Marcus Graves's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Marcus Graves wanted to find his own grave, but he could not remember where they had buried him. He limped through the dead forest on a leg that swung the wrong way. His clothes hung in strips. His left arm dangled from a torn shoulder. Somewhere in this world was the hole where his old life lay rotting in the dirt, and inside that hole was the last piece of himself. He was sure of it. He just could not picture the ground. He stopped and pressed his good hand to his head. Memories moved like mud. He saw a face he could not name. He saw a door. He saw nothing useful. The harder he pushed, the more the pictures rotted and slid away. His own mind was decaying faster than his body. He reached a clearing and froze. A log cabin stood there with sagging walls and broken windows. He knew it. Not with words, but with a pull in his chest that yanked him forward. His feet remembered the path before his brain did. He climbed the porch steps. The floor groaned. Inside, dust covered everything. He turned in a slow circle, waiting for the memory to open like a door. It did not. The rooms stayed strangers. He had lived here once, he was certain, yet the walls told him nothing. Anger burned in him. He struck the wall with his good fist. A shelf tipped. A tin box fell and burst open on the floor. Inside lay a folded scrap of paper. Marcus knelt on his bad leg and picked it up. His fingers shook. On the paper someone had drawn a rough map. A cabin. A dead tree with twisted branches. A stone well. Between the tree and the well, a small black square with one word beside it in faded ink: HERE. He knew that handwriting. It was his own. He had left this for himself, back when his mind still worked. Marcus crushed the map to his chest and dragged himself outside. He did not need to remember now. He only had to follow the lines. He limped past the cabin and found the dead tree first, gnarled and hollow, draped in webs and ivy. His pulse would have raced if it still worked. He turned from the tree toward the well. There it stood, low and round, its stones soft with green moss. Between the two, the ground dipped. A shallow patch of loose earth. His grave. He fell to his knees at the edge and clawed the dirt with his one working hand. His fingers hit wood. A lid. Buried, waiting, exactly where the map promised. Marcus had found the place at last. But his cold hand froze on the wood, because whatever he had sealed inside had been sealed for a reason he could no longer recall.