The Resurrection of Alfred E.

Be it known to all persons that I, William Percival Pease esq., Solicitor of the Courts of England, solemnly make oath and declare that the following is a true and full account of my encounter with Alfred E.

Not being a literary chap, or what you might you call “artistic”, I shall tell my story the only way I know - that is, by beginning at the beginning, and by going on to the end and then stopping. I have read in the newspapers that this way of writing is not “trendy” or “with it” any more, but I have never been mistaken for a fashionable or an impulsive man, not even when I was a trainee solicitor completing my articles. And those giddy heydays of my youth are long gone. As I write these words at 4.32 a.m. in a bare soulless hotel room I am sixty-four years old.

To begin my story, I had worked alone in my law office until late. Please do not think this odd. To be frank, I do not much like people. Do not misunderstand me. I am not angry with them. I have no axe to grind; no cause to promote. I am not even disappointed in them. I simply find it tiresome to pretend that I care for their trials and tribulations when I don’t.

So, except in the way of business, I do my best to have as little to do with people as possible. This is why I have severed ties with my family. I have a sister, and she has a son, but I ignore the cards they send me for my birthdays and at Christmas. I suspect that they are angling for an inheritance and I do not wish to raise false hopes. They will get nothing.

Thus, as an unmarried solicitor of an unsociable disposition and frugal habits, I prefer to work late in the evenings than to employ additional daytime staff. And, to be frank, even the intricacies of house-conveyancing are more entertaining than the tedious gibberish that is broadcast on television nowadays.

It was nearly midnight when I switched off my computer, shut the ledgers in the safe, put on my overcoat, set the alarm, turned out the lights, and locked the street-door. I am recalling these events precisely because I know that you will find it difficult to credit the tale I am about to tell, and, as man of the law by trade, I would not wish my last words to be doubted or contested in court. You see, I still have my professional pride. I have heard it said that hope dies last. It is not true, for I have lost all hope. It is pride that remains.

I stepped out into the street. It was a dark and dreary night in mid-November. It had rained during the day, but the sky had cleared and now it was turning cold. I had left my car at home, for I live within ten minutes walk of my office and I am grateful for the physical exercise. I find it reduces my regrettable propensity for haemorrhoids.

I shivered, gripped my overcoat tight against my throat, and walked with my head down. The streets of my town (one of those quintessential English seaside resorts whose economies were ruined by the advent of cheap package holidays to Spain and which are now the end of the line for ageing drug addicts and washed-up alcoholics) were deserted. My footsteps rang out confidently as I strode along and I did not feel a day older than forty-five.

As is my wont I cut across the graveyard of a mock-Gothic church. As I closed its gate behind me, the church-tower’s bell clanged midnight like a spoon banged against a metal saucepan. At the same moment the full moon cleared a wisp of scudding cloud and its brilliant light illuminated the graveyard. Perhaps it was because I had been drawing up the monthly accounts, or perhaps it was because we solicitors really do only care about money, but I thought that the moon looked like a silver coin worn almost blank by years of constant use. I jangled the loose change in my pocket in mute reverence. In reply the wind gusted, and the tossing yew branches cast fingery shadows across the graves.

It was then that I heard it - a faint cry. I stopped and looked around, fearing that our town’s lamentably numerous heroin addicts had started to use the churchyard as a shooting gallery. Instinctively my hand closed over my wallet. However, as I peered into the darkness, I saw nothing untoward, only mossy headstones and moon-shadows.

I persuaded myself that the cry was a stray female cat in heat. However, as I was about to walk on, I heard the cry come again, louder now and clearly human. My heart jumped a beat and the hairs of the nape of my neck stood on end. I turned off the gravel path, waded through some dank sopping grass, and bent down over the grave from which I thought the cry had emanated. After a few seconds the noise came again, this time accompanied by a feeble knocking from inside the earth.

