Danse Macabre: Close Encounters with the Reaper

by Nancy Kilpatrick

  Casey hadn’t once looked the Bagman’s way. Just one hand on his throat, the other raised, feebly trying to ward off … something.

  And total silence had never seemed so loud.

  The Bagman pushed himself away, a few agonizing inches at a time, until he could rest his back against a pillar holding up the roof. He stared at the ugly mess of his shoe, at the mangled foot inside, at the smeared red trail he’d left behind. While there were probably men who could laugh at the situation, he wasn’t one of them. Fuck the shoe, the foot too — mostly he was wondering how to explain it all away at home.

  And at a time like this, how could he be so sleepy? Go with it, though. You needed a clear head to come up with the best lies, a clearer head than he had right now.

  And in his dreams, they hated him. Reviled him and left him, and the sorrow was so great it made him want to kill them too, because that’s what you did to stop the pain, you had to kill pain at the source, that’s how this path had gotten started so many years ago—

  He jolted awake in the night.

  “Huh?” he asked It.

  “Get up,” It said again.

  He cracked open his eyes, struggled to focus. He could see It, clearly now, and It didn’t look like any hangman, but still, he knew It when he saw It. He smelled the mildewed rustle of Its robes, the spiced miasma of Its breath. The touch of Its bones would freeze him to the core, like a flagpole in winter. Silly. Beyond silly … stupid. But he was old school, they all said so, and so it made a kind of sense that, for him, Death would be too.

  “Both of us,” he said, with a disgusted glance at Casey MacKenna’s carcass. “You came for both of us.”

  “Don’t be a fool,” It said, in a voice that was both rumble and rasp. “Only the worst kind of fool would die of a stubbed toe.”

  “What, then? What are you … why…?”

  His voice trailed off as he looked up at It, through It, solid one moment and translucent the next, but the smell of It never left his nostrils. Seemed like he’d always known that smell, even before he’d known what it meant, and he swore there were times he’d smelled it seeping from his own pores no matter how long he stayed in the shower. He breathed it in and it took him back, took him away, took him in and down and up again. The smell had always been a part of him, just as he’d always been a part of it.

  “It’s my work that you do,” It said.

  He thought of the trail of carnage he’d left behind, an astonishing body of work when you considered that it had all been done by hand, it had all been … personal. Right. That was it. The personal touch. That was what distinguished him from generals and bomb-droppers. It was the personal touch, not numbers, that made legends.

  Death was the ultimate in personal.

  And if the thing before him could beam at all, It beamed with pride.

  “Now do you understand?” It asked.

  He thought he did. Yes. Yes, he was sure of it. God had a Son. The Devil too. If you believed in any of that. Except he didn’t, or couldn’t, not when all he could believe in was the finality of situations. And Death. He’d never doubted Death. It was the most constant thing he’d known. So who was to say that Death didn’t have a lineage of sons that was older than time?

  “Do. You. Understand?”

  “I think so,” he said. “Everything except … why you’ve come.”

  “To tell you this: No man can serve two masters. You must choose.”

  At first he didn’t comprehend. Or didn’t want to. Anything but that. Again, he looked at the ugly mess of his shoe, the mangled foot inside, still no closer to coming up with a way of explaining them that would keep the peace under his own roof. The one place that he’d sworn he would never bring this side of life.

  But had he ever really had that choice?

  “No. Please.” He’d never begged for anything in his life. “Please…?”

  It looked at him with a father’s infinite patience. “You. Must. Choose.”

  And like any father worthy of his namesakes, It stayed with him until he was strong, and ready to pick himself up again. A father like that, how could you begin to think of disappointing Him?

  Family man, businessman, everyman, all of them one kind of mask or another. Masks that got so heavy sometimes, there were days he thought he couldn’t move. That first mask especially, because it was real, the only one that counted.

  He let it fall away again, this time falling so far it shattered. Then he headed for home, ready to resume his father’s work, and hadn’t felt this light in years.

