The bitterness had never left Oscar’s tongue, not for all those years gone by, innumerable in the pressing darkness. He had only recently forgotten what the world above him looked like, and before that he had relied on his fading memory, flipping through scenes in his mind like a tarnished album. Now even that was gone, and only a notion of a feeling remained with him, and it was so distilled as to be immovable in his heart – hate. Yes, he hated and that hate sustained him like the last dregs of water in a desert. Someone had buried him down here and had done a good job of it too – wet earth pressed like a vice over every inch of him and refused to shift.

It might have been another week, or another year for all he knew, before a sound made its way down to him. A thumping, and then a scraping, and then voices. Two voices. Bickering voices, one high and whining and the other deeper, like a large dog barking. The voices stirred something in Oscar, something old and hungry, and that

something urged his atrophied body to move. A twitch of a finger, a trembling eyelid, and toes began to curl and straighten. Each movement disturbed the soil around him, freeing him a little more until he could grab whole fistfuls of earth, tearing away at his crumbling prison. He could hear the voices more clearly now, and the mere

sound of them seemed to beckon him upward, scrambling like a wild animal through the dirt. His hands worked feverishly now, finding a root here and there to grab onto and haul himself onward to sounds above.

He broke through to the surface gasping and swallowing the cold night air, and clumps of bitter earth along with it. He wiped his eyes clean and winced as they adjusted to a harsh light resting near his head. It was a candle-lit lamp, flickering slightly in the wind and casting a warm light over his surroundings. There were a couple of spades resting against a battered wooden coffin, empty lockboxes strewn around them and stretched out next to them were some skeletal remains draped in rotting cloth. Oscar heaved himself out of the mud, frail arms trembling with the effort, his joints threatening to give out with each adjustment. Now that he was standing, he realised that he had emerged into someone else’s grave. He looked up past the jagged walls of the hastily dug pit and saw the moon. He basked in its pale light and felt some semblance of strength return to his body, small sparks whipping through his veins, stirring his senses.

The voices came filtering through to his ears once more, except now he could hear them as if they were stood next to him. They spoke a language he didn’t recognise, but he could tell that they were arguing about something. Oscar climbed out of the pit as deftly as he could as to not alert the strangers and began to stalk towards them. He passed rows of tombstones in various states of disrepair, adorned with names of people long since dead, and wondered why he had been buried without such ceremony. The thought left him as he neared the strangers, who he could now see sitting round a fire, passing a bottle between them and taking long swigs from it. The larger of the two of them had just brought the bottle to his mouth when he spotted Oscar emerging from the shadows. The bottle dropped from the large one’s now slack grip and thudded on the ground, tipping its contents out onto the grass. The smaller man shouted something at him and got up to have a go but stopped in his tracks as Oscar stepped forward into the light of their fire, hands raised in what he hoped was

a sign of peace.

The two men turned slowly to look at one another, then back to Oscar. The small one

cleared his throat and said something with a quizzical tone. A question, Oscar imagined, but not one that he could understand, let alone answer. He started to speak, not knowing what he was going to say, but it didn’t matter all that much because what came out were not words. A piercing, hissing scream poured out of him and filled the air, and the two men fell over themselves to get away. The small one was away before Oscar could even blink, and the large man was left alone. Oscar reached towards him but withdrew when he saw the man flinch away from his hand. The man turned from him, as if it was difficult to even look upon his face and in the

dying light of the fire Oscar saw it. The man’s neck was dirty and scarred but flushed with a brilliant red. Red blood that was coursing through him and dancing under his skin. Blood that was singing with each frantic beat of his heart, singing to Oscar, calling him.

He was upon the man so suddenly and without thought that it felt like falling. Falling through no fault of your own other than losing your balance for a moment. The bitter taste on his tongue was washed away by the sweet metallic nectar that now flowed through his teeth, over his wriggling tongue and down his gulping throat. He drank

greedily and without pause, and for the first time in a long while, he felt alive again.