Trollheart

He's been dead for six, no seven months now. I know this, as I went to his funeral. Everyone around here did. He was well liked. But not that well liked that he should be again walking among the living. He had been somewhat irrepressible in life, had Mr. Bennett, and he had lived to a good age – at one hundred years they said he might get one more, but he made liars of them and lasted for two after that. Many people around here thought he would never die.

Seems he didn't.

Except, I know he did.

And yet, here he stands. Irrepressible is one thing. Long-lived is one thing. But when you finally give up the ghost and let them bury you, you're not expected to come back. Death is a one-way ride; there is no return ticket option.

Except that Mr. Bennett seems to have found one.

Before I can open my mouth to speak to him he turns away. Whether this is because he is afraid that if anyone sees him they will quickly re-inter him in the ground (perhaps ramming a sharpened wooden stake into his heart to ensure he stays there – some people watch far too much Buffy and True Blood) or he has urgent business somewhere else (how urgent can the business of a dead man be?) I don't know, but I know one thing: I'm not letting him get away. If only to sate my own morbid curiosity, if only to point him out to some other living soul and confirm I'm not going mad; that the corpse of Josiah Bennett, (1914-2017) is walking the streets as if someone has forgotten to tell him he is dead, and behaving in a most unseemly manner for a corpse, I have to follow him.

Besides, I'm curious: where does a newly-risen dead person go? I thought he might go back to his house – first denuding his door of a veritable family of menus from A Taste of Mumbai, Pizza Haven and Il Bistro Italiano – but he turns in the opposite direction, heading west. I follow him as unobtrusively as I can (can a dead man hear you pursuing him?) and though we encounter several people along the way, and though I point him out with initial excitement and then successively waning enthusiasm, nobody cares. All I get in response is a weak, tired smile and the by now familiar assurances of His imminent arrival.

I can feel the darkness beginning to gather now around me, like thick smoke pouring in to obscure the world, or at least our town. I am reminded uncomfortably of my experience with the Major Extra Tar, and the first faint stars begin to appear in the sky as the weak sun decides it has had enough and retires, ready to try again tomorrow. Out onto the outskirts of town we go, and I see he is heading for the church. A cold feeling gnaws in my heart, and I pull my jacket tighter around me as the evening chill begins to bite. My jacket is wet from the recent rain, so is of little comfort to me, but I cling to it anyway.

From somewhere, a sudden scream. I whirl, ready for ... what? I'm neither armed nor any kind of a fighter. I avoid confrontations and violence whenever I can. I'm not a coward, exactly; I just don't invite trouble. You live longer that way. Mr. Bennett would obviously disagree. Forty years in the army, three major wars; you can bet he invited a whole lot of trouble. And dealt it out with gusto too. And look at the age he lived to! Hell, even the grave, it seems, couldn't defeat him! But that's him and I'm me, and what can I do if someone's shriek for help pierces the night? Sorry love: my white charger's in the shop and they repossessed my armour, you know how it is..

But I need not worry, at least not about this, as it's quickly clear that the scream is not one of fear or terror, but a ribald one, an involuntary one which has resulted when one of three women, all very much the worse for wear even at this early hour, tottering down the road in front of me, felt the rather cold hand of one of the three men they are sharing their company with slide up her skirt. She collapses against him, her scream turning to bubbling laughter, and the six of them, sharing a bottle, stagger down the road without so much as a glance from their exhausted, drooping eyes at me. The strains of their drunken song drifts back up to me from the valley into which they have descended, to the familiar football chant Here we go....

He is coming, He is coming, He is coming. He is coming, He is coming, He is com-ing. He is coming, He is comng, He is coming, He is coming. HE – IS – COMING!

