The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce — Volume 2: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians

Having finished staking off his claim Mr. Doman walked back to the centre of it and stood again at the spot where his search among the graves had expired in the exclamation, “Scarry.”  He bent again over the headboard that bore that name and as if to reinforce the senses of sight and hearing ran his forefinger along the rudely carved letters.  Re-erecting himself he appended orally to the simple inscription the shockingly forthright epitaph, “She was a holy terror!”

Had Mr. Doman been required to make these words good with proof—­as, considering their somewhat censorious character, he doubtless should have been—­he would have found himself embarrassed by the absence of reputable witnesses, and hearsay evidence would have been the best he could command.  At the time when Scarry had been prevalent in the mining camps thereabout—­when, as the editor of the Hurdy Herald would have phrased it, she was “in the plenitude of her power”—­Mr. Doman’s fortunes had been at a low ebb, and he had led the vagrantly laborious life of a prospector.  His time had been mostly spent in the mountains, now with one companion, now with another.  It was from the admiring recitals of these casual partners, fresh from the various camps, that his judgment of Scarry had been made up; he himself had never had the doubtful advantage of her acquaintance and the precarious distinction of her favor.  And when, finally, on the termination of her perverse career at Hurdy-Gurdy he had read in a chance copy of the Herald her column-long obituary (written by the local humorist of that lively sheet in the highest style of his art) Doman had paid to her memory and to her historiographer’s genius the tribute of a smile and chivalrously forgotten her.  Standing now at the grave-side of this mountain Messalina he recalled the leading events of her turbulent career, as he had heard them celebrated at his several campfires, and perhaps with an unconscious attempt at self-justification repeated that she was a holy terror, and sank his pick into her grave up to the handle.  At that moment a raven, which had silently settled upon a branch of the blasted tree above his head, solemnly snapped its beak and uttered its mind about the matter with an approving croak.

Pursuing his discovery of free gold with great zeal, which he probably credited to his conscience as a grave digger, Mr. Barney Bree had made an unusually deep sepulcher, and it was near sunset before Mr. Doman, laboring with the leisurely deliberation of one who has “a dead sure thing” and no fear of an adverse claimant’s enforcement of a prior right, reached the coffin and uncovered it.  When he had done so he was confronted by a difficulty for which he had made no provision; the coffin—­a mere flat shell of not very well-preserved redwood boards, apparently—­had no handles, and it filled the entire bottom of the excavation.  The best he could do without violating the decent sanctities of the situation was to make the excavation sufficiently longer to enable him to stand at the head of the casket and getting his powerful hands underneath erect it upon its narrower end; and this he proceeded to do.  The approach of night quickened his efforts.  He had no thought of abandoning his task at this stage to resume it on the morrow under more advantageous conditions.  The feverish stimulation of cupidity and the fascination of terror held him to his dismal work with an iron authority.  He no longer idled, but wrought with a terrible zeal.  His head uncovered, his outer garments discarded, his shirt opened at the neck and thrown back from his breast, down which ran sinuous rills of perspiration, this hardy and impenitent gold-getter and grave-robber toiled with a giant energy that almost dignified the character of his horrible purpose; and when the sun fringes had burned themselves out along the crest line of the western hills, and the full moon had climbed out of the shadows that lay along the purple plain, he had erected the coffin upon its foot, where it stood propped against the end of the open grave.  Then, standing up to his neck in the earth at the opposite extreme of the excavation, as he looked at the coffin upon which the moonlight now fell with a full illumination he was thrilled with a sudden terror to observe upon it the startling apparition of a dark human head—­the shadow of his own.  For a moment this simple and natural circumstance unnerved him.  The noise of his labored breathing frightened him, and he tried to still it, but his bursting lungs would not be denied.  Then, laughing half-audibly and wholly without spirit, he began making movements of his head from side to side, in order to compel the apparition to repeat them.  He found a comforting reassurance in asserting his command over his own shadow.  He was temporizing, making, with unconscious prudence, a dilatory opposition to an impending catastrophe.  He felt that invisible forces of evil were closing in upon him, and he parleyed for time with the Inevitable.

He now observed in succession several unusual circumstances.  The surface of the coffin upon which his eyes were fastened was not flat; it presented two distinct ridges, one longitudinal and the other transverse.  Where these intersected at the widest part there was a corroded metallic plate that reflected the moonlight with a dismal lustre.  Along the outer edges of the coffin, at long intervals, were rust-eaten heads of nails.  This frail product of the carpenter’s art had been put into the grave the wrong side up!

Perhaps it was one of the humors of the camp—­a practical manifestation of the facetious spirit that had found literary expression in the topsy-turvy obituary notice from the pen of Hurdy-Gurdy’s great humorist.  Perhaps it had some occult personal signification impenetrable to understandings uninstructed in local traditions.  A more charitable hypothesis is that it was owing to a misadventure on the part of Mr. Barney Bree, who, making the interment unassisted (either by choice for the conservation of his golden secret, or through public apathy), had committed a blunder which he was afterward unable or unconcerned to rectify.  However it had come about, poor Scarry had indubitably been put into the earth face downward.

