Danse Macabre: Close Encounters with the Reaper

by Nancy Kilpatrick

  Anya takes my hand, and I turn to her. “Thank you.” Her voice is marked with tears. She throws her arms around me and presses her lips to my cheek. Over her shoulder, I see the king is awake, his breathing no longer labored. “Thank you.”

  I return her embrace, thinking of what I’ve just gained, and what I’ve forever lost.

  Five years ago I married Anya and assumed some leadership, and still the disapproving half-glances of the courtiers follow me all the way back to my chambers. Knowing looks and whispers, which are not so quiet as they believe, have haunted my presence in court for the last seven years. The court’s romantic affection for a peasant-turned-king had waned years ago.

  Life was so much easier when I was just a healer, when my godfather showed me plainly who might live and who was certain to die. I know how to speak to a grieving family, how to help them accept what has come to pass. That does not help make me a king. Death is straightforward. Politics are fickle.

  It’s no secret Anya is the true ruler, and I am merely around because she has an inexplicable fondness for me. When I met her, she was enduring the trivialities of courtiers while her father lay ill, with a grace I could never manage. And now she lies sick in bed herself, a demon disease sitting on her chest and draining her of life. Her father is travelling here from the warmer climes he grew to prefer after his illness. Our child is in the other room, quarantined away. I have stayed by her side.

  I sit and rest my hand over the bag of herbs strung around my neck. Perhaps I cannot use them, but they still provide some comfort. “I made another mistake today.” She can’t hear me, I know that. I feel for her pulse. It’s soft and slow, but still, she lives. “I made a ruling on some petty land dispute and the courtiers were displeased.”

  I lay my head down next to her hand, and kiss her fingertips. The weight of the day slowly washes out of me, pouring onto the floor. I only notice I’m falling asleep when something wakes me — the scent of freshly-turned dirt.

  My godfather is standing at the head of her bed.

  The room is empty, for which I am grateful. I rise from my chair and tell him, “No!”

  He shrugs, a gesture trapped between bitterness and apathy. “It’s not for me to decide, Dominik, not really.” He reaches to brush hair from Anya’s face, but his hand passes through her. She gasps, a death rattle.

  I’ve seen Death take people before. He rests a hand on their head, and they tremble. He told me that was the soul detaching from the body. Then he would take their hand in his, and their spirit would rise, leaving their spent body behind.

  I’ve seen it many times before, but never someone I loved.

  A nurse knocks on the door before entering with Anya’s medicine and meal. On her tray rests a foul, chalky drink, a bit of plain toast, and a cup of hot water for tea. I run to her, and she mutters something about no, she’ll get it, your highness. But it isn’t the tray I’m after.

  I snatch the hot water and empty the small pouch from around my neck, the last of the healing leaves.

  Death appears at my side, and the scent of brimstone and burning wood flows from him. His face is even more drawn then when I last saw him, but he pushes down the fatigue. “What do you think you are doing?”

  I send the nurse away, telling her to return in five minutes. Something will have happened by then. I’m just not certain what.

  My godfather stares at the cup, watches the liquid grow dark as the leaves steep. “Have you forgotten what I told you?”

  “I remember.” My hands tremble. I tell myself it’s only impatience. “I simply don’t care.”

  “Oh?” He sneers at me. “You can’t live without her? Is that it?”

  “It’s not that.” The tea darkens. It’s almost ready. Just a little bit longer. “I’d just rather not, given the choice.”

  “Do you remember why your father chose me to be your godfather, your spiritual guide?”

  My father told me that story many times growing up. How proud he was, that God, Satan, and Death had all vied to be my godfather. How he turned God down, for the darkness that he let into the world. How he turned down Satan, for the deceit that flowed so readily from him. And he told me how he accepted Death’s offer.

  I give Anya the tea.

  Death rises before me like a storm, his animal cry of fury knocking me to the floor. He is shaped like a man and fire and smoke and a burst of ravens taking flight, robed in crumbling ash. He stares at me, through me, and I see his eyes. Not the red fire of before, when I first crossed him to heal Anya’s father, but the eyes he has in the final moments, the eyes the newly dead see. When he stares at me now, there is nothing, a black emptiness of an eternity alone and cold and unable to scream.

  His voice is a cold nail drawn across hard stone.

  “Because through me, all become equal.”

  I feel as though I’m falling. Then, I feel nothing at all.

  The floor beneath my cheek is hard and cold. Packed dirt clings to my face and my clothes and I dust myself clean as I stand. I’m in a cave, in a small room lit with a thousand candles. The air is so still. I must be far underground.

  “You’re awake.” Death used to greet me with kindness, but now there’s only a frozen tightness when he speaks.

  “Hello, godfather.” I turn, expecting to see him, but I’m alone in the room. “Where are you?”

  He steps out of the air and into being, and it’s only an aching dread that stops me from asking if it’s really him. In our domain, in the world of the living, he’s a terrible specter, containing himself as best he can, but still always inviting a cold shiver. Here, he is different.