Into the valley of death, I think, and realise I have lost sight of the shuffling Mr. Bennett, but how far can he go anyway? He has a gammy leg. Oh yeah: and he's dead. Not likely to cover much ground with – I see him again, entering the church on unsteady feet. I let him enter, then follow, as quietly as I can. I haven't been in a church in years. I think the last time was when - someone - my wife? Not sure; someone close to me, anyway - died. And before that, a long time too, so I'm not in awe of the power of God or anything, but even so, something, some ingrained, almost genetic response makes me lower my head and walk quietly. If, by some chance, I end up speaking to the corpse of Mr. Bennett, I feel sure I will whisper. It's like going into a library. You just naturally fall under its spell.

As I enter the church Bennett is already halfway up the aisle. I watch him, in a mixture of horrified wonder and confusion, asking myself, what is he doing here? Then I remember I'm talking about a man to whose funeral I brought my own best flowers and who I watched being buried, helped throw in the sods of earth on top of his wooden box, as if we were all anxious to get him in the ground, and such questions become almost ludicrous. My real question, asked of myself, should be What am I doing, tracking a dead man across town into a church?

But I have no answer, other than that there is that inside of me that must know. What power could be strong enough, what impetus important enough to wake the dead and call them from their graves? Is Bennett the only one? The sudden implications of this hits me, and I find myself asking myself if I remember seeing any other dead men or women walking in the town, but I can't honestly say. Perhaps those people I thought were tired were really ...? I don't know. My entire life these days seems to be lived in an almost dreamlike state, and I can't be sure of anything.

My headache seems to be making tentative plans for a reprisal against me, gathering its strength.

But if my eyes have not also betrayed me, then I'm watching a dead man stand in the aisle of Saint Jeremy's, standing there, a shaft of moonlight spearing in through one of the high stained-glass windows seeming to catch him as if in a spotlight, as if old Mr. Bennett is about to give the performance of a lifetime. If this is indeed the case, he will have a very small audience.

It's a strange feeling, hearing a dead man talk. I'm not that close that I can make out the words, but I can see his head bobbing up and down and his arms raised in the air, some sort of sound coming out of him. At first I mistake this for a prayer: Josiah Bennett is supplicating himself, offering himself to the god he believed in while alive. Then, as I inch a little closer, ducking down behind one of the rear pews, the cavernous acoustics of the church carry his words back to me, and I know it is no prayer he utters, or if it is, it's a very dark one.

“... everlasting?” he sneers, his voice sounding like logs popping in a winter fire, all sharp and hissy with an undertone of earthiness, as if he has gravesoil in his teeth, which he very well may do. “Believe in me? He who believeth in me, though he die, yet shall he live, we were told. They preached that, every Sunday at mass, and we all believed it. We wanted to believe it. We told ourselves it was true, must be true, for if nothing existed beyond this life, if there was no reward at the end, why bother being good? Why lead a good life if in the end all there was waiting for you was darkness and silence?” A strange sound issues from him, and I realise that he is crying. Or trying to, anyway: any moisture in his body has by now long dried up, and no tears will come. But his body, that frail, almost skeletal body shakes with dry sobs.

“But it was all a lie!” he fumes, his upraised arms now ending in fists, as he vents his rage on the altar, snarling at the huge wooden cross that adorns its centre, the figure upon it looking more like someone in repose than one in torment. The mild, kind eyes of Christ look down on him. There is forgiveness in them, eternal, endless forgiveness. Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do. But Josiah Bennett does not want forgiveness - he knows exactly what he’s doing - and he has not come to offer any either.

“There is nothing after death!” goes on Bennett. “Nothing! Just ... just ...”

Suddenly, the energy, the anger, the rage seems to drain out of him like water going down a plughole or air escaping a balloon, and like that balloon he deflates, sinking to his knees with a noisy crack of bones, his head falling so low upon his breast that I fear for a moment it will snap off. “Nothing.”

It's a whisper now, ironically carried, via the acoustics, to my ears as clear and as perfectly audible as his shouts and roars had been a moment ago. For a long instant, Josiah Bennett is not 103 years old, but six, or seven, or four: a child, a child whose fantasy has been ripped from him, a child whose world has collapsed, staring with tear-filled eyes as he realises it is all a lie, and Santa Claus does not exist.

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Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018