Her Tomb

The pick clanged against the hollow tomb as he battered and chipped flake after tiny flake off the polished crystalline surface. He had made a considerable, if rough, crater in the rock from which the tomb had been carved; his determined work meant that the inscription had nearly been obliterated.

It had read “Lucretia, July 1880 to June 1899” before he had started desecrating the place. The din of him tapping away echoed in the otherwise silent mausoleum; her father was interred her on right and her mother, Beautrice, on her left. A fall had been the end of one and heart failure the other, yet it was the death of their child that the robber wanted to know.

He placed the hot chisel of his into the deepest part of the indentation and swung his hammer up high; when he brought it down hard, he cried out loudly. A large crack had finally appeared on either side of the ragged crater; through it, he could see little but a black void. There was not even a bad smell wafting up and he feared that her cousin had gone as far as to not bury her in the family crypt.

The marble was smooth where he had not been banging away at it for half the night; his grip was slippy and he struggled pull the upper fragment of the heavy capstone back. He slid a hand into the crack and heaved. It was cool inside the tomb, and he leapt back rapidly as the half he was dragging crumbled without warning and fell to the floor in pieces. The polished floor marble was ruined, but he did not care.

It was not without some nerves that he raised his lantern and peered into her final resting place; his gasp echoed as much as his hammering had done.

He found himself looking at the corpse of a slender, and even skeletal, young woman who had not undergone corruption in the decade since her Aunt Nicolette had buried her. She still had her translucent skin and rather cylindrical waist; his attention though was drawn to her head.

The cause of death was immediately obvious; Lucretia had been cleanly decapitated by her cousin Dante. He had used an antique sword on the young woman who had bullied him since their childhood; this much was known because the murder weapon was missing from the collection his father had in the study. It was still was nowhere to be found even when the constable brought in a metal detector and searched the field next door.

It was well known that Dante had prided himself on looking uncommonly handsome with his fair hair and pale skin; his only physical flaw was that he was a little on the thin side. He was older than Lucretia by five years and yet she had the stronger personality to the extent that she dominated her arranged fiancé. He was too spineless to speak out against her until she insulted his mother. It was not known why she did but the damage was done.

He was slashed across the face by Lucretia with a letter-opener. The wound became a scar from his hairless chin to high cheekbone and it maddened him. There was a girl he liked much more than his aggressive cousin whom he did away with in the dead of night. He told everyone that it was self-defence; they met in the parlour to discuss the ruinous incident and Lucretia was found on the landing the next morning.

The spray of arterial blood had dried to a maroon colour on the green wallpaper as her headless body lay slumped against the banister. It was the chamber-maid who found her before she fled, screaming in terror and alerting the local constable; Beautrice died a grief related death by the following year and her husband followed before long. It was her sister Nicolette who got Dante acquitted; everybody knew how volatile Lucretia could be.

It was the head he chose to stare at as it too was uncorrupted-although not as pristine as her body as the skin had a blackish tinge not unlike her long hair. The tresses in question had been severed as neatly as her neck was; somebody had placed the hank in her elegant hand, which rested on her chest.

He exhaled slowly. He had seen what all that he wanted to. He now knew that Dante had definitely chopped her head off and not just slit her swan throat with the same letter-opener with which she had marked him. A kindly person, or maybe someone who had been paid well, had wiped the blood off her chest and dressed her in a new black gown with a plunging neckline. It was almost a mockery of the gown she was supposed to wear when the time came for her to marry her murderer; Dante had killed her for marring him and then wed the other girl that simpered and flattered him. He was still married to her and they had a son.

Lucretia though lay cold in her tomb, as headless in death as those in life had claimed her to be.