“People don’t want them any more,” my son says. So I start to gather them up, to take home and clean. At least washing clothes gives me a kind of purpose. I feel giddy if I look up, so I look mostly at the clothes on the ground.
“We’ll be able to get most of these stains out easily,” I say. He was right; I do feel delighted now. Excited.
He doesn’t answer. I thought he was behind me but no.
He has stripped naked and is already three meters up a tree. I haven’t seen him naked since he was fourteen and insisted that he could wash himself.
“This is the one. This is my tree.”
I look up. “It’s very high.”
With my head tilted back, I can see that many of the trees have do have flowers at the top. Some are bulbous. Some brightly colored.
“I thought they didn’t flower?”
“That’s the others. That’s each one who’s climbed. As the tree grows, they reach closer to Saturn.”
He drags himself up further.
“Don’t go any higher,” I say. I fall to my knees. I don’t want him up there. “I’ll make you any meal you like, just name it. And you don’t have to clean the clothes if you don’t want to. We’ll find you something else. And we’ll find you someone nice to be with and don’t forget Saturnalia, how much you loved it! Only another ten months and there’s another!”
But he climbs up. I watch him and want to follow him, but even the feel of the tree under my palm makes me sick. I sit at the base, waiting for him to come back down again. I can hear him crying.
“Son! Come down! You don’t need to feel pain!”
“It’s not painful,” he calls, but his voice is shaky, withered. “I’ll be down soon. Wait there.”
I have to trust that he will return. I sort the clothes I’ve collected by material and color. People watch, asking questions. Distracting me. Until one woman says, “Do you need a hand to get all those things home?”
“I’m waiting for my son. He’s climbing up. He’ll come down soon.”
The woman shakes her head. “Look,” she says. She leads me through the trees.
Some have tiny thin trails of blood to the ground, crystallized. “Every last one of them climbed like he did,” she says. “Step by step as if there was no other way. This one’s my daughter’s tree.” She stands and puts her hand near a tree that dwarfs many around it. She doesn’t touch it.
My son has become one of them.
There are others, lost like me, gazing up and weeping. The woman says to me, “The only certainties in life are air, water and the grave. Saturn’s sons: Jupiter, Neptune, and Pluto. The only ones he didn’t kill. That’s all that’s real anymore.”
“I’m going to get my son down.”
I don’t want to go up. The thought of it makes me want to cry and never stop.
But my son is up there and I want to bring him down.
Each step is like climbing on sharpened knives. Blood pouring.
I don’t have the strength. I can’t do it.
“He won’t come down anyway. There’s nothing you can do. Once he’s climbed all the way up, it’s too late,” the woman calls. She tugs at my ankles.
As if to demonstrate, one bright green bead of liquid drips down past my face.
Do I love him enough to die trying to get to him? I climb for another hour, making no progress, slipping backwards, dragging the skin from my arms and hands, from my cheek. Then I’m stuck. I can’t move up and own. Frozen.
“Stretch your fingers. Spread them. Let go. We’ll catch you,” they call from below, and I do, and they do.
“It’s too late. He’s so deep now, you’ll never get him out, even if you get him down. They climb up there to die; at least it’s a choice. No one has come back down again, not alive.” My new friend shakes, rolls her shoulders. “I come back every now and then to take a piece of my daughter’s tree,” she says. “She’s happier now her suffering has ended.”
“What about us? What about our suffering?”
She lifts her arms. Smiles. The rest of her is shivering; only her lips are still. She reaches into her bag and offers me a small bottle of vodka. It sparkles. I shake my head at her; not that.
I cry then. I’ve always known I’ll lose him, but I didn’t know he’d choose to go. I cry, leaning against his tree, until I realize my tears re being drawn in. Absorbed.
I break a piece of his tree off to bury it. It is stained slightly with his fluids.
I make his grave in a tiny, tiny pot next to my other Saturn’s Tree. It will grow if I look after it. Feed it. Water it. It may fruit one day, as do the trees in the grove. We watch them grow, the other grievers and I. I say to them, “Whoever said these trees don’t flower? There are our children up there, fruiting.” Sometimes one drops and shatters, looking like an arum lily, the corpse kind. Surrounded by crystals worth a lot of money, and I wonder if people will use them, if it will come to that, and what they’d call the drink. A friend brings me some Sparkle, and another does too, and once I remember how good it is, and forget all the rest, things are better.
