It was clear that a murderer was on the loose. And not just any murderer: a real son of a bitch. A professionalised psychopath. What kind of joke was that cat mask? And the syringe? I imagine what he injected them with was some sort of poison that stopped the heart. A real professional, I’d say. Maybe it was one of those substances that are undetectable in autopsies. It was also true that no one was going to perform an autopsy on the baker or the witch. In any case, as if having to live with this mad time weren’t enough, now we had to add a serial killer to the equation.

  The baker and I explained her situation to the witch. We entered the expected loop of questions and answers.

  “Am I dead?”

  “Is this a joke?”

  After a lot of talking, she ended up understanding, like the baker.

  “We must go to the village, to tell them the news,” said the witch.

  “I don’t think we should mention the killer,” said the baker. “We must be cautious; otherwise panic will spread.”

  “Are you mad?” said the woman. “How are we going to hide the killer? That son of a bitch will keep killing, and if people aren’t warned, it’ll be easier for him.”

  “The witch is right,” I said.

  “Medium.”

  “Erm… yes, you’re right. I don’t think we should hide it.”

  “All right… fine…” said the baker. “I let myself be guided by the cliché of ‘let’s not panic’. You know, in films they always hide these things.”

  “It makes no sense.”

  “No, it makes no sense.”

  “Let’s go to the village!” said the man.

  “No! Wait. I’m going to check the burial register. Just in case someone else resurrects and we have to dig them up.”

  The two of them followed me to my office. The gravedigger’s office. Don’t picture it as a gloomy place, with skulls, cobwebs… No. It was a normal office. Quite grey. Small. Dimly lit by a small high window.

  I consulted the register.

  “Indeed, today only the baker and the witch were due to resurrect,” I said, pointing with my finger.

  “Medium.”

  “What? Oh, yes… look… Two days with no deaths. Therefore we can expect two days with no resurrections.”

  “Check it properly, for God’s sake,” said the man. “Let’s not leave some poor devil locked up all weekend.”

  “Look,” I said. “The next dead man is Methuselah.”

  “Ah, I remember!” said the witch.

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  “Of course. When the rest died, you two were still alive.”

  “Did only Methuselah die that day?”

  “Yes, only him.”

  I ought to make a small aside here: Methuselah was the goatherd. They called him that because he was almost a hundred. No one knew the man’s real age. How fortunate Methuselah was! He had lived a hundred years and now could live another hundred, growing younger and younger.

  “Well… now that we know no one else is going to resurrect, we can go to the village,” I said.

  So the group set off towards the village, ready to bring the good news to our neighbours. We were a bunch of nutters. The resurrected danced and sang along the way, happy to be alive.

  I haven’t told you about the place where our story unfolds. My village was small. Tiny. Largely cut off from the world. You hear news of looting, riots and things like that in the cities. But here… none of that. Everything seems to carry on as if time were moving forwards.

  You won’t find a house more than two storeys high. Only low houses, built from humble materials. There are about a hundred of us. Most people work in farming and raising livestock. But we also have a “writer”. I say “writer”, in quotation marks, because that idiot hasn’t written a line in a long time. He “lost his inspiration”, or something like that. Perhaps reality itself had reached such heights of absurdity that he no longer considered it appropriate to keep writing fiction. You could say that “reality had surpassed fiction”. You could say that I, the gravedigger, had inherited the role of writer. Although I consider myself more of a humble chronicler.

  We were walking along the road that led to the village. As usual, the cemetery was on the outskirts. We ran into a few neighbours. The old milkmaid, milking her cow.

  “What are those two doing singing? Weren’t they dead and buried?” she said.

  “We’re alive!” said the baker. “We’ve been resurrected. The ‘unburier’ pulled us out of the coffin we were locked in.”

  “Nothing surprises me any more! Look at Clotilda,” she said, pointing at her cow. “She’s getting younger and younger. Soon she’ll stop giving milk. What will we do then?”

  “Don’t be so gloomy! Can’t you see she’s old and now she’s going to start growing younger? She’s going to be young again!” said the witch.

  “And what would I want with being young? I’ve already been young, and I’ve already been old. I was ready to die… And then… this stupidity with time…”

  “How strange these old people are…” the witch whispered.

  “Don’t you realise your husband is going to come back to life?” said the baker.

  “That’s all I needed! That idiot coming back!” said the milkmaid.

  “Let’s get out of here…” I said. “This woman is bringing me down.”

  The group carried on, but they were no longer singing or dancing. The pessimistic milkmaid had popped their balloon.

  “Let’s go to my house first,” said the baker. “I have to tell my wife she’s not a widow any more!”

  We took a small detour. The baker’s house was on the way. It was a low house, like almost all the others. It was built of slightly better materials; the door was decorated with carved stone and the roof was, frankly, very well kept. It was a pleasant little house to look at.

  “Did you bring the keys?” said the witch.

  “What do you think? Do you think they were going to bury me with my house keys in my pocket?”

  The baker stood looking at the house. He wanted to knock, but a part of him was afraid. How would she react? His wife was prone to fainting. Would she faint when she saw her beloved husband? So elegant and, a little—just a little—younger than the last time she saw him, stony-faced in the box.

  Since he couldn’t bring himself to knock, the witch stepped forward and, with great cheek, knocked at the door. The man ran his hand through his hair and straightened up, adjusted his clothes and prepared himself, the way an actor prepares to step on stage. No one opened… so the witch knocked again.

  “She might not be at home…” I said.

  “Of course she’s at home,” said the baker.

  The man began to grow impatient.

  Finally, the door was opened wide. Who opened it? His wife? No. The one who opened it was “another” man. Specifically, the bakery assistant. A young, strong lad, a bit stupid but physically attractive. The young man was naked; only a sheet covered him from the waist down.

  “What… what the fuck are you doing here?” said the baker.

  The young man looked stunned.

  “No, what are you doing here?” said the young man.

  The baker’s wife, half-naked, appeared at the door.

  “I’m back,” said the man listlessly.

  The woman fainted, dropping to the ground like a lead weight.