I was eighteen when I joined the rebels. Young, stupid, and restless.
I don’t even know why I did it. Maybe it was the thrill of holding a gun, or the pride of marching into jungle camps like some kind of outlaw soldier. Training was brutal, harsher than anything I’d imagined. We sweated, starved, bled, and crawled until we felt less like men and more like hunted animals. Somehow, I passed.
They sent me to a larger camp near the state border. That’s where the story begins.
🍶 The Village
One evening, on my rare day off, I slipped into a nearby village. The place was alive with the smells of rice beer and cooking fires. I bought soap, tobacco, some small things. Then, like any careless boy, I drank.
An old man laughed when I downed a second cup. “Easy, soldier,” he chuckled, “too much and the forest will take you where you don’t want to go.”
I grinned, brushed it off, and drank again.
By the time I staggered back to the trail, the world was spinning. The stars swirled. My legs moved heavy and loose, but I knew the way back. I had walked it a hundred times.
Or at least, I thought I did.
🌫 The Pull
That’s when it began. A whisper — faint, not in my ears but somewhere behind my thoughts. Like someone calling my name without sound.
I froze. The jungle around me was silent, too silent. No crickets, no owls. Just that pulling urge… a tug inside my skull.
My feet shifted on their own. I walked without choosing. Step after step, deeper into shadows I didn’t recognize.
At one point, I remember the strangest sensation: I wasn’t walking, I was floating. The path dropped away and suddenly I was gliding above the land, looking down as if from the eyes of a crow. Below me, the village glowed faintly, huts like toy houses in the dark. My body moved forward without weight, carried by something unseen.
Then darkness swallowed everything.
⛓ The Awakening
I woke to dampness. Cold earth pressed against my cheek. My head throbbed, my mouth dry and bitter. Slowly, I pushed myself up.
That’s when I saw it.
Gravestones. Dozens. Some leaning, some cracked, all crusted with moss. I was lying in the middle of a cemetery.
My chest tightened. “No… no, no, no…” I whispered.
The mist swirled around me like it was alive. My boots sank slightly in soft dirt. And then I noticed the grave in front of me. Freshly dug, soil still loose. A wooden cross painted white, gleaming pale in the moonlight.
Carved into it was a name.
My name.
Jackson
🕳 The Hands
The whisper returned, clearer now. A voice I couldn’t place. Man, woman, old, young — all and none.
“Lie down… it’s ready for you…”
I stumbled backward. My breath came fast, fogging the air. That was when the ground shifted beneath me. Something broke through the soil — a hand, pale and skeletal, curling around my boot.
I screamed and kicked. The grip was ice cold, impossibly strong. Another hand burst out of the dirt nearby, then another. All around me, graves trembled, soil breaking open as countless hands clawed upward.
Some still had flesh, rotten and grey. Others were bone wrapped in scraps of cloth. They reached, grasping at me, tearing at the air.
I fell to the ground, scrambling, crawling between broken stones as the dead tried to drag me down. My nails split against the gravel. My throat ripped raw from shouting, but no sound carried in that suffocating mist.
🌄 The Return
And then — blackness.
When I opened my eyes again, dawn light streamed into my tent. My comrades said they hadn’t seen me return. Some laughed it off as me getting too drunk in the village.
But when I checked my boots, they were caked with soil — not the red jungle dirt, but dark, damp, clay-like earth that stank of rot.
⚰ The Cross
A week later, one of our fighters was killed in a border clash. They buried him in the village cemetery. I went to the funeral, half-numb.
When I saw his grave, my blood turned to ice.
The white-painted cross. The fresh soil.
It was the same one.
The one I had seen before.
Only now, instead of Martin, the name carved into it was his.
Even now, years later, when I close my eyes, I sometimes hear the whisper again.
Soft. Patient. Waiting.
“Lie down… it’s ready for you…”
The Cemetry Call
