by Paul Hazel
horribly.
“Not much use if we had," Morag answered.
The old dead man kept his eyes averted. Even the
nearer hallways were choked with limbs. He had just been
able to clear a path through. Nearly gasping, he slumped
over his plate. He was too old for this. For the first time in a
long while he felt resentment for the thinness of his legs and
the immensity of his stomach. He had always feared the
physical world a little. But once his size and his clumsiness
had protected him. He saw no reason now for Wykeham to
call on what, before, no one had thought to ask of him.
"You have made your point too well, William,” he said
sadly.
“What point?” Holmes wanted to know.
Hunt’s teeth showed between his lips. “That we are
safe,” he said.
Harwood swore. “You mean that we are hopelessly
trapped.”
“That may be,” allowed Hunt; yet his voice, which
seemed flat, had anger lurking under it. “Still, what is out
there won’t get in. Or at least not at first. So there may well
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be time. That is it, is it not?” His eyes stopped at Wykeham.
“As though a hedge. . he began, grinding his teeth.
“What is out there?’ the Duke demanded.
Hunt did not bother to answer.
“Living men, 1 hope,” Harwood said in his place. “But
beyond them an army of the dead. And beyond them again— ”
“Duinn,” Hunt said coldly and felt Wykeham’s stare.
He looked again into the unmarked face and, watching,
thought how, because Duinn had willed it, he had carried
him a boy, his eyes grown large with fear, across the holy
river into the lands of the dead. And let him come back.
Because that too had been Duinn’s will. Or his pride, Hunt
thought, or that vanity called pride.
Wearily he reached out. He took a drink from his goblet,
unhurried, enough to last him.
“You are lord of this world,” he said. “Yet he will not let
you stay in it.” He raised a pair of his arms, impatiently. In
his lap his fingers twisted. He said, “It was never life he gave
you. Surely, you must know that. Even he has not that power.
It was only death he kept from you.”
For a breath’s space there was silence. Wykeham lifted
his head. He smiled into his eyes. “Forever,” he whispered.
“For as long as you do not tire of it,” Hunt reminded
him. “No longer.”
“I do not tire.”
Hunt put down the goblet. It was blood they drank.
There was no other truth. Though a man yearned only for
pleasure or searched for understanding, to the end of his days
he would learn nothing more. “All that live must tire,” Hunt
said.
Wykeham’s deep eyes in which the memory of a million
deaths were drowned looked him steadfastly in the face.
“Whatever must com e,” he said, “I shall be here.”
“Protected by a few miles of wall?”
“And these few hills and a wood. And this house looking
over them.”
“And a hedge?’ said Hunt. He scowled. “Like some
damn story for children?”
“It was always for children.”
“Where are the women, then?” Hunt asked him.
3.
44W n Black Wood,” Chance said, the wind of memory
Mblowing through him.
He was silent a moment. “Still, I did not die of it,” he
said in a voice that quivered unexpectedly. He looked away
into the fretwork of branches.
In the breeze the trees parried, drifted apart, only to
return, limb by limb, to where they had been.
“The trees were mostly blackthorn then,” he went on
more quietly. “The only barn still standing Alf Jenkins’s. And
him only lately put underground and myself no more than a
lad and feeling, the moment we entered the loft, a sinister
dread on his behalf.” He looked again into the evening. The
cold had withdrawn a little. Emboldened, he said: “She was
not yet sixteen. Still, it seemed a great difference.” He
managed a trace of a smile. “Before I had even touched her,
she took off her dress.”
“And you have thought of her since?”
Chance lowered his head. “Chiefly about other matters,”
he said. “But I have thought of her.” He reached for the
bottle, as the other had done, so that at a distance it seemed
that the two figures sitting in the starlight were respectfully
toasting one another. Once more Chance brought the bottle
to his lips. The whisky was strong and smelled of rainstorms
and oak. He smelled other things; they floated out of his
memory, the smell of fire, of earth, the old puzzling smell of
dying. He looked around. When he recalled the scent of her
hair, his eyes filled with tears.
She had had wonderful hair, brazen and red as flame.
When she had looked up from under it there had been
something touching about her glance, and something shame-
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less too. She had not minded what the village women said of
her. If things had come differently to him, he thought, if she
had not been older, in his youth when a few years, it seemed,
had been everything. . .
“I was seventeen when she married,” he murmured.
