Death be Not Proud

by C F Dunn

  “You knew that was going to happen, didn’t you?” I accused.

  His eyes shone wickedly but he didn’t offer to help.

  “It was always a possibility.”

  I tried to pull first my right leg, then my left out of the confines of the snow but didn’t have enough clearance to get myself free. I struggled to widen the tubes in which my legs were stuck, and heaved. Matthew chuckled.

  “Instead of amusing yourself, I would really appreciate some help here.”

  “You remind me of a newborn moose calf trying to get to its feet,” he leapt gracefully next to me, sinking only to his knees, “and not succeeding.”

  The handful of dry snow I launched at him disintegrated in a harmless scatter of crystals. “However…” he continued, emphasizing the depth of my predicament by lifting his long, strong legs easily out of the snow, and stepping around to the other side of me and inspecting me from another angle, “… it’ll certainly take your mind off things.”

  The sun caught his hair, setting it on fire.

  “It’ll take more than that,” I grunted. Since he evidently enjoyed the spectacle of me wallowing like a hippo far too much to be of any practical use, I resorted to throwing myself inelegantly onto my stomach to spread my weight, and commando-crawled inch by inch until more of me was out of the snow than in it. I lay puffing, my head on my arms, until I had recovered enough for one last effort. I didn’t need to; Matthew put his hands underneath my arms and plucked me from the icy prison, holding me above the surface with my legs dangling like a vastly overgrown Archie.

  “Now, we have a choice: either we use snowshoes – unless you can ski, that is? No? All right then, snowshoes or snowmobile it is or, I can carry you if you promise to behave yourself. What is it to be?”

  His eyes were just about level with mine, the dark lashes emphasizing blue as clear as the sky above us. I couldn’t make a promise I knew I might not keep.

  “I think it’ll have to be the snowshoes – I’ve never tried them and we’ll go back on the snowmobile, won’t we?” Matthew gave a quick nod. “OK, snowshoes it is.”

  He took several long strides and put me down on the unyielding surface of the porch.

  “Snowshoes,” he said, “take some getting used to, but these will take you anywhere when you do.”

  They were not the simple traditional racket-shaped snowshoes I expected, but platforms of lightweight metal and plastic that looked seriously high tech. He showed me how to strap them on and I flapped my legs up and down with my new appendages, feeling the unfamiliar weight of them. They reminded me of wearing swimming flippers for the first time, without the benefit of looking more fluid in water as recompense for looking ungainly on land.

  He was right – they did take some getting used to; but once I did, having fallen over enough times to no longer be embarrassed about it, they allowed us to travel quite a lot faster with relative ease.

  He led me through the wooded slopes, climbing steadily until the trees thinned, and we looked out across the vast landscape. I bent over, my hands on my knees until the stitch in my side eased and I could breathe without raking cold air into my lungs. Matthew waited patiently. Even had I been proficient in the use of snowshoes (and, frankly, they were an art form, and I was useless at art), he would have left me behind long ago, had he the will to do so. As it was, he stood perfectly still, his breathing as even and measured as if reading a book by the fire, while mine rasped noisily beside him.

  Finally I straightened and joined him in surveying the land, feeling the perspiration start to cool beneath my layers of clothing. The trees were sparser up here where the land lay exposed. Below us, a veil of smoke rose and flattened in the cold layer of air, marking where the cabin hunkered down behind the ridge that protected it.

  “This is so beautiful; I love the way it goes on forever. We don’t have this in England now – not to the extent where it looks like eternity.” At home I would always be aware of the finite – that just over the next hill there would be a town or city; and night came inevitably accompanied by an orange glow from light pollution, so I could hardly make out the stars. “No wonder…” Matthew looked quizzically at me and I realized I had spoken out loud without meaning to. I finished the thought so that he could hear it. “No wonder you like it up here – you can be yourself – no pretence, nothing to hide. You don’t need me slowing you up, though, do you? You could have done what you liked then.”

  “I’ve had more than enough of being by myself, Emma. This is the first time I’ve had company for a very long time.”

  “But I thought you come up here with the family?”

  “I do, but that’s not what I mean. They accept my differences – of course they do – but they don’t know all of me.”

  “What about Henry – haven’t you told him?”

  I shifted from one leg to another as my calf muscles tightened uncomfortably.

  “Would you like to sit down?”

  I cast about for somewhere to sit, but there was nothing but snow in every direction.

  “No, it doesn’t matter; I’ll stand, thanks.”

  “Wait a minute,” and he was off to the nearest conifer, snapping branches from the inside near the trunk like dry spaghetti. He came back with an armful, placing them on the snow one by one and building an insulating layer for me to sit on. I sat awkwardly, then took off my snowshoes.

  “Thanks, that’s better. You’re always doing things for me, Matthew; I never seem to be able to do anything for you. I can’t even make you a cup of tea.”

  He sat next to me and put his arm around my shoulders so that I could lean against him.

  “You have no idea what you have done for me, Emma D’Eresby, nor what being with me – being part of my life – might ask of you.”

  A whiffle of wind lifted the edge of my hood and found its way down my neck. I pulled it closer about my ears.

