Lived Once, Buried Twice

It is a terrible thing, to wake up in a coffin. The weight of the world is upon you, and death presses in from all sides. Terror chokes you and you know death truly, intimately. You have slumbered in his beachamber and felt his breath. It's yours. It sticks in your throat like soil.

The fever was a rushing tide, crashing through me, washing me away. I had never felt so ill, and I lay in my bed knowing I might not rise from it. Too weak even to muster any fear on that account. Wishing feebly for respite from the heat that plagued me, from my eyeballs to me tips of my toes. If I'd had an ounce of strength for thinking about such things, I'd have believed in the Devil anew, as never before. Surely this must be his work.

Then nothing... Not even dreams. I was gone. Snuffed out like a candle. In a sleep so deep they could no longer rouse me.

They said I died.

When I woke, I thought I had.

The coffin was tight, the air thick and heavy. I drew in breath after laboured breath, each an almighty effort. Each, so I thought, my very last. None spare for screaming. Nor any space to move, and still weak from the fever that had done me so ill. I came within a kiss of madness, I think.

I thought perhaps I was truly dying, and in my dying, having a fantastic dream of rescue. It was so real! I could hear voices above me, muffled by wood and dirt. Voices of men. Better, even, there was the scrape of blessed shovels, and sounds of earth scattering.

Is that how it sounded when the priest intoned his words over me? That must have been a deader sound, deeper, and more hollow.

The noises were louder, and surely it shouldn't be so not if I were dying at last. Instead, the wood buckled and splintered, and a great blade blundered into my awful burrow, and bit into my hand.

I shrieked, finally, in pain and alarm, and my rescuers fled. Leaving me to heave myself out of the earth, gasping, and choking and look! I bleed! I pushed against the lid with hands red and slick, and prayed for deliverance. The pine gave way. Dirt poured in, heavy and wet, and oh! To drown in mud after all!

From the belly and bowels of the earth, I clawed my way out, ever sure the Devil himself were chuckling and nipping at my heels. Up I went, I thought, I hoped, oh, oh, up, up..., Scrabbling like a mole, and just as blind... until my fingers grasped only air.

The dead know only one thing: to return is forbidden.

How did I, then?

I staggered free of my grave, and gulped enormous lungfuls of Heaven.

Unsteady on my feet, l walked home through the dark. Perhaps, that night, the safest woman abroad. What a sight I must have looked! Barefoot, bleeding, a terrible wild fear clinging to me and shining in my eyes. I must have looked half-crazed.

My husband shrieked when he saw me, and collapsed. For a moment, I thought him dead of shock and fright. What a twist of Fate that would have been, what a cruel trick!

+

Thank you for reading!

A/N This is based on a true story. Marjorie McCall was buried alive in the eighteenth century. She really was dug up by grave robbers who fancied the ring she was wearing. Her husband almost died of shock when she turned up back at home. She went on to have another child afterwards. The title is what's on her headstone.

This is an entry to my own challenge, which I posted about yesterday:

Dollar Challenge - Spooktacular October Edition