Dream: The Fifth Restricting Stone

I dreamed that my fiancee died. I couldn't bear it, I was dangerously overcome with grief. I followed rumors and half-remembered myths until I found a witchdoctor, who I heard could bring people back to life.

She gave me the means to bring my fiancee back. It involved a complex ceremony to be performed over his grave. I had to say opening prayers/acknowledgments to certain spirits while facing specific directions, and then wash something that represented my fiancee in a copper bowl of my own blood. (gross. Why does my subconscious choose these kind of images?)
The witch doctor told me that once my fiancee was raised, his new life would be connected to mine. If one of us died, the other would die as well. This seemed more than reasonable to me, in order to get my fiancee back.

One step in the ceremony that I MUST NOT FORGET involved what the witchdoctor called the restricting stones. She gave me a beautifully embroidered satchel with them inside. I must put the restricting stones around the grave. If I did not do this, the power of the ceremony would not be restricted to that one grave, but spread through the cemetery.

I went to the cemetery, full of desperation and strained hope. I placed the four restricting stones beside the grave in each cardinal direction. I performed the ceremony, washing a crown in my blood. (I don't remember why it was a crown. There was a good reason for it, but I can't recall.)
When I was done, I sat down and waited.

I waited for hours upon hours. I began to rock back and forth slightly, too weary to cry, stretched to the limits of my emotional endurance. Dawn was breaking when I thought I heard something. I held still, and listened hard. The sound was coming from the ground in front of me, a kind of scuffling. I began to dig with my bare hands into the grave. When I was three feet into the earth, my hand hit something warm. It was another hand. It flailed until I grabbed hold and pulled as hard as I could. Slowly, a body emerged from the grave. It was my fiancee. He was alive. He seemed to know what had happened, because he didn't' act confused. We held each other, gasping and weeping at the base of his grave until the sun was well into the sky. Finally we gathered ourselves up, and I led him out of the cemetery.

What I didn't know was that there was a fifth restricting stone.

The next few weeks passed in a blissful kind of dream. My fiancee was back. We had our apartment again -I hadn't changed anything. He told me about what it was like to die. I told him about my grieving. We cried for each other's stories.

I was still going to CIM -my music school. I hadn't confided much about my fiancee's death to the people that I knew. They knew he was horribly ill, but I made it seem like he had a miraculous recovery. People couldn't be happier for me.

There had been a story at CIM that I had been told about 3 students (two vocalists and a pianist) who had died in a car accident a few years before I arrived at the school. I knew their names, but I had never met them. One day, one of these people showed up at school. They were walking around the halls, going to a few classes as if they had never left. At first, I think, people didn't recognize them. But as they started to talk to other people, everyone realized they were the students who had died in the accident.
"What? The car accident? You thought I died in it! Oh how horrible! No, no I didn't die. Obviously. I was badly injured and dropped out of school for a while. I've been abroad for part of the time. I'm back now!"

I met one of these students, the pianist, and shook his hand. I told him I had heard the stories of how he had died in the car accident, and was glad they weren't true. He was very nice to talk to, but as he walked away, for a split second I thought his face changed. Just as he was turning away from me, I thought I saw that his face was covered in blood, part of his skull crushed in. The expression in his eyes was hateful, evil. I blinked, startled, but his face was normal again.
As I was walking up the stairs, wondering what it was that I saw, I looked down at my right hand -with which I shook his hand. It was covered in blood. I flinched, and it was normal again.

More and more, people who were known to be dead started appearing all over town. I heard stories from many different people about long dead relatives, or friends appearing with excuses of having been out of town, or in a coma this whole time.
I tried to talk to my fiance about this strange phenomenon, but he was oddly touchy about the subject. In fact, he was becoming more and more distant. Once or twice I caught him looking at me across the table with a look of pure hatred.

It turned out that the fifth restricting stone had fallen out of my satchel on my desperate journey to the cemetery. This restricting stone was supposed to sit in the exact middle of the grave. The ceremony's power had extended throughout the cemetery, bringing almost every corpse back to life. Their lives were all connected to mine, just as was my fiancee's. If any one of us died, all the others would die as well.
When the dead are brought back to life, they can never be quite whole. There is something off, something sinister about them beneath the surface. The longer they remain living in their second life, the more prominent this dark side becomes. They were turning evil, all of them.