Bill Pronzini - Night Freight

"Like it wasn't what?" I asked him.

"No" he said, "no, I ain't going to say."

Toby said, "I'll bet she was lining the coffin and laid down in it to try it for a fit. You know how she is with her trimming. Everything's got to be just so."

"Tired too, probably, hard as she works," one of the others said. "Felt so good, stretched out on all that silk and satin, she fell asleep. That's what you saw, Charley. Her sleeping in that box."

"She wasn't sleeping," Charley Bluegrass said, "she was dead." And nobody could convince him otherwise.

The next morning he was the one who was dead.

Heart failure, Doc Miller said. Charley Bluegrass was thirty-seven years old and never sick a day in his life.

Citizens of Little River kept right on dying. Old folks, middle-aged, young; even kids and infants. More all the time, though not so many more that it was alarming. Wasn't like a plague or an epidemic. No, what they died of was the same ailments and frailties and carelessness as always. Pneumonia, whooping cough, diphtheria, coronary thrombosis, consumption, cancer, colic, heart failure, old age; accident and misadventure too. Only odd fact was that more deaths than usual seemed to be sudden, of people like Charley Bluegrass that hadn't been sick or frail. Old Mead was one who just up and died. The young Catholic clerk, Frank McGee, was another.

When I heard about Frank I took over to the undertaking parlor to pay my respects. Mrs. McGee was there, grieving next to the casket. I told her how sorry I was, and she said, 'Thank you, Mr. Cranmer. It was so sudden . . . I just don't understand it. Last night my Frank was fine. Why, he even laughed about dying before his time."

"Laughed?"

"Well, you recollect what happened to that half-breed Indian, Charley Bluegrass? The night before he died?"

"I surely do."

"Same curious thing happened to my Frank. He went out for a walk after supper and chanced over here to Oak Street. When he looked in through Mr. Bedford's show window he saw the very same as Charley Bluegrass."

"You mean Grace Selkirk lying in one of the coffins?"

"I do," Mrs. McGee said. "Frank thought she was dead. There was something peculiar about her face, he said."

"Peculiar how?"

"He wouldn't tell me. Whatever it was, it bothered him some."

Charley Bluegrass, I recalled, had also remarked about Grace Selkirk's face. And he hadn't wanted to talk about what it was, either.

"Frank was solemn and quiet for a time. But not long; you know how cheerful he always was, Mr. Cranmer. He rallied and said he must've been wrong and she was asleep. Either that, or he'd had a delusion—and him not even a drinking man. Then he laughed and said he hoped he wouldn't end up dead before his time like poor Charley Bluegrass . . ." She broke off weeping.

Right then, I began to get a glimmer of the truth.

Almost everyone in Little River visited my store of a week. Whenever a spouse or relative or close acquaintance of the recently deceased came in, I took the lady or gent aside and asked questions. Three told me the same as Frank McGee's widow: Their dead had also chanced by the undertaking parlor not long before they drew their last breaths, and through the show window saw Grace Selkirk lying in one of the coffins, dead or asleep. Two of the deceased had mentioned her face, too—something not quite right about it that had disturbed them but that they wouldn't discuss.

Five was too many for coincidence. If there was that many admitted what they'd seen, it was likely an equal number—and perhaps quite a few more than that—had kept it to themselves, taken it with them to their graves.

That was when I knew for certain.

My first impulse was to rush over and confront Grace Selkirk straight out. But it would have been pure folly and I came to my senses before I gave in to it. I went to see Abe Bedford instead. He was my best friend and I thought if anybody in town would listen to me, it was Abe.

I was wrong. He backed off from me same as if I'd just told him I was a leper. Why, it was the most ridiculous thing he'd ever heard, he said. I must be deranged to put stock in such an evil notion. Drive her out of town? Take a rope or a gun to her? "You go around urging such violence against a poor spinster, George Cranmer," he said, "and you'll be the one driven out of town."

He was nearly right, too. The ministers of our three churches wouldn't listen, nor would the mayor or the town council or anyone else in Little River. The truth was too dreadful for them to credit; they shut their minds to it. Folks stopped trading at my store, commenced to shunning me on the street. Wasn't anything I could do or say to turn even one person to my way of thinking.

Finally I quit trying and put pen to paper and wrote it all out here. I pray someone will read it later on, someone outside Little River, and believe it for the pure gospel truth it is. I have no other hope left than that.

She calls herself Grace Selkirk but that isn't her name. She has no name, Christian or otherwise. She isn't a mortal woman. And coffin-trimming isn't just work she's good at—it's her true work, it's what she is. The Coffin Trimmer.

The Angel of Death.

I don't know if she's after the whole town, every last soul in Little River, but I suspect she is. Might get them too. One other fact I do know: This isn't the first town she's come to and it won't be the last. Makes a body tremble to think how many must have come before, all over the country, all over the world, and how many will come after.

But that is not the real reason I'm so scared. No, not even that. Last night I worked late and walked home by way of Oak Street. Couldn't help myself, any more than I could help glancing through Abe Bedford's show window. And there she was in a fresh-trimmed coffin, the silk and satin draped just so around her, face all pale and waxy and dead. But the face wasn't hers; I looked at it close to make sure.

It was mine. A shadow vision of my own fresh corpse waiting to be put into the ground.

I'm next.

This little tale of psychosexual obsession brought yelps of protest from more than one faithful reader when it first appeared. The story seems to push some people's buttons, and not because of the act referred to in the final sentence; the phrase containing reference to said act was left out of the originally published version. The yelps pleased me. I hope there'll be more from readers who catch "Funeral Day" here for the first time. Pushing buttons, after all, is what fiction is all about—from the writer's point of view, anyway.

Funeral Day

It was a nice funeral. And easier to get through than he'd imagined it would be, thanks to Margo and Reverend Baxter. They had kept it small, just a few friends; Katy had had no siblings others than Margo, no other living relatives. And the casket had been closed, of course. A fall from a two-hundred-foot cliff . . . it made him shudder to think what poor Katy must have looked like when they found her. He hadn't had to view the body, thank God. Margo had attended to the formal identification.

The flowers were the worst part of the service. Gardenias, Katy's favorite. Dozens and dozens of gardenias, their petals like dead white flesh, their cloyingly sweet perfume filling the chapel and making him a little dizzy after a while, so that he couldn't concentrate on Reverend Baxter's mercifully brief eulogy.

At least he hadn't been pressed to stand up next to the bier and speak. He couldn't have done it. And besides, what could he have said about a woman he had been married to for six years and stopped loving—if he had ever really loved her—after two? It wasn't that he'd grown to hate or even dislike her. No, it was just that he had stopped caring, that she had become a stranger. Because she was so weak . . . that was the crux of it. A weak, helpless stranger.