Raquel, the daughter of a wealthy businessman, had always been fascinated by the supernatural and the occult. At seventeen, Raquel had a peculiar obsession not shoes or boys or parties but 'the afterlife'. Spirits, rituals, resurrection myths. Her private library at the back of her bedroom was filled with old, fragile books bound in leather, most in languages she barely understood. While other rich kids traveled to Dubai or Paris on school breaks, Raquel had made a different plan for the summer. She had spent countless hours browsing the dark corners of the internet, searching for secrets and spells that could give her the power to defy death. Her parents, oblivious to her interests, had granted her permission to spend her summer vacation at her friend, Emily's, house in the countryside.
She wanted to explore 'death'.
That's how she ended up staying not in a fancy resort but in a modest countryside home with her best friend, Emily, whose family lived on the edge of an old cemetery.
"Your place is… perfect," Raquel had whispered with a spark in her eyes the day she arrived.
Emily was happy to see me, so was her parents and elder brother , or so it seems.
Leigh raised a brow. "It's dusty, has bad Wi-Fi, and our dog sleeps on the couch. You sure you'll survive?"
Selene just smiled and touched the silver ring on her index finger — a family heirloom, according to her father. But lately, it had started to feel... warmer, pulsing, especially when she read the older books. "I'll surely succeed"
Emily chuckled nervously. "You make it sound like a school project. 'Resurrect a soul: worth 20% of your final grade.'"
But Raquel was serious. Too serious.
Raquel had arrived with a suitcase full of black clothes, crystals, dried herbs, and three very old books. One of them, The Book of Hollow Breath, was bound in cracked leather and sealed with a lock that only opened when her ring touched it.
Emily, ever the skeptic, rolled her eyes when Selene first pulled it out.
"You seriously brought a book from the Varelli vault just to mess around in a graveyard?" she asked.
Selene glanced up, her expression half-teasing, half-serious. "You don't mess around with resurrection rituals, Emily. You study. You prepare."
"Does your parents even know about this?"
They sat cross-legged on Leigh's bedroom floor that night, flipping through pages filled with faded ink and ominous diagrams. Symbols. Instructions. Conditions.
"Look at this one," Selene said, tapping a page. "It says the body must be less than two weeks buried. There has to be moonlight. And a token."
"A token?" Leigh asked.
By the second night, Raquel had chosen a grave. It belonged to Eleanor Myles', a 12-year-old girl who had died in a car accident just twelve days ago. The local paper said she was coming back from a ice cream store when she was runover. No family had visited since the burial.
"She was young. She had a life. A reason to come back," RAQUEL said.
Leigh stared at her friend. "You don't really believe this stuff works, right?"
The town of Nanterre was small, quiet, and the kind of place where people left their doors unlocked and their porch lights on. But the graveyard Ravenhill Cemetery had its own reputation.
The air in Ravenhill Cemetery was heavy, soaked with night mist and the scent of damp earth.
Locals said it whispered at night.
Raquel and Emily waited until 3:15 a.m. a time Raquel claimed was the "veil hour," when the spiritual world brushed closest to the physical. Clouds drifted lazily across the moon, casting silver shadows across the ground as the girls crept past the black iron gate and into the older section of the cemetery.
Raquel carried the book, a lantern, and a velvet pouch of ingredients: salt, crow feathers, crushed rosemary, and a pendant she'd bought at an antique store two weeks earlier said to belong to someone mourning Eleanor's death.Emily carried the shovel.
"I still think this is nuts," Emily whispered, scanning the rows of headstones.
"We're not digging her up," Raquel said. "We just need to... disturb the earth a little. Connect."
They found Eleanor's grave under a dying oak tree. The soil was still a different color not fully settled.
Raquel knelt down, spreading salt in a circle and placing four candles at each direction. She opened the Book of Hollow Breath and began to read, voice soft, steady, but rising with each ancient word. The air felt denser. Emily swore the breeze shifted direction.
Then came the final chant.
"...not by name, but by voice. Come forth, Eleanor. Speak if your soul is restless."
There was silence.
Then—
A low, dragging breath.
Emily's heart nearly stopped.
They turned. Nothing. Just wind through the trees.
The candles hissed. The air shifted.
A cold wind blew through the cemetery. The lantern dimmed. Then—
"Hey! Who's there?!"
A flashlight beam slashed through the dark. The night guard's voice rang out again. "I said, who's there?!"
"Crap!" Emily hissed. "We have to run!"
Raquel scrambled to gather the book and spilled some of the elixir they had prepared. A clay vial shattered, its dark contents soaking the corner of Eleanor's grave… and sloshing over the stone slab next to it.
In their panic, neither girl noticed.
They ran. Breathless. Heart pounding.
Two hours later, the graveyard was dead silent.
Then something stirred in the soil of the grave beside Eleanor Myle's.
Not hers.
Someone else's.
A decayed hand pushed through the soil.
The grave marker read:
Juno Mayflower – 2000-2019
"Loyal in life. Forgotten in death."
His blue eyes opened in the darkness.