After that—nothing. Quiet.
The town people entered the mortuary the next morning. They searched the mortuary building and the church, and then they went out into the graveyard.
And they found nothing but blood, a vast quantity of blood, sprinkled and thrown and spread everywhere you could possibly look, as if the heavens had bled profusely in the night.
But not a sign of Mr. Benedict.
“Where could he be?” everybody wondered.
“How should we know?” everybody replied, confounded.
And then they had the answer.
Walking through the graveyard they stood in deep tree shadows where the stones, row on row, were old and time-erased and leaning. No birds sang in the trees. The sunlight which finally managed to pierce the thick leaves, was like a light-bulb illumination, weak, frail, unbelievable, theatrical, thin.
They stopped by one tombstone. “Here, now!” they exclaimed.
Others paused and bent over the grayish, moss-flecked stone, and cried out.
Freshly scratched, as if by feebly, frantic, hasty fingers (in fact, as if scratched by fingernails the writing was that new) was the name:
“MR. BENEDICT”
“Look over here!” someone else cried. Everybody turned. “This one, this stone, and this one, and this one, too!” cried the villager, pointing to five other gravestones.
Everybody hurried around, looking and recoiling.
Upon each and every stone, scratched by fingernail scratchings, the same message appeared:
“MR. BENEDICT”
The town people were stunned.
“But that’s impossible,” objected one of them, faintly. “He couldn’t be buried under all these gravestones!”
They stood there for one long moment. Instinctively they all looked at one another nervously in the silence and the tree darkness. They all waited for an answer. With fumbling, senseless lips, one of them replied, simply:
“Couldn’t he?”
The End
