Danse Macabre: Close Encounters with the Reaper

by Nancy Kilpatrick

  Twiggs detected a hint of vehemence every time Sam mentioned the progenitor’s name. He didn’t take offense.

  “I take it you weren’t an admirer of Adam.”

  “That brutish ape!” Sam said, a terrible anger flashing across his face. “Naming the beasts and birds as if they were his. And then….”

  “What?”

  “Lilith would go away from him. She would come to a far corner of the Garden, and we would speak.”

  “About what?”

  “About the secrets of the universe, about God and the angels. She was like a child, hungry for anything I would teach her. She could learn nothing from the man. One day, he caught us speaking. He raged at her, ‘till all his pitiful blood was in his face. He threw her down, tried to mount her like a dog, as he always did. She would not submit to him. She raised such a clamor that the angels came to see, and God too.

  “I stood helpless at the boundary of the Garden as Adam accused her and demanded of his Creator a more facile mate. Demanded! As though he were owed. God questioned Lilith, and her only answer was to run. She ran from the Garden, into my arms. Out of that lush prison, I swept her into the air. We flew across the world, embracing again and again in a passion that made Creation quake.”

  “Pardon me,” Twiggs interrupted. “But when you say you embracing, what you mean to say is, you …. ah …. copulated?”

  Sam blinked. “What did you think I meant?”

  “But … how is that possible?”

  “It would be hard for you to understand,” Sam said. “Angels could never mimic mortal bodies because being spirit, we’d had no experience with mortal flesh. It was forbidden. The moment she embraced me however, I knew her and she knew me. We found a middle ground, so to speak, and so—”

  “Yeah, that’s not what I meant either. Uh … how do I put this? Even in this middle ground, were you uh … equipped to…?”

  He gestured to Sam’s lap, hoping it would be enough to get his point across.

  Sam cocked his head, then seemed to follow his thought.

  “You are getting ahead of the story.”

  “Sorry. I hope I didn’t offend you.”

  “Where was I?”

  “Copulating over Creation.”

  “Ah yes. The fruit of our passion seeded the earth with demons.”

  “Demons?”

  “Yes. There were no demons before then, only fallen angels. The offspring of Lilith and I were the first. The first four were daughters. We named them Lilit, Agrat, Nehema, and Eisheth. They were born almost simultaneously, at great pain to Lilith. More, they were hideous.”

  “Never heard a father refer to his offspring like that before.”

  “They were,” Sam reiterated. “Bestial. As demons they could control their aspect, but as infants they did not know how. Lilith was terrified by them. She thought them monsters, a curse from God. She ran from me.”

  “Left you with them?”

  “Yes. These were new beings. I didn’t even understand them. They matured almost overnight. They came to me, each of them, in the guise of my Lilith.”

  He paused, and fixed Twiggs with a meaningful glance.”For four nights I thought she had returned to me.”

  “I see where you’re going here,” Twiggs said soberly, reminded of the sin of Lot and his daughters. “How’d you find out it wasn’t her?”

  “God sent Michael the archangel to me and he revealed their treachery out in the wastes. My daughters fled, and Michael told me that Lilith and our offspring were filling the world with demons, and it couldn’t be allowed to continue. I tried to fight him, but the Lord was with him. He cut me, as you see me, so I couldn’t father others. Then I was bound over to be sentenced.”

  “To become the Angel of Death?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you ever see Lilith again?”

  “Once. We were tried together with God our judge and the archangels our jury. In the time we had been away, Adam and Eve had been ousted from the Garden, thanks to Lucifer. Adam blamed Eve as usual, and wandered away from her. He found Lilith in the land of Nod. For a time they were together.” He chuckled. “I suppose she saw the light again though, and left him. But I had taught her strange arts, and she begat demons with him too. Our coupling had made her something more than human. She was caught fleeing across the ocean, and bargained for her life. She allowed a hundred of her children to die every day, but retained the powers she had been given. She was made immortal, and I became psychopomp to the dying.”

