"Jesus… that's awful."

"Oh, I've seen worse, lad."

"Wh-what was the worst you've seen." The young man gulped at his tea.

"Ah… that was two days ago. When we disinterred Rose Burswick. When we opened the lid we saw… ah no… no." He shook his head gravely and slurped his tea. "No. It's so bad I can't bring myself to… no."

But he did go on to describe others in lurid detail. "Old Walter Weltson. My uncle was a gravedigger when they planted him — summer of 1946. Weltson was the fattest man in the country — twenty stone or more. It took so long to build a coffin that the meat-flies got him. Ah… when we opened his coffin up it were like opening a box of long-gram rice. Couldn't see him. Just this mound of maggots all white and hard like dried rice. Then it rained. My God, I'll never eat rice pudding again. Look." The gravedigger pointed to something small and white on the brick floor. "There's one. Must've trod it in on me boots." The gravedigger watched with satisfaction as the young man nervously peered at the white morsel.

"Oh, Christ," he murmured loosening his shirt collar. "Awful."

"Then there was…" The gravedigger had stories involving worms, rats; even rabbits — "you see, the rabbits had tunneled down and built nests in the coffins, and we found the baby rabbits scampering about inside the empty rib-cages" — and there were stories about valuable jewelry, about pennies on eyes — "of course when the eyeballs dried they stuck to the pennies, so when you lifted the pennies…" — and then back to maggots and… The gravedigger noticed the young man's attention had wandered, he even finished replacing the freezer back plate and swigged off his tea without really taking any notice of what he was being told.

Time to play the ace.

Sighing, the gravedigger lit the butt that had been tucked snugly behind his ear. "You know, I can't get that last one we dug up out of my mind. Aye, Rose Burswick."