The Iron Coffin

The cemetery was silent save for the chirping of crickets and the steady scraping of my shovel in the dirt. I’d already dug about three feet down and I was dog-goddamned tired. My hands were blistered, mosquitoes picked at me like an all-you-can-eat buffet, and the dirt wouldn’t even stick to my face for all the sweat pouring down my scalp. I stabbed my shovel into the dirt and took a swig of bourbon from the flask in my back pocket.

“How’s things going?” Pete asked. He was sitting on the cooler he’d insisted on bringing, drinking a cold beer. His gloves sat untouched on the cooler beside him. He hadn’t yet even thought about lifting his shovel.

“They’d be going a hell of a lot quicker if you’d get down here and help me,” I said.

“Come on, Carl. You know I’m no good at digging ‘less I get a few beers in me first.”

“You can’t do a goddamn thing without a few beers in you. You bring that cooler everywhere we go.”

“You forgot your gloves again, didn’t you? You’re always grumpy when you forget your gloves. You want, you can borrow mine.”

“Just finish that beer and get your ass down here.”

“Yes, sir, Mr. Boss Man. Be right there, Mr. Boss Man.”

“Goddamn idiot,” I mumbled.

Wasn’t two minutes later when I heard the familiar sound of a tab cracking open. It was muffled, like Pete had been trying to hide what he was doing so I’d think he was nursing the same drink. I popped my head out of the hole like a gopher to catch him in the act. He whistled a tune and pretended to be gazing at the stars.

“You take one sip of that beer and I’m gonna hit you with this shovel,” I said.

“I was opening it for you. I thought you might be thirsty.”

“Get down here, Pete. Now.”

“Alright, alright,” he said. “Christ Almighty, I’m coming.”

Pete grabbed his shovel and jumped down into the hole. He scooped up some dirt and tossed it over his shoulder. It whizzed past my head like a speeding bullet and grazed me on the ear.

“Would you watch where you’re throwing that shit?” I asked. “You nearly took my damn head off.”

“How the hell am I supposed to watch it if I’m tossing it behind me, Carl? You wanted me to come down here and dig—well, here I am. You don’t want to get hit with dirt, I’ll gladly go back to the cooler while you finish up.”

“Goddammit, Pete, don’t you realize what’s at stake here? This old broad was buried with all of her jewelry. All of it. Every last pearl necklace and diamond ring she ever owned is down there in that casket, just waiting for us to dig it up. It’s the big break we’ve been looking for.”

“Don’t start talking to me about a big break,” Pete argued. “Only thing we’re breaking out here is our goddamn backs. There’s always rubies and diamonds and sacks of fuckin’ gold that are supposed to be inside of these things, but how often do we actually find anything worth selling?”

“If Mr. Hoyt is right about what’s down—”

“Oh, please. Hoyt doesn’t know his funny bone from his pecker. When’s the last time that asshole gave us good information?”

“He’s the one who told us about that watch last year. You remember that? The silver one with the engraving on it.”

“And he kept that damn watch for himself, didn’t he? Gave us fifty bucks apiece and a bottle of whiskey to split between us.”

“It was good whiskey.”

“It was Jack Daniel’s. And he’d already drunk a third of the bottle before he gave it to us. If that’s all Hoyt is good for, he can hobble down here on that wooden leg of his and dig this bitch up himself.”

“Fine,” I said. “That’s just goddamn fine. You want to be done with all this? You’re out. I’ll never drag you back to a cemetery for as long as I may live. But since you’re already here, will you please shut the hell up and help me finish?”

Pete sucked on his lower lip and took a good look at the hole we found ourselves in. It was as if he was trying to conjure up some sort of X-ray vision so he could see through all the dirt and determine whether or not digging would be worth the effort.

He decided that it was.

“This is it, Carl,” he said. “This is the last hole that I dig with you, regardless of what we find down there.”

“That’s all I ask,” I said. “Let’s get it done.”

We dug for an hour without either one of us speaking a word. Pete’s dirt flew by my head more often than I was comfortable with, but I decided that biting a hole through my tongue was more conducive to finishing the job.

