Page:Weird Tales volume 33 number 04.djvu/36

 that I help him kill someone?" From his tone it was quite evident he did not turn the proposition down unheard. "Or is it that he has outside a body he desires secretly interred?"

"Consult your records," Mordecai replied. "Some hours ago, since sunset, they brought the body of a woman here"

"They have brought many bodies here, Citizen. The chopper has been very busy"

"This one was not chopped. She was found dead upon the street and hurried here for burial. In a three-year grave"

"B'en oui. One remembers now. I helped the cartman bury her"

"I want her disinterred."

"Parbleu, you are a resurrectionist—an anatomist, perhaps?"

Mordecai drew out his purse and dropped a golden louis on the pile of paper money. "You will do it?"

The sexton eyed the money greedily. "For fifteen hundred francs, perhaps"

"A thousand or nothing."

"Mille tonnerres, Citizen, you have no heart! A poor man scarcely has the wherewithal to live these days, and the risk I run is great. However"—as Mordecai prepared to thrust the notes and gold back in his pocket—"one consents. There is nothing else to do. If the citizen must have the body at his price, then he must have it at his price." He shrugged as only Frenchmen can shrug when they wish to indicate complete dissociation from a matter, shuffled to the corner and picked up a rusty spade and pick-ax. "I wait your pleasure, Citizen."

of eery half-light lay upon the graveyard as they picked their way down what had been a graveled path. Across the clay-stained almost turfless lawn the fosse or common trench for executed bodies cut like a saber-slash in dirty flesh. Those whose names should be embalmed in history lay in the muddy ditch: Louis XVI, Charlotte Corday, Louis d'Orleans, Marie Antoinette. Silhouetted stark and ghastly by the torn clouds were the age-stained marble tombs of the wealthy, mostly empty now, for the mob had ransacked them for valuables and thrown their tenants out upon the bone-pile. A little farther off the rough unsodded mounds of ten-year graves were ranged beneath their wooden markers, none of which was cross-shaped, for religious emblems were forbidden for the dead as for the living. Huddled by the wall there showed the graves of the poor dead, five- and three-year concessions.

Graves of the five-year class were scarcely deeper than the coffins they enclosed, but their occupants could lie in them for half a decade. The three-year graves were little more than mounds of sodden earth heaped over coffins laid in two-foot trenches. In thirty-six months they would be leveled and the bodies in them thrown into the cemetery's common charnel-house. It was toward one of these the sexton strode.

"Grand Dieu!" he cried as the light from his dark-lantern picked the mound of mud from the surrounding darkness. "Observe him, Citizen!"

Face downward on the grave, arms spread as if he would embrace it, lay a man, and from the cockade in his hat and the tri-colored sash around his waist they recognized him as an agent of Public Security. No need to ask if he were dead or how he died. The wound in his right temple, spilling blood that dyed the red clay deeper