The Darrell Schweitzer Megapack

by Darrell Schweitzer

  I heft my beloved onto my shoulder until I can get my keys out, then fumble my way within. I set her down on the bed, then open the shutters to let the dim daylight in. A dozen dead faces stare at me from out of the shadows, my own company of guests, often those left behind on the docks when everyone else is gone. I have accumulated several old men and women, and a rather startling trio of little children, two boys and a girl, all with their throats cut. The dead crowd my shelves, occupy all my chairs, sit slumped in my corners.

  I prop the new arrival up with pillows (all the while wondering where I am going to sleep from now on). I wrap her in my best sitting-robe, bathe and dry her poor feet and put socks on them, this deference intended to say to the others who share our quarters, Look, this one is special. She is to be your queen.

  Which course is the continuation of my transgression, an actual crime now, for the ideology of our unseen government demands perfect equality among the living and the dead. We may have no queens here, any more than we may have a town official who claims one particular corpse for himself, guards it as jealously as a dog guards a bone, and so subverts the entire process whereby the dead come to rest in the correct place for each one of them.

  Where this girl actually belongs, now, we shall probably never know.

  But the mania is upon me and will not be denied. She is mine. My heart goes out to her, as if I could somehow return her to life, and she could indeed be my queen. I saw some discarded holiday decorations in the mud at the foot of the stairs. I run back down, snatch up some bright metal and streaming tinsel, then fashion them into a crown, which I place, with all reverence, upon my queen’s head. I speak to her in tones I never use toward any of my other guests—to whom I am polite, as duty requires, but nothing more—and, leaning forward to whisper in her perfectly-formed ear, pretending that I do so to prevent the other dead from eavesdropping, I tell her that I love her.

  Have I completely lost my mind, all sense of propriety, any shred or remnant of social conscience?

  Most likely it is so.

  Even I am overwhelmed by the enormity of what I have done, and so I button up my great black coat again, place my hat on my head, and, with cane in hand, make my way down the stairs and into the street once more, where I spend the rest of the day going about my rounds, chatting amiably with the townspeople, observing how people go about their various duties. Mr. K____ sweeps his doorstep at a precise hour and minute, as he always does, whether there is anything to be swept from it or not. J____, the taximan, bawls out an absurd song as he wheels corpses about in his pedicab, sometimes pausing to point out this or that architectural feature or significant spot, as if he is a tour-guide.

  The dead fill the shops, the restaurants, the library, the waiting room in the train station where the train never comes and only the dead have the patience to wait for it.(Once there as laughter in our town and this was seen as a joke. But I have heard no laughter, nor has my father described any to me, nor did his father speak of any to him.)

  Mrs. Z___ complains that the children in the tiny school have to squirm sideways through masses of poorly placed, shabbily maintained dead to make their way into the schoolroom, where the students and teacher have to stand because all the desks are filled by corpses. I promise to investigate, and take my leave of Mrs. Z___. But, when the teacher sees me looking in through the window, she simply waves, and the children, listlessly, raise their hands.

  All is as it has always been, as our unseen government requires, and so, without incident, I complete my rounds.

  The town clock chimes the hour before curfew.

  Somehow the day has passed. I don’t remember most of it. I must have stopped for lunch somewhere along the way, probably at the usual tavern, operated by the redoubtable V___, where a corpse hangs in the place of a swinging sign, with bells tied around his ankles, jingling forlornly in the occasional breeze.

  The day has passed unnoticed, I say, because my mind has been filled with passionate contemplation of what I have done, with expectation which rises to a point of frenzy. I am terrified for myself and of myself. I start in fright when I glance my own visage in a storefront mirror. If such a person could be walking through the streets of our town, garbed in the uniform of the highest authority…then I cannot even complete the thought, save to grope blindly toward the concept that existence is a meaningless horror which provides no security for either the living or the dead, if such undetected moral corruption is possible.

