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The bleak boneyard of Saint Germain de Charonne church was particularly unnerving at night; it was even more unsettling when being viewed through the fog-diffused light of a full moon. The three men waiting outside the wall were on the watch for the rectory light to be extinguished before making their move.

They leaned against a handcart, smoked their pipes, wiped their noses on their sleeves, and talked about nothing in particular. France was at war with Germany, and ever since the death of Archduke Ferdinand, Europe had not been the same. They themselves were ill-suited for the military, being either warped of body or of mind. They were of little value to anyone but themselves, and perhaps more importantly, to the local vivisectionists.

They were, after all, graverobbers.

"Mallaury, how many francs do you think this one will be worth?" asked the rather imbecilic Gerart.

"Twenty, maybe twenty-five. This job pays a pittance with the war going on. Dead bodies are easy to come by, and money is tight."

"Hardly worth the effort. Might be easier trying one of the other cemeteries."

"Them? They are staked out by the other diggers and patrolled by the gendarmerie. You can go if you want to, but I'm sticking to where I know."

"There will be more elsewhere."

"And with them more trouble. Monsieur Godot will overlook a few missing bodies, for it makes more room for newcomers, and there are plenty of souls looking to go to heaven. The more we clear out of the pauper's section the more he can bury, and that means he collects some coin as well. No one is ever the wiser, even if we all are barely the richer."

"Aye, that's true. The old sinner has at least been having some of the old section dug up, and the rotting bones finding their way to the river. That makes our job easier!"

The youngest of the group found the courage to speak up.

"Easier? How?"

"Are you daft in the head?"

"No! How does stealing from the old section make the job easier?"

"Well, for one you idiot, it's back out of sight from the street. And secondly, stealing freshly buried bodies is easier since the dirt has been turned for you, and the bodies don't smell so bad. Fresher the better, and having a chance to work out of sight is a plus in anyone's book."

"I suppose so. Beats having to exchange bullets with the enemy.'

"Aye, that it does, even if this ain't the classiest job around."

The young man drew a pull from his pipe and blew the smoke into the air, where it commingled with the pale fog.

"Kind of wish I was better at life. Digging up dead people seems...outré."

"Well Jean, the first cadaver that lectures us on how despicable our trade is will be the last. Cross my heart, if a corpse wakes up and says even hello to me, I'll run off to the monastery and give up my life of crime, my drinking, and my womanizing."

The young man laughed.

"I know the latter will never happen, because the first will never happen.

The other older man laughed grimly.

"Careful about speaking in the definitive boy. I've heard tales of the dead coming back to life."

The younger man snorted.

"That's what you get for going to church drunk. You think everything the priest says is the gospel truth. A man gets nailed to a cross and stabbed in the chest and you think he came back from that?"

"No, no. He speaks the truth," replied Gerart. "There have been tales of people buried alive, their families thinking them gone to their great reward. A few of them gained extra years because of the likes of us."

"Thinking someone is dead is far different from them being dead."

"True. But imagine waking in a coffin. You'd wish you were."

The young man shivered.

"That's not to my tastes. I'd better be damned cold before they stick me in the ground."

"If you get caught, they'll hang you or guillotine you so there'll be no question of that."

"Since I'm faster than either of you two, I have little to worry in that regard."

The conversation would have degraded further were it not for the fact that the light in the rectory vanished.

"Good. He's down for the night. Keep your footfalls quiet, and no clanking the tools."

The men moved away from the pushcart they had with them and towards the gate in the wall. They wound their way to the back, where there was a fresh mound of dirt in an otherwise featureless plot of ground. Even the trees back there seemed forlorn and decaying.

There were seemingly two mounds, though one was too small to have been a grave. It was more like someone tried to dig and decided to forego the attempt. Maybe a tree root had grown across the spot.

The other was obviously just as fresh, and equally obvious in that it had been dug wide enough, long enough, and probably just deep enough to bury a corpse. The men set their dimly glowing lanterns around the spot and went to work with their tools.