“She was twenty.”
“Her young man died.”
The breeze stirred and a shadow crawled onto the porch.
“Soon after,” Chance said. “He is buried at Greenchurch.”
“Then, had you wished?”
Chance half closed his eyes. “I was roaming,” he said,
“down to Bristol. Later to the docks at New Awanux,” He
seemed to shake his old head. “It was ten years before l was
home again.”
The boy sat with his legs dangling in the grass. He was
looking into the darkness. The spikes of his black hair fell
over his collar. He took up the bottle.
Chance tried to speak casually:
“There’s no hurry, I suppose?”
“There are many I won’t even sit with,” the boy said.
“When that business up at the house is done,” Chance
said obstinately. “I’ve earned something, damn you, sitting in
this place, keeping company with them who no one else
would listen to.”
“Have you had supper?" the boy asked.
“Don’t eat.”
The boy nodded. Unsmiling, he set the bottle down next
to him.
“I’ve a paper,” Chance said. “Sixty— seventy years I’ve
had it.”
He had thought he would be frightened but he was more
angry than frightened. He hadn’t planned when it should be
but that it should be now, before he saw whether Wykeham,
with all his years, had made any difference, was senseless. It
was cruel. Bitterly he dropped his eyes to the floor. He could
see his legs, stuck out straight and stiff, and tried to pull
them back. It worked its way into his consciousness very
slowly th
at he could not.
“Fifty years,” the boy said.
“No matter,” Chance answered, brushing those years
aside, although at the end they were all that was left to him.
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“Time enough,” he said hoarsely. He started to draw a new
breath. He could hear his chest begin to suck clumsily. It
made him angrier.
“And nothing of him changed,” he whispered. “While to
m e . . . ”
The boy turned his head. The darkness had rubbed the
expression out of his face. His eyes were now murky holes,
his mouth a vague tear. Chance shut his sight fast against
them. Do not feel, he thought.
After a little while he heard him get up.
“When I took her,” Duinn said, “she was waiting alone
at her window.” His footsteps came nearer. “Waiting as she
had night after night, hoping for another look at a red, naked
man who, long after she had forgotten you, once waved at her
from the midst of the air.”
Presently Duinn put his hand on the weeping man's
shoulder.
“Shall I tell you what I did?” Duinn asked.
The man did not answer.
“In fact, it is a little thing,” Duinn said, almost diffidently.
"Like killing a hare.”
4.
It was late, too late, Willa Brelling was afraid, when she
began her journey; but then, until the fires, she hadn’t
understood that it was within her power to go. It had not
even been in her mind— a stone only watches, wood only
waits— and with every nerve rigid, she had watched endlessly,
waited endlessly, while the nights had piled up about her. In
her innermost self she still felt the hands that long ago had
pulled her down on the cot, still felt even now, in the
darkness of classrooms and corridors, how he had covered her
with himself. But she had no happiness out of the memory
and though he had come again, he had gone. She could not
follow. It was only because she was often at the windows that
she had watched the fires.
For hours, becoming one substance with the glass, she
had observed the Indians gathering. They had floated down
from the sky, effortlessly, never touching the ground. All
afternoon they had lingered in the air. The frost had turned
the elms into torches of fire. It did not seem strange to her
that the flesh of men should likewise bum. Like herself, the
Indians seemed intent on no other business but waiting. It
was not until evening that they came down onto the roof of
the chapel. Dancing upon it and jeering at those within, they
blew the sparks from their mouths onto the shingles. She saw
the building begin to glow dully. From the main house a
dozen figures rushed onto the lawn. When the chapel exploded, the odd-job man was still dragging up buckets of water.
The fires that twisted on his back rose abruptly as he ran.
Coming over the hill he looked like a shooting star. Her star.
Rushing toward her.
The body dropped and lay still. She drew a part of
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herself into the front step and waited. Sinoke escaped from
the rags of its clothes but the life that had been there had
gone. Yet something of its warmth remained. She did not
mind that its chin was covered with bristles or that, in its
agony, it had fouled itself. She was frightened, however, that
someone might take it from her. She could hear the women
drawing nearer and knew that she must conceal it from them.
All that was necessary, she thought, was to inhabit its
legs. She could do such a thing. Every board and timber of
the hall was filled with her. A body was much smaller.
