Derek Marshall woke up in the coffin.
It was not with the sharp gasp of a person who’d survived a nightmare. It was not with the abrupt shock of a body rushing to life after the void. He woke with an eerie calm, his mind slowly sifting through the murky remnants of sleep, coming to rest on the truth far too late: he had died.
He was supposed to be dead.
The air was thick and heavy around him, like breathing in thick velvet. His arms were pressed too tightly to his sides, his legs stiff and bound by the narrow confines of the box. The space was too small. Too dark.
Derek reached up, his fingers scraping over something rough—wood.
He stopped. He should have known. The thought rose in his mind with clarity. He wasn’t supposed to be able to feel anything. He should have been cold, numb, lifeless.
But his chest was tight, his heart drumming in his ribs as though it still had a right to beat.
His thoughts were frantic, scurrying like rats trapped in a corner. He had been at the hospital. He had heard the beeping slow down. He had seen the way the doctors spoke over him, their faces drawn and pitying. He had heard them whisper about his time of death as though it was already decided. No struggle. No fight.
But here he was. Here he still was.
And then—the scratches.
Derek’s fingers twitched against the wooden lid again, feeling the deep grooves, the way they seemed to claw in desperation. Some were shallow and jagged, others long and deliberate, as though someone had been trying to break out—or, perhaps worse, waiting to break out. The thought made his blood run cold.
His hand traced the grooves, fingers brushing against the letters carved into the wood, slowly spelling out the truth of the space he was trapped in.
“NOT ALONE.”
The words—those words—settled into Derek’s mind like poison, slow and insidious. The silence in the coffin deepened, pressing on him from all sides. But it wasn’t the darkness that made his pulse race. It was the unsettling, impossible thought that there had been others. Others who had scratched, clawed, and begged for their freedom—and never had it.
But the thought didn’t stop there.
How many?
How many had died too soon, like him? How many had woken up in the suffocating dark, too late to escape the earth that covered them? How many had reached out, trying to grasp at air, at life, before they suffocated in their own panic?
And then—something shifted.
Not in the air. Not in the dirt.
But inside the coffin.
Derek’s breath hitched. His chest constricted. It was as if the wood around him had become… alive. There was a pressure, a weight that grew heavier with every breath he took. And then, from the suffocating darkness, a voice—low and cold, not from the lid or the walls, but from deep inside the earth itself.
“You shouldn’t have woken up.”
Derek’s blood ran cold. It was the kind of voice that made the air feel wrong. A presence that seemed to reach past the world of the living. And then, another thought crept into his mind—sliding past his terror like oil over water:
There were others here. Not just the dead. Something else. Something that wanted him to stay buried.
How long had he been down here?
Derek didn’t know. Days? Hours? Time didn’t make sense in the earth, in the suffocating weight of his own grave. How could it? How could anything make sense when death was a whisper in your ear, and the cold fingers of the soil were the last thing you’d ever feel?
He tried to scream.
His throat burned. The sound was muffled—swallowed—by the suffocating dirt above him. The ground was so thick, so alive with pressure. The suffocating silence seemed to mock him, the weight of the earth pressing harder, pulling him further into the dark.
And then, a sound.
A scrape.
Not from the outside. Not from the dirt above him.
But from beneath.
A soft scratching. A dragging of something—someone—moving closer.
The earth above shifted slightly, and Derek’s pulse thudded in his ears. Was it coming for him? Was it something in the earth?
He couldn’t breathe fast enough.
And then, with the cold clarity of someone who has faced their death already, the voice whispered again, closer this time, as if it had always been near, waiting for him to hear:
“He’s asking for you.”
Derek froze.
He’s asking for you.
The voice wasn’t just a whisper now. It had substance. Like it had always been there, like it had always been a part of the earth. It had roots. It had hands.
He tried to understand, tried to force sense from the madness curling around his mind. Who?
And then he heard it—beneath the suffocating soil, beneath the layers of earth—something soft, but unmistakable: the sound of chains dragging over stone.
“He collects us.” The voice continued, smooth like oil, thick and gnarled, like the roots of an old tree breaking through the soil. “He finds the ones who woke too soon. He has need of them.”
The chains rattled.
Need of them.
Derek’s stomach turned, his body trembling in panic. This wasn’t just a grave. It wasn’t just death. It was a place, a space, an abode for something ancient and terrible. A being that didn’t belong in the realm of the living or the dead—a being that watched over those who were buried too soon, who had been overlooked by death.
He had been forgotten.
But not for long.
In that moment, Derek realized what the voice had meant: There were others. But they were not alive. Not really. The dead, the forgotten, the ones who had slipped through death’s fingers, had become something else entirely. They were not just buried.
They were collected.
By the one who had always watched. The one who had always waited.
The chains rattled again, louder this time, as if something—someone—was reaching through the soil.
And then the lid of the coffin cracked open.
Derek’s breath came too quickly. His chest ached.
The chains were close now.
He could hear them.
And, deep in the dark, he could feel the touch of something—cold and alive—grabbing at his feet.
It was time to be claimed.
