Five whole seconds passed…nothing.
Ten more seconds…nothing.
Five more seconds…still no-
My eyes opened in astonishment. I…I heard something. It sounded like something was moving on the slab above with me, but after letting what I heard sink in…I had a weird feeling that told me it was coming from below.
I heard it again, a sound along the lines of a faint muffled scratch below… How is this even possible? I was hearing something from below a grave. A grave that probably had several layers of concrete or dirt below the slab, and I was hearing something? And it sounded like it was getting…faster?
I couldn't tell what I was hearing. It sounded like random scratching, but even that I wasn't sure of. It was too far away for me to tell. Beads of sweat went down my forehead and onto the slab. I could feel every single hair on the back of my neck stand on end every time I heard the strange noise that seemed to have come from below me.
What was happening? What was I hearing? And how the hell did someone like Amy knew about this? It took me a little while, but soon I realized that this sound was indeed getting closer. Getting louder.
The scratching…No, it wasn't so much like a scratching noise anymore… Faintly, I could make out what sounded like… Words? Words that formed a sentence I couldn't quite decipher just yet. It was…a voice. A very hoarse one at that, like someone had been screaming for the past hour or so.
"Doonn…sssst…errr…eyy…" was all I could understand at first. But as it got closer…more of the words started to clear up…
Doooon…err…ssst…rrrr…away…don't…rrr…ssst…err…don't…rrr…ssst…errr…rrr……away…rrrnnn…away…
…away…don't…rrr…ssst…errr…run…away…
My blood ran cold hearing the last two words. Run away? From what...? From...from who?
…run…away…don't…trr…sssst…errr…run…away…
It was getting closer...
Dooon't…rrr…ussst…errr…run…away…run…away…run away…
It was getting louder, more frantic, more angry.
Run away...run away...run away...!
The voice felt like it was only a few inches below me, as if a man pressed his face against the slab and whispered the words up above. Whispering the words into my ears, as I began to understand each word he was telling me...
Just as I was steeling myself for the worst…the voice abruptly stopped. I couldn't hear anything anymore, not even a hint of the mysterious scratchy voice that was coming from below me. I listened in for a good long while, but still, there was nothing. The voice, was gone…
Frustration made me sit upright, seeing Amy again after what felt like an hour. I forgot that she was even there, and seeing a girl who apparently knew about what I was hearing, and one who had a huge excited grin on her face, only added to the mix of confusion and anger that was boiling up inside me.
"Sooooo?! Did ya hear it? Huh? Did ya? Did ya?!" she asked frantically before I could say anything, biting the tip of her thumbnail afterwards.
"What…what the hell was that?!" I asked, in a tone that was far more hostile than I intended.
Rather than being offended, she gasped in astonishment, clapping her hands together in joy. "YOU DID!!! You heard him!! That's so awesome!!! That is soooo aaaawesome!!" she suddenly stood up and began trotting around in circles, constantly repeating what she just said a few seconds ago, doing all sorts of wavy dance-like motions with her arms and legs.
"I…I couldn't understand it" I commented, still trying to make sense of it all. She stopped midway of her dance, one leg and two arms in the air as if she had been frozen in place.
"Oh?" she said, turning back to me. She then returned to her thinking stance from earlier. "Hmm…Try listening again" she said nonchalantly.
I was taken aback at how calm she was. Was this what she was hearing on every grave? "I-I don't know, I don't know…" I hesitated, my anger soon melting back into a state of fear to the unknown.
"Aw!! Come on Charlotte! If ya stop now, you're gonna up feeling like ya wasted an opportunity of a lifetime! You're gonna be stuck with this mystery for the entirety of your life! And you'll never be able to go back!!" she started jumping around again, throwing her arms up in the air. "Unless…" she stopped, holding up her right index finger up like a man who was striking a bargain with someone.
"Unless…what?" I asked, quivering under the weight of the whole scene.
"Unle-eeee-ss, ya put yer ear back down there…and listen again!" she said ominously, pointing to the grave and then tilting her head to one side, cupping her own ear with her hand. Earlier, I would've laughed at how silly her statements and actions were. But during those moments…it felt like she was leading me into doing something that was far more twisted and sinister.
Twisted or not…I couldn't say that she was wrong…
I stared back at Amy one last time, a look of great anticipation written all over her face, and placed my head back down on the slab…
Closing my eyes yet again, I listened in. My entire body shaking from both the ache from straining the neck for so long and the fear that was building up as the silence drove on.
