A Funeral Malfunction

Writen For the "Dialogue 500" contest - It won First Place!
Prompt: You have witnessed what could only be described as something totally supernatural. Try to convince the police or someone of what you saw.

Word Count: 500

A Funeral Malfunction

          “My name is Charlie Miller.”

          “What was your relationship with the deceased?”

          “I told you officer I didn’t have a relationship with the deceased. Mariah and I worked together at Butler-Royal. Our cubicles were next to each other. That’s it! That’s all! She never even spoke to me.”

          “Until today at her funeral and let me get this straight…when she asked you to take off her dress. Is that right?”

          “Yes! That is exactly right?”

          “Oh boy, Charlie I need you to start at the beginning and tell me exactly what happened.”

          “I don’t normally do funerals. My boss, Mr. Butler, made it mandatory that everyone attend Mariah’s funeral tonight, Christmas Eve. Not many people at Butler-Royal liked her.

          “Why’s that?”

          “Well, she only wore black, she never talked to anyone, and there were rumors that she was into the occult.”

          “Go on.”

          “Well, I arrived at the funeral home, signed in at the guest book and took a seat at the back of the room. I figured I would sit there for awhile just to be seen and file out with everyone else at the end.
          I was glancing around the room checking out the décor, looking at the heavy drapes of velvet tied back by those large satin ropes with the tassels, and admiring the rich antique furniture. You know trying to take my mind off where I was. Then I saw her. She was standing up next to her casket.”

          “Who was standing next to the casket, Charlie?”

          “It was Mariah, and she looked really angry. She was wearing this old fashioned dress that had like a million little pearl buttons running up to a lace collar at the neck. The dress was black and it came to just above her ankles. I could see that she was wearing what I would call ‘granny boots’. They were also black with pointed toes and little buttons running up the sides. It’s weird, but the clothes she wore fit right in with the room’s décor.”

          “Enough about the clothing and the furniture get on with what happened, Mr. Miller!”

          “Well, I noticed that she was looking at me through her long, black, stringy hair that always hung down in her face. She started towards me through the crowd floating just above the floor. The eerie sound of the toes of her boots scraping the floor had me frozen to my chair. I blinked once and she was face to face with me and then the storm knocked out the lights.
          In the dark, Mariah whispered in my ear ‘Please Charlie, you have to help me. I can’t go through eternity like this’.”

          “Like what?”

          “The dress was her great grandmother's. This stupid mortician put the dress on her backwards. All the tiny buttons were supposed to be running down the back of the dress. She begged me to go up and change the dress around while the lights were out, but they came back on before I was done.”