Upon the faces of some, decay seemed working with a kind of fantastic cruelty: punching a hole in the cheek or forehead; pushing one eye from its socket, and leaving the other; stripping the skin from one side of the face, and leaving it like a bit of wrinkled parchment on the other. Some were made to laugh from ear to ear; some had the corners of the mouth drawn down and the features twisted, as though pain haunted them in death; others looked defiant, derisive, amazed, indignant. The majesty of death had fled from all of them, mockery and shame had come to take its place. The worms were being avenged on these who should have gone to feed them. Silent and rotting, they had no part in either world; and shrinking continually within their coffins, they cried mutely on decay to hasten his work, and give them the boon of nothingness. Above the line of coffins, on both sides of the chamber, hundreds of clothed and hooded creatures—skeletons in all except the face, which for the most part retained its covering of dried and tarnished skin—were suspended from the walls. Each had a ticket pinned to its dress, bearing the name and the date of death. It was these figures on the walls which gave the chamber its most dreadful aspect. Some were suspended by the neck, like suicides left there for an example. Others in various gruesome fashions parodied the attitudes of life. There was a grotesque group composed of three figures which had tumbled together in such a manner that the two on either side appeared to whisper into the ears of the third. Some had the neck awry, the head on one side, in a listening or questioning attitude; of others the head had sunk forward on the narrow breast. The jaw of some had dropped, and protruded a row of teeth, with a savage or jeering air. Every variety of grimace and grin was shown on those appalling faces; and as Gaston passed down the chamber fingers poked at him from gaping sleeves; he was laughed at, mocked at, scowled at; and when he looked behind him, all these skeletons were laughing, mocking, and scowling at one another. Many of the faces were little else but grinning mouths, and to those whose mouths stood wide open his imagination gave voices, so that the vaults seemed filled with the cries and laughter of the dead. The monk went steadily on in front of him, waving his candle to and fro; and as the smell was nauseate and oppressed the nostrils, he spat occasionally upon the floor.