  * * * * *

  Brian Hodge is the award-winning author of ten novels of horror and crime/noir, over 100 short stories, novelettes, and novellas, and four full-length collections. His most recent collection, Picking The Bones, from 2011, was honored with a Publishers Weekly starred review. Of his story in Danse Macabre, he says, “This was inspired by an incident in the life of notorious mob killer Richard Kuklinski, who really did make a man await his murder to see if his prayers would be answered.”

  The Death of Death

  By Tanith Lee

  “Hang Death by the neck until it be alive.”

  From a graffito found in various though closely similar forms, at many places, and in countless tongues, throughout all the known and recorded ages.

  “I know who you are,” said the girl with golden hair, sitting down across the table from him.

  He looked as she had known he must. Despite, or because of the propaganda. He was very tall, very thin, though with a strong, broad frame. His hair was the color of moonless midnight lacking all glow. His eyes were the color of cold, pale iron.

  He did not answer her.

  No answer, from him, was her answer.

  As she said, she knew him anyway.

  “I’ve been following you for several years,” she added.

  Would he say he doubted this, that she was only twenty-three.

  He did not. No. Of course not.

  “Since my mother died,” she informed him, “in the ‘00’s. I was twelve. That was in—” she named an obscure area in Europe. Simply by naming it she demonstrated that a girl of twelve years, (there) and with her only parent no longer living, would have had every chance to go off in pursuit of him, if no chance at all for most other possibilities.

  She was noticing by then he did not wear black. Or scarlet, as she had sometimes seen him clothed in paintings. He wore grey. Casual clothes that might have come from any sloppy unrich closet or cupboard. Almost from any time, perhaps. He wore boots, too. the boots looked old and worn and she wondered if their divided carapace was actually built up from layers of plague pits, dulled battle-blood, cannon shot and nuclear fallout … things like that. Maybe all his garments were, that was why they were grey, where — to start with — they had been jet and ebony, cramoisi and ruby and gold.

  “I bought you a drink,” she said, and pushed towards him the tall glass of iced back coffee with just a couple of shots in it— “The bar’s nicest Jamaican rum,” she elaborated. Would he drink it? Was he even capable of drinking anything?

  Raising her own fairly similar glass (she had chosen coffee with rye), she drank a mouthful, to remind him it was what you did, when you walked about the world, pretending to pass for human.

  Oddly, as she thought so, he did raise his tumbler. But only to sniff at the drink. His pale chiselled movie-star nostrils flared and relaxed.

  She thought abruptly, He looks the way I want him to, of course. He’ll look like that for anyone, their own fantasy or special dread. “Leave the pale horse outside, did you?” she inquired. “Hope you parked it carefully. They get fussed about that around here.”

  The day was hot and dry, and now the narrow bar windows showed an afternoon dying in a fine amber haze.

  She must only
wait. She must simply stay close.

  If he rose to leave she must follow — even if he went to the men’s room. Be patient. Be calm. Be wide-awake. Actually, just be alive.

  He got up.

  Could he read minds? Well, very likely, but then, she thought, maybe only the obvious bits — that was, things like panic or respect or kinky lust. Absent in her case, all three.

  He had not tasted the drink, or she assumed he had not. The bar was going shadow-dim, the windows even brighter with sunfall, that somehow failed to enter, only hammered hazily on the low-polarized glass: Let me in — let me in — let me get a drink. I’m dying, can’t you see? Surreptitiously, and she had learned to be good at surreptitious, she bore his glass under the table-top and poured the liquid away on the floor. After all, she did not know how lethal it might be. If he had set his lips to it — even breathed on it perhaps — it might inadvertently prove fatal.

  Then she too rose and went after him. He was just passing into the street when she reached him.

  “You don’t mind if I walk along with you?”

  He said — nothing. He strode off, but not so fast she could not keep up.

  What did he think? She was a Death-groupie? She was a suicide wannabe enjoying a misjudged preview?