  Yet at the same time I tell myself that my love for my queen is something new and wonderful, something beautiful, like an infusion of impossible color into our fog-bound existence, which is absurd, as if I were still young and capable of romantic feelings!

  And yet I am! To compound my offenses, I snatch the entire wares of a dead flower-seller out of her dead hands, leaving no payment behind in her cup, and, furtively, I scuttle back up my stairs, past the disapproving, peeling faces of the clock-tower figures. Once more I fumble with my keys. My hands are cold. The damp evening air oppresses me. My teeth chatter.

  Secretly then, ever so secretly I make my way inside, confident in the discretion of my other house-guests, and I strew the flowers across the bed in wild abandon, and then I fall to my knees and worship before this altar of absolute beauty! I spill out to my beloved all my longings, the story of my whole life, gushing about how when I was young I once dreamed of a place of green grass and sunlight, away from the dead. In grotesque profanation of the trust placed in my by the unseen government, I have allowed such thoughts, dreams, or pseudo-memories to grow within me like a luminous cancer, rather than trying to purge myself through my work, as any responsible and moral person would at least try to do.

  Dare I describe what follows? I kiss her hand, weeping, and eventually fall asleep on my knees, holding her hand in mine.

  II

  The Complete Confession of the Disgraced Official, whose name has been expunged from all Town records:

  The miracle, I swear, was not a dream. It was far, far more than a dream.

  I awoke in the timeless darkness of the night, and felt her soft hands caressing the sides of my head.

  I beheld her face, as marble-pale as she had always been, but now positively luminous, as if the full, unshrouded Moon shone from within her. She returned my gaze. Our eyes met, locked, and our souls mingled together forever. She smiled gently.

  Then she whispered my name, my full name, not just the letter of designation by which I am addressed in our town. Only a mother could know that, or a lover. I suppose I had whispered it to her, amidst my prior, frenzied discourse, which only confirmed my suspicion that she was, miraculously, neither dead nor alive, but in a different, transcendent state. She could hear me as the dead cannot. She remembered, as the dead do not. She spoke in a voice like sweetest music.

  Yet the touch of her hand was not cold, like that of a corpse, nor warm, like that of a living person.

  It was almost as if she were not there at all.

  But no! I will never accept that! Not a dream. Not an hallucination. She was a sending from some power infinitely greater than even our hidden government, from some place beyond the fog from which the ships come, which no one in our town has ever imagined.

  I bade her get up, and she got up, and we walked out of the room together. She took my hand in hers and we whirled, we danced to unheard music on the little landing at the top of the stairs, where the wooden clock-tower figures glared at us disapprovingly.

  With flowers in her hair, the crown on her head, and her white gown trailing behind her, she raced through the streets, and called after me to follow, laughing. And laughing, I followed. At the establishment of the redoubtable V___, I unlocked the door, for as a minister of the unseen government I possessed the universal key to all locks in our town. Inside, we broke out the finest wine and toasted one another. I cranked up the player-piano, and then we two danced to real music, in the glare of candlelight, for we two had, laughing, lit every candle in the
place, placing some of them in the hands, or even, mockingly, in puddles of melted wax, on the heads of the numerous dead who lined the walls and filled most of the booths and chairs of V___’s establishment.

  And when V___ came downstairs, wide-eyed, in his nightgown, to discover what all the racket is, we only laughed again and called on him to join the party. We seized him by either hand, and dragged him around and around, calling on him to dance like there is no tomorrow, and he danced, or lurched and shambled, to describe it more accurately, at least until he managed to break away and scramble upstairs again, wailing in terror.

  What more? Yes, there was more.

  We rang doorbells. We summoned the respectable citizens into the streets at a most improper hour, and we called on them to liberate themselves, to dance, to sing, to make noises, to behave shockingly.

  For it time it seemed, they would. The revolution seemed to have taken hold. Out with the old, the stagnant, the ridiculously cheerless, in with the cheerfully ridiculous!

