Abel stepped into the dark churchyard. The ticking came to him in waves now, sometimes deafening while others fainter. His eyes adjusted to the darkness, but he needed to get his supplies from the shed. Luckily, he’d left it unlocked after the ceremony this afternoon. The rain howled, and he cringed as lightning walloped through the sky. For a flashing moment, the quaint chapel with its long crucifix steeple became a ghastly place where unseen things lurked behind the narrow, black windows, watching him from inside. He gulped and took a step back. Slowly turned toward the mortuary. In the gloom, it turned into a nightmare, a haunted building whose fridges stored the bodies of dead angels, their throats crudely slit, bloody crucifixes rammed into their eyes, entrails hanging from hacked-up guts, and wings mangled by an inexplicable evil that at this very moment sat waiting for Abel in the darkness of the embalming room.
Abel shook his head, turned around, and stared at the exit. The light from the street lamp glimmered in the rain that fell onto Old Graves Road. The road that meandered down through the forest, into Sparrow’s Labyrinth, and out over the hills to places Abel had heard of but never been. He took three small steps toward the exit at the end of the short driveway and then stopped. With his head lowered and shoulders slumped, he turned away from the road and took a deep, unsteady breath. Slowly, he raised his head and faced the graveyard. Rain and tears streamed down his haggard face. He couldn’t see it in the darkness but knew what he sought was there. He heard the wind blowing between the graves, picking up each one’s story and whispering it into his ear. A blinding flash of lightning ripped through the sky like a skeleton’s hand. Abel cowered back but saw the hundreds of tombstones, white and jagged against a black sky. He saw the grave at the top of the hill, and a cold chill passed through him as if someone had just walked over his own freshly dug grave. He took a deep but shaky breath and walked to the shed behind the chapel, making sure not to look at the long, black windows staring down at him.