The Equinox (Volume I, Number IV)

THE THREE WORMS In the great vault is a coffin. In the coffin is the corpse of a very beautiful woman. The vault is deep under the ground and very still. Above its bricks is a layer of earth, and if any sound at all percolates into this chamber of death, it is only the delicate tremor and rustle of things growing, of the grass seed pushing its tiny way through the mould, to break at the last into its narrow slip of bright green flame. This, and the weak whisper of trailing rose-roots in whose brown and ugly stems glow such a tender sap and noiseless fervour of exqui- site perfume. At intervals, maybe, this dark blue silence is wounded by strange creakings and indescribable tremors: noises that are really the wastings and settlings of decaying bone and flesh, just as if Death were feasting his lips at last with murderous kisses on the flesh of his latest mistress in the secret peace of his terrible bridal chamber. All around the vault are hung great blue-black carpets of shadow, and the floor is damp, and wriggling with the spawn of low life. Let us look into the coffin of the beautiful dead woman, look into it as we would have strangers look into our own with the child eyes of fancy and imagination, rather than with the cold and scaly eyes of knowledge. Only to vulgar and brutish eyes is there any horror, for 317