  Death is still dressed in his usual funereal black, but clean and pressed, if a little worn, no longer inspiring the image of a freshly-dug corpse. The smell of earth, of fire and brimstone, all are gone, replaced by the sweet and musky smell of myrrh.

  Most notably, however, his hat is gone, and for once, I see his true face.

  He’s middle-aged, and the age is wearing on him. His hair is brown, thin and pale, with streaks of white gathering at his temples. Lines run over his face, and there is a weight, a deep exhaustion from the years of his work running over him like water over a stone.

  Death looks like a man who used to laugh, but sadness made him forget how.

  I stare down at the hard floor, stomach tight with the childlike shame of being in terrible trouble, and knowing I deserve it. “I’m dead, aren’t I?”

  “Just about.” His voice is a gentle whisper. He steps to one side and points at a candle, so short it can barely be called such, the flame guttering in a pool of wax. “This is your life. As you can see, there isn’t much left.”

  The tiny flame stumbles on the wick, deep red where it should be bright yellow.

  “What about Anya?”

  Death nods to another candle. This one is tall, its flame burning bright and proud, with a thick column of wax yet to be spent. Another candle stands next to it, taller still, and I realize it’s for our child. “I told you not to use the herb,” he said. “I never told you it wouldn’t work.”

  I stare at my candle. It’s a wonder the flame hasn’t gone out yet. “What if you use my flame to light another candle?” I ask him. “Or put it on top of one? Could that continue my life?”

  “Well, it looks like you bypassed anger and have gone straight into bargaining.” He sighs and leans against the cave wall. “At least I don’t have to deal with you making a mess of things here with some childish tantrum.” He sighs, and his hands, long and slender, cover his face. If it was anyone else I would suspect they were crying.

  “I’m sorry,” I whisper.

  Death moves his hands from his face and looks at me with that knowing smile of his, but in full light, out of the shadows, his smile has a terror and a sympathy I haven’t seen before. “I
said you wouldn’t mean it until it was too late.”

  I go to my candle and sit in front of it, my back to Death. “I’m supposed to blow it out, aren’t I?” My words threaten the flame, the air from my lips tearing it from the wick, almost, not quite. I recall what he told me years ago. “You don’t make the candles.”

  “I don’t even put them out, actually. I just light them.”

  My wife and child are alive and healthy, many years ahead of them. Does she know I love her? Does our child? Did I tell them these things enough? Did I write to my parents recently? Would they remember me as a peasant who became king, or would they remember me as a man who loved and cherished his family?

  And I realize, this is the gift my godfather was trying to give me, the lesson I was to learn. The deep awareness that he is always coming, and that there is nothing I can do but live the sort of life that would make him think twice before taking me. Shame that I only see it now. What I might have done, had I only listened.

  He stops me before I can tell him once more that I’m sorry. “It’s all right,” he assures me, and for the first time I can see what my father saw, why he would choose Death as my godfather. The patience, the balance, the deep sense of understanding and acceptance.

  “I am sorry, though,” I assure him. “You have a horrible burden. I wish I could have helped you.” I take a deep breath and give one last thought to Anya.

  But before I can blow out the candle, Death cups his hands over the flame.

  He moves the candle out of my reach and stares down at it, deep in thought. “Do you mean that?”

  A response leaps to my lips, but I pause to give it real thought. Was that something I said in my last moment, to appease my own guilt? He wears his disappointment in himself plainly, and it’s clear to see how this task exhausts him. I helped many people live, but I also watched as many died, their families screaming at me, cursing my name, spitting at me for letting their loved one slip away. And I only dealt with the souls that crossed my path. He dealt with everyone.

  “Yes, I mean it.” The pure honesty of my answer surprises me.

  Death begins pacing the room, still holding my candle, muttering quietly, giving me a thoughtful glance every few moments. Earlier I might have warned him to mind the flame, but a deep calm has settled within me. He can have all the time he needs.

  Eventually he closes his eyes and gives a long sigh. All the tension escapes his body, leaving exhaustion behind. “You’re much younger than I was when my godfather came for me.” He smiles and my flame comes alive in his hands, his face washed in a clear yellow that transforms his tired lines into deep black scores. “Who knows, you might last longer than I did.”

  When I realize what he’s saying, I step back as if struck. “You want me to … take over?”

  “Well not right away.” Death slowly closes the distance between us, my flame in his hands growing with each step, burning bright like a cold star. “But that’s the eventual goal.”

  My godfather holds out the flame for me to take. I expect to be burned, but it’s cool to the touch. He tells me the choice is mine alone. “You can go to paradise, or you can spend the ages watching others pass, just as you have your whole life.”

  It’s the cleanest white, soft and warm and dancing with life. He tells me it’s a choice, but it isn’t, not really, not when I hold life in my hands like this, so full and pure. I press the light to my chest, and it floods me with elation and sadness, hope and fear. I’m reminded of when I held my child for the first time. It’s a weight, a burden, a joy, beautiful and heartbreaking.

  I’m not sure how I remain standing. My head is light and my vision is smoke and stars, but slowly I come out of the haze. “All right.” I rub at the new fire in my heart, the joy and ache settling deep. “I’ve learned what I can of life. What can you teach me of death?”

