I was crossing Hudson Street when I started to sing—gibberish or some half-remembered nursery rhyme. I was about to strike up the second verse when cold snaked down the back of my arm. I slapped at it. My hand hit nothing. The skin of my arm did not even sting. Ice washed up my legs. In an instant, the flesh was numb. I whipped around. There was nothing there. I tried to shake off the numbness and keep walking, but my legs would not cooperate. I slipped down to one knee. In the corner of my eye, the shadows darted toward me, eating up the sidewalk a few inches at a time. My throat opened in an animal scream.

I felt a hand on my neck, and the day turned black.

I awoke in a coffin. My arms were crossed on my chest, tight enough that I could hardly breathe. I tried to control my breathing, tried to keep from screaming, tried not to scratch my nails bloody tearing through the velvet-lined lid. It did not work. I was in the dark, with a splitting headache and a howling fear that if I wasn’t dead yet, I would be soon. I screamed until my voice broke, and then lay quiet.

The coffin swayed slightly, which meant I was not yet buried, but merely on my way. I could not find my purse, and the pistol it contained, but a few minutes’ agonized movement brought my hand to my hip, where I kept my pouch of burglar’s tools. I inched out the tiny hammer and chisel and went to work on the wood.

I held the chisel over my right eye and pulled the hammer back along my cheek. The chisel tore through the lining and bit into the cheap, unfinished pine.

As I worked, I sweated. I breathed harder, and the air turned foul. I grew weak and wanted desperately to sleep but kept going as the muscles in my forearms burned with strange exertion and the wood dust collected in my eye sockets. I closed my eyes. There was nothing to see, anyway.

My hands sweated, and my grip weakened. After a particularly vigorous hammer blow—I must have drawn it back nearly three inches—the chisel slipped out of my fingers and was lost in the dark. I did not flinch, and I did not panic. I was finished screaming. I rested the hammer on my face and felt along my neck until I found the escaped chisel, and I started again.

I don’t know how long it took to break through the wood. Perhaps twenty minutes? It felt like a month. At last, the chisel sank through the top of the box, and a few breaths of night air trickled in. For a few minutes, I rested and tried to hear the world outside.