  Children in particular were willing…to do whatever was to be done, whatever they could imagine. One small boy even knocked the hat off a corpse posed in a window!

  And—still more. We two ascended clock-tower and caused the bell to ring at the wrong time. Unscheduled, violated, the wooden figures rose from their coffins and go through their gyrations on the little balcony before the clock-face, while the two of us, with awesome acrobatic skill, joined them in their dance, switching their removable, wooden hats around and even wearing them ourselves, making a mockery of it all.

  Then, with some degree of solemnity, before the assembled multitude, from atop the clock-tower, in a strident, inspiring oration, my amazing companion called on the people to rid themselves of their most precious possession, which is their fear. She pleaded with them to have the courage to smash it, like an ugly glass thing.

  At last, we two retired to my quarters behind the Town Hall, and naked, I climbed into bed with her, and we made passionate love. Afterwards, she told me of a strange country I can almost recall in my memory, where the sun rises in the morning, unshrouded, where the sky is often blue, where the living are alive and the dead in the ground, and there are lands to live in beyond the boundaries of a little, fog-shrouded seaport town.

  She explained that if I tried very hard, if I cast off my own fear and dreamed it, I could awaken into that world.

  “Do it,” she said. “For me.”

  “I have never felt alive before now,” I replied.

  “Nor have I,” she said.

  And so we slept in one another’s arms until late in the morning, and we dreamed that we had indeed awakened into the other, brighter world.

  * * * *

  So it is concluded, and sealed away in the Secret Archives of the Town, never to be gazed upon by any person, save those of exceptional moral fortitude, with the express permission of the unseen government.

  III

  But then the clock-bell thunders, and the whole room shakes with it. I hear the mutter of voices and the tread of many feet on the stairway outside.

  Instantly I sit up, and comprehend my doom. A full understanding of my folly comes to me in a flash.

  To think that the dull clods in our town were capable of sharing what I have discovered—that is madness! To presume that the others possess the sufficiently exquisite sensibility to appreciate love, or the courage to cast away fear—for that I deserve everything that is to befall me. Thus existence cleanses itself!

  In an instant, the door crashes open and the redoubtable V___ enters, accompanied by many others. He snatches up and dons the pewter-buttoned coat and the bicorn hat (which used to be my father’s), and he gesticulates wildly with my cane, wordlessly directing the townspeople to drag me naked out of bed, to haul me down the stairs and through the chill, damp streets in the early morning fog, to hold me fast before the tribunal of substantial citizens (including the redoubtable V___, the punctual Mr. K___, J___ the taximan, Mrs. Z___, and the schoolteacher), where I am to be condemned without words, because my crimes are truly and literally unspeakable.

  I turn once, to look after my lover, but she is only lying in the bed where I left her, naked, limp, her skin as exquisite as near-translucent marble.

  IV

  What more can I say? I did not dream it.

  I could understand, save to appreciate that I, too, had failed to cast aside my most precious possession, for I was very much afraid, in the fog-bound morning of a day, which, by the subtle pause in the rhythm of life, everyone in our town knew had arrived.

  Naked, I lay on the docks, bound hand and foot, humiliated in every possible manner, my head shaven and covered with grey mud, ridiculous designs traced all over my body, to await the arrival of the dead, and those who deliver them, who would know what to do with me.

  THE EATER OF HOURS

  Chronophagos, the Devourer of Time, the Eater of Hours. What man remembereth even the hour of his death if the Chronophagos hath devoured it?

  —Nicephoros Attaliades, The Testament of Nightmares

  We rode in the dark and the cold through that forest, where no bird sang, where no beast stirred but our own horses, where black water dripped from the naked branches, though no one could remember it having rained. Would the sun ever rise? It felt as if we were already in our graves.

