The aunties at church always said there were witches out in the toolshed on the far side of the graveyard. They said there were ten thousand cat-like devils in there with them and they were just waiting for someone to open the door so they can break the church apart and burn the statues inside.
We believed that until we became old enough to think they were just trying to scare us away from gardening tools or maybe the vicar's stash of communion wine. None of us were allowed to try it which only made breaking in just that little bit more tempting.
A few of us thought we'd be able to manage on a Thursday night after the youth group had all gone home and the church was locked up until morning. There wouldn't be anyone to stop us and Rob even brought along a bottle of red grape juice to replace whatever we drank.
By the time we'd waited and creeped across the graveyard to the toolshed it slowly dawned on us that we'd never even been this far before. In fact the furthest any of us had gotten before was one of the larger tombs for the last aristocratic family that had lived here.
The shed itself wasn't much to look at from afar but it was so much larger up close and a lot sturdier than we'd reckoned. Luckily Khia borrowed bolt cutters from her cousin's garage and we snipped straight through the chain, letting the door swing right open and letting the stench of decay slam into us.
The aunties at church always said there were witches out in the toolshed on the far side of the graveyard. In a way they were right... and wrong. There were definitely people in there, at least they had been people and we found them they were definitely corpses.
We recognised some by their clothes - hikers who'd gotten lost on long country walks and teens who'd run away from home. Some were barely bones but one was still fresh enough to ooze, a boy who'd been in the year above us at school and had been sent to a boarding school in Kent... apparently.
The aunties were right about the cat-like devils only they'd once been strays and pets and now they were little sacks of skin that creaked as they let out quiet, gasping mews. That was when we all ran, nobody wanted to stick around and figure out how or why the dead cats were moving.
We sure as hell didn't want to wait and see the people do the same.
News spread about the toolshed being broken into and some communion wine gone missing but we never got far enough inside to nick anything. We did forget to shut the shed behind us though and ever since then we've been seeing weird people out in the fields at night, moving without moving their feet.
All the cats have gone too.
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