I re-open my shop when I run out of clothes to clean. My job is so instinctive I can do it Sparkled or not.
Air, water, the grave.
And Sparkle.
Bram Stoker nominee and Shirley Jackson Award-winner Kaaron Warren has lived in Melbourne, Sydney, Canberra, and Fiji. She’s sold many short stories, three novels (the multi-award-winning Slights, Walking the Tree, and Mistification) and four short story collections. Her most recent collection, Through Splintered Walls, won a Canberra Critic’s Circle Award for Fiction, two Ditmar Awards, two Australian Shadows Awards and a Shirley Jackson Award. Her stories have appeared in Australia, the US, the UK and elsewhere in Europe, including Once Upon a Time: New Fairy Tales. You can find her at kaaronwarren.wordpress.com and she tweets @KaaronWarren
He did not truly expect some fiend to undo the locks and peer out at him.
Alas, he was living in reality, not a book.
A LITTLE OF THE NIGHT
(EIN BISSCHEN NACHT)
Tanith Lee
Preface
Now he was an old man, but you could not entirely think of him in that way. He was lean and tall and hard as steel still, or he looked it. His face was lined, but his eyes had stayed jet black, and he had kept a full head of hair, even if the dark of it had changed to white silver. His teeth were good too—he could crack the shells of walnuts with them, they had seen that only this evening. And in his strong and well-made hands the sabre, when he lifted it, seemed quite as graceful and as dangerous as twenty, thirty years before.
Women had loved his voice, continued to do so. It was a beautiful voice even now, dark in tone, musical. He had persuaded troops into battle with those tones, given them the courage. He was a brave man, and intelligent—as not so many were who were also brave. His name was Corlan Von Antal, and each of the sixteen men here tonight had served under his command. They called him, amongst themselves, Ursus (the Bear), and said it was for his famous cloak of black bearskin. But really it was for his valor and his power, his honor. And for the secret, forest- deep, whatever it was, that they had heard tell of, and that they sensed too about him. Besides, his hound was half wolf, and its pelt, like his, was silver. It would pad courteously from chair to chair when first they were seated, its massive ruffed head level with each man’s heart; a colossal beast, but calm as a trained dove. It took a bear to govern a wolf.
The fire shone crystal red and amber, the tasty meal was over and the crimson wine was in the glass goblets, and all around the finely furnished old tower, in which he lived, went up through the eaves of the night, showing its yellow windows to the stars. Would he tell them the story, this year? He was sixty- five if he was a day. Surely he could trust them now, now, these officers of his. Surely now he must tell them, as they had always hoped he would when they visited him. But they had thought that last time, and the times before. He had been fifty, fifty-five, then
sixty. He might live to be ninety, of course. And they— well they might even die, for they were still active soldiers, and though it was hard to recall sometimes, only these three miles from the town of Ruzngrad, the war was going on eighty miles in the other direction.
The young officer Nacek thought this particularly, as he sat watching Von Antal in the firelight. No man, Nacek reflected, old or young, ever knew how long God would give him. Every day ended in a night. The lights in the windows of the highest towers would go out. No one should keep silent forever.
But Ursus did not tell them anything tonight. Just as he never had. As, perhaps, he never would.
One: Night
Forest-deep . . .
The forests—
Corlan ran through them, his coat and shirt sticking to his back in a freeze of sweat, his thick sheaf of hair flattened into black water by icy rain. He was thirty-four. He was afraid.
