She turned a bend in the path, coming upon her destination. And there he was, with a cloak of white mist and skin that personified the absence of light, so deep his face seemed a hole—empty and featureless. He sat upon a headstone, one that proclaimed the birth and death of Rosalyn Depaul.
“You get away from her,” she hissed, dropping her sack.
He stroked the headstone, tilting his head lovingly this way and that. The edges of his cloak billowed and thinned, wisps of it rolled off and dissipated into the air. “She’s safely back at the Menagerie, where you should be.”
“You still want me? Look, look close! You see what I’ve done to my soul to keep me here? It’s not beautiful anymore, it’s not perfect. I would be a blight to your collection. The others would laugh at you. Who would take you seriously with such an ugly specimen hiding amongst your showpieces?
“You don’t want to expend the effort to keep me in Limbo. I have to slip one way or the other. Life or death. I’m spoiled; I don’t belong in your soul-gallery.”
He waved his black-hole of a hand. “Nonsense. It’s much harder to corrupt a spirit once it’s dead. You’ve only hidden your soul with festers and wrong doings, much like you’ve only hidden your decaying body from sight, obscured it with life. I just have to peel both away and you’ll be mine again.” He slid from the headstone, like smoke, and glided towards her.
She glanced at the headstone and its neighbor: the second marker was her own. Here lies Lenora Depaul, it said, loving daughter, sweet niece, faithful sister.
“You made a mistake,” he snapped, swirling around her. She pulled her shoulders up against his foul wind, hugging herself. “You never should have completed your skin. Now you’re more alive than dead and I can take you back. I can reap you once more. Didn’t you think of that? Desperate, desperate girl.” He stopped and spat, “Stupid.”
A shiver hit her, and it was not caused by Angeu. The wind changed, grew frigid. There was another faucheuse about.
“You underestimate me, Angeu. Think hard, look past your arrogance. You know my soul, and it is not stupid.”
“Angeu!” came a roar from the night.
He backed away from Lenora immediately, his head rolling, searching.
The air around them grew colder. Reapers flooded into the cemetery. Lenora had to crouch and rub her limbs to keep her skin from freezing.
They materialized out of the night, their physical forms rushing together like angry swarms of insects, amassing and coalescing into black figures. Soon they were all around, each darker than the next, each robed in a different kind of weather. There were ones she recognized as visitors to Angeu’s menagerie, and ones she had never seen before. One rose above the rest, massive and intimidating. He wore a swirling storm of air, a tornado that ate at the ground beneath him, pulling up clods of grass, dirt, and rock. He was La Grande Faucheuse, the Lord of the Reapers.
“This is my reaping,” Angeu said immediately, clearly afraid they’d each come to claim Lenora for themselves.
“Then you acknowledge she is yours? You admit it?” the Lord Reaper had a booming voice, like thunder bouncing between mountain tops.
Angeu placed himself between Lenora and the others, guarding his possession from his brothers’ sticky fingers. “Of course she’s mine. Only mine!”
Another reaper stepped closer. His garment was a wash of horizontal rain. “Do you have any idea what your little pet has done? How many pure spirits she’s ruined?”
Angeu’s shoulders fell, his hard stance laxed. “What do you mean?”
“I had two of them pegged for my collection once their time was up. But she tortured them before they died, she shredded their pristine souls. She robbed me of two perfect specimens,” howled one dressed in flurries.
Angeu turned on Lenora, looked over her swollen body parts. “You, you stole from untainted souls?”
“How did she get out in the first place?” demanded Yama, one she recognized. He wore a sandstorm. “You must have allotted her a day, why did you not bring her back when she finished the task you sent her on?”
“He gave me no task,” Lenora cried. “He traded for my services instead.”
The group went silent, taking a collective, breathless gasp.
“You gave her freedom with no bounds?” said Yama. “She was not tied to a task, compelled to complete it? You let her do as she wished?”
“You lay with a reaped soul?” cried another.
They murmured amongst themselves for a moment, each angered by Angeu’s recklessness, and disgusted by his depravity.
