Vault of Horror #5

In a remote Hungarian hotel haunted by a string of mysterious murders, a famed pianist arrives under suspicious circumstances. As the guests grow uneasy and one is found dead—claimed by a beast some whisper is a werewolf—tension mounts. When the hotel owner, desperate to keep his guests, welcomes the enigmatic Mademoiselle Micheline, the night takes a darker turn. She retreats to her room, but the owner soon transforms into a werewolf, only to find her absence impossible to explain—until the piano reveals a secret buried beneath its keys.

In "Fitting Punishment," the Vault-Keeper recounts a chilling tale of a young boy named Stanley, placed in the care of his uncle Ezra, the town undertaker. When Stanley uncovers his uncle’s grim habit of stealing from the dead, the truth proves deadly—Ezra hides his crime by shortening Stanley’s body and sealing him in a coffin. But death doesn’t end the reckoning: after burial, the undertaker is haunted by a series of unsettling knocks at his door, each revealing a piece of the boy’s body, until the final, horrifying confrontation.

In "Escape!", a desperate convict named Pete Lugar bets everything on a chilling plan: swap places with a dead man during an execution, counting on a confederate to dig him out from the grave. But when the coffin is sealed and carted off to a new crematorium, his fate takes a horrifying turn—no one’s coming to free him, and the dead might not be as still as they seem.