All was finished: the
grave-diggers had done their work and departed, and earth had gone back
again into the keeping of the earth. It brought me some great lightening of the spirit to know that, and I
was on the point of turning away when a sound of stir from the heaped
soil caught my ear, and I saw a little stream of pebbles mixed with
clay trickle down the side of the mound above the grave: the heavy
rain, no doubt, had loosened the earth. And then came another and yet
another, and with terror gripping at my heart I perceived that this was
no loosening from without, but from within, for to right and left the
piled soil was falling away with the press of something from below. Faster and faster it poured off the grave, and ever higher at the head
of it rose a mound of earth pushed upwards from beneath. Somewhere out
of sight there came the sound as of creaking and breaking wood, and
then through that mound of earth there protruded the end of the coffin. The lid was shattered: loose pieces of the boards fell off it, and from
within the cavity there faced me white features and wide eyes. All this
I saw, while sheer terror held me motionless; then, I suppose, came the
breaking-point, and with such panic as surely man never felt before I
was stumbling away among the graves and racing towards the kindly human
lights of the town below. I went to the parson who had conducted the service that afternoon with
my incredible tale, and an hour later he, Charles Alington, and two
or three men from the undertaker’s were on the spot. They found the
coffin, completely disinterred, lying on the ground by the grave, which
was now three-quarters full of the earth which had fallen back into it. After what had happened it was decided to make no further attempt to
bury it; and next day the body was cremated. *       *       *       *       *

Now, it is open to anyone who may read this tale to reject the incident
of this emergence of the coffin altogether, and account for the other
strange happenings by the comfortable theory of coincidence. He can
certainly satisfy himself that one Bertha Acres did die at sea on this
particular Thursday before Easter, and was buried at sea: there is
nothing extraordinary about that. Nor is it the least impossible that
the weights should have slipped from the canvas shroud, and that the
body should have been washed ashore on the coast by Tarleton (why not
Tarleton, as well as any other little town near the coast? ); nor is
there anything inherently significant in the fact that the grave, as
originally dug, was not of sufficient dimensions to receive the coffin. That all these incidents should have happened to the body of a single
individual is odd, but then the nature of coincidence is to be odd. They form a startling series, but unless coincidences are startling
they escape observation altogether. So, if you reject the last incident
here recorded, or account for it by some local disturbance, an
earthquake, or the breaking of a spring just below the grave, you can
comfortably recline on the cushion of coincidence....

       *       *       *       *       *

For myself, I give no explanation of these events, though my
brother-in-law brought forward one with which he himself is perfectly
satisfied. Only the other day he sent me, with considerable jubilation,
a copy of some extracts from a mediæval treatise on the subject of
reincarnation which sufficiently indicates his theory. The original
work was in Latin, which, mistrusting my scholarship, he kindly
translated for me. I transcribe his quotations exactly as he sent them
to me. “We have these certain instances of his reincarnation. In one his
spirit was incarnated in the body of a man; in the other, in that of
a woman, fair of outward aspect, and of a pleasant conversation, but
held in dread and in horror by those who came into more than casual
intercourse with her.... She, it is said, died on the anniversary of
the day on which he hanged himself, after the betrayal, but of this I
have no certain information. What is sure is that, when the time came
for her burial, the kindly earth would receive her not, but though the
grave was dug deep and well it spewed her forth again.... Of the man
in whom his cursed spirit was reincarnated it is said that, being on a
voyage when he died, he was cast overboard with weights to sink him;
but the sea would not suffer him to rest in her bosom, but slipped the
weights from him, and cast him forth again on to the coast.... Howbeit,
when the full time of his expiation shall have come and his deadly
sin forgiven, the corporal body which is the cursed receptacle of his
spirit shall at length be purged with fire, and so he shall, in the
infinite mercy of the Almighty, have rest, and shall wander no more.”




The Horror-Horn




The Horror-Horn


For the past ten days Alhubel had basked in the radiant midwinter
weather proper to its eminence of over 6,000 feet. From rising to
setting the sun (so surprising to those who have hitherto associated
it with a pale, tepid plate indistinctly shining through the murky air
of England) had blazed its way across the sparkling blue, and every
night the serene and windless frost had made the stars sparkle like
illuminated diamond dust. Sufficient snow had fallen before Christmas
to content the skiers, and the big rink, sprinkled every evening, had
given the skaters each morning a fresh surface on which to perform
their slippery antics. Bridge and dancing served to while away the
greater part of the night, and to me, now for the first time tasting
the joys of a winter in the Engadine, it seemed that a new heaven and
a new earth had been lighted, warmed, and refrigerated for the special
benefit of those who like myself had been wise enough to save up their
days of holiday for the winter. But a break came in these ideal conditions: one afternoon the sun grew
vapour-veiled and up the valley from the north-west a wind frozen with
miles of travel over ice-bound hill-sides began scouting through the
calm halls of the heavens. Soon it grew dusted with snow, first in
small flakes driven almost horizontally before its congealing breath
and then in larger tufts as of swansdown. And though all day for a
fortnight before the fate of nations and life and death had seemed
to me of far less importance than to get certain tracings of the
skate-blades on the ice of proper shape and size, it now seemed that
the one paramount consideration was to hurry back to the hotel for
shelter: it was wiser to leave rocking-turns alone than to be frozen in
their quest. I had come out here with my cousin, Professor Ingram, the celebrated
physiologist and Alpine climber. During the serenity of the last
fortnight he had made a couple of notable winter ascents, but this
morning his weather-wisdom had mistrusted the signs of the heavens, and
instead of attempting the ascent of the Piz Passug he had waited to see
whether his misgivings justified themselves.