I don’t know. Can you drink enough coffee to keep properly alert all night just staring at a fresh dead body? Listening for the slightest sound? That most delicate twitch of the lips. A finger twitch.

We do it, but come morning, who can remember if they’ve managed to stay fully awake enough to do the job? There’s always that chance you’ve drifted off and never know it. Like waking up behind the wheel of the car after half a second and realizing you’ve dodged a bullet. A certain deliriousness comes on, a punch drunkenness, especially when the voices finally come gurgling up and you witness that “calling out” from the recently dead. It happens so fast. It’s hard to keep up. Better have pen in hand. Always work in pairs. 

I know what you’re thinking. Drugs. There are drugs to stay awake, far more effective than caffeine. We’re regulated and we get tested. The last thing any higher echelons want are lawsuits caused by sloppy notetaking, especially when there’s money involved.

I know what else you’re thinking. Why wouldn’t we just record the night, right? Cameras. Audio. Remotes. Why have anyone on scene at all? Automate it.

We would, but that somehow deters the spirits, or whatever this is communicating through the dead. It’s still early in the phenomenon, so we’re in the dark on a lot of the facts. There are those who believe these are the ghosts of the dead speaking. Others think they’re wandering ghosts taking advantage of an opportunity. Some are convinced they’re dimensional beings. Maybe a form of aliens breaking through. Or that it’s demon possession. Or the first stages of a zombie-like disease. Angels? God. Or gods? You can understand why so many faith sects are popping up around the theories, as well as old religions attaching themselves to the mystery. Remember when people joked about there being a little church on every corner? Well, that’s not much of an exaggeration these days. 

All I know is, you can’t argue about something strange turning in the world when a three-day-old corpse gets chatty in the middle of the night. You either stick around and listen and take notes, or get the hell out of the room. Lucky me, I had the stomach for it. It pays pretty well, too. 

We do know this much. It seems we’ve been missing out on truly miraculous things by embalming bodies far too soon. Come to find out, leaving the dead alone for three days allows a certain possession to happen. At least around her, in the mountains—these mountains. Who knows how long it’s been going on or why it’s only around here and not other parts of the world. Could be the soil. Could be the water. Could be the air. Could be a curse or a blessing.

One thing’s for sure, it’s breathed new life into the dying economy of southeast Kentucky. Unemployment’s down. Spirits are up. The county legalized liquor by the drink after being dry for six decades. New hotels. Restaurants. RV parks. A dozen new funeral homes. They broke ground on a new twenty-acre cemetery just outside town last week. People from all over the world make way here, toting their dead along to see what they’ll say, if anything. They gotta have something to do while they wait.

That’s the catch. There’s no guarantee anything will happen. There’s also no guarantee that what the dead offer up during a “calling out” will be at all useful or worth the trip. I had an eighty-eight-year-old great uncle who’d never left his home county in his life spout Mandarin Chinese for ten minutes before he wound down. My grandmother only spoke for thirty-seven seconds, about the man who’d raped her when she was fifteen. He was arrested the next week and died in jail. His corpse reportedly never said a word, it just lay there and shook like it wanted to get up and run. 

Old folks in the mountains used to “sit up” with the dead for truly practical reasons, though that practice got saddled with lots of folklore over the centuries. It was a necessary way to keep the animals off the body, to keep body snatchers away. It was also a great excuse to stay up all night drinking moonshine and telling ghost stories.

This mountainous region was always known as the Journey Mountains, long before the white invasion. The Cherokee, the Shawnee, claimed it was called that when they arrived, they just didn’t say who told them.

It could be linked to a nearby meteorite crater. This spot sits in the middle of one.  Or is it a sign of the apocalypse? The holiest of rollers would love that. Or has a tiny black hole from space shot through this part of the Earth? Or are we cursed? Is this just the first signs of more reanimation to come? The more you think about it, the more theories there are. What’s funny is, that with all the “calling outs” taking place, you’d think one of “them” would have something to say about this strangeness. But no, they haven’t. It’s business as usual for whoever, whatever, it is. 

We’re not sure how far out the region covers. Areas where bodies respond branch out until the frequency of success slows down, often kickstarting the local economies within the most successful areas. People need things to do besides wait for their dead to speak up and dispose with them. And it may look chaotic, but much of what’s happening is actually organized. Governmental bureaucracy finds its way into most chaotic things, adding more confusion, but with paperwork. It didn’t take long for the city, county, state and federal leaders to get their greedy fingers into organizing and legislating and charging fees. Attorneys even have more work. You can have a DNPCO on file—Do Not Perform Calling Out. But then the families often sue to bypass those, which doesn’t do much good when you’ve only got three days to work with. 

You know when you’re close. The smoke columns from the body pyres go a mile high. You can smell it. We had a problem for decades with abandoned mountaintop removal coal mine sites, left behind like moonscapes, eroded and treeless, the tops of mountains blasted away, leftover ground pushed into valleys and streams, the coal scraped away. Not anymore. The flat spots along the ridges of the old crater are massive burial lands. Some used as mass gravesites. Some as old-style cemeteries. Even in these days when mass cremation is preferred, plenty of people opt for leaving bodies intact. My hometown smells like a combination of house fires and burning flesh and flowers, but you get used to it. There was a problem with ashes and bones clogging up the river system for a while until that was outlawed, though some sects require it as part of their faith.

The worst calls have to be the children, especially ones so young. It’s hard to keep your last meal down when you hear the sound of a crazed, snake-handling preacher in the middle of a hellfire-and-brimstone sermon come screaming from the lips of a child that’s only cooed from hugs and kisses and cried for mother’s milk in its short life. That’ll make you want to walk out of a home and quit.

** Last CALLING OUT communication of deceased subject, former Stenographer for the Dead (SD), sub-region 7, Joseph Ackerman (License: 0997TN), as witnessed by this SD, William Grace (License: 4456LA), September 17, 2027, sixty-three (63 hours postmortem).**

………………………End Report………………………