New Year - Rave at the Grave

Rave at the Grave by Peri Lainchbury (c)

"Come one, come all. After midnight falls. Come and be brave to New Year's Day Rave at the Grave - details below"

(1)

No-one ever visited the small graveyard, hidden at the back of the park, with the decommissioned church. Most people had forgotten it was there. With its grisly history and scary tombs, it had high walls surrounding it and only one entrance. The gate was stuck open, swollen wood, overgrown with climbing ivy.

It was the perfect spot, the organisers of the rave had decided, forgotten, hidden and suitably creepy. The idea of the first party of the New Year in such a location would appeal to the young, to the wild and to the weird. It was sure to be a sell out.

(2)

The music pumped and boomed. The light was subdued and eerie, the beer from the giant keg flowed and the bodies moved and moved. A mass of humanity gyrating and swirling amongst the gravestones and tombs. Others joined the throng. Silent and unnoticed. They mixed and mingled and started to dance and intertwine with all the bodies. They hadn't paid the entrance fee, had no interest in the beer and no-one noticed them arrive.

The air got chillier, the revellers sweated as they continued to dance and their sweat steamed with cold like dragons breath on a frosty morning. But no-one noticed and the music got faster and louder and they were driven as a mass to dance on and on. The press of bodies got closer and closer, herded together. They were encircled and they didn't even know. They didn't feel the horror of the spine chilling cold, they didn't feel as the flesh was starting to be stripped from their bones, and they didn't feel the blood start to leech from their veins. They danced madly on, lost in a hypnotic trance, lost from the world.

(3)

As dawn broke on New Year's morning the graveyard was empty. Not a reveller in sight. The lights still glittered weakly, the empty keg laid on its side and the decks and speakers were silent. The churned ground around the graves was the only other sign that any people had been there and the first awake of the thrushes hopped about looking for worms in the disturbed soil. Underground the graves were silent and full, the tomb doors closed tight, the air in them freshened by the night. The ivy had settled back into place and the gate to the graveyard was closed and padlocked as usual. The sign on the gate was back in situ "PRIVATE PROPERTY - KEEP OUT" it read, as it had for as long as anyone could remember.

A mist swirled softly in the early morning air and the few old fashioned street lights in the surrounding park still glowed with a dim yellow light. All was(c) quiet and tranquil. The perfect winter’s dawn coloured the landscape a silvery pink, an idyllic start to a new day and a new year.