Danse Macabre: Close Encounters with the Reaper

by Nancy Kilpatrick

  There was just one woman standing close by the wall here, looking at a picture of Lee Redmond when she held the world record for the longest fingernails. Lee’s fingernails curved in extreme arcs in front of her, giving the impression that she stood inside a cage that she had grown from her own hands. As Harald considered this image he pursed his lips and, without thinking about it, made a small sympathetic humming noise.

  The woman must have thought the noise was intended to get her attention because she turned to look at him. She had a very pale face, with eyelashes and brows so fair as to be almost invisible. Her lips were startlingly dark in contrast, purplish, as though all the blood in her head had decided to settle there. The color did not look like lipstick, although it might have been some sort of stain.

  He was thoroughly flustered. He opened his mouth, poised to speak, but failed to think of anything to say. It seemed like at least five minutes before he finally managed, “I don’t usually have anything to do with these sorts of things.”

  She continued to look at him, not replying. Somehow he had assumed she was Icelandic. Her black jacket and long black skirt reminded him of the traditional costumes that were sometimes brought out for tedious rural celebrations, except that hers bore no embroidery.

  “Do you understand what I’m saying?” he asked, sticking to Icelandic. He had no interest in trying to communicate in any other language, and had done his best to forget the little bit of Danish and English he had been forced to take in school.

  “I understand,” she replied. “You would much rather be at home, working on your sculptures.”

  She had recognized him! He was surprised at just how flattered he was by that. He supposed he must be getting to the stage of life where it was a novelty to be of any interest to a woman. She was not exactly attractive, perhaps because of her unnerving way of staring, but she possessed an unusual elegance that intrigued him.

  Before he had thought of a suitable reply, she said, “I don’t often bother talking to people either.” There was a flatness about the way she spoke, rather like that of a person who is too tired to put emotion into their voice. He wondered if it was some sort of Gothic affectation, to go with the black outfit.

  “And is there something you would rather be working on too?”

  “Actually, I do have a project of my own.”

  That explained how she had recognized him, then: a fellow hobbyist. He made up his mind to be gracious and encouraging. “Well, tell me about it. What is this project? How long have you been at it?”

  “Oh, a very long time. I’m building a ship out of nails. Fingernails and toenails.”

  Harald had trouble picturing that. He assumed she meant the little crescent shaped trimmings from nails: slender, uneven things. Some sort of glue must be involved, and the nails would have to overlap each other in layers to get anything remotely sturdy. He glanced at his own fingernails, with their thick strips of white. His father, who milked a flock of horned shaggy-wooled sheep every morning, believed nails should always be trimmed close. Harald had developed the habit of being careless about trimming during his surly teenage years. And it was useful sometimes to have longer nails: they allowed a certain precision of gripping, of creasing, of separating small things from one another. They let you touch a thing without having to actually feel it against your flesh. “How big of a ship?” he asked.

  “It will carry an army of giants.”

  “So you are a gamer!” He decided not to mention his opinion of the sort of hobbies in which most of the creative part — the conception — is already done for the hobbyist. He leaned towards gracious and encouraging. “But you are making this ship from scratch?”

  “So to speak.” A little smile quirked her lips as though he had made a joke.

  “That is good. Very good. It might be worth claiming as a record once it is done, though you would probably want to leave out the giants.” He had a feeling that he had actually heard of someone making a ship out of fingernails before, but even if it had been registered as a record, hers might be heavier or longer or something.

  “I think it will be a while yet, but I see the end in sight,” she said.

  “So much the better. Anyone can climb a mole-hill without breaking a sweat. Always stick to your vision; don’t compromise. Never compromise.”

  “I don’t.”

  Harald could not think of any more encouraging things to say, which he supposed meant that he should let the conversation die. But instead he found himself asking, “Do you live in the city?”

  “No, but I come here often.”

  “Visiting family?”

  She hesitated a little, and then said. “I don’t see much of my family.”

  “Neither do I, except for my father. We both live out on the old farm; everyone else moved away. I haven’t seen my brother in six years.”

  “My brothers were just small when I saw them last.” For the first time there was a definite emotion in her voice: a fierce bitterness which made Harald wish he had avoided the topic of families. He had a feeling that this woman’s life story would turn out to be something ghastly, and he felt he had already said enough about his own family. His brother’s last visit was still a sore point: he had gone on about coming all this way and they would hardly talk to him, as though their father had ever spared more than four words in a row for anyone without that many hooves.

  “Do you have any pictures of your work?” he asked. On those occasions when he ended up discussing his work with other people, they usually asked him that. He had even gone to the trouble of putting a few snapshots on his phone that morning so he would seem prepared for a change, though in hindsight it was a bit redundant when he could just point to a corner of the room.

  “Would you like to see it?” she asked.

  “Yes, of course.” That was an easy one. The conversation was back under control.

  “You can look at it today, when you come back to my place.”