My blood ran cold as I imagined some poor soul buried by mistake had woken up inside their coffin, and that they were crying out to me from that stifling and terrifying darkness. But when I examined the grave’s headstone, it was moss-covered and overgrown, and I could only make out the half-obliterated name “Alfred E…” and the weathered dates “1833-18…”

It was absurd. I told myself that I had been working too hard. But then the cry came again, louder than before, accompanied by a muffled knocking on wood, as if the grave’s occupant had sensed that salvation was agonisingly near. I knew, as a practising solicitor, that it is always a bad idea to get involved in other people’s business - unless you can bill them for your time and trouble, of course. But curiosity got the better of me. I had to know who or what was buried in that grave. I could not walk away. I had to act.

I looked round. Near the gate of the churchyard a wheelbarrow had been left propped up against a wooden shed. Next to it was a pile of rotting compost, and sticking out of it there was an old spade. I fetched it and started to cut away the turf. Beneath the grass the earth was loose and easy to dig, and it smelt of humus and earthworms. Soon I was standing in a hole two feet deep. The unfamiliar physical exertion made my heart thump painfully and my head pound, but whenever I paused to breathe I heard the cries and knocking coming from below. I could not stop. I had to go on. It was like I was in a trance.

At last my spade struck wood.

“Hey, you be careful up there,” a croaky voice called out from inside the coffin. “You carry on like that and a body might get hurt.”

I stumbled backwards in surprise and sat down in the dirt. I got back up, lifted my head out of the hole, and looked round the churchyard, worried that I’d been heard, or worse, seen. I pictured the scandal of a respectable solicitor being discovered exhuming old graves in the dead of night, and I broke out in a nervous sweat. But, luckily, nobody had seen or heard me.

I picked up the spade again and cleared the loose earth away from the wood. Then, so anxious that I could scarcely breathe, I dug the edge of the spade into the crack between the coffin and its lid, and levered them apart. The half-rotten coffin lid bowed and bent, and then broke apart with a loud crack.

A half-whiskered grey-haired man lay motionless inside the shattered coffin. His skin was a ghostly chalky-white and he was dressed in an old-fashioned charcoal suit. For a moment I thought he was a wax doll or a well-preserved mummy. But then the dead man opened his eyelids and looked up at me. His eyes were as grey as a January sea.

“Well, you took your time, squire,” he grumbled in an old-fashioned accent as he sat up. “So who’ve I got to thank?”

The pain shifted from my chest to my jaw. I stammered out my name. Then I asked in amazement, “But who are you? And how did you get down there?”

“You sound like an educated man but you do ask some dumb-fool questions,” the man retorted, picking dirt and splinters off his suit. “You know my name already. I’m Alfred, Alfred er... oh there I go, forgetting my own name again. Any road, I’m Alfie to my friends, of whom you’re not one, so don’t get familiar. You can call me Mister, proper and respectable like. And I got in here the usual way. I died. Worst mistake of my life.”

Alfred was so surly that I wasn’t afraid of him, even though I wasn’t sure if he were alive or dead or undead. “Pleased to meet you,” I murmured.

“Much obliged I am, too, I’m sure,” Alfred replied, pushing aside the broken coffin lid and thrusting a pallid hand up at me.

I could count the bones in his hand through his glassy skin. I stared blankly at the faded ship’s anchor tattooed on its back, not knowing if it was good manners or good hygiene to shake hands with a corpse.

“Bless me! What’s wrong with you?” Alfred griped stroppily. “Ain’t you going to help a body get out of this hole? Are you a good Samaritan or not?”

I took his hand. It was cold and clammy, like a dead fish. I pulled hard. Alfred stood up in his coffin. His head came up to the level of the ground, and he turned round to look at his own headstone. Once he had deciphered the timeworn inscription, he snorted, “Well, thank the Lord for small mercies. At least they didn’t bury the wife in with me. That prude, she made my life a proper misery; always banging on about my fancy girls and my swearing and drinking.”

Alfred clambered out of his grave, muddying his hands and knees as he did and cursing under his breath. As he stood on the grass, he shook an earthworm from his trousers with a peculiar disgust and looked down at a hole in one of his soles. “Damn her eyes, the stingy fish bucket buried me in my old boots!” he griped. Then he looked round the crowded graveyard, whistled softly under his breath, and exclaimed: “But would you look at all these stones! It used to be quite roomy in here. I guess that’s progress for you!” Finally, like a man asking casually after the time of day, he inquired: “So what year is it now, squire?”

