In The Mud

“No— way. I am not going to spend my night in a place only reserved for the dead.”

“It’s not that bad! I’ve been there at night before. At most, it’s just a bit dirty.”

“Why would I want to stay the night somewhere dirty?”

“Also dark.”

“Okay… Why would I want to stay the night somewhere dark and dirty?”

“To be fair, you already sleep in darkness so—”

“Yeah well, whatever, I just don’t see the appeal in a sleepover with corpses.”

“It’s not about the appeal, it’s about the experience! Ya know… you can tell your kids and your kid’s kids about the night you spent in a graveyard. Live your life for once, Olivia. It’s in your freaking name!”

“Molly… is this really that important to you that we do this?”

“Yes, I wanna do something fun and exciting for once!”

“Ohh my-lanta, okay! You win! Are you happy now? Can you maybe take that excitement down a couple clicks?”

“Eee! Yay! You won’t regret it I promise. I can’t promise you’ll love it, but you certainly won’t regret it.”

I’ve seen Molly this happy before, but that was usually when she’s had a few shots or when she has a beer in hand. That was Molly, party girl extraordinaire. Exceptionally fun at parties and an incredible friend to have, one that has really got me through plenty of rough times. She just doesn’t know when to chill out for a moment and relax, preferably without the numbing haze of alcohol. We don’t have as much in common as one would think two best-friends should, but we simply just get each other.

I’m not one for partying much or drinking for the sake of getting drunk, I’m more the one to have a glass of wine for dinner or to sit down with one and read during a cozy night in. Don’t get me wrong, I still love her to death and I’ll be by her side no matter what is going down. Honestly, this is more on my side of stuff I like to do since we won’t be going to a party and alcohol won’t be involved. Just a lot of dead people buried only feet beneath us, in the dark, just the two of us. Why did I agree to this again? Oh right… love, and all that.

We still had a few hours to burn before the sunset and even more time before the actual night comes around, so we spent the time packing what we thought we might need. I like lists, so I thought I’d take a few minutes to create a list of stuff to grab, one list for her and one for myself. So while she was raiding my pantry for snacks and specifically noted ‘non-alcoholic drinks,’ I was gathering stuff like blankets, pillows, and some flashlights. Neither of us had a tent. I have no use for one, and she told me that it’s much more fun to do it in actual nature. I can guess what she meant by it, but I’m not trying to burn any pictures in my mind at the moment.

“Liv! It’s almost time, did you grab your stuff?”

“Everything but a tent, not that it matters. What about you? You find what we need?”

“Yup! Ready to set sail, Captain.” She quickly zips up the bag and slings it over her shoulders, skipping her way to the front door, “C’mon, let’s go!”

The graveyard in question would only be a few minutes from my apartment if we’re driving, but we’ve decided we were going to walk our way there. There’s still a bit of time until the scarlet shaded sun passes beyond the horizon, so the walk should put us there just as the stars in the dark sky really start to come out. I looked up at the sky to see a few stars already making their big debut, shouting for us to look at them. Why couldn’t we just be going to a nice grassy hill in the park to lay a blanket down and watch the stars glint and shine? Different ideas of fun, I suppose.

The walk wasn’t anything to write home about, just a casual stroll on the sidewalk with the occasional car speeding by in the dusky light. Finally, we come to the front gates of the cemetery, closed of course, but I’m sure Molly has a plan for that. I turn to her expecting her to do or say something, but she’s just standing there looking at the gate.

“Soo… what’s next, Miss Tour Guide?”

“We go into the cemetery.”

“Okay, and how might we go about doing that if it’s all chained and locked?”

“Who said anything about it being locked?” As she says that, she turns to me with a big grin on her face while holding up a key.

“What!? Where— How in the hell did you get that?”

“Swiped it. Last week during the daytime. Evidently, their security isn’t the best, especially when their policy is to leave spare keyrings hanging in an office all by their lonesome.” Even if I hadn’t seen the grin on her face, by now I can hear it in every word rolling off her tongue.

“Alright then, Miss Tour Guide, or would you prefer Miss Criminal?”

“Whichever one leads us to the most fun, preferably.” The playful lilt in her words bounced and skipped through the air as she unlocked the padlock. She unwrapped the chain from the gate and pushed it open just far enough for her to skip through it just as her words had done moments before. I can’t help my smile seeing her with such joy and energy. I come through the gate behind her and loosely wrap the chain around the bars on the gate, securing them together with the padlock. Click! We’re now officially locked in a graveyard at night. My bucket list couldn’t even see this one coming.

