A man,
In the middle of the night,
Alone, he knows exactly what he is doing.
On his knees, before a stone,
Digging, bare handed,
Digging down, down to what he doesn't want to find.
It is raining, pouring,
Massive, bulging drops of water
Bleeding from a terrible wound in the clouds,
The man wails as the lightning flashes,
He howls with an unsettling laughter,
As the thunder claps,
All the while, pulling colossal heaps of muck
From the disturbed ground underneath him.
Behind him is a tree,
Hundreds, maybe thousands of years old,
A towering oak timber that was just a sapling
When Charlemagne first laid siege to Eastphalia,
A spreading veil of leaves between earth and sky,
A vast arboreal estate,
That has seen it's share of sorrow and grief and anguish,
And the terrors created by humans,
Absorbing it all,
Budding each spring,
Leaves saturated with fright and dread and affliction.
And the man continues digging.
He howls and he scrapes,
He wails and cries and gouges,
And the rain pours down,
While around the tree
Stands a crowd of onlookers.
A gathering of those best unseen,
Hundreds of bone-men,
With their ghastly expressions
A ghoulish light in each eye socket.
They look on at the man,
Murmuring and chuckling and chittering
At his dire condition,
Their bones clinking together
Making a horrid sound,
As though the tree was hung
With a thousand abhorrent wind chimes.
And the man still digs.
What is this? The man pauses,
Something is found in the mire,
His fingers scrabble across a hard surface,
He quickens his pace,
Flinging the dripping sod
Out of his gruesome excavation,
And reveals the wooden surface,
Of what you have probably guessed,
Is a coffin.
An unceremonious casket,
A simple pine box,
With a mysterious script
Inscribed on the top.
The man is now very close
To the end of his task.
Flinging open the lid,
He discovers it empty,
He knew this would be the case.
So he climbs inside,
Lays himself down,
And closes the lid,
Sealing himself inside,
With a curious feeling of satisfaction.
And the bone-men above
Take over the task,
Roaring with a hideous laughter,
Tossing the damp grime
Back into the horrifying breach in the earth.
And the man now knows,
He is right where he belongs.