  “You didn’t say about Henry,” I sidetracked.

  Matthew allowed himself to be. “Henry only knows I’m long-lived; he thinks I’m probably just over a century old. He knows my attributes but he doesn’t know who I am or where I come from.”

  He scanned the horizon with restless eyes.

  “Who does he think you are, then?”

  “He thinks I came from the eastern seaboard around the turn of the twentieth century. The family believe I’m only a little older than Ellen, and I’ve never disabused them of the idea.”

  “So when did you arrive in the States?”

  “I came here towards the end of the century – the seventeenth century, to be precise.”

  “And have you been here ever since?”

  “I’ve come and gone – Europe mostly, but also Cathay, India, parts of the African continent, Java and its environs. I spent quite a bit of time in the old Arab seats of learning. But not home. Never home.”

  As I moved slightly, a branchlet spiked my leg. I broke it off and scratched the spot through my sock where it had left a tickle.

  “What were you doing when you travelled?”

  “Trying to discover what happened to me and, in doing so, acquiring the knowledge to do what I do now. And various other things.”

  “And did you get any closer to discovering your true nature and what made you like this? What you are?”

  “No, not really.”

  “And are you still looking?”

  He lifted his face to the sun and breathed out, “All the time.”

  I turned my head to where his hand draped over my shoulder and kissed his palm. His hand – his bare arm – felt no more warm or cold than it ever was.

  “I love you, whatever you are – whatever you might be,” I whispered.

  “Even if I turn out to be a monster after all?”

  “I think that being a monster is more a reflection of someone’s behaviour and their spiritual relationships than their physical state.”

  He looked glum. “Then I failed on that score the other night.” />
  He had, we both knew it, but we had moved on since then.

  “You’re not a monster, Matthew.”

  His palm caressed the side of my face and he kissed my head through my hood in acknowledgment.

  “No, physically I’m not – I know that much. I’m as human as you are – just more so. But why – how – that is something I haven’t yet found an answer to.”

  “And reading Richardson’s account in his journal didn’t bring you any closer to finding out?”

  “No.”

  “Warm enough?”

  We had worked our way along the crest of the slope accompanied by the soft soughing of wind and the song of small birds. He had pointed out the shallow tracks of a bobcat as it hunted rabbits, described the predatory antics of blue jays and, when I exclaimed at what I thought to be the trilling call of a coal tit, identified the chickadee perched on a branch flexing in the breeze. Now, sitting huddled on a tumbled boulder, although getting chilly around the fringes, I didn’t want to disrupt what we were doing or go back – not yet. Matthew used his body to shield me from the wind as we looked out over the mountain range where it touched the sky, a slight haze smoking the highest peaks in the distance.

  “Why haven’t you told your family the whole story; don’t you trust them? And if you don’t trust them, how on earth can you trust me?”

  I bent my knees so that I could tuck my booted feet on the rock and he adjusted his posture accordingly.

  “It’s not that I don’t trust them, but knowledge makes them more vulnerable.”

  “What they don’t know can’t hurt them?”

  “Something like that. Sooner or later, somebody would let slip some insignificant scrap of information in front of someone like Monica, and then there would be an investigation: the press, government agencies… have you ever seen the inside of an animal testing facility? We would be hounded, experimented on… without a doubt, this life we have built for ourselves would be destroyed. Any of my blood relatives would be exposed to the same testing. I’ve seen it in different guises all over the world, through the centuries – using a vast panoply of excuses: in the name of democracy, autocracy, religion, national security, science, medicine…”

  “Witchcraft.”

  “Quite. So you see, the less they know, the more we can protect ourselves and I can protect them.”

  That brought me back to the uncomfortable questions I had been asking myself during the night.

  “Would you do anything to protect your family?”

  “Yes, just about.”

  “And what if someone says something, or goes AWOL, or gets drunk or… or has a grudge and threatens to tell what they know – what then? How do you stop them?”

  “That’s where having a close-knit family comes in.”

  That wasn’t enough to satisfy me. “But Monica left, and then there’s me…” I stopped as Matthew’s expression became glacial at the mention of her name.

  “Monica. Monica is no longer a problem; she won’t say anything; and you? Well, mmm, there’s a thought. You, who know everything. You, who could expose every inch of us to the cold scrutiny of this world… I wonder, what would it take for you to betray me? Money, envy, passion, hate… fear? Money doesn’t do anything for you, does it? No. Hate, then? Could you hate me enough to betray me? Hate can be such a close companion to love. Or fear – I saw fear in you the other night.”

  I could feel the muscles in his chest constrict against my back as he spoke.

  “Yes, but not because you threatened me, but because it wasn’t you. I didn’t know who you were, and that frightened me.”

  “Perhaps that was the monster within me; perhaps that’s what I truly am.”

  I put my head against his heart and listened to its steady beat to show him I didn’t believe it.

  “Emma, would it help if I told you that the other night I was testing myself?”

  I lifted my head and looked at him in disbelief.

  “Next time you want to test yourself, would you mind telling me first? If you had been anybody else, I would have taken a knife to you if I’d had one; you scared me enough.”

