The Next in Line

The Next in Line is a short story from Bradbury's collection titled The October Country. It's almost 40 pages long. This story is about a young couple who is on a trip in a small town in Mexico. The man is a photographer. They visit a graveyard. There is a tradition held in this town where people who can afford to bury their dead in the graveyard will do so, but less affluent families are forced to have their dead mummified and placed in a cellar underground. The young couple is escorted into this hall, where dead bodies are lined up against the walls. The woman is quite frightened of this and does not like it at all. In fact, she hates it so much that she becomes afraid of the entire town itself and begs her husband to let them leave. However, the husband has a strange fascination with the chamber. He loves to photograph it and he's very interested in it, almost too interested. He finally agrees to leave the town, but, the next day, the car wont start up, and they figure out that it will take weeks to get it fixed, a fateful misfortune. The woman's thoughts become consumed by fright. She cannot think clearly. She thinks that she is dying. She begins to fear death. She imagines herself in that frightful hall of mummies and she cannot calm herself down. She starts to think that her husband is conspiring against her. He seems too calm. He tries to coax her into relaxation but to no avail. In the end of the story, the woman seems to die, and the husband seems to smirk, as if he had really been planning to bury her in this mummy chamber all along. This story was quite eerie and frightening to me. I thought about how even your own loved ones can turn against you. It brought back stories that I've heard throughout my life of husbands murdering their wives and vice versa. I'm reading Agamemnon in my Greek class, and we just discussed today how Clytaemnestra murdered her own husband when he returned home after conquering Troy. This theme of murdering loved ones seems to be a common one in literature and especially in Greek mythology.