The Horrors of Our Mind [COMPLETED]

Waking Up

In a small town in the middle of New Mexico, there was a legend that anyone who died on the third Tuesday of September wouldn't truly die. The legend dated the back the to early 1600s, but there was no proof of it ever occurring in later times as civilization grew and technology advanced.

Morticians prepared the body for eternal death, sewing their jaws shut, gluing the eyelids so they would never open again, and pumped the bodies up with formaldehyde to preserve the body for the funeral, but after they would rapidly rot. The legend was no longer believed in and slowly faded away with time to be forgotten by everyone and everything except old, yellowed books.

Years and years pass, the books slowly rotting away, and it was the third Tuesday of September. There was a flu outbreak, and people were dropping dead left and right, the funeral homes were overloaded with dead bodies, half of the town was eradicated by the deadly virus.

The local graveyard filled up quickly because of the rapid deaths, making the town have to expand the graveyard, putting many of the graves in the grassy fields where the headstones could barely be seen.

Within a couple of days, people stopped dying and eventually those who were still sick got better. Years passed and people noticed that when they visited nearby towns, they saw those who passed from the flu outbreak. They were quiet, barely mumbling when they talked. Their memories were hazy as well, they barely recognized their family who survived the flu. When they moved, they were stiff and rigid.

Not believing what their eyes were seeing, people raced back to their small town and to the graveyard to dig up the coffins. What the townspeople saw astonished them. The coffins were broken and busted, the wood engraved with nail marks, some even having broken nails stuck into the grain of the wood. The coffins were empty, and no one knew how it was possible. Other coffins still had bodies in them, but with twisted faces or horror and broken fingers from trying to claw their way out of the coffin that held them captive.