I stopped to check my watch and saw that it was going on three in the morning. The sky was cloudless and the moon was shining down on us like a penitentiary spotlight. I was absently wondering why all the crickets had stopped chirping when Pete’s shovel struck the earth with a harsh clink that rattled my eardrums. Our eyes rushed to meet each other, and for the first time all night, we had something worth smiling about.

Fueled by how close we were to the prize, we caught our second wind. We burrowed into the dirt like mischievous dogs digging up a garden and we didn’t let up until the coffin was revealed.

Its appearance surprised us both.

In our line of work, we typically came across rickety caskets made of glorified driftwood, but this one was made of solid cast iron. Weirder yet, it was shaped and sculpted to look like a human body with arms folded across its chest. There was a large cross engraved in the iron just beneath the arms and a circular glass window positioned directly over the corpse’s face so that folks could peek at the deceased without opening the lid.

“Sucker must weight as much as the truck,” Pete whistled in amazement. “I wonder how the hell they got it down here.”

“Must have used one hell of a crane,” I said. “How do we open this thing? Do you see a lock or a latch anywhere?”

We knelt atop the coffin and pushed loose dirt around with our hands.

“Look at this,” I said, feeling around the edge of the coffin. “These here look like threaded holes to me. I reckon someone was supposed to drive bolts through here to hold the coffin closed, but it looks like this whole side is empty.”

“Ain’t but three bolts on this side,” Pete said. “Why the hell wouldn’t they finish driving them down before burying her?”

“Maybe they were in a hurry. A dead body isn’t going anywhere anyway. Even if it could, this lid must weigh a few hundred pounds. Ain’t nothing getting in or out of that thing.”

“Except for us,” Pete grinned, his spirit reignited by our discovery.

“Except for us,” I agreed. “Bring your shovel over here. Let’s see if we can slide the heads into the crease here and pry this bastard open.”

“What if the shovels break?”

“Let’s just hope they don’t.”

I had a vision then.

A waking dream of the new life I’d be able to soon afford.

I was sitting in a quaint room next to a fireplace, a glass of whiskey glistening in the firelight and the gentle snores of a beautiful woman drifting from the bedroom. There was a rug made of real bearskin on the floor and photographs of a life well lived on the mantle. My hands were clean and smooth, and my back had altogether forgotten the existence of pain.

And that’s about the time Pete started screaming.

“Carl! Carl, goddammit, get over here and look at this!”

He was hunched over the coffin window, peering inside.

“Keep your voice down,” I hissed. “What the hell is it?”

“The glass!” he shouted, no quieter than before. “Look at the glass!”

“Just what in the hell do you think I’m doing? It’s too dark in there. I don’t see anything.”

“I saw something when I was stepping over, Carl. I swear I did. It looked like a pair of eyes. Glowing red eyes.”

“How much beer’d you drink up there, Pete?”

“You son of a bitch, I’m telling you—there were red eyes looking out at me.”

“Think about what you’re saying right now, Pete. Really think about it. Now tell me, which is more likely—that an old dead lady was staring at you with glowing red eyes, or that you saw the moonlight reflecting on rubies or some kind of other jewelry that we already know is supposed to be down there?”

Pete exhaled and his shoulders slumped, releasing some of their tension.

“I reckon you might be right,” he said.

“Of course I’m right.”

“They looked just like eyes, though, whatever they were.”

“I’m sure they did, Pete. Now come on, let’s pry this thing open and get the hell out of here before a real pair of eyes sees what we’re doing.”

Pete and I slid our shovels into the slim gap between the top and bottom of the iron coffin. The hole we were standing in wasn’t spacious enough to leverage the shovels in an easy way, and the wooden handles groaned so loudly it was a miracle they didn’t give out, but eventually we got that heavy fucking lid lifted high enough to push with our hands. The bolts on the other side of the coffin fought against us, but with both of us pushing our weight against them, we were able to fold the lid over them like a door hinge and prop it against the wall of dirt. 