He had killed a man. For a soldier currently employed in the chess maneuvers of warfare, that would have been a superfluous statement, were it not that the man Corlan had killed belonged to his own regiment, an officer of equal rank. Gerner was a plague-pig, greedy, bloated, crass and vicious. His men suffered from him, which Corlan and his brother Knight-Captains had watched, and said, done, nothing, for Gerner was not the sort to listen. But days ago Gerner had gone into a small village in the forests’ outskirts, taken every bit from it that was edible or portable, lined up the men and any male children and had them shot, then made his supper among the females. Some of his battalion had joined him with enthusiasm. Some always would. Others hung back. These village people had had little enough, and were not even counted among the enemy. A day after the “Feast,” as Gerner had called it, three of his men deserted. Winter was beginning and the weather was strident; they were easily caught. Gerner had the trio hung up by their ankles from a tree and left in the sleeting rain till their brains should burst. He had also previously made a little supper on them, too.
They were young, not yet sixteen, and—as Gerner remarked—had the “beardless faces of girls.”
One evening after that Corlan met Gerner unexpectedly, both of them alone and walking across a half-reaped, spoiled field, under the gray roar of the sky. And Gerner had smiled at Corlan. “You have some difficulty with me, brother Knight?”
“Only one,” said Corlan. “You still live.”
“Oh,” and Gerner laughed, “so I do, so I do.”
In that moment Corlan, into whom the discipline of the military had been calcified nearly from birth, felt a cool high hand lift him upwards from his own body, until he stood some seven meters tall. From here, not dazed only a little surprised, he looked down on the ugly face of Captain Gerner. And then, almost gently, Corlan stepped forward and slammed his right fist into Gerner’s jaw. Corlan felt nothing much, though he heard the crack of a tooth—or a bone. But when Gerner toppled over, Corlan stamped hard, once, on his guts. After which, as the creature writhed there, bulge-eyed, retching, and wheezing for air like a damaged street-organ, Corlan drew his army sword and decapitated him.
Only when he had wiped off the blade and re-sheathed it, with a certain military precision, did Corlan Von Antal drop back into his own skin. And at once, from a mad retributory angel he became a mad, terrified boy. And the boy turned and sprinted from the field, straight through into the deepest avenues of the trees, nearly mindless, with everything lost and thrown away—Gerner, obviously, but also Corlan’s prospects, career, family, friends, ideals—life—heart—lying in the rotted stalks like pieces of a broken plate.
All told five nights had passed, five days, since the murder in the field.
That fifth night there was a bloody sunset, carmine and implacable. Cut off now from the army, he had found no shelter anywhere, and the few cold-withered roots he managed to grub did him no good. One afternoon he caught a rabbit, a skill from his youth. But then he could not kill it, not even efficiently and cleanly as he knew how to do. He could not kill it because he had, of all things, killed Gerner, and the curse of the outlaw was on him. So he let the animal go. Stunned, it kept like a stone long minutes in the frosty grass before bolting out of sight. There were streams where Corlan broke the morning ice and drank the water. He was used to that. By now the little pewter flask in his greatcoat pocket was empty of brandy.
When the blood soaked from the west, he sat on the ground and saw stars appear above, each one like the tip of a polished sabre driven through the uniform of the sky. Or they were shiny bullets.
Then the trees wept. Sleet striped through with a horrible, determined sound.
Well, why not just lie down here, just lie down and let the world that had cursed him finish him off? Or he could fire one of the shiny stars in his revolver through his head.
Eventually he got up, and ran—then only stumbled—on. The stars were washed away.
And darkness fell like a curtain.
Maybe it was the days without food, or the peculiar roots, even the icy chewiness of the cold, cold water, that made Corlan think he met his grandfather about an hour later.
Corlan was walking by then, slowly. And the old man simply appeared between two of the pillar-like stems of the black pines. He was made of trees and winter, and his hair of the gray snowy rain. But he had been like that.
“Well, Cor, here you are,” he said, thoughtfully, the way he had been used to, a couple of decades earlier.
Corlan’s father was a bullying sot. The grandfather had often stepped between them. But whereas the father ruled through violence, the grandfather exerted command through his calm iron will. And where, perhaps, this had unhinged his own son, his grandson it saved. It was the grandsire, inevitably, who had weaned Corlan towards a military life. He had, too, taught him how to read and value books, to absorb music, to deal well with women, even those he loved. And to kill an animal for food swiftly and without redundant pain. “We are allowed to eat them, my boy,” he had said, “which does not mean we should hold them in contempt. We must face the hard nutritional facts, perfect our methods, and cause as little suffering as possible. Respect your food, it was alive only yesterday. Hunting is a necessity, never a sport. We have the right to sustain our existence, but not to pretend those other things, upon which we prey, are unworthy of our concern and care.”
