The morning after the storm, the village of Lesser Nailmarsh found out just how cluttered the countryside could be. It wasn't just the usual post-storm debris, not just branches on the roads and garden gnomes in the trees, it was the dead again. A bloody nuisance really.
This hadn't happened for over two hundred years but in such a small community it was talked about as regularly as the Sunday sermons. Whenever there was a storm incoming there would be group meetings in the church hall where they'd do whatever the old books had done to keep the dead down the last time.
They thought it had been working but they'd made a mistake this time. That's all it ever takes you know, one wrong word or a half-arsed gesture and then suddenly every coffin that has ever been left within the village's grounds is now not only on the surface of wherever it was left but also open and full of water.
It was a disturbing sight for many of the folk living near the church, more so for those living beside the woods. The church grounds had been used for burying the local dead for as long as the river had run and the usage of that exact acre boomed when the Catholic church saw fit to consecrate it.
Of course there was a time when it was meant only for the wealthy and the rest were buried in boxes beside the woods, as close to the spiritually "safe" grounds as they could get without getting into trouble. Presently it meant that a fair few folk woke up to shoddily built coffins leaking faintly grey water all over their floors while the grinning dead beckoned them closer.
They didn't record what went wrong, only their desperate attempts to send the dead back to where they should be- bodies below, souls above. They did record in graphic detail exactly how the dead moved around in the water and, if the coffins were close enough to touch, shift between graves as though they were swimming in an endless oceanic abyss.
The dead were always smiling, always waving and beckoning like it was just another day for them and perhaps it was, most of them had probably seen the previous rising and knew the drill, Some mimicked the ceremony in groups further down into the unfathomable depths contained within the coffins while others poked at the water, testing their boundaries and waiting for the ceremony to be done right.
This hadn't happened for over two hundred years but in such a small community it was talked about as regularly as the Sunday sermons. Whenever there was a storm incoming there would be group meetings in the church hall where they'd do whatever the old books had done to keep the dead down the last time.
They thought it had been working but they'd made a mistake this time. That's all it ever takes you know, one wrong word or a half-arsed gesture and then suddenly every coffin that has ever been left within the village's grounds is now not only on the surface of wherever it was left but also open and full of water.
It was a disturbing sight for many of the folk living near the church, more so for those living beside the woods. The church grounds had been used for burying the local dead for as long as the river had run and the usage of that exact acre boomed when the Catholic church saw fit to consecrate it.
Of course there was a time when it was meant only for the wealthy and the rest were buried in boxes beside the woods, as close to the spiritually "safe" grounds as they could get without getting into trouble. Presently it meant that a fair few folk woke up to shoddily built coffins leaking faintly grey water all over their floors while the grinning dead beckoned them closer.
They didn't record what went wrong, only their desperate attempts to send the dead back to where they should be- bodies below, souls above. They did record in graphic detail exactly how the dead moved around in the water and, if the coffins were close enough to touch, shift between graves as though they were swimming in an endless oceanic abyss.
The dead were always smiling, always waving and beckoning like it was just another day for them and perhaps it was, most of them had probably seen the previous rising and knew the drill, Some mimicked the ceremony in groups further down into the unfathomable depths contained within the coffins while others poked at the water, testing their boundaries and waiting for the ceremony to be done right.
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