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She came to him as he slept and they spoke, and he was afraid, but he stood tall on the cemetery bank upon which the moonlight slept sweetly. He heard no voice, but words made themselves clear to him, and her gown billowed in an unseen breeze, and her eyes were dark and colder than the soulless shadowed sky.
"What is this," he asked, and could not hear his voice, "which I see before me, speaking words I cannot hear with lips that move no more than the frozen stars that light us and call lie to this place? Come, let me clutch thee. I have thee not, and yet I see thee still. Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible to feeling as to sight? or art thou but a shadow of the mind, a false creation, proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain?"
"Tell me, poet, what you think you see."
"A lady - a spectress of deceit - a fearsome creature of the night. And..." he paused, sighed, "I glimpse before me that which will end me." The village slept, and the unhappy spirits slept uneasily in their graves, and the gravedigger dreamt of his death, and in his dream a child screamed, and a red-haired man looked blindly to his past, and a hound howled; and they returned to him, and a woman wept; and he heard the faint tap dance of rolling dice.
And when they woke at dawn, as though from enchantment, the village looked in resigned sadness upon the body of the gravedigger, lain carefully, with no signs of struggle, within his own grave, pale and peaceful, and a headstone lay upon the ground above him, and it read, carefully carved, 'To sleep, to risk to die... perchance in dream.'
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