Kill the Dead

by Tanith Lee

  Then, through half-closed eyes, he saw a woman mantled in gold hair, leaning to his firelight. She was very real, but when he raised his lids, no longer there.

  The child at the farm had triggered certain memories, one familiar and crucial. He thought about it, turning the past over in his mind, as he waited for the present to catch up to him.

  His father had been a soldier in some small border war big enough to kill him. Parl Dro’s mother had died a while later, when he was about four years of age. The local landowner kept a house where homeless children might grow up in reasonable conditions. When he was ten, Dro was already working in the fields. But, because he had shown some aptitude for learning, the landowner, much fairer than most, sent him twice a week into town, to be schooled.

  The school was ramshackle. In winter, icicles formed high on the indoor beams under the attic where the roof leaked. The children would huddle around an iron pot with coals in it. There were fifty boys and about fifteen girls whose relatives thought them odd enough to need lessons. All but one of the girls were alien creatures, whose nurses always came with them. In winter, they brought their own iron firepots, too. The last girl was poor and came alone. She sat bolt upright in a clean ragged darned dress. Her hair was always clean, too, a long fair flag that hung down her back and onto the bench. The well-off little girls would not speak to her. They had remarked loudly to each other that she was a hussy, having no nurse to guard her. The poor girl remarked as loudly, to the air, that she, being virtuous and trustworthy, required no guard, as they plainly did.

  Dro saw her twice a week, each of the two days that he came to the school, for three years. Then, one day when he was thirteen, he suddenly noticed her. She would play dice games with the boys, which she usually won, and run races with them, which sometimes she won. She would also climb trees, though not in company with the boys, for she expressed the opinion that this would be unseemly. The day Parl Dro noticed her was an evening in early summer. He came out into the field behind the school and saw her sitting in an apple tree. The sun spilled down her hair like molten honey. She was talking to herself, or to the birds, or the tree. He climbed an adjacent tree and sat and looked at her. She did not seem offended or abashed when she saw him. They began to converse quite easily. What they spoke about was unrecalled and meaningless. It might have been books or the state of the crops.

  When he came back to the town on his next school day, he arrived early, and walked slowly by her house. It was a tiny hovel, held up mainly by two other hovels at either side of it. Yet it was the cleanest hovel for miles around. When she came out she did not seem amazed to see him. Her only kin was a grandmother, who that morning had been baking. The girl had two slices of warm crackling bread, spread with dripping, one of which she presented graciously to Parl with the compliments of the house.

  She had a name, but he never called her by it. Her nickname, which her grandmother had given her for her hair, was “Silky.” Parl and the grandmother, but no one else, called her that.

  Through the summer, they spent a lot of time together. Sometimes they played truant from the school. They roved about the hills. They talked of myths, legends bound up with the land, and ancient times when emperors had ruled empires there, and women with hot blood had ridden over it to battle. He showed her how to catch fish in the streams. She told him he was cruel to catch fish he did not need to eat. Later, when the grandmother suffered a setback in her meagre life style, Silky begged him to show her again how to catch fish. They took the catch back to the hovel together, the colour of river pebbles and fine to eat, particularly when starvation was the alternative. He stole bread for them, Silky and the grandmother, from the landowner’s ovens. When times grew fatter, Silky, by way of repayment, stole a knife for him from the steelsmith’s. Parl had a little trouble replacing it in the forge before it was missed. They were very young, and their sexuality was limited by their youth, their situation and their codes of honour regarding each other. But they learned certain lessons of fire together, light fierce kisses, the rapidity of a heartbeat, hands and bodies and the press of summer grass. There would have been more, if things had evolved differently.

  When the harvest came due, the landowner called in all his workers to the fields. For three or four weeks, Parl would not see the school, the town, or Silky. They parted gravely, as if for a year, beneath the apple tree in the field behind the school.

  The harvest went as it always did, which was back-breakingly, but well. The weather was hot and the sheaves like tinder, and men were posted to keep watch for fires. At night, Parl fell asleep in the open, the stars dazzling overhead. The air smelled of grapes and wine and scythed grain. Fireflies sprinkled the bushes. He hardly thought of Silky, comforted that he did not need to think of her, because she would be there for him when he returned.

  In the last week of the harvest there was a storm. Roaring and trampling, it tore down on the fields like a gigantic animal. Great smacks of wind clapped the corn flat to the ground. Lightning drove steel bolts through the earth. A tree blazed up on a hill, exploding with white electric fire and noise.

  They worked against the gale and the lightning. When the rain came, they worked against that. Purple and wailing in the wind, the fields surrendered themselves to destruction. The last of the harvest was taken by the storm.

  Somehow worse than the material loss, the threat of reduced rations, cut wages, which must inevitably follow, was a primitive distress which fell over all of them. The storm was like some supernatural show of wrath, sent as if to punish them, as if to demonstrate that however settled life might seem, nothing was certain. It was no surprise to Parl when the landowner, riding by him through the sodden ruin of the stacks, tapped his shoulder. “No more school for you, boy. I’m sorry. I’ll need you here.”

