Entry #A23

My Soul to Take

by

LM Boelz

The grey mist, as if signaled by the setting sun, silently floated up from beneath the churning soil, while the headstones lay festooned by the inhabitants clinging to the intricate webs cradling them. Gently, the ground continued to roll and bob like pieces of cork drifting in a brown sea of moss on undulating waves.
With infinite patience they waited in anticipation of the stroke of midnight, marking the time the thin veil separating the spirit world from the world of human reality was at its thinnest. Soon it would be time for only the evilest of souls to reach out in hopes of finding a host body to possess, allowing them the opportunity to live again.

The sound of footsteps creeping closer to the family cemetery, skirting the far side of the house, brought a stop to the movement of the earth. Suddenly, the ground shook and trembled with the excitement of the spirits approaching their desired goal.

As it is on many All Hallows’ Eve, a group of four High School students, on a dare, had come to walk among the dead.

The spirits strained to free themselves from their prisons, from the wretched rotting bodies they lay trapped in. No longer did they wish to endure the living hell they had been thrust into. No longer did they wish to feel the pulsating bodies of the earthworms and beetles as they dined on their flesh, day and night, unabated.

As the innocent young ones drew closer to the burial sites, the spirits encased within, fed and grew stronger as they absorbed the life essences emanating from the bodies standing only a mere few feet away.

Hungry to live again, their voices rose and lingered on the wind. The air was filled with soft sorrowful moans, beckoning to them to come closer, closer yet. The crisp October night grew colder as the spirits began to reach up, up through the cracks and crevasses in the loosened earth.

The spirits strained against the unseen bindings that held them at bay, until the veil of life separating them from the world of the living grew paper thin.

The young girls, in an effort to get them to leave, pulled and tugged on the arms of the laughing boys who stood and taunted them with stories of ghost and goblins. With each cracking of a twig or howl of the wind the girls threw themselves against the bodies of their protectors in unabashed fear.

With shuddering anticipation coursing through their shapeless bodies, the spirits rose under the guise of the drifting fog. Methodically, they spiraled up the legs of the unsuspecting youths. They clung to their bodies like a death shroud sent to consume the damned. By the time the couples realized the fog contained more than they bargained for, the spirits had gained control and had entered their bodies.

The air was filled with shrieks of anguish accented only by the screeching of a hoot owl. Who, without response, oversaw the casting-out of the former souls, which only a few moments ago had occupied the vessels now crumpling to the ground.

Carefully, the spirits lifted the corpses from the ground, and aided by a wisp of wind, ascended the steps of the house they had once lived and love within, so many years ago.

Turning to peer out into the black velvet night blanketing the sky, they paused to listen as the tortured screams of the new guests in the graveyard, faded with the retreating of the witching hour, until again the night lay still.