Mark Rogers - The Dead

When the mass was over, the pallbearers took the coffin back out to the long metallic-grey hearse and slid it in. Frank Debuque gently closed the hatch while his brother, wearing a pair of silvery shades, looked on. Gary turned and made for his Pinto with Linda and Max; before they reached the car, Steve Jennings and the redhead intercepted them.

“Sad day, buddy,” Steve said. He and Gary shook hands.

“Yeah,” Gary said.

“Don’t know what to say.”

“Don’t worry about it. Max, you know Steve here?”

Max nodded. “Met him at that New Year’s party, remember?” He didn’t extend his hand.

Steve flashed him a grin. “Topic was God, as I recall.” He nodded toward the redhead. “This is my new wife, Sally. I don’t think any of you have met her. Sally, that’s my old pal Gary Holland, his brother Max, and Gary’s wife Linda.”

“Pleased to meet you,” Linda said.

Sally returned her smile. “Same here.”

At that moment, Frank DeBuque came up.

“We’re ready to proceed to the cemetery, Mr. Holland,” he said.

“Okay,” Max said. “Come on, Gary.”

“See you at the reception,” Gary told Steve. “Our house.”

The mourners got into their cars; with the addition of the people who’d gathered at the church, the procession was longer now by a half-dozen vehicles. Lights burning beneath the mid-day sky, it wound its way north to the Squankum Bridge, crossed over into Squankum Township, and entered the huge River Rest Cemetery.

Well inside, beside a gentle slope, the hearse came to a halt. Once again the pallbearers took up the coffin, carrying it up the incline toward the tree-dotted crown. There a dark green canopy had been erected; two gravediggers sat on a backhoe drawn up on the right. Going beneath the canopy, the bearers set the coffin down on the bier surmounting the grave, then took their seats. Father Ted cracked open a Bible, read passages from the Old and New Testaments, then droned off into his own theological never-never land.

Gary listened to some of it, but was distracted midway along by a muffled thumping. His immediate thought was of his dream, his father hammering his way out of the coffin-all of a sudden he felt a fine mist of sweat on his forehead.

Yet the drumming wasn’t coming from his father’s casket. There seemed to be several sources, all some distance off. It was the damnedest thing, but if Gary hadn’t known better, he’d have sworn the sounds were coming out of the earth.

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.