It didn't take long before they heard metal on wood. Surprisingly, whoever this person was had had enough coins on them to purchase a coffin. There might be a bit extra in tonight's haul having a used coffin to sell. Every coin was hard earned, as they saw it.

They started digging with more determination, now that their goal was realized. It didn't take too long to clear away the dirt and pry up the casket. Even then, it took all three of them to do it.

"Oof! This one is a chunky bastard. They had better pay extra for the weight!"

They got the box and the body out, but the younger man succumbed to crumbling ground and fell back into the hole. His pickaxe nearly knocked him senseless, but he moved just in time.

"Clumsy imbecile!" hollered one of his co-conspirators.

"Pardon the ground giving way under my feet!" he yelled back.

He stood, brushed the dirt from his coat and reached for the edge of the hole to hoist himself out. His hand found stone.

"Hey Malluary, should there be a tombstone here?"

"What? No. This is the pauper's section you dope."

"Then what's this?"

Using the tip of his pick, he cleared away the dirt. Sure enough, there was the edge of a stone slab a good hand's breadth thick, and a foot or so beneath the grass.

"I'll be damned. No wonder they had to move over to dig. What moron left a marker here in the pauper plots?"

The other older man answered.

"Some poor fool paid good money for a stone and here it sits buried like the corpse it was supposed to remember."

"Hey! Do you think anyone special is buried underneath?"

"Jean, you idiot! This is the pauper's section. No one here but unfortunate buggers that found peace at last in the taking of their final breath."

The young man wasn't deterred. Planting his feet firmly he took his pick and drove it into the side of the pit he was in. He was rewarded with a dull, muffled clang.

"What the hell?" asked the other man.

"I told you! Someone hid a body here, maybe to keep it away from robbers."

"You mean like us," said Malluary sarcastically.

"Sure! Hide it where no one would look for it. There might be gold and jewels on the body!"

"Sure. And my mother was the great granddaughter of Marie Antionette! Probably just some chest of old bones someone gathered together to make room for more elsewhere in this hellhole."

"Then why put a stone over it?"

"To hide the stone as well, you imbecile! Dig it out if you wish, but we are leaving shortly. I will not get caught because of your dumb curiosity."

The young man began digging furiously, sending dirt in a torrent into the hole he was in. In a few moments he had enough cleared to see the edge of the metal object. He held up the lamp and whistled.

"Merde! This is a coffin. Would you look at that!"

The side of it was exposed, and while it was black and encrusted with mineral deposits and clay, it was definitely a coffin. Where the lid met the base, there were flanges with bolts, and the sides seemed to undulate as if made of cloth. He brushed away more dirt, clearing as much of it as he could.

"This is worth something just for the iron! We should take it and sell it to the scrappers!"

"Not a bad idea...for an imbecile. I suppose you want us to get down there and help you dig it out?"

"I can undercut the soil beneath it, but once it slips into here, we'll need to get the rope to haul it out."

"Rope? I doubt we have enough for that."

"Listen Mall; this thing is going to weigh two hundred kilograms if it weighs anything. Even the three of us will be hard pressed to get it up and out."

"Hmm. Get it loose and if it's too much, we can cover it over and come back for it later.'

"Fine with me."

The young man swung the pick under the casket, eating the dirt away a bit at a time. It was soon shown to be full length, indicating it was for an adult and not a child. He dug under it, slicing away a bit at a time until it shifted. He scrambled out of the hole as it came crashing out.

In the light of the lanterns, it had an evil look to it.

It had landed top side up, showing it to be more like a sarcophagus one might see in the Louvre than a coffin containing a more modern body. The head end of it held a plate, which logic dictated must cover the face, though why someone would bother with a viewport remained obscure to them.

"Sacre Bleu! Who the hell would have had the money for this monstrosity just to then bury it back here?"

"I don't know. Are we taking it or not?"

"Oui, but it will weigh more than the cart can hold if we try moving both. We will have to take it to the parlor and work with it there. We will get it there, return here for the body, and with any luck, not get caught in the process."