  “So you can never meet again,” Twiggs said.

  “I remember the last time I saw her, before they sealed me in this prison. She was clothed in animal skins. I had never seen such a thing. She was a fierce, golden spirit twice-wrapped in death. So willful. She would have stared God in the face if that act wouldn’t have burned her to nothingness. But she didn’t even look at Michael as he passed sentence. She looked at me. And there were tears running from her eyes. The blood of the human soul.”

  They were quiet for a long time, Death and Twiggs. Death’s thoughts were inscrutable, but Twiggs’ were of Junia and the last time he’d seen her. It was the last time he would ever see her.

  “For the first thousand years,” Sam said, “I punished you mortals. I tore your souls from this earth and shook you like babes wakened in the night by enemy soldiers. I flung you into hell wailing. I laughed to see you scream. I concocted new perversities to inflict upon every soul I was called to claim, and each one I think plummeted into hell a little less sane than the last. I think I was insane myself. I have danced with the dying, swung them around and around to music only I could hear, only to cast them into the inferno on the last go ‘round. I emptied my heart in hatred of you until I became a great scar. Then my sadism bored me, and I spoke little at all. All the crimes I committed were useless. No soul came to me dreading what I had done before. Each feared only the change I represented. Once I sat silently on the soul of a man for eight years, just to watch him gibber beneath me like an animal.”

  “Well,” said Twiggs, “I’m glad you’re past that period, anyway.”

  “In time,” Sam went on, “I do not know how long, I became curious about humanity. I asked every soul about the world. I learned of man’s wars, of the plagues that brought him to me in droves, of the progress and failures of his civilization. But soon that fanned the hatred in me again, because I could not see these things myself. From time to time I asked about Lilith and occasionally heard rumors, but no one knew of her. Sometimes, I forced the souls of young women to mimic her. It was never the same.”

  “Do you still hate us?”

  “Not anymore. Learned men came to me and begged me to let them stay. They wanted to see their work bear fruit. Artists, poets, leaders. But this could never be. Only one soul at a time, and so I threw them out with the rest. Such a waste. I began to pity you your mortality.”

  “Do you still?”

  “Now I envy it. As long as men are born, no one will ever come for me, Mr. Twiggs. You live your lives and pass into something else. I go on and on without change.”

  Twiggs sat quietly, ashamed at his earlier thoughts of betrayal. Could he do nothing to help this poor creature?

  “Sam, what if I took your sword there and—?”

  Sam shook his head. “It will not cut me.” Then, after a moment, he put his hand over Twiggs’s and smiled. “Thank you, though.”

  Twiggs shuddered. Death’s touch was colder than the bottom of the river where he’d expired.

  Sam rose and stretched his long limbs. The moon was gone leaving the sky above in total darkness, though the east was purpling with a deep blue spreading over the rim of the earth. Somewhere a bird sang in anticipation.

  “That is all there is to tell,” Sam said.

  “It’s
a helluva story,” Twiggs said. “Hope to tell it to someone else someday.”

  Sam’s expression was flat, and Twiggs realized he’d been fishing. He thought he had him then.

  “If you don’t know what happens to me, how do you know about hell?”

  “I was told to tell you at my sentencing. It’s my only other duty. If it is a lie, I would not know.”

  “God is a vindictive sonofabitch, isn’t he?” said Twiggs.

  “I think He’s forgotten me.”

  “I won’t.”

  “You do not know that.”

  “What happens now?” Twiggs asked, fighting down that trembling again.

  “Put your hand by the crown of your head. Up near the back,” Sam suggested.

  Twiggs did. There was something there. It felt like a strand of cobwebs between his fingers, but it was attached to his skull. No, that wasn’t right. It was a part of him, coming out of his head. Touching it made him swoon. The world seemed to jar and bend around him, as if everything hung from that tether.

  “What is it?” he whispered, afraid.

