The Most Frightening Story Ever Told (10 page)

There was no room for a lamp inside the coffin. Only a candle. Scipio had made a small hole in the wood of the coffin and covered this with a piece of metal gauze so that the flame from my candle would not cause the coffin to catch fire, but before I dared to place the candle under this spot I waited until I had felt myself settle on the floor of the grave for fear that the candle might be overturned and my light lost, and waited again until I heard the explosive sound of earth being shoveled back onto the coffin, which was sufficient confirmation that I would not move again.

It is the most wretched, ghastly sound—perhaps the most ghastly thing I have ever heard—and would surely have terrified someone who did not have the hope of escape from burial that I myself did.

Fearing discovery, Scipio worked quickly and, gradually, the noise of earth and stones crashing onto the wooden box I was in diminished as the layer covering me grew thicker, until I could hardly hear anything but the unnervingly close sound of my own breathing. Perhaps it was the slight smell of damp and decay, or a little dust that might have been clinging to the wooden interior, but something caught my throat and, for a moment, I was convulsed by a violent fit of coughing and found my head turning one way and then the other as I tried to clear my lungs of irritation. But I was not yet worried that the air inside the casket was about to run out, having been assured by Scipio that a whole day might pass before that finally happened: and hence I did not panic—at least not until the expulsion of air from my mouth blew out the candle that was my only source of light.

Immediately I forgot about my coughing and reached for the little tinderbox containing flint, fire steel and char cloth that was in my breast pocket to relight the candle. I was horrified to discover that it was not there, and my fingers scrambled like a spider over my chest and body, searching the other pockets of my clothes, only the tinderbox was not there. And in my mind's eye I suddenly saw it quite clearly on the table in my room at home where foolishly I had left it.

If I had not panicked before, I started to panic a little now, for there is something about the darkness inside a coffin that is so palpable and close that a person might actually bite it. But equally there exists the very strong and alarming sensation that something might reach out of the darkness and bite you.

I shouted for Scipio and kicked the toes of my boots on the coffin, but to no avail. He was surely gone by now, cowering by poor Wilson's pale corpse in the shelter of the Shockoe Hill Cemetery wall, and wouldn't be back at my graveside until dawn the following morning. Half stifled by the intensity of the darkness, I stared hard into the black air above my head and willed my mind to detach itself from my nerves, to pretend that I was back in my own bed at home and that I was half-asleep and dreaming, beset by the usual tricks of my own nocturnal imagination.

I do not know for certain how long I lay there like this, for although I had a pocket watch with me, I had not the means to see even the hand that might have held it, let alone the watch face. Perhaps I may even have dozed a little, for I was tired after the exertions of the exhumation. But gradually I became aware of a muffled sound beneath the coffin and, thinking at last that this might be Scipio's grandfather the houngan called Msizi come to play Virgil to my Dante, I cried out to hurry up and open the coffin, for I had no light.

At this, my cry for help, the sound stopped altogether and, thinking that someone or something might be there—wherever “there” was—I shouted out my name and announced that I was a friend of Scipio's, which was something of an exaggeration given the fact that Scipio was a slave owned by my stepfather. Indeed it was the nature of my relationship with Scipio that now gave me some pause for thought, concerning how, in similar circumstances, I should have reacted to meeting a person who was master to my own brother. And I decided it was unlikely that I should have been at all well disposed to such a creature. Why had I never considered this matter before? Was it not the height of arrogance to assume that I would be greeted with warmth and hospitality? I was about to loudly declare my apologies for Scipio's unfortunate station in life and my own unhappy relationship with his owner, the cold Mr. A——, when the coffin opened—not from below as I had expected, but from above, which seemed impossible, but there it is. And if I now hesitated to climb out of my wooden berth it was not because the sight that greeted me was too awful to contemplate but because there was nothing at all to be seen—so much nothing that I was reminded of the second verse of the Book of Genesis, where it says that “the earth was without form and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.”

