The lucky coffin

The business about the coffin started as a joke, nothing more. So I didn’t think at the time that it would affect Uncle Sim or me or the fact that I needed to inherit Uncle Sim’s money real bad.

Where did the coffin really come from? That I can’t say. All I know is that an old fellow in town named Jasper Grandy was about ready to die and he ordered himself a coffin from a mail-order house. Nothing fancy, just a plain, simple pine coffin. Should have been like millions of other wooden boxes made to hold human remains. But it wasn’t. There was something about that particular coffin that was different. And I think I knew more about its being different than anybody.

Well anyway, this Jasper Grandy was in his seventies and failing fast. Being a provident man who’d always wanted a roof over his head, he decided now to look out for his future in the best way left to him. So he bought the coffin. He couldn’t afford any of those metal affairs, so he had to settle for wood. Mind you now, just plain wood. Couldn’t have cost more than a hundred dollars.

But the funny part of it was, Jasper Grandy didn’t die. No, sir. He was in the advanced stages of what the doctors like to call “an incurable illness.” But he didn’t die. The minute the truck stopped in front of his house and the men brought the coffin in and set it down in Jasper’s parlor—that was the minute Jasper started to get well. And it wasn’t more than a couple of weeks before Jasper was up on his feet, walking around town telling everybody about his “miraculous recovery.” That’s what the doctors called it too.

Now in a town the size of ours, people are apt to be a bit more superstitious than big-city folks. The coincidence of the arrival of the coffin and Jasper’s sudden recuperation was bound to be noticed. It wasn’t long before there was speculation on some sort of connection between the two events.

But not on Jasper’s part. Though he didn’t put much stock in the notion himself, Jasper was well aware of the things people were saying about his coffin. Being a hard-headed business man, he was not above turning the incident to profit.

There was a cantankerous old maiden lady in town named Busby, Josephine Busby. She was having a bout with pneumonia, and for some reason she wanted to hold on to her miserable old life. She sent for Jasper. And I happened to be there because Miss Busby had asked the bank to send down a wad of her cash. Being on the brink of eternity, she wanted to complete the transaction then and there.

You should have heard the two of them haggling. Miss Busby was saying she was expecting to die any minute—and she looked it—and so she figured she’d do one last good deed and take that surplus coffin off Jasper’s hands. And Jasper was saying she didn’t need to worry none because he’d be needing the coffin some time and it didn’t take up hardly any space in his parlor. Being rebuffed like that, I thought poor Miss Busby was going to expire right then. She started shaking and trembling and getting clammy-looking. Jasper bided his time.

He wouldn’t deny her one last favor now, Miss Busby went on, would he? On the basis of their lifelong friendship? They hadn’t spoken for thirty years. Not since Jasper had told her flatly he wasn’t interested in marrying her. But Jasper wasn’t one to hold grudges. How much did Miss Busby think the coffin was worth?

That wouldn’t pay him for the trouble of ordering the thing and then waiting for it.

They settled for a nice round sum, one thousand dollars—cash. Miss Busby managed to scratch her signature, and I handed the greenbacks to Jasper.

And that was when it happened, the minute I gave Jasper the money and the sale was official and complete. Even before the coffin was delivered to Miss Busby’s house. It happened the moment the ownership of that pine box changed hands. Miss Busby lay back on her pillow. The trembling stopped and her breathing came easier. And she got a look on her face of a woman with a future, a woman who expected to live a long time.

Well, as could be expected, it wasn’t long before the whole town knew about the sale. They started waiting, and not so patiently. You never saw so many people kindly stopping by Miss Busby’s house to see how the poor sick lady was getting along. The reports began piling up. She was getting along fine. In ten days—it didn’t take her as long as it took Jasper—she was up, poking around making a nuisance of herself just like before, as good as new.

So it wasn’t strange that people began saying that there was something different about that coffin.

...The matter of the coffin wasn’t, however, the subject of conversation one night there when I went to call on Meg. Meg Norton, that is. My girl. Been my girl for almost seven years. That, in fact, was the subject of conversation—those seven long years.

