The boy nods. For a moment, his eyes flick upward, taking in a glimpse of the strange, solitary man. Gant wears black and keeps his hair cropped short, but otherwise could be any other man from the village. His rich, brown eyes sear the boy’s like coal embers, and the child looks away.
Gant turns and places the pot on a small table. His boots prate against the wood floor; the boy scarcely breaths. Gant moves to the door, and the boy follows like a whisper and vanishes down the path. As he runs away, the tiny scratch of his feet against gravel echoes against the lonesome hills.
○
The house is Gant’s inheritance: a rather stock, box shape — a single story with few rooms, most unused. During the day, he sleeps in a windowless chamber at the center of the first floor. A tower rises at each of the four corners of the house, and each tower holds a lamp and reflector. In this way, the structure reveals its purpose, utilitarian but not warm or comforting as a home might be. The lamps provide light, but little warmth. On the slope overlooking the dingy village, Gant’s house becomes an artificial sun each night, a four-pointed star against the velvet of the surrounding hills. The Eaters of the Dead abhor the light, or so Gant was taught. The lanterns are his only weapons against the ghouls. His army at the gate. Unlike the dream, there is no wall protecting the house.
But his inheritance does not end with the house.
Gant’s family has watched over the dead for generations, their sole guardians until the fires at the spring and fall equinoxes set their souls free. But Gant is also the last of the line, the last keeper of the dead. He has no heir, and toils into his middle years with a solemn understanding that the line will end with him. Perhaps another might wander from the village and take up the mantle. Perhaps the Eaters of the Dead, the gaunt, ungainly legends with whom he battles with fire and light, will once again seep from the shadows and pour like liquid ash into the trembling ears of the villagers.
Perhaps nothing will happen at all.
○
The boy is back each night for a week, trembling on Gant’s doorstep. His meager clothing, not much beyond gray rags, hangs from thin arms and legs like old burial lines. Winter is coming, and the boy shivers. Gant opens his mouth, trying to imagine a phrase that might comfort the child. There are no words from the keeper of the dead which would comfort anyone in the village, let alone the pale lump on the stoop.
“Thank you,” Gant says in his grim, cold voice.
The boy doesn’t move.
“Thank you,” he says again, louder, expecting the child to turn and fly away.
The boy’s eyes circle to Gant’s face. “You’re welcome,” he mutters and looks back to the ground.
A moment passes in silence.
“What are they like?” The boy lifts his face slightly as he speaks.
Gant’s eyes narrow. “Who?”
The boy shivers. “The things that come at night.”
“Oh.” Gant’s shoulders drop. “It’s been years since I’ve seen one up close.” The boy seems to shrink in front of him. He kneels and finds the child’s eyes. A tiny breath shakes between the boy’s lips like the rattle of a leaf in the wind. “I was about your age when I did.” Gant savors the fear as it flickers on the boy’s face.
○
The seasons shift, pulling color from the grass and trees as the village plods toward the fall celebration. According to tradition, the dead are free then — free from the hungry jaws of the Eaters, free from the rank maze of stone below Gant’s house on the hill, free from superstition and story. They are his constant companions for months, his only contact with humanity save the brief visits of food-bringers and the villagers who carry the dead.
“They talk about them. Monsters.” The boy shudders. “The old men in town talk.”
“And what do they say?” Gant asks.
“Not much. They say they’re lean and hungry. Long arms and legs… fingers like twigs from a winter tree. Dark skin. They hide with the shadows.”
“Stories,” Gant says. “Just stories.”
“They talk about you, too.”
Gant smiles.
“They say you’re worse than the monsters. That you’re Death’s concubine.” The final word is broken and awkward coming from the boy’s mouth. His face twists in a frown. “I’m not sure what that means.”
“Just stories.” Gant pats the child on the shoulder. When the boy leaves, Gant remembers he has never really seen the Eaters of the Dead, save for the twitching shapes on the border of shadows in the night. There are faint snatches from his childhood, but memories are illusive things. He remembers them, and does not remember them. Illusions and truth.
