The Undead: The Living Corpse

Part 1: The Death, the Retrieval - Chapter 4

However, we are talking about an age and a place where people believed in superstitions, forest fairies and ghosts. And after all, Nikos had no other choice. He would either bring a dead body in the house or escort a dead body out of it, for his wife had withered to a point where death was imminent and that is what the couple of villagers who managed to visit Panagiota had attested to Nikos at the time. "Do something or she will not survive another fortnight!" they had warned him, absolutely certain that the next time they saw Panagiota's face, she would be in a coffin covered with flowers.

Her plan was this: They would reclaim the body from its grave, bring the deceased girl back home and bury her under the bed. Sounds highly unrealistic? Well, Panagiota did not think so and, what is more, she even had her arguments ready. Everyone and everything seemed to be in their favour: the fact that Maria was buried in the small graveyard by the forest where only small heaps of the forest's soil covered the dead bodies; the fact that they happened to live just by the forest, only a few minutes' walk from the cemetery; the fact that under their bedroom and the small living room, there was an underground basement, used as a storage area. And of course, one must not forget the fact that if anything was to go wrong, Panagiota's own brother (and the dead girl's uncle) was the village mayor.

But Maria didn't want to think that far ahead. She had planned everything up to the last detail and it seemed that crying and sobbing was not the only thing she had been doing by hiding away in her balcony. One could argue that all this time her main concern had been to come up with the perfect plan, beginning with the very story of Maria appearing in her vision. It didn't take long to convince Nikos. Women, it seems, had their way with things even back then. Of course, not all women were the same, but when it came to devising the most grotesquely unscrupulous and darkest plan, it looked as if Panagiota had nailed it. That is the dark power of death and this is how it can blind even the most common sense.