  Harald was very glad he was not drinking anything, because he was sure he would have sprayed it all over that black jacket. Was she propositioning him?

  He was not even close to figuring out how to respond when she asked, “Do you ever feel as though you are half dead?”

  That definitely did not sound flirtatious: he should have known better than to get his hopes up. But he still found himself scrambling for something intelligent to say. People had asked him before whether he didn’t feel he was missing out on life by spending so much time on his hobbies. He had always dismissed the question. They did not understand the wonderful peace that he felt when he was engaged in his work, when the world seemed to go away, and time seemed to stand still. If he had been sure that was all she meant, he would simply have told her that if she felt that way she should do something else. And yet he got the impression that she did understand, that perhaps she understood too well. There were times when, if he was completely honest, he would finally look at the clock after being up half the night and feel as though he had not experienced anything at all … as though he somehow wasn’t really inside himself…

  “Doesn’t everyone?” he said.

  “Some people feel too much alive,” she said. There was no sympathy in her voice at all. “And some people are so hardened off that hardly anything touches them to the quick.”

  Her words made Harald think of how unbearable life had been when he was a boy, when he had felt everything so intensely. He supposed he must admit to being hardened now. But would he be any less hardened if he had spent his work years at some city job, putting his energy into things that meant nothing to him, and coming home to some flat just like every other flat in an apartment building just like every other apartment building? He thought not. Instead he might have lost that part of himself that still thrilled at the idea of a new challenge.

  He did not try to express these
thoughts out loud; they were too personal. Instead, he fell back on a speech of a sort he had made many times before. “It seems to me that people these days aren’t so much hardened as hypnotized. They are so distracted by all their computer games and text messages and television shows, they never have an original thought.”

  She looked him right in the eye as he said this, and silently held the gaze for long enough afterwards that his own words began to strike him as pretentious and even ridiculous. Just how did you decide what was or was not an original thought anyway? He had no idea.

  Finally she said, “Of all the distractions people have come up with, the only one that has ever struck me as more foolish than the others was the pursuit of fame.”

  Harald bumped his shoulder into the typewriter DNA thing, and realized that he had been unconsciously backing away from her. He felt suddenly off balance, and put his hand on one of the typewriter casings to steady himself.

  The sculpture tipped. As he made a startled leap to one side, the sleeve of his sweater caught on one of those things which you press to go down a line. It made a noise like a little bell and the whole helical monstrosity changed direction, grazing his shoulder as it plunged toward the middle of the room. It struck the floor and the entire room felt as if it was shaking. Harald’s feet slipped out from under him, dropping him onto his knees.

  When he recovered his equilibrium, he discovered that the woman was sprawled on the floor with one foot caught beneath the sculpture, twisted to an unnatural angle. “I’m so sorry,” he squeaked, not sure if she even heard him over all the voices in the room which had now risen in the commotion.

  She pulled her skirt up. The stench hit Harald first, and then he saw her legs. They were gangrenous black, the flesh rotted and shrivelled against the bone. The foot of the caught leg had pulled apart at the knee, bones showing through on either side. There was no blood, only a foul dampness where the inner tissues had separated.

  She grasped the foot and pulled it loose, lined the two parts of the leg up neatly, and then popped the knee back together. A pustulant ooze seeped out, coagulating over the joint.

  Harald’s stomach lurched toward his throat and he made a desperate effort to avoid retching, choking the cry which had started to escape his lips.

  The woman looked at him, at first with the exact same unnerving calm as before. Then her lips curled back from her teeth, her head rocked backward, and she began to shake with laughter.

  Harald lost the battle with his nausea; he had no chance of making it out of the room, but he managed to turn and propel himself into the corner in time. There was not much in his stomach, but for some time he could not seem to stop heaving up little drips of bile. He was in no hurry to turn around. He needed to get his head together first and come to grips with the fact that what he thought he had seen must actually have been some sort of hallucination. Right now, the stench was still in his nostrils, and the laughter continued to echo in his ears.

  Suddenly he remembered where he had heard about a ship made of fingernails. It was from his grandmother’s story, the one which he had been making light of just a little while before. Naglfar: that was the name of the ship. It belonged to Hel, who ruled over the dead, who was half immortal and half corpse. Since the first human beings walked the earth, she had been building Naglfar from the nails of the dead. She would be finished at the end of time, when she would take the ship to join her monstrous brethren — Fenrir and world-encircling serpent Jormungandr — in their war against the gods.

  The story did not strike him as humorous now; against his will, it was taking on a horrible reality in his mind. He did not want to see that ship. He did not want to imagine how many nails had been added to it, one by one, generation after generation, from the bodies of people who had lived and died and been forgotten.

  The whole room heaved around him, and not because anything else had fallen, or because his nausea was making him dizzy. This time there was no mistaking that it was something much bigger.

  Harald tried to stand but failed. He pressed himself into the corner as the shaking grew stronger and the walls buckled. People were yelling and shrieking and he could make out that some were calling for help and others helpfully letting everyone know that it was an earthquake.

