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The rusted hinges of the iron cemetery gate screamed out like a bird of prey in the night as Bradley Beauregard pushed the gate open. He made it wide enough for his girlfriend, Carly, and himself to slide through. From somewhere off in the distance, the eerie baying of a dog rose up and was carried away on the wind like an omen of something dreadful to come. The howling was like that of some diabolical beast, tormented and soulless, that was doomed for all eternity to roam the earth on death-cold nights such as this one.
“Hurry up, Carly,” Bradley barked with impatience in his voice. “It’s going to be midnight in less than twenty minutes. Must you always be so slow?”
“I’m coming,” Carly answered as she squeezed through the crack of the gate and stepped inside the desolate cemetery. She pulled up her jacket collar to shield the bite of a chilling December gust. Apprehension tied a dark knot inside her stomach as snow flurries danced and swirled, ghost-like, in the air. The tiny frozen flakes landed upon her nose and cheeks, and immediately melted.
“I really don’t like the idea of this, Bradley,” Carly stated, nervously looking left to right. “I really think we ought to turn around and head back before someone catches us in here. I think it’s against the law to wander around in a graveyard after sundown and I’m afraid of getting into trouble. My parents would kill me if I got busted – especially on Christmas Eve.”
“Stop being such a coward,” Bradley taunted. He rubbed the palms of his hands together in an effort to warm them. “I think what you’re really afraid of is the legend.”
“What?” Carly replied with a bit of a snicker. “The legend of mausoleum thirteen? Don’t be ridiculous! I don’t believe in that silly old wives’ tale. That was made up a long time ago by a bunch of superstitious fools.”
“You don’t believe that if you knock thirteen times on the mausoleum’s doors at midnight on Christmas Eve, the specter of death will answer?” Bradley inquired, cocking his head to one side.
“Of course not,” Carly answered, rolling her eyes. “It’s nothing but a load of bull. And I also don’t believe the rest of the legend that he’ll whisper in your ear the name of the next person destined to lie in the graveyard.”
“You don’t?” Bradley asked with a smirk on his face. “Well, I guess tonight you and I will find out if that legend is true or not. That is, unless you’re scared, little girl.” He then began making clucking sounds and moving his arms to imitate the flapping of wings.
“I’m not scared,” Carly retorted. She then placed her hands upon her hips and a look of aggravation came over her face. “And must you always act so pathetically immature? I swear, Bradley, sometimes you act more like you’re eight years old instead of eighteen.”
The two teenagers trekked through the old cemetery past macabre statues of weeping angels, and white bronze obelisks. Row upon row of crooked and weathered gravestones marked the burial spots of long-forgotten faces and names from centuries past. Another chilly blast of wind nipped at their faces, flushing their cheeks. The bright ribbons of a Christmas wreath hanging on a dead child’s tombstone fluttered in the wind like red flags.
A small gothic-styled building of gray stone with double doors of Art Nouveau ironwork came into view. It bore no family name, as did other mausoleums; only the number thirteen, engraved into a curved stone block above its arched entrance. Built sometime back in the late nineteenth century, the structure had become a local mystery and the subject of strange legends. Nobody in town, not even the oldest residents, knew for sure who had built the mausoleum, or whose bodies were entombed within its walls. Some people believed it was haunted, while some claimed it housed the body of a high priest who led a devil-worshipping cult.
Bradley looked down at his wristwatch. It was now ten minutes before the hour of midnight and a light snow was beginning to fall, turning the bare branches of the trees and the tops of the tombstones ghostly-white.
“It’s almost time,” he said as he climbed up the four stone steps leading to the front of the mausoleum. “I hope you aren’t going to chicken out on me.”
Carly reluctantly joined her boyfriend, continuously looking over her shoulders to ensure that no one was following them. “This is absolutely ridiculous,” she stated. “And I’m freezing to death on top of everything!”
“Shhh,” Bradley held his pointed index finger in front of his mouth and nose. He whispered, “I think I hear footsteps.”
Carly’s face went pale and she quickly turned around to see if anyone was coming. She appeared to be ready to make a run for it
“Oh, never mind,” Bradley teased with a stupid grin on his face. “Must have just been one of those headless ghosts wandering around looking for its lost head.” He added a moaning ghost sound.
“You asshole,” Carly muttered, sounding clearly unamused. She shook her head in mock disgust at her boyfriend. She found his childish antics to be most annoying; yet, at the same time, she was enamored by his boyish charms, which she found irresistible.
Bradley let out one of his “deranged mad scientist laughs” as Carly liked to call them. Teasing his girlfriend was a favorite pastime for him. He again gazed down at his wristwatch and announced that it would be midnight in less than one minute. He began counting down the seconds, and at the stroke of twelve, as a church bell echoed in the distance to signal the start of Midnight Mass, he pounded thirteen times upon the iron door with his fist.
