This is C.M. Eddy's 1919 short story, "The Loved Dead," rendered in ballad form, slightly AU. Like its original, this adaptation centers on necrophilia and also touches on themes of incest, wartime violence, murder, and suicide. It is, that is to say, strong milk: you have been warned.
"A pedophile cannot become a child, a shoe fetishist cannot become a shoe, but a necrophile can and does flip over to the other side. Eventually—nay, inevitably—he becomes the object of his own weird brand of perversion: a dead body."
— Supervert, The Necrophilia Variations
They found him sprawled upon a grave
And giggling like a bride.
The Black Maria idled by.
They wrested him inside.
"Great God," said Bailey, "He's gone mad!"
"And you're surprised?" said Roarke.
And Bailey found his little flask
And threw away the cork.
The madman had a scribbled book.
Roarke drove, and Bailey read
The saturnine confessions of
The man who loved the dead:
"This graveyard stinks of earth and rot.
The moon is thin and wan.
It's midnight now, and come what may
I will not face the dawn.
"I was a homely sickly child:
Small, sallow-faced, depressed,
Forever breathing mingled fumes
Of languour and unrest.
"When I was sixteen, all came new.
My grandfather had died.
My mother took me to the wake.
I shuffled by her side.
"The lilies made me headachey.
I slouched and was deject.
But—when I saw the dead man's face
My spine became erect!
"My body was electrified
By some demonic force:
My famished eyes unhinged their jaws
And feasted on the corse.
"For two whole weeks I was alert
As anyone could be,
But never traced it to its root:
That death is life to me.
"My mother died. I mourned her—yet
My grief was checked by lust.
My father died, and at his grave
I reveled in the dust.
"I moved away, and as I grew
Aware of my condition,
Found honest work that suited me:
Assisting a mortician.
"I was discreet the first six months,
And wild and careless after,
Till one day I was found asleep
Embracing a cadaver.
"How my employer pitied me!
That bleak environment
Had quite unstrung my nerves, he said.
I took my pay and went.
"The moment war broke out I was
Enlisted and entrenched.
Decorum non, sed dulce erat.*"
Roarke, the stoic, blenched.
"The bullets droned, the dying moaned,
The gas grenades did hiss:
Four years of blood-red charnel Hell…
Four years of ceaseless bliss!
"To Irishmen, a bottle;
To Chinamen, a pipe;
To me, a broken jar of clay:
They all are of a type.
"They all expand the appetite
As fast as it is fed.
So coming home to peace I feared
How much I craved the dead.
"Then came the nights a furtive figure
Stalked the shadowed streets
And gratified the journalists
Who pen the yellow sheets.
"I killed with razor, pistol, club,
Stiletto and garotte.
I made no pattern, left no clue,
Had no cause to be caught.
"Then one black night, as I enjoyed
A woman I had bled,
A shouting sounded in the street.
I stumbled from the bed.
"A drunken couple, coming home,
Had fought and come to blows.
The bitch would have the bastard's head
For bloodying her nose.
"Though I was not detected yet,
I had no time for ease.
A row like that, and at that hour,
Would soon attract police.
"I broke a window out. I jumped
Into the trashy yard
Unfastened, bloodied, still enflamed,
And almost caught off-guard.
"I laid my course through alleyways.
They never saw my face.
I crossed the creek, I pierced the woods,
And finally slowed my pace.
"An awful recollection came
Behind the rising sun:
I'd had two knives the night before
And now had only one.
"One knife's my jury, speaking guilt
From prints of hands ungloved;
And one's my executioner.
I'll be what I have loved!
"For fear and danger, heat and cold,
Ache, sickness, hunger, thirst
Though pains indeed, are joys beside
The pain which is the worst.
"The nameless sensuality—
The craving that consumes—
The veil of mental scum that's only
Lifted in the tombs.
"I've walked for days, and made it home
To where my parents lie.
I'll not be caged with living men,
Which worse is than to die."
Then Bailey frowned. "I searched him well.
I swear he had no knife."
Roarke stopped the van. The madman was
Unmarked—but void of life.
The coroner confirmed him dead
And would say little more,
But showed the blade: he'd swallowed it
At least the day before.
* "It wasn't pretty, but it was sweet."