Chapter 13
When you’re going crazy, or even just think you’re going crazy, you’re perception of reality gets so messed up to the point where you’re basically screwed. You can no longer tell what’s real from what’s in your head. Pretty soon, you start to doubt your whole life, everything that happened to you. Why didn’t you start to see things sooner? Or have you always been crazy and the things you’ve been seeing weren’t as obvious? If that’s the case, what if everything in your life had been fake? What if you imagined everything that had ever happened to you really never happened? Or what if all the people you loved didn’t really exist? Just wondering all this was enough to make me lose my mind and I knew I was coming really close to that.

So when I opened my eyes after trying to rub something out of them and found myself in a cemetery instead of in front of my washing machine, I wasn’t exactly sure what to make out it. The sun seemed to have set in the two minutes I was in the laundry room and now it was dark as a moonless night out. The rain poured down heavily but I was already soaked to the bone, still dressed in the thin flannel pajamas I had been dead set in wearing for the next week or until they started to admit an undeniable odor that I would no longer be able to blame on Emmett.  

My hands scrambled against the ground, digging up the dirt of the fresh made grave. I didn’t even need to look at the headstone to know where I was. I just knew that I had no memory of getting there and no memory of starting to dig yet there I was, standing in a six-foot hole and covered in mud. My fingernails were ripped and bloody and I was pretty positive that a couple seemed to be missing altogether. My hands were too numb with cold to feel the pain though but my whole body ached, my muscles sore and fatigued. I had just dug up Edward’s grave by myself and I was pretty sure, given how messed up they looked, that I had done it with my bare hands alone.

Under normal circumstances, I would have freaked out if I had suddenly found myself in a cemetery in the middle of the night with more than half a day missing from my memory. But, then again, these were not normal circumstances. Under normal circumstances, I would not have been a half-crazy widow in a cemetery in the middle of the night with no recollection of digging a hole that was nearly a foot taller than I was. Since it was not normal circumstances, I did not freak out but instead continued to clear away the last couple inches of lose, muddy dirt, desperate to get into my husbands coffin. Though I did not remember getting there, I knew why I had come. I had to see the body in the coffin, make sure that I hadn’t simple imagined that the body wasn’t his. Adrenalin and grief rushed through my body as my hands finally uncovered something solid.

They don’t often have people digging up graves in movies and in TV shows, but whenever they do, they don’t show quite the truth. Then again, do they ever depict the actual truth in Hollywood? But back to my point. They show people digging up a grave and finding a coffin sitting there in perfect condition, not muddied at all, just waiting to be opened for whatever reason. Well, they don’t ever show that it’s a little bit harder than that. Nowadays, not only do you bury the body in a coffin, you also put the coffin in a cement box. I don’t even know what the point to that is. Why do you need to give a body even more protection when it’s going to compose eventually no matter what you put around it? When it’s always just a matter of time?

Anyway, basically what I’m trying to say here, it was going to be impossible to get to Edward’s coffin without a sledgehammer. I scrambled around the grave, the tall walls closing in on me. I had to find leverage, any way to get to the coffin that was under me, separated from me by less than a foot of solid concrete. My hand brushed against something and I couldn’t help but laugh out bitterly at the irony of it. There was a sledgehammer right by me. I had somehow thought to bring one along when I hadn’t even brought a shovel.

I picked the sledgehammer up and started to break through the cement, my aching muscles fueled by the fact that I had to get into the coffin, I needed proof. I needed to know that he actually was alive. I needed to know that I wasn’t crazy! The sledgehammer hit the cement, breaking through it and I continued to hack away until I had a broken away enough to open the top of the coffin. I reached up and slid the sledgehammer out of the hole.

My hands were no longer just trembling from the cold and fatigue but now from fear as well. I kneeled down and wrapped my hands around the edge of the coffin, fumbling with the latch. No matter what I found inside this coffin, it wasn’t going to be good. If it was in fact not Edward’s body, I wasn’t even sure what I was going to do because, regardless, it was a dead body that had been in the ground a few weeks now. But if it was Edward’s body, it would prove that I was after all going crazy and I was wrong about Edward being alive. Both of the scenarios were terrifying and made my knees go weak. I swung open the coffin, bracing myself for the worst, not so sure exactly what the worst was.

