To be honest, bedroom dramas don’t interest me much. And what do I care what that woman does? Wasn’t she a widow, after all?

  We gravediggers learn something early on: we must not judge. When someone dies, a certain tacit contract is activated. It doesn’t matter what you did or didn’t do in life. Everything is forgiven. The dead must not be judged. And what if, in life, he was an idiot? And what if he was unfaithful, or a cheat? None of it matters. Death makes tabula rasa of your past. “It’s always the best that go.” That’s precisely the point. When you go, your sins no longer matter. As I said, we gravediggers do not judge.

  We helped the baker’s wife. As best we could. Once she came round, we left, leaving the baker at his house. You can imagine the classics: “How could you do this to me?”, “So soon you forgot me…”, “Your husband’s corpse was still warm and you were already with someone else…” I liked that last one. I really enjoy funeral remarks. There are only a handful of them, and they repeat themselves, death after death. I imagine death somehow activates a mechanism in our brains that makes us blurt out clichés uncontrollably.

  The group had lost one of its members. A soldier had fallen in battle. In a humiliating way, too. Now it consisted of a gravedigger and a witch. What a combination. We carried on towards the public square. My idea was to start shouting to anyone who would listen, like a town crier: “There’s a killer on the loose! He kills wearing a cat mask!” That was roughly what I had in mind. But, as you can imagine, it didn’t happen. We ran into the mayor.

  The mayor was an old man, short and fat. He looked like the “Monopoly” man, but without a moustache. I always thought he looked very mayor-like—a sort of king of the dwarfs. Since this was a small village, he still had to work as a cobbler. The mayor was one of those political leaders who benefited from the phenomenon of inverted time. He had one year left of his term. But that year will never arrive. So that little “Monopoly” gentleman, however pleasant he seemed, was a dictator.

  “Mayor! Mayor!” I shouted. “We have important news!”

  “What are you doing here?” he said, looking at the witch. “Have you cast one of your spells?”

  “That’s exactly what this is about,” I said.

  “To be honest, I never believed you had real powers.”

  “Well, I do!” the woman said.

  “Anyway…” I said. “The baker has also come back to life.”

  “The baker?”

  “Yes, and all the dead are coming back, in order.”

  “Oh! Tell the baker not to go home, will you?”

  “Too late,” said the woman.

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  “Well, the dead are going to come back to life, but that isn’t what we wanted to tell you.”

  “What is it, then?”

  “There’s a killer.”

  “A killer?”

  “Yes,” the witch interrupted. “He murdered me and the baker.”

  “How is that possible? Didn’t you have a heart problem?”

  “Yes. Apparently the weapon he uses is a syringe. It must contain some compound that makes your heart stop.”

  The mayor fell silent, thinking.

  “We mustn’t let panic spread,” said the mayor.

  Why does everyone say that? Another one. That meaningless phrase: “let’s not panic.” Wouldn’t it be appropriate for a little panic to spread? There’s a fucking killer on the loose, a psychopath with a syringe and a cat mask. The neighbours were vulnerable, like lambs, at the mercy of that son of a bitch. Was the mayor hiding something? Or the baker? It was highly unlikely that the killer was that little fat man. It would be easy to recognise a short, chubby cat. We would have caught him quickly. We are dealing with a mystery that must be solved. I will suspect anyone who comes out with that idiotic “let’s not panic”.

  “The killer will go on killing,” I said. “If people don’t know anything, it will be easier for him to keep killing.”

  “What have you got in your head?” the witch shouted, pressing her index finger against the mayor’s forehead. “Don’t you realise people are at the mercy of the killer?”

  The mayor brushed the woman’s hand away from his forehead.

  “All right… all right… there’s no need to get like that…” the man said, scratching his head. “When did these crimes take place?”

  “When was I killed?” the woman hesitated.

  “I mean, was it before or after the clocks were reversed?”

  “Before…”

  The mayor straightened up, lifted his chin, proud. He had a certain petulant, condescending air of “Sherlock Holmes.”

  “Don’t you see? The killer could kill only because he did it before the phenomenon. Now it’s impossible to kill. It doesn’t matter what he injects.”

  How could we have been so stupid? Of course. The killer was now completely harmless. The only way to die was from “natural” causes. By “natural” I mean dying when you turn into a foetus—one small enough not to survive on its own.

  “That’s true…” said the woman. “How did we not think of that?”

  “We were too excited about the resurrections…”

  “That’s why I’m the mayor!” he said proudly. “Who will be the next to come back?”

  “Old Methuselah.”

  “That goatherd is a fortunate man!”

  “And you couldn’t foresee what was going to happen?” the mayor said to the witch.

  Here we go again…

  A neighbour had been listening from above, hidden on her balcony.

  “Corrupt!” the woman shouted, throwing a piece of cauliflower at the mayor.

  “What on earth are you doing, madam?”

  “Resign! You bastard.”

  “We’ve discussed this many times. I will be mayor until a year ago.”

  “I’m tired of your tricks! That day will never come!”

  “Do you think I want this? The post is a great responsibility. It is a heavy burden.”

  The woman threw another piece of cauliflower.

  “Stop throwing things at me, madam!”

  “And what’s this about a killer on the loose? It’s your son! The libertine! The drunk!”

  “My son is a writer, madam.”

  Let me make a brief aside here. Perhaps we should look more closely at the life of that second-rate writer who doesn’t actually write. He is a bastard son the mayor had with the village prostitute. For many years he denied his paternity, but after the mother’s death, the mayor decided to acknowledge him. The “writer” was, as that woman rightly said, more libertine and drunk than writer.

  The woman threw another piece of cauliflower.

  “A writer? Your son is a layabout.”

  No sooner had she said that than she clutched her chest. As if she had been shot. She gripped the railing tightly. Finally, she toppled from her balcony, headfirst onto the ground, breaking her neck. It was like watching a rag doll fall.

  “Another victim of the cat killer,” said the witch.