Kill the Dead (8 page)

“Hallo, Parl,” she said, “I thought you never would come back.”

He stared at her, as he had stared at the tree. When she started to come toward him, a monumental terror boiled up in him, as if his blood and all his bones had changed to blazing ice.

“I waited for you, Parl. I’ve waited, every time I could, here by the tree.”

He found he had backed a step away. When he did so, her face seemed to tremble. He still could not work out what was wrong. Then suddenly, as before, he broke into a run. He raced out of the field, away from her and from the tree, and as he ran, he shouted, long blank wordless shouts.

He did not stop again until a door stopped him. He had rushed right into it, and was crashing there with his fists. His yells had started all the dogs in the neighbourhood barking. Then the door opened and he almost fell through it. He recognised Silky’s grandmother as if from a long way off, and so he realised which door he had been hammering on.

“Oh,” she said. “Oh, someone told you.”

She started to cry. He became aware that he was crying, too. She led him to a chair and she shut the door.

She did not tell him directly, for of course she supposed he knew. It was only by her elaborations of grief that he found out. On the night of the storm which wrecked the harvest, Silky had been lingering by the apple tree in the field behind the school. When lightning had struck the tree, it had struck Silky also. Silky was dead. She had been dead for more than a month.

The grandmother brewed a herbal tea, which once the three of them had drunk. Nobody could drink it now. She patently wanted to keep Parl with her. He had been so often with Silky that now he seemed to conjure the girl for the old woman. Then the grandmother went to a chest and brought out something mysteriously. Drawing near to him, she showed him a cloth packet and opened it to reveal a clot of shining threads.

“All I’ve got left of her,” she said.

She had trimmed Silky’s silken hair the very morning before she died. The lightning had left nothing much, stripping flesh and sweetness, as it had stripped the tree. But these fringes of hair the grandmother had, by sheer luck, retained. Now, with a supreme effort of sacrifice, she offered the packet to Parl.

The instant he saw the hair, he felt very sick. Truths that he would learn and reason for himself in later years, came to him now merely instinctively. He felt but did not know what the shorn hair represented, and what its power must be. He had not guessed yet what that power signified.

Even so, instinct ordered him. Though he almost cringed with revulsion, he took the packet of hair.

He sat, with the packet lying by him, most of the day, in Silky’s grandmother’s house. All that time they said hardly anything to each other. She did not think to ask him if he should be anywhere else. She had forgotten real life. And Parl, though he understood the world went on, the landowner and his fields and his anger, they were only dimly perceived, dimly remembered, events outside the bubble which enclosed him and the blasted apple tree and the dead girl and her shorn hair.

When the day began to drain away, he rose and politely said good-bye to the old woman.

As he was going to the field, he met three of his former fellow students from the school. They clustered around him, eager to commiserate, or, as it seemed to him then, to enjoy his pain. Finally, one said, “So-and-so told me the priests went to bless the ground where she was killed. So-and-so said she might not lie quiet.” One of the others cuffed him, growing aware of sheer bad taste at last. They went away.

Bats fizzled over the field and dissolved in the darkness. The sky was overcast, and rain fell. The struck tree glowed strangely in the wet with a hard vitreous sheen.

After an hour, Silky came walking softly through the rain toward him.

She was strong. She looked very near mortal this time. Before, she had been mostly transparent. He felt the weird drawing, the drag of energy going out of himself to her. He had wanted her to be there, and the sense that he fed her existence was almost pleasant. But then again, somewhere inside himself, he shied from this pleasure, was revolted by it. When she stood close to him and put her hand on his arm, he grew cold, colder than he had ever been in his life. He could not actually feel any pressure of her fingers.

There was no mark on her of the lightning. There rarely ever was, as he would come to know, evidence of the positive wounds or bodily spasms of death upon a living ghost. Its whole revenance was a masquerade of life; it tended to be amnesiac about the instant of annihilation, even in the degree of camouflage.

They sat together on a flat-topped stone. They talked. Presently he took her hand, and this time her hand felt real.

She had been young and innocent. Perhaps it was her naïveté that made her do what next she did, a frank and honest desire that they should be together as equals. Some would cheat and trick from jealousy and vengeance, out of hatred for those whose lives were genuine, some never slew directly or intentionally, warming themselves at lives as if at fires. Silky had been honourable. What remained of her could not have altered, so cruelly, into a fiend.

She was thirteen. A lovely, generous, desperate child. No, it was her naïveté, her longing not to lose him, that had made her seek his death.

She said that they should go into the school. There was a side door which each knew how to open. The rain was falling still, and she said they must take shelter. He asked her, almost with embarrassment, if the rain could inconvenience her now. She smiled radiantly at him.

“No. See, my hair’s quite dry, and my dress. But you’re wet through.”

