She noticed me watching, and gasped. In her fright, she bolted away, running straight into a gatepost. It would’ve been comical if the impact wasn’t so great—it threw her backwards, and she landed on her rump.
I swung the gates open, and helped her up. “I’m so sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to scare you. I just stopped to watch—you dance very prettily.”
She sniffed. “Do I have a bruise?”
I nodded. An angry purple spot was spreading across her white forehead.
She gave a little cry and whimpered. Dead didn’t weep, but there was a phlegmy rattle deep in her chest.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s just a bruise.”
Her mouth curled downwards. “You don’t understand. It’ll never heal.”
I knew that she was right, and felt wretched. I didn’t mean to shorten her time, I didn’t want to speed up her decay.
She finally looked at me. “It’s not your fault. It was an accident.”
I nodded. “Thank you.”
“You’re an aliver. What are you doing here?”
“I came to see your neighbor,” I said. “The one who lives in that house.”
“I know him. I think. A tall young man, right?”
“Yes, that’s the one. I guess I’d best be going.”
“Why do you want to see him?” I was certain now that she hadn’t been among the dead for long—she asked too many questions. The deaders were usually more reserved, less curious.
Of course I wasn’t going to tell her the exact truth; but I wasn’t going to lie either, not after I hurt her. “He’s my brother,” I said. “Used to be, I mean.”
Her mouth opened in awe. “And you still see him?”
“Why not?”
“No one else does.”
She was right, of course. I opened the gate, all the while feeling her curious stare at the back of my neck. Before I stepped into the street, I turned to face her again. “I know. The alivers prefer not to think about the folks here. And I can’t stop thinking about them . . . you.”
I knocked on the dingy, peeling door of the house with red shutters. It gave under my knuckles, and I stepped inside. My teeth started chattering as soon as I crossed the threshold.
“It’s you,” Jas said.
“It’s me. How are you?”
He sat slouching on the floor, his back propped against an ice chest. It was half-full of dirty water and pellucid ice shards. He had changed little since last I saw him—perhaps a bit more decay darkening the skin around his eyes and on his temples, perhaps more sinking around his mouth; but he was still in good shape—as good as one can expect after ten years of death. “All right, I suppose. You?”
“Same.” I sat by the door, the warmest spot of this one-room house. “Want me to fetch an ice merchant for you?”
“Nah. What do you want?”
I gave a laugh that sounded unconvincing even to me. “Do I need a reason to see you?”
He coughed, and it sounded like something came loose in his chest with a sickening tear of wet tissue. “Nah. But you usually have one. I’m not as dull as you think.”
“I don’t think you’re dull. You’re right; I do have a question. I’m looking for two deaders—new ones. One is tall and dark, has only one hand. The other is medium height, light hair, no beard. Young.”
The ruin that was my brother nodded. “I know them. Still, it wouldn’t kill you to come and just visit.”
“I didn’t think you wanted me to. Every time I come you act like you don’t want me here.”
“I don’t want. I can’t; I’d like to, but I can’t. And I forget a lot, y’know?” His tongue turned awkwardly in his mouth, scraping against blackened teeth. “When you come, you remind me. And I don’t want to forget. So please come. To remind me.”
“Jas . . . ”
“Lemme finish. Other deaders, they don’t remember squat. Who they were, and they tell me, they tell, ‘How do you know you even have a brother? Who can know such a thing? You can’t remember about the alivers.’ But I do, because of you. I’m lucky—everyone else, they’re alone. But not me, not me.”
“All right, Jas.” My voice shook a bit, but I didn’t think he’d noticed. “I’ll come more often. But now I need to know about those men.”
“Why?”
I hesitated; not that mistrusted Jas, but the deaders had loyalty to their own kind, not to the alivers—even if they were kin. “They might know something that is of interest to me.”
Jas shook his head. “You’re still dealing in secrets. Dangerous trade.”
“I know. I almost had my hand broken the other day.”
