my hand hit the inside of the heavy metal door.