“Hello, Emery.” She greeted me apathetically. Of course seven years is a long time to keep up enthusiasm. Still I sensed things were even more wrong than usual.

But I kissed her anyway, gave her the customary signs of affection. Her response was half-hearted. I knew something was really awfully wrong. “What is it?” I asked her. “What happened today that was so bad?”

“I got an announcement in the mail,” she stated mournfully. “An announcement of the date of Jenny Cartwright’s wedding.”

“Well, Jenny’s a friend of yours,” I said. “You ought to be happy about it.”

“Jenny is a friend of mine,” Meg answered. And she was getting ready to cry. “That’s the point. She’s the last of my friends. I am now the only girl in my school class who isn’t married.”

In a flash I understood. I lit a cigar, took a few puffs, remembered Meg didn’t like the smell of cigars, and let it go out.

“I didn’t ask you that. That sometimes has nothing to do with it, I’ve found out. I asked you if we’re ever going to get married.”

Why did we have to go through this routine so often? On the average of almost once a week now. The questions didn’t change, and neither did the answers.

But I walked over to her, and sat beside her, and put my arms around her, and got my shoulder ready for the tears that would come. “When we can afford it, darling,” I said. “When we can afford it.”

The tears came, and I went on talking, trying to soothe, hoping that the same old words might turn the trick just once more. “Now you know I want to get married, Meg. As much as you do. I want a home. A pretty little woman waiting for me at the end of the day, and a kid or two to comfort me in my old age. But getting married takes a lot of money. And I’m just a flunkey at the bank. I’ll admit that. Hardly make enough money to support myself, much less a wife. So that means we have to wait.”

“Yes, of course, for Uncle Sim. He’s got close to a million. Or half a million anyway. And I’m his only heir. So when Uncle Sim dies I’ll be rich.”

“Oh, I’m not so sure. I don’t think he’s been looking too well lately.”

“Really!” Meg brightened through her tears. “Oh, Emery, that’s wonderful.”

“Well, I can’t help rejoicing if your Uncle Sim has poor health,” she said stubbornly. “Because if he doesn’t die pretty soon, I’ll be an old maid.”

Yes, I thought to myself, and I’ll be a crotchety old bachelor, lonely and alone. So I squeezed Meg tight, and said with all the confidence in the world, “He’ll die, Meg. He’ll die. Uncle Sim can’t last much longer. He just can’t.”

Well, that just shows how wrong some people can be about the future. Of course, I was thinking of the law of averages and normal life expectancy. I didn’t figure on the coffin.

But it was that darned coffin that changed everything, that made me do what I did—what I had to do.

You see, after Miss Busby got well and had the doctors shaking their heads about how it couldn’t have happened, the coffin became the principal topic of conversation in every corner of the town. There were all sorts of theories about what made it the way it was, but none of them made much sense. Only one thing was certain—everybody wanted it. At least everybody who was sick, or scared of dying, or getting along in years.

I never thought Miss Busby would sell. She refused several mighty tempting offers. Like most people, she was greedy. That was her undoing. She might have kept the coffin and lived to be a hundred. But a big wad of money sometimes will make people take chances even with their lives.

Of all people it was Meg who broke the news to me. “I heard a rumor,” she said to me one evening when I came to call. “The coffin’s been sold for twenty-five thousand dollars.”

I couldn’t help laughing. “Who would pay that much money for a wooden box?” I wanted to know.

Meg wasn’t laughing that night. “There’s only one person in town who could afford it,” she answered. “Your Uncle Sim.”

Well, I don’t know exactly how I felt just then. I can remember looking at Meg and seeing that she had a crushed, helpless expression on her face.

“What’s going to happen to us now, Emery?” she was asking. Her voice was a little wobbly, and any minute she could have gotten hysterical. “Now Uncle Sim won’t die! He won’t ever die!”

I went to her and tried to take hold of her, but she wouldn’t let me. “Sweetheart,” I said, “surely you don’t believe that silly talk about the coffin.”

