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| Courtesy VideoBlocks |
Summer, steamy and alive, a mere distant passion
now. Long lit shadows and cool winds crossed the abandoned part of the
cemetery—the pauper's grave at Perilous Point. Scraggly, long-armed elm and oak
trees, two-hundred years old if a day, bawled away amber and ochre leaves, all
skeletonized they were from their life's sap long gone, all emaciated and
dehydrated and all done. Autumn's rape of summer. It is a deadly time of year.
Pauper's grave was home to pirates and henchmen and
rapists and thieves, the dregs of society civilized beings felt compelled to
deliver unto God but quick chose to forget here on earth. Faith had not
hastened their heavenly transport, for their souls lingered, wandered, and
paced back and forth, waiting for the season when their soul-charred
celebrations could begin.
"All Hallows Eve," they whispered,
"at last, it is here. We dance for Heaven's homeless. We make merry for
those of us who had black blood course through our veins. For the wretched and
the feared, and the utterly forgotten. For those who wreaked death upon others;
we reposit everlasting life upon them!"
As if in God's answer, the wind flew and the
thunder clapped, and the blue sky, once radiant and full of joy, tore away in terror
of the blackened and bruised and voluminous and voracious and menacing clouds.
With each crack, a ghostly skeleton would cheer.
With the barrelling thunder, scurrying incantations would snicker low and giggle
quiet. Fear they rarely had, but for their Creator.
Leaves flew and fluttered, tormented and aghast.
Their spiny shells folded into one another and soon amassed. A swirling vortex
of autumn hues, clusters then bushels then tons in their combined weight became
a mighty ball as big and as spine-chilling as the decrepit cemetery itself. The
ball rolled silent, save for a roiling, rustling growl. The innocent trees made
those innocent leaves and those leaves would seek vengeance in a just verdict
for those merciless men.
Otherworldly cries, screams, wails, and
caterwauling cannonaded through the spindly trees and listing headstones, every
soulless skeleton fearing its end.
No being could out run those leaves. A mashing of wicked
thoughts and a crunching of brittle bones echoed throughout the cemetery, reaching
all the way to the rocky cliffs and the sea below, the sonorous tidal waves smothering
the final death throes.
Each leafy judge mashed every soulless subhuman far
below ground, all the way back to the brackish bowels of Hell... at least for
another year.