“…They had brought blankets and pillows and made beds in the long hard pews…”
(Male, 30’s) A friend of mine had died and I was attending his wake. I was in a small chapel of maybe a hundred seats. The walls, the pews, everything was made of a rough hewn stone, dark grey, nearly black. There was a casket at the front of the chapel.
Here’s what was strange: it was the custom of this family to spend the night before the funeral in the chapel with the casket. They had brought blankets and pillows and made beds in the long hard pews. I had been invited to participate. I tried to sleep but couldn’t relax. The bed was cold and hard. Everyone else was asleep, it seemed. I got up and paced, trying to relax.
My dead friend’s brother saw me and took me by the hand. Wordlessly, he lead me over to a pew where my friend’s female cousin was. I sat down and she kissed me. We made out for awhile and I think she would have gone all the way but I was too freaked out.
I got up and tried to find my way back to my bed. I found myself next to the coffin. I touched it by accident and it was as cold as the walls of the chapel – Could it be that the coffin was made out of stone? Who could lift that? As I woke, I was still wondering if the coffin was perhaps built into the chapel, that perhaps the room was a catacomb, that the pews where the relatives slept were also graves.