Kill the Dead

by Tanith Lee

  “Did you steal the instrument, too?”

  “I? Oh no. My father did that. He killed a man to get it, and the man, I assume, put a bane on him, and on me, I shouldn’t wonder. My father used to beat sparks out of me every time he got drunk, which was pretty frequent. When he was sober, he’d teach me to play that. I hate my father. I’m not that keen on myself.”

  He lapsed into a moody reverie, staring where the dark man, who looked like handsome Death, was still watching the village, the road, the mountain. Soon, Myal lay down in the grass again.

  “What’ll you do about that girl, that Ciddey Soban?”

  “What do you think?”

  “Go back and make her miserable some more. Push her dead sister out of this world into the next, so they can both be nicely lonely and wretched.”

  Something pecked at his hand. Fearing snakes, Myal jerked three feet backward, landed, and saw the flask Dro had been offering him. He accepted the flask gingerly, uncorked it and sniffed. An appreciative grin, unlike the smile, altered the desolation of his face.

  “White brandy. Haven’t tasted that since I was on the Cold Earl’s lands.”

  He tasted it, and kept on tasting it. Dro let him.

  They said a few more things to each other, on Myal’s side progressively unintelligible. Bees came and went in patches of clover. Large grape-dark clouds with edges of gold tissue clotted together behind the mountain.

  “Why’d you do it?” Myal Lemyal asked. “Why’d you send um out of thissorld wheney doan wanna go?”

  “Why does a surgeon draw a man’s tooth when it’s decayed?”

  “Issen the same. Not attall. I’ve heard of you, and your kind. Poor liddle ghosts driven sobbinganscreaming out’f the place they wanna be most.”

  “It’s necessary. What’s dead can’t go on pretending it’s alive.”

  “Anthasswhy you wannagetter Ghyzemortwa—”

  When the light began to go, Myal Lemyal was already gone, blind drunk on white brandy and passed out in the clover. Senseless, however, one hand had fallen on the sling of the grotesque instrument, and mingled with it in a firm and complex clutch.

  Of Parl Dro there was no longer any sign.

  When he woke and saw the stars scattered like dice overhead, Myal knew he had made yet another mistake.

  There was a clean fragrant wind blowing on the hills. It helped soothe his pounding headache. But it did not help much in the other matter. He had lost the King of Swords, handsome Death, Parl Dro the Ghost-Killer. Of course, it was inevitable that he would ruin this chance too. Myal considered his first slip-up had been in getting born. He had gone on wrecking his chances systematically ever since.

  The worst thing was that he was still drunk. Despite the headache and an inevitable queasiness, he still felt inclined to roll about in the grass howling with insane laughter. His own inanity irritated him. He put the instrument on his shoulder and staggered down the slope, alternately giggling and cursing himself.

  He was detouring by the village and stumbling across the fields to rejoin the road beyond it, making for the faintly glowing cutout of the mountain, before it dawned on him why. Though Dro had abandoned him, Dro would not have abandoned the leaning house and its two sisters, one quick, one dead. Sooner or later Dro would be revisiting that house. Myal had only to be in the vicinity to freshen their acquaintance. Perhaps another tack might be in order. “I never had a big brother. Never had anyone to look up to, learn from.” He could hear himself saying it, and winced. It was difficult to be sure how to get around someone like Dro.

  The house was leaning there, in its accustomed position of decline, when he re-emerged on the road. Starlit, the moon still asleep, and dominated by its trees, it did look ghostly.

  Myal shivered, scared and also romantically stirred by the idea. He had glimpsed the live sister, Ciddey, five evenings ago, when he first exhaustedly arrived here over the mountain. She was a true lady, like one of the Cold Earl’s women, or the Gray Duke’s, or a damsel of any of those endless succession of courts he had flitted in and out of, mothlike, scorching his wings. Ciddey was like a moth too. Pale, exquisite, fragile. And somehow inimical, eerie... abroad by night with unhuman glittering eyes—

  Myal began to know the itching panic of a babe alone in unfamiliar darkness.

  He looked at the house among its trees, and hugged himself in an infantile intuitive search for comfort. Naturally, Parl Dro would come along the road and find him this way, quivering with fright. But there was as yet no evidence of Dro or his inexorable exorcism.

  Suddenly Myal had a wild impulse. He was accustomed to them; they were usually misguided and mostly led to mishap. Their phenomena had also commenced with him in childhood. The perverse directives the brain was sometimes capable of—to drop the tray loaded with priceless glass, to leap the too-wide gap between a pair of speeding wagons, to spit in the face of the landowner’s steward—such contrary notions, normally suppressed by the average person, had always proved irresistible to Myal. They were not caused by reckless bravery, either, for Myal was not brave, but merely by the same chemistry that had forced him, so unwisely, to be conceived.

  The current impulse was driving him across the road, toward the iron gate, into the umber yard. That achieved, he sat, trembling slightly, on the edge of the stone well. He swung the instrument forward, and began to sing Ciddey (or was it Cilny?) a love song. His voice was an unpowerful but attractive tenor. In the silence it seemed very loud. The strings popped under his fingers, and the notes struck the walls like uncanny sideways rain.

