Lovecraft, H P - In The Vault

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In The Vault

by H. P. Lovecraft

Written 18 Sep 1925

Published November 1925 in The Tryout, Vol. 10, No. 6, p. 3-17.

There is nothing more absurd, as I view it, than that conventional association of the

homely and the wholesome which seems to pervade the psychology of the multitude.

Mention a bucolic Yankee setting, a bungling and thick-fibred village undertaker, and a

careless mishap in a tomb, and no average reader can be brought to expect more than a

hearty albeit grotesque phase of comedy. God knows, though, that the prosy tale which

George Birch's death permits me to tell has in it aspects beside which some of our darkest

tragedies are light.

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

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