Vault of Horror #16

In a remote Hungarian hotel haunted by a string of mysterious murders, the sinister owner Hubert Antone and the enigmatic concert pianist Mademoiselle Michelin play a deadly game of cat and mouse. When a guest vanishes, the staff and guests grow uneasy—especially as the hotel’s manager begins to act strangely, and the pianist’s late-night performances echo with something far more sinister than music.

In the shadowed town of Black Hollow, young Stanley—nephew to the reclusive undertaker Ezra Flint—begins to suspect his uncle’s grim trade goes beyond mourning. When Stanley uncovers a gruesome secret buried beneath the town’s quiet surface, his discovery leads to a chilling act of vengeance that refuses to stay in the ground. As the coffin’s lid creaks open and the dead begin to walk, Ezra learns that some punishments are best served cold—and delivered with a foot in the door.

In "The Grave Wager," Paul and Clyde make a reckless bet: they wager $50 that Roger won’t spend the night in a room with a corpse. To make it real, they enlist Pirro, the Wax Man, from a local freak show to play the part—his waxen form delivered to Roger’s apartment under cover of darkness. Roger, confident and amused, settles in, only to be shaken when the sheet over the corpse begins to move. The next morning, Paul and Clyde arrive to gloat—only to find Roger screaming in madness and Pirro’s lifeless body, brutally beaten, lying in the room.

Pete Luger’s desperate plan to escape prison hinges on swapping places with a corpse—only to find himself trapped in a coffin, sealed and en route to the crematorium, with no sign of his expected accomplice. The Old Witch watches from the shadows, her presence a silent omen as the dead are moved and the living face a fate worse than execution.