Her bucket floated free, bobbing in the rapid current. She followed, her body turning slowly. At length, a long way down river, she climbed out.
Because Death had not found her, she was not entirely dead. Rather, she existed in a strange place between life and death. Her fur was drenched with water. Her teeth chattered, and she shivered all over.
She tried to gather dry vegetation to huddle under, but her hands went through the branches and leaves.
Next, she looked for people and their fires. She found a group of hunters around a roaring bonfire. Her old sul was among the sulin and growled, but no one else noticed her. She moved closer and closer to the fire, till she should have been roasting or burning. But the heat did not reach her. She remained wet and cold. Crying out in despair, she fled into darkness.
So began years of wandering. She never dried off or grew warm, though she tried over and over to heat herself at every fire she found. Even on the hottest days of summer, when everyone else was panting, she remained wet and cold.
People could not see her, though they sometimes felt her as an icy draft. Her only company was angry ghosts, who gathered around her complaining—not gently, like the newly dead, but in harsh, loud voices. Their deaths were unjust. Their families were ungrateful. The neighbors had been out to get them. Malice and bad luck had followed them all their lives. Their voices pierced her like knives of ice, making her even colder.
Finally, after years of wandering, she came to Death’s house. Her son was outside, sweeping the front step. By this time, he was nine or ten, a tall and promising boy. He looked at her and frowned.
“You look like my mother, though she was not soaking wet the last time I saw her.”
“What house is this?” the woman asked.
“Death lives here.”
“Then you must be my son. I gave him to Death years ago.”
The boy paused, considering. “It hasn’t been a bad life here, and Death has always told me to be courteous. So I will welcome you, though I never liked the way you handed me over. Come in!”
She entered the house and sat by the fire. Her son pulled the fine, thick quilt off the bed and folded it around her shoulders. At last, she stopped shivering and her teeth stopped chattering. The boy heated soup and gave it to her. At last, she was able to eat, though she hadn’t eaten or drunk for years.
Hah! The warm soup felt good going down! The quilt felt good on her shoulders! The fire’s heat felt good on her face and hands!
“Who is this?” asked Death, coming through the door.
“My mother,” said the boy.
“I am Ala,” the woman said. “I tricked you five times. Nonetheless, I died.”
“You haven’t died entirely, but you are mostly gone, as I can see,” Death replied. “This is why a stupid person can do my job. No one can escape the rules of physics and biology.”
“I died by accident, not physics,” Ala replied angrily.
“All living beings die one way or another,” Death replied comfortably. He helped himself to a bowl of soup and sat down to eat.
“What happens now?” Ala asked. “I can tell you I don’t like my current existence. I have been cold and hungry and tired for years, unable to warm myself or eat or sleep.”
Death gave her a considering look. “Usually, people die the moment I pop them in my bag. They may make a little noise, but they are gone. When I get them home, I take them out of the bag and divide them in two. The good parts go off to another place. I have no idea what happens there. The bad parts remain here as angry ghosts, complaining about their lives and deaths. Gradually, their anger wears them out. They grow thin and vanish entirely.
“But you are something new, neither alive nor dead. If I popped you into my bag, you might well become entirely dead. Then I’d have to divide you into good and bad. I’m worried about what would happen. You gave up a pet bird, a loyal sul, and a son to remain alive. This is bad; and it leads me to believe that most of you would become an angry ghost. Maybe I could drive you away; but since you tricked me five times, I’m not sure. I don’t want an angry ghost screaming and crying around my house at night. It would be unpleasant and likely to bother the boy. What do you say, lad? Do you want the ghost of your mother screaming outside our door?”
“No,” the boy said. “You have taught me to appreciate quiet. I don’t want to hear my mother screaming in the night.”
“I think I can see a few glimmers of good in you,” Death said to Ala. “The good is small and dim, and it’s tightly tangled with badness. It would be hard to pull free. Maybe this could change in time. Do you think you have learned any remorse?”
“I have learned there are worse things than death,” Ala replied.
“That’s a start,” Death said. “Why don’t you stay here? I would enjoy some grown-up company, and your son would enjoy his mother; and neither of us would have to deal with an angry ghost.”
