Talbot had argued vigorously three chief points in these discourses:

Of course, none of the anti-Catholic Unitarian ministers condoned the acts of enraged Boston laborers who burned down a Catholic convent after witnesses said that Protestant girls had been kidnapped and kept in dungeons to be made into nuns. The rioters chalked HELL TO THE POPE! on the rubble. That was less a disagreement with the Vatican than a warning to the Irish increasingly receiving their jobs.

On the strength of his debates and his anti-Catholic sermons and writings, Reverend Talbot was encouraged by some to succeed Professor Norton at the Harvard Divinity School. He declined. Talbot enjoyed too greatly the sensation of entering his crowded meetinghouse on a Sunday morning, coming in from the Sabbath quiet of Cambridge, and hearing the solemn peals of the organ as he stood over the pulpit robed grandly in his plain college gown. Although he had an awful squint and a deep, melancholy intonation with the perpetual character that one’s voice assumes when a dead person is lying somewhere in the house, Talbot’s presence at the pulpit was confident and his pastorate loyal. That was where his powers mattered. Since his wife had died in childbirth in 1825, Talbot had never had a family and never desired another one, because of the satisfaction brought by his congregation.

Sexton Gregg’s oil lamp timidly lost its luster as he lost his courage. When the sexton had to exhale, mist encased his face and tingled his whiskers. In Cambridge it was still autumn, but in the Second Church’s underground vault it was the dead of winter.

“Anyone about here? You ain’t supposed to…” The sexton’s voice seemed to have no physical bearing within the vault’s blackness, and he shut his mouth quickly. Strewn along the edges of the vault he noticed small white dots. When their number increased, he stooped down to inspect the litter, but his attention was redirected by a sharp crackling from up ahead. A stench horrible enough to subdue even the air of the burial vault reached out to him.

With his hat held in front of his face, the sexton continued ahead between the coffins lining the dirt floor, through the sad slate archways. Gigantic rats scurried along the walls. A flickering glow, not from his own lamp, illuminated the way ahead of him, where the crackling was a continuous sizzling.

“Someone there?” the sexton continued cautiously, gripping the dirty bricks of the wall as he turned the corner.

“Upon the Eternal!” he cried.

From the mouth of an unevenly dug hole in the ground up ahead projected the feet of a man, the legs visible as far as the calf, with the rest of the body jammed inside the hole. The soles of both feet were on fire. The joints quivered so violently that the feet seemed to be kicking back and forth in pain. The flesh of the man’s feet melted, while the raging flames began to spread to the ankles.

Sexton Gregg fell on his backside. On the cold ground beside him was a pile of clothing. He grabbed the top garment and batted it against the blazing feet until they were extinguished.

“Who are you?” he cried out, but the man, who was just a pair of feet to the sexton, was dead.

It took the sexton a moment to realize that the garment he had used to put out the fire was a minister’s gown. Crawling through a trail of human bones that had risen from the earth, he returned to the tidy stack of clothing and dug through them: undergarments, a familiar cape, and the white cravat, shawl, and well-blacked shoes of the beloved Reverend Elisha Talbot.

As he closed the door to his office on the second floor of the medical college, Oliver Wendell Holmes nearly collided with a city patrolman in the corridor. It had taken Holmes longer to finish his work for the next day than he planned, having hoped to start earlier so he might have time with Wendell Junior before Junior’s usual group of friends arrived. The patrolman was searching for someone with authority, explaining to Holmes that the chief of police requested the use of the school’s examining room and that Professor Haywood had been sent for to assist in the inquest of an unfortunate gentleman’s body that had been discovered. The coroner, Mr. Barnicoat, could not be located—he did not say that Barnicoat was known to frequent the public houses on weekends, and surely would be in no condition to conduct an inquest. Finding the dean’s rooms empty, Holmes reasoned that since he was the former dean (Yes, yes, five years at the stern of the ship was enough for me, and at fifty-six, who needs so much responsibility?—Holmes carried on both sides of the conversation), he could rightfully indulge the patrolman’s request.

A police carriage carrying Chief Kurtz and Deputy Chief Savage arrived and a stretcher covered by a blanket was rushed inside, accompanied by Professor Haywood and his student assistant. Haywood taught surgical practice and had developed a keen interest in autopsy. Over Barnicoat’s objections, the police occasionally asked the professor to the deadhouse for an opinion, as when they found an infant walled up in a cellar or a man hanging in a closet.

Holmes noted with interest that Chief Kurtz posted two state constables at the door. Who would care to intrude at the medical college at this evening hour? Kurtz rolled up the blanket only to the body’s knees. This was enough. Holmes had to stop himself from gasping at the sight of the man’s bare feet, if that word could still be applied,

The feet—only the feet—had been torched by fire after a smart dousing with what smelled of kerosene. Charred to a crisp, Holmes thought, horrified. The two remaining blobs were protruding awkwardly from the ankles, displaced from the joints. The skin, hardly recognizable as such, was bloated, cracked open by the fire. Pink tissue was pushing out. Professor Haywood bent down for a better view.

Though he’d cut open hundreds of corpses, Dr. Holmes did not possess the iron stomach of his medical colleagues for such procedures and had to back away from the examination table. As a professor, Holmes had more than once left his classroom when a live rabbit was to be chloroformed, beseeching his demonstrator not to let it squeak.

Holmes’s head began to spin, and it seemed to him that there was suddenly very little air in the room, with the paltry amount present encased in ether and chloroform. He did not know how long the inquest could last, but he was quite certain he would not remain long without dropping to the floor. Haywood uncovered the rest of the body, introducing the dead man’s pained, scarlet face to the room and brushing away dirt from his eyes and cheeks. Holmes allowed his eyes to travel across the whole of the naked body.

He barely registered the familiar face as Haywood stooped over the body and Chief Kurtz delivered question after question to Haywood. Nobody had asked Holmes to remain quiet, and as Harvard’s Parkman Professor of Anatomy and Physiology, he could have contributed to the discussion. But Holmes could only concentrate on loosening his silk neck cloth. He blinked convulsively, not knowing whether he should hold his breath to save the oxygen he had already collected or breathe in quick spurts to stockpile the last pockets of air available before the others, whose apparent obliviousness to the dense air made Holmes certain they would all drop to the floor at any moment.