Silas Blackburn touched Bobby’s arm timidly.
“I’ve been a hard man, Bobby—”
He broke off, his bearded lips twitching.
The grating of the screws tore through the silence.
Rawlins glanced up.
“Lend a hand, somebody.”
Groom spoke hoarsely:
“It isn’t too late to let the dead rest.”
Robinson gestured him away. Graham, Paredes,
and he knelt in the snow and helped the detective
raise the heavy lid. They placed it at the side
of the grave.
They all forced themselves to glance downward.
Katherine screamed. Silas Blackburn leaned on
Bobby’s arm, shaking with gross, impossible
sobs. Paredes shrugged his shoulders. The
light wavered in Robinson’s hand. They
continued to stare. There was nothing else to
do.
The coffin was empty.
BOBBY’S VIGIL IN THE ABANDONED ROOM
For a long time the little group gathered in the snow-swept
cemetery remained silent. The lamp, shaking in
the district attorney’s hand, illuminated each
detail of the casket’s interior linings.
Bobby tried to realize that, except for these meaningless
embellishments, the box was empty. That was what
held them all—the void, the unoccupied silken
couch in which they had seen Silas Blackburn’s
body imprisoned. Yet the screws which the detective
had removed, and the mass of earth, packed down and
covered with snow, must have made escape a dreadful
impossibility even if the spark of life had reanimated
its occupant. And that occupant stood there,
trembling and haggard, sobbing from time to time in
an utter abandonment to the terror of what he saw.
To Bobby in that moment the supernatural legend of
the Cedars seemed more triumphantly fulfilled than
it would have been through the immaterial return of
his grandfather. For Silas Blackburn was a reincarnation
more difficult to accept than any ghost. Had
Paredes, who all along had offered them a spectacle
of veiled activity and thought, grasped the truth?
At first glance, indeed his gossip of oriental theories
concerning the disintegration of matter, its passage
through solid substances, its reassembly in far places,
seemed thoroughly justified. Yet, granted that,
who, in the semblance of Silas Blackburn, had they
buried to vanish completely? Who, in the semblance
of Silas Blackburn, had drowsed without food for three
days in the house at Smithtown?
The old man stretched his shaking hands to Bobby and
Katherine.
“Don’t let them bury me again. They
never buried me. I’ve not been dead!
I tell you I’ve not been dead!” He mouthed
horribly. “I’m alive! Can’t
you see I’m alive?”
He broke down and covered his face. Jenkins sank
on the heap of earth.
“I saw you, Mr. Silas, in that box. And
I saw you on the bed. Miss Katherine and I found
you. We had to break the door. You looked
so peaceful we thought you were asleep. But when
we touched you you were cold.”
