Fantasy Writers of America. The narrator works
for Graves Registration, an organization within the
U.S. military that retrieves, identifies, and provides
for the disposition of the bodies of servicemen
killed in foreign conflicts.
Under ordinary circumstances the protagonist
never leaves his base and processes bodies that
have already been removed from combat areas. On
rare occasions, if there is a suspicion that the death
was a murder rather than a combat fatality or if
there are unusual circumstances, he is sent into
the field. That is the situation as this story begins,
and he and his supervisor are sent to a dangerous
remote firebase to examine the body of a naked
Vietnamese man. The body displays unusual muti-
lations, although it is generally intact, dried by the
heat into a kind of mummy. Their efforts to exam-
ine it further come to a halt when they come
under enemy fire, and the major accompanying
them is instantly killed.
The firefight lasts through the night, ending
only when aircraft arrive to drive the enemy away.
Once the situation has stabilized, they set out to
recover the major’s body, only to discover that it
has been horribly mutilated as though some crea-
ture feasted on his flesh and drank his blood. Even
more unsettling is the disappearance of the mum-
mified body that was their reason for being on-site
in the first place. Although the narrator suggests
possible rational explanations, he admits that they
are extremely unlikely and that he has been trou-
bled ever since by nightmares. Haldeman delivers
a chilling tale of the supernatural even though
there is no overt fantastic content, suggesting just
enough to stimulate the imagination of his readers.
The contrast between the presumed horror sur-
rounding the body and the more familiar horror of
chaotic warfare is particularly effective.
“The Graveyard Rats”Henry Kuttner(1936)
Although he is best known for his science fiction
and fantasy, Henry KUTTNERwrote several horror
stories early in his career, many of them in imita-
tion of the work of H. P. LOVECRAFT. The best of
his horror stories is this short tale of a cemetery
caretaker turned grave robber who gets his just
desserts. Masson has recently been hired because
his predecessor disappeared under mysterious cir-
cumstances that are probably explained by his own
subsequent fate. Masson hates the rats that live in
tunnels under the cemetery because they have a
habit of chewing their way into the coffins and
making off with the bodies, including any jewelry
or gold teeth that Masson might have purloined
himself. His efforts to exterminate them all fail,
and he continues to be amazed by their size and fe-
rocity. Their tunnels, for example, are large enough
for a grown man to crawl through.
When he digs up a particularly valuable coffin
just as the rats are carrying away its contents, Mas-
son snaps. With a revolver in his pocket, he feels
brave enough and angry enough to go after them,
so he begins crawling through the tunnel, ever
deeper into the earth, only beginning to reconsider
when he grows tired and senses that there is some-
thing very large moving in the distance, perhaps
some dark intelligence that is directing the activi-
ties of the lesser rats. Then he stumbles across a
rotting corpse that is nevertheless somehow ani-
mated and realizes that something distinctly un-
canny is happening. Panicking, he discovers next
that he does not have room to turn around and
must back out all the way to the surface. The rats
pursue despite his efforts to drive them off with his
weapon, and he attempts to take refuge in a side
corridor, blocking the entrance by collapsing part
of the roof. He realizes only when it is too late that
he is inside a coffin, not a through passage, and
that he is effectively buried alive.
Kuttner’s story is filled with frightening im-
ages—the animated dead, oversized intelligent
rats, and the claustrophobic descent through the
tunnels. He packs a variety of strong images into
an efficiently small story. Although not credited,
the story was probably the inspiration for the
movie The Dark(1993).“The Great God Pan”Arthur Machen
(1890)
Although he turned away from supernatural fiction
almost entirely after the turn of the century, the
Welsh writer Arthur MACHENwrote a fairly large
number of fantastic tales early in his career and re-
mains highly regarded, although perhaps more be-142 “The Graveyard Rats”