Danse Macabre: Close Encounters with the Reaper

by Nancy Kilpatrick

  “The rules are different here. Finding love isn’t about chance or destiny. It’s a journey of conscious thought, of choices and consequences.”

  “You’re waxing philosophic again,” I say.

  “And you’re stalling.” He points at the door. “Get in.”

  Moving with caution, I pull myself to standing, climb into the car, and put the key in the ignition. Still unsure as to which direction to take, I turn over the engine but it doesn’t catch.

  Again and again, I try to start the Mustang, growing more frustrated by the minute, though here time doesn’t seem the same. Convinced I’ve flooded the engine, I push the pedal all the way down, close my eyes, and remember that photograph of my grandparents by the railing.

  The engine starts. I give the gas pedal a few pumps, feeling the exhilaration of the horsepower under my control. When I look up, Death is gone. I am alone, stopped in the centre of a roundabout, with dozens of exits.

  I recall a moment with my mother, on a night when her warm arms wrapped around me, tucking me in. I shift the car into gear and take the first exit that tugs at my soul.

  * * * * *

  Originally from Toronto, Suzanne Church lives in Kitchener, Ontario with her two teenage sons. She is a 2011 and 2012 Aurora Award finalist for her short fiction. Her stories have appeared in Cicada and On Spec, and in several anthologies including Tesseracts 13 and 14. “Death Over Easy” is a scrambled combination of her love of greasy diner breakfasts and her fond remembrance of summer excursions with her grandparents.

  Mr. Go Away

  By Brad Carson

  Deputy Brian poked his head through the pine root fence that ran opposite their Ontario tobacco farm. “Bang! Ka-pow!” he shouted, aiming his colt .45 at Nasty Ned, the no-good bank-robber.

  Trooper barked a bullet in return. Deputy Brian ducked as the shot splintered wood. “Missed me, ya ornery cuss! Take that. Bang! Bang! Bang,” he said fanning his finger gun.

  But Nasty Ned didn’t die, didn’t even stop coming. He poked his big fluffy head through the fence and gave Brian a face-full of wet tongue.

  “Trooper, stop that!” Brian said. “You’re supposed to be Nasty Ned. How can I shoot you when you do that? Awwgh. Get back over there and play right.” Brian wiped his face and re-adjusted the silver deputy badge on the pocket of his cowboy shirt. “If Grandpa was still here, he’d show you how.”

  He stopped, tears filled his eyes. Marshal Grandpa had left the town to his deputy.

  Trooper’s tongue washed the tears away. Brian hugged him and then leapt up both guns blazing. “Bang! Bang!”

  Nasty Ned dropped to the ground, paws out-stretched, pink tongue dangling, then he barked twice.

  “Hey! I shot you first.” Brian said. “You can’t shoot me when you’re dead. You have to wait a count of ten then you get up. One two…”

  The lop-eared Lab mostly had the hang of playing cowboys. Of course, he couldn’t shoot a finger gun, because he didn’t have fingers and he couldn’t count to ten … well, because he didn’t have fingers, but the old dog was a lot more fun to play with than his sister who made Brian sit through boring tea parties and never really got the hang of dying.

  Trooper wasn’t as good at dying as Grandpa, but then Grandpa wasn’t playing anymore.

  Brian could hardly recall a time when Grandpa didn’t have a cig hanging from the corner of his mouth or the makings in his hands.

  “Why you smoke?” Brian asked one day.

  “Be like a beef farmer not eating meat,” Grandpa said, deftly rolling the tobacco-stuffed paper with wrinkled fingers and licking it shut.

  “Mom says them thing’s is gonna kill you.”

  “She tell you that?”

  “I heard it through the stove-pipe in my room.”

  “Well, don’t go believing everything you hear through stove-pipes.” They stepped inside the kiln. Grandpa buried his arm in hanging tobacco that Brian’s mom and the table gang had tied to sticks so it could cure. As usual, bits of flakes rained down on Brian, but he didn’t mind.