Jas sat up. “Like the man you’re looking for.”
I felt a chill, and it didn’t come from the icebox. “I thought his hand was missing.”
“They broke it first, then cut it off, then slit his throat.” Jas spoke with relish. I noticed it before; the deaders seemed to enjoy the details of death.
“Who?”
Jas shrugged. “The Areti goons, who else? I sure hope they don’t want anything from you; they and the deaders have been fighting for no one remembers how long.”
“You know why?”
He nodded. “Every deader knows. It’s about a curse, and a cherrystone.”
“Areti’s cherrystone?”
His lungs whistled a bit—the sound that signified laughter. “Is that what she’d been telling you? No, that’s ours. It’s our curse, see, and we’re keeping it, Areti or not.” Jas stood. “C’mon. There’s someone I want you to meet.”
I stepped toward the door, but Jas shook his head. “It’s too warm out. We’ll go the other way.”
He creaked and groaned, but bent down enough to touch the earthen floor. He groped around in the dirt.
“Can I give you a hand?”
“Sure.” He pointed out a bronze ring mounted on a wooden trapdoor, hidden under a layer of dirt. I never noticed that it was there.
I pulled on the ring, and as the dust and grime cloud settled, I saw a rickety ladder leading downwards. “Where does it go?”
“To other houses . . . everywhere. It’s nicer to travel underground, cooler.”
That explained the scant traffic on the surface. I let Jas descend, and followed him. It wasn’t nearly as dark as I had expected—strange fluorescent creatures darted to and fro among the weakly glowing walls of the tunnel, and sick, gangly dead man’s birches illuminated the way with their dead light.
There were ladders everywhere, and the deaders too—the underground seemed a much more animated place than the surface. I mimicked Jas’ shambling gait, eager not to attract attention. “Should I even be here?” I asked Jas.
He stopped and mulled it over for a moment. “Don’t see why not. You’ll move here, sooner or later. As long as you don’t hurt the deaders, you’re all right.”
I was moved that he never even considered the possibility of my betrayal; then again, perhaps it was one of the deaders’ limitations. Just as they forgot their relatives, so perhaps they lost their understanding of the ways of the living.
He led me deeper into the labyrinth. The passersby grew less frequent, and the light—weaker. I could not discern the direction, but guessed that we were close to the river once I noticed drops of moisture seeping along the support beams through the earthen walls.
He stopped and looked around, as if getting his bearings. Then, he sat down on the earthen floor.
“What now?”
“Now we wait,” he said.
We didn’t wait for long. I did suspect before that the deaders could communicate with each other through some unfathomable means. Soon, four deaders showed up, then three more. All of the newcomers sat down on the floor and remained quiet, as more of them kept arriving.
There were all kinds of them there—young and old, and even one child. Some were dead long enough to lose most of their skin and flesh—at least two hundred years; others were quite fresh. Even the girl I met
earlier showed up; I noticed with a pang of guilt that the purple bruise on her forehead was spreading. Despite my repeated application of the wintergreen ointment, the air grew putrid with their smell, and my heart was uneasy. There I was, underground, surrounded by a throng of deaders. If they turned on me, I would never be able to fight through them—or find my way back to the surface. The trust I attributed to Jas was actually mine.
Underground, I had lost the sense of time, and only knew that it was passing—slowly, like water weeping from the walls. The sounds of soft, dry voices of the deaders mingled with the dripping of water; while the monotony of it was somewhat lulling, the content was certainly not.
I learned that the cherrystone in question was cursed. A traveling warlock passed through our town, many years ago. When the Areti came to the warlock, demanding that he lend his talent to them, they were met with a refusal. They sent their thugs to make him pay for their humiliation, but the thugs were never heard from again. The warlock was nonetheless angry with the Areti. Before he left, he hid the cherrystone somewhere in town, and told them that as long as the cursed stone was within the town walls, our dead would walk the land.
