Chapter 1118: Story 1118: Dead Man’s Lullaby
The graveyard behind Saint Gallow’s Church had always been quiet. Too quiet.
Jasper Crane, the gravedigger, often heard things beneath the soil—soft thuds, faint weeping, and, lately, sothing far worse:
Singing.
It happened at dusk, when the sun bled over crooked tombstones. A lullaby, old and broken, drifted up from the oldest graves. No birds answered. No breeze stirred. The earth itself humd.
He first heard it while burying a child nad Isadora. The mont her coffin touched the dirt, a voice rose from below—soft, male, off-key.
“Sleep, sleep, don’t wake the night…
The worms will hold you warm and tight…”
Jasper froze. His shovel slipped from his hands.
There was no one there.
From that night onward, the song returned each evening. So nights louder. Sotis joined by a faint humming chorus. Other gravediggers quit. The priest turned to drink. But Jasper… he stayed. He couldn’t explain why.
Until one evening, he followed the song.
It led him past the oldest headstones, down into a half-collapsed crypt sealed for over a century. Moss-covered angels wept along the entrance. The heavy stone door bore no na, just an engraving of a music note split in half.
He descended into the dark.
The lullaby grew louder, clearer—like a father singing to a child who would never wake.
In the deepest chamber, he found a coffin suspended by chains, swaying slightly. It was wrapped in faded sheets of music, each one charred around the edges.
The singing was coming from inside.
Jasper approached with the lantern.
“Who’s in there?” he asked.
The song stopped.
A mont of stillness.
Then, softly:
“A lullaby never truly ends,
Until the drear is made whole.”
Jasper stepped back. “You’re… dead.”
The voice chuckled. It sounded like rust peeling from an old gate.
“Am I? Or am I what remains… of every child left unburied, every song silenced too soon?”
Suddenly, the music sheets caught fire, one by one, without smoke, without heat—burning in reverse. Notes danced upward into the crypt walls, carved into stone with every bar.
The coffin opened.
Inside lay not a corpse, but a figure stitched from song—its mouth a treble clef, eyes hollow clefts, skin papery and marked with lyrics.
Jasper couldn’t move. The figure rose, one note at a ti, floating inches above the ground.
“I must sing again,” it said. “The dead forget themselves without song. I sing so they rember.”
“You kill with your lullaby,” Jasper whispered.
The figure tilted its head.
“Only those who refuse to sleep.”
Jasper opened the lantern.
The cold fla flickered violet—uncertain, afraid.
But then, a sound answered.
A child’s laugh.
Isadora.
Her voice joined the song, soft and pure.
The creature recoiled, fractured, and shattered into pages of music, fluttering down around Jasper’s boots.
By morning, the graveyard was silent again.
But sotis, when he stood near Isadora’s grave, he could hear her humming—
a lullaby just for him.
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