Undying Dread: A 400-Year-Old Corpse, Locked to Its Grave

(NY Times, 9/25/2023)

In 17th-century Europe, the dead were a constant threat to rise again and bedevil the living. Now archaeologists have found the remains of a suspected child revenant.

The candles have burned down to sputtering stumps, oozing the memory of their younger selves into misshapen splotches on the wooden slat floor, but still, dawn is hours away.

I reach for the bottle on the table again but find it empty. I know that there’s more in the cellar. Down in the dark and the cold, where no amount of scrubbing can erase the stains, where I swear I hear the knocking in the moments before I start awake and rush to check the awkward barrier of stools and flour sacks and books piled up like rubble to bar the way.

I push the bottle back. Not worth it.

The dying embers of the fire and the waning candlelight fight a war of pale yellow and red against the cold white of the moon shining through the window. With every passing hour, the night gains ground, moonlight inching ever closer to my seat. Just the thought of its touch is enough to make me shiver.

I know I’ve earned the fear. Lashing out in anger again and again until no amount of apology could make amends that mattered.

Of course, it had happened in the cellar. On a night like this, empty bottle in hand, I’d stumbled down the narrow stairs in search of another. He’d barred my way. Begging me to stop. So small and kind in a world full of people like me.

I’d raised the bottle.

I’d brought it down.

Then kneeling with drunken tears, I’d screamed. Coated in the red evidence of my crime, I’d screamed. Wishing and praying to awaken from the nightmare, I’d screamed until my throat was raw, and I’d collapsed from exhaustion.

In the morning, I’d awoken stiff and dirty on the hard stone. The glassy eyes of my son unfocused and unblinking. He was gone.

I’d dragged what remained to the woods. Buried him and my shame in a deep grave, and returned to the house, desperate for another bottle, but unable to descend the stairs for fear that he’d be waiting. His eyes upturned and sad, angry and vengeful, ready to drag me off to the hell I knew I deserved.

The knocking started soon after. In the darkest hours of the night, after my weary body had finally succumbed to human need, I’d heard the gentle rapping. It sounded like a child’s knuckles on a solid wooden door, pleading to be released from the dark and cold of the world below. And it just wouldn’t stop.

At the first rays of the sun, I’d said a prayer for my survival and returned to the woods to find the grave undisturbed, but I knew better. I’d dug him up again, set a lock around his feet, and placed him face down in the dirt.

But when night returned again so did the knocking. Over and over, night after night. As the season crept toward the solstice, the knocking grew louder and more intense, demanding to be answered by one who’d answer for the crime.

And now, the longest night is at its peak. The night when the shroud is thinnest and ghostly forms haunt the world of the living. And I don’t know what to do.

The thought that haunts me is paying for my sin. My son returned to claim my soul as would be his right to do. But remembering the cold steel of the lock and the blisters still on my hands from heaping dirt and heavy stone upon the child’s final place, another thought is even worse.

What if something else is knocking? Something not small. Not innocent with unblinking pale eyes. Something altogether terrible, built for vengeance, and hungry.

I jump with a start, eyes on the cellar door as it rattles on its hinges.

I can hear the knocking.