  Or did he not think? No, probably he did not think, as he did not drink, or blink, or jink or stink or dress in mink—

  Shut up, Ilka, the cooler half of her mind told her.

  She obeyed. Her mind’s cooler half had propelled and protected her this far. Best keep in line.

  After her mother died and the town was burned, Ilka had managed, Cool-Mind-guided, to get out. She had for a while travelled over scorched earth, by ruins and through bitter forests, and then into a winter of mountains deep in snow. People died all around her, like the town, like her mother in the town from the sniper’s non-selective bullet. At night, sometimes in the day, Ilka slept with a man, only five of them in all. They gave her food. The last one helped her on the snow, until his snow-cough killed him, too.

  Getting across into a safer country was tricky, but accomplished. She had a smatter of the language. Then there was the stowaway boat, and further on the bigger boat with the woman in fur who wanted her for a pet during the voyage. From the woman, guided by the Cool Half, Ilka learned extra, useful knacks, and also the language of the other, larger landscape in which, three years along, she would end up. Half-Cool made, or would make Ilka very intelligent, and she was canny and quick anyway. Quick as a monkey some of them said, or a lizard, or — once — a magpie. All this time though, and from the moment the shot pierced her mother’s brain, or possibly in fact from the next moment when her mother fell, a body, tenantless, on the ground, Ilka had been in pursuit of Death. It was that she wanted to find him, (him — or her) and ask Why? What for? Never When?, though. Never that. She was too young for that. Or else too much her self. She had not perhaps been really properly aware of this quest to begin with. Even in the mountains, when the last man, only nineteen, had died on her lap with her arms around him, and the others straggling on, leaving her since she had not immediately left him too, even then she did not consciously know that all the while, waking and sleeping, a part of her (not the hot half, or the Cool Half, rather some glinting, spinning fragment that fizzed between the two) that was staring in all directions to try to anticipate him, to spy him and rush over: I know who you are. But Why this slaughter? What for? Of course it was not until the actual remonstrating accusatory questions dulled and faded from her double mind, like mist from a cold/hot window, that Ilka came to believe she had the chance to find Death. To find him while she lived. And presently to find him when she was equipped with her own answer, no longer needing his. And obviously she had decided by then he was male. but she had her own logical and legitimate solipsism also, for that. He was her opposite.

  By the time she was nineteen going towards twenty, Ilka had managed to pay her way through some form of schooling, and she was working in the Laboratory, at B—- G—- Heights. Not, that was, as a technician, naturally. She was a cleaner. but this job demanded certain IQ credentials, and even though her then sleeping-patron, SL, had helped a little, her skills with language and people, and a kind of urbane, apparently humble diplomacy, sailed her in like a skater over creamy ice.

  One year, seven months and thirteen days later she had — almost by accident — Half-Cool and Fate joining elegant forces — discovered the great and wondrous secret, and taken her chance.

  Undetected, she had stayed on at the lab, to be safe, a further quarter year.

  And then she pretended to a love-type boyfriend, and another, better job in the south. A little bored with her by then, SL was really sweet about it. He gave her five hundred in crisp notes, to ‘help her’ with her ‘new start’.

  She spent a day absorbing steak, chocolate, beer and whisky, bought some better clothes, abandoned her apartment and the entire northern seaboard. Now her quest was to be full-time, and she was in full awareness of it. She had, before, never given that quest over, so much went without saying. Asleep or awake, awake or asleep, combing her hair, showering, paying her rent, humping a guy or cleaning a bone-white lab, with the ink stamp of super security smeared on her wrist and her eye-print in the B—- G—- Heights personnel bank, still, she was the pursuer of, the searcher after, Death. Yet, it had become not only her part but part of her. And when she deserted that last life and was able to become what always she had been — then—

  Then Ilka graduated. No longer a pursuer or searcher, not a watcher and spy. She sprang from the wings a Hunter, a Warrior. and the war was on, always had been. And the final battle would at any minute begin, black as a spent bullet, blood-red as a burning town. Pale as a horse.

