by Fritz Leiber
“Well,” I said, “what’s happened here is that the foot-stone’s been put in wrong.” He stared at me as though he had expected me to say something entirely different.
“Put in wrong,” I repeated. “Upside down. It faces the wrong way.”
He looked at the stone. His eyes squinted and then opened wide.
“Why,” he said, “I put that there stone in myself. I ain’t never made any mistakes like that.”
“And look at the condition of the grass,” I went on bitingly.
At my words the sexton began to tremble. He knelt and pulled at a piece of sodding. It came up without difficulty. The face he raised to mine was full of fear, fear and a dawning suspicion.
“Come on, mister,” he said, “we got to go to the authorities about this.”
“Why?” I questioned, half expecting the answer that came.
“Somebody’s been into the grave. And I think I know who.”
I cannot rid my mind of the dreamlike quality of the events that followed. People entered and moved through them as though hypnotized.
Sexton Eldredge and I first visited Hopkins, the owner of the cemetery. We went with him to the police.
“But surely,” I said, “there’s no such thing as grave robbing today?”
He shook his head. “There’s sometimes jewelry to be gone after; and there’s madmen and… well, I know something’s wrong here. Know it.”
I expected the chief of police to be skeptical, but he, too, was strangely impressed with my discovery.
“Call Dr. Kingsbury,” he directed his subordinate, explaining to me, “He’s the man that wrote out Mrs. Ellis’s death certificate, I bet.”
Then, without explaining why in the world it was necessary that the doctor be called, he turned to the sexton with an “Eldredge, what else do you know about this?”
Eldredge quickly looked at us all, took a deep breath, and said, “I never thought nothing of it at the time, but this is what happened. About five nights ago”—that would be about two days before I arrived—“I’m goin’ my last round (that’s just after dark) and I sees Dr. Ellis standin’ near his wife’s grave. And I ain’t surprised, only sorry for him the way he’s been hit by his wife’s death. Well, he sorta smiles at me, quick like, and tells me he’ll be out before I finish up. Then I go on with my round. Come to think of it though, his voice was sorta excited, quick like—if you get what I mean. Funny, how I remember.
“Anyway, whiles later I’m finishin’ up and, just as I’m get-tin’ near the gate, I hears it close, softly like. And the next second I get a big start ’cause I think I see somebody slip-pin’ into the shrubbery—inside the gate, mind you. Well, I take my flash and shoot it around but I don’t see nothin’ more. So I go off home, thinkin’ all the time I’d just heard Dr. Ellis shuttin’ the gate as he went off.”
“Why didn’t you report to me about what you saw?” came sharply from Hopkins.
“Well, sir, of course you see I just thought I’d had a fit of nerves. Just like anybody’s apt to get at night. Sure, I never figured I’d saw anything real. I figured I’d just seen a shadow… then.”
“What was this person you thought you saw like?” questioned the chief.
“Couldn’t say. If ’twas a man he was dressed in black; a long black coat. Somehow he seems familiar but there’s no more I can say about it.”
“Familiar?”
“Yes sir, but I can’t say how.”
“What did you mean when you said ‘if it was a man’?”
Eldredge hesitated a moment and then muttered something unconvincing about how “it mighta been a woman.”
In this short time quite a few people had gathered in and in front of the police station. I know news spreads rapidly in small towns but here it must have spread like wildfire through a dry field. And sibilant—like fire through corn— rustled their whispers, the whispers of the gathering crowd. The subtle noise grew in volume, then suddenly ceased. Those out in front of the station craned their necks down the street whence there came a more insistent voice, high, feminine, and hysterical. A doctor pushed his way through the crowd, followed by the woman I had seen the day before in front of the undertaker’s parlor. There was a look in her eyes compound of terror and triumph. Her lips were tight now; she was confidently biding her time, though why or for what I could not imagine. The medical man was plainly rattled.
“Dr. Kingsbury,” boomed the chief, “there has come to my attention evidence that the grave of Mrs. John Ellis has been disturbed and possibly entered. Now…”
He paused.
“That’s most unfortunate,” Kingsbury replied, shifting nervously, “but I fail to see how it concerns me.”
“Well,” said the chief slowly, “you wrote out her death certificate, didn’t you?”
