Among the Fallen: Resurrection (8 page)

The winds lashed and blew the rain around her viciously, her damaged and almost war-ravaged, ice cold body curled up in the mud as she sobbed for her stolen life. She closed her eyes suddenly, mumbling and preying, muttering pleas and begging with profound desperation as the ghostly world howled around her. Suddenly, she opened her eyes and stared through the tormented graveyard, her prayers ignored and her pleas coldly rejected. As her tears began to wither, she looked out through her heavy matted hair, her teeth chattering and her soil clogged eyes blinking erratically.

She wiped her mouth slowly, leaving a dirty smear up her face as the bare wounds on her hands began to tingle and move. She stretched out her hand, watching curiously as the muscles and blood began to regenerate over the bones that crudely protruded. Her muscles and flesh weaved and gelled, arteries and veins started to mysteriously rebuild and restore her fingers. She looked on in bewilderment at her hands, her wounds slowly vanishing and her fingers becoming somewhat normal. She turned away as her eyes filled with more tears, her black lips quivering uncontrollably as she clasped her new hands to her chest.

Alex stood up painfully and turned her head towards a marble angel to the left of her monument; a tall and graceful angel on a pedestal with a wing of finely detailed feathers and a face of sorrow. As the angel stared out into the dark world it clearly had no place being in, Alex approached it cautiously, her heart mysteriously drawn to it. The name on the plaque said
Sarah Beaumont
.

Her emotions suddenly became overwhelming and too much for her to bare, sobbing at the angel’s unsympathetic feet, crying and weeping under the ruthless barrage of rain. She knew there was nothing she could have done, which in some respects made it unendurably worse. All Alex could think about was ways she could have done that day different, some action that could have altered what happened. As mental images flashed before her of Sarah laying twisted in the road, she felt her heart collapse within her chest; drowned within guilt and torturous agony as she bawled into the night, alone, terrified and with nobody to comfort her.

“I’m so sorry, Baby” She whispered as she stroked the stone angel’s flawless face. “I miss you so much” she whimpered desperately. “I failed us, I failed you!” she cried, her words snatched heartlessly by the lump in her throat.

She looked away swiftly, an attempt at hiding her cries from the sad angel, gazing out into the darkness her tears stifled her. She lowered her head solemnly and stared at the monument with her blackened eyes, her tears instantly stolen by the rain. Suddenly, she turned away from the statue and stared down at the waterlogged ground. The angel’s stone eyes suddenly welled up, releasing a single tear of blood down its cold face which was quickly snatched from its cheek. Alex walked away stricken in grief; the angel’s face suddenly turning behind her. The statues sad eye sockets sobbed and its long screaming mouth cried as its sister walked away and abandoned her once more. Alex turned and looked over the stone face one more time, its expression now back as it once was, its grief hidden from Alex’s saddened gaze.

“Goodbye Baby, see you soon.” she said tormented in growing grief and heart-wrenching guilt.

Alex walked away choked and sick, beleaguered and haunted as she strolled through the nightmare landscape lost and traumatized, the weather battering her tiny frame. As the wind screamed around her, the bare trees creaked with desolation, the rain randomly switching directions as Alex battled against it, pushing her mortal frame through the sick and twisted landscape as the monuments and stone figures all around her wept in agony. Lightning cracked silently in the distance as her tiny silhouette walked through the graveyard, the skyline ruined with ghostly trees and stone shapes as her teeth chattered through her weeping eyes.

Alone and hurting, she continued across the land without a goal, her heart and soul tormented and hopeless, ravaged by solitude and loneliness. She walked over to a puddle that rippled on a tomb and looked at her distorted reflection, her face white and lifeless, her lips and eyes black and featureless, her dark hair hanging in the head beating rain.

“What the hell has happened to me?!” She whispered softly.

She sat down under a tree as is it pathetically shielded her from some of the downpour. Her thoughts casting back to a father that hated her, friends that she left behind; a string attention seeking one night stands and life that seemed long gone; set upon her to forever punish her for sins that eluded her. Then she thought about Sarah, a beacon of happiness and symbol of love in a life that was pretty shit to say the least. She picked a handful of wet grass and slowly tore it to pieces, the rain thrashing at her head as she thought about how she wasted her life doing nothing, maybe this was the point being made; maybe she would realize that she was a money wasting, self-loathing bitch and wake up, like in a bad dream.

