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His fingers trembled on the cool stone surface

BORN 1898—DIED 1933

Born again…?

What year? He glared at the sky and thein slow illus of centuries in those stars Orion thus and so, Aurega here! and where Taurus? There!

His eyes narrowed His lips spelled out the year:

“2349”

An odd number Like a school sum They used to say a man couldn’t encompass any number over a hundred After that it was all so da This was the year 2349! A numeral, a sum And here he was, ato be buried, hating the living people above who lived and lived and lived, hating them for all the centuries, until today, now, born out of hatred, he stood by his own freshly excavated grave, the smell of raw earth in the air, perhaps, but he could not smell it!

“I,” he said, addressing a poplar tree that was shaken by the wind, “am an anachronism” He smiled faintly

He looked at the graveyard It was cold and empty All of the stones had been ripped up and piled like so many flat bricks, one atop another, in the far corner by the wrought iron fence This had been going on for two endless weeks In his deep secret coffin he had heard the heartless, wild stirring as the men jabbed the earth with cold spades and tore out the coffins and carried away the withered ancient bodies to be burned Twisting with fear in his coffin, he had waited for them to come to him

Today they had arrived at his coffin But—late They had dug down to within an inch of the lid Five o’clock bell, tione off To into their coats

Silence had come to the emptied tombyard

Carefully, quietly, with a soft rattling of sod, the coffin lid had lifted

Willia now, in the last cemetery on Earth

“Re at the raw earth “Remember those stories of that lastin ruins, alone? Well, you, William Lantry, are a switch on the old story Do you know that? You are the last dead man in the whole world!”

There were no more dead people Nowhere in any land was there a dead person Impossible! Lantry did not smile at this No, not iinative, antiseptic age of cleansings and scientific methods! People died, oh my God, yes But—dead people? Corpses? They didn’t exist!