Chapter 1 - Prologue

Prologue-The Animator’s Voice


This is the room he had first woken up in. I had had to carry him all the way home, which was something I had not expected. When I came home, my parents immediately knew exactly what he was and where he had come from. Simply put, he had come from the grave.

There’s a little cemetery down the road from my house, in fact, I do not know why I had just called it small. It houses multiple family tombs of the like that shelter generations upon generations of families in the area. In winter, it is the creepiest place this side of the world. Many lonely apparitions are said to appear there. Although most of these sightings and tales had come from paranoid, over-active imaginative students of who were told of the tales before or upon entering the gloomy grave.

However, my family has been in the business of the dead for over two centuries, so I knew that apparitions were likely to have been seen, even by the exaggerators or village idiots. Apparitions give off strong feelings. Usually when someone reports a certain aura or feeling to an apparition, they are correct about its mood.
I have many lame reasons for resurrecting him from his resting place. I was a very lonely person when I was younger and possibly a little curt and cocky.

My room had been small and white and clear of clothes and papers. It had been one of my better weeks. It was a lovely day when he finally woke up, but I had drawn the blinds down for him. I imagined that the dead could be very sensitive to things while they were first experiencing the world again. I was right.

I had been sitting on a chair next to my bed where he slept. His breaths came in slow and steady and I was immensely proud of myself for bringing him back whole and healthy. My parents were not so happy about it. In fact, they were furious, but they were even more worried for the soul that I had brought back.

My family has a great respect for the dead, so great in fact that we have quite a name in the area we live in. We are quite famous for our respect for the dead, for our powers with them as well. For a while now however, we have kept the business deep underground for obvious reasons. The new century would not understand and we would be swamped with unwanted visitors.

My mother had brought extra blankets in case he was cold, which he probably was for the weather outside had been atrocious. He had curled up almost instantly under the new covers as if reflecting his gratitude with his actions. He stayed curled up in the same, exact position until he had woken up. My father checked in all of the time, glaring at me with rebuke and looking with concern on the reborn corpse. I had no idea what I had brought back. He had come back human, but he had been vicious at one time. He had been a monster.

Then, the eye that was not buried in the covers opened up to the bright world. It was the afternoon after the night when I had woken him. He instantly screeched and dug himself under the heavy layers of blanket. Maybe the blinds had not been enough to protect his sensitive eyes, I had thought at first. At first, I had made many assumptions about him and his origins.

He had also thought that he had woken up to his old century, which was expected. If there was a heaven, the dead came back without any memory of it. I could see him shiver beneath the blankets. I turned my chair about so I could rest my arms on its back and I watched him. My mother came in with dinner for me and as I sipped at soup and clinked my fork against a plate of chicken and rice, he slowly came out. He had very feminine features. The skin on his face was very smooth and young and his eyes were very thin and small but perfectly placed on his face. He had pronounced lips and his frame was incredibly skinny as if he had been starving. He glanced at me briefly, but his gaze almost instantly dropped to the food in my hands. He stared in awe at the plate of food. I saw him lift his head slightly, sniffing the air like an animal, wondering, questioning. Then he looked beyond my shoulder and saw the TV and jerked back. He stared at me, then. It was so suspicious I almost laughed. It was not nice to laugh at the dead, however. That would not do at all.

He did not say a thing for a whole three days. I imagined that he did not realize he could speak. Or perhaps he knew that he could and his mind was just so full of memories and of the strange and fantastic objects in the room that he could not speak.

He had the blanket wrapped around his shoulders and renewed garments. When a corpse is very far off, their clothes will regenerate as if they were part of the actual body. They were strange clothes for someone who had died barely over a hundred years ago. It reminded me a lot of a band’s uniform, the kind of band that goes marching for their school on game day or perhaps of a Union soldier’s uniform from the Civil War. His uniform had been all red and it had been very ragged. He had little strips of cloth buttoned over his shoulders, of which I was fairly sure were there for simple display. First thing was first, no matter how awed he was at the food, he had to take a shower first. He may have been renewed but that did not mean he had not come with an odor.

My mother came in at that moment. She had always told me to let them choose. I would let him choose the clothes he wanted to wear and what towel to use. Frankly, it was not just a matter of respect, it was a matter of free will. Nobody (dead or not) deserved to be a servant. So is the way of my family and I agree with them wholeheartedly. He got up with strong posture, sliding off of the bed with some fantastic grace that would have just impressed kings and queens of his time. He could have been important at one time. Or he could have been just incredibly haughty. Chances were he had been both. I had been impressed with his composure. If I had woken up in his place, I would have been incredibly frightened. My wits’ end would have been around the corner to jump me.

I had walked to the end of my bed, past it, and stopped in front of a double-doored closet. I opened it for him and made a curt nod as a bow and told him to pick something out. I might have been stammering a bit for I had been nervous. I was only a high schooler after all. At the time of his rebirth, I had been 16 and on the verge of hitting my final growth spurt. I had already acquired my deepened voice and was already growing hair in places that I had once thought would remain naked forever. I noticed, as he got up and his hair swayed, that on the right side of his head his hair was shorter than on the other. I would find that if one were to walk around him, the hair was like a spiral. The tips twirled around the side of the right side of his face about at the cheek line to the middle of his forearm on the left. It had been a precise cutting job. More stunning than that however, was the color of his hair. It had been a darker color than I had ever encountered before in my entire life and I had been in many a crowded places. The complete and utter blackness and opacity of it, like it had been feeding on the light and sucking it in, is something that I will never forget.

Then I noticed his expression, zombie-like as his movements were. He looked deep in thought, his eyes whirring with glints of color and…ice. Something seemed to be shaking up inside of him, behind those tired eyes. The tired eyes are normal. Many come back like zombies for a time and then reawaken to their true spirit after. However, he never lost the eyes, glacier eyes, with the ice tumbling and cracking against each other constantly behind them.

I stepped back from him as he raided the closet and shuffled out a regular, white, button-up shirt and an old button-up vest that had gone out of style at school a while back and black slacks of which I had feared were too short for him. He was taller than I was and the skinniness made him seem lanky. That soon changed as my mother quickly fattened him up with her hospitable cooking. The red uniform, which had been rather small to begin with, hung off of his form like rags on a scarecrow. The buttons on the ends of his sleeves looked about to fall off, dangling on thinned thread and shredded fabric. The collar of his attire was frayed and darkened with some sort of grease or dirt, same with the ends of his pants.

At that moment, I had wondered how he had died.

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