“As her owner, Angeu,” said the Lord Reaper. “You take responsibility for her crimes. She destroyed perfect souls, stole them from your brothers. You know the punishment for stealing a prized reaping.”
“And she ruined dozens,” Yama added.
Angeu turned on Lenora. She’d tricked him again. Only on ground filled with death-rot could reapers materialize solidly enough to physically interact with one another. Only in a cemetery could one reaper be captured by another.
He raised his arms and flexed his fingers, intending to strike out and wring her decaying neck, but paused. The watchful eyes of the others made him impotent.
He glanced from each brother to the next, imploring them to understand. “No, you can’t blame me.” Panic sounded uncouth on a reaper. “Punish her, torture her. You can’t blame me.” He backed away, only to be corralled on all sides. They came closer and closer, tightening their circle. “No, you cannot take me. You cannot.”
“We can,” said the Lord, “And we will.”
They converged on him at once, rising into the air and slamming down in a stormy pile. Lightning cracked into the sky where warm fronts and cold fronts collided, a swirling storm of ice, wind, and fire obscured Angeu from view. The air smelled of burnt ozone. He screamed a protest, denied his responsibility, cursed Lenora. Dark hands sprang out from the tempest, like black wings of squabbling birds, and the edges of their cloaks snapped outwards, flinging weather in all directions. The storm became a whirlpool, spiraling down and down, tighter and tighter until it disappeared into another realm, beyond the physical world, leaving nothing behind but the echoes of Angeu’s cries.
Heat slowly returned to the night air, making it warm and comfortable in the aftermath of the reapers’ cold.
Hurrying to her task, Lenora fetched the shovel she’d hidden in the bushes some nights before. She toed the blade into Rosalyn’s grave, and heaved out shovelful after shovelful. Down and down she dug, until she hit the coffin. The top was wood and already rotting. She jabbed at it with the shovel, splintering it apart, then pulled the shards out of the hole until the corpse was fully exposed. Jumping into the grave, she lugged Rosalyn’s gray and flaking body from its casket, then pushed it up onto level ground. The head detached from the neck, falling back against the worm-eaten lining. She tossed it up afterwards.
She pulled herself up out of the grave, then opened her bed sheet. Working quickly, but carefully, she gently removed the sections of skin from their mountings and placed them in the proper alignment on the body. She sewed loose stitches, foregoing tidiness for haste.
A reaper could only be gone from his menagerie for so long before the walls began to collapse. If he did not repair them the souls would float free, drawn out of Limbo either downwards towards death, or upwards towards life.
Before giving herself over to Angeu’s desires, she’d told Rosalyn of her plan. “Choose life,” she had pleaded with her sister, “Come up, I’ll be waiting for you. I’ll prepare everything. I’ll get you out of here. He’ll never touch you, I promise.”
The walls of the menagerie would fall soon, and Rosalyn’s spirit would rise. But if she had no living flesh to cling to, Lenora could not keep her.
Lenora worked from the bottom up, starting with the soles of Rosalyn’s feet, laboring up the legs to the torso and beyond. She attached the head with a long, fine strip of neck, then affixed the scalp. Finally
she began work on the face.
She felt the ground breathe beneath her, heaving upwards. Spirits were escaping the nether world. In the distance, she heard a scream. A soul had reentered its dead body, and was struggling to stay. It let out one long, blood-filled cry as it sank back down into oblivion, away from life forever.
“Just a few moments, my dear,” Lenora pleaded, sewing on the nose. “Just another moment.”
When she placed the lips over the exposed teeth of the skull, Rosalyn’s fingers began to twitch. A sucking sound, like air into a vacuum, started deep in her chest, beneath the new flesh of her living breasts.
“Stay with me. Stay with me!” Lenora worked faster. Only a few more items to go. She dug out the flaccid, dry remains of her sister’s eyes and popped in the new ones.
Rosalyn blinked, focused, and saw her. She tried to open her mouth, to speak, but something was still holding her back.