There was a brief moment when Pete and I held our breath, expecting the usual scent of death and decay to waft over us like a gargantuan fart, but the only foul stench to be found was coming from our own sweaty bodies. 

Without us having to plug our noses or climb out of the hole to throw up as we sometimes did, it gave us a chance to truly examine what we were seeing.

Lying inside of the coffin with her arms crossed over her chest just as they were on the lid was an elderly woman with thin white hair that flowed over her shoulders and down to her waist. She wore a black Victorian dress with criss-crossed lace over her bosom and a silky black cape over her shoulders. Around her neck was a thick silver necklace with a ruby-red amulet hanging from it. It looked to me like some sort of insignia or ancient family heirloom.

“That looks expensive,” I said. “But where the hell is everything else?”

“Something ain’t right here, Carl.”

“You’re damn right about that,” I lost my cool. “Mr. Hoyt said she was buried with all of her jewelry. You’re telling me we went through all that trouble for one goddamn necklace?”

“Forget the necklace!” Pete said. “Look at her, man. She’s been down here for how many years and she hasn’t started rotting at all? It looks like she’s sleeping. Not dead, just asleep.”

“Of course she looks that way. That’s what this sort of coffin is for—to seal you in tight and preserve your beauty for as long as possible. Don’t you know anything, Pete?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, I do,” I assured him. “Now, why don’t you go ahead and take that necklace off of her and then we’ll lift up the body to see if there’s anything hiding underneath.”

“I don’t know,” Pete said again.

“Go on and do it. She’s not going to bite.”

Hesitantly, Pete knelt over the old lady’s corpse and started removing the necklace. I wiped sweat from my brow and took in the scene. My eyes were drawn to the woman’s hands. They were smooth; young. They didn’t match the rest of her at all. Her fingernails, on the other hand, were disgusting—pointed at the tips like tiny daggers and yellow as the callouses on my own feet. And when Pete lifted her head to unclasp the necklace, they started to twitch.

“Shit,” I said. “Get away from there, Pete!”

But my warning came too late.

Pete stared up at me with that hapless look of his and that’s when those red eyes flashed open. 

The old woman let out a feral screech and thrust a sharp fingernail into Pete’s throat. I didn’t have enough time to react or move a muscle to try and save him.

Blood erupted from the wound and she pressed her dry, quivering lips to the hole and sucked on it like a nursing calf. Purple veins expanded in her face as she drank, and it seemed to me like the skin there was turning smooth like her hands. Pete kicked his feet all the while, his body jerking involuntarily, until he was finally, mercifully, still.

The sight of his limp, lifeless body snapped me out of the trance I was in. I climbed out of the hole in record time and hauled ass across the cemetery.

Behind me, I could hear the old woman screeching like a wounded animal. Worse yet, I could hear her pointed nails in the dirt as she climbed out of the hole, finally free of the iron coffin that held her.

I’d barely made it past Pete’s beer cooler when she slammed into the back of my legs and knocked me down.

She dug her nails into the flesh between my shoulder blades and flipped me over onto my back, then she sat her heavy ass on my chest and swiped at my throat with those rotten claws. It wasn’t until she leaned in with parted lips to leech the blood from my neck that I realized the glowing red eyes I was staring into didn’t belong to the dead lady at all—they were Pete’s.

As I drifted between lives and felt my human soul seeping through the holes in my flesh, there was a newfound hatred stirring within me. I thought of Mr. Hoyt in his home, sitting by the fireplace with a glistening glass of whiskey, listening to the steady tick tick tick of his fancy silver watch. I imagined Pete and I paying him a late-night visit, showing him our brand new sets of eyes. Then we would drive his wooden leg through his throat for a taste of the good life. Yes sir, we’d drink him right up—make sure there was nothing left of him to turn.

We could drink his wife, too.

His children.

That’s generational wealth.

Or perhaps we’d let them go, as a favor.

Hoyt had been right, after all.

There was something waiting for us down in that coffin.

The greatest goddamn treasure of all.