Phantom Pain (trilogy)

The Castle

Chapter 1: The Castle

The first thing I noticed was the smell of damp earth.

The second was that I was in a coffin. I was buried alive. Panic overtook me and I began to scream and thrash. Oh God. What if nobody heard me? What if I was stuck down here forever, until the worms began to eat away at my flesh? I had been buried in a jacket with buttons and it was with these dull pieces of metal that I scraped my way through the wood. It was like I knew what to do.

Grave dirt came rushing in, choking me, surrounding me in the bodies of rotting things. As I dug through the newly packed soil, it almost felt like I'd died already, and my digging hands were just some involuntary twitch. And then there was the dread, a creeping feeling that intensified the closer I got to the surface, but that was forgotten in the second of relief where my head broke into the air. I sucked in greedily and just lay there for a few moments—half out of the ground—letting the cool breeze move through my dirt caked hair. Once on my feet, I realized I was in a cemetery. Polished headstones surrounded me. Mine read John Doe, and had a little carved cross. It was very small, a tiny plaque on the ground.

Wind whistled through the trees that surrounded the cemetery, and I spun, looking for something. What it was I wasn't sure. Something was there, watching me from the shadows. But it was so eerily silent I could not figure out how that might be true. I had to get out of here. I had to get far, far away. A vision of the ground collapsing out from under me came to me, and I began to run. Something on my back hurt. It was like with every step I was pulling open a wound, or two: one on each shoulder blade.

My feet hit the cement of the path, not loud at all, but the only sound in the entirety of the night. Why were there no birds? No bugs? I wanted to scream, but terror kept the sound inside. It was listening. It was following me. I could feels its presence behind me, right on my heels. Thoughts I did not want to think attacked me. Being lowered into the ground over and over again. A crying angel.

My back was burning. I could feel a droplet of blood run down my spine. Something very, very important was missing. I couldn't run straight. The agony clouded my vision and I slumped forwards, catching myself on a grave marker. It was still crushingly silent, like I was buried in a coffin I could not see, under tons and tons of unmovable earth. The shadows were moving where there shouldn't have been shadows, but on the other hand everything was swaying from side to side. It was like the world was a boat and I was an island.

I could sense my grave site behind me. It was like it exuded some sort of magnet field. Go. I had to go. I could not run, but I stumbled. Just one foot in front of the other. I could do it. The cemetery gate was locked. I shook it weakly, letting my forehead fall against the cold bars. There was pain in the air behind me, like my body was bigger than I was aware of. It was a strange phantom pain, and my mouth opened, preparing to make a sound that my vocal chords never produced. My knuckles gripped the fence like it was my life line.

I couldn't make my eyes focus, and I found myself beginning to slide to the ground. It was through true strength of will that I pushed myself back to my feet. I could not be buried again. All I could see were the shadows. The swaying and the fading made them even more ominous, as I couldn't tell where they were.

My shoulder blades screamed as I lifted my arms over my head, but I began to climb. I did not know how I'd done it, but my stomach was on top of the spikes. Nothing was real but the pain. The world was an illusion. Falling. It was only the shadows, and me, and the cuts on my back. Ground hit. I'd rolled over forwards. I was lying there on my back, outside the cemetery. The ground below me moved, and it was all I could do to role onto my stomach. It didn't help the pain. I would be naive to think a fence could keep me from being dragged back into the box. I was not safe yet, but I also could not move.