I climbed out of the grave as well and told him.

“Well, I’ll be jiggered! I overslept my watch alright,” Alfred exclaimed. He coughed and patted his empty pockets forlornly. Then he leant towards me, and whispered conspiratorially, “Listen, I know it’s late, but it’s been donkey’s years, and my gullet’s as parched as Egypt’s sands. There used to be a pub, opposite the harbour mole, it didn’t close all night. You just knocked quiet-like on its shutters and the landlord let you in. I bet it’s still there. I hate to cadge, squire, but dammit, the wife was too stingy to even put pennies on my eyes.”

I could understand how a man might be dying for a drink after more than a hundred years trapped in his own coffin. Nonetheless, I hesitated.

“God save us, are you too tight-fisted to stand even a dead man a drink?” Alfred complained.

It is true that I am a careful man, and that I seek to count the cost and calculate the consequences of any particular course of action before I commit myself. But I did not think it fair that Alfred E. should criticise me for my circumspection. He did not have a reputation to consider. However, my hands were shaking and I thought a shot of whisky might help calm my nerves. So, despite my usual caution, I told him to lead the way.

Alfred walked clumsily, weaving from side to side of the narrow streets like we were on a ship in a rolling sea. Then, just as I thought he was getting the hang of bipedal locomotion again, a car whooshed by at a crossroads and I barely managed to pull him out of its path.

“What the blazes! Where are that damn carriage’s nags?” he blurted out in his shock. “Invisible horses, who’d have thought it? That must be what they call the March of Mankind! Well, you’re the officer on deck, you’d better read your mate the ship’s log.”

I stared at Alfred, not understanding his gist.

Alfred explained, “You know, squire, like Queen Victoria, even she must be dead by now. And how’s the grand old Empire doing? Does Britannia still rule the waves?”

I told Alfred about the two world wars and the loss of our empire; and about the discovery of relativity and penicillin; and about the invention of motor-cars, aeroplanes, telephones, computers, and atom bombs; and about how men had walked on the moon. I was happy to talk. It was reassuring to hear my own voice. I felt in control of my own destiny again.

I thought Alfred would be awed by our achievements. But when he’d heard out me out, he just spat and grunted, “I got you, squire. More machines. More money. More madness. The more things change, the more they stay the same, eh?” He walked on a few more steps, then stopped and gazed up at the full moon for nearly half a minute. At last, he shook his head in disbelief, turned to me and asked, “But what about the important things?”

“What do you mean - the important things?” I wondered, unable to conceive of what could matter more to humanity than our comprehension of the cosmos and the spectre of nuclear Armageddon.

“You know, squire,” Alfred explained, “are the girls still as pretty? What’s it like to watch a babe take its first steps? Can you still smell the salt on the morning breeze? Where’s the best beer? And how are the Town doing in the footie?”

My mouth opened and closed but no sound came out. I did not know the answer to his questions.

Alfred stared at me with naked contempt and muttered, “Oh, I get it. That’s why you were working so late. And why you don’t have a family, most like. You’re that kind of man that hides his face in books so he don’t never have to face up to life. It’s ink that runs in your veins, not blood.”

I was offended. Alfred was being impertinent and ungrateful: I had rescued him from the grave. I wanted to explain to him how times had changed, but I knew he would not understand my lawyer-talk about the calamitous financial consequences for a moderately successful professional man of marital breakdown. Or how teenagers nowadays did nothing but sponge off their parents so that they could buy drink and drugs. Instead, to change the subject to a safer one, I coolly remarked that he had hardly spoken kindly of his own wife.

“Aye, and a hard-praying woman she was, but she gave me five bairns,” Alfred retorted vigorously. “You, you’ll never know the joy a man feels when he cradles his young in his arms.” Then, all of a sudden, sorrow ghosted across his gaunt features, and he went on, “Only my one boy, he died, he did. We buried him in an apple box he was so small. It proper broke my heart. But I suppose you could say that’s life, too.”

Alfred looked away and snuffled quietly, like he was trying to hold back tears. I didn’t intrude on his grief; a good solicitor never lets a conversation become too personal. Even in the bitterest divorce cases it always pays to disregard emotional outbursts and to focus on the money.