She entered its feet through the soles, hastily, eager only
to be done. But there was more room inside than she had
imagined. She had a feeling of terrible vastness. In order to
fill it, she was forced to draw herself down from the roofpeaks
and out of the walls. Yet life can only be filled with life and,
although she had pushed all she was into it, the sense of
emptiness was appalling. Nonetheless she could make it
stand. She could open its eyes.
She looked toward the road on the side of the hill. The
road led toward the river and the trains. It led, she did not
doubt, to Greenchurch and the house to which he always
returned.
If she wished to, she felt, she could follow him.
She made the legs bend. They carried her down the hill.
In her heart there was a sudden, overwhelming nostalgia for
movement. Ignoring the sluggishness of its gait, she crossed
the first poor square, passing into the narrow street beyond
with an air of giddy anticipation.
The fires were not yet general. The few men stood about
idly, unnoticing, or sat in groups on the steps of the houses,
talking in the lateness of the evening. But already the women
were leaving. Each alone, with eyes shrewdly vacant, they
strolled out onto the avenues. Yet they seemed without
purpose and, if a man they knew caught sight of them, they
smiled and went on without speaking. In the darkness their
footsteps were soon gone beyond hearing. Unless one followed
down the dim, shifting streets that led to the trains, one
would never have guessed their numbers.
Bristol station slanted upward into the blackness. Out on
the platform the women assembled. Their stares, which at
first had been impersonal and questioning, warmed as they
met the stares of others. Very little was said. They knew and,
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assured of the reasons, had no cause for concern. Some of the
women had owls, others jays or wrens, in little wire cages or
free on their shoulders. Unmindful of the soft twittering, the
women looked across at the river. Their eyes had become
clearer, the lines at the sides of their mouths more deeply
satisfied.
“Go home, father,” said the matron who was the first to
see the old man climbing the stairs from the street. Her voice
was kind but it was firm. “Get along home,” she repeated.
Willa did not try to speak. It was the body of the man
the woman was talking to. And the body was not interested.
It was stiffening. Willa let it lean on the rail. The woman
continued to speak to it.
“We— needn’t— take— care— of—you,” the woman said,
spacing the words and giving them a certain triumph. “We
needn’t bathe you, though you need it. Needn’t clean up after
you. Not ever again. And there is no use in following.”
Pausing, she saw its face and mistaking what she saw there,
said more gently but as earnestly: "You will just have to get
by as best you can.”
The body waited, unmoving.
To Willa, who was alone in it, the corpse seemed larger
than it perhaps was, but it seemed even emptier as well. At
last, robbed of any argument, the woman wandered away.
Women hurried by, pushing pas
t her, Willa watched the
crowd of absorbed faces indifferently. The mouth of the
corpse hung open. Its muscles and tendons were beginning
to feel like iron. Soon, Willa thought, it will not move at all.
But when the train pulled into the station, she dragged its
halting feet over the platform, made its legs mount, heavily,
one by one, the black metal steps into the car. With every
step the corpse looked older and more vile. But, within,
under the glare of the lanterns, the women recognized the
dazed and temporary nature of its life. There was nothing to
do, they decided, nothing worth the trouble of taking charge
of, and so they did not protest. It only sat with its ropy hands
hung between its knees, staring rudely at the many colored
birds that shared the car, listening wearily to the unmerciful
joy of their voices.
The young woman, her chin lowered and her hands in
her lap, did not wake until the train started. It was the wrong
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place to sleep but her body was exhausted by the life
stretching and pulling inside her and any respite had been
welcome, forgetfulness most welcome of all. She twisted
awake. Startled at finding the old man sitting next to her, she
moaned.
“They have made you sit here,” she said unhappily. “To
punish me. Because I am already pregnant.”
Its stench sickened her; still the woman did not move.
She accepted the punishment as she had accepted the life
growing in her, because she felt or wished to feel the presence of the man. The women, of course, had done this. She was certain of that. They had sent the old man, his head
like a skull, to remind her of the mortality of earthly affection: the man, they as much as said, will become as this man.
She had known all the while they were leaving, going off
to a much better world. Nonetheless when the man had come
to her she had put that knowledge aside. Afterward, in the
large rented room of the King’s Hotel, although they had
talked on for hours, they had never discussed the possibility
of a child. When he had gone away, the man had gone away
unknowing.
Carolyn let her head fall back on the seat.
In the darkness of the river she could see the darkness of