The Comfortable Coffin

by Richard S. Prather

  “My name is Melinda Jones,” she said.

  “Yes, Miss Jones.”

  “Oh, please call me Agnes.”

  “Agnes?”

  “Yes. All my friends call me Agnes. I…I was hoping we could be friends.”

  “What’s your problem, Agnes?” I asked.

  “My husband.”

  “He’s giving you trouble?”

  “Well, yes, in a way.”

  “Stepping out on you?”

  “Well, no.”

  “What then?”

  “Well, he’s dead.”

  I sighed in relief. “Good,” I said. “What’s the problem?”

  “He left me ten million dollars. Some of his friends think the money belongs to them. It’s not fair, really. Just because they were in on the bank job. Percy…”

  “Percy?”

  “My husband. Percy did kill the bank guards, and it was he who crashed through the roadblock, injuring twelve policemen. The money was rightfully his.”

  “Of course,” I said. “No doubt about it. And these scum want it?”

  “Yes. Oh, Mr. Sledge, I need help so desperately. Please say you’ll help me. Please, please. I beg you. I’ll do anything, anything.”

  “Anything?”

  Her eyes narrowed, and she wet her lips with a sharp, pink tongue. Her voice dropped to a husky whisper. “Anything,” she said.

  I belted her over the left eye.

  That was the beginning, and now they were all outside, all twenty-six of them, waiting to close in, waiting to drop down like the venomous vultures they were. But they hadn’t counted on the .45 in my fist, and they hadn’t counted on the slow anger that had been building up inside me, boiling over like a black brew, filling my mind, filling my body, poisoning my liver and my bile, quickening my heart, putting a throb in my appendix, tightening the pectoral muscles on my chest, girding my loins. They hadn’t counted on the kill lust that raged through my veins. They hadn’t counted on the hammer that kept pounding one word over and over again in my skull: kill, kill, KILL!

  They were all outside waiting, and I had to get them. We were inside, and they knew it, so I did the only thing any sensible person would have done under the circumstances.

  I set fire to the house.

  I piled rags and empty crates and furniture and fish in the basement, and then I soaked them with gasoline. I touched a match, and the flames leaped up, lapping at the wooden crossbeams, eating away at the undersides of the first-floor boards.

  Melinda was close to me. I cupped her breast in one hand, and then tapped her lightly with the .45, just bruising her. We listened to the flames crackling in the basement, and I whispered, “That fish smells good.”

  And then all hell broke loose, just the way I had planned it. They stormed the house, twenty-six strong. I threw open the front door and I stood there with the .45 in my mitt, and I shouted, “Come on, you bastards. Come and get it!”

  Three men appeared on the walk, and I fired low, and I fired fast. The first man took two in the crotch, and he bent over and died. The second man took two in the crotch, and he bent over and died, too; I hit the third man in the chest, and I swore as he died peacefully.

  “Agnes,” I yelled, “there’s a submachine gun in the closet. Get it! And bring the hand grenades and the mortar shells.”

  “Yes, Dud,” she murmured.

  I kept firing. Three down, four down, five down. I reloaded, and they kept coming up the walk and I kept cutting them down. And then Melinda came back with the ammunition. I gathered up a batch of hand grenades, stuck four of them in my mouth and pulled the pins. I grabbed two in each hand and lobbed them out on the walk, and six more of the bastards were blown to their reward.

  I watched the bodies come down to the pavement, and I took a quick count of arms and legs. It had been seven of the bastards.

  “Seven and five is thirteen,” I told Melinda. “That leaves eleven more.”

  Melinda did some quick arithmetic. “Twelve more,” she said.

  I cut loose with the submachine gun. Kill! KILL! my brain screamed. I swung it back and forth over the lawn, and they dropped like flies. Fourteen, fifteen, sixteen. Nine more to go. Seventeen, eighteen, and they kept dying, and the blood ran red on the grass, and the flames licked at my back. They all ran for cover, and there was nothing to cut down, so I concentrated on a clump of weeds near the barn, shooting fast bursts into it. Pretty soon there were no more weeds, and the barn was a skeleton against the deepening dusk. I grabbed a mortar and tossed it into the yard, just for kicks. Pretty soon there was no more barn.

