"In the Vault" is a Short Story written by H. P. Lovecraft and dedicated to Charles W. Smith, at the time the editor of Tryout. It was written on September 18, 2015 based on a suggestion Smith made the previous month. Despite this connection with Tryout, Lovecraft first pitched "In the Vault" to Weird Tales, but in the aftermath of the controversy surrounding "The Loved Dead", Farnsworth Wright rejected it for its inclusion of corpses. Hereupon, Lovecraft turned to Tryout and got the story published in the November 1925 issue. On urging by August Derleth, Lovecraft pitched "In the Vault" once more to Weird Tales in 1931 and it was subsequently published in the April 1932 issue.
The story revolves around a lazy and rather crude undertaker who finds himself trapped in a vault with several coffins of his own making. Trouble further arises when he tries to find a way out only for a certain act of pettiness that he had inflicted on one of the bodies filling those coffins to come back to haunt him.
"In the Vault" provides examples of the following tropes:
- The Alcoholic: Birch is said to have enjoyed a good drink during the time frame of the story's events, but it is explicitly pointed out that he didn't become a true-blue alcoholic until after the events of the story.
- Agony of the Feet: At the beginning of the story it is said that Birch suffered severe injuries to his ankles following a bad slip during his incident in the vault, and that these injuries rendered him lame for the rest of his life. As it turns out, these injuries were actually the result of bite wounds apparently inflicted on him by the undead corpse of Aphram Sawyer, in retaliation for Birch sawing off Saywer's feet.
- Framing Device: The story is related to us by an unnamed doctor, to whom Birch was transferred following his previous physician's death.
- Kick the Dog: Almost literally. Asaph Sawyer is said to have stepped on a puppy once because it snapped at him. In the same paragraph, it is also said that he "ruined old Raymond thirty years after their boundary suit". Birch is described as being rather petty and vindictive, with the key example in the story being his decision to cut off Sawyer's feet to make him fit in a coffin that he had originally intended for a child, although given what a bastard the old man was Birch can perhaps be provided with a little bit of slack.
- Pet the Dog: Birch may be lazy, crass, and generally unpleasant, but he does display a surprising inkling of kindness by choosing to give little Matthew Fenner a nice, respectable coffin rather than the half-assed one he had initially planned on.
- Posthumous Character: Obviously the corpses, who play an important role in the story, but Birch and Davis are also said to have passed on by the time of the Framing Device.
- The Slacker: Birch is exceptionally lazy. Notably, he initially put off burying the coffins because of the weather, but then continued to delay it for several days after the weather had cleared up.