Grave of the Damned

A soft mist tangled through the trees past the haunting of midnight, as the wind rustled a few dead leaves still clinging to the branches. One crooked gravestone leaned under the shifting moonlight, its crumbling edges and rough surface slowly losing the fight against time and the elements. The winter-tinged breeze swirled the detritus on the ground in crinkles and crunches as if someone was walking across the grave, bent on disturbing the mouldering remains of one Jebediah Osbourne.
A rich man in life, the last of an ancient family, Jebediah embraced the esoteric and eccentric, shunning polite society. In death, society had abandoned him to a dark eternity alone in the woods, buried and forgotten.
Well, perhaps not entirely forgotten.
The box appeared with the full moon, on that October 31st in 1913, summoned by the rumblings of a war beginning across the ocean. The faint drum of a heartbeat reverberated from inside, inexplicably echoed by the corpse interred below the earth.
Thump, thump. Thump, thump.
A pulse vibrating along the earth, sinking its rhythm into the soil and intoning through the trees until they trembled with the cadence. Sensing the unnatural disturbance, an owl screeched in the distance, The forest screamed in response as the dirt quaked and shifted, as streams of blood poured from the deep bowels of nightmares.
Thump, thump. Thump, thump.
And then a click.
The box opened. Not with a shriek or a howl. With a soft, lingering chuckle.
And the hand of dead Jebediah Osbourne broke free of its grave, reaching for the night sky.

~ A. F. Stewart