  It was another month before Parl could find the space or energy to make the two hours’ trek to the town. And then he had to set off two hours before sunrise, hoping he would not be missed when the other boys and men turned out soon after dawn. Probably he would get a beating. The idea of it seemed very distant. There had begun to be a feeling of depression, almost of fear inside him. In the swift importunate way of the young, he knew where salvation lay, and had come to care less and less for anything else.

  He even ran some of the miles. The dawn was just a phantom smudge of light along the hills when he reached the town, the gate not even open. He did not wait for it, but climbed in at a place he knew of, illegal and urgent. Then, coming to the alley where the neat hovel sparkled between its far from immaculate supports, a sudden peculiar reluctance overcame him.

  He loitered, undecided, on the street, until a woman came out of a door farther down, water bucket in hand. She glanced at him, and a half-startled look spread over her face. Something in the look unnerved him utterly, though why he did not know. He turned and ran.

  He ran straight to the field that backed the dilapidated school. Again, he could not have said why, perhaps because it was a reference point, because he had come most often that way in the past.

  In the field, he did not know what to do with himself. A dreadful uneasy restless exhaustion was coming over him. His hands buzzed and were full of nerves like needles. Insects seemed to crawl along his scalp, under the hair. Then, walking stupidly, he came on the apple tree and checked. It was still not quite true dawn, the sky silvery but nothing much lit up. For a moment the hideousness of the tree was more illusion than fact. As he was staring at it, he heard Silky’s voice call lightly across the twilight behind him.

  He turned and there she was in her clean darned rags, her gossamer hair blowing.

  “Hallo, Parl,” she said, “I thought you never would come back.”

  He stared at her, as he had stared at the tree. When she started to come toward him, a monumental terror boiled up in him, as if his blood and all his bones had changed to blazing ice.

  “I waited for you, Parl. I’ve waited, every time I could, here by the tree.”


  He found he had backed a step away. When he did so, her face seemed to tremble. He still could not work out what was wrong. Then suddenly, as before, he broke into a run. He raced out of the field, away from her and from the tree, and as he ran, he shouted, long blank wordless shouts.

  He did not stop again until a door stopped him. He had rushed right into it, and was crashing there with his fists. His yells had started all the dogs in the neighbourhood barking. Then the door opened and he almost fell through it. He recognised Silky’s grandmother as if from a long way off, and so he realised which door he had been hammering on.

  “Oh,” she said. “Oh, someone told you.”

  She started to cry. He became aware that he was crying, too. She led him to a chair and she shut the door.

  She did not tell him directly, for of course she supposed he knew. It was only by her elaborations of grief that he found out. On the night of the storm which wrecked the harvest, Silky had been lingering by the apple tree in the field behind the school. When lightning had struck the tree, it had struck Silky also. Silky was dead. She had been dead for more than a month.

  The grandmother brewed a herbal tea, which once the three of them had drunk. Nobody could drink it now. She patently wanted to keep Parl with her. He had been so often with Silky that now he seemed to conjure the girl for the old woman. Then the grandmother went to a chest and brought out something mysteriously. Drawing near to him, she showed him a cloth packet and opened it to reveal a clot of shining threads.

  “All I’ve got left of her,” she said.

  She had trimmed Silky’s silken hair the very morning before she died. The lightning had left nothing much, stripping flesh and sweetness, as it had stripped the tree. But these fringes of hair the grandmother had, by sheer luck, retained. Now, with a supreme effort of sacrifice, she offered the packet to Parl.

  The instant he saw the hair, he felt very sick. Truths that he would learn and reason for himself in later years, came to him now merely instinctively. He felt but did not know what the shorn hair represented, and what its power must be. He had not guessed yet what that power signified.

  Even so, instinct ordered him. Though he almost cringed with revulsion, he took the packet of hair.

  He sat, with the packet lying by him, most of the day, in Silky’s grandmother’s house. All that time they said hardly anything to each other. She did not think to ask him if he should be anywhere else. She had forgotten real life. And Parl, though he understood the world went on, the landowner and his fields and his anger, they were only dimly perceived, dimly remembered, events outside the bubble which enclosed him and the blasted apple tree and the dead girl and her shorn hair.

  When the day began to drain away, he rose and politely said good-bye to the old woman.

  As he was going to the field, he met three of his former fellow students from the school. They clustered around him, eager to commiserate, or, as it seemed to him then, to enjoy his pain. Finally, one said, “So-and-so told me the priests went to bless the ground where she was killed. So-and-so said she might not lie quiet.” One of the others cuffed him, growing aware of sheer bad taste at last. They went away.

  Bats fizzled over the field and dissolved in the darkness. The sky was overcast, and rain fell. The struck tree glowed strangely in the wet with a hard vitreous sheen.