Perhaps he has only convinced himself of their truth.
○
Fearing the legends, the villagers bring a new corpse during the daylight hours — an old man — interrupting Gant’s sleep. They leave the body on the stone terrace outside the door, not daring to cross his threshold. Gant must carry the unfortunate into the cellar alone. He uses a system of planks and pulleys to lower the body rather than struggle with it on the narrow stairwell. In the cellar, before filing the corpse in the cooler stone catacombs below, he drains the blood. The catacombs are cold, nearly enough to keep his dead tenants uncorrupted, but blood spoils from within. It must be drained. Using an array of finely-bladed knives, he cuts slits in the flesh and collects the fluids in an oil bucket. That night, he burns the blood with the oil, and its black smoke is lost to the dark sky.
When the equinox comes, Gant will bring the bodies from the catacombs and lay them, still dressed in their shrouds, under the afternoon sun. Being a small village, the death rate is low, a meager harvest for the reaper. The wagons will come before the celebration, squeaking and rattling up the gravel path, and village louts will handle the corpses. Gant has come to think of the dead as family, and he cringes to think of how the thick-fingered simpletons pass the bodies like sacks of blighted potatoes.
○
Cold rain falls and dead leaves collect in rotting caches of brown — under trees, at the sides of the path, in the crook of the hills. Gant looks on the hunched backs of village hovels below, and imagines the streets deep with mud and decay. The boy wants to see the bodies.
“My grandfather died a month ago,” he says.
Gant remembers pressing his sharp knives into the gray flesh. “I can’t,” he says.
The boy fidgets with his hands and glances to the rain through the open door. His hair sticks to his forehead in a black paste. “How do you know they’re there?”
“The bodies?” Gant asks.
“No.” A bead of water cuts a line down the boy’s face. “Those things. The monsters.”
Gant studies the granite sky and the black shapes of trees like broken bodies. Illusions and truth. The villagers need monsters.
“They come every night,” he says.
The boy leaves without another word, and a new girl brings Gant’s food the next evening. From her height, the lumps under her smock, and her thin cheeks, she is a few years older than the boy. She doesn’t speak — doesn’t even look at Gant. Each time the village sends a new child, he starts over. Gant grows weary of new faces.
“Thank you,” he says, but she is gone.
Gant lets a lantern die that night. He allows it to gutter and wink. After the light is gone, he fills the lamp with oil, and stands near with the igniter, ready to click the flint against metal until a spark takes the wick. Before he does, he waits. He watches the shadows.
The Eaters of the Dead do not come. Ink pours across the lawn, but no hands form. No fingers like twigs from winter trees crawl from the shadows. Gant feels a hollowness in his chest. An emptiness. Perhaps they aren’t there at all.
Perhaps he needs the monsters as much as the villagers.
○
They bring another body only a week after his experiment with the lamp. A small body. Gant thinks of the boy. An old man looks a
t Gant. The man’s tired eyes glisten in the daylight, surrounded by wrinkled skin like furrows in the brown earth. His fingers stretch out, somewhat like dead twigs, but pale, and touch Gant’s sleeve. He leaves without a word, sorrow and fear hanging about his shoulders like a shroud.
The body is small, but Gant refuses to use his pulleys. He struggles through the narrow hallway, down the stairs, and into the antechamber with the burden in his arms. The stone slab is cold and rough with grooves cut to allow blood to drain in dark, narrow lines. The air is cold. It rises from stone and old blood — a damp, cloying air that hangs on his skin. Gant works by candlelight. When he pulls back the shroud, he doesn’t recognize the face. He’d expected the boy, but the face is strange. Too easy, he supposes, if it had been the child.
Gant arranges the tools, the tray of old steel and brass, the sharp knives for incisions and the tiny pump with which he frees the dead blood in clotted lumps. His steady hand takes up the first knife and pushes it into soft flesh. The blade would cut living flesh just as well, he thinks. The plan comes to him while he toils with the knife and works the blood. Even the Keeper of the Dead has choices.
