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In the Vault - H. Lovecraft

In the Vault

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Берч приобрел ограничение и изменил свой бизнес в 1881 году, но никогда не обсуждал дело, когда мог его избежать. Точно так же поступал и его старый врач доктор Дэвис, который умер много лет назад. Обычно говорили, что болезнь и шок стали результатом несчастного случая, когда Берч закрыл себя на девять часов в камере приема кладбища Пек-Вэлли, вырвавшись только благодаря грубым и катастрофическим механическим средствам; хотя это действительно было правдой, были и другие, более ужасные вещи, которые человек говорил мне в своем пьяном бреду в конце жизни. Он доверился мне, потому что я был его врачом, и, вероятно, чувствовал потребность довериться кому-то еще после смерти Дэвиса. Он был холост, не имел никаких родственников. Берч до 1881 года был похоронным предпринимателем в деревне Пек-Вэлли; и был очень безнравственным и первобытным существом, как, собственно, и все такие экземпляры. Практики, о которых я слышал упоминать, были бы непостижимы сегодня, по крайней мере, в городе; и даже Пек-Вэлли потряслось бы немного, если бы узнало о легком этическом подходе своего моргового художника к таким спорным вопросам, как владение дорогостоящей одеждой "взло" невидимой под крышкой гроба и степень достоинства в устройстве и адаптации невидимых членов безжизненных жильцов к контейнерам, не всегда сублимно точно рассчитанным. Берч был небрежен, нечувствителен и профессионально нежелателен; и все же я все еще считаю, что он не злой человек. Он просто был кощунственным по натуре и работе, беззаботным и пьяным, как доказывает его легко избежимая авария и без того незначительное воображение, которое заставляет среднего гражданина оставаться в рамках, установленных вкусом.

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In The Vault

Dedicated to C. W. Smith,

from whose suggestion the central situation is taken.

Birch acquired a limitation and changed his business in 1881, yet 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 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; but while this much was undoubtedly true, there were other and blacker things which the man used to whisper to me in his drunken delirium toward the last. He confided in me because I was his doctor, and because he probably felt the need of confiding 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; and 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 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 fibre and function – thoughtless, careless, and liquorish, as his easily avoidable accident proves, and without that modicum of imagination which 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. Fortunately the village was small and the death rate low, so that it was possible to give all of Birch’s inanimate charges a temporary haven in the single antiquated receiving tomb. The undertaker grew doubly lethargic in the bitter weather, and seemed to outdo even himself in carelessness. Never did he knock together flimsier and ungainlier caskets, or disregard more flagrantly the needs of the rusty lock on the tomb door which he slammed open and shut with such nonchalant abandon.

At last the spring thaw came, and graves were laboriously prepared for the nine silent harvests of the grim reaper which waited in the tomb. Birch, though dreading the bother of removal and interment, began his task of transference one disagreeable April morning, but ceased before noon because of a heavy rain that seemed to irritate his horse, after having laid but one mortal tenent to its permanent rest. That was Darius Peck, the nonagenarian, whose grave was not far from the tomb. Birch decided that he would begin the next day with little old Matthew Fenner, whose grave was also near by; but actually postponed the matter for three days, not getting to work till Good Friday, the 15th. Being without superstition, he did not heed the day at all; though ever afterward he refused to do anything of importance on that fateful sixth day of the week. Certainly, the events of that evening greatly changed George Birch.

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