  After an hour, Silky came walking softly through the rain toward him.

  She was strong. She looked very near mortal this time. Before, she had been mostly transparent. He felt the weird drawing, the drag of energy going out of himself to her. He had wanted her to be there, and the sense that he fed her existence was almost pleasant. But then again, somewhere inside himself, he shied from this pleasure, was revolted by it. When she stood close to him and put her hand on his arm, he grew cold, colder than he had ever been in his life. He could not actually feel any pressure of her fingers.

  There was no mark on her of the lightning. There rarely ever was, as he would come to know, evidence of the positive wounds or bodily spasms of death upon a living ghost. Its whole revenance was a masquerade of life; it tended to be amnesiac about the instant of annihilation, even in the degree of camouflage.

  They sat together on a flat-topped stone. They talked. Presently he took her hand, and this time her hand felt real.

  She had been young and innocent. Perhaps it was her naïveté that made her do what next she did, a frank and honest desire that they should be together as equals. Some would cheat and trick from jealousy and vengeance, out of hatred for those whose lives were genuine, some never slew directly or intentionally, warming themselves at lives as if at fires. Silky had been honourable. What remained of her could not have altered, so cruelly, into a fiend.

  She was thirteen. A lovely, generous, desperate child. No, it was her naïveté, her longing not to lose him, that had made her seek his death.

  She said that they should go into the school. There was a side door which each knew how to open. The rain was falling still, and she said they must take shelter. He asked her, almost with embarrassment, if the rain could inconvenience her now. She smiled radiantly at him.

  “No. See, my hair’s quite dry, and my dress. But you’re wet through.”

  He let her take him to the door, and he opened it Not because he cared about the rain, but because she had seemed to want them to go inside.

  They wandered about the benches and the chests. The books were piled untidily and the slates more so. A mouse pranced over the tiles. It had been eating the large candle which the tutor used to tell the time. The atmosphere was very dark, yet somehow Parl could see everything well. Even when the girl hurried up the narrow stair to the attic, he was able to follow her with ease.

  The floor of the attic, which rested on the beams of the hall below, was mainly rotten from the leaking roof where the rain even now entered, and where the sprays of winter ice would poke through to drip slowly on the pupils’ heads fifty feet below. The joists had long since cracked. The walls bulged. The pupils were forbidden to enter the attic.

  Silky ran daintily over the unsafe floor. Old parchment and cobwebs lay about. Where Silky’s feet passed over them they left no imprint.

  At his first step after her, a plank groaned. At the second, he heard the wood crack quietly. In that instant, he was aware of how she invited him and where, and it did not matter. There was a savage sweetness in her face, pain that she would cause him pain, happiness, blind and foolish, that called for him to come to her. If she saw anything, it was their life together–their unlife–children and lovers, wedded forever in the shadows.

  Then his foot went through the rotten boards as, years later, most of his body would go through the rotted struts of a bridge.

  The escaping manoeuvre was complex and almost hopeless, but somehow he achieved it, flinging himself away from the floor, and from her. He landed in the doorway in a shower of splinters. His head rang, and he heard her through the ringing, murmuring to him, coaxing him to return.

  When he could look at her again, she was still smiling. She held out her hands, mutely encouraging him. A moment of discomfort, and all would be well. A moment, only a moment.

  He staggered down the stair, and back into the school room. He was not certain what he meant to do, but, as if it had been planned, his confused gaze settled instantly on the tall wax time candle, and the flint and tinder that lay beside it.

  He did not know–how could he?–that the ultimate act must be performed in their sight. Yet his instinct knew, that seventh sense which would make him what he was to become, that seventh sense which all that frightful day had been forming inside him, brain and soul.

  When she drifted down the stair, he already had the candle alight. She glanced at it wonderingly, then took up a slate and a scrap of chalk. He was not amazed that she could hold them in her unreal hands, the shock came when she showed him what she had written. Not that he could read it He would have needed a reflective surface for that. For, in the way of her kind, she
had written unhesitatingly from right to left, back to front, in mirror writing. If he had needed any further sign, she had supplied it.

  When he drew the packet of her hair from his belt, her eyes and mouth widened in frightful demented shapes. He had his first glimpse into hell, then, as the first of the great white moths dashed itself against him, throwing the filaments of its wings over his face, tearing him with the shards of its nails and its frantic unhuman cries–

  The burning packet of hair fell from the candle onto the tiles.

  And as he destroyed her, in that minute he learned, and learned forever, that yes, it could be possible, and essential, and unbearably horrible, to kill the dead.

  It was his very last lesson in that schoolroom, as it was his last night in that town or on that stretch of land.

  When the rainwater, dripping through from above, quenched the smouldering ashes, he ran away into the undergrowth of night. He had been running from things since sunrise. Running from them, and toward them. Now too, he ran toward his future, and his trade. Although he did not know it, and just then would have wept if he had.