“Such a young man! The prime of life. What did he die of?”

“They said encephalitis-”

Encephalitis. Sleeping sickness. The corpse considered this and had trouble keeping a straight face. It was indeed to laugh.

And a woman’s voice, slow, halting, thickly accented: “You know, he doesn’t look dead. To look at him, you would think he was alive. You would look at him and you would say, hoo, he ain’t dead, hoo, he’s only sleeping.”

Hoo.

Well, you get the idea. It went on from there, and I suppose the service was shorter than usual, and I know it seemed longer. Tom Sawyer, I seem to remember, had a grand time at his own funeral. De gustibus and all that. I had a rotten time myself.

When the service ended, Hammacher and his assistant closed the casket and nailed down the lid, and it was like all those dim dark nightmares. There were air holes in the box, and I had rehearsed this part of it before and knew it was possible to breathe, but when they hammered those nails home the air inside there suddenly seemed inadequate in the extreme.

Then six good men and true bore my pall to the rickety old hearse. They might have carried me more carefully. The hearse bounced and jounced over a terrible old road out to the cemetery, and there was a mercifully short graveside service that I, mercifully, couldn’t hear very clearly through the coffin lid. And then there was a hell of a wrench and the coffin was abruptly lowered six feet to the bottom of the fresh grave. I suppose it was imagination at work, but at once the air in the box seemed to turn cold and clammy and tainted with the odors of embalming fluid and formaldehyde.