  My godfather places his hand on my shoulder. “Why do you speak as if they’re so different?”

  * * * * *

  Morgan Dempsey is a writer and software engineer, currently living in Silicon Valley, California. Her fiction is available at Redstone Science Fiction, as well as another EDGE anthology titled Broken Time Blues. “Death in the Family” is a retelling of the classic folktale Godfather Death.

  Blue-Black Night

  By Timothy Reynolds

  It was a cool Southern Utah evening and I was sitting on the front stoop of my rented trailer, strumming on my battered flat-top. I say ‘battered’, but even with worn strings, a missing pick guard and through-and-through bullet holes that have matching ones in the case from a long night in Buffalo, it was in a sight better shape than me. Granted, I have no bullet holes, but who needs them when you’ve got cancer?

  “I want to learn a love song, Mark.”

  I looked up from the barre chord I was working on and nearly crapped my drawers. “Are you shi — kidding me?!” I was raised to not curse in front of a lady, especially a full-on beautiful one; even if that lady is Death. Yeah, that’s what I said. Death is a woman, and she wanted me to teach her a love song.

  “I’ll pay you.” She sat down next to me and vanilla drifted over to tickle my nose and tease me.

  “No disrespect, miss, but money’s not much use to me this late on.” She knew what I meant. None of my friends or family would have had a clue because none of them knew the cancer was back. Matter of fact, none of them had seen me in at least six months; not since I stood up at Easter dinner and told them I was heading out the next day to tour with a buddy and his band. I was to be the show’s MC, throwing out a little stand-up, a few song parodies, and keeping the boys out of all the small town jails waiting for 21st-century troubadours like us.

  Of course there was no tour. There wasn’t even a band. There was just my own Yamaha guitar, the Chevy and the wide-open state of Utah. And my tent, at least until I decided a few weeks ago to make my way up to St. George and spend what time I had left with a roof over my head.

  So, like I said, Death is a woman, at least to me. She’s a pretty, pony-tailed brunette with dark-green eyes and a little gap between her front teeth. She wears a well-loved, baggy, soft denim shirt with just enough buttons undone that her cleavage taunts me. Her jeans are tight enough so as to not hide her cute little butt and loose enough that she could spend three days in them on a saddled chestnut mare following trails wherever they lead without chaffing or burning. And she’s wearing sneakers. Simple, no-logo, timeless, white sneakers.

  “What payment would you accept? I can’t cure you, though I can help a little with the pain.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Can’t what? Teach me a love song?”

  “No, I can’t take payment.”

  “I insist.”

  She was a stubborn one, Death was, but I was no rookie either. “You’re hardly in a position to insist on anything.”

  “You do know who I am, don’t you? The power I have?”

  “I know exactly who you are. You’ve been standing just off to the side since I was a kid. With any face, in any shape, I’d know you.”

  “So then—”

  “But I’m not taking payment. If you pay me, all you’ll get is a song about love. If you just sit back and let me give you this one thing, then you’ll get a love song, a song from my heart to yours.”

  She got real quiet for a moment, caught off guard most likely. It’s nice to know that even Death can still be surprised.

  “How do you know I’ve got a heart? I’m not exactly mortal, with blood coursing through my veins.”

  “A heart isn’t about being a blood pump, and it doesn’t matter whether you have one or not, because I do.”

  “Yes, you most certainly do.” She gently placed her palm on my chest, over my heart. While she felt the rhythm of my life still beating, I noticed her long, slender fingers, her nails sh
ort, clean, and simple. She had good picker’s hands, as my teacher used to say. Chord shapes would come easily to those fingers and picking would be sure and quick with practise.

  “So, do you want to learn a song about love or do you want to learn a love song?”

  “You’ll teach me a love song?”

  “I’ve been playing love songs for you for the past ten years or so, so I suppose it’s time I teach you to play one yourself.” I traverse-picked a simple G-C-D progression to punctuate my point, but she put a hand on the strings to still them.

  “Back up a minute there. What do you mean, you’ve been playing love songs for me?”

  “Just what I said. What’s so tough to understand?”

  “You’re saying you love me?”

  “Love you, in love with you — yes’m.”

  “You love Death?”

  “Ever since the car accident. I saw you smile down at me lying on the shoulder of the I-65 and when you shook your head to say ‘not yet’, I was hooked.”

  “But—”

  “You’re in my dreams, waking and sleeping. You’re first in my thoughts in the morning and last in them at night. Everywhere I go, every happy laugh I hear, every taste that touches my tongue, every sunset I watch, you’re with me. Every perfect moment I want to share with you and every imperfect, painful moment I lean on the knowledge that you aren’t far away.”

  “You’re just in love with this form, this face.”

  “Is it your form? Your face?”

  “One of the many.”

  “Then that’s part of it. But there’s your essence, what makes you unique. Your light.”

  “I’m Death, Mark. My essence is death. My light is darkness.”

  “Not to me.”

  She wasn’t getting it. She didn’t know that love sees none of those things.

  “You’re not afraid?” she asked.