It was a struggle to get it out of the cemetery and onto the cart, but they made it. Huffing, puffing, and strangling back curses, they pulled and pushed their cart through darkened streets until they came to their lair, as they often referred to it. It was an abandoned storefront, though they kept to the rear. The old undertaker's business was perfect for their needs, so long as it remained unclaimed during the war.

Maneuvering to the wide rear door, they slid the monstrosity off and onto the floor with a leaden thud.

"Jean, you can stay and work on getting this thing open. No one is going to want any rotter parts when we scrap it out. We'll hurry back and take the body to our buyer. We'll see you in a few hours' time. Make sure you have this thing stripped out by the time we get back."

The older men didn't give him a chance to reply. They were out the door and hurrying on their way back to their original prize. Let the kid deal with the smell and the mess while they dealt with the fresher corpse. That'll teach him how to deal with the ghastlier parts of the job.

Jean watched them go before turning to the hefty iron sarcophagus. That was what it looked like to him, having seen a few during a hurried visit through the museum. The lower portion was raised to allow room for the feet, and the head end was also higher, with that strange device on the top. Everything was corroded and dirty, and in the interest of satisfying his curiosity, he grabbed a brush and began cleaning it off. There was far more to it than it seemed.

The top, where the head would be, was the aforementioned plate with a winged angel of some sort embossed in the metal. He found it was sitting slightly askew and tried to move it, but it was corroded in place. Throwing caution to the wind he grabbed a pipe and knocked it to one side, revealing a glass pane underneath. He rubbed his sleeve across it. Even with his lantern he could see little inside, mostly white material - linen perhaps - wrapped around something or somebody.

Strangely, it seemed too clean for its age.

The edge of this monstrosity was covered in tar, and picking away at that revealed a bead of decaying wax between the top and bottom edges. Someone had taken some extreme precautions in burying whomever this was. Perhaps they had died of a severe form of plague and no one wanted it to spread. That made him pause in his exertions.

Still, there was money in this thing, so he went back to taking it apart. On the foot end he found a circular plate with a name - Fisk. But overall that seemed to be the name of the man who made it, rather than the name of the man inside. It was inscribed in English and he could barely read his French. But it did seem to be aged; maybe fifty or more years old if it was twenty. And there was nothing to indicate why it was in a pauper's grave.

Grabbing a hack saw, he went to work on the bolts sealing the two pieces together. The blade was nearly dull by the time he made his way through them all. Replacing the saw with a prybar, he wedged its edge into the space between and put his weight into prizing off the lid. The tar and the wax made a formidable seal, but eventually it gave way. With a hollow clatter, the lid hit the floor and cracked into three pieces, sending a little scattering of glass across the rug.

Jean held up the lamp and looked inside. He was quick to note the lack of any smell. At best, there was an earthy aroma one might associate with the soil, and maybe just a hint of something else. The lining was relatively intact, and the body...it had to be a body...was wrapped in layers of cloth. He almost wondered if it were a mummy that someone had hidden away. There just might be jewels under that shroud worth more than the iron casket and a hundred bodies combined.

He got a hold and pulled it out, noting that the heaviness, while not excessive, was a bit more than he imagined a mummy might weigh. Everything he had heard made them sound like they were tinder-dry and feather-light. Plus, they were wrapped in strips of ancient cloth and this material looked to be intact and rather more modern.

He found an edge tucked in on itself and began unraveling it. He discovered that the only practical method of doing it was to pull and roll the body, dragging it back and doing it some more. He rather wished he had his knife, but he had lost it some time back and hadn't found the time to steal a new one.

Meter after meter of material revealed itself until finally, a human form emerged from the folds. And yet, it was still wrapped in another layer. If this person had been alive it would have been enough to enduringly immobilize them. It seemed redundant to do such a thing to a dead one. After all, where were they going to go?

When he reached the end of the last bit of cloth, he was thrown backwards by the suddenness of it. He fell into the wall and then to the floor. As he caught his wind, he looked across to see what his unshrouding had exposed.

