Bradbury, Ray - SSC 09 by The Small Assassin (v2.1) Read Free Book Online

caretaker, “the bodies are reburied for as many years as
are paid.”
                 “Sounds
like blackmail,” said Joseph.
                 The
little man shrugged, hands in pockets. “We must live.”
                 “You
are certain no one can pay the one hundred seventy pesos all at once,” said
Joseph. “So in this way you get them for twenty pesos a year, year after year,
for maybe thirty years. If they don’t pay, you threaten to stand mama- cita or
little nino in the catacomb.”
                 “We
must live,” said the little man.
                 Fifty-one, fifty-two, fifty-three.
                 Marie
counted in the center of the long corridor, the standing dead on all sides of
her.
                 They
were screaming.
                 They
looked as if they had leaped, snapped upright in their graves, clutched hands
over their shriveled bosoms and screamed, jaws wide, tongues out, nostrils
flared.
                 And been frozen that way.
                 All
of them had open mouths. Theirs was a perpetual screaming. They were dead and
they knew it. In every raw fiber and evaporated organ they knew it.
                 She
stood listening to them scream.
                 They
say dogs hear sounds humans never hear, sounds so many decibels higher than
normal hearing that they seem nonexistent.
                 The
corridor swarmed with screams. Screams poured from terror-yawned lips and dry
tongues, screams you couldn’t hear because they were so high.
                 Joseph
walked up to one standing body.
                 “Say
‘ah,’” he said.
                 Sixty-five,
sixty-six, sixty-seven, counted Marie, among the screams.
                 “Here
is an interesting one,” said the proprietor.
                 They
saw a woman with arms flung to her head, mouth wide, teeth intact, whose hair
was wildly flourished, long and shimmery on her head.
Her eyes were small pale white-blue eggs in her skull.
                 “Sometimes,
this happens. This woman, she is a cataleptic. One day she falls down upon the
earth, but is really not dead, for, deep in her, the little drum of her heart
beats and beats, so dim one cannot hear. So she was buried in the graveyard in
a fine inexpensive box. . . .”
                 “Didn’t
you know she was cataleptic?”
                 “Her
sisters knew. But this time they thought her at last dead. And funerals are
hasty things in this warm town.”
                 “She
was buried a few hours after her ‘death?’ ”
                 “ Si , the same. All of this, as you see her here, we
would never have known, if a year later her sisters, having other things to
buy, had not refused the rent on her burial. So we dug very quietly down and
loosed the box and took it up and opened the top of her box and laid it aside
and looked in upon her—”
                 Marie
stared.
                 This
woman had wakened under the earth. She had torn, shrieked, clubbed at the
box-lid with fists, died of suffocation, in this attitude, hands flung over her
gaping face, horror-eyed, hair wild.
                 “Be
pleased, senor, to find that
difference between her hands and
these other ones,” said the caretaker. “Their peaceful fingers at their hips,
quiet as little roses. Hers? Ah, hers! are jumped up, very wildly, as if to pound the lid free!”
                 “Couldn’t
rigor mortis do that?”
                 “Believe
me, senor, rigor mortis pounds upon
no lids. Rigor mortis screams not like this, nor twists nor wrestles to rip
free nails, senor, or prise boards loose hunting for
air, senor. All these others are open of mouth, si , because they were not
injected with the fluids of embalming, but theirs is a