by Amy Cross
***
Outside in the moonlit garden, the Crucifix of St. Joan had come to rest at the edge of the lawn. As Cavaleri's screams rang out from the house, a dark figure made its way through the garden, and then knelt and picked up the crucifix.
VI
“What the hell?” Kate muttered, turning to look back at the house as the scream stopped.
She paused, her mind racing with all the possibilities, before finally she turned and looked back down at the hold she had managed to dig. So far, she hadn't found any sign of a coffin or tomb, but she was still convinced that if she just kept digging, she would eventually strike something. The scream from the house had sounded like a woman, but she told herself that she couldn't run, not yet. If someone was truly buried alive in the garden, she had to get them free, so she forced herself to keep digging.
A couple of seconds later, the tip of the shovel suddenly struck something solid. After removing some more soil, Kate knelt in the dirt and ran her hand across a wooden surface. She began to remove dirt from the sides, and soon she could see that she had found a coffin. The metal pipe ran all the way down to the top of the box, as if it was some kind of mechanism for sending items down into the darkness.
“Hello?” Kate hissed. “Is someone in there? Can you hear me?”
She waited, and after a moment she realized she could hear a faint scratching sound from under the lid. She kept telling herself that this was impossible, that her imagination was running wild and that there was no way Edgar would actually have buried a man alive. At the same time, she could still hear the scratches, and they sounded a lot like fingernails being run against the inside of the coffin lid.
“I'm going to get you out of there!” she continued, using the shovel to get more dirt away from the side.
It took her a few minutes, but finally she was able to clear most of the lid. When she tried to pull the coffin open, however, she found that the lid seemed to have been screwed into place. No matter how hard she pulled, nothing seemed to budge.
“It's okay,” she whispered, “I'm working on it. I swear, I'll get you out! I don't know how, but...”
Getting to her feet, she hauled herself out of the six-foot-deep grave. She glanced briefly at the house, almost expecting to hear another scream, but the scene felt strangely silent. She had no idea what Edgar was doing, but she felt certain that soon he'd realize that she had left. Hurrying back toward the maintenance shed, she struggled in the darkness to find anything that might help her to prize the lid of the coffin loose, and finally she found a crowbar. It wasn't much, but she immediately turned and ran back to the grave, jumping down and getting to work.
After just a couple of tries, she managed to break part of the lid loose. Working furiously, she quickly pulled away another section of the frame, before tossing the crowbar aside and using her bare hands to pull the lid loose. Finally she managed to open the coffin, and she saw to her shock that inside there was a startled, gaunt and pained-looking man staring back at her with wild eyes. A horrific smell rose from the coffin, and the man seemed to be covered in not only his own feces and vomit, but also in moldy, rotten food.
“Oh my God,” Kate gasped, stepping back. “Who -”
Before she could finish, she realized that she recognized the man from one of the photos she'd found while she was working in Edgar's archive, and from the dream she'd experienced just a few hours earlier. He was much thinner, of course, and the expression in his eyes bordered on pure madness, but without a shadow of a doubt she knew exactly who she had found.
“Nixon,” she whispered. “John Nixon?”
The man's eyes widened even further, as if pure insanity had taken over his mind after spending months buried deep in the soil. He was partially on his side, with his knees drawn up to his chest, and his once-smart business suit had become tattered and torn, while his whole body seemed to be trembling. All around him, there were rotten pieces of food, which had evidently been sent down to him through the pipe.
“You're him, aren't you?” Kate continued. “You're John Nixon.” She reached a hand out toward him. “Come on, we have to get out of here! You can trust me, I'm going to take you somewhere safe!”
Ignoring her hand, the man merely let out a faint, terrified whimper.
“You have to come with me!” Kate hissed. “He's going to find us if we don't leave! I'll take you to town and then we'll get a ferry away from here! When we get to the mainland we can get some help, but you're not safe as long as you're on Thaxos!”
The man groaned, as if her was far too terrified to move.
“Do you understand me?” Kate asked. “Am I making any sense at all?”
He stared up at her.
“Wait,” Kate continued, pulling herself out of the grave before looking back down at Nixon, who was still curled up in the coffin in a fetal position. “I'm going to grab my phone from my bag, okay? I'm going to call someone!”
Hurrying to her bag, she fumbled in the darkness for a moment before finally finding her phone. She pulled up the number for the local police station, but the phone merely rang and rang.
“Come on, Cavaleri,” she hissed, “where the hell are you?”
Moments later, she heard a faint whining sound coming from the grave.
“It's okay!” she called out, hurrying back over and kneeling at the edge of the pit. Looking down at John Nixon, she could see from the look in his eyes that he had lost his mind completely. “I'm going to get help,” she told him, with the phone still ringing. “Someone's going to come and -”
Suddenly a dark figure moved up behind her, put its arm around her neck and drove the Crucifix of St. Joan into her back and straight through her heart. She gasped as the sharp, bloodied tip burst out through her chest, and she stared straight ahead for a moment, with blood starting to flow from her mouth, before the dark figure pushed her forward and she slumped dead onto the grass.
ALSO AVAILABLE
Dead Souls Volume Two (Parts 14 to 26)
Dead Souls Volume Three (Parts 27 to 39)
Dead Souls Volume Four (Parts 40 to 52)
COMING SOON
Dead Souls Volume Five (Parts 53 to 65)
ALSO BY AMY CROSS
Horror
Ward Z
Asylum
American Coven
The Night Girl
Devil's Briar
The Devil's Photographer
The House We Haunted and Other Stories
Darper Danver series 1
Hugo: The Lockton Downs Haunting (Novella)
Fantasy / Horror
Dark Season series 1, 2 & 3
The Hollow Church (Abby Hart)
Vampire Asylum (Abby Hart)
Lupine Howl series 1, 2, 3 & 4
Grave Girl
Ghosts
The Library
Journey to the Library
The Ghosts of London
The Vampire's Grave
The Werewolf's Curse
Thriller
Ophelia
The Dead City (Ophelia 2)
The Girl Who Never Came Back
The Dead and the Dying: A Joanna Mason Novel
The House of Broken Backs: A Joanna Mason Novel
The Return (Sophie Ash 1)
Other People's Bodies
Dystopia / Science Fiction
The Shades
Finality series 1
Mass Extinction Event series 1, 2 & 3
Erotica
Broken Blue
Broken White
Author's Note
Dead Souls is a paranormal romance / horror serial published in weekly installments. This omnibus edition contains the first thirteen installments.
Table of Contents
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Part Five
Part Six
Part Seven
Part Eight
Part Nine
Part Ten
Part Eleven
Part Twelve
Part Thirteen