MidnightScreams

Full Story:

I'll begin with the truth: I never meant to steal from the dead.

It started with a hunger—not the kind you satisfy with food, but the kind that gnaws at your ribs and whispers to you in the dark. I had nothing. No family. No future. Only a name people spat at and a reputation that kept me out of decent company.

So when I heard about Black Vein—an old mining town left to rot after the last vein of ore ran dry—I saw an opportunity. There were stories, of course. That the miners had uncovered something they shouldn't have. That the entire place had been abandoned overnight. That bodies were left unburied, or worse, taken by the earth itself.

But I didn’t believe in ghosts.

I took my spade, my lantern, and my knife, and I went where no one else dared to tread.

The town was silent when I arrived. Not just empty—silent. No birds, no wind, not even the creak of wood settling. Just rows of crumbling buildings and a main street thick with dust. I passed the old general store, the saloon with its doors barely hanging on, and finally, the church.

The graveyard lay behind it, half-swallowed by creeping weeds. The markers were warped by time, some names worn down to nothing. But I wasn't looking for ordinary graves. I was looking for those that had been left untouched—the rich ones, the ones whose bones still clutched at gold rings and silver lockets.

I found one quickly. A marble headstone, still standing tall despite the years.

AMOS GRAYSON
1841 – 1889
MAY THE EARTH GRANT HIM PEACE

The dirt was loose beneath my boots.

I set my lantern down, wiped my hands, and started to dig.

The first strange thing happened when I was maybe three feet down. The ground beneath me… shifted. Not like collapsing dirt, but like something underneath was moving. Breathing.

I told myself it was nothing. Just loose soil. Just my nerves.

I kept digging.

By the time I hit wood, sweat slicked my skin despite the cold. I pried at the coffin lid, expecting rot, expecting bones.

Instead, I found nothing.

Empty.

Not even a scrap of fabric.

The inside of the coffin was lined with deep, twisting grooves—like claw marks. The wood was split in places, as if something had fought to get out.

A gust of wind blew through the cemetery, and for the first time that night, I felt truly watched.

And then I heard it.

A whisper—not words, not really. Just a low, rasping exhale from the hole I had dug.

I staggered back, my breath hitching. The wind stopped. The silence returned.

I should have left. I should have filled the grave and left.


But something in me needed to know.

I lifted my lantern, shining the light deeper into the pit, and then I saw it.

Not Amos Grayson. Not a skeleton.

A hole.

A tunnel.

A black maw carved deep beneath the grave, leading somewhere far below the town. The wood of the coffin had been torn away from inside, as if its occupant had crawled downward rather than up.

I don’t know why I did it.

Maybe I was curious. Maybe I was stupid. Maybe something wanted me to go in.

I climbed down.

The tunnel walls were damp, slick with something that smelled like wet decay. The air was thick, pressing against my skin like unseen hands. My lantern cast flickering light across the uneven walls, revealing symbols scratched into the stone—spirals, jagged lines, eyes without pupils.

And then I saw the bones.

Not just human. Animals. Rats. Birds. Some things I couldn't recognize. All of them scattered along the floor, some gnawed down to splinters.

I wanted to turn back. I should have. But then I saw the gold.

A heap of it, glinting faintly beneath my lantern’s glow—coins, rings, trinkets piled in the center of a hollowed-out chamber.


Riches. Enough to get me out of this life, out of the dirt.

I stepped forward.

And something moved in the darkness.

Not just a thing. Many things.

At first, I thought they were worms, writhing in the soil. Then I saw the limbs, thin and stretched, too many joints bending the wrong way.

Then the eyes.

Dozens of them, embedded in the tunnel walls, watching me.

The whispering returned—louder, closer. Repeating my breath. My heartbeat. My thoughts.

I turned to run, but the tunnel behind me was gone.

The dirt had closed in, leaving nothing but a wall of blackened earth.

I was trapped.


The things in the dark began to move toward me, their limbs unfolding like broken marionettes.

I screamed.

I don't know how long I ran. The tunnels twisted, stretched, the symbols on the walls pulsing like open wounds. My lantern flickered, then died.

And then I heard it.

A voice. Deep, rattling, and inside my skull.

"You took from us."

The air turned thick, pressing against my lungs. My knees buckled.

I felt something slither across my skin.

"Now, you will feed us."

The darkness swallowed me whole.

When I woke up, I was in the graveyard.

The lantern was cold in my hands. The grave I had dug was gone—no sign I had ever disturbed the earth.

But something was wrong.

My hands were filthy, caked in something darker than dirt. My fingernails were broken, my clothes tattered.

I felt empty.

Like something had been taken. Or something had been left inside me.

I stumbled out of Black Vein that night, never looking back.

But the hunger never left me.

Some nights, I hear them whispering beneath the floorboards.

Some nights, I find dirt under my nails, though I have no memory of digging.

And some nights—when the silence grows too deep—I wake up with a mouth full of soil.

And I know.

I never really left that tunnel.

And I never will.