I was not buried in the ground, of that much I was certain. The coffin was not six feet deep in anything very much. I could raise both my arms into the air—for I was breathing—and after a while I stood up, as if in an Indian canoe, and since evidently the coffin was supported by something, although it was in no way apparent what this was, I stepped out onto what felt like solid ground.

It might reasonably be asked how I could see any of this, since, as I have already said, “darkness was upon the face of the deep.” There was no source of light that I could see; and yet my own person and the coffin were as clear to me as if I had been standing in the drawing room at home. With eyes straining from their sockets to see more than my own poor self, and hands outstretched in front of me lest I come upon some wall or door, I looked one way and the other, but there was only darkness visible.

Plucking up what remained of my sorely tested courage, I called out. “Hallo,” I said. “Is there anyone there?”

A loud bang was my answer, which made my heart leap in my chest like a dog storming a gate. Still shaking a little, I turned around to discover, with some relief, only that the lid on the coffin had fallen shut. So it was all the more surprising when, looking up again, I saw that I was no longer alone, but accompanied not by an African but by an Oriental-looking man wearing a black frock coat. I say a man but the truth is more macabre, for this was a man with two heads, four arms, one body and one pair of legs, which is to say that they were conjoined twins. One twin had his right arm around the other's shoulder while the other kept his arm around his twin brother's waist, which lent him an amiable aspect, although this was not apparent in their greeting to me.

“What do you want here?” said one.

“You don't belong in this place,” said the other.

“This is most irregular.”

“Nevertheless, I think I was expected, sir,” I said, as politely as I could. “Msizi was informed that I would be visiting for a short while, by his grandson Scipio.”

“Scipio?” said one.

“That is not his real name,” said the other.

“His real name is Bhekisisa,” said the one.

“I'm sorry,” I said. “I didn't know that.”

“It's him you should apologize to,” said the one.

“Not us,” said the other. “Well, now that you are here—”

“What do you want to see?” asked the other.

I opened my mouth to speak and found myself short of an answer. It was an obvious question and yet it was one I had not really considered; but now that I did I realized there was only one thing I wanted to see, had ever wanted to see, which was the whole reason I had wanted to come in the first place.

“Sir,” I said. “I should like to see my mother again. Her name is Elizabeth P—— and she died in Richmond, Virginia, during the month of November 18—.”

“Your mother,” said the one. “Well, that changes everything.”

“You should have mentioned it before,” said the other. “It might have speeded things up a little. She could have been here to greet you.”

“I'm sorry, sir,” I said. “I didn't mean to inconvenience you.”

“No matter,” said the one. He turned to face his other head. “It's a reasonable request, don't you think?”

“Reasonable, and not uncommon given the young woman's premature demise,” said the other.

They both nodded. “Lots of boys and girls your age come down here looking for their mothers,” said the one.

“Elizabeth P——? She was an actress, was she not? From England?”

“That's quite correct, sir. I believe she lived there until the age of nine.”

The two strange men smiled. “Where someone lived and for how long is hardly relevant down here. Life, any amount of it, is of no consequence at all when measured next to all of eternity. Life is but a dream. What goes before and what comes afterwards are true reality.”

“But you shall see your mother, boy,” said the one.

“It will be our pleasure,” said the other, and waved his hand at the coffin, which opened magically, as if he had uttered the word “sesame.” “If you will walk this way.”

He stepped into the coffin and began to descend a staircase that had not been there before, and I followed without demur.

We walked down an invisible black staircase in silence for several minutes and only gradually did I perceive that the staircase was spiral in its design and that we appeared to be going down into a very deep pit. Minutes more elapsed. Perhaps as long as half an hour before finally the floor leveled out and I found myself in a dim, circular room furnished only with a black longcase clock in which a brass pendulum dully marked time with mechanical indifference. The face of the clock was like none I had ever seen, for it appeared to me to be that of my own mother, or at least the same indifferently painted portrait miniature I had of her at home.