  His mouth flickered with humour. “Emma, if I had been anybody else, that might have worked. As it is, I was angry with myself for lying to you, deceiving you. And I felt frightened – scared that I would lose you – and I was pushing us both to the limits… No, that sounds too calculating. I didn’t do it consciously; I didn’t set out to frighten you.”

  He struggled to explain something he didn’t fully understand himself.

  “I hope you don’t make a habit of it, that’s all.”

  He shook his head apologetically. “I haven’t done anything like that for quite a few hundred years.”

  “Then why do it now?”

  “I thought that might be obvious?”

  “Not from where I’m sitting, no.”

  He removed a stub of twig caught in the wool of my socks and used it to score the snow next to him in regular lines.

  “That’s the effect you have on me.”

  I shook my head, irritated. “Oh, that’s an old one. ‘I didn’t mean to rape her, m’lud, but she was just asking for it.’ I don’t think so.”

  “That’s not what I meant and you know it.”

  “I’m not sure if I do.”

  “Emma, I’ve spent tens of decades coming to terms with who I am and what happened to me, living in a world in which I don’t rightly belong, never able to reveal what I am to any other being. I build a life for myself, I find a way of making that life worthwhile through my work in order to find some sort of peace, and then you come along, and it’s as if I’m back at square one again. All those emotions, all that fear, hope, desire – all stirred up – all because of one frail package of you.” He stabbed at the snow, leaving pockmarks.

  “But you had Ellen…”

  “Yes, and I loved – love – her, but not in the same way. She knows only part of me, she loved only that which she knew, but I could never let her know the rest. But you do. Have you any idea what it means to me that you accept me as I am – despite what I am? When I married Ellen, she thought she was marrying a ‘regular guy’, as she would say. She found it difficult to come to terms with me not being… normal.”

  “I can’t say I blame her.”

  “No, and I didn’t either, but you can see why I have to conceal my true self from her as well as from the rest of my family, can’t you?” He bent his head so that he could search my face around the edge of my hood. I thought of the laboratory animals I had seen on emotive Animal Rights videos as an impressionable undergrad. I recalled the scenes of inquisition and torture from my countless books and manuscripts, from the documents I had scoured over the years: graphic, mind-numbing, horrific – and entirely true – and I understood completely. I understood to my core, and I would do anything to prevent it from happening to him. I looked at him.

  “Yes, I do understand, Matthew, better than you might think.”

  Closing his eyes briefly, he rested his forehead on mine.

  “And that is why it is safe for you to know who I am and why I do trust you with my life, because even when you feared me or when you were angry – and rightly so…” he said before I could interrupt, “there was never a moment when I doubted I could trust you, no matter what we said to each other at the time.” He paused, then added, “You realize, don’t you, that you know as much about me as I do myself – fundamentally, that is.”

  “Do I?”

  He found my ear beneath my hood. “You do.” He kissed the tip of it, and then ran his nose down to the edge of my jaw, making me shiver with pleasure.

  “That makes me a potential lab rat as well then, doesn’t it?”

  He stopped and drew away so that he could see my face. I regarded him steadily.

  “Yes, it does, but I wouldn’t let that happen to you.”

  “But you couldn’t stop it, Matthew, not once it starts and they – whoever they a
re – get their teeth into us. It would be beyond your control.”

  His tone became stony. “I said I wouldn’t let it happen to you, Emma.”

  What on earth did that mean? I stared at him, wondering whether to press the issue.

  “It’s getting cold,” he stated. “Time to get back and get you some lunch.”

  He handed the snowshoes to me.

  I yawned. “Bath and bed, as well. To sleep – bed and sleep,” I said quickly, but not before I heard him laugh quietly as he led the way down the slope.

  Although the fire burned low, the cabin felt baking after the sub-zero temperatures outside. My skin glowed with cold but I withstood the temptation to roast my hands in front of the fire in fear of chilblains, and wandered instead towards the kitchen with vague thoughts of hunger.

  “I’ll get lunch, you go and do… whatever you want to.” Matthew steered me towards the stairs.

  “But I can get my own lunch,” I resisted, although the lure of the bath was mightily compelling.

  “We’ve been through this once today already – upstairs, now. Go.”

  I needed the second bath more than I had needed the first. Every muscle made itself known, shouting abuse loud and clear. And although in want of sleep, my body wouldn’t hear of it; so, having changed, I went back downstairs.

  “What happened to the sleep part?” Matthew asked as I mooched into the kitchen, feeling fuzzy around the edges.

  “Not sleepy,” I lied. He eyed me sceptically, taking in the stiff limbs and yawns that accompanied me downstairs.

  “You’d better go sit by the fire. This won’t be long.”

  I smiled to myself, noting the Americanism as I willingly did as bidden, sinking into the upholstery and yawning again. Matthew had stoked the fire, and it blazed contentedly behind the glass front of the stove. Curling up, I rested my head on the arm of the sofa and watched the play of the flames.

  That was another meal I managed to sleep through.

  I woke because Staahl pursued my dreams – the ones I never had. Next to me in an armchair, his hands clasped on his chest, Matthew sat. I stiffly raised myself onto an elbow and rubbed sleep from my eyes; it was not yet dark.