Story 1181: The Call Beyond Flesh

The voice didn’t come from the wind or sky. It came from within—from bone, from blood, from sinew.

A summons older than language, more intimate than memory.

Jasper Crane felt it first.

While digging graves at Hollowgate Cemetery, he collapsed into a pit he hadn’t dug. The earth whispered his name—not aloud, but in the silent rasp of marrow trembling inside his limbs.

“Below the skin. Beneath the shell. Come.”

When he awoke, his hands were bleeding. Not from the fall—but from carving strange symbols into the coffin lid beneath him. Symbols he didn’t recognize, but which pulsed with living warmth.

He tried to flee. But the cemetery had changed.

The graves were breathing.

Tombs swelled like lungs inhaling dust. Headstones wept dark sap. Root veins broke through soil, spelling messages in spirals. He ran until he reached the Mourner’s Chapel, now half-swallowed by ivy with eyes that blinked.

Inside sat the priest. Or what was left of him.