We turned a corner in silence and walked along the empty sea front. A stiff breeze skimmed a salty spray off the foaming breakers and grey clouds raced across the night sky. “It’ll blow a Nor-Easter good and hard tomorrow. It’ll be cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey, don’t think it won’t,” Alfred muttered at last, and I understood that his heartache had eased.

The pub was where Alfred had said. Despite the late hour, its facade was festooned with strings of brightly-coloured light bulbs and its windows were lit up. Alfred marched straight in the drinking hole. The barmaid looked at me oddly as I followed in his wake, but only in the usual way that barmaids look oddly at professional men when they bring penniless tramps onto their premises in the dead of night. I bought two pints of bitter and two pork pies at the bar and brought them to the table at which Alfred had sat down. But Alfred didn’t touch his vittles or his ale. He just watched me drink and eat, his cold grey eyes hungrily following every sip and bite that I took.

“It must feel good, eh, slurping that beer? And that pie, it must fill your innards up nice inside?” he griped enviously.

He was right. It did feel good. And I had not even noticed it.

“Take it from a man who knows,” Alfred advised me, “you’re dead a long time. Enjoy life while you can.”

I looked him in the eye questioningly.

“Yes, dammit, it does that, too,” Alfred answered my unspoken thought. “You ache for a woman so bad it hurts, but you can’t have one, not for nothing. Not even your own wife, damn her bones.”

I took another bite of my pie and washed it down with a gulp of beer, savouring them both. My heart was calmer now and it felt good to be alive. I even felt proud that I had, so to speak, “discovered” Alfred.

“So what did you do, well, before you know what?” I asked my protégé.

“Before I popped my clogs, you mean? I was a master mariner. I sailed the tall ships before the mast,” Alfred bragged. “We brought home tea from India and rum from Jamaica and spices from Java and opium from China. I crossed the line a dozen times.” Then he winked and broke into a grin, revealing a mouthful of yellow stubs instead of teeth, and recalled, “And in every port you can be sure there was a girl, squire. Black ones, brown ones, white ones, yellow ones; girls of every possible colour. Oh, me and my mates, we had such fun in them days.”

I thought he wouldn’t mind me asking, so I did.

“Oh, that. I had an apoplexy,” he said, casually tapping his chest. “My pump’s tubes got all clogged up. And then one day the main pipe burst. Just like yours did.”

I did not like hearing myself talked of in the past tense. We all like to think that we’ll live forever, and even mentioning death in polite company is a social faux pas worse than flatulating at a dinner party. But I made nothing of it.

Now I am not what you would call a religious man, but I could not restrain my curiosity. After all, my companion was only the second man in recorded history to have risen from the dead, and the first instance was, so to speak, unproven in court and entirely dependent on hearsay evidence. So I asked, “Is there, well, you must know, like in the Bible…”

“A heaven or hell?” Alfred finished off my question. He shrunk his shoulders into a shrug and went on, “I couldn’t say, squire. I wouldn’t know. I never was much of a believer. I left all that gibberish to the wife. To my mind, maybe there’s both, but you get them before you die.” His eyes misted over and he concluded, “And with the same woman, too, most like. You marry a dream, but before your eyes she turns into your worst nightmare.”

Alfred looked down at his untouched beer, and I discerned that, for all his cursing, he had once loved his wife. Of course I had also formed fleeting romantic attachments in my youth, but I realised that, if I were honest with myself, I could not say I had ever loved any woman. I had always held a part of myself back. I recalled my companion’s words about ink and not blood running in my veins, and I wondered if I had ever truly lived at all.

The pub’s door opened and closed and a couple of strangers walked into the saloon bar. They sat down in a dark corner silently without ordering drinks. I sensed my heart skip a beat again and I felt giddy and weak at the knees.

Alfred E. didn’t notice my discomfort. Instead he patted me on the shoulder and murmured confidentially, “Come on, squire, you’re only human. Admit it, you’re wondering what it’s like down there in the dirt, eh?”

I must have nodded, because Alfred went on, “Well, mostly it’s regrets. Not for the things you did do, good or bad. Mostly you can live with them. No, the worst of it’s regrets for the things you didn’t do. The girls you didn’t ask to dance. The ships you didn’t sail. The ports you didn’t tie up at. The life you didn’t live.”