  Behind me, I heard Melinda scream. I whirled. Her clothes were aflame, and I seized her roughly and threw her to the floor, I rolled her in the dust, and then I tore off all her clothes, until she was stark naked. When I saw her like that, I almost lost my mind, and I almost forgot all about the nine guys still out there. I tore myself away from her, and I ran into the yard with two mortar shells in my mouth, the submachine gun in my right hand and the .45 in my left. I shook my head, and the mortar shells flew, and three more of the bastards were dead and gone. I fired a burst with the machine gun, and another two dropped. There were four or five left now, and I picked them off one by one with the .45. The yard ran red with blood, and the bodies lay like twisted sticks. I sighed heavily and walked back to the house—because the worst part still lay ahead of me.

  I found her in the bedroom.

  She was still naked, and her clothes were laid out on the j bed, neatly. She had taken a quick sponge-bath, and her body gleamed like dull ivory in the gathering darkness.

  “All right, Agnes,” I said. “It’s all over.”

  “What do you mean, Dud?”

  She reached for a stocking, and she sat on the bed, and she I began rolling it up the smooth curve of her long leg. Roll, roll, over the ankle, the calf, the creamy-white thigh.

  “The whole mess, Agnes. Everything, from start to finish. A big hoax. A big plot to sucker Dudley Sledge. Well, no one suckers Sledge. No one.”

  “I don’t know what you mean, Dud.”

  The other stocking was on now. She reached for the frothy panties on the bed, stepped into them, pulled them up over her thighs, smoothed them over the flatness of her belly, the rich curves of her hips.

  “You don’t know, huh? You don’t know what I mean? I mean the phony story about the bank job, and the ten million dollars your husband left you.”

  “He did leave it to me, Dudley.”

  “No, Agnes. That was all a lie. Every bit of it. I’m only sorry I had to kill twenty-six bird-watchers before I realized j the truth.”

  She strained into her bra, and her breasts quivered as she clasped it over her back. The bra was sheer, and it covered nothing. I watched her, and my palms began to sweat, and I wanted to bust her one in the snoot.

  “You’re wrong, Dudley,” she said. “Dead wrong.”

  “No, baby. I’m right, and that’s the pity of it, because I love you like a bastard, and I know what I have to do now.”

  She shivered into her dress, and the green silk of it spilled down over her shoulders, over the ripe jut of her quivering breasts, over the narrow waist, the full hips, the white, white thighs, the tapering legs.

  “Dudley…” she started.

  “No, Agnes. Don’t try to sway me. I know you stole that ten million from the Crestwood Avenue Bird-Watchers Society. You invented that other story because you wanted someone with a gun, someone who would keep them away from you. Well, twenty-six people have paid…and now one more has to pay.”

  She clipped two earrings to her delicate ears, snapped a bracelet on to her wrist, dabbed some lipstick on to her wide mouth. She was fully dressed now, dressed the way she’d been that first time in my office, the first time I’d slugged her, the time l knew l was hopelessly in love with her.

  She took a step toward me, and I raised the .45.

  “Kiss me, Dudley,” she said.

  I kissed her, all r
ight. I shot her right in the navel.

  She fell to the floor, a look of incredible shock in her eyes, and when I turned around I realized she wasn’t reaching for the mortar shell on the table behind me. Nor was she reaching for the submachine gun that rested in a corner near the table. She was reaching for the ten million bucks.

  There were tears in my eyes. “I guess that’s the least I can do for you, Agnes,” I said. “It was what you wanted, even in death.”

  So I took the ten million bucks, and I bought a case of Irish whisky, and that night Giselle and I got stinking drunk before I beat her senseless in my apartment.

  To Strike a Match

  Erle Stanley Gardner

  The Love of Loyalty Road in Canton is a wide thoroughfare cut ruthlessly through the congested district in order to modernize the city. Occasional side streets feed the traffic of automobiles and rickshaws into it, but back of these streets one enters the truly congested areas, where people live like sardines in a tin.