This wasn’t like a reaper’s gift of flesh, which was endowed with his power. If the skin was incomplete, Rosalyn would seep out of the gap and back into Limbo. Lenora looked around for what she could have missed, and saw a gaping hole on the side of her skull. She hadn’t yet attached her second ear.
Her sister began to scream like the other spirit had. She reached up for Lenora, clawed at her blouse and hair, looking for a handhold to keep her in this world.
Lenora pulled herself away from the flailing half-dead and searched in panic for the lost item. It wasn’t in the sheet, and she could see it nowhere on the ground.
She couldn’t have gone through all this to lose her now. She refused to fail.
Abandoning the search, she returned to Rosalyn. Steadying herself, she reached up to her own newly-grafter ear and tore with all her strength. The ear ripped free, and she hurried to attach it before her sister finished her death cries.
The deed done, Lenora sat back on her haunches, and noticed the sweat her skin had produced.
“Lenora?” Rosalyn asked, her lips not yet working as they should. She sat up slowly, her bones creaking, decaying ligaments snapping, but her form held fast in its new casing.
Lenora began to laugh, and cry, though no tears fell. Rosalyn was safe, and Angeu was gone. They were back amongst the living, though not truly alive. They still had more to steal if they wished to eat, and breathe, and run with blood as life demanded.
She leaned over and hugged her sister, grateful to no one but her own hard work for their second chance. Rosalyn struggled to stand, and Lenora helped her to her feet. She took shaky steps forward, her hands wandering her body, feeling the ridges that formed the borders between different pieces of skin.
Rosalyn clearly couldn’t comprehend the strangeness of her form. Continuing to explore, her hands shook as she asked, “Lenora, am I alive?” Her face displayed raw fear.
Lenora knew she was afraid of the answer, afraid that the tissues were not her own, afraid this was just a death-dream. “No, not yet,” she said. “We are the Low Ones, neither living nor dead. We take from the High Ones to preserve our place.” She touched her sister’s nose and Rosalyn struggled to smile with her poorly stitched lips. “I’ll fix those better for you when we get home,” she promised. “But right now, I only have one good ear, and I need a pair before the sun rises.” She took her sister’s hand and led her away from their graves. “Come with me, and I’ll tell you how I beat the reaper.”
KATHARINE KERR has been a mainstay of fantasy sections in bookstores everywhere for the past four decades. Her best known works comprise the Deverry series, which began in 1986 with Daggerspell and spans fifteen volumes. She is also an accomplished SF writer, most notably with her Polar City books and many standalone novels. Her most recent urban fantasy series features Secret Agent Nola O'Grady, and she has edited several anthologies, written multiple short stories and has contributed gaming modules to TSR and others.
Check out her website at www.deverry.com
Trufan Fever
Katharine Kerr
“We’re getting an expansion team!” Angela emailed me with many more exclamation points than two, but I’ll spare you. “We’ve got to get season tickets! Drinks after work to discuss?”
I answered yes. After I closed up the boutique I manage, I went to our usual well-lighted bar and got our usual spot in a corner among the greenery. In a few minutes Angela came striding through the tables to join me. She’s a tall woman, nearly six feet, with a mane of long blonde hair that flaps behind her when she walks fast, which she usually does. She sat down and flopped a couple of pieces of print-out onto the table between us.
“Brochure,” Angela said. “I printed it out just for you.”
“I know I’m a Luddite.” I grinned. “And I’m proud.”
“When are you going to get a smartphone? So you can text. Email is so lame!”
“I can’t type on those little tiny spaces.”
“Well, it’s those nails of yours. God, they’re so long!”
“Oh, go on, call them claws. Sound like my mother. I dare you.”
Since we held this discussion on a regular basis, Angela merely rolled her eyes and ordered a drink. While she sipped a murky liquid called a chocolate martini, I allowed myself one small dry sherry and glanced at the ticket prices. OMG! High doesn’t begin to describe it. Still, I could scrape up the space on my credit cards, if I really wanted to.