From what she said to me earlier, she’s been here before so I’m really just a faithful friend tagging along and following her lead. I’ve never been to this cemetery before. No reason to since none of my relatives are buried here, or not that I know of at least. 

This place is much bigger than I thought it was going to be, there are lots of winding pathways that bob and weave between trees and reconnect again to create a burial plot in the center. Even the ground doesn’t know what it wants to do. It’s just full of hills, with the ground jumping up on one side and sinking down on the other. That sounds a little dramatic for them actually being barely a hill, but when I’m here in the middle of it all it just seems more dramatic, I swear. We finally come to a spot that Molly chose which is a comfortable little area casually surrounded by grave markers and one massive tomb structure just a stone throw away. The tomb is an unsettling sight to look at, I don’t see why she picked this spot in particular.

“Uhh Molly… why did you choose here, of all places?”

“Dunno,” she says with a shrug like it’s nothing at all, “I just had a feeling about this spot. Sorta was calling to me, if that makes sense. Plus, I haven’t been around here before and this big building is just crazy cool!”

“Oh yeah, crazy cool,” I replied with hardly a hint of enthusiasm, “So what do we do now?”

“Settle in and settle down,” She pulls out a collapsible battery-powered lantern from her backpack and sets in on the ground near where our pile of blankets and pillows lie, and turns it on, illuminating a small area around us. Then handing me a flashlight and taking one for herself, she grabs my hand and pulls me up to my feet, “Let’s go take a look around!”

“What about the ‘settling down’ part?” I ask as she yanks me off into the gloom around us. Odd, it seems much darker now than it was just a couple minutes ago.

“Where’s the fun in that?”

I swear that girl can’t stop herself when she’s excited about something. She lets loose my hand and starts prancing from one grave to the next, putting one hand on a stone and dancing around it in a circle. “Molly! You shouldn’t be doing that!”

“Doing what? Having fun?”

“Didn’t you ever hear that it’s disrespectful to dance on somebody’s grave?”

“Awh, that’s just a bunch of superstitious blah, c’mon dance with me!” 

She grabs both my hands, dropping her flashlight and I nearly drop mine, but I manage to hold onto it tight enough. Her energy is contagious and I can’t find myself to be mad at her, and in a matter of seconds I give in to her prancing and skipping around like a lunatic. By now, we’re dancing back and forth with each other, spinning one another or improvising dance moves which both of us have only seen in movies. On a dance floor with loads of people around, we’d look like fools, but here under the dark shroud of night, we are boundless. No one to judge us, no one to bother us, just us together creating a memory that will last for the rest of our lives.

Suddenly I come out of the moment and notice that we’re stepping around in mud. I let go of her hands and stop for a moment to look down at my shoes and pants only to see that they’re covered in mud as if I’d jumped into a small pool of it. How long were we dancing in it, and where did it come from? It hasn’t rained for a week around here and there aren't any flowers that I can see that might need watering, especially with that much water. I look over to Molly who is still twirling around lost in herself.

“Wait, where did this mud come from?” I look around even more with my flashlight and notice that she doesn’t have hers, “Where’s your flashlight at, Molly?”

She snaps out of her supposed trance to reply, “It was just there on the ground…”

“Maybe it got turned off when you dropped it, help me look for it.” We spent a few minutes looking around the gravestones near us, as we know we didn’t move any farther away down the scattered rows of gravestones. Nothing to be found. I stop and glance around in the distance, turning every which way. “Where’s our camp?” Now my heart is knocking on my chest and feels like it wants to jump out of my throat.

“Relax, it’s over this way,” she says as she confidently points off to one direction, “I remember passing this little tree on our way here so it’s gotta be this way. The battery in the lantern must have died.” She begins to walk towards where she pointed and I catch up to walk by her side, aiming my flashlight at the ground in front of us. None of this looks familiar to me, but I trust Molly and so far her intuition hasn’t led her astray. As we wind in and around the gravestones, I make a conscious effort not to step directly on the graves. By now the grass has roughly cleaned the mud off my shoes so a bit of the white sole shines through.

“Are you sure it’s this way? I don’t remember walking this far—”

“Olivia, you seriously need to learn to relax and just trust me. I know where we are.”

“But—”

“No buts! Promise me now that you’ll let go and trust.”

“I promise.”

“Aha! There it is!” Before I had realized it, the lantern she had set down was now only twenty feet from us, fully lit. Were we that close to the tomb before?

