Grandma Saw a Dead Man Once

My grandmother and I have been roommates for about a year now.

That probably sounds pretty weird for a twenty-three-year-old to say, but I have to say that it's been a great arrangement.

My girlfriend and I have lived in the apartment for about three years now, both of us deciding that campus housing wasn't for us, and Grandma has honestly been the best roommate I've ever had. She cooks and cleans, doing so despite Regina and I telling her that we don't expect her to, and our laundry always seems to find its way into the closet once the hamper is full. She was one of those hippies who missed the sixties and is incredibly chill. I don't know many other grandmothers who like to sit on the back porch at night and have a beer or smoke a bowl. She doesn't judge me for what most people over fifty would consider an "unnatural relationship" either, which means the world to Regina and I. She's told my girlfriend many times that she considers her a second granddaughter and people in the community tell me how cool it is to have someone like Grandma in my life.

Most nights while we were sitting on the porch, having a beer or two and passing around some stuff that's not strictly legal here, Grandma would tell us how this reminded her of when she was young.

"My friends and I used to sit on the verandas and drink wine sometimes. The nights in Greece were warm, and we used to just sit out in our shifts and tease the boys when they came by. It was a marvelous time to grow up. The war was a distant memory, at least for those of us who were young, and life was full of possibilities."

Grandma grew up in Greece, missing the end of the war by three years, and she would often talked lovingly about her time there. She was never very clear about where she grew up, but it must have been near the water because many of her stories involved her and her friends swimming or going to the beach with boys they fancied. She had met Grandpa at seventeen, him studying abroad and her waiting tables in a cafe. She said it had been love at first sight, and he'd asked her to marry him once his time in Greece was over.

"He brought me back to California with him, and to me, it was the grandest place in all the world."

She often told us stories from when she was young, and Regina and I usually found ourselves laughing at the antics of her younger self. She and her friends had sounded less like a group of young girls and more like a group of street toughs, and Grandma told us how they had done everything from teasing boys into fighting to stealing a scooter and fleeing from the police. If it hadn't been for Great Aunt Sofie and Uncle Marteen, Grandma might have been a full-fledged criminal instead of a sometimes rapscallion.

They had all been happy stories, at least until tonight.

Regina had come home from work and I could tell that something was off. Regina is in nursing school and often has to work in the ER as part of her studies. They pay them for their time, of course, but it's expected that students will pursue jobs in the medical field so they can gain experience. Regina is usually full of stories about how she helped clear the airway of a baby or how she got a patient to tell her that the "prescription drugs" they had taken were more recreational than they'd let on. Grandma and I had already started our little revel without her, and she took the beer I handed her with a shaky hand.

I watched her sip at it for a few seconds, hands jittering, before finally asking her what had happened?

"They brought in a lady today. She had been stabbed over a dozen times and they said she had no pulse. They wheeled her in on a gurney and asked if I could notify the morgue that they had a Jane Doe to go back."

I nodded, "Not your first dead body, babe."

Regina shook her head, "I turned to get the phone, the paramedics walked away for a moment as a call came over their radio, and when I turned back, the woman had sat up. I was a little scared, but I thought it was just gas in the corpse or something. I turned back to the phone, and then the gurney creaked and she climbed off. She went walking up the hall like a ghost in her sheet, and when I started screaming, the paramedics came back in a hurry."

It seemed funny to me, a lady in a sheet shuffling up the hallway towards freedom, but I guess it was a little different when you were living it.

"Turned out she had just had a very weak pulse, and when she'd come to, she'd attempted to run. Her heart stopped before she could get to the door and she died right there in the ambulance bay."

"How horrible," I said, the image less funny now.

"She must have been searching for her killer, just like poor old Victor," Grandma said, patting Regina on the arm.

"Who?" I asked, not sure who this Victor was that Grandma was talking about.

"Victor Mustraff." she elaborated, "He was a handsome young man in the village I grew up in. He was quite a bit older than me, around twenty-two when I was thirteen, but he was so handsome. It was a shame what happened to him, but it was even worse what happened afterward."

I leaned forward on the cheap plastic chair I was sitting in and asked her if she would tell us?

She nodded, adding, "It's a little scary, though. At least, it gave me a shiver when I was young."

As she spoke, her eyes seemed to cloud a little, her mind traveling back over the years and the miles.

"It all started after Victor's murder."

They didn't realize it was a murder right away.

Poor Victor was a carpenter, he and his brother Issac. The two worked for their father, Marcus, but it was pretty clear who Marcus favored. Victor was set to take over his father's operation when his father grew too old to work, and Victor had let this, and his charm, go to his head. He was vain, we all knew it, but he was charming too and his vanity was really no big deal. He dated many girls in the village, and my friends and I were even taken with him.

Then, one day, he went missing.

We all searched for him, the whole town coming together to look for a favored son. Issac came with us, saying that his brother had left the job site after saying he had to go do something. We searched the woods, the hills, and everywhere around the village, but we couldn't find his car or Victor.

He was simply gone.

A week went by with no sign of him, but most of us just assumed he had taken after some woman from out of town. Victor was prone to that sort of behavior, but this was the longest he had ever been gone. Issac went right on working as if his older brother wasn't just gone. Marcus was inconsolable. We saw him many evenings sitting on his porch, sot drunk and weeping openly. Issac would often be there trying to console him, but Marcus wanted nothing from him. My friends and I changed sides of the street when we walked past Marcuse's house, not wanting to get drawn into their arguments.