“Yes,” said the boy slowly. “I think I would like to have my mother here, in spite of everything.”
Ala frowned. “It’s wrong for men and women to live together, unless they are members of the same lineage.”
Death laughed, showing his dung-brown teeth. “You are thinking of mating and reproducing. I represent undoing rather than doing. That being so, I can neither mate nor reproduce. Think of me as an old uncle or great-uncle, an eccentric member of your family, tolerated and possibly loved.
“In any case, you are in no position to talk about right and wrong. There is a lot about morality you need to learn, though I do admire your cleverness. It might prove helpful the next time someone tries to trick me.”
Ala looked at Death. He wore nothing except a cape, pushed back over his shoulders, and seemed to be a smooth, hairless man, though lacking any genitalia. She knew he was frightening, but at the moment he looked harmless. “I will stay,” she said.
Death laughed again.
Ala kept her word and stayed with Death. For the most part, she was happy. So long as she stayed close to Death’s house, she felt alive, able to eat and sleep and defecate. If she moved any distance, she began to feel herself grow thin and unreal. So she returned to the house.
She cooked meals and sewed clothing, told stories and helped raise her son. When Death came in with his bag, she tried to ignore the sorting process. Gradually, however, she began to watch. The boy had seen the ghosts in Death’s sack as glowing body parts. But when Death took them out, they looked like badly snarled tangles of thread or yarn. They came in all colors, but most were black, white, gray, or red. Using his clumsy hands, which were surprisingly deft at this task, Death pulled the filaments apart. When he was done, the gray and black threads rose into the air and wove themselves into an image of a person.
“Thank you,” the person said, rose to the ceiling and vanished. That was the good part, going to an unknown place.
As for the white and red filaments, they wove themselves into the image of an ugly, angry person with burning eyes and a mouth full of tusks. Saying nothing, it stormed out through the door.
What about the threads of other colors? They lay on the floor awhile, then faded and were gone.
“Most people have fur that is either black or gray,” Death told Ala, “and these are the colors of ordinary virtues, such as thoughtfulness and cooperation. Red is the color of rage and greed. White is the color of selfishness and indifference. These are the traits that destroy families and societies.”
“What a moralist you are,” Ala said angrily.
“I am the being the Goddess made,” Death replied. “Maybe she shat her morality out, after she finished making the world. It isn’t always clear to me that the universe is moral now. But I am. I have to be, in order to divide the dead.”
“What are the other colors?” Ala asked.
“Yellow and green and so on? The ones that fade? They are the parts that have nothing to do with morality. A liking for flowers. An ability to sing. Good reflexes. They go back into a gene
ral pool of traits, from which they are taken by future generations. Nothing is wasted here.”
When the boy was twenty, he left to find his own life. It is never easy to be a man alone, with no kin. But he found a job as a soldier, working for a large and contentious family that quarreled with all its neighbors. He was good at what he did, being strong and quick to learn, with an even temper and the good manners Death had taught him. In addition, he was not afraid of Death, though he certainly respected him. His calmness and lack of fear made him a very good soldier.
He and Death met from time to time on battlefields and in field hospitals. The man could always see his foster uncle, though no one else could, except those who were actually dead. They chatted before Death put the man’s comrades and enemies into his bag and carried them away. Both Death and the boy, now a man, took comfort from their conversations.
As for Ala, one day Death said to her, “I think I could divide you now. You seem to have learned something about morality over the years. There is more good in you, and it’s less mixed with the bad.”
Ala considered. It seemed to her she was as selfish as ever, though she liked and respected Death, who had a hard job and did it carefully. “I’d rather stay here. I have no desire to leave the world; and I am terrified of becoming an angry ghost. Even though I am not entirely—or even mostly—alive, I can still take pleasure in flowers and food and in telling a story.”
“Very well,” Death said after a long silence, during which he frowned mightily.
They remained together like two old relatives.
Ala’s son became the leader of a war band, respected by all. When he was sixty-five, a stray arrow killed him; and Death came for him. The man’s spirit rose from his body, looking no more than twenty. “It’s good to see you,” he said to Death and embraced the old monster. “Do I have to get into the bag? I didn’t like it the first time.”
“No,” said Death. “Though I will put the other soldiers there.”
They traveled home slowly, talking. In the mean time, many people on the edge of dying remained alive. Let that be as it was, Death thought. He treasured this journey with his foster nephew.
Hah! The forests they saw! The rushing rivers and tall mountains!
At last they reached Death’s house. “Your mother is inside,” Death said.
“Let her remain there,” the man said. “She is afraid of dying, and that is what I’m here to do.”
They sat down on the bare ground in front of the house. The man looked his age now, still solid, but no longer young. The long guard hairs over his shoulders were silver-white, as was the soft, thick fur around his mouth and along the line of his jaw. “Go ahead,” he said.
Death reached in and pulled out the threads that were the man’s spirit. Only a few were red and white, the colors of anger and selfishness. Many were gray and black, the colors of responsible behavior. Most were other colors: yellow, orange, green, blue, purple.
The red and white threads were too few to become anything. They faded at once. The black and gray threads wove themselves into the image of a person, who nodded politely to Death, then rose into the sky and vanished.
The rest of the threads wove themselves into another person, this one blue-green, dotted with yellow, orange, and purple. The person floated on the wind like a banner. “What am I?” it asked Death.
“I don’t know. I have never made anything like you.”
“Then I must find out, but not here. I will come back for a visit, if I am able.” It flew off on the wind, soaring and rippling.
Death rose and went inside, where Ala waited by the fire. Here the story ends.
Translator’s note # 1: The hwarhath live in large families. A few are solitary, mostly because of their jobs: a forest fire-spotter or herder, the operator of a lift bridge in a remote location. But women with children are always surrounded by relatives. A hwarhath reader would know at once that something was disturbingly wrong about Ala, though we never find out why she is living on her own, except for her son.
Translator’s note # 2: Several human readers of the translation have complained that the story does not close the way a human story ought to. Ala has learned nothing from her experiences and does not suffer any consequences for her really awful behavior. The hwarhath (and the translator) would reply (a) some people do not learn from experience and (b) Ala does suffer consequences. At the story’s end, she is trapped in Death’s house, unable to go any distance from it; and she is stuck between life and death, not entirely dead, but not really living. In spite of all her cleverness, has she escaped the thing she fears? Do any of us escape the things we fear?
CLOSE ENCOUNTERS
ANDY DUNCAN
Andy Duncan [https://sites.google.com/site/beluthahatchie/] was born in South Carolina in September 1964. He studied journalism at the University of South Carolina and worked as a journalist for the Greensboro News & Record before studying creative writing at North Carolina State University and the University of Alabama.. He previously was the senior editor of Overdrive, a magazine for truck drivers. Duncan’s short fiction, which has won the World Fantasy and Theodore Sturgeon Awards, is collected in World Fantasy Award winner Beluthahatchie and Other Stories and The Pottawatomie Giant and Other Stories. Duncan also co-edited Crossroads: Tales of the Southern Literary Fantastic with F. Brett Cox and wrote non-fiction book Alabama Curiosities: Quirky Characters, Roadside Oddities & Other Offbeat Stuff. He currently lives with his wife Sydney in Frostburg, Maryland, where they are on the English faculty of Frostburg State University.
She knocked on my front door at midday on Holly Eve, so I was in no mood to answer, in that season of tricks. An old man expects more tricks than treats in this world. I let that knocker knock on. Blim, blam! Knock, knock! It hurt my concentration, and filling old hulls with powder and shot warn’t no easy task to start with, not as palsied as my hands had got in my eightieth-odd year.
“All right, damn your eyes,” I hollered as I hitched up from the table. I knocked against it and a shaker tipped over: pepper, so I let it go. My maw wouldn’t have approved of such language as that, but we all get old doing things our maws wouldn’t approve. We can’t help it, not in this disposition, on this sphere down below.
I sidled up on the door, trying to see between the edges of the curtain and the pane, but all I saw there was the screen-filtered light of the sun, which wouldn’t set in my hollow till nearabouts three in the day. Through the curtains was a shadow-shape like the top of a person’s head, but low, like a child. Probably one of those Holton boys toting an orange coin carton with a photo of some spindleshanked African child eating hominy with its fingers. Some said those Holtons was like the Johnny Cash song, so heavenly minded they’re no earthly good.
“What you want?” I called, one hand on the dead bolt and one feeling for starving-baby quarters in my pocket.
“Mr. Nelson, right? Mr. Buck Nelson? I’d like to talk a bit, if you don’t mind. Inside or on the porch, your call.”
A female, and no child, neither. I twitched back the curtain, saw a fair pretty face under a fool hat like a sideways saucer, lips painted the same black-red as her hair. I shot the bolt and opened the wood door but kept the screen latched. When I saw her full length I felt a rush of fool vanity and was sorry I hadn’t traded my overalls for fresh that morning. Her boots reached her knees but nowhere near the hem of her tight green dress. She was a little thing, hardly up to my collarbone, but a blind man would know she was full-growed. I wondered what my hair was doing in back, and I felt one hand reach around to slick it down, without my really telling it to. Steady on, son.
“I been answering every soul else calling Buck Nelson since 1894, so I reckon I should answer you, too. What you want to talk about, Miss—?”
“Miss Hanes,” she said, “and I’m a wire reporter, stringing for Associated Press.”
“A reporter,” I repeated. My jaw tightened up. My hand reached back for the doorknob as natural as it had
fussed my hair. “You must have got the wrong man,” I said.
I’d eaten biscuits bigger than her tee-ninchy pocketbook, but she reached out of it a little spiral pad that she flipped open to squint at. Looked to be full of secretary-scratch, not schoolhouse writing at all. “But you, sir, are indeed Buck Nelson, Route One, Mountain View, Missouri? Writer of a book about your travels to the Moon, and Mars, and Venus?”
By the time she fetched up at Venus her voice was muffled by the wood door I had slammed in her face. I bolted it, cursing my rusty slow reflexes. How long had it been, since fool reporters come using around? Not long enough. I limped as quick as I could to the back door, which was right quick, even at my age. It’s a small house. I shut that bolt, too, and yanked all the curtains to. I turned on the Zenith and dialed the sound up as far as it would go to drown out her blamed knocking and calling. Ever since the roof aerial blew cockeyed in the last whippoorwill storm, watching my set was like trying to read a road sign in a blizzard, but the sound blared out well enough. One of the stories was on as I settled back at the table with my shotgun hulls. I didn’t really follow those women’s stories, but I could hear Stu and Jo were having coffee again at the Hartford House and still talking about poor dead Eunice and that crazy gal what shot her because a ghost told her to. That blonde Jennifer was slap crazy, all right, but she was a looker, too, and the story hadn’t been half so interesting since she’d been packed off to the sanitarium. I was spilling powder everywhere now, what with all the racket and distraction, and hearing the story was on reminded me it was past my dinnertime anyways, and me hungry. I went into the kitchen, hooked down my grease-pan, and set it on the big burner, dug some lard out of the stand I kept in the icebox and threw that in to melt, then fisted some fresh-picked whitefish mushrooms out of their bin, rinjed them off in the sink, and rolled them in a bowl of cornmeal while I half-listened to the TV and half-listened to the city girl banging and hollering, at the back door this time. I could hear her boot heels a-thunking all hollow-like on the back porch, over the old dog bed where Teddy used to lie, where the other dog, Bo, used to try to squeeze, big as he was. She’d probably want to talk about poor old Bo, too, ask to see his grave, as if that would prove something. She had her some stick-to-it-iveness, Miss Associated Press did, I’d give her that much. Now she was sliding something under the door, I could hear it, like a field mouse gnawing its way in: a little card, like the one that Methodist preacher always leaves, only shinier. I didn’t bother to pick it up. I didn’t need nothing down there on that floor. I slid the whitefish into the hot oil without a splash. My hands had about lost their grip on gun and tool work, but in the kitchen I was as surefingered as an old woman. Well, eating didn’t mean shooting anymore, not since the power line come in, and the supermarket down the highway. Once the whitefish got to sizzling good, I didn’t hear Miss Press no more.
The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year Volume Seven Page 5