Long are the hours of a Mortician, filled as they are with the preservation and preparation of a cadaver for viewing and burial – the time consuming chores of embalming, the grooming and dressing of the dead. Many a day, stretching into evening or night, I have spent toiling in my morgue, with little to occupy my mind or senses but the omnipresent stench of formaldehyde and the lingering spectre of death.


    Upon reflection, it was this boredom and a general indifference to the mundanities of everyday existence, driven by an acute understanding of the human condition unique to my trade, that led to my eventual undoing.


    But I am getting ahead of myself: My name is Johnathan Robert Briggs, lifetime resident of Providence, New England, and this is my confessional, for I am a practitioner of that profane and accursed art known as necromancy, and I have spoken with the dead.


    My tale begins in late August, when I was informed of the passing of one of my mentors, Dr. Eliza Hugo, a retired Professor of biology and anthropology who had lectured at my Alma Mater, Miskatonic University, during my tenure as a graduate student.


    Her sudden and unexpected death came as a minor shock to me, for despite her advanced age and lackadaisical attitude towards life, the Professor was famous for her boisterous good health and many of her colleagues had predicted that she would live to become a centenarian.Find this and other great novels on the author''s preferred platform. Support original creators!


    Her death so shook me that when I later attended her interment, I made some discreet inquiries to the funeral director concerning the cause and nature of her passing, but was met with curt dismissal and obtained no definite answers.


    From her family and close relatives I learned she had grown reclusive in her retirement, withdrawing to her studies, and was rumoured to have been in the early stages of writing a grand book or scientific paper. Indeed, my own contact with the Professor had become intermittent, our meetings growing further and further apart, until we had all but stopped meeting in person, our interactions limited to the exchange of the occasional letter or correspondence.


    My last communication from her, a long letter pinned only three weeks prior to her death, contained no mention of ill-health, but rather the excited proposal of a research trip to the Near East, of which she had already begun the initial preparations.


    Thus, when I received word that I had been named as a beneficiary to her estate, I found my thoughts continually returning to the late Professor, and her fascination, bordering on mania, of certain Mesopotamian burial practices, and the curious mummification methods of the ancient Egyptians.


    I recall: my university days would often find me in her office, where we would debate for hours. The Professor was quite convinced that the origins of our modern practices concerning the preparation of the dead could be traced directly back to those Egyptian pharaohs of old, and older still, to those ancients who occupied the river deltas of the Fertile Crescent during the age of prehistory.


    She had once joked, “while our modern gravestones and mausoleums pale to the grandeur of the great pyramids of yore, the average middle-class American receives a decadent embalming on par with that of Tutankhamen.”