I clenched my teeth, biting at nothing as I heard…nothing. There was nothing. No voices. No sounds. Nothing.
There was no sound for two whole minutes… Until finally…
"Charlotte? What the heck are you doing?" I heard my mother ask from behind me.
"M-mom?!" I blurted out, head still down on the slab. I opened my eyes and could faintly see her white pant leg on the edge of my vision.
"Get away from that grave, god knows what sort of people stepped on that" she scolded me, but I still couldn't move. A sudden wave of panic and confusion petrifying me on the spot.
"Don't worry miss! The graves here are a hundred percent clean!" I could hear Amy say to her.
"Still, get your head off of that, it's a little disrespectful to the dead. Don't you think?" Even if I wanted to listen in, I knew my mother wasn't gonna let me. I wasn't even sure if I really wanted to find out about what the voice was saying. Really, I was glad that she was there to stop me. To drag me back into the normal world…
…but just as I was about to pull my head off of the concrete surface, I heard it again…This time, I heard what he said very clearly. I jumped back, falling down on the grass as I tried to stop a shout of terror from getting out. "Charlotte! What's gotten into you?!" my mother exclaimed.
"I-I-I heard…I-I heard it!" I practically shouted out of fear.
My mother, of course, looked utterly confused. "Heard what?" she asked me, her confused stare slowly turning to a look of concern.
"It was…" I was left speechless. There was no way in hell that she would've believed me if I told her--I was having a hard time believing it myself.
My mother helped me up. "Well?"
I could feel my lips still quivering. I didn't know what to do. "It's…nothing…" I said, defeated and disappointed at how things were turning out.
"Okay…well, just wanted to let you know that we can go home. Unless, you wanted to do something else with your friend here"
"NO!!" I found myself shouting out loud. Realizing what I had done, I felt my face heat up with embarrassment. "I-I mean…we can go, it's okay" I muttered.
"Uh…alright, so…who's this new friend of yours again?" my mother asked me, obviously eyeing the strange get-up of the girl in front of us. I wanted to say then and there, that she was most definitely not someone I would consider as a friend after what she put me through…
But I stayed quiet…
Leaving us in a very unsettling and awkward silence for a while, before Amy took the chance to introduce herself. "Amy Dall dear madame! Just a humble teen trotting along the journey we call life!!" she gave her a soldier's salute; though she was using her left hand instead of her right.
My mother couldn't help but laugh at her gleeful antics. "Well, it's nice to meet you Amy"
"Likewise miss Charlotte's mom!!" she replied.
"It's Charmaine, and I admire your enthusiasm, hehe"
It took a while, but we soon said our goodbyes and went our separate ways. Inside the car, my mother kept asking me what I was doing with my "New Friend" before she got there. I tried my best to avoid the question altogether, only telling her a half-baked lie that didn't really make that much sense; one that I can't even remember anymore.
That whisper…That one sentence…
What that voice told me still kept swimming around in my thoughts, self-paranoia building up more and more whenever the memory resurfaced. It made me constantly shiver in my seat the whole ride, up until we got home. Even on the next day, it still got me jumping at shadows…
I tried convincing my mother that I should try to get home by myself. Sometimes, it works, other times it didn't, forcing me to return to that cemetery with her.
She was still there, almost like she never leaves. She would wave at me, the stuffed rabbit ears on each side of her hood bobbing up and down as she did. I tried to ignore her as best as I could, only to fail whenever my mother would see her and eventually wave back.
She never got close to us anymore though, giving me a good reason to never talk to her again. I didn't know if I should be happy about that, but…deep down in my mind…I knew I won't be this lucky for too long…
Over the next few weeks of my life, I still felt an uneasy feeling of dread building up after each passing day. Everything was normal, and sometimes it felt normal…but my life was never the same again…
All because of one moment in my life…
One sentence that I could never forget…
Mere seconds away before I had decided that I had enough and stand up, the voice shouted into my ear with utmost clarity:
Don't trust her! Run away!! RUN AWAY!!!
Hearing that below a grave was bad enough…but my own thoughts gave it a much more horrifying image…
For one thing, I never really found out who exactly he was referring to as "Her" in that cemetery…
Comments (0)
See all