A Pleasure to Burn Read Online Free PDF Page A

pennant of smoke issued from the top.
    There’s where your dead people go.
    â€œTake care of yourself, William Lantry,” he murmured. “You’re the last one, the rare item, the last dead man. All the other graveyards of Earth have been blasted up. This is the last graveyard and you’re the last dead man from the centuries. These people don’t believe in having dead people about, much less walking dead people. Everything that can’t be used goes up like a matchstick. Superstitions right along with it!”
    He looked at the town. All right, he thought, quietly, I hate you. You hate me, or you would if you knew I existed. You don’t believe in such things as vampires or ghosts. Labels without referents, you cry! You snort. All right, snort! Frankly, I don’t believe in you, either! I don’t like you! You and your Incinerators.
    He trembled. How very close it had been. Day after day they had hauled out the other dead ones, burned them like so much kindling. An edict had been broadcast around the world. He had heard the digging men talk as they worked!
    â€œI guess it’s a good idea, this cleaning up the graveyards,” said one of the men.
    â€œGuess so,” said another. “Grisly custom. Can you imagine?
    â€œBeing buried, I mean! Unhealthy! All them germs!”
    â€œSort of a shame. Romantic, kind of. I mean, leaving just this one graveyard untouched all these centuries. The other graveyards were cleaned out, what year was it, Jim?”
    â€œAbout 2260, I think. Yeah, that was it, 2260, almost a hundred years ago. But some Salem Committee they got on their high horse and they said, ‘Look here, let’s have just ONE graveyard left, to remind us of the customs of the barbarians.’ And the gover’ment scratched its head, thunk it over, and said, ‘Okay. Salem it is. But all other graveyards go, you understand, all!”
    â€œAnd away they went,” said Jim.
    â€œSure, they sucked out ’em with fire and steam shovels and rocket-cleaners. If they knew a man was buried in a cow-pasture, they fixed him! Evacuated them, they did. Sort of cruel, I say.”
    â€œI hate to sound old-fashioned, but still there were a lot of tourists came here every year, just to see what a real graveyard was like.”
    â€œRight. We had nearly a million people in the last three years visiting. A good revenue. But—a government order is an order. The government says no more morbidity, so flush her out we do! Here we go. Hand me that spade, Bill.”
    William Lantry stood in the autumn wind, on the hill. It was good to walk again, to feel the wind and to hear the leaves scuttling like mice on the road ahead of him. It was good to see the bitter cold stars almost blown away by the wind.
    It was even good to know fear again.
    For fear rose in him now, and he could not put it away. The very fact that he was walking made him an enemy. And there was not another friend, another dead man, in all of the world, to whom one could turn for help or consolation. It was the whole melodramatic living world against one William Lantry. It was the whole vampire-disbelieving, body-burning, graveyard-annihilating world against a man in a dark suit on a dark autumn hill. He put out his pale cold hands into the city illumination. You have pulled the tombstones, like teeth, from the yard, he thought. Now I will find some way to push your damnable Incinerators down into rubble. I will make dead people again, and I will make friends in so doing. I cannot be alone and lonely. I must start manufacturing friends very soon. Tonight.
    â€œWar is declared,” he said, and laughed. It was pretty silly, one man declaring war on an entire world.
    The world did not answer back. A rocket crossed the sky on a rush of flame, like an Incinerator taking wing.
    Footsteps. Lantry hastened to the edge of the cemetery. The diggers, coming back to finish up their work? No. Just someone,