By Tina Wingham

I sat quietly, hands clasped on my lap beside his grave. The cemetery had a strange chill that engulfed me, and the scent of rotting roses burned my nose—that sweet, metallic tang of death pretending to be perfume. I tried to breathe, but even the air felt heavy, thick with the damp of old and half-remembered graves. Hopefully, it wouldn’t be long until I could join my Reggie.

Reggie was so strong and brave; he had always been by my side. When he smiled, the world softened, and everyone was kinder to each other. He died last week, and since then, the silence of the house had become unbearable, his chair still pulled out, his cup still sitting on the bench where he’d left it. But the nights were the worst. The ticking of the clock felt like a heartbeat that refused to stop, even when he had. So tonight, I came here to St. John’s, the church where we’d promised each other forever.

We’d married in the frigid winter of 1978. The snowdrops had carpeted the churchyard; their small white heads bowed as if blessing our vows. The old stone church had stood proud, like an ancient sentinel watching over her parishioners, its bell tower slightly cracked, with ivy clawing its way up the walls. But to Reggie and me, it was perfect.

St. John’s was a mesmerizing church from before the Black Death, clouded with superstition. The locals spoke of a place in the churchyard called Whispering Corner. They said the villagers of Lytchett Matravers once gathered there to conspire against their king. When his men found out, they butchered the traitors where they stood. The ground was soaked in their blood, feeding the trees and shrubs that shot up overnight and grew ever since. But those roots, born of death, trapped the souls beneath, cursed to whisper their unfinished schemes forever.

If you stand there, and the wind stills, you can hear them, faint voices rising from the soil, muttering words no one can ever quite make out. A warning, perhaps. Or a plea. Some claim they whisper your own name before pulling you to join them.

The sun slowly began to slide behind the crooked church roof, flooding the world in a bruised light. The air grew colder, the shadows longer. I sat at Reggie’s graveside and wrapped my coat tighter, though it did nothing to stop the shiver creeping through me. That’s when I heard it, soft at first, like the sigh of wind through the leaves. Then another voice joined it. Then another. 

The whispers.

They rose and fell, overlapping, bouncing off the stone graves until they sounded almost human. My heart began to race. I told myself it was just the wind, or maybe my imagination, but the words came clearer. The voices were angry, yet still, I stayed. 

But the whispers grew louder, echoing against the church walls, twisting like smoke around the gravestones. A flicker of cold danced in my stomach, tiny butterflies at first, then hundreds of frantic wings battering my insides. Sweat trickled down my temples, pooling at the base of my neck. The air thickened, electric, charged, the kind that comes before a storm.

Then came a sound I couldn’t explain, a wet, gurgling slurp from the soil beside me. My head turned slowly, dread moving faster than my breath. The earth was bubbling. Mud shifted, cracking open like a wound.

Hands emerged, thin, splintered bones clawing their way upward, dragging shreds of dirt and worms with them. One after another, they broke through, spindly fingers grasping at the air. Half-rotten bodies followed, their faces a nightmare of sagging skin and exposed bone. Maggots dropped from hollow eye sockets. A thick, sickly, rotting smell followed next that coated my tongue.

I gasped. Every head turned toward me at once. Empty sockets fixed on my face as if they could actually see me.

For a moment, we stared at one another, the living and the long dead, suspended in that dreadful stillness between breaths. Then they moved.

A dog’s carcass lurched forward, ribs showing through matted fur, jaw dangling by threads of muscle. I stumbled back as two skeletal arms grabbed me from behind. Their grip was cold, impossibly firm. I could smell the stench of decay clinging to my hair, seeping into my skin.

I screamed. The sound vanished into the night. More of them came, clawing and pulling, skeletal hands scraping at my coat, my legs, my face. Scratches burned across my skin; then something sharper drove deep into my back, the unmistakable stab of bone or blade. My knees gave way.

The world tilted. My breath came shallow and fast as the blood soaked through my clothes, running warm down my sides. The ground seemed to open beneath me, swallowing me whole. I reached out, searching for Reggie’s hand, but all I felt was cold dirt, tying me to the wrong kind of forever.