  When the shutter slapped open overhead, Myal’s heart practically stopped.

  He glanced up, keeping the song going. A pallid bolt of light hung in the ivy, the shape of a single moth’s wing.

  The girl leaned through the light. It was the live one—probably. Her braided hair was like moonshine.

  Myal gasped and left off singing. He was half in love with her, and frozen with fear.

  “What is it?” said the girl. She stared at the instrument. Slender little hands like fox paws gripped the sill. “What do you want?”

  “I want,” Myal swallowed and lost his head completely. “I want to warn you.”

  “Don’t trouble. I know the village. They’ll behave themselves. They still respect the name of Soban.”

  “I don’t mean that. I mean the man called Dro.” He heard her catch her breath. She was lovely. He wished he was a thousand miles away. “He made out he was leaving, but he’ll be back—if he isn’t back already. He was going to Ghyste Mortua—I think. But he reckons he’s got dealings to settle with you first. You and—your sister.”

  “Go away!” cried the girl in the window.

  Myal jumped, but felt more familiar ground under his feet at her tone of anger and threat. “Only trying to be helpful. Sorry I spoke.”

  “Wait,” said the girl. She was suddenly, appallingly defenceless. “What do you know about him?”

  “Only that he’ll be back. If you want my advice, not that you do, you’d run for it”

  “Where could I go?”

  “Maybe—with me.”

  He stared up at her, shivering at the romance of it all and wishing he could shut himself up. To his chagrin and his relief, the girl laughed at him.

  “You. Who are you? Besides, what about my dead sister? Where is she to go? With you, too?”

  “Perhaps,” Myal shuddered, “Parl Dro made an error there. Perhaps I don’t believe in ghosts.”

  A shriek slit down the night.

  It came from the topmost room of the tower, on the north side of the house.

  Myal and Ciddey were momentarily petrified. The girl broke from her rigor before he did. Leaving the shutter wide, she turned and ran away into the depths of the house.

  Myal remained in the yard, glaring wildly between the trees at the one corner of the tower that was visible from this vantage, a constriction in his throat.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The tre
es around the house on its north side could have been deliberately planted to give access to the tower. One in particular rested its boughs almost across the sill of the second-story window. Of course, a lame man might not be reckoned capable of scaling trees.

  When Parl Dro reached the window, he found it latched from within. Easing the lame leg, which itself did not reckon it should be required to scale trees, Dro produced a slender knife, and slid it through the join between the shutters. In a couple of seconds it had raised the latch, and the two panes of dull glass parted. The room beyond was bare and empty, save for a few skeletal plants dying in dry soil and cracked pots on the floor. Dro entered it and vacated it as swiftly. The possible significance of the pots—herbal witchery—did not concern him, nor any longer the witch, judging by the state of them. Dro moved out through the door onto a steep stair. The top room lay straight above him at the stairhead, closed by a thick wooden door with plates and lock of rusty iron.

  The girl was in the house, for he had seen her there soon after sunset, going with her lamp from window to window, latching each. The light had ultimately come to rest in an upper room, a thin thread behind shutters of wood. It was possible that this was a ruse, but he did not judge her so devious as to leave her lamp barely obvious in one place, and creep to another through the pitch-dark house. Besides, she would be hoping he was gone.

  Just as he was starting up the tower stair, he heard the poignant unmistakable notes of Myal Lemyal’s wire strings.

  Interested, Dro checked, almost pleased. If anything, this was to the good; Myal playing troubador at one end of the building would distract Ciddey Soban from this one. On the other hand, Myal’s purpose was decidedly oblique, maybe even to himself. It had been straightforward to dupe the musician, yet almost simultaneously, he had shown himself possessed of both talent and cunning—a talent and cunning he appeared bored with: or even unaware of. Not every man could have tracked Parl Dro to his cover on the slope that day, and not every man had ambitions connected to Ghyste Mortua. Nor did every minstrel make such music.

  The current theme was trivial but not displeasing. Dro listened to it with a quarter ear as he finished the climb up the rest of the stairs, and picked the iron lock of the door at the top with his knife.

  When he got into the room, he forgot the music

  The aura of the manifested dead was intense and total. That pervasion, like an odour of cold stale perfume. That feel of an invisible active centre, which strove to draw off the energies of life, and of the living, into itself. No wonder Ciddey Soban was pale and slight. His earliest training had taught him that, even where love caused the deadalive to linger, they sucked the vitality of the quick who harboured them. They could not help it, any more than fire could help destroying a stick of wood put into the hearth. It merely happened. It merely had to be stopped.

  Sometimes Parl Dro had been paid large sums of money to perform such work as this. Other times, he had slunk in like a thief, as he did now, and sharp pebbles had struck him across the back when the task was done.

  The physical aspect of the room was itself depressingly invocational.