“I don’t know about season tickets,” I said. “I don’t want to commit to every other weekend. It’s too much excitement for the likes of me.”
“Rita, you need more excitement in your life.” She wrinkled her nose at me. “All you do is sell clothes and read books.”
“Yeah, so? I need my peace and quiet.”
Angela ordered a second martini. I looked at the print-out again. This time the name of the team jumped out at me.
“Los Angeles Leopards,” I said. “Okay, I’m in.”
When we bought our season tickets, Angela, her boyfriend Cody, and I deliberately chose seats behind one end zone. Other friends joined us when we decided to go in costume. Yes, of course those Oakland Raider fans in their Black Hole gave us the idea, but if they could dress up and have fun, why couldn’t we? Angela and Cody created orc suits—black and yellow face paint, lots of cardboard armor painted to look like golden bronze but with black leopard spots painted on, spiky cardboard helmets—you get the idea. Others in our pack chose to dress as wizards, white-faced ghouls, and just plain weird creatures, all of them with fake leopard-print fur or rosettes of spots prominent among the bits of finery.
I decided upon full leopard formal dress. For most games I wore a headpiece with the proper rounded big cat ears. I pasted cat whiskers on my face, painted rosettes on my décolletage, and wore elbow-length gloves made of gauzy leopard-print material with slits to let my nails come through. I sewed up a fake fur pair of gloves, too, for later in the season, but it’s hot in L.A. during the early fall. My main costume piece was a slinky red full-length dress left over from college. Just call me Miss Leopardine Sweetheart.
For most games. Once there was this exception.
All expansion teams start out dismally, and the ‘Pards ran true to form. Or maybe I should say, didn’t run, because our million dollar running back fumbled more often than he scored, and the two million dollar quarterback threw perfect passes—right to the opposing teams’ DBs, that is, their corners and safeties. Our defense guys mostly stood still and hoped that the ball carrier would run into them instead of bothering to go around.
Our friends often ask Angela and me why we enjoy watching football. I guess females “aren’t supposed to,” but to hell with that! Seeing truly bad football helped me find answers. I’ve always loved the intellectual side of the game, which I think of as small unit tactics, not strategy in the broad military sense. It takes a keen mind to invent ways to advance a football down the field when other tactical geniuses are trying to come up with ways to stop that advance. The calculations involve assessing the potential of
both sets of players and using psychology as well as understanding the rules at a gut level so you can find loopholes in them. That first year, the Leopards’ OC and DC lacked the right kind of mind. They obviously thought football involved nothing more than big guys banging into each other.
Don’t get me wrong. Brutality’s part of the game, too, but what intrigues me is the difficulty of implementing those carefully devised tactics in the midst of the violent action. The game has room for clever schemes, individual initiative, heroism, self-sacrifice, and buffed guys in really tight pants. What’s not to like? In those first games, the ‘Pards supplied mostly the men in tight pants, not enough to hold the interest of the truly dedicated fan.
When we weren’t busy groaning and booing, the end zone crowd got to know each other. At first, my friends and I were the only ones in costume, but soon enough everyone in the rows down front joined us. The costumes built up slowly, a hunk of printed fake fur there, a pair of leopard-like ears there, a little orc-ish makeup over yonder, until by the October home games a lot of fans appeared in full fantasy body armor or assemblages of fake fur pieces and tattoos. Hey, it kept us all from thinking too much about the horror show going on out on the turf.
One good-looking Hispanic guy in our section held out, though he made up for his lack of costume with the amount of fan gear he piled on himself. He had official Leopard team laces in his running shoes, the official sweatpants, a genuine Leopard home-game jersey with his own name, Valdez, on the back, a training-camp-style Leopard hoodie, and an official away-game baseball cap. Thank the spotted gods, however, he never wore one of those grotesque fake wigs in team colors. His own hair was dark, short, and lustrous, and he had deep-set dark eyes. Just every now and then I’d look his way. He’d smile and consider me with one eyebrow quirked, as if he was daring me to speak to him. I never did.
Fantasy For Good: A Charitable Anthology Page 23