  They visited a lot of bars, Death and she.

  Also shopping malls, the parks, the subway transit … and streets, endless streets, and alleys with drunks lying there like badly packaged sausages. Once a dog barked at them. Ilka decided it had in fact barked only at her. Death was invisible to it. It was not the dog’s Time to meet Death. It was Ilka’s Time — but not to perform the usual scenario; Ilka was not dying. Only dying to be and do exactly what she was.

  She kept up with him. She did not tire. She had a will of bronze, and a bladder of pure steel.

  She had walked through burnt ruins and over mountains and into other lands. She had walked away from her mother’s corpse. Oh, she could walk all right.

  No dialogue. They did not exchange any talk.

  The date from Hell, that was Death.

  Inevitably.

  Whenever they stopped, she bought herself, and him, a drink. An Orange Coke in the park, coffee or spirits or wine or beer in the bars, a Lime Slinker in one mall and a Strawberry-Milk at another. Each time when she carried the drinks over to where he had sat or leaned himself, he did not drink them. But he always sniffed at them, like a connoisseur with a rare Chablis.

  He won’t, she thought. He understands and it’s useless.

  No, said Half-Cool. It isn’t that.

  What then?

  It isn’t that. Just go on. You have enough about you to do this for hours. Trust. Continue.

  She broke the silence and started to tell him about what had in fact happened at the lab. (Not about her life. That was irrelevant, to him.)

  It had been a late shift. About 2 a.m., PFN appeared scowling, and went into Third Bay. Third Bay was where new commodities were stored, and where any film connected to them was run, after they had made an info movie of an experiment. They only did this when it had been a great success — or a terrible failure. Lower staff generally did not know this, but SL had let her in on the method much earlier, for his own reasons.

  PFN, a rude and nervy bastard, told Ilka, then cleaning the corridor outside with the floor-buffer, to ‘Fuck off’. So, subservient, unfazed and mute, off she fuck
ed. But, it was unusual for persons of PFN’s rank to come in out-of-hours. Aside from anything else, they hardly needed overtime pay. She sidled back a minute after and listened at the thick silver door, pretending she looked for some dropped pin or button — surreptitious and inquisitive had often paid dividends. She could hear the film-Dex active and murmuring, and then, faintly, a bark or cough, followed by a recorded exclamation—applause. The movie then stopped, and instead she heard PFN whining to himself, as if something had viciously hurt him. Words came out through tears or saliva. Her hearing was acute. She heard: “It works, it does. It does. I saw the damn thing at eleven tonight. It was playing, ate its food. Oh Christ, it works. Oh—” whined PFN— “Robby—”

  And Half-Cool said into her listening quiet, Hurry and back off; he’s coming right out now.

  Ilka retreated again, and was in the other corridor with the buffer, down at the farthest end, when PFN hurried into view.

  Seeing her this time he checked, and then scuttled up to her. Ilka got ready to defend herself verbally or physically. There was no security camera right here. But PFN said, “Sorry I snapped, okay? Been a tough night — reason I came in — left some notes behind. Hey, buy yourself a drink, yeah?” and passed her some cash worth about quarter of a cup of coffee. “Don’t let on I came back, okay? Don’t want us to get in trouble, yeah?”

  “Sure,” she said, and shyly, admiringly smiled.

  When he had gone, she let herself into Third Bay. Her security clearance allowed her to do this — SL had seen to that. She had eye-pass to almost all the labs, though not everyone knew it. SL liked her, just once in a while, to get him the odd little bit or piece, nothing really missable, for there was always so much of everything. You did it as you cleaned. If you were careful and cute, the camera could never see. With her certainly it never had. And SL, with his communications with the darker open market outside, had been reasonably grateful. When she left there, months later, she was aware he was already grooming his next protégé thief.