Voices |E. Cullen|

ONE

"I don't know about this," I said as I crunched the leaves beneath my feet when sneaking through the iron gates of the old cemetery. 

"Stop being such a baby," my friend Lucy whined as she dragged me along through each of the gravestones and toward a massive mausoleum in which we were going to spend the night. "Nothing is going to happen, people disappear when they die, it's just the aesthetics of it. 

"But what if we get caught by the police or something?" I was never someone to break the rules, I didn't like to steal or sneak out like everyone else, I was too afraid of getting caught more than I was knowledgable about the wrongness of the action. 

"We won't, you're such a scaredy-cat, just shut up already and unroll the sleeping bag," she was unrolling her own and setting her pillow up right behind the cement casket, it was disturbing she wanted to be so close to death. 

"Fine, but if I get in trouble it is 100% your fault," I sighed and unrolled mine with several feet between myself and the body buried in the building. I was tired, I didn't want to stay awake for several more hours after we had already hiked three miles just to get to this stupid place. 

"Let's see how long we can stay up before we fall asleep," Lucy was energetic as all hell, she had eaten fistfuls of M&M's on our way to the cemetery. 

I sighed, "Well what do you want to do?" 

"Hmm, well for starters you could tell me about your brother!" She gushed, Jesus Christ not this again. Every girl in my grade wanted to know about my older brother because they all thought he was the hottest thing alive. It was so annoying, for Pete's sake he was a senior in college and we were all juniors in high school. What is he going to do? Bang a 17-year-old? No, the answer is most definitely not.

"Lucy, for real? Why is this the only thing you ever want to talk about?" 

"Your brother is the hottest guy in school! Come on! Please!" 

I rolled my eyes and was immediately over the night. My watch was the only thing I paid attention to because I was watching the hours tick by. "He's twenty-two, first of all. Secondly, he's my brother, I can't describe him in the way you want me to, it would be disturbing for me to even think about him that way. 

"Okay, okay, fair enough. Tell me about Parker then," which earned another sigh from myself. 

"Everyone thinks that we have a thing when we definitely do not. The last time I talked to him was about my science paper because I was confused on how to write it, that's it."

"You can be so boring sometimes, you know," and with that Lucy rolled over away from me and went silent. 

Whatever, pleasing her was not my top priority. I rolled on my back and stared up at the dark ceiling as I waited to become tired enough to fall asleep. I could hear my watch ticking loudly as my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I couldn't see anything but outlines. My eyes closed shut and then opened from time to time, the crickets became louder and then it was a competition between which stimulation was more prevalent; the watch or the crickets. 

The cement felt cold under my back but I didn't have enough space in my bag to carry another blanket with me. I didn't even have enough space for my snacks which my stomach was desperately crying out for at that moment. I tried to think of my favorite song and play it in my head, Dancing in the Dark by Bruce Springsteen, none of that Madona that everyone loved so much. I couldn't get into it, not even at football games when it would play over the loudspeakers during halftime. 

Footsteps were loud at the front of the mausoleum, my heart quickened and I tried to lay very still so that they would leave before finding us. My breathing was as silent as I could make it but I could not control how fast it was becoming. Closer, closer, closer. I shut my eyes tight and just prayed that they would go away, Lucy was asleep and I was alone in this matter. Suddenly, they stopped. After a few seconds, I opened my eyes and looked around, then I screamed. 

"They took my eyes out! They cut my throat!" A woman with a bloody chest and two holes for eyes stood over me screaming and crying. 

Another man popped out from the side which caused me to scream again, "They shot me in the face!"

"This isn't real! This has to be a nightmare!" I shook as I pulled my chin to my knees and curled into a ball. 

More people appeared, screaming and crying and moaning about how they were murdered. "My daughter! They killed my daughter and then drowned me!" "He hung me!" "She ran me over with our truck!"

"Please stop! Stop! Stop!" I felt like I was going to have some sort of heart attack, maybe I was already dead. 

Lucy was startled awake by my screaming, "What the fuck, Julia, shut up!"

"Don't you see them?!" I was crying, hot tears streamed down my cheeks. 

"See what? Who?" She looked around as if she didn't see all these people screaming at me. 

"The people! The dead people!" I rocked back and forth and grasped the back of my head. 

"Julia, you're fucking crazy. Are you tripping right now? What did you take?" She didn't believe me, she didn't see them.

"I didn't take anything!" I screamed, "Make them stop! Make them go away!"

"I'm leaving, you're insane," she got up, grabbed her stuff in a hot second and then walked out of the building leaving me in the grasp of the people who were angry with me, angry with the world, angry with their murderers. 

I rocked myself back and forth after backing into a corner and cried until there weren't tears to cry anymore.