She looked up into the red sky, her hand shielding the rain from her black eyes. The air smelt of burning wood and chemicals, the horizon almost glowing in the distance. She stood up throwing the grass to the wind and rolled her head, her neck cracking as she stretched. The wet soil squeezed grossly through her toes as she wandered the dreary and gloomy graveyard with nowhere to go. As the lanterns floated, they flickered and blurred in the rain and cast ugly long shadows all around the granite littered cemetery.

Alex painfully began to recall the joy her little sister brought to her life, dunking for apples at Halloween and letting her win. Watching her trying to eat a bag of sweets like there was no tomorrow, their cuddles in bed on a Saturday morning while watching cartoons. As each loving memory came back to haunt her, she began to see the cardinal rule of the core of life’s happiness, the rule being you don’t actually know or realize happiness until your confronted with unbearable despair. With life being nothing more than a collection of moments, it’s those moments that she will remember from this day on; the moments she will miss and regret forever. At this present instant in a macabre time of this life, existence or whatever it may be; memories of moments were all she had left to hold on to. Memory after memory, no matter how small, how irrelevant or time lost, came back to her; each with its very own tear. Even the toys she played with and books she read as a child, she could now suddenly see in her mind, remembering all the fine details she had long forgot in her arrogance, a cold and tormenting lesson of just how special moments are.

Chapter Seven: Darkness Falls

“A day of darkness and gloom, a day of clouds and blackness. Like dawn spreading across the
mountains a large and mighty army comes, such as never was of old nor ever will be in ages to
come” -
Joe 2:2

Alex stood for a few moments just collecting her thoughts, the rain pelting down and blinding her as she looked into the red seared skies. She held her arms trying to warm her aching body, walking further into the graveyard, her tired vision tainted by the blackness that seemed to surround her in every direction. All she could see were the lanterns that bizarrely stayed alight, almost supernaturally in such intense weather. Suddenly the rain stopped, frozen mid-air. Alex took a step back and looked around as the droplets of rain hovered still, frozen in time and yet, when she touched them they were still wet and cold, flowing freely over her hand.

Suddenly, the ground went dark and a light mist flowed along the land, swallowing the grass and granite slabs effortlessly. The lanterns glared brighter and brighter, lighting up the meek horizon; the tombstones sinking into the Earth as the angels and monuments bled. The chains in the trees rattled and the columns of skulls began to move, the skulls looking up into the sky; their blind and empty eye sockets coldly looking away. Suddenly, a few tombstones shot into the air, shattering into a thousand pieces and abruptly pausing; the air around her floating with droplets of water and pieces of stone. All of sudden, there was a fabric, shiny and blood-stained, its texture of leather but strangely, it were as light as the air itself; covered in buckles, straps and stitches; flowing around her randomly and enigmatically. As her fear deepened, the strange cloth just leapt around her playfully and harmlessly, haunting yet surreal, more or less ghostlike. On the horizon stood three dark shadows, all human looking and still, one in front and two behind her. Alex turned fearfully as they gazed upon her with intimidating silence.

“Alexandra Beaumont!” a dank putrid echoing voice whispered behind her. She turned in fright and stared across the dark miserable horizon as a tall dark shape with a massive cloak adrift in the rain stood staring at her, perched upon a concrete angel like a chilling gargoyle on a church roof. The creature’s cloak just continued to dance around her, snatching the paused water droplets from the air, its scorched and leather like texture creaking as it twisted around the head stones and bleeding monuments weightlessly. The figures eyes glowed in an evil hazy red as the cloak waved and weaved in all directions around it, as if it moved freely like flowing water. Its body clad in black leather, straps and chains and strange Baphomet symbols were embedded and burnt into the body, eerily similar to the suit that was clamped to her aching body. Patches of revealed flesh and weeping wounds were held open with hooks and wire, painfully and indiscriminately all over its body as they wept in the open air. Suddenly, the other three figures stepped into the light revealing different tortured faces, leather symbolic attire and their flesh carved with wires, bloodless wounds and skin artistically arranged and altered almost demonically.