We come up to our camp and immediately grab a spare shirt out of my bag and begin to wipe off more of the mud. Molly is rifling through her bag for a moment and turns to me with a smile stretching from ear to ear as she holds out a bottle of vodka, and not even the decent kind.

“Molly! Where did you get that? because I know I didn’t have a bottle of vodka just lying around.”

“I transported it from one place to another, and voila! Now it’s here!” She replies, still brandishing a world record smile. 

“Well, wherever it came from I don’t want t—” 

CRR-AACK! BOOM!

Molly screamed as a thunderous crash echoed through the sky, shaking the ground around us as the boom reverberates in our chests. Quickly followed by another flash of lightning flooding the sky with its sudden piercing light, and another shattering BOOM echoes once more. That’s when the rain came, abruptly, and like a tsunami. Coming down heavily in this gloom I can hardly see a thing now. We hurry and pack up everything we can, as quickly as I can, and I put my bag over my shoulders while bending down to pick up the lantern. At the same moment I hold it up in front of me, the light flickers several times before going out. Evidently not waterproof. I toss it to the ground and reach for the flashlight I had set down as we came back, but nothing is working. I bang the light against my hand several times and the light flickers briefly on and off, teasing me with hope.

I turn to Molly, barely able to see her, and yell, “The lights are dead!” Hoping she heard me over the roaring sound of the rain.

“Follow me!” She waves her hand and leads us off away from the towering structure before us. The ground is now turning into the same thick mud we found earlier, sloshing and groping at our shoes as we trudge through it. I can’t see any pathways now, only the slight variations in the ground and the gaps between graves. We plodded our way through for what felt like several minutes, watching the ground as I went, making sure to keep my footing, and suddenly I walked square into her back. Startled, I look up and see what stopped her. Our lantern is lit not even ten feet from us. Next to it sits the tomb, decrepit and forbidding, with the light accenting every edge and corner.

I run past her, brushing her shoulder as I do, and straight to the lantern. From behind me, I hear her call out ‘Liv, don’t!’ but it was too late. I reached the lantern and picked it up, and just like before, it flickered several times before going out for good.

“Shit!” I throw it down, slamming it in the mud which ends up covering it almost entirely. That’s when I notice the mud is now above my ankles. Molly sprints over to me as best as she can, grabs my hand without saying a word, and drags me off in another direction. We both broke out into an awkward run, splashing through the mud with every pounding foot. My heart is running faster than my legs now as the panic truly sets in. Finally, after dodging around and between trees, bushes, and graves we slam into a wooden fence-wall towering over us. There’s no way we’re going to climb that. 

I turn around, hoping to maybe see something, something that might help clear my mind and let me think straight, but as I do… It’s there, looming in the dark only several feet from us, the tomb with the lantern light shining brightly against it. This time the lantern is at the threshold of the entrance, propped up without even a drop of mud on it. I felt the blood rush from my face. Run… Paralyzed, my legs numb, not wanting to move. Run… I snap my gaze to my right to see her sprinting away down the fence line. Run! My legs come to and I hurry after her, running faster than I thought was ever possible. “Molly!” I scream, praying that she hears me and looks back to see that I’m not with her. I scream her name again, and again. No answer. I can’t see her anymore ahead of me.

Despite my body screaming back at me to stop, screaming to just give up and sit down to rest, I keep pushing harder. 

Olivia! I heard her yell my name, but I couldn’t tell from where. Liv! She’s behind me? I turn about on my feet and rush back along the fence until I see her jumping and waving for me, “I’m over here! Hurry!— I need the key!”

“I don’t have it!” I shout back.

She grabs me and turns me around to open a zipper on my bag, drawing the key from it. When did she put that there? She fumbles with the lock a few tries before finally unlocking the padlock and yanking the chain to one side freeing up the large wrought iron gate. We both jerk the gate open and hurry through the heavy doors out to the street, and I pull it closed behind us binding the gate together with the chain and securing it shut once more.

“Liv…” Her voice was cold, “Olivia…” 

I turned slowly to her expecting to see the street with its lights lining the sidewalk, yet there’s nothing but the dark and the rain covering us like a veil. We’re still in the cemetery, surrounded by the frigid stone grave markers, the mud climbing up ever higher. Turning about every which way looking for the gate we just came through only to find there’s nothing left, and right in front of us, we see it, looming over us ominously like a nightmare before us… 

It’s there.