[For the previous Dark Carnival post, click here.]

“The Tombstone” (1945)

Bradbury offers a wonderfully offbeat premise: a carved headstone found sitting in the middle of a rented room in an apartment house. Turns out, the previous occupant, Mr. Whetmore was an “apprentice marble-cutter” who botched his first commission, mistakenly spelling the decedent’s name as “White” instead of “Whyte.” A perfectionist with an inferiority complex, Whetmore became so upset by his erroneous etching that he ran off that morning and left the tombstone behind (now the landlord is in the process of arranging its removal).

Despite this perfectly rational explanation for the object’s presence in the room, Leota seizes the opportunity to act superstitious and deliberately “frustrate” her husband Walter (whom she resents for his air of superiority and penchant for “spoiling her fun”). Leota treats Mr. White’s marker as an actual gravesite (placing cut flowers in front of the tombstone) and carries on that the late figure is haunting the room (in vain, Walter tries to explain to his wife that the muffled voice heard through the floorboards is that of the man in the room directly below them). At story’s end, Whetmore comes knocking and happily retrieves his abandoned handiwork. By “the most astonishing stroke of luck,” he has found someone who can make use of the “White” tombstone. He promptly ventures one floor down, presenting the marker to Mrs. White (whose pneumonic husband has passed away in the room below). To Leota and Walter’s shock, they have been living above a dead man this night after all.

The climax of “The Tombstone” is too coincidental to satisfy in dramatic terms, and the “shivering” (of Leota and Walter) in the closing paragraph doesn’t elicit the same fearful reaction from the reader. But the piece is noteworthy for the marked antagonism between wife and husband. Already in our revisiting of Dark Carnival, we have seen Bradbury depict unhappily married couples (“The Jar”; “The Lake”), and we will witness such character types again in the collection. In retrospect, “The Tombstone” highlights Bradbury’s strong influence on the horror genre, as the Constant Reader of Stephen King (and his many tales where the road trip of a bickering husband and wife takes a turn for the weird) would doubtless recognize.