  “It binds you to this world. My sword will cut it.” He pulled the sword out of the earth. The blade was still clean and pure.

  “Will it hurt?”

  “I do not know.”

  Twiggs wiped his mouth with a shaking hand. He tried to stand up, failed, and stood again.

  “Are you ready?” said Sam.

  Twiggs looked at the river beneath which his corpse lay. He looked all around, taking in the dark desert, wishing he could see more, wishing the sun would hurry the horizon. A small tecolote swooped into its little roost, a hole in a saguaro. He wanted to take it all in, take it with him, but dawn was a long way off. He found the sight he lingered on most was somewhere behind his eyes.

  “Can I tell you why I didn’t hunt me up a shootist and make a name for myself in the dime novels, Sam?”

  “It can’t take long,” said Sam, not unkindly, but firmly.

  “It was a woman too. Her name was Junia. We loved each other from the get go. But her pa was a powerful man. He wouldn’t let us be. Sent her abroad. Fixed her up with some rich swell. He wouldn’t have me for a son-in-law, so I made myself his enemy. Went after him with everything I had. Dug up every murderous deed, every underhanded thing he’d ever done and held it up for everybody to see. Made it my life, digging in the dirt. Didn’t even get me a grave. Women and fortune. They drive us down strange roads, don’t they, Sam?”

  “Yes.”

  “Will I remember her?”

  “I do not know.”

  Then Twiggs felt a buildup deep inside him, something he’d been holding back. He wasn’t the sort to panic, but here he was, sitting by the dark water, and it would be the last sight he ever saw in this world. It should’ve been a waterfall, or a sunny meadow, or children playing. Junia ought to be here, holding his hand, a wrinkled old liver-spotted hand with a band of gold on the finger. God, did he have to die alone? He thought about how he had played with his life in the past, put so many things off. Now he wanted it back. He wanted it all back. And it was drifting away quicker than the river over his bones.

  “What is this? A goddamned game? Why do I have to die? What’s next?” he spluttered, losing his composure. He put his face in his hands.

  The Angel of Death waited patiently.

  “I broke my promise. I’m sorry,” he said after a minute.

  “No matter.”

  “Well,” sighed Twiggs, hugging himself, though his body was already gone. “I’m sorry for your troubles. And I do thank you for the exclusive.”

  “Thank you for listening, Barry.”

  It was good to hear his own name.

  “Go on.”

  Sam raised the sword. His face was placid. He tried to show empathy, and perhaps he did feel it, but it was a bootless, comical gesture, a thing with no hope trying to give hope to one who had lost it.

  In the moment the sword tilted back. Twiggs saw great black wings over Sam’s shoulders, like a crow’s.

  There had been crows like that around the farm in Shreveport when he was a boy. They would perch on the fence posts and chase the sparrows through the willow trees. He pitched rocks up at those crows, feeling for the little birds. Once he’d killed one dead.

  He closed his eyes.

  The sword cut the air and parted the ethereal chord. Twiggs came apart like a stack of copy sheets in the wind, swirled on the etheric breeze, and went off into the dark.

  Sam lay the sword across his shoulder and walked on down the river.

  * * * * *

  Edward M. Erdelac is the author of Dubaku, The Crawlin’ Chaos Blues, and the acclaimed Merkabah Rider weird western series for Damnation Books (in which Samael, The Angel of Death, and his paramour Lilith both appear), Red Sails for Lyrical Press, and Buff Tea from Texas Review Press. A member of the HWA, his fiction has appeared in Murky Depths Magazine, The Midnight Diner, The Trigger Reflex from Pill Hill, and Comet Press’ DEADCORE anthology. In 2009 he wrote, shot, and produced an independent film, Meaner Than Hell. He has also written for Starwars.com, and contributed an entry to The Complete Star Wars Encyclopedia.