Then, one night, someone said they saw something strange.

I heard it around the market first.

It was an older woman, someone's grandmother, who said they had been walking home when they had encountered someone.

Someone they thought was Victor.

"He was staggering on a badly twisted leg, kicking up dust from the cobbles with every shaky stagger. His clothes, however, looked like the kind of garments a dandy might wear. His vest was filthy, and his pants left a trail of water when he walked. I called his name, thinking he might have been in an accident, and when he turned around I thought for certain I might faint. The hair was wet and lank, the curtain seeming to spin in slow motion, and then I could see the weeping crater that was his face. He had no eyes, no nose, no mouth, and the hole where they had been did little but gurgle and wheeze. I screamed, turning away in my fright to clutch the edge of the fountain, and when I looked back, it was gone."

I scoffed at her story as the other old ladies clutched their rosaries and told her she was lucky to be alive. Old women often made up things like this, I thought in my youthful wisdom, and went back to my shopping. It had likely just been some beggar or a scarred-up vagrant. I told my friends about it that night as we sat smoking on my mother's veranda and we all laughed at how silly she had been.

When Julie saw him that night on her way home, it changed our outlook a bit.

Julie was supposed to spend the night, but she had run home after dark to get something. She was gone for a little while, longer than I would have thought, and when she came back, she was out of breath and sweating, close to hyperventilating. It took us quite a while to calm her down, but finally, she told us that she had seen the man from the old woman's story.

"It was just like she said." She gasped, her face fearful as she recalled it, "I was going home to get my records. When I came to the plaza, near the fountain, I heard a weird dragging sound. He came out of an alley and I turned to see his smooshed face looking straight at me. I ran as fast I could, but it seemed that no matter where I went, he was limping close by. I finally hid in the market until he shambled away, but I was terrified that he would find me."

We consoled her, trying to keep her quiet so she didn't disturb my parents with such talk, and eventually she went to sleep as her fear began to ebb.

The strange shambling man was all anyone could talk about in the coming days.

People saw him walking through the streets, shambling along as though looking for someone. He would always be gone whenever groups came to see him, but the longer it lasted, the more people started traveling in groups. There was a lot of speculation about who it was and what they were after, but some people thought it was Victor. Chief among them was Miss Trayda, a woman believed to be a Strega. She claimed that Victor was seeking his killer, and wanted to find his body so they could use cruentation to find them. She had conducted things like this before, offering to help the police if they would let her display the body, but she had often been turned down. Cruentation was something old that she believed in, and it seems to associate guilt with blood coming from a dead body when the murderer touches it. No one really believed in it anymore, it was an ancient practice, and besides, how would you collect everyone up to touch the body? Our town was home to hundreds, and collecting them all would be quite the effort. Most people rolled their eyes at Miss Trayda, but I think a lot of them secretly believed that the shambling specter was Victor.

When it broke into Marcus's house and scared him half to death, many more people thought it might also be Victor.

A few people whispered in the market the next day that the spirit had come after Marcus, and there were some rumbles about checking if he was the murderer. Miss Trayda had started offering money to anyone who could find Victor's body. Some young men had started roving the streets at night to see if they could follow the specter back to its place of rest, but it seemed to avoid them as easily as it avoided the constables that hunted for it. This went on for several weeks and it was a very exciting time. People sat and made up wild rumors about the stranger and what it wanted, and my friends and I were no exception.

Then, one night, it all came to an end.

I remember being woken up by someone screaming.

Our house wasn't too far away from Isaac's house, and when I went to my window, I could see the corpse as it carried him through the streets. It had him by the front of his shirt, Isaac beating at him as he carried him towards the plaza where he had first been seen. Others were looking out their windows, watching the grim procession as it made its way through the streets. Despite the horror, many of us put on our robes and shoes and ran to see where the shade was taking Isaac.

As he came into the plaza, it was hard for the crowd to ignore the blood that was oozing from him, his pours excreting his thick and tarish juices.

Miss Trayda, standing amongst the crowd by then, didn't have to tell them what that meant.

Isaac had already begun confessing his sin again and again for all to hear.

Upon hearing his brother confess, it was as though the shade folded in on itself.

He collapsed, dropping Isaac, and lying dead on the cobbles of the plaza.

The constables arrested him immediately, and I watched him beg for forgiveness as they hung him three months later. His lawyer drug out the proceedings, claiming that evidence provided by a corpse was not what modern justice was about, but the number of people who had heard him confess in the plaza was inarguable. Isaac himself plead guilty, despite his lawyers pleading for him to be silent, and he refused to leave the jail until he was led to the gallows. I heard he told people that Victor's shade visited his window every night, and he was afraid to leave the jail, fearing it might come after him again.

A hundred people saw Victor's corpse bleed that night, a hundred or more, and they all lived in fear of the shade for nearly a month.

That was, thankfully, the only time I saw a corpse walk.

Regina and I looked at each other, both of us trying to see if the other really believed her?

As I lay here now, Regina snoring thinly beside me, I can say that whether I believe it or not, it's a story that will follow me for quite some time.