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| Weird Tales 1932.04 |
Opening Statement:
There is nothing more absurd, as I view it, than that conventional association of the homely and the wholesome which seems to pervade the psychology of the multitude. Mention a bucolic Yankee setting, a bungling and thick-fibred village undertaker, and a careless mishap in a tomb, and no average reader can be brought to expect more than a hearty albeit grotesque phase of comedy. God knows, though, that the prosy tale which George Birch’s death permits me to tell has in it aspects beside which some of our darkest tragedies are light.What in Brown Jenkin's Name..?
An undertaker is trapped inside a tomb with several freshly-prepared coffins. While trying to escape, he is hampered by an unhappy patron.Synopsis:
An infamous undertaker named Birch is accidentally locked inside a vault with eight ripe bodies in their coffins. Birch stacks the coffins on each other in order to reach the upper aperture exit but one coffin lid falls apart under his feet. As he pulls himself out of the window, something tears at his ankles, but he manages to escape. Later, the doctor finds that the corpse of an especially vindictive old man had apparently chewed on Birch’s ankles in revenge for Birch cutting the corpse’s feet off in order to fit it inside a smaller (and cheaper) coffin.Essential Saltes:
Clutching the edges of the aperture, he sought to pull himself up, when he noticed a queer retardation in the form of an apparent drag on both his ankles. In another moment he knew fear for the first time that night; for struggle as he would, he could not shake clear of the unknown grasp which held his feet in relentless captivity. Horrible pains, as of savage wounds, shot through his calves; and in his mind was a vortex of fright mixed with an unquenchable materialism that suggested splinters, loose nails, or some other attribute of a breaking wooden box. Perhaps he screamed. At any rate he kicked and squirmed frantically and automatically whilst his consciousness was almost eclipsed in a half-swoon.
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| Weird Tales 1932.04 |
- Another variation on the graveyard story, following the earlier "The Tomb" (1917) and "The Statement of Randolph Carter" (1919).
- Written while living in Brooklyn.
The Horrible Conclusion:
Great heavens, Birch, but you got what you deserved. The skull turned my stomach, but the other was worse—those ankles cut neatly off to fit Matt Fenner’s cast-aside coffin!”Read it here.
Follow'd by "The Descendant".
