I Am Alive

By Bob Liddil

The last thing I remember before I died was a feeling of weightlessness just before the noose around my neck jerked tight. Not that I didn’t deserve being hung. In the 24 years before my death, I’d been a highwayman, a thug, and a murderer for hire, a drunkard and a wife beater. By no means did I live a life tempered by mercy or compassion.

The whole “after death” thing was pretty surreal. Instead of the plunge into blackness one might expect, or for that matter, the plunge into a lake of fire I personally was expecting and certainly deserved, I found myself floating above my body, watching the hangman and his helpers take me down from the rope, and place me in a rough hewn pine box on a wagon pulled by the saddest looking donkey I have ever seen in life or afterward.

As I followed the wagon, I was keenly aware of several things at once. I could hear no sound, but I could feel the vibration enough to absorb what I would have heard, had I ears. The distortion was terrible and it was difficult to make out actual words, but what I “heard” was something like sound. My sight wavered between clear when I stayed still and blurred whenever I moved. It was disorientating to begin with, but gradually, as I followed the donkey wagon along the rutted wooden path that passed for a road in our village, I became oriented better, and that mitigated the overall effect.

About half a mile from where they hung me, the road forked North and down a long hill to where lay the cemetery. Westward and up the hill, the road joined a larger road that led to a large castle that dominated the sunset, as seen from the village. To my surprise, that was the direction toward which the wagon carrying my body turned. Realization washed over my specter like a cold north wind. My body had been sold.

It made sense when I thought about it for a moment. Among my many occupations as a living scallywag, grave robbing had been quite lucrative. I had delivered many a corpse to the same castle toward which my own former body now plodded. A fresh body, newly hung would fetch four silver pieces easily, enough for a night of ale and wenching at the village tavern with enough left over for a loaf of bread for the wife and kids.

I should have been outraged. More to the point though, I was fascinated as I watched my former body delivered like a bag of ground corn to the same hunchback from whom I’d collected many a coin as a living man. Unlike other deliveries though, this time I was able to go inside, to discover that which had always tweaked my curiosity: what did the master of the castle do with all those bodies?

The servant carried my corpse slung over his shoulder along several passageways, through several heavy oaken doors with me trailing along behind and slightly above. Candlelight is pretty dim compared to the sunlight from which I’d just come. I could still see pretty clearly but it was a bit hazy.

Beyond the last door, we entered a large room in the center of which stood a large table surrounded on three sides by a strange apparatus. Nearby, stood a tall older man wearing a white coat that hung almost to his knees. He turned toward us as we entered the room.
I heard the servant say, through that strange, distorted sound barrier between us, “Master, we have had a delivery.”

“Put him on the table, Igor,” came the reply, to which the servant responded by doing so. I then watched in complete fascination over the next two hours as the servant assisted the master in removing the brain from the inside of my former head and placing it in a large jar partially filled with some kind of bubbling liquid.

“So,” I thought, “ I am to be eaten by cannibals.” That turned out not to be the case at all.

When you are dead, I discovered, time does not flow the same way as when you are alive. When there is motion, there is chronology, true enough, but no real sense of time passing as I had known when breathing. I did not follow my body after it was separated from my brain, but rather, stayed with the jar in which that gray mass was stored. So it came to pass that I, as a ghost, for surely that is what I had become, haunted a pantry off the main laboratory, as I heard it called on more than one occasion.

Neither night, nor day meant anything to me. There was simply the coming or going of Igor or his master, who was referred to as “Doctor” by the occasional guest who visited the great rooms of the central castle. None of those guests ever visited the laboratory, though.

Bodies continued to be purchased. After a while, on the table in the laboratory, one single body came to lay, to which the doctor added fresh parts from a seemingly endless supply of corpses that appeared at the gate, brought along by nefarious men such as whom I used to be. The doctor grew agitated at the sight of many of these offerings as being “unacceptable,” as though he were expecting the deceased to be recent, as I had been, as opposed to moldering and maggot ridden, as were those stolen from graveyards around and about, by men wanting easy money, but unwilling to stand about waiting for someone to be hung.

Came at last a day when all parts were assembled into a single man on the laboratory table. By now, I knew a fair amount as to what the doctor was about. The apparatus surrounding the table was “electrical” as he described it. On the roof of the keep above that room was strung a rat’s nest of wires and metal rods, a “lightning catcher,” I’d heard it called. I saw it tested one thunder booming rainy night, and I’d felt fear for the first time in my life as a ghost. The crackling, popping, spark spitting, whining apparatus nearly exploded, but it was the raw energy that flowed through the wires that I feared and that energy had driven me from the room to seek refuge in the pantry near my brain.

The “creature” was pronounced ready several days later. I call it that because although it did resemble a man, and was in fact assembled from parts and pieces of dozens of men. It was a hideous, inanimation whose purpose escaped me completely until the exact moment Igor came for the jar containing my brain. It was as if a curtain had been pulled away from my eyes. The doctor installed my brain into the creature’s head. That was the finishing piece to the puzzle. Though still dead, the creature was complete and the doctor was now awaiting a storm. He didn’t have to wait long either.

Dark clouds had been building all day. Come the evening, all hell broke loose; with lightning raking across the sky like the devil’s own flickering tongue. Six times, bolts of white-hot lightning struck the upper part of the apparatus. Six times Igor closed the switches and adjusted the dials that regulated the electricity flowing into the creature through the bolts in his head.

The seventh strike was more powerful than all the previous ones had been. It seared the apparatus, fusing the wires and switches in a burst of sparks and fire. It exploded in a barrage of thunder so violent that not a single glass jar or beaker remained intact. It poured, raw and unimpeded into the body of the creature, causing it to convulse uncontrollably. It sent both the doctor and Igor diving for cover where there was none. It crackled throughout the laboratory, carving a pathway of destruction everywhere it touched. Then it vanished, leaving only darkness in its wake.

I tried to take shelter in the pantry but could not. I felt drawn toward the creature, which I could see in the darkness as still convulsing. I tried to escape but could not. I tried desperately to flee but could not. I was being sucked down into a well of indescribable horror, a vortex of light and darkness and sound and silence and chaos, then calm. An acrid stench filled my senses. I could hear a stirring in the darkness. Someone lit a candle. I opened my eyes. I took a deep breath and expelled it.

The voice of Igor said plainly in my hearing, “Master, you’ve done it.”

Then, the doctor’s voice exclaimed, “It’s ALIVE!” in a single triumphant scream of pure, unadulterated joy.

It was true. I was alive. I had returned from a death ordered and carried out by men from the village of my birth. Red rage surged through me. I knew what I’d been reanimated to do. No one would be able to stop me. Power crackled through ever cell in my body.

Revenge would be swift, satisfying and mine. I thought, “Why not start with the doctor and his servant,” and then sat bolt upright.

I am alive.

 (c) 2009 by Bob Liddil. All Rights Reserved