As I was in need of some excuse to procrastinate today, I've tried to write something for the first prompt:
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A loud bang echoed through the nave of the empty church as John closed a heavy wooden door behind him. Though he had been here many times before, both during the day and at night, he still let out an involuntary shudder at the sense of gravity that was exuded by the ancient building, with its slender, skeletal pillars that vanished high up in the distant shadows beneath its arched roof. Light from the crescent moon outside filtered through the many stained-glass windows, and turned the altars, and the empty pews, into a kaleidoscopic still life of divine providence and protection. John couldn’t help but shake the feeling that a coldness lay hidden beneath the dazzling lights, and he wrinkled his brow as clouds passed in front of the silver moon, casting shadows over the stern faces of glass saints and fire-painted virgins. A lesser man would have found it a bad omen.
John had often found that cynicism was an ideal mechanism to cope with the demands of his job, as it was for many in his line of work. Whereas he started working with the full conviction that the light of God, and all of his saints, shone brightly still upon the Earth, and that the tenets of his religion were infallible; after thirty years, his only surety was that darker beings lurked within the shadows, unhindred. John was called here to stop them.
Turning his back to the darkened face of Saint Peter, John quietly opened the trapdoor that led to the church’s crypt. The bishop had spoken of strange noises and otherworldly lights that kept the nearby villagers up at night, but nothing yet stirred within the crypt’s darkness. Producing a small flashlight from his coat pocket, John decided to climb down the mouldy wooden ladder, to investigate further.
A familiar shortness of breath gripped John’s lungs as he inhaled the musty, stale crypt air. A faint smell of rot and decay entered his nostrils. Of all the places he frequented in his line of work, John hated crypts the most. While most people would feel uneasy at the thought of being surrounded by the decaying remains of other human beings, John most of all hated the feeling of being buried alive; sealed away in a tomb beneath tons of dirt and stone, with only the moonlight shining through a narrow trapdoor to guide him back out. John would almost prefer to visit Hell itself, and he had material for comparison.
Unfortunately for him, the dead were almost never buried in the sunlit, cosy places of the world, and the dead (or at least those who were supposed to be dead) were what drew him here this evening. A soft scratching noise could be heard in a distant corner of the crypt, almost inaudible were it not for the chamber’s oppressive silence. Though John figured it was caused by a rat, feasting on the remains of the recently buried, he shone his flashlight in the sound’s general direction to be sure. The narrow beam of light was absorbed by the dark marble and granite slabs on the cobwebbed burial vaults, as it grazed nearly vanished inscriptions and withered flowers.
The scratching had stopped by the time John’s flashlight rested on the furthest tomb, though a hollow chattering, as of bones rumbling against each other, now sounded behind him. John’s intuition, however, drew him towards the marble slab which now brightly shone with reflected lamplight. With every step John took towards the tomb, the rattling around him grew louder. A frightened rat ran away when John placed a gloved hand upon the marble slab, and stroked its smoothed inscription, barely legible under decades of cobwebs and disrepair:
“(…) Island, Island of tropic diseases. Always the hurricanes (...)”
The words involuntary echoed in John’s mind, and as they did, he could swear that a small light, as of a candle’s flame, started to flicker above him. Though the rat had long ran away, he could still hear chattering and rattling behind him, now almost taking on a rhythmic beat. A memory popped into John’s head of a job he took years ago, where he met his first voodoo priest. The remaining inscription in front of him was blurred and as good as illegible. John found that his lips strained along with his eyes to form coherent sentences, but all they produced were incoherent patches of text.
“Money owing.”
“Babies crying.”
“Bullets flying.”
With every word that formed on his lips, he felt the crypt grew brighter, and faint music started to emanate from the burial vaults surrounding him. Yet his eyes remained firmly fixed upon the marble slab, drawn in by some force that John could neither name nor explain. Unblinking, his eyes scanned the smudged writing in front of him, desperate to find some cohesion, some explanation of what was happening to him.
Then, suddenly, as his eyes neared the end of the slab, and with the utmost straining of his mind, John finally managed to break free of the inscription’s pull, and turned his head back towards the sliver of moonlight that shone through the opened trapdoor behind him.
The crypt was as silent and dark as it was when he entered it. Not even the scurrying of rats could be heard anymore. The silence felt numbing. John had half a mind of climbing back up to the cavernous church above, of reporting back to the townspeople that nothing was amiss in their fair town, apart from the matter of compensation for his work; but his promise to the bishop, and his professional pride, kept him from doing so. Besides, how often had he himself not ridiculed colleagues that ran away from their job, tails between their legs? No, he was staying right there.
“Smoke on your pipe and put that in!”
The words slipped from his mouth without a second thought, but the moment that John spoke them, the crypt erupted into a swirling maelstrom of light and sound. Multi-coloured, blinding flares erupted across the stone ceiling, drowning out the pale moonlight from the church above. The floor trembled as burial vaults sprang open, ancient stone breaking on the packed earthen floor, dark voids amidst the sea of granite and marble, with darkness appearing to leak from them. The rattling of bones grew louder, rhythmic thumps echoed throughout the cobweb tombs. Then, without prompt, but as of one mind, countless voices – hoarse and groaning, creaking or lamenting – erupted from the coffins around John in a deafening cacophony of sound:
“I like to be in America!
O.K. by me in America!
Ev’rything free in America!
For a small fee in Americaaaaa!”
“Bloody undead immigrants”, was the only thing that John could bring himself to say.