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.
The Next In Line, Ray Bradbury
4 comments:
in the days of no internet, i read this short story by ray bradbury and found it to be amazing and absurd. Surely there wasn't such a thing as mummies dug up because loving families had no more money to pay the monthly rent of keeping them under the ground in coffins...so they were exhumed and stood below ground as some kind of tourist attraction. Just awful.
Years later i had a summer job cleaning the high school near our home and they were tossing a ton of TIME LIFE magazines.... I flipped through one and THIS photo was in there.
I nearly fainted. I couldn't believe Ray Bradbury was writing about an actual location....about actual horrors of dried-out bodies in dry corridors underground.
yeah..the cemeteries were so crowded & if your family couldn't pay the cemetery tax, they would dig up their deceased to make room for a taxing paying stiff. so horrible. & when they dug em up & saw they were mummified they were like..Bingo!! instant tourist attraction with all these homeless mummies. so cruel to make the dead work, like NO rest for you, even in the afterlife. i think those people will pay & dearly.
October Country is like the Bible & "The Next in Line" is sucha powerful letter from the dead. like man, i swear that story will stay with you Forever. all the little hints along the way leading up to the sinister ending. brrrrrrrrr.
there's a little film from 2005..All Souls Day. starring Jeffrey Combs..David Keith & Danny Trejo (3 faves of mine) & it's pretty bad & i don't like to say that. but man...there's also ALL this wonderful threaded thru the film. i think it coulda been a real winner. i own a copy & we watch it every so often & are kinda in awe of what coulda been. anyway...it always makes me think of "Next in Line".
Chilling photo, and it kinda reminds me of the Catacombs. Though this would be a far worse fate for a corpse!
I became fascinated with this years ago and searched in vain for the book "The Mummies of Guantajuato"...I finally found a used copy for sale from a library. It is filled with amazing photographs by Archie Lieberman and of course Bradbury's story.
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