When his prediction came true, the Areti looked for it. They looked everywhere—on the bottom of the river, under every rock, even in the catacombs under the deaders’ town. After a few years they stopped looking—old legends are easy to forget. The cherrystone was left be, until the present Mistress of the Areti clan realized her mortality. The search for the cherrystone had become an obsession, and she sent her goons and hirelings to look for it. It took her awhile, but she had learned that it was in deaders’ town.
“Why does she want it?” I said.
“To end the curse,” said one of the oldest deaders.
I nodded. I could understand that desire, and yet I wasn’t sure why the Areti were so concerned about it.
“It’s their family’s curse, or so they see it. It’s the matter of honor for them,” said the child. “They don’t care what will happen to us. They only know that they don’t want to become us.”
There was no good way to ask this question, but I asked anyway. “Do you . . . do you like being like this?”
They whistled and chortled, their laughter akin to scratching of nails.
“You’ll see when you’re in my shoes,” Jas said. “It’s more life, even though you might not see it as such. See, I don’t relish being what I am, but I still prefer it to lying still in the ground, being eaten by worms.”
“Do you know where that cherrystone is?”
The crowd grew silent, and I felt their eyes on me, judging, weighing. “ ’Course we do,” Jas said. “That’s the first thing you learn as a deader—it’s important, see. And we tell it to each other every day, so that we don’t forget—about the Areti, about their snooping goons . . . ”
The appearance of two more deaders interrupted him. One was tall and dark, one-handed. The other, a teenager, seemed young enough to be his son, but his light hair belied this conclusion. His nostrils were torn open, and a slow trickle of pus trekked across his pale lips and down his chin.
“You came to kill us,” the youngster said.
Once again, I grew aware of precariousness of my situation, and protested my innocence with as much sincerity as I could muster.
“The Areti sent you,” his companion said. “Just like they sent us.”
I shrugged. “So? I find things; I never killed anyone.”
Jas’ heavy hand lay on my shoulder. I could feel through my jacket how cold and clammy it was. “He wouldn’t do something like that,” he said to the gathering. “He knows better.”
I nodded. “I do. Only others don’t. You think people across the river would listen to me? Or to you, for that matter. Far as everyone’s concerned, if the stone is gone, so much the better. The Areti won’t leave you alone. Not with the present Mistress.”
Everyone nodded in agreement.
“She won’t stop,” the bruised girl said. “Not until she’s one of us.” She gave me a meaningful look. “Will you help us?”
“Whoa,” I said. “You’re not asking me to kill her, are you?”
They murmured that it wouldn’t be a bad idea, and after all, it wouldn’t be all bad for her. The deaders’ town was a nice place.
“I’m not a murderer,” I said. “But I think I can help you. The stone needs to stay in town, right? Doesn’t matter where?”
“No,” Jas said. “But she won’t stop looking.”
“I think I know a good place for it,” I said. “Just give me the stone, and don’t worry about a thing. She’ll never find it.”
Their silence was unnatural—not even a sound of breathing broke it. Dozens of dead eyes look at me, expressionless, weighing my proposal in their oozing, ruined skulls. I asked a lot of them—to put their very existence into the hands of an aliver, a being as alien to them as they were to me.
If I were in his shoes, I doubt I would’ve done what Jas had done: he pointed at the girl with the purple bruise. “Give it to him,” he said.
The girl stepped back, away from me, and I reached out, afraid that she would stumble and fall again. She remained on her feet—I supposed she was getting a hang of her new limitations. “Why do you think he’ll help us?” she asked Jas, but her hand was already reaching for her chest.
“He’s my brother,” Jas said.
Her fingers pushed away a flimsy shawl that cradled her slender shoulders, and I gasped at the sight of a deep wound, left by a dagger. That was what killed her—an angry father, a jealous husband, a sullen stranger. She reached deep into the wound, pulling out a small round object, covered with congealed gore. I tried not to flinch as the bloodied cherrystone lay in my palm.
