“Hell,” I hear the skinny guy’s voice say. “The last guy got buried just to get a number! Shit.”

“I know,” starts another voice, “this one jumpy, like that…”

Diment holds up a hand to silence them.

Standing in the moonlight, with my improbable tuxedo seeming almost to absorb the moonlight, I fumble for the words. “What I’m being asked to do,” I start. My mouth is so dry, I can hardly speak. “What I’m being asked to do – will it be worth it?”

“That up to you,” Diment says to me. His face is stone. His eyes glint in the torchlight. He looks tired and angry. Around us, the others murmur.

I feel like I’m at the top of a cliff, about to leap into space. “No,” I tell him. “It’s not up to me. It’s up to you. Can you tell me how to find Boudreaux?”

Diment shakes his head. “You out of turn, son. That a question for after; you understand what I’m saying? First you got to prove your trust.” But although the old man dodges the question, his rheumy eyes don’t. They remain fastened on me. He stares intently, holding my eyes. There’s no malevolence in his gaze. “If you trust me,” he says, “I help you.”

I don’t know why, but I believe him.

A drumbeat starts up, a slow steady rhythm from somewhere to my left. Voices murmur. Someone chugs rum. The skinny guy cackles. A woman hums the tune of a lullaby.

I keep my eyes on my feet as I walk over to the casket. And then, before I can change my mind, I climb into the box. The whole crowd leans over me. I can see the big man, bending to lift the wooden cover. I close my eyes. I’m crazy.

“Alex!” Diment says, and my eyes snap open.

He’s looking down at me. Behind him, the big man and a couple of others hold the lid of the casket. Diment drips some liquid onto my face from his fingers. It feels cold, but it seems to burn as it hits my skin. Tetrodotoxin? Are my lips beginning to feel numb?

“Wait!” I say, trying to sit up. Three men push me gently back down.

A clear soprano sings “Amazing Grace.” Panic rolls through me. Isn’t that for funerals? And then I think: This is a funeral. They’re burying me.

“Trust me,” Diment says, and then the lid clatters into place atop the casket.

I keep my eyes shut tight. Maybe I’m hypnotized or something. Because this is how people disappear.

Suddenly, I can feel my breath against the wood, and my heart vaults into my throat. Maybe they’re going to let me out now, I think for one glorious moment. Maybe all I had to do was prove I’d do it, and then…

But no. That hope evaporates and it’s all that I can do to stop myself from panicking and hurling myself against the wood as they begin to nail the top of the casket into place. Why is that necessary? If this is some kind of fake funeral, why real nails? Big nails, too. I saw them. And the coffin looks brand-new. Why wouldn’t they use the same coffin over and over again if this is a regular thing? Because this coffin is going to stay here. The swamp is probably full of buried bodies.

It’s so loud, amazingly loud, each blow of the hammer a deafening concussion. There’s also the impression – which makes me cringe down, away from the lid – that the nails might plunge right through the wood. The nailing starts at my head and goes down around to my feet and then back up toward my head. In the background, when the man driving the nails moves to a new site, I can hear the drumbeat, and singing.

The hammering starts again. It’s so loud. I’d like to put my hands over my ears, but the coffin is too tight for that.

I count the nails as they’re driven in, eleven so far. Isn’t that excessive?

It’s so loud.

And although I really can’t stand it, somehow I endure the noise. When it stops, I find to my shock that I am praying. Praying in a mindless, stumbling way, repeating the Our Father over and over, a tumble of meaningless syllables. I’m not religious, and the rush of words in my head seems like a cheap trick. And a sort of collapse. I don’t think I should be allowed to pray if it’s not something I do regularly. It’s like I’m borrowing something I’m not entitled to.

OurFatherwhoartinheavenhallowedbethyname.

Still, I can’t stop.

Thykingdomcomethywillbedoneonearthasitisinheavengiveusthisdayourdailybreadandforgiveusourdebtsasweforgiveourdebtors.

I have the impression that if only I can say it fast enough, perfectly enough, if only there are absolutely no silences between the words, nothing bad will happen to me.

Andleadusnotintotemptationbutdeliverusfromevilforthineisthekingdomandthepowerandthegloryforeverandever.

Did I mess up? I think I did. I start over. OurFatherwhoartinheaven…

The casket shakes and there’s a smell of plastic as a pipe, or something like a pipe, is fitted into a hole in the casket, just above my face. I never noticed the hole, which surprises me. You’d think I’d be all tuned in to anything like that. See, your prayers are answered, the voice in my head says.

I can’t touch the hole, I can’t see it, but I can tell it’s there from the smell of plastic and the slightly cooler drift of air through it. With some effort, I can raise my head up and fasten my lips around the pipe and draw in air.

It’s as if my entire body has been clenched like a fist while the coffin was nailed shut. Now, realizing there’s a pipe for air, I begin to let go a little. I’ve been so clenched up, though, that relaxing my muscles makes me start to shake. I’m still caught in this spasm when I feel the casket sway as it’s lifted into the air.

It seesaws back and forth, yawing right and left. I can hear voices, a shout, but I can’t hear what they’re saying. And then the coffin is lowered. It yaws gently as it descends, but then, with a couple of feet left, they let go. Newtonian forces prevail: I slam into the top of the coffin, my nose crashes into the breathing tube hard enough to make me cry out. I have a terrible fear that I’ve dislodged the tube. I squirm up, to see if my lips can reach it. Yes.

And then a shovelful of dirt crashes onto the wood. I wince, as if it might come through the wood and hit me.

Then another, and another.

Then… nothing. Just the darkness.

And the sound of my own breathing.

I’m not sure if I’m asleep or just in a kind of trance – or maybe oxygen deprived – when I first hear the sound. It comes from a long, long way off – like China. It’s a muffled scraping noise, one that means nothing to me, that’s happening independently, that seems to exist in a separate universe. I observe the sound with the detachment of a machine, one of those monitors in a museum, for instance, silently tracking humidity and temperature, keeping a record for future perusal by some sentient being.

The sound goes on and on, and gradually I adopt the idea that my new universe will contain this sound. I’m not sure how I feel about it because the sound is not actually pleasant, now that I contemplate it as a permanent condition. Now that it is omnipresent. Now that it occupies most of my consciousness. I cannot feel much – the wood against my fingers, the ragged surface of the breathing tube. I can see nothing. Smells are confined to the odor of my own body, the pine wood, the manufactured smell of the plastic pipe.

The only thing that changes is the sound, and so it comes to absorb all my attention. After a while it seems to me that the sound is actually inside my own head, that I’ve somehow invented it.

It’s not until a shovel hits the wood that I’m jolted into the perspective of a true observer, that the sound represents an event in time. It’s the sound of a metal implement striking the wooden object in which I am encased. The realization propels me out of my trance state.