by Gahan Wilson
At length Andy stirred and pointed to the small sarcophagus the statue and its case stood upon. The case, like the statue, was carved from pale, unveined stone and was waxy smooth.
"Do you suppose he's in that thing or buried underground?" Andy asked.
George stared and pursed his lips in thought.
"I think he's in there," he said at last. "It's just about the right size, isn't it?"
Andy nodded and then he stiffened and pointed.
"Look at that!" he said.
There was a crack running wavelike through the lid of the sarcophagus from one side to the other of its middle. It was clearly not only a surface crack. The lid was split.
"I'll bet you could open that if you wanted to," said Andy.
He crouched down and bent close to the crack in the lid. He reached out his right hand and traced the crack with his forefinger.
"Hey!" said George. "What're you doing?"
Andy looked up at him thoughtfully, then back at the crack, then he placed both hands, timidly at first, palms down on the lower half of the lid.
"Hey!" said George again.
"Shut up," said Andy softly, and he pressed down on the lid and felt it wobble. "It's loose," he said, still in the same soft tone.
"Come on now, Andy," said George. "Stop that! You aren't supposed to do things like that!"
Andy ignored him, pushing the lid carefully in the direction of the foot of the little marble coffin. The cement which had held the lid in place had crumbled from more than a hundred years of rain and frost and rot, and with a grating sound which sent chills up both their backs, Andy got the lid moving until the crack was a little over two inches wide. Then Andy withdrew his hands and the two boys stared quietly at the opening.
"I can't see anything," George said in a muffled voice. "Can you see anything?"
Andy bent down until his nose poked just through the crack, and squinted.
"No," he said.
He cupped his hands around his eyes to block out sidewise rays of sunlight and continued to peer until George could hardly stand it anymore and then he finally spoke.
"It's just dark," he said.
George couldn't figure out whether he was relieved or disappointed when his eyes widened in horror as he saw Andy lean back on his knees and begin pulling back the right sleeve of his jacket until he had bared his whole forearm.
"Oh, no, Andy!" said George.
"I'm going to do it," Andy said, and slowly but steadily, he put his hand through the crack and reached in and down, and farther down, and only when his arm was in the little marble casket all the way to the elbow did he stop. He looked up at George with a thoughtful expression.
"I'm touching something," he said.
"Oh, gee!" said George. "Oh, gee, Andy, whyn't you stop this? Whyn't you just Atop it?"
"It's him," said Andy, and suddenly there were little drops of perspiration all over his forehead. "I'm touching him."
He looked up, staring blankly ahead, and began searching with his unseen hand in the darkness of the marble box. He paused, took a deep breath, and made a decisive movement.
"I've got something," he said, pulling his hand out into the light and staring wide-eyed at something small and green held between his thumb and forefinger.
George backed up and almost tripped over a gravestone.
"Put it back!" he cried. "For Peter's sake, Andy!"
But Andy stood, still holding his prize. He looked over at George with mixed triumph and confusion.
"I never thought I could ever do anything like this," he said, in an exultant whisper. "Jeez, I really didn't think I could do it!"
George opened his mouth to speak but stopped with an abrupt, startled jerk of his whole body at a sudden rustling coming, unmistakably, absolutely unmistakably, from the interior of the little marble casket.
"What's that?" he hissed.
Then they both ran, this time really ran, hard as they could, banging their feet onto the graveyard earth. Andy fell once, heavily, with a loud thud, but he scrambled up almost as quickly as a ball bounces.
Somehow or other, with no idea at all how they did it or any memory whatsoever of doing it, they made their way to the fence and through it, and only when they were clear of the alley and more than half a block up Mercer Avenue to the east did they become aware of what they were doing or where they were. Still moving, they shot quick glances to their rear and began reviewing what had happened.
First it was only gabble, but then, with a little more distance between them and the graveyard and that small, marble box, they began to make a little sense. Eventually they were only walking very rapidly.
"Was it him?" George gasped, staring sidewise at his friend. "Was it the marble boy made that noise in there?"
But they had to walk on another full half block before Andy got his answer ready.
"Yes," he said. " 'Cause he was rotting. The air got at him and he fell apart."
He looked over at George and George looked back at him and they went on a little more in silence.
"I think he was just kind of caving in," Andy continued. "It wasn't that he was really moving."
"It wasn't?" George asked.
"No."
By the time they had reached Maple Street and Main Street they were walking at a reasonable pace. This was the corner where Andy would turn east and George continue on north. George reached out and touched Andy's arm.
"Let me see," he said.
They both looked around, making sure no one was near, and then Andy opened his hand.
The green thing rested on Andy's palm as the two of them studied it in awe. It was a tiny, withered business, like a broken-off stick.
’'What's that?" George asked, pointing at a sort of curved flake growing out of one end of the thing.
’'I don't know," said Andy, frowning and squinting his eyes. "I can't figure it out."
"Oh," said George in a hushed voice, after a pause, "I think I know what it is."
"What?"
"Can't you see?" asked George, reaching out to touch the edge of the flake, but then shying away from it. "It's his fingernail!"
"Wow!" said Andy, his eyes shining brighter and brighter. "Wow!"
