Risen Read Online Free

followed Jesus and Mary to the tomb of Lazarus and how Jesus commanded the stone over the tomb to be removed.
    "Jesus said to her, 'Did I not tell you that if you would believe you would see the glory of God?' So they took away the stone."
    Irma's old woman heart beat fast in her chest. Her body felt cold and frail. The dark unnamable thing rose from the horizon, blotting out all light, and towered over her. She saw it as clearly as Franz saw the words on the page before him, and when she closed her eyes she could feel it closing on her, engulfing her, swallowing her whole....
    "When he had said this, he cried with a loud voice, 'Lazarus, come out!'"
    Irma felt the dark nothingness wrap around her and squeeze her in an icy fist. Her body was paralyzed, unable even to squirm in the grip of the thing. She felt herself being drawn away, down, down, down into the lair of the thing. In another instant she would disappear into the subterranean nether world beneath the feet of the living and dissolve into the suffocating being of the thing. She drew in her breath, filling her aging lungs until she felt they would burst.
    Irma screamed with the terror that inhabited every nerve and vessel of her fragile body. She screamed from deep within her soul, screamed to shatter the grip of the black encompassing thing, screamed for her life.
    Franz leaped from his chair and took his wife of forty-seven years in his arms. He held her close and whispered soothing words into her ear. He knew from experience that the words didn't matter. It was the sound of his voice that would draw her back from whatever oblivion she had witnessed. Just soothing words, nothing words, words spoken with love.
    But tonight there was something sinister in the air. A sterile coolness. The dead smell of an ancient tomb. Something that whispered of death without redemption, of purgatory. Something that made Franz Klempner shudder and made Irma Louise Klempner scream and keep screaming until sheer physical exhaustion overcame her and she collapsed, spent, in her husband's arms.
    ***
    Tom Culler took another swallow of beer and marveled at the profound effect digging a hole and filling it with water could have on a community of human beings.
    That's all the Cooves County Reservoir was, really, just a hole with water in it. At some point in the history of Cooves County a bunch of enterprising men known as the Army Corps of Engineers diverted water from the river and regulated its flow into a big hole they'd dug in the countryside, and the reservoir was born. Trees were planted along the shore and a road was graded into being between the reservoir and the freeway, and the reservoir became a recreational lake. Bass were dumped into the water annually and pulled out again one by one by fishermen. Boats were launched, canoes paddled.
    Area nudists had claimed one tiny cove as their own. They built a dock and were the scandal of the county for doing sober and in the daylight what decent folks did only after dark and half a bottle of Jack Daniels.
    For many teenagers the reservoir was the make-out point of choice. These days, of course, a lot more went on than mere making out. Guilt—even Protestant guilt, which is a ninety-eight-pound weakling next to its muscle bound cousins in the Jewish and Catholic faiths—was still a force to be reckoned with, and the natural setting lent a certain wholesomeness to all sexual proceedings, even the clumsy backseat fumbling of the young. Somehow slipping your hand under a girl's shirt didn't seem quite so sinful under a full moon beside a body of water under maples and oaks murmuring in the breeze.
    No good free thing exists without opposition and the Cooves County Reservoir make-out point was no exception. Local authorities had tried to close the lake road after dark with a padlock and a chain strung between two poles set in concrete, but the effort was doomed from the outset. Horny teenagers quickly dug out the poles and left the whole