  The Street of the Wild Chicken is so wide that one may travel down it in a ricksha. But within a hundred feet of the intersection of The Street of the Wild Chicken and The Love of Loyalty Road, one comes to Tien Mah Hong, which, being translated, means “The Alley of the Sky Horse.” And in Tien Mah Hong there is no room for even rickshaw traffic. Two pedestrians wearing wide-brimmed hats must tilt their heads as they meet, so that the brims will not scrape as the wearers pass each other shoulder to shoulder.

  Houses on each side of Tien Mah Hong, with balconies and windows abutting directly upon The Alley of the Sky Horse, give but little opportunity for privacy. The lives of neighbors are laid bare with an intimacy of detail which would be inconceivable in a less congested community or a more occidental atmosphere. At night the peddlers of bean cakes, walking through The Sky Horse Alley, beat little drums to attract attention, and shout their wares with a cry which is like the howl of a wolf.

  Leung Fah walked down The Sky Horse Alley with downcast eyes, as befitted a modest woman of the coolie class. Her face was utterly without expression. Not even the shrewdest student of human nature could have told from her outward appearance the thoughts which were seething within her breast.

  It had been less than a month before that Leung Fah had clasped to her breast a morsel of humanity which represented all life’s happiness, a warm, ragged bundle, a child without a father, a secret outlet for her mother love.

  Then one night, there had been a scream of sirens, a panic-stricken helter-skelter rush of shouting inhabitants, and over all, the ominous, steady roar of airplane engines, a hideous undertone of sound which mounted until it became as the hum of a million metallic bees.

  It is easy enough to advocate fleeing to a place of safety, but the narrow roads of Canton admit of no swift handling of crowds. And there are no places of safety. Moreover, the temperament of the Chinese makes it difficult to carry out any ambiance of an air defense program. Death in one form or another is always jeering at their elbows. Why dignify one particular form of death by going to such great lengths, so far as precautions are concerned?

  The devil’s eggs began to fall from the sky in a screaming hail. Anti-aircraft guns roared a reply. Machine guns sputtered away hysterically. Through all the turmoil, the enemy flyers went calmly about their business of murder, ignoring the frenzied, nervous attempts of an unprepared city to make some semblance of defense.

  With fierce mother instinct, Leung Fah had held her baby to her breast, shielding it with her frail body, as though interposing a layer of flesh and bone would be of any avail against this “civilized” warfare which rained down from the skies.

  The earth had rocked with a series of detonations, and then suddenly Leung Fah had been surrounded by a terrific noise, by splintered timbers, dust and debris.

  When she had wiped her eyes and looked at the little morsel of humanity in her arms, she had screamed in terrified anguish.

  No one had known of Leung Fah’s girl. Because she had no husband, she had kept her offspring as a secret; and because she slept in one of the poorest sections of the city, where people are as numerous and as transient as bats in a cave, she had been able to maintain her secret. Since no one had known of her child, no one had known of her loss. Night after night she had gone about her work, moving stolidly through the heat and stench of the city, her face an expressionless mask.

  Sahm Seuh, the man who had only three fingers on his right hand, and whose eyes were cunning, moving as smoothly moist in their sockets as the tongue of a snake, had noticed her going about her work, and of late he had become exceedingly solicitous. She was not looking well. Was she perhaps sick? She no longer laughed, or paused to gossip in loud tones with the slave girls in the early morning hours before daylight. Was it perhaps that the money she was making was not sufficient…Sahm Seuh’s oily eyes slithered expressively. Perhaps that too could be remedied.

  Because she had said nothing, because she had stared at him with eyes that saw not and ears that heard not, her soul numbed by an anguish which made her as one who walks in sleep at the hour of the rat, Sahm Seuh grew bold.

  Did she need money? Lots of money—gold money? Not the paper money of China, but gold which would enable her to be independent? Aiiii-ahh. It was simple. So simple as only the striking of a match. And Sahm Seuh flipped his wrist in a quick motion and scratched a match into flame in order to illustrate his meaning. He went away then, leaving her to think the matter over.

  That night, as she moved through the narrow thoroughfares of the city, her mind brooded upon the words of Sahm Seuh.