  For I Must Be About My Father’s Work

  By Brian Hodge

  He could pass for normal when he had to. Which was most of the time, actually. Family man, businessman, everyman, each of them one kind of mask or another. A man could hide a lot behind masks like that. Behind what everyone else expected to see. But whenever he walked into a place like this — the cold, stark hollow of this warehouse — gearing up to get down to work, the true work, then he could drop the masks and get real. No more family man, businessman, everyman. Now he was the Bagman. They saw him and just knew. Knew that at least one person who’d also walked into the place wouldn’t be coming out alive.

  Like this one. Casey MacKenna — his name was pretty much all the Bagman knew about him. His name, and that tonight was his last night on earth. Anything else was trivia.

  “Aw God,” was the first thing out of his mouth. “No…”

  Guys like Casey, even if they’d never laid eyes on him before, they knew him the moment they saw him, because they knew about him. Knew about him the same as children know about bogeymen. His reputation preceded him the way a snot-colored sky preceded a hurricane. Thieves, thugs, hijackers, extortionists, and the rest, if they’d worked one of Ritchie Scanlon’s crews long enough, then they knew. New guys, the punks just coming up, maybe they didn’t, if their roots didn’t run deep enough. They’d hear Bagman and think in small letters. They’d think some guy doing deliveries.

  But no. It was Bag as in body bag.

  “Aw, fuck me, no…”

  He wasn’t even pointing the gun yet, but Casey MacKenna remained planted in the same spot like he’d never known the meaning of the word run. That was the power of reputation. It sucked the breath from a guy’s lungs and cut the nerves in his legs without the Bagman having to say a word.

  “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph…”

  Casey would’ve heard the stories. Heard them, retold them, keeping the legend alive. Like the time the Bagman had dumped a corpse by loading it in the trunk of an old car and driving to the scrapyard. While the car was dangling from the giant claw and the crane was swinging it toward the crusher, that’s when you could hear the guy screaming and trying to pound his way out.

  Or the time he’d tied an underboss to a post and turned loose the dogs he hadn’t fed for a week. How he’d set up a camcorder on a tripod for that one. Because the boss who ordered it done wanted proof that it hadn’t been quick, or neat, or clean.

  Or the time he’d knocked an informant down with a baseball bat, then finished him off by stomping him with his size 18’s, later explaining he couldn’t use the bat anymore because he thought he�
��d torn his rotator cuff.

  The stories were all like that, each one worse than the last, until you couldn’t be sure what was true and what had grown in the telling, like the size of a fish. But they all sounded true, and that was all that mattered. He wanted them all to believe the worst — that Death walked among them — and they did. Even if they laughed during the telling. They’d laugh like they’d never heard anything so funny.

  Casey too — the Bagman would’ve bet money on it. Casey too stupid to believe there could ever be the slightest chance that he himself could wind up on the bad side of one of these stories. That the same guys he thought were his friends might someday be sitting around the same table telling a new story with him at the center of it.

  These would’ve been the same friends who’d gotten him here tonight. We need to go to the warehouse to meet some other guys about a truckload of stolen office equipment — whatever their story was. Another story for why they had to duck out for a minute. Some guy complaining about low blood sugar, maybe, and that he had to go get a candy bar. Be right back, Casey. You stay right here.

  “Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death…”

  This was the common denominator. They all got religion at the end. Still, you had to hand it to Casey MacKenna — he was really good at it. Jesus this, God that, have mercy, help me help me help me. He was a savant, Rain Man with prayers on his lips. Or maybe it was a Tourette’s thing, everything he’d learned twenty years ago during confirmation classes now flying out of his mouth, and he couldn’t stop it if he tried. Impressive, in its way. Snake handlers babbling in tongues couldn’t make a bigger fuss.

  “Okay,” said the Bagman, finally. “I’ve got time. We can wait.”

  “Wait…?” Casey went blank, like he didn’t realize what he’d been saying. “For what?”

  “For God to come save you. Weren’t you the one crying for that a few seconds ago? Well … I’ve got time. So let’s wait.”