Hudson House [Now available for the Kindle]

Chapter 7

CHAPTER 7

Tommy came by the next day. Eric told his father he felt ill and though his father's eyebrows rose in suspicion, his father relayed the message. Eric watched from his bedroom window as Tommy walked down the driveway to the street. Tommy stopped and glanced up. Eric jumped back, his window blinds snapping into place. Tommy had seen him and knew Eric wasn't sick.

He didn't have time to waste with Tommy's plans for the return to Hudson House. Tommy's belief that they needed to reconcile the wrong done to the house made a certain amount of sense and Eric knew there was no way to talk Tommy out of returning, but he wanted to delay the trip as long as possible. Could he delay it endlessly?

Eric had his own theory to explore.

His father kept a study downstairs, a room that in other people's houses might have been a bedroom or a family room or a storage area, but Eric's father had claimed it as an office with a large desk at the far end (perpetually covered in papers) and shelves stuffed with books on all the walls. "Why is your office so messy?" Eric had asked him a few years ago. "Yes, dear," his mother said, "Why is that?" Eric's father smiled. "It's not an office, son; it's a study." Eric asked what the difference was and after a moment, Eric's father said, "An office is a place of rigid work. A study is a lounge of intellectual exploration." His mother burst out laughing.

When not at work, Eric's father spent most of his time in the study. Had he not been napping right now, he would be behind his desk, shuffling papers. Eric entered the room carefully, as if a wrong step might set off an alarm. He went right to the set of encyclopedias. His father had pointed them out once with pride. "If you ever need to find something out, look no further." Eric hoped he was right.

He removed the one marked number four: Birmingham to Burlington. The book weighed more than he expected and strained his arms after only a few moments. He set it on the floor and flipped through pages of black and white text and pictures until he found BURIAL. The entry told him to See DEATH CUSTOMS AND RITES. That led him to book eight: Corot to Desdemona.

He finally found the entry on page 568. He read through the reasons for burial rites (dispose of the body, aid the passage of the soul, reorganize the family/society) and skipped over the various Methods of Disposal-primitive man ate the brains of the dead to gain their knowledge while Polynesian people remove the skin of the dead to free the spirit. Two pages of double columns in tiny print later, Eric found Live Burials.

It was once almost commonplace for people to be buried alive. During the earliest days of civilized society and into the twentieth century, the limits of medical knowledge meant many sick people ended up under ground before their time. Some people came alive during funeral services, knocking and beating on the inside of their coffin to be freed. Some people, the article explained, refused to acknowledge the cries from within the coffin-a kind of group paralysis took hold of entire churches full of people. Though a coffin might have rocked back and forth, people didn't always save the suddenly alive. The person in the box was supposed to be dead. The cries for help could have been tricks of the mind or even a trick of the Devil. Though not common, it was documented at least a few times. A few times, however, was all it took to create a pervasive fear of live burial.

To allay those fears, numerous concoctions were devised for the dead, once interred, to signal that he or she had been buried alive. One of these inventions was a bell attached to a string with the other end attached to one of the presumably dead person's fingers: if the person came alive, he or she could pull on the string and ring the bell placed at the base of the tombstone above. The family would visit daily for weeks after burial hoping for the bell to ring. There was at least one documented case in which the bell did ring but during the exhumation the weight of the dirt collapsed the coffin lid, crushing the person inside.