IN THE VAULT

by H. P. Lovecraft (1925)

Dedicated to C. W. Smith, from whose suggestion the central situation is taken.

As I view it, there is nothing more absurd than that conventional association of the homely and the wholesome that 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 prose tale that George Birch’s death permits me to tell, has aspects in it, besides which some of our darkest tragedies are light.

Birch acquired a limitation and changed his business in 1881, yet he never discussed the case when he could avoid it. Neither did his old physician, Dr. Davis, who died years ago.

It was generally stated that the affliction and shock were the results of an unlucky slip whereby Birch had locked himself for nine hours in the receiving tomb of Peck Valley Cemetery, escaping only by crude and disastrous mechanical means. Still, while this much was undoubtedly true, there were other and blacker things that the man used to whisper to me in his drunken delirium toward the end.

He confided in me because I was his doctor and because he probably felt the need to confide in someone else after Davis died. He was a bachelor, wholly without relatives.

Birch, before 1881, had been the village undertaker of Peck Valley, and was a very calloused and primitive specimen, even as such specimens go. The practices I heard attributed to him would be unbelievable today, at least in a city. Even Peck Valley would have shuddered a bit had it known the easy ethics of its mortuary artist in such debatable matters as the ownership of costly 'laying-out' apparel invisible beneath the casket’s lid and the degree of dignity to be maintained in posing and adapting the unseen members of lifeless tenants to containers not always calculated with the sublimest accuracy.

Most distinctly, Birch was lax, insensitive, and professionally undesirable, yet I still think he was not an evil man. He was merely crass of fiber and function – and thoughtless, careless, and fond of drinking, as his easily avoidable accident proves, and without that modicum of imagination that holds the average citizen within certain limits fixed by taste.

Just where to begin Birch’s story, I can hardly decide, since I am no practiced teller of tales. I suppose one should start in the cold December of 1880, when the ground froze and the cemetery delvers found they could dig no more graves till spring.

F