That evening, at dinner, Andy's parents asked him a few carefully casual questions as it was obvious that something more or less serious was preoccupying their child, but when all they learned was that he had been nowhere in particular where nothing much had happened, they gave up on it, as they usually did, on the theory that whatever it was would eventually come out if it was really important enough to have to come out.
After dinner Andy unconvincingly pretended to do his homework, then he bid his mother and father good night a full half hour before the usual time, and quietly made his way to his room.
In bed, with his pajamas on, after listening carefully to make sure no one was in the hall outside, he leaned over and carefully slid the drawer of his bedside table open, noticing for the first time in his life that it moved with a slightly sinister thmdhing noise.
He licked his lips, for they had become suddenly very dry, and bent to look inside the drawer, doing it slowly so as not to rush the moment. It was still there, just where he had placed it, in the exact center of the bottom of the drawer. The two top joints of the left index finger of the marble boy. He knew exactly which finger it was because he had felt the rest of the marble boy's dry, tiny hand in the darkness in that casket when he had pulled the finger loose.
Andy stared at it with a kind of solemn joy and shook his head in wonder. He had never had such a thing. He had never heard of any other kid having had such a thing.
Wait until Chris Tyler had a look at it! Or Johnny Marsh! Or, yet, Elton Weaver! Andy could hardly wait to see the sick, envious expression on Elton Weaver's usually smug face when he got a look at it!
He smiled at the finger affectionately, then gently closed the drawer, thuth, then turned off the lamp and settled into his bed with a sigh of dee
p contentment. He pulled the covers up until they were just under his chin, and with a clear, shining vision of Elton Weaver's tortured face floating before him, he drifted contentedly off to sleep.
When he awoke, some hours later, he had no idea why. He stirred, blinked, and then looked up with a growing sense of wrongness to observe that the bedroom door was open. He could see the pale paint of its outer surface gleaming faintly in the dim light coming from the bathroom down the hall.
He sat up, puzzled. He was sure that the door had been closed. He knew that it had been closed. He had been particularly careful that evening about closing it because of the finger. Had his father or mother peeked in and then gone off and left the door open by mistake? It didn't seem like them.
But then he realized that something was happening to the door even as he looked at it. It was changing shape, growing narrower. He couldn't understand how that could possibly be happening until he realized, with a sharp, hurtful pang in his chest, that he was watching the door being slowly and deliberately closed.
He had just cowered back to the headboard in a kind of half sitting position when he heard the faint, crisp click of the latch announce that the door's shutting was complete. He peered into the gloom at the foot of his bed but he could see nothing. Absolutely nothing. '
He swallowed and opened his mouth in order to speak, but found he couldn't. He swallowed again and this time managed to whisper: "Whoa there?"
Had he heard a noise? Had there been a brittle grating? An odd, grotesquely unsuccessful effort to reply from somewhere in the darkness over there?
He tried again*. "Who's there?"
This time he knew he'd heard a noise, a different sort of noise than the last one, but definitely a noise. What had it been? A sort of dry rustle, that was it. There'd been a faint sort of rustle at the foot of his bed in the darkness over there.
He pulled more of himself nearer to the headboard until he was crouching against it as far away as possible from the bed's foot. He gathered the sheets and blankets, bunching them in front of him like a soft cloth wall. He strained his eyes, peering into the darkness as hard as he could.
Was there something there in the dark? It almost seemed so. It almost seemed he could barely make out a small something only barely higher than the top of the bed. Something moving.
Andy squeezed his knees against his chest and lifted the edge of the sheets and blankets so that only his eyes looked over the top edge. He was sure, now, absolutely certain that he was seeing something in the dark, even though he could only make it out as a faint silhouette.
It was working its way along the side of the bed. Very slowly. Very, very carefully. Awkwardly. Now Andy was able to see just a little something of the shape of the silhouette. It was round at the top.
Then he realized that he was breathing so hard that it was impossible to listen to anything else, particularly to the sort of soft sounds he'd heard before when he'd seen the bedroom door close, so he held his breath completely, and sure enough! he could hear the rustling which he'd heard before. And it was much closer.
Andy let himself breathe again because he realized he didn't want to hear the rustling after all, because he'd heard it before, and not just tonight but earlier that day! He'd told himself and George a lie about the rustling, saying it was probably only the falling in of old bones and rotting fabric, but he'd known better. He'd known it hadn't been any such thing at all. He'd known, deep down inside of him, standing by the cracked casket back there in the graveyard, that he and George were listening to the stirrings of the marble boy!
There was something else in the bedroom which he remembered from the graveyard: the sour, bitter smell which had oozed out of the casket when he'd opened up its lid, only this time it came from next to his bedside table where the silhouette now stood.
But, being this close to Andy, it was no longer just a silhouette. There was a lace collar, the sunken shoulders of the jacket were moldering velvet, and the brass buttons had all turned to lumps of verdigris. There was quite a bit of straight blond hair left on the skull and though someone had long ago carefully parted it in the middle, it stood up at all sorts of horrible angles. He could make out nothing of its face.