“Yes sir, Dr. Ellis and I both examined her. But I still fail to see why you sent for me.”
The chief scratched his head. It was obvious that he was painfully bewildered. His behavior struck in my memory a chord I could not interpret. Why he had made such a stupid mistake as to send for a doctor I could not imagine.
Then the woman from the undertaker’s, Miss Harkness, took a hand in the game.
“Go on,” she hissed at Kingsbury, “tell them what you know, you coward.”
“Chief,” he said quickly, “Miss Harkness started to scream at me in the street and followed me all the way over here. I can’t imagine what she’s so excited about. I—”
“You can’t, can’t you?” she cut in with loud sarcasm. “0 no, none of you know a thing! O, no! But deep down in your hearts you know, all of you. And you’re scared to death on account of what you’ve done. And won’t admit it. No. But that won’t help you because I’m going to tell you all. Mary Ellis wasn’t embalmed! I know. I helped to wash her up. Mary Ellis was buried alive!”
The hush was intense.
Upon every face was a look of wonder, but—and this was the amazing thing—not so much wonder as comprehension. It was just as Miss Harkness had said; they looked as if they’d known it all “deep in their hearts.” They looked guilty. But, further, they looked exactly as though they’d just become certain of something they had only unconsciously known before.
All that could be heard for a moment was the chalk-pale doctor weakly mumbling something about “ridiculous.” Then the chief reacted.
“Come on, Kingsbury,” he shouted. “Eldredge, get a couple of shovels as we go. We’re going to exhume that grave!” And they rushed off, the crowd following them to a man.
CHAPTER 6 -CONSEQUENCES OF AN EXHUMATION
Slowly I stepped out of a corner into which I had been violently pushed during the scramble. Without thinking why I was doing what I was doing I shook my head, as if to clear my mind. It was just as if I’d witnessed a scene in an insane asylum and was now left, a discarded piece of sanity, alone.
No, not quite alone.
For, leaning back against the inward opened door, clutching the knob as though for support, a set look on a face that seemed focused on terror, was my acquaintance, the young minister Ferguson. I strode down toward him.
“Mr. Ferguson,” I said simply, “I’ve seen some things. But I’ve never seen the police quite so helter-skelter. I’ve never seen a town gone so mad. Can you tell me what it is?”
He looked up at me slowly, got himself under control, and shook his head.
“You’re an intellectual,” I went on frankly. “You’re a young man. You’re fresh from a big city and a metropolitan seminary. And now you’ve seen all this. You have the power to look at it objectively. What do you make of it?”
“Well…” he faltered. “There’s mass-psychology.”
“To name it doesn’t explain it,” I insisted violently. “Mass-psychology? How? Why?”
“Yes… yes…” he agreed slowly. “But it’s all so indefinite, so insubstantial.”
“That’s just it!” I fired back. “Indefinite, insubstantial— a sort of mas
s feeling, an epidemic of guilty faces and fearful eyes. But look how it affected men like the chief and Dr. Kingsbury. And look how they accepted Miss Harkness’s hysterical, ridiculous assertions without asking her one question. And now—going off to exhume a grave without even going through the proper legal procedure. It’s simply incomprehensible, don’t you see?”
“O, I see well enough,” he replied, a new note in his voice, a note strong and strange. “I’ve seen more than you’re looking for, perhaps. For let me tell you, Mr. Kramer, I’m not myself immune to what you’re pleased to call this ‘epidemic.’ When Miss Harkness spoke I actually found myself believing what she said: that Mary Ellis had been buried alive. And, worse, I seemed to remember looking at her face during the funeral and seeing color in her cheeks and a fluttering of her eyelids. It’s horrible. I can’t even now get the picture out of my mind.”
“The power of suggestion…” I began.
“It’s more real than that, Mr. Kramer.”
“But you say you only just now get this delusion; that is, you only just now remembered all this about Mrs. Ellis.”
“That’s it,” he nodded eagerly. “A couple of days ago the fear first came.”
Like a germ, like a contagious disease, I thought.
“And at first,” he went on, “I kept shoving it out of my mind. I guess I kept it pretty well under until Miss Hark-ness crystallized it for me. My God, I hardly suspected that the others had it too. What can it, can it be? It’s like… yes, it’s like coming out of a deep hypnotic trance. I’ve been a subject once or twice, you see, and I know.”
Hypnosis! That was what I’d been trying to think of. And something else: post-hypnotic suggestion! That would explain such things as the chief of police stupidly sending for Dr. Kingsbury when there was no cause; it was as if he’d been told to do it by a master hypnotist. But then how to explain Miss Harkness, Eldredge, and the rest? How could so many be hypnotized by a mere man? Impossible. He would have to have powers undreamed of; the power of hypnotizing and suggesting from a distance, hypnotizing by telepathy. For a moment I was lost in a vision, the vision of a man sitting lonely in a lonely room, managing the people of Smithville like puppets, drawing them about sardonically by invisible mind-strings… Suddenly I realized that thinking could wait. I broke the vision.
“Do you want to go on with me and see what they do at the grave?” I asked Ferguson.
He started to shake his head, then nodded. We walked fast. When we hit the street leading to the cemetery stragglers began to hurry past us, those who were late in getting the news and those who had farther to come—distraught yet silent folk. We glimpsed many scenes, caught many scraps of quick conversation. One thing sticks in my mind: a little boy dragging at his mother’s hand and screaming out, “I didn’t let her be buried alive! Honest I didn’t!”
It is not good for children to be as terrified as that one was. There was something sick and sinking at the pit of my stomach.
“What was that rot about not embalming the body?” I asked Ferguson.
He shook his head. “Not rot, truth. Ellis wanted it that way.” He jerked back at me.
The cemetery looked as if a full half of Smithville’s citizens had been unceremoniously dumped into it from the sky. There was a good deal of whispering and some sobbing, but little loud talk and no screaming. There was a compulsive restraint, a tenseness, as if all of us had been scooped, breathless, into the palm of one man’s hand. We arrived at what seemed to be a crisis, but then I suppose that everything that happened that day was of the nature of a crisis.
People were crowded close around Mary Ellis’s grave, where a full half-dozen furious shovelers were getting in each other’s way and making for delay.
“Go it faster!” yelled a distraught woman and then added ridiculously, “There’s still time to save her!”
An old woman, clutching an ear trumpet in one hand and the chief of police’s coat lapel in the other, was screaming at him:
“I tell you, on that selfsame night that the sexton says as there was prowlers, I saw somebody loitering near the gate. My house is right by and I’m always at the window. Well, that person I saw, and he didn’t look good to me, that person was Mister Kesserich.”
“Who?” said the chief, suddenly beginning to pay attention.
“Mister Kesserich!” The hag’s answer was almost a howl. It turned Sexton Eldredge around like a shot.
“That’s it!” his voice joined in the pandemonium. “That’s who I thought I saw sneakin’ around like a shadow after the gate was closed. Mister Kesserich! He done it!”
It seemed to me rather early to talk about anything having been done and I said as much to Ferguson, who kept close beside me. He nodded, but I could tell that his nod was merely an intellectual automatism.
There came a cry from one of the diggers that the coffin top had been uncovered. The cemetery became silent save for the squeal of screws and the hard breathing from those who had been shouting or running about. Then, like an actor who had perfectly timed his entrance, Mr. Elstrom strode up to the crowd around the grave. I hardly recognized the little pursy man whom I had seen crabbing in the courtroom. Now he looked haunted. Haunted and frightened. But he forced his voice to take on a tone of command.
“See here,” he bellowed, save for an occasional laryngitic squeak, “I’ll have the lot of you clapped into jail. You too,” he continued, pointing at the chief of police, who hardly heard him. “And stop this desecration at once! What do you mean by entering a grave without consent of next-of-kin or those that have the say? I’ll take it to the state. I’ll make you smart for it. Stop it, right now!”
He was interrupted, or answered, by the dull thump of wood on sod. Those around the grave looked down. I could almost see their trembling as they started back. The chief of police turned to Elstrom.
“Guess you’ll allow we had right,” he said in a low voice. “We knew what was what. The casket’s empty. Mary Ellis’s body is gone.”
The color drained from Elstrom’s face. Making a little clucking noise in his throat he fell senseless to the ground.
CHAPTER 7 - IN THE MINISTER’S STUDY
Ferguson’s hand trembled as he lighted a cigarette. I could see that this annoyed him; he clenched both fists hard before settling himself in a chair that faced the comfortable one in which I was already ensconced. The light was restfully shaded. About us were books and a few small objects of art, inexpensive but tasteful.
“With all this excitement,” I began abruptly, “we’ve got to keep what facts there are carefully organized. Now, as far as I can see, we’re dealing with two separate strings of ideas, and it’ll be a good thing to keep them separate. I’ll take the simpler one first.”
“You mean the disappearance of the body, the grave robbing?” put in Ferguson. Obviously he was as glad as I to have an intelligent person to talk things over with.
“Yes. Now there’s evidence that Kesserich, yes, and John Ellis were around the cemetery after dark and after-hours five days—was it five?—yes, five days ago.”
“But remember, Mr. Kramer, there’s no precise evidence to show that was the night on which the body was stolen.”
“Very true,” I replied thoughtfully, “and we have only the word of an antique sexton and a deaf woman as to their presence, though I must admit I’m inclined to credit them. Their testimony sounded like something from the well of truth itself compared to some of the stuff we’ve heard responsible people saying today.”
Ferguson shifted uncomfortably.
“Of course,” he said, “it’s inevitable that their suspicions should turn to Kesserich. You knew him at college, didn’t you? I suppose he’s just the usual independent scholar: eccentric, a recluse, but nothing more except perhaps a generous allotment of sardonic humor. I’ve been here almost two years and can’t truthfully say that I’ve seen anything more. But the rumor! Especially during the last two months. If you hadn’t already seen something of the p
eople in this town you wouldn’t believe me. I tell you their attitude toward Kesserich was that of a medieval serf toward a black magician, a puritan scullery girl toward a so-called witch. That is not an exaggeration.”
“But what was the cause of this attitude?”
Ferguson shrugged his shoulders helplessly.
“Don’t know,” he said briefly. “Lonely life, language they couldn’t understand. Can’t guess further.”
“O, he used to like to impress and frighten people even in the old days,” I assured him. “You don’t mean to tell me, though, that this afternoon was an average sample of Smithville behavior?”
Ferguson shook his head and smiled.
“No, certainly not. I’m afraid I was doing what we’d decided not to, that is, mix separate groups of facts and ideas. No, I must say there was nothing inexplicable in the rumors. Given a small town like this and a sardonic mystifier like your friend Kesserich and they can be explained.”
“Well, then,” I went on, “that leaves only one thing outstanding to speak against Ellis and Kesserich: the fact that they’ve disappeared. Disappeared would be too strong a word—for, after all, no one’s even tried to get in touch with them—except for things like the blowing up of Kesserich’s cottage. Does your reasoning let you see any further in this direction?”
The minister shook his head slowly. He was obviously surprised that I spoke out thus frankly against people I claimed were my friends. However, I thought it best; there was nothing to be gained by refusing to see points that were obvious to anyone.
“Then,” I continued, “that brings us bang-up against the main business: this—well, I would call it insane if it weren’t for what you told me in the police station—but, anyway, this impossible notion that seems to have struck half the people in Smithville, the notion that Mary Ellis was buried alive.”
I paused but Ferguson remained silent, so I went on: “Now, there was nothing secret about her burial, was there? And in a burial that isn’t secret many people are involved, many see the body. Just how could anything happen? I know she wasn’t embalmed, but that is often the case, as you are well aware. Personally, I can understand the reasons that motivated Dr. Ellis there. I’ve known him fairly well. Of course, we’ve all heard stories of people being buried while in cataleptic trance, but this wasn’t catalepsy—it was poison. And then there’s the crucial point that the idea that Mary Ellis was buried alive sprang up in people’s minds almost a week after her funeral. Why in the world that interval before the epidemic of guilt? God, almost like the incubation period of a germ! But surely that interval proves that the whole thing must be some strange and unusual mass-delusion. You yourself surely don’t think there could be anything real behind it? It’s absurd to think of a secret cult having as members half the citizens in this town, a cult devoted to burying its initiates or its enemies alive.”