  Grandpa pulled out a golden leaf. “Feel how it’s dry, but still got some bounce? That means it’s in case. Ready to come out tomorrow.” They stepped back outside and Grandpa adjusted the temperature. “Everything’s going to die sometime. This tobacco, goes into the field a seedling, grows up then we put it in the kiln. The green goes out of it and it dries up and crumbles away”

  “You gonna crumble away?” Brian asked.

  Grandpa laughed. “Yeah, I suppose I am.” The laughter got harsher and louder and turned into a wheezing that made Grandpa’s eyes red. He held his chest just like the bad guys after a shoot-out, but still fished a red and white tipped match out of his vest.

  Before he could strike it, a long, skinny arm in a dusty dark sleeve snaked in with a flame flickering from a burning finger.

  The tall man wasn’t wearing a black hat, but Brian knew a bad guy when he saw one and blew the finger out. “Go away, Mister. Leave my Grandpa alone.”

  The man’s face got dark red, like Brian’s mom just before she yelled, and he flicked up another fire, but this one was skinny and weak. He glared at Brian as if it was his fault and burst into a raging flame that wrapped up Grandpa and the tobacco kiln behind him.

  “Go away!” Brian cried and blew on the fire as hard as he could.

  Flames disappeared as if they’d never been.

  Grandpa stared at Brian. “You okay? You look kind of funny.”

  “Did you see him?”

  “See who?”

  “A man. With a fire hand. He burned the kiln and…” But Grandpa wasn’t burned up. Neither was the kiln.

  “Is this a new game?” Grandpa asked.

  “I don’t know,” Brian said. He brushed off a bit of ash thinking that it must have fallen from Grandpa’s cig, until he noticed Grandpa was still holding the un-lit match.

  He grabbed the cig in his grandpa’s hand. His voice broke and tears rolled down his dusty cheeks. “Don’t smoke anymore, okay? Just don’t.”

  That night, his mom rousted him out of bed. “Brian, get dressed! One of the kilns is burning! Hurry! A stick of leaves must have fallen on top of the burners.”

  But Brian knew better, just as he knew which kiln it was before he saw the clouds of black smoke writhing around the inferno.

  Brian looked around for Mr. Go Away.

  Kiln fires didn’t happen often, but when one did, it scared everyone. Neighbors arrived from miles around to help, with their kids in tow, aiming their car headlights at the burn, although there wasn’t much they could do but huddle together and watch, waiting for a fire truck from town.

  His dad and Grandpa and a couple of the other men got out the tractor and chains and pulled the fuel tank away before it could explode. Tar-paper smoke circled around them, like Injuns surrounding soldiers.

  Grandpa inhaled an awful lot and afterwards couldn’t seem to stop coughing.

  The next morning his mom drove Grandpa to the hospital.

  Brian ran down the laneway chasing the car, shouting and waving.

  From the rear seat, Mr. Go Away waved back.

  “…eight, nine, ten!”

  Bark! Bark! Bark!

  Deputy Brian dodged the bullets and ran for cover. Nasty Ned followed fast. Brian turned to get off a quick shot and saw the pick-up truck barreling around the curve in the gravel road, Mr. Go Away at the wheel.

  Truck met dog with a too-real crunch. Trooper yelped. Brian screamed.

  Trooper lay on his side. Not moving. Not breathing. Blood trickled out of the dog’s nose and mouth.

  Brian hugged him. “Get up, Trooper. I didn’t even shoot you!” Tears blinded him, but he knew whose shadow stood over him.

  Mr. Go Away reached for Trooper. />
  Just like he’d reached for Grandpa. “Go away!” Brian shouted.

  The next minute Mr. Go Away was further down the road.

  “Get up, boy!” Brian pleaded.

  A sharp whistle sliced the air.

  And Trooper stood up.

  Or at least a Trooper did. He took a few steps away, then a few back. He looked at Brian. The whistle sounded again, harsher. Trooper whimpered and ran toward Mr. Go Away.

  “Trooper! Don’t leave me!” Brian looked down at his dead dog. It wasn’t right, wasn’t fair. Grandpa, Trooper. No!

  He pressed his face against Trooper’s ear and with all the belief he could muster he whispered, “Ten.”

