Winterking (1987)

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