  It was a bedchamber, or had been arranged to be: A stark canopied bed, maiden narrow, with fluted white drapes. A carved chest, in which he had no doubt Cilny Soban’s garments lay carefully folded amid bags of herbs. An antique mirror of polished silver stood on the chest, and two or three old books. On the inside of the door he had closed hung some tiny charms on a thread. Some of them looked like a baby’s teeth. In a bony chair sat a child’s doll, made of wood with cannily jointed limbs. It was dressed in faded spectral white, like everything else, and had long lank hair of flaxen wool. There was a tapestry on the wall, a rug on the floor, a table with an ewer and basin, some little combs chased with imitation mother-of-pearl, and an open ivory casket with delicate beads and bangles in it.

  It was a sad room, and very horrible. It provided the perfect compost from which a ghost might ferment itself and establish its false claims on an earthly existence.

  In the darkest comer, something stood off the rug, on the floor. It was a slim, two-foot-high stone jar.

  The moment he looked at the jar, he felt her seep into the room. She had not been there when he entered. Cilny had died in the spring, not so long ago. She might need a human presence to rouse her. But also he suspected Ciddey had warned her into hiding. Even now, she was reluctant to evolve, sensing antipathy. A desire for her company, love, even fear, she could feed on. Dro offered her none of these. Yet now, looking at the pot which held her ashes, he began to exert his will on her. He began to drag her, willing or not, into the room.

  His spine and the roots of his hair registered her arrival before his eyes did. But in less than half a minute, he could see her quite plainly too.

  Frail and blonde she was, mostly transparent. No, she was not a very strong deadalive. She wore the clothing of her death hour, which was quite usual, the long flimsy nightgown the villagers had described, though for some reason the wreath of flowers was absent. Then, in the way of ghosts, unexpectedly and piteously, she touched him—by folding her arms shyly about herself. It was the modesty of a very young girl who had never slept with a man, and discovered herself alone with one in her nightwear. Nor was it contrived: he was fairly sure of that. He said to her gently, “Don’t be afraid, Cilny. Do you know who I am?”

  Her voice was hardly more than a rustle, dry papers or blown leaves.

  “Ciddey told me of a man, a lame man in black”

  “What did she say?”

  “That you’d kill me.”

  “Cilny,” he said quietly, “how can I kill you? You’re already dead.”

  “No,” she cried in her rustling voice. Panic made it stronger, “No—no—” She stared at him. “Ciddey woke me. I was asleep and she woke me.”

  “She shouldn’t have awoken you. You should have woken in your own time and gone on your own way, to the place you have to go to.”

  “No. I’ll stay here. I want my sister. I want Ciddey.”

  He did not wish to be rough with her. Sometimes it was possible to comfort, to smooth the path. The going through could be calm, even some cases blissful, thankful. But this one would plead and whimper at him. He was steeled to the hurt, but to prolong the hurt for her would be no sort of kindness.

  He took a step towards the pot of ashes, and then the ghost-girl shrieked.

  The shriek had attained a dumbfounding strength. It thrilled through the room, through his ears, through stone. He knew Ciddey would have heard it.

  Dro lunged towards the jar. To reach it, he had to go right by the ghost, partly through her. A debilitating chill sank over him as he did so. But he paid no attention to it. He kneeled and wrenched off the cover of the jar and threw it away. She came all about him in that moment, a white gale, a pale insect whipping him with frantic opalescent wings. Primeval horror strangled him, swarming over his skin. He could smell only the grave, and phosphorescent worms crawled across his eyes. He wanted—needed—to lash out, beat her insubstantiality away, run yelling from the room—well-known sensations he was accustomed to controlling.

  Vaguely, beyond it all, he heard a door flung open lower in the tower.

  Her ashes were Cilny’s link to mortal life.

  The link had always to be destroyed, or at least altered. The means were as various as the links themselves. The bone must be smashed, air mingled with its fragments. The scarf, the glove must be charred in fire, flames mingled with the cloth. Change was the key.

  The ashes lay far down in the stone pot. He could see them, even through the whirlwind of pallor and dark. He unhooked the flask of white brandy from his belt and pulled the cork. Luckily, it did not take very much to render Myal Lemyal drunk. There was enough left for the enterprise.

  Dro poured the libation with a careful steady hand, covering all the floor of the jar. There was a brief smoke, as if from acid.

  Suddenly the swirling nightmare dispersed from about him. I
t was as if a great noise had fallen silent.

  He stood up slowly, and looking around him saw Cilny’s face staring at him, huge-eyed, desperate, but it was the doll in the chair. Cilny was gone.

  She had not cried out again. Perhaps she could not summon the power. Or perhaps, at the very last, she had seen beyond the gate, seen that the land she must journey to was unknown, alien, yet not terrible after all, not to be feared.

  For a second, Parl Dro felt weak and drained to the threshold of illness. At such times, his will expended like a loss of blood, he was inclined to believe the adage that for every ghost a ghost-killer returned to its death, he moved himself a little nearer to his own.

  He leaned his shoulder on the wall and watched the door, waiting for it to burst aside. Which it presently did.