  Trooper’s ear flicked, his legs kicked.

  “Ten!” Brian shouted. “Ten! Ten! Ten!” The old dog licked Brian’s laughing face, his tail thumping the ground.

  Mr. Go Away roared over top of them, tall as a tree. His mouth opened wider than an empty barn and a huge sucking wind tried to rip Trooper out of Brian’s arms.

  “You, go away!” Brian shouted. He dug his fingers into the soft fur and held on as tight as he could, but felt Trooper slipping away from him.

  “Need a hand, Deputy?” and Grandpa was there, a big, bright golden star, blazing on his chest. “I’ll take care of Nasty Ned,” he said, “You get that cayoot.”

  Deputy Brian stood up; his hands hovered above his guns.

  A snaky arm snapped towards him, but he drew his pearl handled Colts like greased lightning and fired, screaming louder than the roaring wind, “Go away!”

  Something streamed from deep inside and a bullet forged in the real world of play traced a shining path straight into the monster’s howling mouth.

  A bright light flashed. Mr. Go Away exploded.

  Darkness thundered over Brian, knocking him down.

  He awoke to a big wet tongue.

  “I got him, Grandpa!” he jumped up shouting, “I got him!”

  But there was no Grandpa. No Nasty Ned.

  Only his dog Trooper, tongue lolling, tail thumping, drooling Trooper.

  He looked down at his guns, and saw they were really only fingers, and his silver badge, well, that was just a piece of cardboard his mom had cut out and wrapped in foil.

  But his cowboy shirt hung in tatters and he could feel a burn on his skin.

  He knew he would never see Mr. Go Away again. And in a kind of grown up way which he hadn’t felt before, he knew he would never, ever defeat him again.

  He whistled for his dog and they went home.

  * * * * *

  Born and raised on a tobacco farm, (where he played cowboys), Brad Carson learned the craft of writing dialogue and the value of strong coffee while working in theatre. A 2009 finalist for an Aurora Award, he has sat beneath hundred year old oaks in Wistman’s Woods in Dartmoor, and wandered Druid paths in Snowdonia. He currently resides with his writing partner Arlene Stinchcombe in Norfolk County where they listen to the trees whisper stories. One night while contemplating childhood loss, the veil shimmered; “Mr. Go Away” appeared and wouldn’t go away until the tale was told.

  A Song for Death

  By Angela Roberts

  The song filled her like it always did when she sang for the dying, the notes infusing her skin with the tingle of their vibration. She closed her eyes and was no longer in the crowded hospital tent. She was bathed in the sunlight of the feast day when she first heard this song. The thin shaking hand that clutched at hers now became a strong firm hand, wanting to join her in the dance circle. The moans and soft sobbing turned into laughter. And through it all, the song poured from her throat, a song that spoke of happier times, before the gripe pneumónica, before the Great War.

  The last of the woman’s strength left her and she released Ana’s hand. Ana opened her eyes and the dream was gone. She felt a pang of disappointment at viewing her stark surroundings. The dirty white canvas hospital tents were a blight on the venerable whitewashed walls and clay-slatted roofs of Leiria.

  It seemed as if the whole of Portugal had come to this small rural town because they’d heard that there was a doctor. Young men in short coats and fishermen’s breeches lay on military-style cots next to young women in wide dark skirts and white blouses, paisley kerchiefs binding their hair. Her husband had said that The Spanish Lady had come to Portugal. He had seen that term for the gripe pneumónica in the letters that continued to come to him from his British medical colleagues. It was an expression so bizarre to Ana that she had laughed when he tried to explain it in Portuguese.

  The patients who came did not know that the doctor was dead. That he had departed only a few months before when the world-spanning epidemic returned in force. She had many of his letters to answer, when she could bring herself to do so.

  She felt for the young woman’s pulse as Ana’s husband had taught her to do in those carefree days when it had been a lark, a love game between the two of them, feeling each other’s heartbeats. That had been before he died coughing in her arms. Before he’d returned with the remnants of the Expeditionary Corps a haunted man who cried out in his dreams.

  The woman was dead, a peaceful smile curling the corners of her lips. Ana had not even known her name.

