The Dead

Keith Moon in Hell, he thought uneasily.

“Hear that?” he whispered to Max.

“Do I?” Max asked. “Wish I had earplugs. What a windbag.”

“Not Father Ted. That pounding.”

Max cocked an ear. “What are you talking about?”

Gary was surprised; Max’s hearing was sharper than his. Gary guessed his brother had been too infuriated by Father Ted to notice.

In any case, the sounds had stopped.

When the priest was done, the women went forward to lay flowers on the coffin. The gravediggers got down off the backhoe, and the mourners filed out from under the canopy. Gary heard the whir of the lowering device behind him as the coffin sank into the ground.

As the group worked their way slowly down the slope, Gary noticed another party of mourners, on a hill some two hundred yards distant; some kind of commotion had broken out among them. Even against the wind, he thought he could make out faint screams.

“What the hell?” he said, pointing.

“Are they going nuts over there, or what?” Max asked.

“Hey!” came a voice from behind. “Hey! Someone’s made a big goddamn mistake!”

They turned. One of the gravediggers beckoned desperately.

“This guy’s alive in here!” he yelled.

Gary’s heart began to race.

“Come on!” the gravedigger yelled.

The mourners started back up the hill.

“Is Uncle Max alive, Dad?” Dave Holland yelled.

“How the fuck should I know?” Buddy snapped.

The crowd neared the grave. There were loud, powerful thumps coming from the hole, and muffled screams. Gary reached the edge just in time to see the last of the floral displays sliding off the casket, shifted by the vibrations from inside.

“For Christ’s sake,” Max called to the gravediggers, “Can you open it?”

“It’s locked,” cried Frank DeBuque from somewhere.

“There’s a crowbar on the backhoe,” one of the diggers shouted.

“Go get it,” Max said. “He must be running out of air.”

The man pelted off.

By now the grave was ringed with mourners. Aunt Lucy had her handkerchief over her mouth, and Mr. Hersh, standing between Mr. MacAleer and Mr. Williams, seemed to be praying.

“It can’t be Mr. Holland in there,” cried Rodger DeBuque to his brother Frank, both of them very agitated. “I drained him myself.”

But whoever was in the coffin, there could be no doubt that he was very much alive. The casket was now rocking visibly at the bottom of the hole, the posts of the lowering device scraping the sides of the grave, dirt raining onto the coffin lid.

The gravedigger came racing back and climbed into the hole. The coffin bucked and shook beneath him, and he barely managed to set the bar’s head between lid and casket. But finally he started to pry, trying to force up the front section of the lid.

From inside the box came a great booming thud, and a fist-sized bulge appeared in the bronze lid. The gravedigger’s jaw dropped, and his hands flew back from the crowbar, leaving it still upright, stuck in the joint. The mourners fell quiet. The thumping stopped.

“In-fucking possible,” Uncle Buddy said, staring at the protrusion, breaking the hollow silence.

Gary looked at Linda and Max. “Just like my dream,” he said tonelessly.

“Dream?” Linda asked. “Which dream?”

Gary said nothing, eyes still fixed on the coffin. The box continued silent.

The gravedigger licked his lips and reached for the crowbar again-only to jerk his hand back as a wave of subterranean pounding rumbled across the graveyard in what seemed to Gary a kind of chain reaction. He could feel the impacts through his shoes, almost as though a herd of cattle were stampeding beneath the earth. Large clods of dirt fell from the sides of the grave, onto the coffin.

Gary looked back toward the other slope. Most of the people there had reached their cars and fled, but some were prone on the grass, being beaten by other mourners-or were those mourners at all?

A far-off gravestone flashed sunlight as it toppled. Was that an arm flailing up out of the grass before it?

The shrieks and pounding from his father’s coffin started once more. Gary turned again.

Another bulge had appeared. The gravedigger, terrified now, got to his feet. Eyes wide, he started to clamber up from the hole. The coffin rocked up from the grave bottom, the lid’s front section springing open-unlike Gary’s dream, the latches had given way before the lid itself. The lid smashed with terrific force into one of the gravedigger’s legs; bone snapped.

Gary stared down at the coffin. Its occupant was indeed his father, tossing his head violently from side to side, eyes clamped shut, pale forehead and cheeks furrowed with lines of agony, lips drawn back in a tormented snarl.

Despite his injury, the gravedigger managed to haul himself over the edge of the pit, kicking the lid closed in the process.

But an instant later the top boomed up again, this time bashed from its hinges, an astonishing shriek following it skywards, almost as if the sound had blasted the heavy bronze from its moorings; the fillings in Gary’s teeth buzzed at the cry. People scrambled to get out of the way of the falling lid.

“Dad,” Gary cried. “Dad…”

Beyond all hope, the old man was alive. Gary knew he should be overjoyed. Something was plainly, horribly wrong with his father, but at least he wasn’t dead…Gary couldn’t think why this miracle so filled him with panic.

His father’s eyes opened. Blank white cotton flashed. For the first time Gary noticed the small popped threads on the lids, and fringing his father’s mouth. The embalmers had been at him, given him the full treatment… but why then was Max Holland Sr. still writhing and shrieking?

“Dad!” Gary cried.

His father only went on screaming, forcing open the lower section of the lid. Then he ripped the cotton from his sockets. As his eyelids sagged, two gleaming obsidian beads stood forth, cocking back and forth as though they were on stalks.

Linda plucked at Gary’s arm.

“Dad…” Gary said.

She dragged him backward a few steps, but he pulled free, wondering dazedly if there was anything he could do to help his father. Most of the others had already retreated, many knocking over the chairs under the canopy in their haste. The injured gravedigger was crawling away on all fours.

All at once, as if he’d been jerked up out of the grave on wires, Max Sr. bounded up onto the edge, head thrown back, arms down at his sides, fingers curved like claws, mouth still pouring forth those deafening shrieks. For a moment he stood motionless, totally rigid. Then he lowered his head. His expression changed, twitching muscle by ridged muscle into a mask of such rage and malevolence that Gary thought his brain would wither in its glare. And once the expression was established, some horrific force seemed to settle over his father’s face, stiffening it, desiccating and petrifying it as if to preserve that look forever, to render it eternal, world without end, amen… Tiny black eyes shining in their wrinkled sockets, the mummy that had been Max Holland creaked swiftly forward like a wizened robot, grinning hatred at all who stood before him.

“Dammit, Gary,” Max said. “Come on!” Together with Linda, he pulled his brother down the slope.

But they hadn’t gone far when a rakelike hand, parchment skin streaked with dirt, thrust out of the turf, tripping Linda. Gary yanked her back up.