I died on September 13th, 1871, at the age of seven.

But of course, I wouldn't stay that way.

The truth behind my resurrection shall be examined in a short time. But first, here's a little information that I believe you—as the reader—should know.

It's not information about me, be assured.

It's about my dear, sweet mother and father.

The Lord and Lady Webb didn't celebrate their marriage as much as they tolerated it. My mother, Lady Abigail Webb, stayed with my father simply for the pleasures of the upper class and the preservation of her noble blood. And the only reason my father hadn't disposed of her, or me for that matter, was due to his insatiable thirst for owning things—and people. To the public eye, the radiant Lady and her stately Lord were the very picture of refinement and happiness.

But in the dead of night when I was lying in my bed, I could hear my mother screaming. The next day, my eyes would be bruised from a sleepless night. Hers would be bruised quite literally.

In the winter of 1869, when I was just a child, Lord Harold Webb left for a trip to France.

He never came back.

My mother's skin was never bruised again.

That is, until September 13th, 1871.

Our mangled bodies were dragged out of the crashed carriage at approximately 3:46 in the afternoon on a rainy Tuesday. Lady Abigail Webb was pronounced dead at the scene. And I, Elsie Webb, was pronounced dead only a moment later. I never saw my mother's corpse, but I had heard that all of her limbs had been twisted into unimaginable positions. Her face, I was told, was hardly recognizable.

And I, her sheltered child, was found protected by her mangled arms. However, even my mother's protection couldn't save my fragile young skull from suffering a blow hard enough to stop my life immediately.

But that's the funny thing about death. You see, clinical death and legal death are not quite the same. I had been pronounced legally dead without full examination of clinical death. When I was toted into the Undertaker's funeral parlor, Elsie Webb was scratched out of the records. Dead, deceased, forgotten.

Yet, even when the hearts stops beating, the conscious mind isn't always gone.

There was still enough blood traveling through my veins to keep my brain and my limbs alive.

The Undertaker found this out after laying my naked body on the operating table and beginning the first incision. Ms. Elsie Webb would not be embalmed, no siree. Ms. Elsie Webb was not dead just yet.

As his scalpel grazed the center of my chest, a thick trickle of blood poured out.

And it was still warm.

I don't think it was love that led the Undertaker to nurse be back to consciousness. I believe it was more of a matter of business than anything else. He needed an apprentice; someone who would stay by him unconditionally, someone who had nothing else to live for.

And I was now an orphan who, by society's standards, didn't exist.

Not to mention, I owed this man my life.

I woke up, whimpering pathetically, in the middle of the night. My eyes were covered in a bandage, but without even seeing my environment, I could smell the stench of death and knew that I was not home. The next thing I heard was the high-pitched, cockney voice of my new guardian. He was telling me that I was alive. Alive, alive, alive, but how? There was a gunshot. No, a crash. I don't even remember…

It didn't matter anymore. I was dead. Not physically, but socially.

The Webb empire had ended.

Our history was now all but faded into memory.

The tale of the upright house of Webb had now become the story of a filthy, sniveling funeral rat.

...

"Elsie!...Elsie, get in here!"

The Undertaker's voice echoed through the small, cramped hallways of the funeral parlor I called my home. He had interrupted a very precious moment. Just before he called for me, I had been blissfully staring out the window at noblewomen passing by. So lovely they were, in their gowns with their lacy hats perfectly placed atop their clean, flowing curls. Once upon a time, I could have been one of them. But here I was, ogling. Such a creepy girl I must have seemed, staring out the window for hours on end at strangers. If only one would catch my eye. That awkward second of unexpected human contact was a momentary pleasure I had yet to experience.

"Elsie!"

"Coming, sir!" I screamed back as I reluctantly pulled myself away from the window. I picked up the ragged train of my dress and stomped down the rickety stairs towards my master's calling.

As I reached the bottom of the stairs, I stopped before a set of open doors. My master, or father, as he had instructed me to call him, was just a silhouette in front of an overpowering yellow gaslight. His long gray hair cast a shadow of its own as it separated from his shape in a mess of tangled split ends.

Broken, half-crazed…this is how I always remembered him.

"Yes, mas-…father?" I stepped into the embalming room casually. After all, nothing scares a girl after she's seen and touched a thousand dead bodies.

The Undertaker was bent over his newest friend, a man of approximately thirty years of age who had drowned in the river just hours ago. His naked body was colored a murky gray, like most, with swollen lips and digits from his stay at the bottom of the river. He was stiff, unmoving…like a fish, I thought to myself with a tiny chuckle. Just like a dead fish.

"Ah, there you are, my pet." Undertaker patted me on the head like a precious doll, smiling widely from ear to ear with a mouth full of sharp, jagged teeth.

I smiled at him gently, and then gave the dead man's arm a playful little poke. "Who's our guest?" I asked.

My master reached out and grabbed the dead man's eyelids, prying them open to reveal white, veiny eyeballs underneath them. "Robert Hutch." He said, giving the corpse a little slap to the side of the face, making his bloated cheeks jiggle comically. "Thirty-two years old, father of two, successful fisherman…Trouble is, the sod couldn't swim. Poor bloke. We'll have to drain his lungs, we will."

"So what do you need me to do?" I asked as my attention was drawn to the sets of tools sitting on the desk beside me. I picked up a pair of rusted clamps and listened to them clank together.

"You, my dear," Undertaker grabbed the utensil from my hands with a swift yoink, "are gonna loosen this man up. He's got the rigor. You've gotta—"

"I know, I know, massage the joints until they loosen." I grabbed ol' Robert's arm and began twisting the skin between my clenched fists. "Relieve the tension in the muscles before we drain 'em, yeah, yeah, I know."

My master wore a wide grin on his parchment-gray face. "That's me good girl," he said as he gave me another pat on the head and made his way to the door. A girl, he called me, like I was still a child. I think, in his mind, I would always be the seven-year old he had almost embalmed; not the 20-year old that now worked under his keep.

"Let me know when you're done," he instructed from the next room. "And remember to shove some cotton down 'is throat before you sew his mouth shut. We don't want the smell traveling up his nasal cavity, now do we?"

No, father, I thought to myself as I stared into the dead man's eyes as I massaged the rigor mortis from his ice-cold limbs.

We most certainly don't…