The storm was only getting worse.

The storm was only getting worse.

Ichabod knew he'd made a horrible mistake. If only God would allow him the time and the strength to make it up, to right the wrong he'd perpetrated...then perhaps he would be able to face his beloved Amelia in the afterlife. The thin man's rail-like frame rattled with a stifled sob as he picked up the cast-off shovel. He cursed himself for making the deal, for even considering a partnership with Amol. He'd known, deep in his soul, that the man was something far more sinister from the moment he'd first laid eyes upon him. How could he have been anything but a devil from Hell? Amol offered the unthinkable: the return of Ichabod's cold, dead wife.

Amol had said he could raise the dead.

Outside the church, the storm howled like a thing with a life and a sorrow of its own. Rain rattled against the leaded windowpanes with the sound of bony fingertips rapping--the skeletons of Ichabod's deepest fears given grasping hunger and unending locomotion. With trembling hands, Ichabod lit the hooded lantern. He whispered a prayer, fervently asking God to forgive him. The professor wasn't sure if God was even listening tonight, and if he was, then Ichabod could only hope that the Almighty was feeling particularly magnanimous.

The wind's keen reached an ear-splitting pitch, followed by an instantaneously and seemingly universal vacuum composed of utter and complete silence. It was like being trapped inside a dark and noiseless cave, in the bowels of the Earth, in the perfect pit of despair. Ichabod's fear rose. The professor knew that the ritual had reached it's zenith. The ancient rite that he himself had discovered and translated at the request of Amol--it had been Ichabod's part of the devilish deal--was being consummated with unholy energies and baleful fire.

Amol had said he could raise the dead.

The dead were about to walk.

The categorical and cavernous silence lasted for another heartbeat and the sensation was one of the whole of Creation teetering madly on the edge of a terrible and deleterious precipice, but it was suddenly shattered by a titanic thunderbolt and a blinding, sizzling flash of eerie green lightning. The deed was done. Somehow, Ichabod knew it.

Amol had said he could raise the dead.

The dead were about to walk.

This had been the fiend's plan all along!

"No!!!!" the spindly professor screamed, hating himself nearly as much as Amol, the minion of the Dark One, who had beguiled him and made this gut-wrenching, soul-defiling moment happen. Ichabod charged out of the church, dove into the pouring storm, his only weapons held aloft in his still-trembling hands and his overly long scarf whipping in the hell-borne wind. Ichabod was ready to strike down every single being of undeath that Amol had called forth from the church's graveyard, or he was at least ready to die in the attempt. Of one thing, he was sure: Amol would have far fewer minions to command when he was done this night.

Ichabod ran into the storm, into the dark graveyard, barking his shins on cold, craggy crosses and slipping amid the ice-like gravestones and slick tomb markers. Then, the entire sky was lit with a bolt of bright-as-day lightning...

...And Ichabod had no doubt whatsoever that he would indeed die trying.

Art Source: "Walking Graveyard" (c)/by RM73
Story and Characters: (c)/by Brannon Hollingsworth

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