When terror and absurdity make alliance, the effect is frightful.  This strong-hearted and daring man, this hardy night worker among the dead, this defiant antagonist of darkness and desolation, succumbed to a ridiculous surprise.  He was smitten with a thrilling chill—­shivered, and shook his massive shoulders as if to throw off an icy hand.  He no longer breathed, and the blood in his veins, unable to abate its impetus, surged hotly beneath his cold skin.  Unleavened with oxygen, it mounted to his head and congested his brain.  His physical functions had gone over to the enemy; his very heart was arrayed against him.  He did not move; he could not have cried out.  He needed but a coffin to be dead—­as dead as the death that confronted him with only the length of an open grave and the thickness of a rotting plank between.

Then, one by one, his senses returned; the tide of terror that had overwhelmed his faculties began to recede.  But with the return of his senses he became singularly unconscious of the object of his fear.  He saw the moonlight gilding the coffin, but no longer the coffin that it gilded.  Raising his eyes and turning his head, he noted, curiously and with surprise, the black branches of the dead tree, and tried to estimate the length of the weather-worn rope that dangled from its ghostly hand.  The monotonous barking of distant coyotes affected him as something he had heard years ago in a dream.  An owl flapped awkwardly above him on noiseless wings, and he tried to forecast the direction of its flight when it should encounter the cliff that reared its illuminated front a mile away.  His hearing took account of a gopher’s stealthy tread in the shadow of the cactus.  He was intensely observant; his senses were all alert; but he saw not the coffin.  As one can gaze at the sun until it looks black and then vanishes, so his mind, having exhausted its capacities of dread, was no longer conscious of the separate existence of anything dreadful.  The Assassin was cloaking the sword.

It was during this lull in the battle that he became sensible of a faint, sickening odor.  At first he thought it was that of a rattle-snake, and involuntarily tried to look about his feet.  They were nearly invisible in the gloom of the grave.  A hoarse, gurgling sound, like the death-rattle in a human throat, seemed to come out of the sky, and a moment later a great, black, angular shadow, like the same sound made visible, dropped curving from the topmost branch of the spectral tree, fluttered for an instant before his face and sailed fiercely away into the mist along the creek.

It was the raven.  The incident recalled him to a sense of the situation, and again his eyes sought the upright coffin, now illuminated by the moon for half its length.  He saw the gleam of the metallic plate and tried without moving to decipher the inscription.  Then he fell to speculating upon what was behind it.  His creative imagination presented him a vivid picture.  The planks no longer seemed an obstacle to his vision and he saw the livid corpse of the dead woman, standing in grave-clothes, and staring vacantly at him, with lidless, shrunken eyes.  The lower jaw was fallen, the upper lip drawn away from the uncovered teeth.  He could make out a mottled pattern on the hollow cheeks—­the maculations of decay.  By some mysterious process his mind reverted for the first time that day to the photograph of Mary Matthews.  He contrasted its blonde beauty with the forbidding aspect of this dead face—­the most beloved object that he knew with the most hideous that he could conceive.

The Assassin now advanced and displaying the blade laid it against the victim’s throat.  That is to say, the man became at first dimly, then definitely, aware of an impressive coincidence—­a relation—­a parallel between the face on the card and the name on the headboard.  The one was disfigured, the other described a disfiguration.  The thought took hold of him and shook him.  It transformed the face that his imagination had created behind the coffin lid; the contrast became a resemblance; the resemblance grew to identity.  Remembering the many descriptions of Scarry’s personal appearance that he had heard from the gossips of his camp-fire he tried with imperfect success to recall the exact nature of the disfiguration that had given the woman her ugly name; and what was lacking in his memory fancy supplied, stamping it with the validity of conviction.  In the maddening attempt to recall such scraps of the woman’s history as he had heard, the muscles of his arms and hands were strained to a painful tension, as by an effort to lift a great weight.  His body writhed and twisted with the exertion.  The tendons of his neck stood out as tense as whip-cords, and his breath came in short, sharp gasps.  The catastrophe could not be much longer delayed, or the agony of anticipation would leave nothing to be done by the coup de grâce of verification.  The scarred face behind the lid would slay him through the wood.

A movement of the coffin diverted his thought.  It came forward to within a foot of his face, growing visibly larger as it approached.  The rusted metallic plate, with an inscription illegible in the moonlight, looked him steadily in the eye.  Determined not to shrink, he tried to brace his shoulders more firmly against the end of the excavation, and nearly fell backward in the attempt.  There was nothing to support him; he had unconsciously moved upon his enemy, clutching the heavy knife that he had drawn from his belt.  The coffin had not advanced and he smiled to think it could not retreat.  Lifting his knife he struck the heavy hilt against the metal plate with all his power.  There was a sharp, ringing percussion, and with a dull clatter the whole decayed coffin lid broke in pieces and came away, falling about his feet.  The quick and the dead were face to face—­the frenzied, shrieking man—­the woman standing tranquil in her silences.  She was a holy terror!