“Well yes. But it was coincidence. Psychological. There isn’t any magic charm to it. The age of miracles is over.”

She looked fiercely back at me, not at all convinced. When she answered, she almost spat the words at me. “You said your Uncle Sim wasn’t looking too well. Why don’t you go over and see how he looks now?”

I didn’t like her challenging me like that. “All right, I will,” I said. And I slammed my hat on my head and walked out.

It was a kind of long walk to Uncle Sim’s. He lived in the big old white house on the hill, over at the other end of town. It took me half an hour to get there, and I spent the time telling myself that all this talk about the coffin being something special was nonsense and I wasn’t going to let a wooden box stand in the way of my getting half a million dollars. Also I was a little mad that Uncle Sim had already spent twenty-five thousand dollars of my money for such foolishness.

When I got there, there were lights blazing in the house, which was a little odd because Uncle Sim usually went to bed early. When I banged with the knocker it was Uncle Sim himself who came answering.

“Well, look who’s here!” he greeted me cheerfully. His eyes were sparkling, not weak and watery. His white old mane glistened as if he’d just applied some hair-grower. He wasn’t leaning on his cane. And his wrinkled face had an awful healthy glow to it.

“Come in, sonny, come in. I want to show you something.” And he had me by the arm, squeezing my biceps with the strength of a vise, dragging me inside and into the big parlor.

The rumor was true. There it was. Much as I’d heard about it, I’d never seen it. A place had been cleared for it on the big library table, and there it sat in state. It was a cheap thing, no doubt about that. Wood, with a thin, flimsy covering of black cloth and plain, black iron handles. It didn’t look like twenty-five thousand dollars’ worth. Neither did it look like the Fountain of Youth. But I got a funny feeling as I stared at it. Something like thinking that this thing looked like a coffin but wasn’t a coffin, because a coffin is intended to contain a corpse and this box refused to accept any such contents....

“She’s mine now, sonny, all mine.” Uncle Sim walked across the room and posed proudly beside his acquisition.

“Why did you buy it though, Uncle Sim?” I found myself asking in a voice that didn’t sound like my own. “You weren’t sick like those other people.”

“No,” he said. “Not real sick anyway. But I was getting little pains here once in a while.” He indicated his heart. “The old ticker was beginning to give out.”

I had been right then about his not looking well. No one knew how close I’d been to that half million. But now....

“Has buying the coffin made you feel any better, Uncle Sim?” My voice quavered, I was so afraid of the answer.

He walked over to me and poked a finger in my ribs, devilishly. “I feel ten years younger already,” he declared.

“I was getting ready to die, sonny. And now I feel like I’m going to live forever.”

Forever! He looked it too. Like some Grand High Lama who knows the secret of immortality. Wrinkled and old on the outside, but beaming eternal youth from within. I groped behind me for a chair arm and sat down before I should collapse.

“What’s the matter, sonny?” I could hear Uncle Sim asking. “You don’t look too well yourself.”

I think I believed from that moment on. I must have believed. Because I could see myself getting old, older than Uncle Sim because he didn’t age. And I still had that flunkey job at the bank. And I could see Meg too, with lines in her face, sitting rocking in a rocking chair, waiting for me to marry her through eons and eons till the end of time.

So I must have decided then. It was plainly and simply a matter of self-preservation. Uncle Sim’s life or the stagnation and ruin of my own. And Meg’s.... If Uncle Sim wasn’t going to die decently, under his own power, I would have to urge him, and help him.... It just wasn’t right or natural for any man to live forever.

Forever! That word again. Forever is an awful long time to have to wait for half a million dollars. Too long.

I remember getting up from the chair finally and escaping from Uncle Sim’s house, leaving him fondling that horrible pine box. I suppose I found my way home. But I couldn’t have slept. What I was thinking about didn’t allow for sleep.