  I tell you we all crossed ourselves then, and we were by no means godly men, any of us: rogues and brigands, bastards and younger sons, landless knights—a dozen of us, more? Who could remember?

  Even I struggled to remember, as if rising from a deep, dark dream, as if swimming toward doubtful sunlight from out of a dank, muddy pond—remember? My own name, Erec de…Erec of Brittany, of some parentage or other, from some castle I could not quite bring to mind, a castle I did not own, where I was not particularly welcome at table. The boy beside me, called merely Jon, not old enough to have a beard yet, but in the company he kept, his soul was no doubt blackened already. My squire? Maybe even my own (bastard) son?

  The big man beside him, with the wild red hair and the scarred face, Ulrich von Schwartzenberg, Ulrich of the Black Mountain, also called Ulrich the Axe, famed for his bloody deeds among Christians and pagans alike.

  We rode in silence, even the hooves of our horses silent on the muddy path.

  Would the sun ever rise? Would this night ever end?

  Beside him Father Gregorias, the renegade priest, who had reputedly sold his soul to Satan, though now he lowered his head and counted his beads and muttered something I couldn’t make out.

  In the cold and the dark we rode, and cursed the treachery of the Greek emperor, Isaac Angelus…even as, admittedly, we had allowed ourselves to become distracted on the way to the Crusade, never laid eyes on a Turk, turned to pillage and rapine among the Hungarians and Greeks in order to reach the East…all for the glory of God, of course, until defeated, crushed by our fellow Christians, we fled northward, into the mountains, into lands unknown.

  And the darkness closed over us like a tide, and it seemed the night would never end.

  Suddenly the lead man of our company cried, “Hold!” and we came to a halt, gathered around him, some fingering or even drawing their weapons.

  The blackness of the forest was absolute. The path we rode upon, it seemed to my fancy, was like a pale white tongue extended from a dark mouth, ready to draw us in.

  “There is something—” the lead man said. (A French knight. Jehan de—? In my dream, I could not recall his entire name.)

  I leaned forward. Jon, the boy, looked to me expectantly. Father Gregorias, alone, did not look up, though his mount came to a halt with the rest.

  “Yes, I see it.”

  And I saw, like a returning memory, like a face slowly unmasked, the dim shape of a tower with darkened windows, a wall, a gate. I shook my head. Horses neighed nervously. Father Gregorias went on with his praying, the tone of his voice rising to a frantic whine.

  One of our number, who was wounded and soaked with b
lood, fell from his saddle with a splashy thud. No one moved to help him, not even the priest.

  We filed, one by one, like doomed men, through the gate and into a courtyard. We were…twelve? The number of the apostles. Eleven? The apostles minus Judas? Twelve again, when Matthias was chosen?

  Would the daylight never come?

  So we dismounted, leaving our horses as they were (there were no grooms come to greet us) and we stood for a time, short or long, beyond counting, in the cold and the dark, while gradually the windows of the castle around us filled with light, like glowing eyes lazily opening from a deep and troubling dream.

  And I thought I remembered all this happening before…in a deep and troubling dream.

  The boy Jon held onto my arm with his pale hand, as if he had slipped in the mud and needed to steady himself, but actually, I think, for comfort.

  It was Ulrich Bloody-Axe who grunted and turned his head and said, “We’d better go in.”

  The door before us was already open, the way lit with candles held in cupped hands carven of palest marble and set in little alcoves along the walls.

  Single-file, again, we ascended worn marble stairs, and emerged into a broad room, hung with rich draperies, the walls decorated with ancient shields and arms, a table set with a rich feast before us.

  And we twelve (if it was twelve) sat down, waiting first in silence for some host to appear and greet us.

  I noted, pleasantly surprised, that the knife on the table before me was my own. I’d thought I had lost it. I took it and began to eat of the meat set there (which was cold, but not spoiled) and the others ate, too, in silence, until after a time, after a few cups of wine, we were more at ease, and small talk arose among the company.