A full, yellow moon hung low above the ancient looking cemetery, its moss-covered gravestones sticking out of the ground at odd angles like crooked, rotting teeth in a mouth cracked wide, cackling as it slowly devoured the corpses shoveled into its gaping maw. A chill wind bearing the scent of decay rustled the leaves at my feet as I walked on towards the arcane woods surrounding the cemetery. A short, wrought iron fence marked the bounds of the graveyard — a symbolic demarcation between the rest of the world and this dreary realm of the dead and those who come to grieve them. In many places, the fence had succumbed to the surrounding forest’s roots and to the interminable passage of time. Sections of it bucked riotously out of the earth while others lay fallen. Rusting. Forgotten. Deteriorating amongst the leaves and grass. An army of vines flooded out of the forest through the gaps like creeping insurgents, as if the fence had been the sole bulwark keeping them at bay. They encroached upon the outermost graves, clinging and coiling and digging their way into fissures in the stone to get a better grip. And above this slow, silent battle between nature and the last fractured bits of the humanity of the dead, dark clouds scudded across the sky, blotting out the moon’s sickly light. I had but a moment to wonder what I was doing in this eerie place before I stepped through one of the breaches in the iron barricade and into the forest. 

The trees seemed to whisper warnings as I walked along, the chill wind acting as breath and forming the hissing sounds of words as it blew through the rattling, bone-dry leaves. With every shift of the shadows, the murmuring trees appeared to close in on me, gnarled branches grasping and reaching like outstretched arms. A gust set the boughs creaking, and I imagined the trees’ knobbed fingers tearing me to pieces, their twisted roots pulling me down beneath the black earth. 

The mephitic smell was worse here, the air close and damp. And the deeper I ventured into the woods, the stronger the odor became until with every breath I was suffocating on it. The stench was old. Rotten. There was something about that smell that made the hair on the back of my neck stand up and my body break out in a cold sweat. It quickened some small voice in my head, a voice that screamed to run. But my legs would not obey. I walked as one half-asleep, perceiving everything as if through a flat haze, dull to the danger of my surroundings. Then, through the dark columns of trees, I spied several flickering orange lights.

Three forbidding figures in night-black robes stood in a clearing, their murmuring voices rising and falling on the air. Each one held a torch, but their faces remained obscured beneath the shadows of their hoods. A shudder skated down my spine; I wanted no part of whatever eldritch ritual I’d stumbled upon in these fell woods. I had every intention of turning around, of going back the way I came, but the moment the thought entered my head the three figures turned towards me, their hidden eyes fastening on the place where I stood. 

As if beckoned by some sinister, unseen force, I stepped into the clearing. I walked into the twitching light of the torches, towards the three figures, heart hammering against my ribs.

Come and see…

The voice was inaudible, yet it was there. In my mind. It rasped its portentous invitation again … but I did not want to see. The three figures encircled something on the ground, and whatever it was, I knew the thing was the source of the fetid smell permeating the forest. I was practically choking on it now, eyes watering from the sheer putridity. But still I drew closer, unable to stop.

When I’d taken my place in that dread circle, I looked down. There upon the ground lay a corpse, its bones just starting to peek through gelatinous globs of liquifying tissue. I felt my gorge rise as the muttering voices resumed and the corpse appeared to spasm. I watched in horror as the decay began to reverse. Tendons reconnected bone to muscle. Flesh regrew. Blood began to flow. And as eyes reappeared in the skull’s darkened sockets like small inflating balloons, the body took a shuddering breath.

Its skin still bore a deathly grayish tinge as the half-formed body rose from the ground. The manic voices of the hooded figures assaulted my ears, and all around I heard the frenzied baying of dogs summoned to join in the unholy chorus. The thing looked at me and smiled, insects and maggots scurrying and writhing between its cracked yellow teeth. I tried to scream as it opened its mouth to speak, its breath old and reeking like the foul air of a centuries-old tomb. 

“I’ve been waiting for you, John…” it said, its voice dry and sepulchral. “We’ve all been waiting…”

And before I could so much as scream, it lunged, one cold, clammy hand closing around my throat.