The Madman's Room

What can one expect to find in a coffin?

It sometimes happens that it’s necessary to break ground in a cemetery in order to exhume a body. It’s fairly rare, admittedly, and there has to be good reason to do so.

When the coffin appears in the light of day under the fixed stares of those present, and feverish hands get ready to raise the lid, the same question is on everyone’s lips. What are we about to discover?

In detective novels, such events occur most frequently at dead of night or in the pale light of dawn. In real life, for the sake of discretion, they are usually arranged to take place outside of normal cemetery visiting hours. In deathly silence, the awed attendees stare fixedly at the coffin which is about to be opened. The slightest noise is amplified, the rustling of leaves becomes a moan and the creaking of the coffin lid sounds ominously sinister. Those watching are on the alert… some are expecting the worst, others are secretly hoping for it, but all have the same nagging, tormenting question: what shall we find?

There are obviously several possibilities: the body — or what’s left of it — is still there and is the same as the one which was buried. This is the most frequent case, but some witnesses, their morbid imagination influenced by the circumstances, anticipate a different outcome.

It can also happen that the body has disappeared, a curious phenomenon, particularly if it can be demonstrated that there was indeed a body in the coffin when it was interred and that the ground has remained unbroken prior to the exhumation. It’s also been known for the coffin not to be empty, but to contain the body of another person altogether!

Crypts offer other interesting variations. For example, when opening the door to a crypt — sealed, needless to say — as a result of a recent death reveals the incredible sight of smashed coffins lying in total disarray. Or, worse still, every coffin in its place, but skeletons scattered everywhere!

A particularly twisted mind might be able to imagine other baffling and shocking situations, but surely none more so than the incredible discovery which confronted the protagonists in the tale which follows. The opening of the Thorne family tomb revealed something absolutely inadmissible and completely inexplicable, but which was merely one episode in a tragic affair replete with incomprehensible events.

At the end of this tale, it will be hard to deny that destiny is indeed a very strange thing, and to ask whether, in fact, it wasn’t written by a malicious hand guided by an evil force, a particularly devious — even demonic — spirit. In it, there was a chain of facts and circumstances, regulated as if by clockwork, and of an extreme complexity, in which each element was indispensable. The reaction of each one of the individuals involved was critical. The slightest variation, the slightest change of nuance, could have brought down the edifice so patiently constructed to achieve the tragic conclusion. But that’s also true of everyday life: if X’s mother hadn’t put salt in her husband’s coffee, and if the latter hadn’t smashed the service which had been a gift from his mother-in-law, and if the cat hadn’t given birth in his sister’s wardrobe, X would never have walked about in the blazing sun wearing waterproof boots and carrying an umbrella and thus met the woman who was to play a disruptive role in his family life, etc.

Destiny, luck or fate? What to call the gigantic, monstrous puppet theatre guided by the hovering hand of he who controls the strings — he who knows what will happen, because it is he who has decided it shall be so?

It’s obviously not possible to go back and trace every action of each protagonist in our tale from the moment they were born, what are their principal characteristics, and how they were influenced for better or for worse by events. But the scene which follows — which took place in a Cornish cove on a baking hot summer day in the 30s — is of particular importance, even though it occurred one year before the main events in our story.