And the very strangest oddity of all was this: How could a body actually have been buried with such a cargo of wealth? In Jerry's experience, the people in charge of burials, except for close relatives temporarily deranged by grief, considered that gold and gems belonged to the living and not the dead. But that was not Jerry's problem now; the carelessness of those long-dead workers was his good fortune.
'Real? By God, we'll soon find out.'
Methodically one of his companions opened the blade of his clasp knife—he had to retrieve it from the pocket of his discarded coat—and started trying to cut one of the old man's fingers
The sensation of an independent movement in the arm that he was holding went through Jerry like an electric shock.
Chapter Four
' 'Ere! Wot—?' Jerry's chums were stuttering and mumbling in amazement. Before their eyes, and hardly more than an arm's length away, the wooden casket was collapsing around its occupant. The pieces of wood, the planks and plates and partitions making up the coffin, which for decades had enforced compartmentalization inside that silk-lined receptacle, had badly rotted over that span of time in the damp earth. Under the strain of sudden movement, they had now broken loose from each other and fallen free. They were no longer capable of maintaining a separation between the occupant's head and body.
The diffuse beam of the lantern showed how the free hand of the headless body in the coffin—the hand not occupied with being robbed—went groping for the gray-haired head, found it, and pulled it into place.
Jerry, beyond astonishment, stood gaping like a fish in air. The two pieces of the long-dismembered corpse had somehow got themselves back together.
One of Jerry's fellow despoilers, watching, sat back on his heels, pointing with his raised right hand and muttering incoherently in horror and disbelief. The other stood as silent as a statue.
Unbelievably, within the grave, the head of slightly curly hair—a lustrous, luxuriant white—was now turning of its own volition on the reconstituted neck. The withered, regal face came more fully into view, the long-lashed eyelids quivering and opening at last. For a moment Jerry viewed the impossible sight with sheer relief, because it proved that he was only dreaming. But even as the thought crossed Jerry's mind he knew it was ridiculous.
The lantern light shone full upon a pair of eyes of glassy blue. The expression in them was only half- conscious—no, not even half, but now they had actually opened and were anything but dead. They moved in their sockets, and slowly achieved a focus. Their gaze was shiny and moist in a way that suggested some warm emotion, like that of one awakened from some pleasant dream.
The pale, withered hand, whose bejeweled fingers had successfully resisted the robber's sawing with the knife, shot out and closed with unexpected power, with the tenacity of death itself, upon the intruding hand and wrist of the unfortunate graverobber.
Jerry went stumbling forward, to the aid of the man who was down deepest in the pit, when the latter cried out for help.
The body in the coffin was garbed in once-rich, now worm-eaten fabric, antique clothing that crumbled, spitting free its loosened buttons with the motion of the unspoiled flesh within. That entire pale-skinned body now moved, stiffly at first, as if almost paralyzed, then with increasing ease and speed. The once-fine silken lining of the coffin, now mottled with decay and mold, tried to stretch and crumbled, too.
It was at this point that the taller of Jerry's associates turned away and fled, running in silent, deadly earnest, in superstitious terror. The sight of the white hand gripping his comrade's wrist had been too much.
Jerry and his remaining colleague, a man named Smith, were at the moment too stunned to try to run. Then, with a tremendous effort, Smith managed to wrench himself free, a feat made possible only by the fact that his coatsleeve tore away in the corpse's grip.
Even as Smith went stumbling back, the undead hand grabbed Jerry, who had remained too paralyzed to move.
The other man, possessed by a fatal loyalty, or terminally afflicted with common sense too strong to let him believe what he was seeing—or perhaps simply too stupid and unimaginative to be much daunted even by a vampire—picked up a shovel and started pounding on the thin and ancient-looking arm emerging from the coffin. His aim was accurate. The impacts were startlingly loud, as if the man had been beating on a solid beam of wood.
Still, the only immediate effect of this effort was that a second white hand, as if energized by the assault, emerged from among the cracked boards and took effective action, catching the pounding shovel on the third try ina grip that proved as relentless and remorseless as that of Fate itself. The shovel was wrenched violently from the hands of its breathing wielder and thrown aside.
All this, from the moment of the old coffin's sliding into the deep pit until now, had happened very quickly. The pounding feet of the man who had run away could still be heard, but in a few more seconds the sound faded into darkness and patchy fog.
Somewhere, in the city that now seemed so far beyond the cemetery wall, a dog was howling in abandon.
Jerry was still held by one wrist. His remaining comrade appeared to be free, but did not run away. Nor did Jerry struggle. Slowly the bodies of both men slumped, until they were sitting on the ground. It was as if they were held in place by a combination of greed and amazement, subtly aided by an hypnotic influence which neither breathing man could recognize for what it was.
Presently the inhabitant of the coffin, twisting his body slowly from side to side, and now displaying a touch of uncertainty in his movements, had got himself entirely free of the splintered wood. Now he was sitting up. And now he was crawling, the warm blue gaze in that decrepit face fixed on Jerry, his teeth, which were very white and at the moment very pointed, displayed in a friendly smile.
Deep in his throat Jerry was making incoherent sounds. Just when he was on the point of springing to his feet again, he was stunned and half-paralyzed by a gentle-seeming stroke, almost a caress, as the hand he had been trying to butcher for its rings released his wrist and rose to stroke him on the cheek. A moment later the same hand fell on his ankle with a wrenching grip, to pull him even closer with nightmarish ease. Then the hand let him go for a fraction of a second, only to re-establish its grip upon his neck. There it left an impression that filled his arms and legs with pins and needles.
Satisfied that Jerry was temporarily deprived of the power of movement and of speech, the thing from the coffin reached out and took hold of Jerry's remaining colleague.
Too late, and ineffectually, the man began to struggle. Then he screamed: a faint, half-breathless, inarticulate sound. The sound was not a conscious utterance, but only the result of the breath being crushed entirely out of his rib cage by arms almost skeletally thin, but far stronger than those of any breathing human.
No blood had yet been visibly spilled, though now a great deal was being drained. The helpless, dying man was being dressed like a fowl, by a butcher who set a very high value on the avoidance of carelessly spilled blood.
And soon the two pale hands, working together, had wrenched off one of the living arms that a minute ago had been swinging a shovel at him. And now at last there came a spray of red, quickly cut short as Radu's mouth closed over the pumping artery.
* * *
… and a little later, after a timeless interval of unconsciousness, Jerry Cruncher opened his eyes to see that the man who had been buried (his hair that had been white was now luxuriant and raven black, growing on a head as firmly fastened to his body as Jerry's own—How could he ever have imagined that the head had once been separate?)—that man was chewing to pulp much of the soft tissue of Smith's body, his white teeth crushing, splintering the bones. The man from the coffin was straining Smith's blood through his mouth to swallow it, spitting out the gruesome residue, murmuring and puffing a red froth of satisfaction…
The white face, marked with only three almost microscopic spots of wasted blood, turned in Jerry's direction.
