A Sharpness On The Neck (Saberhagen's Dracula Book 9) by Fred Saberhagen (most read book in the world .TXT) 📗

      One of the diggers called down curses on their bad luck—which was in fact much worse than he suspected. The first touch on the afternoon’s fresh coffin had sent it shifting and falling from its designated resting place, sliding down another three or four feet into an unexpected cavity created by the decay of much earlier interments. Jerry and his two companions were surprised; but as an habitué of such environments, I can assure my readers that the circumstance is not particularly unusual.

      Ever deeper delved dogged Jerry and his determined colleagues. But the more the short-lived, breathing intruders discovered, the greater the depths to which they probed into this unexpected trove of splintered wood and rotten bones, the more they were impressed, and the more their greed for treasure was aroused.

* * *

      “Ere, we’ve struck some kind of pit. Bring another light, I say!”

      … and Jerry, when he was holding the second lantern closer, looking into the accidentally broken coffin (not even the oldest of the two or three the diggers had disturbed), saw that which confirmed his first vague impression. He beheld the body of a white-haired man of saintly and ascetic mien, who had obviously been claimed by death when far advanced in years. But his corpse was in a startlingly, even unbelievably good state of preservation.

      For a moment young Jerry Cruncher, never too swift of thought, was convinced that what lay before him was actually the fresh body he had come to steal. But for a moment only. According to his information, today’s interment had been a woman, and there could be no doubt that the body before him now was no female, as beautiful as the long hair, slightly curly, and finely chiseled features were … the clothing on this strange one was almost a century out of date, decayed and discolored. But still it originally had been of the finest quality—you could tell that by the persisting fineness of lace, and by the buttons, which were of pearl and ivory.

      And though the cloth had decayed, had fallen prey to rot and insects, it seemed that the flesh had not.

      Holding his lantern closer, the young graverobber caught the glint of what certainly must be a valuable ring, glinting with both gold and jewels, on one aged finger, and if his eyes did not deceive him, there were even two ostentatious rings on the same hand … mere costume jewelry? In this bad light it was hard to be sure, but he thought not.

      And only then—such was the intensity of his focus upon profit—only then did Jerry note that the body’s head lay divided from the torso, the two parts of the body separated by a narrow strip of wood running athwart the coffin. This fact struck the discoverers as remarkable indeed. The disjunction was not merely an effect of decay, or of the jostling of the old box by more recent burials. No, it had obviously been accomplished deliberately before interment; the coffin had actually been constructed in two compartments.

       What Jerry was seeing seemed to him impossible to interpret, to invest with meaning. Vaguely he assumed that the man had been beheaded for treason. At the moment no other reason came to mind for such a grisly act. Though the punishment was still on the books in His Majesty’s courts, and no one had yet removed the last dried traitor’s head from Temple Bar—its empty sockets still peered into the office windows of Tellson’s Bank, where Jerry sometimes served as errand boy—he hadn’t heard of any such event in recent years.

      Jerry, going single-mindedly after those gleaming rings, gripped the headless torso and took hold of the stiffened arm in its crumbling sleeve. It occurred to him, even as he reached into his jacket pocket for his clasp knife, that the arm in his grip ought not to be so stiff after so many years, nor ought it to be so rounded with firm flesh. The depth of this burial, and the presence of at least one layer of rotting coffins in the earth above it, indicated that it must have lain undisturbed under the dirt for a period at least equal to a long human lifetime.

      The dead hand on its rigid arm somehow resisted, passively but very effectively, the removal of its jeweled and golden rings. The longer and more closely Jerry looked at those small circlets, the more he would have sold his soul to have them. The gleaming treasure so concentrated his attention that he was hardly aware of the body and its strangeness, except as an obstacle that stood between himself and instant wealth, to be overcome.

      Jerry’s two colleagues were drawing closer to him, one on each side. The one on the right grunted: “ ’Ere! D’ you s’pose them rocks are real?”

      No one bothered to answer.

      The graverobbers were on the verge of a serious falling out over this tremendous treasure, not realizing that the current possessor of the gems was going to have something to say regarding their disposal. For a long moment the two men glared warily, suspiciously at each other. Then the moment was past, and they agreed it would be daft to fight. Here was enough treasure, and far more than enough, to enrich them all.

* * *

      But over the next few minutes, it was borne in on both of the intruders that the beheading, and the compartmentalized coffin, were not at all the strangest things about this find. The state of the body augured that this had to be a fresh burial, while the condition of the coffin, and the clothing, testified that it could not be.

      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