I thought he’d said his piece, but then a look of horror came over his pale bloodless features, like he’d seen a ghost himself. “And the worms, the worms,” he whispered hoarsely, “you lie there in the pitch dark in that blasted box, listening to them wriggling towards you, and there’s not a damn thing you can do to stop them crawling into your mouth and eyes and eating out your memories.”

Without thinking, Alfred reached out for his pint of beer, but his hand passed right through the glass without spilling a drop. In his annoyance he swore like only a man who has sailed the high seas before the mast can.

A few more harmless night-people wandered into the pub. Without buying drinks they stood around the bar, silently motioning to one another with signs.

I felt the pain in my chest and jaw come again. “So what are your plans now?” I asked my companion, to keep up the pretence that we were just two casual strangers having a drink and nothing was out of the ordinary.

“My plans, squire? Now there’s a thorny question,” Alfred muttered, shaking his head. “I guess my home, well, it was only a cottage, but even if it’s standing, and it’s still in the family, it’s not really mine now, is it? I can’t imagine my great grandchildren will be overjoyed if their great grandfather comes back from the dead and robs them of the roof over their heads.”

As Alfred talked I mused idly how questions of inheritance could become rewardingly complex should resurrection become a commonplace phenomenon. Alfred looked me in the eyes, like he was looking straight into my soul. “Aye, you’re right, squire. There’d be a fortune in it,” he went on. “I bet all those clever wills you drew up never considered circumstances like mine, did they? A good lawyer could make a killing if us dead rise up and walk again.”

He broke into a cackling laugh. But I didn’t laugh with him. Instead, I felt dizzy with fear. Because I hadn’t told him what I did for a living. He just knew.

Alfred didn’t notice my consternation. Instead, he rambled on, “No, it won’t do, pestering my descendants, bless them. I guess I’ll have to tramp about a bit and sleep under hedges. Any road, it’s a damn sight better up here than down there with the worms. And if a copper asks me where I’m going, I’ll just have to say I lost my train ticket, won’t I?”

Yes, that was it, I thought. Alfred had lost his train ticket. Or maybe I had lost mine.

Alfred cackled at his own words. But I wasn’t listening to him now. More and more lost souls were coming into the pub. Even though it was the dead of night the saloon bar was getting crowded - only no one was talking or drinking. The air was turning cold and clammy, like I was in a morgue. The pain darted from my jaw to my left hand. Suddenly, I felt so tired that I felt that if I closed my eyes I could sleep for years. I knew instinctively that I had to get out of the pub whilst I could. I downed my beer, glanced at my watch, stifled a fake yawn, and said that I’d better call it a night.

“Well, go on home, squire, if it’s past your bedtime,” Alfred remarked, unimpressed. “I guess you’ll never learn that life’s too short to waste in sleep. But, mark my words, as you lie in your box you’ll be sorry you never danced the darkness down to dawn.” Then, as I stood up, he asked again, as though he’d forgotten already, “Eh, what year did you say it was again?”

I told him again.

“Who’d have thought it? Who’d have thought it? Doesn’t time fly!” he exclaimed, and whistled under his breath.

I started to walk out of the pub. But then it came to me - the question. I turned back to Alfred and asked him, “Why? Why me? Why tonight?”

Alfred stared blankly at me, feigning that he didn’t know what I was talking about. But I knew that he could read my mind. And I had to know. I had to be sure.

“Why me? Why tonight?” I insisted. “I must have walked home through that churchyard a thousand times. And you were buried there all those years. Why could I only hear your cries for help tonight?”

Alfred shook his head in disappointment, as though I’d failed a simple intelligence test. “And I made you for a proper headucated man, squire,” he replied. “I guess it’s like the old song goes: those who blow their horns the loudest often have the thickest fogs in their skulls.”

I didn’t know what he meant. Then the penny dropped. I felt my heart race uncontrollably. My knees turned to jelly and I gripped the back of a chair just to stay upright.

