Definition
1 : having death as a subject : comprising or including a personalized representation of death
2 : dwelling on the gruesome
3 : tending to produce horror in a beholder
We trace the origins of macabre to the name of the Book of Maccabees, which is included in the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox canons of the Old Testament and in the Protestant Apocrypha. Sections of this biblical text address both the deaths of faithful people asked to renounce their religion and the manner in which the dead should be properly commemorated. In medieval France, representations of these passages were performed as what became known as the "dance of death" or "dance Maccabee," which was spelled in several different ways, including danse macabre. In English, macabre was originally used in reference to this "dance of death" and then gradually came to refer to anything grim or gruesome.
The catacombs were blissfully quiet. The chattering and feeble minded tourists, with their bright lights, noisy gossip and louder clothes had finally left for the day, along with the tired and light deprived tour guides (whose teeth must surely be ground to dust by now with the amount of teeth grinding smiles they had to bare during the day - or perhaps they all wore mouth guards to protect their pearly mouth gems, like the boisterous american footballers you often saw on television in the various sports bars in town, populated by angrily joyous men in cheap synthetic shirts, with a malnourished bored looking woman beside them, irritably fiddling with the complimentary bar nuts that were no doubt infested with various forms of bacteria.)
Not that I went out in town much, really. It was a pain to drag myself so far and the summer heat sped up the decomposition of my flesh and sinew, leaving it so ropey and stretched it was as if cheap pink bubblegum was the only thing keeping my limbs somewhat together, So far, my body had not completely, permanently disassembled itself, but i did once make it an alley and a half before i realised my wrist had become caught on a railing and I'd left my hand trapped, the bubblegum ligament stretched almost to breaking.
I'd hurried back of course, but i'd had to wrap the pink muscle fiber around and around my wrist like some sort of ribbon for ages and ages before it relaxed enough to reset to its original length.
I'd tried super glueing my various joints together as well, to try and strengthen them, but it either didn't set, or set too well and for a while I could only move like a fixed limb doll, awkwardly hopping about from leg to another, arms straight by my sides like some sort of rotten demented penguin.
I didn't like it much. I mean, it was nice to not have to worry about leaving something important anywhere, but it made what was left of my now putrefied and liquidized internal organs slosh about inside me so much I felt incredibly nauseous.
It was hard, being in the in-between stage. My friend, down the tunnel, said that as soon as the flesh finally, completely dissolved, it was much easier to be out and about. I could even join in the monthly dances. I couldn't as I was. I mean, I was invited but even I, as oblivious as I usually was, could tell that my appearance unsettled the other attendees. Despite most of them having gone through something similar in their own transmogrification. Perhaps that was even why they had trouble looking at me - too many bad memories.
Or it could be the smell. I admit, I was super grateful that I had lost some of my five senses. I mean, I couldn't imagine how much agony I would currently be in if I still had my sense of pain, so I definitely considered myself blessed that I could not feel my body decomposing about me. I was also almost as grateful that I had lost my sense of smell. Judging by the looks on peoples faces (that, to be fair to them, they did try hard to suppress when I was around them) and the involuntary gagging that most of them did, I never wanted to know how bad I currently smelt. Ever.
A little rain of dust sprinkled across my body, like powdered sugar on a chocolate cake. Mmmm, chocolate cake. I did miss that. Not that I could eat it anymore. Or smell it. Or taste it. But I still loved the idea of it.
More dust floated down. They must be getting into the swing of it at the party in the graveyard above me. I'd heard they'd managed to get one of the vampire DJs to do the music for this evening. Having had hundreds of years to master their talent, their music was truly a sight to behold - or a sound to hear? They were so good I'd heard they'd had trouble keeping out of the limelight recently - apparently loads of human music producers and agents had been chasing them about town, trying to get them to sign a contract. Rumour has it that they were getting so exasperated by it, they were half tempted to just drain the lot of them dry. Of course, they wouldn't really do that (goes against many of the rules of our world) but it had meant that they would need to leave town. Tonight would be the last time they were playing. They probably wouldn't return here for another couple of centuries.
I would have liked to have heard them one more time.
More dirt trickled down, along with several cobwebs that had been shaken loose from the pounding the grass was being given from dancing above. The werewolves must have come along. They might not be too fond of the undead, but boy did they love a good party. One cobweb settled right across the hole over my ribcage, where the flesh had completely given up and concaved into my chest, eventually tearing away under it's on weight to lodge somewhere inside my chest where it was slowly, I suspected, rotting away into yet more goop. The hole proved to be quite useful however. Sometimes I practiced the yoga moves I remembered from my living life and by positioning my body, I managed to empty out some of the rotting fluid that was collecting inside me. I had agreed to do this outside, away from the catacombs, as the last time I had done it inside, the tourists had found it, freaked out or passed out from the smell and for a while the catacombs had been on lock down while a disease forensics team checked it out to make sure it was contagious or harmful. Then, once they had discovered it was human remains, had combed the catacombs as far as they could to find the rest of the dead body. Everyone had been stressed out for days hiding from them.
I thought it was kind of the police to try and find the rest of me - even though I had clearly been dead for a long time going by the remains and they had no idea who i was or what had happened. I kept that to myself though.
Which led me onto the main reason people tended to be cautious or wary around me (as well as the smell and gruesome visuals). I had been murdered - which made me a revanant. Most revenants, I had been told, woke up...grouchy. And usually emotionally unbalanced from the traumatic event which led to their death. They also tended to be psychotically fixated on obtaining revenge on their murderer, with a special, strong emphasis on 'psychotic'. They didn't stop for anyone or anything until they had torn their murderer limb from limb, literally. They were definitely not party people.
So, of course, the second people saw me and realised I had been murdered (even with my rate of decomposition it was easy to see that someone had tried to hack me into pieces as well as cave my head in) they tended to back away - slowly. And politely of course, no one ever say anything mean or nasty to my face or tried to hurt me in any way, but they still backed away.
And that did kind of hurt.
Especially because i was not psychotic or unbalanced in any way, shape or form (except my physical form). In fact, had i not had these stupidly visible murder marks, people would just assume i was your average zombie and i could go to the parties.
In fact, I suspected the reason I wasn't psycho crazy, was because I'd already had my revenge. Apparently, revenants usually took three nights and days to rise after they have been murdered. I took less than an hour.
I can only imagine it was because I'd finally just been accepted into one of the most prestigious dance schools in the world, after a lifetime of effort, and then some jackass with mummy issues and a machette puts paid to all of that in under five minutes. So yeah, I was pissed. I woke up just as he was shoving my dead body into one of the catacomb's corpse cavities.
He's still alive. Not sure about sane though. I kinda left him to his own devices once I'd pushed him to the point of clawing out his own eyes as cried for his mummy to save him.
Heh.
So yeah, I am totally sane and chill and a really nice person. Honest.
And all I need to do now is wait for my flesh to finish rotting off. As soon as it does, I'm applying to the catacombs dance school for skeletons. The one here is one of the best in the underworld you know. I reckon I only have a few more months spent down here in the dark to go.
And then I'll be up and about with nothing to hold me back.
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