And there was Edward, lying in the coffin. It was his face, that was for sure but there was something so, so, so wrong with the picture in front of me. His eyes were open, his irises black, and instead of glossed over and staring like they should have been, they were moving, rolling around their sockets. His skin had the bluish pallor of death but it was deeper than it should have been. And his mouth – his mouth was sewn shut with rough, thick black stitches but it wasn’t just that his mouth was sewn shut but that he had no mouth at all. His lips were missing and there was just a stretch of blue skin there under the black thread. His eyes locked on me and he lifted a blue hand towards me.

I screamed, slamming down the lid of the coffin. My heart was racing with fear and a cold, terrified sweat would have drenched me if I hadn’t already been soaked. I fumbled with the latch again, trying to lock the body in. It (because I couldn’t think of the undead thing inside as my husband) pounded against the coffin, moaning through its lipless mouth. I tried to haul myself out of the grave but my arms were shaking so bad that I fell back in a few times before I finally found myself on solid ground. I started to push dirt back into the grave but most of the mud I had dug out of it seemed to have been washed away by the rain. It was pointless to try to fill it back in and so I turned and ran.

I was crazy. It was now proven. I was stark raving mad. There was no way to deny it anymore. I was a lunatic and should be locked up. I should go to Carlisle right now and tell him to put me in the loony bin because there wasn’t any way that any sane person would let someone as crazy as I was roam free. Edward was dead, my best friend was pissed, I was insane, and my whole life was over at eighteen. If I wasn’t careful, the next thing I’d do unconsciously would be murder the entire town. And in ten years, someone would make a movie of my life, saying I was driven crazy by the death of my husband which ended with the death of a hundred. I’d get a serial killer name like Bella the Lunatic. Not as fancy as Jack the Ripper but it would work. And I’d be famous for being frickin’ insane.

I ran through the cemetery, slipping through the mud and tripping over tombstones. Lightning flashed and thunder cracked. One of my knees was split open and blood was running down my leg. My chest was tight and my heart was pounding so fast with fear that I was sure it was going to explode. I was going to die of a heart attack or aneurism in a goddamn cemetery.

Then, they were there. She appeared out of nowhere, her baby in her arms, wearing my face and sitting atop a headstone. Only this time, it wasn’t just the two of them. There was a man with them, his arm wrapped carelessly around her shoulder. Another stroke of lightning illuminated the sky and my heart about stopped when I saw his face. It was my Edward, but not the cold, mouth-less corpse he had been in the coffin. It was Edward, alive and breathing, but looking slightly different like he had in our room the morning before his funeral. He was just as white as the girl sitting next to him, his red eyes gleaming. His mouth was surrounded by ring of bloody lipstick. It took me a moment to realize it was actually blood.

The girl stared at me and ran her tongue across her lips. Edward leaned down and whispered something in her ear and the two of the laughed. The baby began to wail. The girl lifted her head up towards Edward and he leaned down to kiss her but instead of pressing his lips to hers, he kissed her neck, licking up the blood that spilled from the gash. Something in me snapped right then, loud and audible.

I walked towards them on shaking legs. “What the hell do you want from me?” I screamed when I was just a few feet away from them.

The girl glanced at me but other than that, neither of them paid me any attention. “No!” I screeched right in the girl’s face. “I know you can hear me. I know you know I’m here. Now tell me what the fuck you want from me!”

The girl looked at me, stared straight into my eyes and smiled a big, wide smile. Blood dripped from her teeth and she licked her lips again, this time running her teeth over her eyeteeth that suddenly grew into sharp, gleaming fangs. She reached up a hand and absentmindedly stroked Edward’s cheek while he stared out into space.

“I have your darling Edward here,” she said and it was the first time I heard her speak. I expected her voice to have something evil about it, something different, but she sounded just like me. “What else could I need?”

“Edward?” I asked frantically. “Edward, look at me please. Edward?”

And he did turn to look at me, but his face was off again. His skin had blued and his mouth was missing, replaced by those crude stitches. One of his eyes was rolled back in his head, so I could only see the whites of it, and he lifted one of his hands sloppily into the air, coming down with a thud in my own that was outstretched to him. I gasped as his slimy hand hit my own and a piece of paper slid into my fingers. Then my whole world went black.