Meanwhile, Alfred picked up his beer glass, gestured towards the other shadows in the bar, and chuntered, “Us dead, we aren’t really rising up from our graves. It’s the other way about, squire. It’s you who’s coming down to join us. It’s your ticker; the main spring’s broken. It’s your time. You won’t live to see sun up.”

Alfred drank his pint of beer down in one, belched, and smacked his lips with crude pleasure, as though he had been dying for a drink for a century or more. I watched the liquid drain down his half-transparent throat in horror. Then a wave of sound broke over my ears, and I heard the roar of voices and the clinking of glasses and the tinkling of an old-time piano as the night-people partied the night away. I panicked. Mumbling insincere apologies, I pushed and shoved my way through the bar’s clientele, desperate to escape. Behind me voices cursed and muttered, but I didn’t turn and look back.

I reached the pub’s street door and staggered out onto the sea front. I gasped in the cold night air. For a moment I thought that everything would be alright. But then I felt my heart stutter and stop, and I was overcome by a numbing black despair. I slumped against a lamppost, sweating and panting horribly, and crippled by an agonising cramp that started in my chest and spread throughout my body. Then, after a pause that felt like eternity, my heart beat again.

I don’t know how long the cramp lasted. But, very slowly, it eased. The numbing black despair lifted and I breathed again. I glanced back at the pub, wondering if the old sailor were partying inside it. But the pub’s windows were dark, its door was locked, and the unlit light-bulbs strung across its facade looked like hollow glass tears. I decided that the barmaid must have called time whilst I’d been slumped against the lamppost.

Or, perhaps…

I began to hope that my encounter with Alfred E. had only been a crazy hallucination and that the dead weren’t really rising from their graves. But I had to know. I had to be sure.

I staggered unsteadily back to the town centre, stopping in the pool of dim light beneath each lamppost to catch my breath. I didn’t think about telephoning for an ambulance, because if Alfred had been real then it was too late for doctors and hospitals. And if Alfred had only been a dream then I’d got nothing to worry about.

I shuffled past my office, out of which I’d stridden so confidently only an hour or so before. I caught sight of my reflection in an unlit shop window, but I barely recognised the feeble bent old man I saw reflected in the plate glass as myself. I’d aged ten years in a single night!

I came to the church again. To my horror my encounter with Alfred E. hadn’t been a bad dream. In the centre of the cemetery I found the hole where I’d dug up his corpse. As I gazed down into the empty grave it hit me: the deafening banshee-like wailing of the dead shrieking to be released from the other graves all around me. And underneath the wailing I could hear another sound, like that of rats scuttling under floorboards: the sound of corpses desperately clawing with their fingernails at the wooden lids of their coffins.

The church-bell clanged one o’clock. I gazed up at church’s mock Gothic tower, pleading for help from the God in whom I’d never believed, even when I’d sworn on the Bible in court. However, instead of the heavens opening and a train of angels singing hosannas appearing in glory, the full moon just slid behind a bank of cloud. The churchyard went dark and I felt the ground shudder gently beneath my feet, like an animal in its sleep. Then the church itself trembled and shook as the dead honeycombed into its walls and floor all pushed open the lids of their tombs and sarcophagi at the same time. A moment later the church’s stained glass windows burst outwards, its buttresses gave way, and the whole edifice collapsed in a cloud of dust. Meanwhile, in the churchyard graves sank down into the earth. In each yawning hole a coffin burst open, and a ghost-white corpse sat bolt upright, opened its eyes, and looked round.

I staggered backwards, frightened that I was losing my mind. More and more ghosts emerged from the earth and swarmed around me, screeching and wailing horribly. Their touch was cold and clammy, like damp sheets flapping in the wind. I closed my eyes and jammed my fingers in my ears, trying to shut them out. Then, terrified that at any moment a grave would open beneath my feet like a trapdoor and I would be plunged downwards into a bottomless black pit, I dashed blindly out of the graveyard, only stopping when my racing heart cramped up again in the street.

I leant against a chestnut tree to recover and looked up at the cracked sky through its bare branches. I was certain now that Alfred E. hadn’t been lying, and that all that was left to me was to die in darkness. Then I remembered Alfred’s horror of the worms and I realised that I couldn’t go home. No, I had to find somewhere where I knew my body would be found when my time came.