And I didn’t think about much else for the next week or so, while my resolve was becoming hard and inflexible. I saw Meg a couple of times, but it was too painful to stay long in her company. Because she knew, all, everything. The hurt look in her eyes, like a wounded deer bleeding its heart out in uncomplaining silence, told me that she knew and realized. Just the look in Meg’s eyes, if nothing else, would have been enough to inspire me to stern action.

I took to going to Uncle Sim’s house oftener, hanging around as long as I could manage, and observing. The excuses I gave were interest in Uncle Sim’s improving health and the fascination of the coffin.

The opportunity, as I discovered, presented itself readily. One day I found my good uncle, in the highest of spirits, cleaning out the contents of his medicine cabinet. “Don’t need this stuff any more,” he chortled to me gaily. “I’m fit as a fiddle. No more pills or potions for me.”

Boxes, tins and bottles were sailing with good aim into the wastebasket. I watched them go, forcing a smile, and noting that indeed my relative showed little need for any sort of medicine. He was looking healthier every day.

“Now this stuff,” he said, and held up for my gaze a bottle filled with clear liquid. “At one time this was my life-saver. Had to take a spoonful every time I had a bad heart pain. Not any more than a spoonful though. Much more than that would be fatal. But sometimes I felt like drinking the whole bottleful. Glad now I didn’t.”

As it joined the other items in the wastebasket, I memorized that particular bottle’s size, shape and label. I felt my smile become genuine. My good uncle had delivered himself into my hands.

I said I’d stay for dinner. When he went to the cellar to fetch a bottle of wine, I retrieved the heart medicine from the wastebasket. I laughed to myself. Uncle and I were both in a mood to celebrate.

I joined him in the parlor, where the coffin was. This evening I walked right past the thing, serene in my confidence that it could do no further harm to me. Uncle Sim had suggested that I open the wine and pour for both of us. I was only too happy to oblige.

It was a simple matter for me, while Uncle Sim was standing admiring his coffin, stroking its black surface as he might a dog’s back, to add to one of the wine glasses the complete contents of the medicine bottle. A dozen spoonsful, I estimated, at the very least.

And then we sat together by the fire, each with his wine glass, as any lovable old uncle and loving young nephew would have. I felt perfectly calm, thinking what I would say when someone arrived after Uncle Sim was dead. “He had a sudden attack,” I would say, “and asked me to bring his medicine. I did. He seemed in terrible pain. He snatched the bottle from me and drank every drop of it.”

And of course, I would have pressed the bottle into my uncle’s dead hand. No need even to wipe my fingerprints off the bottle, for there was a perfectly good reason why they should be there.

“It’s really tragic,” I would say. “He should have remained under the doctor’s care. But he imagined that he’d be safe as long as he had that coffin.”

At the thought of being a murderer I had absolutely no qualms. I looked across at Uncle Sim, and found him gazing happily into the firelight. “Your health, Uncle Sim,” I proposed. “Your health and long life.”

If any toast were calculated to get him to drink with a will, that one was it. He lifted his glass and began to toss off a hefty swallow. Then all of a sudden he was convulsed in a violent fit of coughing and choking. What he had tried to drink sprayed out of his mouth and sizzled in the fire, and in trying to rise from the chair, he dropped the glass. The red contents of it flowed freely upon the hearthstones. Then, as quickly as it had begun, the fit of coughing ceased.

I sat there, too stunned to speak or move. But Uncle Sim didn’t appear at all unhappy over the accident. He was, instead, smiling a big wide smile. “You know what made me do that?” he asked me.

“Well,” he said, “an idea just came to my mind. And it was such an amazing idea that it startled me. About that coffin. You know, Emery, if there’s something magic about that coffin that will keep the owner from dying from sickness, it might protect him from dying other ways too. Like getting run down by an automobile, for instance. I’ll bet you I could walk across the street any time with my eyes shut and never get hit.”

Never once had it occurred to me that if the coffin was a good luck charm against pneumonia or heart disease, it could just as well work against violent, unnatural deaths. But now I had it. Now it had been demonstrated to me. The poison irretrievable on the floor, and my uncle none the worse for wear.

