3

Darkness stopped being empty. It became crowded. At first, he thought it was just his thoughts finally turning on each other fracturing, overlapping, losing their sense of order. But the sensation was different from panic or fear. This was heavier. Thicker. As though the darkness itself had gained weight and was pressing inward, filling every space he had left unguarded.

His breathing no longer followed his will.

It came in short, involuntary jerks, each one weaker than the last. His chest barely rose now, ribs trembling with the effort. The burn in his lungs had dulled into something deeper and more dangerous a cold ache, distant and wrong.

That terrified him more than the pain ever had.

Pain meant resistance.

This felt like surrender.

His thoughts slowed, stretched thin, as if pulled apart by invisible hands. Memories bled into one another without sequence or sense. The past lost its edges.

He saw himself as a child, knees scraped raw, dirt packed under his nails, staring at the ground while someone towered over him. The voice came without a face.

“Stay quiet.”

Another memory replaced it before he could grasp itolder now, lying still while a doctor shone a light into his eyes, asking questions he couldn’t answer fast enough. Someone said unresponsive. Someone else said wait.

Someone else said time of death

The words echoed grotesquely inside the coffin, bouncing off the walls of his skull.

No, he tried to think. They were wrong.

But certainty was slipping through him like water through open fingers.

His body was no longer fully his.

His hands felt enormous and numb, as if they belonged to someone else. His legs had gone completely still not from restraint, but from absence. He could no longer feel where they ended and the coffin began.

The air had thinned to almost nothing now.

Each breath was a shallow drag, barely enough to keep the darkness from swallowing him whole. His mouth hung open uselessly, lips cracked and dry. His tongue felt swollen, heavy, pressing awkwardly against his teeth.

A low, broken sound rattled out of his throat.

Not a word.

Not even a cry.

Just proof that something inside him was still trying.

The soil above had stopped falling.

There was no more ceremony. No more murmured prayers. Only the deep, oppressive silence of earth settling into its final shape. The weight above him felt absolute now unyielding, final.

Buried.

The word surfaced slowly, carefully, as if his mind were afraid of breaking if it named the truth too loudly.

I’m buried.

The thought should have sent him spiraling.

Instead, it landed quietly.

Acceptance crept in like a disease.

His heartbeat slowed further, each beat heavy and labored, separated by long, terrifying pauses. He waited for the next one every time, unsure if it would come.

Sometimes it didn’t at least not when he expected it to.

Blackness bled into his vision even though his eyes were open. Not darkness something else. Shapes flickered at the edges of perception, twisting and collapsing before he could focus on them.

Whispers followed.

Not voices.

More like impressions. Emotions without sound. A pressure against his mind, probing gently at first, then with increasing insistence.

Loneliness.

Fear.

Longing.

None of them felt entirely his.

A strange awareness stirred in him, thin and fragile but undeniable. A sense of being observed not from above the coffin, not by the living, but from somewhere farther away. Somewhere that did not care about soil or wood or breath.

His chest tightened painfully as the invisible pressure increased.

Who...

The thought fractured before it could finish.

His body convulsed suddenly, a violent, involuntary jerk that slammed his shoulders against the coffin walls. The impact rattled through him, sharp and disorienting. A gasp tore free from his lungs, raw and broken.

Air rushed in.

Not enough but more than before.

His heart surged in response, pounding erratically, as if startled back into motion. Pain flared again, bright and vicious, tearing through his chest.

He welcomed it.

Pain meant he was still here.

The warmth returned the same unnatural warmth he had felt moments earlier. It spread through his chest slowly this time, radiating outward, threading through his ribs and spine like something searching for a place to anchor itself.

His breathing steadied slightly, no longer entirely his own.

The realization sent a jolt of fear through him.

This isn’t normal.

Something was wrong.

Or perhaps something had finally noticed.

The pressure intensified, sharp and intimate now, as if fingers pressed against the inside of his ribcage not touching flesh, but the space around it. His thoughts blurred further, tugged toward something distant and unfamiliar.

Images surfaced unbidden.

A pair of hands gripping a cemetery gate too tightly.

A sharp intake of breath in open air.

A heart stuttering in someone else’s chest.

The connection snapped taut.

His mouth opened on a silent scream as the sensation peaked overwhelming, invasive, terrifying. His vision exploded into light, white and blinding, completely at odds with the darkness surrounding his body.

For a fleeting moment, he was not in the coffin.

He was falling.

Or rising.

Or being pulled.

He couldn’t tell.

The sensation tore through him, ripping at whatever fragile boundary still separated him from the world above. His heartbeat surged wildly, then faltered again, uneven and strained.

The warmth flared brighter—

Then vanished.

The darkness crashed back in.

Hard.

Final.

His body went limp.

His breath shuddered once… twice…

Then stopped.

Silence claimed the coffin.

Above ground, far from the grave, someone doubled over suddenly, gasping for air as if they had been underwater too long heart hammering violently, chest burning, palms shaking.

They did not know why.

Only that something had just slipped through their fingers.

And deep beneath the earth, in a coffin sealed too soon, a body lay unnaturally still

caught between what had ended

and what refused to let go.

***Download NovelToon to enjoy a better reading experience!***