“Be careful with it,” the one-handed man told me. “It’s a powerful thing.”
“What can it do?” I said, rolling it on my palm gingerly. It left a trail, but didn’t seem very powerful.
“Whatever it has to do,” Jas said.
The sight of the moonlit Areti manor greeted me from afar. It was deep night, and not a window shone in the darkness. The bulk of the building sat immobile but sinister, as a stone gargoyle ready to come to life and rip out the heart of the next victim. I heaved a sigh and slowed my steps; no doubt, the manor would be guarded, and I was disinclined to reveal my presence just yet. Fortunately, in my line of business I had learned a thing or two about surreptitious visits.
I avoided the front door, where the two goons of my recent acquaintance sat on the steps, trading monosyllabic talk. My soft-soled shoes made no sound on the grass as I edged around the corner and along the wall, looking for a different point of entry. There was a backdoor, as I had expected, latched shut from the inside. Worse, the door was cased in iron, and a slightest manipulation would surely reverberate through the building.
In the pale moonlight, I let my fingers run along the edges of the door, looking for a gap. The door was quite well fitted, and I procured a short knife with thin blade from my pocket, and forced it between the door and the wall that surrounded it, trying to feel the latch inside. The scraping of metal against metal tore the still air. I jerked my hand away, and fell into a crouch by the wall. I waited for a long while, but nobody appeared.
I explored the perimeter of the manor again, in hopes of finding a ground level window or another door. None were forthcoming, and I returned to the back entrance guarded by iron. I wondered if the cherrystone could be of use, and took it out of my pocket. It glowed softly, and I touched it to the door. Nothing happened.
“Come on,” I whispered to it. “Do you want to be found and destroyed?”
The stone did not answer.
I felt foolish, carrying on a conversation with an inanimate object, but persisted. I sat down, my back against the cold wall, cradling the stone’s tiny light in my open palms. “See,” I told it, “it’s like this. I could just give you up, take my money, and go home. But it’s bigger than me or her or even you . . .
”
My voice caught in my throat as my own words reached me. There was no doubt that the Areti would kill me—break my fingers, cut off my hand, perhaps rip my nostrils open, just like they did to the dead boy. But I also realized that it would be better to die now and have a place to go than eke out another few years and succumb to the black nothingness to which people from other places went. We lived with the deaders for so long that we saw them as a nuisance; we didn’t realize how lucky we were to have them—to become them. And this stone made it all possible. I closed my hand around it, protecting it, protecting all of us.
The stone grew warmer in my hand, and soon it burned it. It shone brighter too, and narrow white beams of light squeezed between my fingers—my fist looked like a star. When I touched it to the door, the metal sang, barely audible, and the door swung open. I entered the dark dusty hallway, my way illuminated by the cherrystone.
I followed it to the dark recesses of the sleeping manor, to the kitchen. There, a massive brick stove towered against the far wall. The light beams cut through the stone as if it was butter, forming a long, narrow tunnel behind the stove, just spacious enough to let my hand through.
I released the cherrystone, and let it roll into its new hiding place. As it cooled and darkened, what was left of its power sealed the passage, returning it to the normal appearance of the brickwork of the stove and stone of the walls.
As quietly as I entered, I left. I crossed the river as the sun was rising above the rooftops. I listened to the crowing of roosters and to the first banging of shutters, inhaled the sweet aroma of baking bread, basked in the first sunrays alighting on my shoulders. I was heading back to my favorite restaurant, where I intended to drink until the Areti thugs found me.
I thought about what would be my last trip to the deaders’ town—how I would shamble along, until I arrived to Jas’ house. I would have to tell him right away that I was his brother, before I forget and lose the tentative connection between us, and ask him to remind me. Then I would settle next to the ice chest, and we would talk, in loopy, halting sentences. And we would remind each other every day, so that we don’t forget, keeping the memory of our shared blood alive.
The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror, 2010 Page 67
