"The Secret in the Tomb"

by Robert Bloch

originally published Weird Tales May 1935

Our Narrator makes his way to a tomb where an ancestor is buried.  Said ancestor having been a sorceror.  It seems the family bequest is the secret of immortality.  He gets into the tomb, but his ancestor, a skeletal undead thing, attacks him.  It seems the secret of immortality only applies to the ancestor, who takes the life of those fool enough to seek him out in order to prolong his.  O.N. managed to fight Skeletor off and hoofs it out of there, having learned a lesson.

This is barely even a story. Mostly an atmospheric vignette in a pseudo-Lovecraftian style, and with less surreal imagination than HPL would've shown.  That being said it has a certain charm, because despite his self-deprecating remarks in the introduction to this tale in the collection Mysteries of the Worm, Bloch did have talent and even this, a first effort that's hardly an "A", still resonates with that, if only slightly.