Ep. 31: Graveseed

A couple visits a graveyard at dusk, but it's been waiting on them for hundreds of years.

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Being a graveyard connoisseur is an interesting thing.

Samantha Williams had been calling herself that for over a decade. It started in middle school when she did it just to make people think she was weird. Back then she didn’t even really like them. She thought they were creepy. But it had blossomed into the most interesting hobby Sam had.

Something about them soothed her. Graveyards told Sam that death was finite. And because it was measurable, there was nothing to be scared of. Lately, too, she’d been getting into astrology, much to the chagrin of her partner — Devin. He might’ve been cynical about that stuff, but he was a good guy. An old soul. She’d fallen into far too many relationships with shitty men and now she’d found a lovely one, freeing her to explore herself. When she met him, he was frightened of cemeteries, but he was warming to it.

Now, as they drove to the oldest cemetery in Mississippi, he was entertaining her whimsy again. It wasn’t something he readily admitted, but her adventurous side was the most interesting thing he’d ever had in a relationship. The more he experienced it the more he embraced that side of himself. He played the part of the partially exasperated boyfriend, but just beneath the surface he was fizzing.

The sun had almost completely waned. It played peekaboo with deep south pines while its warmth lifted sap into the dense humidity.

Sprites were stretching, as they do in the twilight. Preparing for a night of embracing the full moon and tiptoeing in its glow.

The couple exited their Honda sedan in high spirits, ready to read the name plates and imagine the living years of old corpses beneath their feet. No one else was there. They crunched across 15 feet of gravel, opened the metal gate, and stepped onto hallowed grass.

“For an old graveyard, this sure looks nice,” Devin said as he scanned.

The graveyard was well manicured. Even as old as some of the headstones looked, very few of them were lopsided or falling apart like they had expected.

Sam looked at him and smiled fondly. “It does, doesn’t it? I’ve been to some old ones and this…nice. The church must maintain it well. Honestly it looks almost nicer than the church itself.”

“Yeah,” Devin said, distracted by a large headstones toward the back of the fenced area about 50 feet from him. There was a row of 8 monoliths that looked as if they marked burials of the ultra-wealthy. One in particular fascinated him. A vine rising 10 feet from the earth and terminating at a taper.

When Sam saw where he was heading, she followed. As many cemeteries as she’d been to, she’d never seen something like that. But as she walked, a gravity that pulled her left. She wanted to follow her lover, Devin, on her right who approached the intriguing monolith with wide eyes. But there was no choice for her to make. Gravity pulls everything no matter how much it wishes to float.

Sam’s eyes were the last thing to lock onto where she was going. It was a small stone. A cross. Discolored to a rusty hue and tilted. The approach yielded a voice. One that vibrated her brain stem rather than her eardrums and spoke only in feelings. It was warm. Welcoming. Like her mother’s lemon chicken casserole.

While what was left of the sun receded behind the trees, Sam closed her eyes and bathed in unexplained fervor over the grave of a 300 year old stranger. She was staked to a palace of meandering zeal.

Then it ceased.

Suddenly.

Like a heated blanket ripped from cold feet.

When she turned, Devin was on the other side of the massive marker he’d gone to inspect. A bit disheveled from the encounter with something she couldn’t quite explain, Sam walked over, intent on wrapping her arms around his torso and squeezing more of that same feeling out of him.

“Devin,” she called.

No answer.

A little louder now. “Devin!”

Nothing.

Her walk turned into a jog. When she could see around the other side of the monolith, he was gone.

It wasn’t until that moment that she noticed the color of the aether around her. The air was supposed to be the color of dusk but its palette reminded her more of a combusted Borealis. Some flavor of flickering hot red, purple, and a suggestion of green. The air didn’t smell of pine anymore and as she whipped around, it was all disintegrating.

The church. The trees. All of it ashing into the earth like dry rotted rubber.

Her mouth fell open and like the rest of her surroundings, dried in real time. But there was a howling in the distance. Something calling her. Muffled at first, the low pass filter lifted from it and became clear, and very near.

“Excuse me miss,” said a man standing right in front of her, searching her body and face for some sign of presence.

It was difficult to conjure a coherent response. “Hi, I’m…”

“Are you alright?”, the ebony man said.

A gray mustache and head of hair thicker than she’d expect on such a seasoned face gave her enough solace that she grabbed an arm and lent him some of her weight. The man was strong to catch her.

“Woahhhh woah now, hold on. Let’s sit you down.” He eased her onto a couple of steps serving as the base of one of the large granite headstones. “I’m gonna get you some water.”

The stranger left with enough haste that it surprised her, but not enough to keep her from slipping back into the other place. Everything had fully disintegrated into piles of powder. Even the large vine monolith that Devin had gone initially to inspect. Everything was gone except the small headstone she’d walked away from.

In the absence of the gravity that had once taken her there, she found enough strength to will herself toward it. What was once a soothing warm radiance had become a searing heat. Its rusty red was now a molten orange glow that stood in contrast to deep black lettering that she didn’t notice before.

HERE LAY A WITCH

A thought rose to the front of her mind while the stranger called her back from the banal realm in which she was rooted — What did they do to you?

“Miss…miss!”, he shook her awake. “You need to sit back down, here —“ he uttered softly as he handed her an open bottle of water.

She sat down right where she stood in the centipede grass and he crouched with her. “Where is my boyfriend?”, Sam wearily asked.

“Your boyfriend?”, the man wondered as he scanned the area. “I didn’t see anyone with you when I came over. I live right over there.” He pointed at a house she hadn’t noticed before, just beyond a wire fence behind the church. “People don’t usually come out here any time other than Sunday. What ya doin’ out here, young lady?”

“I just need to find my boyfriend. His name is Devin. Please help me.”

“Okay miss, I’ll help ya. But you shouldn’t be here after dark. This ain’t no ordinary cemetery. They don’t even bury people here no more. My momma was the last one.”

She wanted to listen, but all she cared about was — “Devin!!!” she yelled. There was still no response.

“Devin!”, he assisted with some baritone. There was nothing.

At first.

They both heard it.

Again, it began as a mumble, but quickly it crescendoed as they fell into the other realm together. Devin stood where the large stone once was.

“Help! Oh my god help me, please!” Devin’s voice cracked in agony. “Make it stop ahhh!”

A flaming vine had merged with his left tibia and became it, rising from the ground and into the Mississippi air through his torso. His nostrils flared with white hot plasma, muffling his cries for help while Sam remained frozen in shock. The hellacious vine ripped through and transmuted Devin’s body into a molten tree, rising from the earth to collect souls as if they were sunlight.

Suddenly the screaming was gone. Replaced by a humming vibration of bass that emanated from the tree as its morphing slowed to a crawl.

“I was beginning to think this wasn’t real,” the man said from beside her.

It took a moment but Sam peeled her eyes from the glowing branches to look at the man who, instead of horror, radiated a sense of awe and pride.

“Wha—“

“Beyond life we wait for light to see,

A pair of souls, cold and fair.

Palace mired in pain and longing will

Release its wrath — a molten mare.”

“What?”, Sam cried as exasperated mascara ran over her cheeks.

“I’m sorry, miss. But I’ve been waiting my whole life for this — two virgins, destined to be mated by their souls, to willingly set foot in this graveyard. Your boyfriend opened the portal. You’re to spread its seeds,” he said as he watched a human-sized bulb, formed on the end of one of the tree’s branches, thud to the ground and pop open. “You’ll give birth to a new world. And it’ll be so beautiful.”