"Isn't that rather gruesome for his parents?"
The little man was earnest. "They never think of it," he said.
"Did you hear that, Marie?"
"What?" Thirty, thirty-one, thirty-two, thirty-three, thirty-four. "Yes. They never think of it."
"What if the rent is paid again, after a lapse?" inquired Joseph.
"In that time," said the caretaker, "the bodies are re-buried for as many years as are paid."
"Sounds like blackmail," said Joseph.
The little man shrugged, hands in pockets. "We must live."
"You are certain no one can pay the one hundred sev-enty pesos all at once," said Joseph. "So in this way you get them for twenty pesos a year, year after year, for maybe thirty years. If they don't pay, you threaten to stand mamacita or little nino in the catacomb."
"We must live," said the little man.
Fifty-one, fifty-two, fifty-three.
Marie counted in the center of the long corridor, the standing dead on all sides of her.
They were screaming.
They looked as if they had leaped, snapped upright in their graves, clutched hands over their shriveled bosoms and screamed, jaws wide, tongues out, nostrils flared.
And been frozen that way.
All of them had open mouths. Theirs was a perpetual screaming. They were dead and they knew it. In every raw fiber and evaporated organ they knew it.
She stood listening to them scream.
They say dogs hear sounds humans never hear, sounds so many decibels higher than normal hearing that they seem nonexistent.
The corridor swarmed with screams. Screams poured from terror-yawned lips and dry tongues, screams you couldn't hear because they were so high.
Joseph walked up to one standing body.
"Say 'ah,'" he said.
Sixty-five, sixty-six, sixty-seven, counted Marie, among the screams.
"Here is an interesting one," said the proprietor.
They saw a woman with arms flung to her head, mouth wide, teeth intact, whose hair was wildly flourished, long and shimmery on her head. Her eyes were small pale white-blue eggs in her skull.
"Sometimes, this happens. This woman, she is a cataleptic. One day she falls down upon the earth, but is really not dead, for, deep in her, the little drum of her heart beats and beats, so dim one cannot hear. So she was buried in the graveyard in a fine inexpensive box…."
"Didn't you know she was cataleptic?"
"Her sisters knew. But this time they thought her at last dead. And funerals are hasty things in this warm town."
"She was buried a few hours after her 'death?'"
