Page:Weird Tales volume 33 number 04.djvu/34

 night air out, of course, but this was pitch-black darkness, impenetrable as a velvet hood. She moved her arms uneasily. To left and right were hard, rough wooden walls that pressed her sides and interfered with movement. She started up and fell back with a startled cry, for she had struck her head a violent blow. The air about her pressed against her ears; it had a damp and heavy feeling, as though confined.

Then with a reason-shattering shock she knew. Her scalp began to sting and prickle as the awful truth ran through her like an icy wave. This was no dream, but dreadful fact. The bonds of lethargy had dropped away, she was once more mistress of her body, conscious, able to call out for help—but none would ever hear her. She was coffined, shut up beneath a mound of muddy earth in the cemetery of the Madeleine.

Buried alive!

She screamed in agony of soul and body. The horrible reverberation of her voice in the sealed coffin rang against her ears like thunder-claps tossed back by mountain-peaks.

Her eyes were open—open staring-wide—and she searched the Stygian darkness for a gleam of light. It was as if she pressed her fingers on her closed eyelids. Only fiery sparks and shining patches of bright lightning-color showed, changed and faded like the patterns of a kaleidoscope.

Then she went mad. Shrieking, cursing the day that she was born and the God that let this dreadful fate befall her, she writhed and twisted, kicked and struggled. The coffin sides pressed her so closely that she could not get her hands up to her head, else she would have torn her hair out by the roots and scratched her face to the bone; but she dug her nails into her thighs through the flimsy stuff of her gown and bit her lips and tongue until her mouth was choked with blood and her raving cries were muted like the gurgles of a drowning man. At last with a tremendous effort she turned herself face down and beat her brow against the coffin floor. Again and again she struck her forehead on the rough pine planks, getting a slight surcease from her horror in the pain.

Once more she writhed inside the straitness of her tomb, twisted till she lay upon her back, arched her body, drew her knees up, kicked frenziedly against the coffin foot. It gave a very little and she thought she saw a flickering glow of light. One little minute, just long enough to breathe the air while they rushed her to the chopper—let her smell the open air once more! She started up, her forehead crashed against the coffin lid. A wave of weakness flooded over her. She fell back, sick and faint

rain had slacked almost imperceptibly as Mordecai strode toward the cemetery. By the time he reached the sexton's hut beside the gate there was no water falling save wind-lashed drippings from the trees and eaves.

His first knock brought no answer, but continued hammering at last evoked a shuffling step, and a blast of super-heated, almost fetid air swept from the little house as the door was opened on a six-inch crack. Behind the little gnome-like man who peered at him through, the small opening Mordecai descried a candle burning in a bottle and a charcoal poêle glowing redly. "The Citizen has doubtless lost his way," the porter ventured. "This is the Cemetery of the Madeleine."