"Your finger's in the drawer!" Andy whispered with a great effort and hardly any breath at all to do it with. Tm sorry I took it! Honest I am!"
It wavered and half turned to the bedside table. It even reached out to it, and a black little spider of a hand hooked its fingers over the knob, but then it slowly rotated its head on its thin little log of a neck until it was staring directly at Andy and Andy could just make out the stirring of leathery wrinklings deep inside its sockets. It made a small forward lurch and reached out spastically toward the bed with both of its shriveled, stumpy arms. A great gust of foul air puffed out from it.
Tm sorry," said Andy in a voice so weak and faint he could barely hear himself. Tm sorry!"
It clutched the blanket and pulled itself up onto the bed, and as it dragged its stiff little body over the covers, closer and closer to Andy, he could see its rigid smile widen terribly.
He opened his mouth to plead again and had just discovered that he lacked the breath to even whimper when it suddenly grabbed both his wrists with an unyielding, merciless grip and bent its round, sour head over Andy's left hand and bit the edges of its sharp little teeth deeper and deeper into the skin of Andy's forefinger.
It wasn't going to settle for what was in the drawer.
End Game
Balden's mouth worked, chewing sidewise like a parrot, or a turtle, or some other hard-beaked creature, and he moved his bishop to his queens knight four with a sparse, economical shove of the hand. I leaned back in an ostentatiously casual fashion and lit my pipe. Balden's eyes remained fixed stonily on the board, I wafted forth a tiny plume of smoke and watched it drift slowly over Balden's head like a small cloud working its way past Abraham Lincoln's portrait on Mount Rushmore.
"Did I ever tell you about the circumstances surrounding Mannering's death?" I asked.
"No," said Balden shortly, his voice, as always, muffled and remote.
"I speak not of the circumstances before, nor those during. It is the circumstances that came after of which I speak."
I gazed at the ceiling, ignoring Balden's obvious disinterest, and continued.
"The instructions in Mannering's will concerning his postmortem treatment were peculiar, to say the least. As his lawyer, however, it was my duty to see that they were properly carried out, no matter how bizarre they might seem."
"Your move," said Balden.
I lazily advanced a pawn and went on with my narration, seemingly all unaware of Balden's glaring indifference.
"He had always been a great traveler, as you doubtless know, and thanks to the family money, was able to indulge his predilection to the full. Reports of his activities came in from the most exotic places. Amazonian explorations, dizzying mountain climbs in Tibet, deep African probes—he seemed always to be investigating some new corner of the Earth."
Balden's eyes glittered coldly as he moved a knight to one side, exposing a thrusting rook.
"He died in a fitting room at Abercrombie and Fitch while preparing for a polar journey. He was being measured for an insulated parka when he suddenly keeled over and died."
"A pity," said Balden, tapping meaningfully at the edge of the board.
"The strange conditions of his will were a direct outgrowth of his lifelong passion for travel." I moved my hand vaguely this way and that over my pieces. "I shall never forget the growing expressions of stunned incredulity on the faces of the beneficiaries as I read the terms out, one by one."
I absentmindedly interposed a bishop between Balden's rook and my threatened queen. He sighed.
"The body was to be dressed in a specified wool suit, placed in a natural-looking position, and coated with a clear, nonreflecting plastic. The general effect to be strived for was that of an elderly gentleman, comfortably seated, with his
eyes alertly open. The slightest suggestion of the macabre was to be studiously avoided."
Emitting a rasping cackle, Balden captured my queen knight with a rook. I let him study my expression of benign serenity for a moment and then picked up my tale.
"Thus prepared, the body was to be sent perpetually from one part of the world to another on an eternal global tour. Always first class, of course, and always accompanied by someone familiar with the area so that the corpse would not miss any local points of interest."
Balden had taken to clearing his throat rather noisily and I was forced to raise my voice.
"The family put the whole business into the hands of a carefully chosen undertaker and travel agent, who to this day remain in their employ. Both did their jobs well, and for a period of several months, everything went beautifully."
A slight but unmistakably convulsive movement on the part of Balden pulled me temporarily back to the business of the game. I moved my queen one square to unpin my bishop, doing it with the air of one who is only dimly aware of his surroundings, and continued my account.
"Then, in Hong Kong, the whole plan went dreadfully awry. In an ill-advised attempt to show Mannering's cadaver an interesting quarter of the city, his guide had installed the body in one rickshaw while he took another. They had barely reached their destination, an unbelievably crowded sector, when a street riot broke out. Horrified, Mannering's guide saw his dead client's vehicle vanish into the swarm. The desperate fellow struggled frantically to follow after, but he was hopelessly pinned by the howling multitude to the wall of a bean curd factory. There was nothing he could do to alter the ghastly course of events. Mannering was gone."
Some time since, Balden had made his next move. He brought the fact home to me now by repeatedly indicating the piece's change in position with jabs of his index finger. It was a bishop, and I captured it quietly and unobtrusively with one of my knights.
"A search was initiated instantly, of course. At first it was thought that the task would be a fairly easy one. We broadcast a description of Mannering and, considering his unique condition, had the firmest expectation it would quickly bring results. It did not."