The door to the catacombs is heavy and dark — no gate of crossed iron like in his dream. After preparing the small body, Gant starts in the deepest chamber, the niches reserved for the first bodies, the ones which come to him in the first months after the festival. The stench is heavy. He hugs the corpse, pulls its mass against his chest, and hefts it to the antechamber, placing it on the floor next to the stone table. Six more follow, a light harvest considering the closeness of the Feast.
He has no sense of the sun or time while he slogs in the earth. By the time he drags the first tenant up the stairs and through the back door, the sun flirts with the horizon and his pot of stew, no doubt left by the girl or another like her, is cold. When he’s finished, when all eight corpses lay in neat rows on the lawn, dusk lays its veil upon the world.
His is bait ready; he does not light the lamps.
He eats his cold stew and waits. Shadows, ordinary patches of black, fill the yard. The white burial clothes of his lifeless friends pull in the reflection of the moon, shimmering in the darkness. He drops the spoon into the empty pot.
They do not come. The Eaters of the Dead do not take the bait.
“Stories,” he mutters.
Gant takes one final trip below. He collects his knives, the surgical tools he’s used on the dead for years. Tonight, their blades will taste living flesh.
As he leaves for the last time, he opens each door of the house, even the heavy door deep in the earth which leads to the catacombs. He spills lamp oil on the polished floor of the foyer, on his bed. His eyes close when a spark flies from his igniter.
He smiles at the creatures his shadow forms as he walks in front of the fire. His thoughts turn to the village. Will they hide when he comes? Will they wish for a wall like that in his dreams, one with a high gate and spiked-topped stones? When they find the work of his blades in the morning, what stories will they tell to replace the old myths?
Aaron Polson currently lives in Lawrence, Kansas with his wife and six children. He’s now at full sitcom. To pay the bills, he counsels high school students about post-graduation plans, but he’s still not sure what he wants to be when he grows up. His short fiction has appeared in Shock Totem, Shimmer, Bourbon Penn, and under several unsavory rocks. Rumor has it he prefers ketchup with his beans. You can find more of his work at www.aaronpolson.net.
Lullabye of the Grotesque
by Jason Muller
The wailing of the newborn infant is mingled with the dirge of death.
Lancashire, England, 1827
Deep in the English countryside, beneath a haunting moon, Dr. Amos Crouch, alongside his pupil, the young Thomas Blackwell, stood peering down at the wooden coffin. The digging had not been too laborious, for the earth was still loose from the previous morning’s burial. It had been a small funeral. The priest recited somber elegies in the cold gray of January. Mourners, garbed in black, lamented for the woman — and for her unborn child, as well.
Now, tonight, Dr. Crouch turned and extended his lantern toward the dark of the churchyard. He scanned the staggered array of old and forgotten tombs. The trees stirred in the wind. He turned to Blackwell and motioned him to resume.
“Get on with it, lad, and be quick.”
Though hesitant, he nodded and cast his spade onto the ground, then pried off the coffin lid with an iron bar. They leaned in over the shallow grave and looped a length of rope around the women’s chest, brought it up under her armpits. Blackwell then stood and heaved the corpse from the grave, dragged it up into the living world.
The body was light. She was a petite woman, though her belly was swollen with child. They worked together in stripping away the burial shroud, the shoes, until nothing but a pale corpse lay naked in the moonlight. They tossed the garments back into the hole and hastily wrapped the body in a sheet — like a spider cocooning its prey. Then they hauled it off, weaving through weathered headstones, and stowed it in back of the covered carriage. They returned to the grave and backfilled the hole, and by the time they’d finished this, by the time they’d loaded up their spades and departed, the only evidence of their having been there was a thin pair of tracks which the carriage wheels had scored into the ground.
Blackwell held the reigns, steering the carriage through the night. Dr. Crouch rode beside him, his silver hair flowing in the crisp passing breeze. He patted the breast pocket of his frock coat, in which rested a small pistol. He glanced over his shoulder, in search of pursuers, but saw nothing but the cathedral spire looming over the distant tree line.
