Sixth Entry, approx late May

My father came back from the dead once.

He first died some time in December. The man himself is a vague, watercolour image in my mind; pale, with the same build as a pencil and probably as easily snapped in half. He said little- in truth, I barely recall his voice- and there was a faint smell of tobacco about him. I believe he smoked a pipe, although I suppose the scent could have been from cigars. Like myself he was red-haired, and had a very red complexion. He was a solicitor, I believe, and went abroad once or twice due to his occupation.

I was about eleven when he "died". At about six o'clock in the morning, I awoke to a high-pitched shrieking. Darting out of bed, I ran towards the noise, only realising as I approached the staircase that the scream was my mother's. Hurdling down the corridor, I felt my heart stop as I banged madly against the chamber door. A million horrid ideas ran through my subconscious as I threw myself against the locked door; a fire from a candle crawling over the room and cackling as it consumed all it touched, my parents included; a burglar with a knife tying my parents up; a terrible illness festering on the white skin of my mother, boils and scabs covering her soft, warm skin, pus fusing her eyelids shut. It was around this point that I heard myself shouting: "Mother, what has happened? Mother!"

She did not reply nor open the door for a good ten minutes. When she finally did, she shut the door behind her with such force that I thought it would cry out.

"Robert, go back to bed," she ordered me, her face whiter than that of a fresh corpse. "And stay out of mine and your father's room." I was about to ask why went, holding her skirts up, she ran off, shouting to our housekeeper to fetch a doctor as I stood stunned by the door of the master bedroom. Inside lay my father, paler than the bedsheets. He was terribly still, and when I shook his shoulder to wake him, and found that he was colder than the December wind wailing outside.

The doctor, an imbecile with a waxed, grey moustache, put the "death" down to natural causes- my father was in his fifties and not a particularly healthy man- and the colour seemed to be sucked from my mother's cheeks. She was not usually one for "making an exhibition of myself" as she would have put it, but she wept there and didn't seem to properly stop for a good week until the funeral, and even then a haze of misery seemed to enshroud her as she stared at the coffin held upon the undertakers' shoulders. I myself said little- what was there to say?

The funeral was fairly usual- I assumed so, at least, as it was the only one I had been to- up until the time where six gentlemen began to lower the remains of my father's body into the hole dug for him. Even then, I did not believe in anything past this world- my father did not either- so I knew that the priest's promises of eternal life were false, fabrications to comfort my mother. What really loomed for my father, then? The pit of fire? Anything at all? What a wretched thought that my father, a kind man, a man who hurt no one, could be so easily discarded, useless and irrelevant like a clock that no longer ticked. Was that death? With these thoughts came the most dreadful nausea, a swirling terror that I could only compare to the fear of a child who thinks they have seen a monster in the dark.

I believe that I was distracted from these awful thoughts at about the time that the coffin was being lowered bit by bit into the ground as the priest droned, "Dust thou art, and unto dust thou shalt return" Now, it is this point at which, supposing that some person someplace is reading this, I must ask for my anonymous reader to trust me, though I myself did not believe it as it happened, because as the priest moved his lips to form the word "shalt", a loud thudding was heard coming from the grave. I looked to the priest. Was this something that usually happened at a funeral? Frowning, he shook his head at me and went on.

"In the name of the Fath-"

Bang bang bang.

"And of the Son-"

Bang bang bang. It was at this point I thought I was imagining things, until my mother turned her head and looked at me as though to say, "Did you hear that?" Regardless, the priest continued.

"And of the-"

Bang. Bang.

"Of the Holy Spirit. A-"

"Help! Let me out, damn you, let me out!" This was punctuated by banging and screaming, floating like a ghost from the inside of the mahogany coffin.

Not a moment was lost in hoisting the "corpse" from its final resting place. There was a lot that I could not remember the details of, shouting, arguing, panic and my mother shouting something, but the moment that the coffin was prised open is as clear as the words on this page. As the coffin lid was shoved back like the stone from the entrance of the tomb, my father's corpse sat bolt upright and drew a deep, loud breath, his eyes bulging from their sockets, his mouth still open with a silent scream too terrible to hear. His hands were covered in blood from his scratching at the coffin. Two of the fingernails never grew back.

It was later decided that my father must have fallen into some sort of coma which prevented him from waking that morning and slowed his pulse, although my grandmother insisted it was a miracle. My father's expression at the moment of his ressurection is perhaps so clear in my mind because he wore in forever after. He was not the same as he was, of course- he spoke less, and would scream the most terrible screams if the candles in he awoke to darkness.

My younger brother could not understand why our "dead" father was sitting eating breakfast with us the next morning anymore than I could. For example, he refused to believe that Father was really alive. Instead, he would insist that he was "undead" because, by his logic, a person is not put into a coffin unless he is dead. Yet he was not really alive either, I supposed- not as he had been. From then on he seemed to have difficulty staying still. He fidgeted. He bit his nails, and if he woke in the darkness he would shake and sob with fright like an infant.

He caught typhus a while later. Again, he refused to wake one morning, and again we buried him. But this time he did not wake up, though my brother and I waited for him. This time he was not undead, but one of the truly dead.