Mary had never been scared of the dark. As a child, her father, sticking firmly with his decades-old tradition of scary stories before bed, would attempt to continue this tradition by telling her tales of gnarly toothed witches lurking in dark woods or scary goblin-like monsters under her bed. She would only glare at him — both amused and agitated. Because Mary was not afraid of what lurked in the dark. She was not afraid of the unknown.

But now, as the stood at her grandmother’s grave, for the first time in her life – she was terrified. The old cemetery was hidden deep in the woods. Legends say it was to ensure that the agonizing howls from the undead wouldn’t wake the neighborhood in the middle of the night. Mary wondered why her father had decided to bury his mother in such a place. Permanently coated in fog, it seemed, it reeked of rotting skin and untended graves. Several tombstones had been turned over by grave robbers, entirely severed limbs lay lazily strewn about the cemetery grounds. Her bouquet of flowers – flowers she had picked freshly from a garden less than an hour ago – were already leaning over in death.

With shaking hands, she leaned down to her grandmother’s grave and wiped away the dust from her tombstone.

HERE LIES RACHEL MORGAN

MOTHER, SISTER, GRANDMOTHER, WIFE

May 1, 1929- April 10, 2017

Mary gently laid the flowers down on the rain soaked dirt and patted the mound as though her grandmother was laying there.

“I miss you Grandma. I wish you were here…”

She leaned down and laid her face against the soft earth. The wetness of the dirt kissed her cheek and she smiled with her eyes closed. Peaceful.

Suddenly the earth around her began to move and Mary, momentarily lost in her moment of bliss, was drawn into it. It swirled around her like a hurricane and she yelped in fear as, through the dirt mound she lay on, a ghastly hand shot up, reaching for the sky. This hand was emaciated, rotting flesh languidly dripped off the bones, fingernails as yellow as the moon and rotted as the soil it came from. Mary screamed, her voice so shrill and loud, it awoke the birds and critters in the forest. Owls angrily hooted and crows aggressively flapped their wings and cawed restlessly as Mary’s screams of horror pierced through the relative calm, disturbing their rest. Those bony hands slowly clutched onto untouched earth and from the rest of the mound arose a decaying and decrepit corpse dressed in a stained wedding dress.

With a portion of its skull exposed, this corpse had a permanent smirk on its face but the eyes were open and blank. Mary was frozen in fear at what she was witnessing. Her breath came out in short, panicked spurts and her heart threatened to beat out of her chest.

The corpse cricked its neck and finally glanced in her direction. It leaned over ever so slowly with its outstretched hand and slowly caressed Mary’s cheek. Her breath caught in her throat and she grimaced in disgust as the hand moved to the other cheek.

Then the corpse leaned over and whispered into her ear, “Thanks for the flowers…”

Mary watched in shock and horror as the corpse grabbed the bouquet of flowers, put it up to its nose… then leaned back into the cursed earth it arose from.

Mary stood and ran. She ran through the dark woods, away from the cemetery, away from the fog. As she ran, the creatures of the night celebrated her departure and the moon seemed to loom dangerously close above her as a warning sign:

Stay Away From The Forest Of Souls