“Hey! Mister Death!” he called out. “You in there? We want to know, who’s going to be the next one pushing up daisies in this graveyard of yours? Come on and tell us. We’re waiting.”
Carly sighed and rolled her eyes. She felt ridiculous being a party to this nonsense and was more than anxious for this ordeal to reach its conclusion so she could return to the comfort of her parent’s house, warm her hands by the fireplace, and enjoy a nice cup of eggnog. She loved spending time with Bradley, but she was now regretting accompanying him to the cemetery. What a crappy way to spend a Christmas Eve, she thought.
And then a strange voice that possessed an unearthly quality to it whispered from within the darkness beyond the mausoleum doors, “Bradley Beauregard is next.”
A chill colder than the wind in the graveyard swept through Carly’s body; she felt the blood in her veins suddenly turn to ice. With her eyes bugging out in disbelief, she turned to look at her boyfriend, whose face was cloaked by a look of shock. And then, much to her horror, the iron doors of mausoleum thirteen began to creak and squeak and slowly open right before her.
Terror surged through Carly’s body like a burning electrical charge and she let out a blood-curdling scream. Without hesitation, she turned and took off running pell-mell like the proverbial bat out of hell. Within a matter of seconds she was out of sight, leaving behind only a trail of footprints in the thin dusting of freshly fallen snow that clung to the ground.
The mausoleum doors opened wide, revealing Bradley’s best friend and fellow practical joker, Fletcher. The two young men looked at each other and then burst into uncontrollable laughter.
“You should have seen the look on Carly’s face before she screamed loud enough to wake the dead!” laughed Bradley with tears streaming down his cheeks. “I thought her baby blues were going to pop right out of her pretty little head when she heard you whisper my name! Oh man, that was too funny! But, Fletch, you were supposed to have said her name, not mine.”
Fletcher stopped laughing and a serious look came over his face. “That wasn’t me, Brad,” he explained. “I thought you were the one who whispered it.”
Bradley smiled. “Yeah, right. You can’t bullshit a bullshitter, dude. Like I don’t know it was you. We’ve only had this joke planned out for like what... the last two months?”
“But I swear it, bro,” Fletcher insisted. “It wasn’t me. And if it wasn’t you, then I don’t know who the hell it was.”
Bradley was beginning to feel annoyance with his buddy’s insistence that he wasn’t the ghostly whisperer when he knew for a fact that he was. He stepped inside the mausoleum and walked past Fletcher, who stood, looking dumbfounded. With his hand on his forehead like a visor and a sardonic expression on his face, Bradley roamed around in the small space, pretending to search for a third person.
“You know what, Fletch?” he said sarcastically, “I’ve looked high and low and I don’t see anyone else inside this stiff house besides you and me. Unless it’s the Invisible Man.”
The sudden sound of stone grinding against stone echoed within the walls of the mausoleum and Bradley and Fletcher turned their heads in the direction from which it came. All at once, the heavy lid of the burial chamber located at the rear of the mausoleum beneath a small stained-glass window slid open. And then, like a bad dream, it appeared.
Hideous. Vile. Reeking of absolute evil. It was a thing of inhuman form and unearthly origin; nightmarish in its appearance and ravenous after its long sleep in the blackness of the crypt. Its yellowish, snakelike eyes fixed themselves upon Bradley’s, and then the thin, blackened lips of its vertical gash of mouth pulled apart to reveal the horrific rows of glistening, tapering fangs that protruded from the upper and lower sections of its great oral cavity. They resembled grotesque stalactites and stalagmites inside a cave dripping with foul and venomous slime.
Stunned by disbelief and too horrified to speak, Bradley and Fletcher stared at the beast, unable to take their eyes off of it. They watched as it rose up higher from the crypt, darkening them with its shadow as the top of its octopus-like head nearly touched the ceiling of the mausoleum. And then, without warning, it lashed out a long tentacle with talon-like claws on the end that hooked deeply into the flesh of Bradley’s throat, causing blood to shoot out through his mouth and nose. Within a split second, the creature reeled in its convulsing human prey and returned to the darkness of the crypt to feast upon its long-awaited meal. Its victim’s screams echoed through the stone structure but were soon muted by the heavy lid that slid back into place, resealing itself.
Fletcher let out a blood-curdling cry of terror and ran from the mausoleum in a cold sweat as the ghostly voice whispered his name on the cold wind, over and over and over. He tripped on the four stone steps and landed face down in a pile of lifeless leaves that were the color of dried blood.
When the bright sun of Christmas morning burned away the gloomy shadows of the night before and the baying of the distant hound was replaced by the sound of wintry stillness, the gray-haired caretaker arrived for work right on time. While making his rounds through the snow-shrouded cemetery, he discovered Fletcher wandering aimlessly around mausoleum thirteen, babbling to himself incoherently.
His eyes were hollows of madness.