I stopped and stared at it for a full minute before the case opened and my mother stepped out of it.

“Five minutes,” said my guide. “Agreed?”

“Agreed,” I said vaguely.

She was delicate and pretty with large, dark eyes, curly brown hair, a slender neck and a small nose. She wore a pearl earring on her right ear, a low-cut dress and a large bonnet with a bow upon it. She stared blankly at me for several seconds and it was a moment or two before I realized that I had grown a great deal since last she had seen me and she almost certainly did not recognize me.

“Mother,” I said. “It's me, Edgar.”

“Edgar who?” She glanced nervously at the conjoined twins. “Who are you and why am I here?” Her accent was English, with just a touch of Boston in it.

“Don't you recognize me, Momma?” I asked. “I'm your son.”

She looked at me with barely disguised contempt. “I've never seen you before.”

I shook my head. “Surely you remember me,” I insisted. “Your son Edgar? I have a brother called Henry, who's two years older than me. You were married to my father, David. And then to Mr. A——, my stepfather. We lived in Richmond, Virginia. Surely you remember us, Momma?”

I felt a sharp pain in my heart as my mother continued to stare at me with a look of cold incomprehension.

“I remember nothing, boy,” she said. “Nothing at all. Not who I was, not who I am. Why have you come here? Is this a joke? Some new torment that you have devised for me?”

“No, Momma, no. I'm telling you the truth. I really am your son. I just wanted to see you again because…I miss you so much. More than words can say. That's why I'm here. To tell you that I love you and I miss you and that I've never forgotten you.”

Her dark brown eyes narrowed and she let out a little sigh that drew her hand to her mouth.

“Oh,” she said, as if something had been awoken in her mind. “Yes. I do begin to remember something. From long ago. Before I came here. Yes. It's been so long, I had quite forgotten, yes. Forgive me, Edgar, yes. I remember now.”

I moved to embrace her but found my guide interposing his twin selves between my mother and myself.

“Time's up,” he said.

“What?”

“Five minutes,” said the one.

“You agreed,” said the other.

A curious thing now happened. The twins separated at the hip. One took hold of my mother around the waist and the other took firm hold of my arm and began to lead me away from her, back to the stairs.

“Please,” I said. “Give us two more minutes, I beg of you.”

“He begs,” said the man holding my mother. “Here, of all places. He begs and expects us to listen. Can you credit it?”

“Please,” wailed my mother. “Don't go.”

The man holding me laughed and led me to the stairs, for he was much too strong to resist. “Is it possible that you still do not understand where you are, boy?”

“Edgar, my son.”

My mother's little hand reached out for mine and our fingers touched fleetingly.

“Edgar, my boy. Don't leave me here. Forgive me, son. Yes, it's true, I had forgotten. But I remember now. I remember everything. You, Henry, your father. Our house in Richmond. When we were a family. Everything. Please, don't abandon me here. Please.”

This last word was not spoken so much as screamed in anguish, cutting through my chest like a huge, sharp blade.

“Please,” she screamed again. “Don't leave me, Edgar. Please!”

“Momma, I'm right here. I'm here.”

And then she was gone, although that terrible scream stayed ringing in my ears for several hours after I saw her no more. No more!

Suddenly it was horribly plain to me the awful truth of what I had done. Until she had seen me again, my mother had been reconciled to our being parted by the grave; but now, as a result of my stupid underworld tourism, she would have to endure the awful torment of our being parted once again, only this time until I myself was dead.

Why had I never perceived any of this before? Why had I not recognized where I was and the true identity of my smiling Oriental guide?

“What have I done?” I whispered as he led me back upstairs. “What have I done?”

“Done?” He grinned a sulfurous, evil grin that was part man and part wolf. “Why, you've done my job for me, old fellow. You've done my job for me.”