One must realize that the only bodies available for legal medical dissection were those of hanged criminals, though these were few in number, amounting to only twenty per year at best. Strangely, bodysnatching was not illegal. One could, however, be convicted for the minor offense of breaking and entering, and for violating public morals. Nevertheless, Crouch, a surgeon of little renown, was loathe to be caught guilty of either of these.
○
An hour later they were in the city. Apart from tavern windows aglow with revelry, the streets of Manchester were asleep. Smog lingered in the air overhead, a symbol of industry and progress by the hand and heart of the English spirit. Oil lamps lined the streets, scarcely illuminating soot-coated buildings. As the horse’s hooves clopped slowly along the brick pavement, Blackwell noticed a dark figure emerging from an alleyway on the left; it tip-toed quickly into the street, stopping suddenly before the horse. Dr. Crouch pulled back hard on the reins. The horse reared.
He peered down over the side of the carriage. “Who goes there?”
The figure began to materialize in the lamplight; it was one Lewis Briery, a local drunk whom many of the townspeople thought senile. He was an uncouth fellow, hatless and with long, tousled hair. He wore an eye patch over his right eye, giving him a piratical look. He merely stood there, staring at them with his one bloodshot eye.
Dr. Crouch said, “Well, well, if it isn’t Mr. Briery. Out of the way, you drunken sot.”
The drunk regarded him with contempt. “I know your business, Doctor Crouch. I know your deed. Ye wretches who pursue this barbarous trade, your carcasses in turn may be conveyed. Like his.” With a gnarled finger he indicated Blackwell, whose face turned to utter concern. Grinning, the drunk continued: “Aye, that’s right, lad. In some unfeeling surgeon’s room, your flesh will be consumed. How can ye justly meet a better doom?”
“Ignore him,” said Crouch to Blackwell. Then to the drunk he roared: “Enough! Step aside, fool, or I shall run you over!”
Briery showed no fear. He just smiled, revealing rotten checkerboard teeth and casually hobbled across the street. He went slurring off into the night, laughing in a tenor that only the insane can muster. They studied his departure, perplexed — and were on their way.
○
A while later they turned into an alleyway behind an old red-brick warehouse on the corner. They unloaded the corpse, bringing it in through the back door. After bolting the back door shut, they lugged the body through the main room of the warehouse. It was a drab and unfurnished place, coated with dust, littered with empty wooden crates that had been abandoned by the previous occupants. The wooden rafters overhead were webbed with gossamer threads, and shadows seethed within every dark crevice. Slanted shafts of moonlight streamed through the high, filmy windows.
They turned right, proceeded down a narrow corridor, and entered the room at the terminus. The laboratory — this is where all the grisly work was done; this is where bodies were cut, probed, severed and analyzed in an attempt to better understand the complexities of human anatomy, a subject in which surgeons of the time had developed an insatiable interest. The walls of this room were of stone and mortar, lined with shelves. And on these shelves were glass jars, filled with clear fluid, in which floated various organs: brains, livers, hearts, and veined appendages of curious import. They placed the corpse on the surgical table at the center of the room, and then took a moment to catch their breath.
While Blackwell kindled the fire, Dr. Crouch lit a lantern and candles and placed them on the table. The walls danced with firelight and shadow. They went to the table and stood staring down at the sheeted body. Dr. Crouch then proceeded to fold back the sheet from the body. He tilted his head and studied her, as did Blackwell. She had been a pretty woman, despite her having gained the weight typically associated with pregnancy. Her hair was long and black, and her blue-veined breasts hung limply at the sides of her chest. Even in death, her expression seemed to convey the protective will that all mothers assert over their children. Blackwell couldn’t help but feel a pang of remorse. He felt as though they’d violated the sanctity of humanity. Crouch, however, composed as usual, removed his coat and hung it over the back of a chair. Then he lit his pipe and said, “I want to start by removing the fetus. Let us begin, shall we?”
Fear of the Dark: An Anthology of Dark Fiction Page 6
