That our ordinary physical capacities represent only a fraction of our latent powers becomes strikingly evident in moments of extreme crisis. Faced with the prospect of such a fearfully, such an inconceivably hideous death, I summoned up every ounce of my strength and began to struggle against my captors with the fierceness of a tiger. But my exertions were in vain. At the first sign of resistance, Neuendorf and his cohort simply redoubled their hold upon my arms. Shouting, writhing, kicking, I was thus dragged inexorably toward the edge of the yawning pit.

For a moment, I stood tottering at its brink, my arms still tightly clamped in the unbreakable grip of my captors, my bulging eyes fixed in an extremity of horror upon the gaping hole at my feet.

“Breathe deep, you son-of-a-bitch” growled Neuendorf. Then, with one sharp, vicious motion, he and his loathsome assistant released their grip and hurled me downward into the grave.

I landed with a thud upon my back, the impact of the fall driving the air from my lungs. Gasping for breath, I gazed upwards in an agony of terror and perceived my three tormentors staring down at me with a single, shared expression of demonic glee. As I attempted—unsuccessfully—to emit a shriek of horrified protest from my fear-constricted throat, Neuendorf glanced over at his shovel-wielding henchman and spoke two words whose dreadful import froze the very marrow in my bones:

“Bury him.”

CHAPTER 30

To be buried while alive is, beyond question, the most harrowing—the most ghastly—the most sheerly calamitous—ordeal that has ever fallen to the lot of mere mortality. Indeed, it may be asserted without hesitation that no event is so terribly well adapted to inspire the supremeness of bodily and mental distress as is premature inhumation. The mere thought of this appalling fatality carries into the heart a degree of exquisite and intolerable horror from which the most daring imagination must recoil. We know of nothing so agonizing upon Earth—we can dream of nothing half so hideous in the realms of the nethermost Hell.

I hasten to add that there is nothing merely speculative about the foregoing assertions; rather, they are solidly founded upon my own actual experience—upon my own direct and personal knowledge.