I suppose I endured the rest of that evening somehow. My mind was numb. The sight of half a million dollars trickling out of one’s fingers, just as the wine spilled out of Uncle Sim’s glass, is quite a shock to the nervous system.

It took me, in fact, a few days to recover. I stayed away from the bank. I couldn’t have concentrated even on the simple tasks I performed there. And I didn’t go to see Meg. For I didn’t know what I should have told her, or how I should have kept it from her that the whole situation was utterly hopeless.

There is nothing worse for one’s morale, I believe, than an abortive murder attempt. It seems to unstring one entirely. To steel one’s self to the unnatural job of snuffing out a life, taking careful aim, and then missing. The remorse of failure is far worse than that of success. For with success, one can at least be compensated by the rewards of the crime.

But as must always happen, even the blackest defeatism spends itself. I began to recuperate. I began to think again. And to plan.

My plans were of a different sort now, however. I no longer regarded the matter as simple. I considered the problem of the coffin at length. I did not seek for the explanation of its effectiveness in warding off death for its owner. I tried to accept that fact and proceed accordingly.

First, however, I tried once again, more to make absolutely sure than with any hope of success. The most frequently used murder weapon, I knew, was a gun. Uncle Sim had one. One day my uncle was asleep in his chair by the fire. I took the gun out of a drawer, made certain it was loaded, walked over behind the chair and aimed it at my uncle’s head.

If I kill him, I told myself, I will say I was cleaning the gun and didn’t know it was loaded. If I do not kill him and he wakes up at the sound of the shot, I shall tell exactly the same story. So with a rather unusual sang-froid for such an occasion, I pulled the trigger.

Or rather, as I pulled the trigger something else happened. The floor lamp beside my uncle’s chair was an ancient article, had tottered precariously on its defective base for years. The moment I pulled the trigger was the moment it chose to fall. The upright caught my wrist, deflected my aim, so that the bullet plowed harmlessly into the upholstery of the chair.

The crash of the lamp and the roar of the shot sent Uncle Sim flying out of his seat. For an instant he gazed uncomprehendingly at the wreckage and me with the gun in my hand.

“That was a close call,” I told him, with an unfeigned nervousness. “I was going to clean your revolver for you, and I was just crossing in back of your chair when the lamp fell over. It hit my hand and made the gun go off. The bullet went into your chair.... I almost killed you, Uncle Sim.”

He came over and patted my back soothingly, as if I were the one who needed assurance. “Don’t get wrought up, sonny,” he advised. “No need to think you’re going to hurt me. That coffin, sonny. As long as I own that coffin, nothing can touch me. Now forget it.”

Well, I wasn’t likely to forget it. I had corroborated my earlier belief. I could not kill Uncle Sim. The man led a charmed life. The solution to my problem was not in murder.

I had considered, of course, merely stealing the coffin. It was a project involving considerable risk, but I did not reject it for that reason. I concluded that removing the coffin from the premises would not alter the legal ownership of said item. It would still be Uncle Sim’s and Uncle Sim would remain alive and healthy.

The alternative was to destroy the thing. What destroys wood is fire. Arson was inadvisable, since our town had a quite alert fire department. I would have to smuggle the coffin out of the house first. I prepared the spot for the cremation far out in the woods. But the blowtorch I had acquired gave me a bad burn and a worse scare in experimenting with it. Twice I hauled kerosene to the place. Once a scavenging animal got the cap unscrewed and spilled it for me. Another time I stumbled in a hole, spraining my ankle and so damaging the can that the contents seeped out. Confronted by obviously adverse fates, I gave up the idea of destruction by flame.

While recuperating from the sprained ankle, I thought of explosives. I spent two months constructing a time bomb out in Uncle Sim’s tool shed. My workmanship must have been defective. One night, prematurely of course, the thing went up with a roar, demolishing the tool shed not more than thirty seconds after I had left it. Nobody ever found out what caused the blast, but the accident was altogether too close for my comfort.

I went to see Meg that same night. My hang-dog look must have been pretty plain.