  Canton is a sleepless city of noise. At times, during the summer months, there comes a slight ebb of activity during the first few hours after midnight, but it is an ebb which is barely perceptible to occidental ears. In the large Chinese cities people sleep in shifts because there is not enough room to accommodate them all at one time in houses. Those who are off-shift roam the streets, and because Chinese ears are impervious to noise, just as Chinese nostrils are immune to smells, the hubbub of conversation continues unabated.

  Daylight was dawning, a murky, humid dawn which brought renewed heat to a city already steeped in its own emanations—a city of silent-winged mosquitoes, oppressive and sweltering heat, unevaporated perspiration, and those odors which cling to China as an aura.

  Sahm Seuh stood suddenly before her.

  “That gold?” he asked. “Do you wish it?”

  “I would strike a match,” she said tonelessly.

  “Meet me,” Sahm Seuh said, “at the house on Sky Horse Alley where three candles burn. Open the door and climb the stairs. The time is tonight at the last minute of the hour of the dog.”

  And so, as one in a daze, Leung Fah turned down The Sky Horse Alley and shuffled along with leaden feet, her eyes utterly without expression, set in a face of wood…

  Night found her turning into the Alley of the Sky Horse.

  In a house on the left, a girl was playing a metallic-sounding Chinese harp. Ten steps back of her, a bean peddler raised his voice in a long, howling “o-w-w-w-w e-o-o-o-o.’’ Fifty feet ahead, a family sought to scatter evil spirits by flinging lighted firecrackers from the balcony.

  Leung Fah plodded on, circling a bonfire where paper imitation money, a model sedan chair, and slaves in effigy were being sent by means of fire to join the spirits of ancestors. Three candles flickered on the sidewalk in the heavy air of the hot night.

  Leung Fah opened the door and climbed stairs. There was darkness ahead, only darkness. She entered a room, and sensed that others were present. She could hear their breathing, the restless motions of their bodies, the rustle of clothes, occasionally a nervous cough. The hour struck—the passing of the hour of the dog, and the beginning of the hour of the boar.

  The voice of Sahm Seuh came from the darkness. “Let everyone here close his eyes, and become blind. He who opens his eyes will be adjudged a traitor. It is given to only one man to see those who are gathered in this room. Any prying e
yes will receive the kiss of a hot iron, that what they have seen may be sealed into the brain.”

  Leung Fah, seated on the floor, her feet doubled back under her, her eyes closed tightly, sensed that men were moving around the room, examining the faces of those who were present by the aid of a flashlight which stabbed its beam into each of the faces. And she could feel heat upon her cheeks, which made her realize that a man with a white-hot iron stood nearby, ready to plunge the iron into any eyes which might show signs of curiosity.

  “She is strange to me,” a voice said, a voice which spoke with the hissing sound of the yut boen gwiee—the ghosts of the sunrise.

  “She is mine,” the voice of Sahm Seuh said, and the light ceased to illuminate her closed eyelids. The hot iron passed by.

  She heard a sudden scream, the sizzling of a hot iron, a yell of mortal anguish, and the sound of a body as it thudded to the floor. She did not open her eyes. Life, in China, is cheap.

  At length, the silent roll call had been completed. The voice of Sahm Seuh said, ‘‘Eyes may now open.”

  Leung Fah opened her eyes. The room was black with darkness.

  “Shortly before the dawn,” Sahm Seuh said, “there will be the roar of many motors in the sky. Each of you will be given a red flare and matches. To each of you will be whispered the name of the place where the red flare is to be placed. When you hear the roar of motors, you will crouch over the flare, as though kneeling on the ground in terror. When the motors reach the eastern end of the city, you will hold a match in your fingers. There will be none to watch, because people will be intent upon their own safety. When the planes are overhead, you will set fire to the red flares, and then you will run very rapidly. You will return most quickly to this place; you will receive plenty gold.

  “It is, however, imperative that you come to this place quickly. The bombing will last until just before daylight. You must be here before the bombing is finished. You will receive your gold. In the confusion you will flee to the river. A boat will be waiting. It will be necessary that you hide for some time, because an investigation will be made. There are spies who spy upon us, and one cannot explain the possession of gold. You will be hidden until there is more work.”