  “You should not sing with your mask off, Mistress Ana,” said a soft stern voice above her.

  Ana shrugged and pulled the sheet over the woman’s face. She could at least say she had brought some comfort to her at the end.

  A distant sound of mourning reached Ana’s ears and she lifted the tent flap to see what the commotion was. A funeral cortege was passing, a small entourage escorting a plain wooden box on its way to the cemetery. Three women draped in black wailed and beat their chests. Most bystanders barely looked up as the group went through the square. Funerals had become so commonplace that the busiest men in town were the gravediggers and the priest. There were so few people not sick that the old and young had been forced to go out into the fields just to ensure the town had food.

  “Some are calling you the angel of death,” said the voice again.

  Ana turned sharply to face the source of that voice. Sister Maria Graciete clasped her hands in front of her black-robed stomach, a white mask covering the lower half of her face so that, with her wimple, all one could see of her head were her eyes and the bridge of her nose. Even toiling eighteen hours a day in this tent could not prevent the nun from maintaining her impeccable composure.

  “I tell them that is blasphemy, of course,” the Sister continued.

  “I do not care what they call me,” said Ana. Blasphemy. Do we not live in blasphemous times, she could almost hear her husband say. What kind of God would condone such death? Would take the young and strong, the pregnant? Her beloved Ricardo had been a socialist, and when he spoke in that passionate voice of his, she supposed that she was too. Ana had not been educated enough to read his thick books, had never learned English and German as he had, but when he spoke of Marx and Lenin and Trotsky, it had all seemed right to her. She had shared his joy when he wrote to her from the trenches about the Bolshevik revolution, so far away yet seeming so close when he wrote of it, even if she had not understood all of its implications. It all seemed hollow now.

  Ana reached up to replace her face mask and a cough erupted from her chest. Pain stung her lungs and throat. The back of her throat itched madly and she coughed again. And again, doubling over, her face swelling with the force of her coughs. She was dimly aware of Sister Maria thrusting a cup of water into her hands and lifting her hands to her lips.

  The water drowned the cough. Ana straightened, her lungs still reflexively heaving, her face hot and red. She waved away Sister Maria’s hovering concern, and replaced her mask.

  “Ay Jesus!” Ana, surprised by the profanity escaping the prim nun’s lips, looked down at the white mask.
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  The mask was spotted with bright red blood.

  The cobblestone streets of the town were terribly silent at night. All public gatherings were forbidden because of the gripe pneumónica. The cafés were dark, the community hall shut and silent, the church closed off with a thick chain around the great brass door handles. Here and there a light shone in a window, but no voices broke the silence as Ana made her way towards the fountain in the town square.

  The gas lamps lit the street in isolated circles of light only a few feet across. Between them lay pitch darkness. Ana hurried through the dark patches, feeling her way along the rough pockmarked walls. Every time she stepped through the boundary between light and dark, she felt that she was being watched.

  She reached the town square and its fountain, the trickling of water into its basin the only sound. This was the best-lit place in the entire town, but to Ana’s eyes, the light seemed to make more substantial shadows on the structures. She tread lightly on the cobblestones, uncomfortably aware of every footfall.

  The fountain was older than the great stone church behind it. A statue of a woman elegantly poured water from a jug into the basin, a lamb reclining at her feet. The fine details of her face and dress had worn away with time, but one could still make out the serene curve of her lips as she gazed down into the water. Townsfolk had ringed the Lady with tiny lit candles and offerings of flowers, bread and fruit. The fountain had long ago been dedicated to the Virgin, but Ricardo had told her once that it belonged to a goddess much older and more powerful.

  It mattered not who was listening, as long as someone was. Ana knelt at the edge of the basin and clasped her hands, resting her elbows on the stone edge. She still clutched the blood-stained mask in her fingers, the red livid against the white. She closed her eyes and tried to think of what to say. It had been so long since she’d prayed, not since before she was married, when her grandmother, iron-gray hair bound in a long braid, had insisted that her son’s grown daughter join her in evening prayers. Ana remembered that braid and steel black-clad back more than she did the words she’d mumbled.