“Alexandra!” the caped figure mumbled from the shadows, its voice rumbling and rasping as it gasped at the air around it.

“Who are you people?” she said meekly as she lowered her head unnervingly. The creature slid off the stone pedestal like elegant water, standing tall like an eight-foot giant over the horizon as its cape writhed and followed loyally behind. It floated towards her as the lanterns gracefully parted and drifted away without it even touching them, creating a breath-taking glowing path of fierce red candlelight. Alex turned and looked at one of the other figures as it just stared at her quietly without sound, its face pulled tight with wires and hooks to the back of its head to what appeared to be a metal symbolic halo, its eyes stretched to a permanent squint and its mouth taut and flawed into a undying straight smile. Wounds on its body wept and its pale skin glistened in the light, chains dangling silently from its belt as did an arrangement of knives and cleavers. Alex bowed her head as the creatures twisted gaze unsettled her, its silence hinting at more horror than she could ever imagine.

Suddenly, the second figure appeared behind her, grunting and puffing in the darkness as its equally twisted and tormented body slowly walked through the frozen rain. His skin and face moulded and stitched like putty, red and sore as its jaw constantly chewed into the leather strap that gagged him cruelly, the flesh around his mouth stretched open revealing bleeding and decaying gums.

Alex stepped away cautiously and frightened as the third approached from behind, a female disfigured and tortured, eyes bound with a leather strap hooked to the sides of her head, her black hair pulled tight and interwoven with a chain that disappeared into the back of her skull. Her black lips graced with a faint frown as she moved gracefully through her surroundings, the leather tightly hugging her tortured and decaying body as her lesions wept. Suddenly, the caped creature raised itself and its companions stood as still as stone. Alex looked over her shoulder and watched as the Gagged quietly looked into the eyes of a stone angel inquisitively.

“You have been given a second chance, Alexandra, a chance that is rare and a chance that is honourable!” the creature hissed creepily as it towered above her, its blazing skull-like eyes peering over its thick leather collar.

“A chance at what?” she said fearfully. “Am I dead?”

The creature’s eyes glowed furiously and silently as flies buzzed around its tortured and painful body. The Blind turned and stared at Alex blankly before turning her head and gazing upon her master, awaiting his response to the frightened girl in front of her. Alex gradually backed away as the ghost grew closer and closer, its mantle breaking holes in the fog and slicing through the floating rain and debris.

“Why do you humans fear death so bitterly?” the creature said sharply, leaning towards her as its reflection cast over her black eyes. Alex stood mystified and terrified as she thought about the Wraith’s question without finding an answer.

“Please, I must know!” she sobbed with a plea of desperation.

“Yes, Alexandra” it mumbled as it straightened up to full height. “You are what you would call dead, but you stand before us more alive than you ever were before”

The creature’s cape flowed around the headstones charmingly yet erratically and random, wrapping and choking headstones as it flowed defiantly through the rain. Alex just stood wearily and defeated, waiting for the creatures to just kill her, or do whatever they had planned and get it over with, but strangely, they seemed to keep their distance. Its eyes glowed brighter before dimming again; it’s cold and dark body standing as still as stone, controlled and fearsome. Alex turned coldly as the Gagged just mumbled and walked off into the darkness, wandering the graveyard and amusing itself.

“You stand here for a reason more important than your life ever was!” it said creepily. Alex lowered her head without taking her eyes off of the sinister looking creatures around her. Her lips quivering in fear, her body shivering as she fought back the tears; her mind flashing back to a life she once took for granted as the ghosts dismissed it completely without regret.

“What purpose?!” she gasped acrimoniously as she tried to avoid eye contact with wraith, yet her undying curiosity and fear compelling her to do otherwise. A long cold silence aired across the putrid landscape of headstones, lanterns and monuments, the rain suddenly continuing to batter the stone reminders that had been left to rot by the sands of time. She could hear the Gagged man at her side, chewing down on the strap that cut into the sides of his mouth, his eyes hidden behind his stretched skin, thoughtless yet obedient to his caped master. The caped creature stood staring at her, completely focused and not even phased by the twisted cloak that danced around them all.