“Well,” asked Meg, “what’s new with your rich uncle?” She had grown thin and haggard in recent weeks. Already she was beginning to look her role of spinster.

“Meg,” I told her, “I don’t think my uncle is going to die in the foreseeable future. Therefore I have come to a difficult but inevitable decision. I hereby release you from our engagement, so you can find someone else and get married before it’s too late.”

She didn’t say anything. She just stared at me, getting whiter and whiter by the second. Then she opened her mouth just once, and screamed. I was barely able to catch her before she fell in a dead faint.

And then, as she was coming out of it minutes later, she was mumbling, “You can’t do this to me, Emery. You’ve already taken the best years of my life. You’ve got to marry me. Your Uncle Sim has got to die....”

The stuff I needed was brewed, I had heard, by some sort of South American Indians. It was a long and complicated job getting hold of some. But I was patient and determined. I got it. And I got a hypodermic needle and put the stuff into it.

I was staying at Uncle Sim’s house at the time. I had lost my job at the bank and Uncle Sim, not usually helpful or charitable, had grudgingly consented to shelter me. So I had the opportunity one night of sneaking into Uncle Sim’s room, jabbing the needle into his leg where the mark wasn’t likely to be seen, and then holding him down for the few minutes necessary for the injection to take effect. Then I called the doctor.

The doctor came and he was so amazed to find Uncle Sim, the owner of that amazing coffin, dead, that he didn’t make a very thorough examination. He signed the death certificate without ever noticing the hole made by the needle.

The matter of the undertaker wasn’t quite as easy. I phoned him a couple of hours before dawn, and insisted that he come right over and do all his work right there at the house. He arrived sleepy and wrathful. The promise of a fat fee calmed him somewhat, and then finally a glass of Uncle Sim’s wine with a little something added put him back to sleep. I prepared Uncle Sim myself, dressed him in his black suit and laid him out in that precious coffin of his. When the undertaker woke up about noon, I congratulated him on his fine job, and he went on his way, somewhat confused but never doubting.

Then all that afternoon I let the population file by the coffin, look down at Uncle Sim, and see how dead he was. I stood by, listening to their conversation and accepting their sympathies.

“Well, there wasn’t much to that coffin,” more than one person told me. “Your uncle died after all.”

Brushing away a tear, I replied, “There’s the law of nature, we must realize. Death and taxes, you know.”

There were also those who confided, “Never believed that coffin story for one minute.”

I didn’t disagree with them. I just shook their hands and mumbled something appropriate.

And finally there was Meg. She arrived dressed in the black she had saved for so long, and she tried her best to look sorrowful. But when she came up to me she couldn’t restrain a tiny smile.

I squeezed her hand. “You can start picking out your trousseau, honey,” I said.

We laid Uncle Sim to rest the very next morning. We put him in the big fancy vault that looked like a small Greek temple that he had had built for himself years ago. The whole town came to the funeral. It was the end of the coffin story, and they all wanted to see it. They stayed till the big iron door clanged shut, and then they all went home.

The bank, my old employers, advanced me some ready cash until all the red tape about Uncle Sim’s will could be unraveled, and I married Meg right away. We didn’t, I’m ashamed to say, wait for “a decent interval.” We had waited too long already.

Then just the other day I went out to the cemetery and walked around Uncle Sim’s vault. And there, in the calm and quiet of that peaceful spot, I heard it. The knocking. The knocking from the inside.

I suppose he got over the effects of the paralyzing drug pretty quick after the funeral, and by this time he must have had time to get awful mad. But it’s his own fault for buying that coffin he’s in, and I hope he realizes it.

Transcriber’s Note:

This etext was produced from Tales of the Frightened, August 1957 (vol. 1, no. 2). Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.

Obvious errors have been silently corrected in this version, but minor inconsistencies have been retained as printed.

New original cover art included with this eBook is granted to the public domain.

The Project Gutenberg eBook of The lucky coffin

The Lucky Coffin

Transcriber’s Note: