by Sean Wallace
“And then?” I asked.
“Pushed right up through the dirt and into the moonlight,” he said. “Amazing feeling. The first thing I wanted to do was run to the nearest farm and tell them, look, I’m not dead after all.” He stopped; he’d said the word without thinking. “But then I thought about it; and I still wasn’t breathing, and I couldn’t actually feel anything. I could move my hands and feet, I could stand upright and balance, all that, but – you know when you’ve been sitting a long time and your feet go numb. It was like that, all over. It felt so strange.”
“Go on,” I said.
He didn’t, not for a long time. “I think I sat down,” he said. “I don’t know why I’d have done that; standing up didn’t make me tired or anything. I don’t feel tired, ever. But I was so confused, I didn’t know what I was supposed to do. It all felt wrong.” He lifted his heels slowly and let them drop; clump, clump, clump. “And while I was there the sun started to come up, and the light just sort of flooded into my head and bleached everything away, so I couldn’t think at all. I guess you could say I passed out. Anyway, when I opened my eyes I was back where I’d started from, lying in the dark.”
I frowned. “How did you get back there?”
“I just don’t know,” he said. “Still don’t. It always happens, that’s all I know. When the sun comes up, my mind washes away. If I’ve gone any distance, I know I have to get back. I run. I can run really fast. I know I’ve got to be back – home,” he said, with a sort of breaking-up laugh, “before the sun comes up. I’ve learned to be careful, to give myself plenty of time.”
He was still and quiet for a while. I asked, “Why do you kill things?”
“No idea.” He sounded distressed. “If something comes close enough, I grab it and twist it till it’s dead. Like a cat lashing out at a bit of string. Reflex. I just know it’s something I have to do.”
I nodded. “Do you go looking . . . ?”
“Yes.” He mumbled the word, like a kid admitting a crime. “Yes, I do. I do my best to keep away from where there might be people. It’s all the same to me: sheep, foxes, men. I’d go a long way away, into the mountains, if I could. But I have to stay close, so I can get back in time.”
I’d been debating with myself, and I knew I had to ask. “What were you?” I said. “What did you do?”
He didn’t answer. I repeated the question.
“Like you said,” he replied. “I was a schoolteacher.”
“Before that.”
When he answered, it was against his will. The words came out slow, flat; he spoke because he had to. “I was a Brother,” he said. “When I was thirty, they said I should apply to the Order, they thought I had the gift, and the brains, and the application and the self-discipline. I passed the exam and I was at the Studium for five years. Like you,” he added.
I let that go. “You joined the Order.”
“No.” The flat voice had gone; there was a flare of anger. “No, I failed matriculation. I retook it the next year, but I failed again. They sent me back to my parish, but by then they’d got someone else. So I ended up wandering about, looking for teaching work, letter-writing, anything I could do to earn a living. There’s not a lot you can do, of course.”
Suddenly I felt bitter cold, right through. Took me a moment to realize it was fear. “So you came here,” I said, just to keep him talking.
“Eventually. A lot of other places first, but here’s where I ended up.” He lifted his head abruptly. “They sent you here to deal with me, am I right?”
I didn’t reply.
“Of course they did,” he said. “Of course. I’m a nuisance, a pest, a menace to agriculture. You came here to dig me up and cut my head off.”
This time, I was the one who had to speak against my will. “Yes.”
“Of course,” he said. “But I can’t let you do that. It’s my . . .”
He’d been about to say life. Presumably, he tried to find another way of phrasing it, then gave up. We both knew what he meant.
“You passed the exams, then,” he said.
“Barely,” I replied. “207th out of 220.”
“Which is why you’re here.”
His white eyes in the ash-white moonlight. “That’s right,” I said. “They don’t give out research posts if you come 207th.”
He nodded gravely. “Commercial work,” he said.
“When I can get it,” I replied. “Which isn’t often. Others far more qualified than me.”
He grunted. It could have been sympathy. “Public service work.”
“Afraid so,” I replied.
“Which is why you’re here.” He lifted his head and rolled it around on his shoulders, like someone waking up after sleeping in a chair. “Because – well, because you aren’t much good. Well?”
I resented that, even though it was true. “It’s not that I’m not good,” I said. “It’s just that everyone in my year was better than me.”
“Of course.” He leaned forward, his hands braced on his knees. “The question is,” he said, “do I still have the gift, after what happened to me? If I’ve still got it, your job is going to be difficult.”
“If not?” I said.
“Well,” he replied, “I suppose we’re about to find out.”
“Indeed,” I said. “There could be a paper for the journals in this.”
“Your chance to escape from obscurity,” he said solemnly. “Under different circumstances, I’d wish you well. Unfortunately, I really don’t want you cutting off my head. It’s a miserable existence, but . . .”
I could see his point. His voice was quite human now; if I’d known him before, I’d have recognized him. He had his back to the moon, so I couldn’t see the features of his face.
“What I’m trying to say is, you don’t have to do it,” he said. “Go away. Go home. Nobody knows you came out here tonight. I promise I’ll stay away until you’ve gone. If I don’t show up, you can report that there was no direct evidence of an infestation, and therefore you didn’t feel justified in desecrating what was probably an innocent grave.”
“But you’ll be back,” I said.
“Yes, and no doubt they’ll send someone else,” he said. “But it won’t be you.”
I was tempted. Of course I was tempted. For one thing, he was a rational creature; with my eyes shut, if I hadn’t known better, I’d have said he was a natural man with a heavy cold. And what if the gift did survive death? He’d kill me. I had to admit it to myself: the thought that I could get killed doing this job hadn’t occurred to me. I’d anticipated a quick, grisly hour’s work in broad daylight; no risk.
I’m not a coward, but I appreciate the value of fear, the way I appreciate the value of money. I’m most definitely not brave.
I saw something in the moonlight, and said (trying not to talk quickly or raise my voice): “I could go back to bed, and then come back in the morning and dig you up.”
“You could,” he said.
“You don’t think I would?”
“Not if we’d made an agreement.”
“You could be right,” I said. “But what about the farmers? You’ve got to admit—”
At which moment, the Brother (who’d come out of the back door, crawled up on the roof behind him, and edged down the roof-tree toward him until he was close enough to reach his neck with the ax he’d brought with him) raised his arms high and swung. No sound at all; but at the last moment, the dead man leaned his head to one side, just enough, and the ax-blade swept past, cutting air. I heard the Brother grunt, shocked and panicky. I saw the dead man – eyes still fixed on me – reach behind him with his left hand and catch the swinging ax just below the head, and hold it perfectly still. The Brother gasped, but didn’t let go; he was pulling with all his strength, like a little dog tugging on a belt. All his efforts couldn’t move the dead man’s arm the thickness of a fingernail.
“Now,” the dead man said. “Let’s see.”
The d
elay on my part was unforgivable, completely unprofessional. I knew I had to do something, but my mind had gone completely blank. I couldn’t remember any procedures, let alone any words. Think, a tiny voice was yelling inside my head, but I couldn’t. I heard the Brother whimper, as he applied every scrap of strength in a tendon-ripping, joint-tearing last desperate jerk on the ax-handle, which had no effect whatsoever. The dead man was looking straight at me. His lips began to move.
Pro nobis peccatoribus – not the obvious choice, not even on the same page of the book, but it was the only procedure I could think of. Unfortunately, it’s one I’ve always had real difficulties with. You reach out with your hand that is not a hand, extend the fingers that aren’t fingers; I’m all right as far as that, and then I tend to come unstuck.
(What I was thinking was: so he failed the exam, and I passed. Yes, but maybe the reason he failed was he didn’t read the questions through properly, or he spent so long on Part One that he didn’t leave himself enough time for Two and Three. Maybe he’s really good, just unlucky in exams.)
I was mumbling: Sol invicte, ora pro nobis peccatoribus in die periculi. Of course, there’s a school of thought that says the magic words have no real effect whatsoever, they’re just a way of concentrating the mind. I tend to agree. Why should an archaic prayer in a dead language to a god nobody’s believed in for 600 years have any effect on anything at all? Ora pro nobis peccatoribus, I repeated urgently, nobis peccatoribus in die periculi.
It worked. It can’t have been the words, of course, but it felt like it was the words. I was in, I was through. I was inside his head.
There was nothing there.
Believe me, it’s true. Nothing at all; like walking into a house where someone’s died, and the family have been in and cleared out all the furniture. Nothing there, because I was inside the head of a dead man; albeit a dead man who was looking at me reproachfully out of blank white eyes while holding an ax absolutely still.
Fine; all the easier, if it’s empty. I looked for the controls. You have to visualize them, of course. I see them as the handwheels of a lathe. It’s because I had a holiday job in a foundry in Second Year. I don’t know how to use a lathe. What I mostly did was sweep up piles of swarf off the floor.
Here is the handwheel that controls the arms. I reached out with the hand that is not a hand, grabbed it and tried to turn it. Stuck. I tried harder. Stuck. I tried really hard, and the bloody thing came away in my hand.
It’s not supposed to do that.
I re-visualized. I saw the controls as the reins of a cart, the footbrake under my boot that was not a boot. I stamped on the brake and hauled back hard on the reins.
I haven’t got around to writing that paper for the journals, so here it is for the first time anywhere. The gift does not survive death. Nothing survives. The room was empty. And the handwheel only broke off because I’m clumsy and cack-handed, the sort of person who trips over cats and breaks the nibs of pens by pressing too hard.
I heard the Brother gasp, as he jerked the ax out of the dead man’s grip. The dead man didn’t move. His eyes were still fixed on mine, right up to the moment when the ax sheared through his neck and his head wobbled and fell, bounced off his knee and tumbled off the roof into the short grass below. The body didn’t move.
I know why. It took ten of us, with an improvised crane made of twelve-foot-three-inch fir poles, to get the body down off the roof. It must’ve weighed half a ton. The head alone was 200-weight. Two men couldn’t lift it; they had to use levers to roll it along the ground. There was no blood, but the neck started to ooze a milky white juice that smelt worse than anything you could possibly imagine.
We burnt the body. We drenched it in pine-pitch, and it caught quite easily and burnt down to nothing; not even any recognizable bits of bone. The white juice flared up like oil. They rolled the head over to the slurry-pond and pitched it in. It went down with a gurgle and a burp.
“I heard you talking to it,” the Brother told me. For some reason, the word it offended me. “I guessed you were using a variation on the riddle game, to keep it distracted till the sun came up.”
“Something like that,” I said.
He nodded. “I shouldn’t have interfered, I’m sorry,” he said. “You had the situation under control, and I could have ruined everything.”
“That’s all right,” I said.
He smiled, as if to say, it wasn’t all right but thanks for forgiving me. “I guess I panicked,” he said. Then he frowned. “No, I didn’t. I saw a chance of getting in on the act. It was stupid and selfish of me. You’ll have to write to the prebendary.”
“I don’t see why,” I said mildly. “The way I see it, your actions were open to several different interpretations. I choose to interpret them as courage and resourcefulness. I could put that in a letter, if you like.”
“Would you?” In his face, I saw all the desperation and cruelty of sudden, unexpected hope. “I mean, seriously?”
“Of course,” I said.
“That’d be . . .” He stopped. He couldn’t think of a big enough word. “You’ve got no idea what it’s like,” he said all in a rush, like diarrhea. “Being stuck here, in this miserable place with these appalling people. If I can’t get back to a town, I swear I’ll go mad. And it’s so cold in winter. I hate the cold.”
You can sleep in the coach, Father Prior said when I tried to make a fuss about the timetable. I didn’t say to him, have you ever been on a provincial mail-coach, on country roads, at this time of year? A dead man couldn’t sleep on a mail-coach.
I slept, nearly all the way; on account, I guess, of not having had much sleep the night before. Woke up just as we were crossing the Fulvens bridge; I looked out of the window, and all I could see was water, moonlight reflected on water. Couldn’t get back to sleep after that. Too dark to read the case notes, which I’d neglected to do back at the farm. But I remembered the basic facts from the briefing. These jobs are all the same, anyhow. Piece of cake.
The coach threw me out just after dawn, at a crossroads in the middle of nowhere. Somewhere up on the moors; I’m a valley boy myself. We had cousins up on the moor. I hated it when they came to visit. The old man was deaf as a post, and the three boys (mid-to-late thirties, but they were always the boys) just sat there, not saying a word. The mother died young, and I can’t say I blame her.
They were supposed to be meeting the coach, but there was no one there. I stood for a while, then I sat on my bag, then I sat on the ground, which was damp. I heard an owl, and a fox, or at least I hope it was a fox. If not, it was something we never got around to covering in Third Year, and I’m very glad I didn’t see it.
They arrived eventually, in a little dog-cart thing; an old man driving, a younger man and the Brother. One small pony, furry like a bear.
The Brother did the talking, for which I was quite grateful. He was one of the better sort of country Brothers: short man, somewhere between fifty and sixty, a distinct burr to his voice but he spoke clearly and used proper words. The boy was the younger man’s son, the older man’s grandson. He’d been fooling about in a big oak tree, slipped, fell; broken arm and a hideous bash on the head. He hadn’t come around, and it had been a week now. They had to prize his mouth open with the back of a horn spoon to get food and water in; he swallowed all right, but that was all he did. You could stick a needle in his foot half an inch and he wouldn’t even twitch. The swelling on the back of his head had gone down – the Brother disclaimed any medical knowledge, but he was lying – and they’d set the arm and splinted it, for what that was worth.
I thought, better than killing the restless dead. One of my best subjects at the Studium, though of course we did all our practicals on conscious minds, with a Father sitting a few feet away, watching like a hawk. I’d done one about eighteen months earlier, and it went off just fine; in, found her, straight out again. She followed me like a dog. I’d been relieved when Father Prior told me; it could’ve been some
thing awkward and fiddly, like auspices, or horrible and scary, like a possession. Just in case, I’d brought the book. I’d meant to mug up the relevant chapter, either at the farm or on the coach, but I hadn’t got around to it. Anyway, it had to be better than that empty place.
It was quite a big house, for a hill farm; sitting in the well of a valley, with a dense copper-beech hedge on all four sides, as a windbreak. Just the five of them in the house, the Brother said: grandfather, father, mother, the boy, and a hired man who slept in the hayloft. The boy was nine years old. The Brother told me his name, but I’m hopeless with names.
They asked me, did I want to rest after the journey, wash and brush up, something to eat? The correct answer was, of course, no, so I gave it.
“He’s in here,” the Brother said.
Big for a hill farm, but still oppressively small. Downstairs, the big kitchen, with a huge table, fireplace, two hams swinging like dead men on gibbets. A parlor, tiny and dusty and cold. Dairy, scullery, store; doorway through to the cow stalls. Upstairs, one big room and a sort of oversized cupboard, where the boy was. I could just about kneel beside the bed, if I didn’t mind the windowsill digging in the small of my back.
The hell with that, I thought, I’m a qualified man, a professional, a Father; a wizard. I shouldn’t have to work in conditions you wouldn’t keep pigs in. “Take him downstairs,” I said. “Put him on the kitchen table.”
They had a job. The stairs in that house were like a bell tower, tightly coiled and cramped. Father and grandfather did the heavy lifting, while I watched. It’s an odd thing about me. Sometimes, the more compassion is called for the less capable I am of feeling it. I offer no explanation or excuse.
“He shouldn’t have been moved,” the Brother hissed in my ear, just loud enough so that everyone could hear. “In his condition—”
“Yes, thank you,” I said, in my best arrogant-city-bastard voice. I couldn’t say why I was behaving like this. Sometimes I do. “Now, if you’ll all stay well back, I’ll see what I can do.”