In the rain-lashed port town of Blackshell Cove, the dead did not rest—they loitered.
Mortimer Fain was the only undertaker left who knew the old ways. While others nailed coffins shut or weighted bodies with stones, Mortimer practiced the Ninefold Nod—a ritual of whispered words and precise knots tied around the wrists and ankles of the deceased. When done correctly, the dead would lie still. When done poorly…
Well. That’s why the town had a curfew after sundown.
Mortimer’s secret was simple: he didn’t just bury bodies. He hired them.
For a few coins pressed into their cold palms, the dead would work the night shift—mending nets, turning salt meat, even scrubbing the soot from the lighthouse lens. By dawn, they’d crawl back into their graves, payment clutched in stiff fingers. It wasn’t kindness. It was a transaction.
But then the Harbinger’s Luck shipwrecked on the jagged rocks offshore.
Twenty-seven drowned sailors washed up, bloated and blue-lipped. Mortimer prepared them as usual, tying their knots, tucking copper pennies between their fingers. But when he returned at sunrise, the graves were undisturbed, the coins still there.
That night, the docks were full of movement.
The sailors weren’t working. They were waiting.
And they weren’t alone.
Every corpse Mortimer had ever paid off now stood among them—still knotted, still silent, but with their heads tilted toward the sea like dogs catching a scent. In their palms, the coins had melted into blackened, twisted things.
The townsfolk bolted their doors. Mortimer knew better. He walked to the shore, where the tide lapped at something half-buried in the sand—a sodden ledger, its pages filled with names. His name. Their names. Every transaction, every coin, every unspoken rule.
And at the bottom, in ink that glistened like fresh blood:
"Final payment due."
The next morning, Blackshell Cove found the graveyard empty, the undertaker’s shop looted of every coin.
Now, when the fog rolls in, you can hear the creak of wet ropes and the rustle of old wool coats along the docks.
And if you’re foolish enough to peek through your shutters, you’ll see them—standing ankle-deep in the surf, staring at the horizon.
Waiting for whatever comes ashore to collect its debt.
