Chapter 1: The Second Heartbeat
The dark did not feel like empty space; it felt like a physical weight, thick and freezing, pressing down against her eyelids before she even tried to open them.
Julie tried to draw a breath, but her chest collided with raw, splintered pine. The air tasted of copper, damp soil, and the unmistakable rot of old oak. Panic hit her not like a wave, but like a physical blow to the stomach. Her fingers clawed upward in the absolute black, scraping instantly against coarse, abrasive wood.
No. No, no, no.
She was buried.
She remembered the hospital room, the blinding white lights, the nurses whispering, the cold paralysis creeping up her limbs until her heart simply refused to beat. They had declared her dead. They had signed the papers, closed her eyes, and nailed the lid shut.
With a whimper that tore straight out of her raw throat, Julie slammed her palms against the roof of her prison. Bang. Bang. The sound was dull, muffled, swallowed instantly by the crushing tons of earth above her.
"Help me!" she screamed, though the air in her lungs vanished almost as fast as she expelled it. "Please! Is someone there? Please!"
She curled her fingers into claws and began to tear at the wood, weeping, her fingernails snapping one by one against the grain until blood warmed her fingertips. Every breath she took shrank the world a fraction more, oxygen turning to poison, her own heartbeat hammering frantically in her ears: thump-thump, thump-thump, thump-thump.
And then, through the ringing panic and her own ragged sobs, she heard it.
It wasn't the sound of earth shifting overhead. It wasn't the distant rumble of traffic or the rain above the cemetery.
It was right beside her ear.
A heavy, wet, methodical scratching sound against the inside of the pine board.
Julie froze, her breath catching in her throat. The sound was too rhythmic, too deliberate to be a rat or settling dirt. It was coming from the far corner of the casket, inches from her face.
Scratch. Scratch. Pause.
Then, a second sound joined it—a low, rattling exhalation that did not belong to her. Something else was sharing the narrow box with her in the dark. And as the scratching grew faster, heavier, and closer, Julie realized the horrifying truth:
Whatever was in the coffin with her wasn't trying to dig its way out.
It was digging its way in.