I staggered back to the town centre. The dead now thronged its streets like the living do every Saturday morning. A few of the ghosts looked at me curiously, as if they were puzzled how I could see them. But most of the shadows only gazed into nothing and jabbered to themselves, like lunatics or teenagers with mobile phones.

At last, I found what I was looking for: a neon sign blinking “HOTEL”. The hotel’s door was locked, but I rapped my signet ring on its plate glass. After a couple of minutes a young night-porter appeared, yawning and pulling on his liveried jacket.

“Busy night?” I asked distractedly, as I filled out a registration card in a shaky scrawl.

“No, only you, Sir. The town’s as quiet as a graveyard,” the night-porter replied, rubbing the sleep from his eyes.

I glanced behind me. The dead were clearly visible through the hotel’s windows, but the young man couldn’t see them. They were real only to me.

“Are you quite sure you’re alright, sir?” the night-porter asked as he gave me a room key. “You’re as white as a sheet. I could call a doctor if you like?”

“No, no. I’m fine, I’m fine,” I stammered guiltily. “I’m sure you know why a man checks into a hotel in the middle of the night without any bags.”

“Alas, we all have arguments with our loved ones,” the spotty youth replied glibly. “Have a good night, Sir.”

So here I am writing this affidavit on hotel notepaper, waiting for the dawn to break with the same dread a condemned man faces his execution. As I look out of my room’s window it is still dark outside, but soon enough the sky will begin to grey in the east.

I am dog tired but it is too late to sleep now. My end is racing up to meet me; my failing heart aches, and every few seconds it skips a beat. Already I am experiencing bitter regrets for the life I did not live and for the love I did not give: regret that I never danced naked in the rain; regret that I never told a woman I loved her; regret that I never cradled my newborn offspring in my arms; even regret that I never let tears for a dead child fall from my eyes. And I feel an overwhelming terror of worms munching through my face and eating away my memories as I lie helpless in my grave.

This bleak soulless room will be a lonely place to die. But it is better that the chambermaid has an unpleasant surprise in the morning than that my corpse lies undiscovered at home for several days whilst it bloats with gas and flies lay their eggs in my mouth and eyes. I have left the poor woman a generous tip - an exceedingly generous tip - to compensate her for her understandable distress.

And so I, William P. Pease, solicitor of the courts of England, being of unsound heart but of sound mind, wish to to append the following codicil to my last will and testament:

• I no longer wish for my body to be placed in a coffin and buried in the ground. Nor do I wish for my body to be cremated. Rather, I desire that my body be dressed in my best clothes, and placed inside a glass capsule that may be easily opened from the inside.

• I desire that this capsule be placed in the conservatory of my current abode.

• I also desire that every endeavour be taken to prevent the entry into the capsule of flies, maggots, worms, bacteria, and all other agents of decay.

• I furthermore desire that the capsule shall be equipped with a working telephone, and that a generous supply of banknotes and gold coins be placed about my person.

• Finally, I hereby cancel, annul, and void all financial arrangements in my current will and disinherit my current beneficiaries absolutely. Instead, I decree that my entire estate shall be placed in a trust which shall be used to maintain and secure my abode in vacant condition in perpetuity, for my spirit to haunt in peace.

Signed and Witnessed: William P. Pease, Solicitor

Editor’s Note: Mr. Pease’s terror turned out to be well-founded. The hotel’s Polish chambermaid discovered his corpse the following morning. However, as she barely spoke English, she believed that this affidavit was a suicide note. Fearful that she would not be allowed to keep the generous cash tip that Mr. Pease had left her if she disclosed the note to the police, she concealed these papers from the authorities. As a consequence, Mr. Pease’s death was recorded as from natural causes (heart failure), and he was buried and his estate distributed as per the instructions of his pre-existing will.

It is only now that Mr. Pease’s affidavit has come to light. Inquiries have been made regarding its veracity. The church concerned is still standing, but it has been determined that a grave was indeed disturbed in its burial ground that night. However, no sightings have been reported of the ghost of Alfred E.

As for the unfortunate writer of this document, he rests six feet down in the earth, hopefully in peace, and not listening to the sound of worms as they crawl into his coffin, and eat away at his mouth and eyes…