  All around him panels and plaster came down, striking him, burying him. Frantically, he tried to fight his way upward against what piled on top of him, grasping and scraping. His lungs burned, and soon he could tell that he was only shifting a bit of loose debris beneath heavier things which were settling inexorably. But he refused to give up the struggle. Even though it would make no difference, even though nobody would remember, he was not going to compromise and give up the struggle. Even though he felt his fingernails being torn down to the quick.

  * * * * *

  J. Y. T. Kennedy writes mostly science fiction and fantasy, and has had one novel, Dominion, published by DragonMoon Press. She lives in Alberta, and keeps a few sheep but doesn’t milk them. She has had a lifelong interest in myth, legend and folklore, and performs as a storyteller mostly as an excuse to revisit favorite old tales and learn new ones. She was struck by the idea of Hel as the ultimate obsessive hobbyist when listening to an audiobook of Norse myths with her children.

  Ghost nor Bogle Shalt Thou Fear

  By William Meikle

  I heard the yell of pain outside in the yard. By the time I got to him, old lady Malcolm from next door was at his side. My friend Doug lay on the ground next to a still buzzing saw, curled up in a fetal position. The old lady bent over him and managed to pry his good hand away from the wound on his arm. She sucked through her teeth.

  “How bad is it?” I asked.

  “Bad enough. He needs to get to the hospital, and quick.”

  The old lady tried to stand and lift Doug at the same time. He was a dead weight. His eyes rolled up in their sockets, and when I took the weight off Ms. Malcolm he fainted in my arms. He had his injured arm wrapped in the folds of his jacket … a jacket that was already soaked in blood, black in the shadows in the yard.

  Mrs. Malcolm got in the back with Doug.

  “Don’t be waiting too long at any lights,” she said. “Your pal need stitches … lots of stitches.”

  I reversed out of the yard at top speed before doing a handbrake turn onto the road. I went through the first junction at fifty and got faster after that. Lucky for us, the traffic was light.

  The old lady kept up a constant stream of chat, interspersed with singing soft childhood songs while cradling Doug’s head in her lap. For one verse in particular she raised her voice, the song echoing high and clear inside the car.

  “Ghost nor bogle shalt thou fear,”

  “Thou art to love and heaven so dear,”

  “Naught of ill may come thee near,”

  “My bonnie dearie.”

  I was afraid to look in the mirror. My own grandmother had sung those self-same words to me, every time I hurt, every night when she sang me to sleep. I hoped they comforted Doug as much as they did me.

  When we got to a long straight stretch of road she leaned forward.

  “I could do with a cigarette, if you’ve got one.”

  I didn’t like the way my hands shook as I tried to light the cigarette, and in the end I handed the pack and lighter to her to do it for me.

  “How’s he doing?” I asked, as she handed a lit cigarette back over my shoulder.

  “He’s alive,” she said.

  That was all, but I heard the rest in her tone, the two unspoken words.

  For now.

  I was doing nearly eighty when I saw the sign for the ER and I went over the speed bumps in the hospital drive still doing fifty … the car’s suspension held up to it, but the old lady cursed long and loud in the back. I guessed she had known a few sailors in her time.

  I hit t
he car park at thirty and came to a halt in a bay ten yards from the brightly-lit entrance.

  “Help us. We’ve got a badly hurt man here!” I shouted as I opened the car door.

  I’d seen the movies and television shows. I was expecting ER doctors and nurses to dash out to our aid, gurneys rattling, perfect teeth gleaming in the headlights. But there was no movement, either in the car park or in the well-lit hall behind the entrance doors.

  “Help! Injured man here!” I shouted again as we manhandled Doug through the doors and into reception.

  Two rows of waiting patients turned and stared blankly in our direction. Behind a heavily fortified reception area a matronly woman with a blue rinse perm looked me up and down.

  “You’ll live,” she said to me. “Take a seat. There’ll be a doctor free in a couple of hours.” She dismissed me with a wave of her hand and went back to filling in forms in tiny, neat, capital letters.

  “I’ll just leave this one with you then,” I said, and on cue Doug woke long enough to raise his arm and bring it down close to the ten-inch square hole in the reinforced glass that shielded her. Blood spurted in through the opening, a small red fountain that covered her, her desk and all the paperwork in front of her.

  She shrieked.

  “I’ll have security onto you,” she said to Doug.

  “You’d better hurry then,” the old lady said. “For I don’t think he’s hanging around for long.”

  Doug slumped against the screen, smearing more blood down the glass as he fell forward. His eyes rolled up in their sockets and I only just got a hand under his jaw before he smacked it on the desk.

  Finally, the receptionist hit the panic button, and I was gratified to see that the doctors moved just as fast as the ones on television. What they lacked in expensive dentistry they made up for in speed. One minute we had Doug in our arms, the next he lay on a gurney. An ancient janitor wheeled a bucket over and started cleaning up the blood.