Yet now, having spoken only his brief greeting, the grandfather merely stood there. And Corlan had the urge to go to him and kneel down and make a confession. The grandfather had nevertheless been dead for fifteen years. Corlan did not forget this. And next minute the old man’s image faded in the rain, as the stars had.
And then, through the unfilled gap in the trees, which seemed damaged, Corlan saw the great pile of a building, reared up above the forest. Something in the rain outlined the building on the sky, although no lights showed in the bulk of it. A ruin, perhaps, some long-abandoned architectural hulk from the days of the Rupertian Conclave—centuries out of date.
Corlan stayed where he was, and looking upward at the masonry he felt a profound despair.
It was as if, he later decided, condemned to death, he had witnessed before him the proposed scaffold.
Yet he did not linger very long. He moved free of the dilapidated tree-line and started to climb the steep slope beyond. There was nowhere else to go. Or only one. And he was not ready, despite his previous thoughts, to go there.
By the time he reached a sort of fossilized drawbridge, and crossed by it over a type of pit, to a huge, arched, black door, Corlan had seemingly recalled every legend and eerie tale told of these forests. To see a ghostly grandsire was nothing. The vegetal labyrinth contained the strongholds of far worse phantoms, not to mention vampires, were-men, and ghouls.
He had always disdained such stuff. In childhood even he was seldom afraid of anything supposedly supernatural—the natural world being adversary enough.
When he struck the door he believed no one and nothing would respond. The door might even simply creak inward, unsecured in th
e building’s abandonment. (It was a castle, towers here and there seemed to rise up from it, and it was far larger than any mansion.) But the door did not give. And all at once a greenish feeble light woke up overhead, in a shoulder of the stone, which was pierced he then saw by the thinnest slits of windows. This light began to crawl down towards him.
Corlan quietly considered taking to his heels. But that was an intellectual joke he was having with himself.
He did not truly expect some fiend to undo the locks and peer out at him. Alas, he was living in reality, not a book.
Something made grinding noises—bolts, keys, hinges, and a quarter of the black door opened.
A fiend looked out at Corlan Von Antal.
For a moment he gaped at it, and then he broke out laughing. “I’ve died and gone straight to Hell for my crime, yes?”
The poor fiend shook its head, from where narrow gray snakes of hair trickled, shaking in harmony. “Not so, sir. This is the House Veltenlak. What do you seek?” The voice was like rusty nails softly scratching together.
Corlan said, “I’ve lost my way,” smiling still at the awful irony of his words. “I need somewhere to rest. To eat something, drink something not frozen mud, to sleep. Oh,” he said unhappily, “if death’s just sleep, I’ll settle for that.”
He was addled, of course, from events and five days without food. He heard himself with censorious dismay.
But the poor fiend, he now realized, eyes adjusting to its waveringly hand-held lantern, was only a skinny, bent-over man, about a hundred years of age, which probably indicated seventy or so. He wore faded dusty eldritch black clothes, perfectly couth though worn out—as was he. His eyes were dull and watery, and his mouth, which now sadly smiled back at the visitor, contained, it seemed, only a third of the teeth God had originally planted there.
“We have not much now. But you are welcome. Come in, sir, come in. A little company will be pleasant for us.”
What did Corlan feel as he crossed that threshold? (Where the miniscule bones of a mouse lay like brown needles.) He was never certain, so weary, his head swimming. He always afterward had a vague notion he stumbled, and the old fellow did not reach out to steady him, only moved backward a step, and stood waiting a short way into what seemed to be a vast dark cave, whose high walls were of striated rock, and here and there on them something murkily gleamed or glinted, as the lantern-light trembled over it. Then, after Corlan had righted himself, if so he had to, the other man turned and limped off into the darkness.
The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, 2014 Edition Page 38