He blinked, rubbed his eyes, and looked again.

It was a girl.

Her ivory hair was oddly coiffed and puffed out between her scalp and the braided portion, and her skin was pale as death. That made sense. What didn't make sense was the fact that she looked like she died five minutes ago. Jean got onto his feet and walked around the corpse. She was perfect, though he readjusted his contemplation of her age. She had every attribute of a woman, if only in condensed size. She seemed short, and yet perfectly formed.

Perfectly formed.

Her cause of death was readily apparent. There was a section of pole or pike extruding from her ribcage, sawn off close to the skin. Why someone hadn't simply removed it before burial was beyond his comprehension. Also, why had they wrapped her up, instead of putting her in some sort of gown? He crouched down and touched her skin.

It was cool and dry.

And firm. So too were the muscles underneath.

"Mon dieu! Who the hell embalmed you!" he muttered under his breath.

At that moment, Jean was struck with a thought. It was an unsavory one at that. His cronies had told him stories of how they might get a little extra use from a corpse, but he had taken their tales as being no more than sick imaginations. Now he was left wondering. A body like this...well...it did seem a waste to throw it out, or for that matter sell it to the vivisectionists just to have it chopped up. If she had lasted this long, then she might hold out a while longer.

He picked up the limp form and carried it to his cot. Those two might want a chance at her, but Jean intended to hide the body once he was done with it. He still had to throw away all evidence of that there had been a body inside the casket, and tear out the lining to make it look like what had been inside had been thoroughly putrefied.

He dropped his trousers after kicking off his shoes, arranged the body with the legs dangling over either side, and prepared to violate it. He hesitated upon seeing the stake in the chest. With a swift decision, he put his fingers on it and yanked. It moved. He got a better grip, pulled harder and the nasty thing came out, a good fifteen centimeters of polished and pointed oak.

The hole that remained leaked no fluid, nor had he expected it to. The stake had been driven between the ribs and likely had pierced her heart and she had lost her blood from that wound. He gazed at her again, trying to imagine how something like this could have happened to such a lovely thing as her.

Determining nothing along his train of thought, he resumed where he had left off. He stroked his cock until it was hard, spit on it to make sure it slid in and then lowered himself on top of the body. He was struck by how it didn't seem as cold as it should be, which was all the better for him. He was having second thoughts about doing this, but in the end, he figured there was no harm to be done.

He slid in easier than anticipated, and pushed until he was in all the way. Whoever she had been, a virgin wasn't on the list of things she had to her credit when she had died. He marveled at the feel of her body, knowing what he was doing was wrong, but still amazed that this lifeless form was more appealing than any of the overly adorned frumps that sold themselves in the maisons d'abattage.

Whoever she had been, it seemed that someone had gone to lengths to hide her away, and yet she had no jewelry or identification that made such secrecy a requirement.

Oh well. She was a nice quiet partner and he could foresee many more enjoyable evenings.

As he relaxed and got more into it, he found his mind wandering again on those unanswerable questions; who had she been in real life? And when had she been buried? And why had she died with a stake through her heart...

He closed his eyes, enjoying this far too much, or so he told himself. It was disrespectful and yet... No one would know so who would there be to care about such physical desecration?

He opened them back up as he felt that rise in his loins. He hadn't noticed before how remarkably well preserved her eyes were, with them being green and all.

That made him pause.

They hadn't been open before.

He was slow to react as a pair of hands came up and clamped around his throat.

They weren't strong, but they were sturdy enough for him to know they were there. And the thumbs pressing against his larynx were strong enough to reduce his scream to a gurgle.

Her own voice cracked and screeched, sounding like something from the depths of hell.

"How dare you!"

The voice was hoarse, harsh, and nearly as strangled as his own would have been had he been able to talk. In his fear he ejaculated and nearly passed out. He rather wished he had lost consciousness when she opened her mouth, exposing two long canine teeth. He got his wish as those formidable fangs sank into his neck.