He let her take him to the door, and he opened it Not because he cared about the rain, but because she had seemed to want them to go inside.

They wandered about the benches and the chests. The books were piled untidily and the slates more so. A mouse pranced over the tiles. It had been eating the large candle which the tutor used to tell the time. The atmosphere was very dark, yet somehow Parl could see everything well. Even when the girl hurried up the narrow stair to the attic, he was able to follow her with ease.

The floor of the attic, which rested on the beams of the hall below, was mainly rotten from the leaking roof where the rain even now entered, and where the sprays of winter ice would poke through to drip slowly on the pupils’ heads fifty feet below. The joists had long since cracked. The walls bulged. The pupils were forbidden to enter the attic.

Silky ran daintily over the unsafe floor. Old parchment and cobwebs lay about. Where Silky’s feet passed over them they left no imprint.

At his first step after her, a plank groaned. At the second, he heard the wood crack quietly. In that instant, he was aware of how she invited him and where, and it did not matter. There was a savage sweetness in her face, pain that she would cause him pain, happiness, blind and foolish, that called for him to come to her. If she saw anything, it was their life together–their
_unlife
–children and lovers, wedded forever in the shadows.

Then his foot went through the rotten boards as, years later, most of his body would go through the rotted struts of a bridge.

The escaping manoeuvre was complex and almost hopeless, but somehow he achieved it, flinging himself away from the floor, and from her. He landed in the doorway in a shower of splinters. His head rang, and he heard her through the ringing, murmuring to him, coaxing him to return.

When he could look at her again, she was still smiling. She held out her hands, mutely encouraging him. A moment of discomfort, and all would be well. A moment, only a moment.

He staggered down the stair, and back into the school room. He was not certain what he meant to do, but, as if it had been planned, his confused gaze settled instantly on the tall wax time candle, and the flint and tinder that lay beside it.

He did not know–how could he?–that the ultimate act must be performed in their sight. Yet his instinct knew, that seventh sense which would make him what he was to become, that seventh sense which all that frightful day had been forming inside him, brain and soul.

When she drifted down the stair, he already had the candle alight. She glanced at it wonderingly, then took up a slate and a scrap of chalk. He was not amazed that she could hold them in her unreal hands, the shock came when she showed him what she had written. Not that he could read it He would have needed a reflective surface for that. For, in the way of her kind, she had written unhesitatingly from right to left, back to front, in mirror writing. If he had needed any further sign, she had supplied it.

When he drew the packet of her hair from his belt, her eyes and mouth widened in frightful demented shapes. He had his first glimpse into hell, then, as the first of the great white moths dashed itself against him, throwing the filaments of its wings over his face, tearing him with the shards of its nails and its frantic unhuman cries–

The burning packet of hair fell from the candle onto the tiles.

And as he destroyed her, in that minute he learned, and learned forever, that yes, it could be possible, and essential, and unbearably horrible, to kill the dead.

It was his very last lesson in that schoolroom, as it was his last night in that town or on that stretch of land.

When the rainwater, dripping through from above, quenched the smouldering ashes, he ran away into the undergrowth of night. He had been running from things since sunrise. Running from them, and toward them. Now too, he ran toward his future, and his trade. Although he did not know it, and just then would have wept if he had.

The fire was low. A crimson branch had broken open, whistling as the sap bled from it. The fortress wall hid the lights of the village from Parl Dro the man. Only the mild passage of the river at its summer low was audible, and sometimes a treacly chorus of frogs.

_{He was thinking the endlessly repeated question.}
Did I simply curtail her dead-life because she would have robbed me of my human one
_?

The answer came, as it always did, soothing him, never quite enough: He had not destroyed her in rage, not even merely in terror. He had grasped, or some part of him had, that this thing which would murder him, for whatever reason, could only be an echo, and a defiled echo at that, of the girl he had been companion to, the girl who had had such rights to love, whose human life he would have equated with his own. Wherever she had gone to, she had gone away from being that, that parody of herself.

The moon was up. A vixen screamed, miles off. He heard the muffled scrunch of a boot scraping on the brick causeway he had crossed hours earlier.

The imperative present had arrived.

Parl Dro sat, back to the wall, not moving. The meadow contained the footsteps which would now be negotiating it. Once there was a brief stumble. If he had not known, Dro might have taken it for some night beast tussling with rival or prey in the grass. Then the feet shambled over the uneven ground where the outer walls had come down. The stumbling was very evident now. Abruptly a voice cried out to him.

“Dro! Parl Dro! Are you here?”

Pitching his voice to carry as well, or better, than that cry, Dro said, “I’m here, Myal Lemyal.”

The feet erupted into an uncertain gallop. Suddenly, around the wall, the musician careered into view. His face was dead white, his eyes appeared as black as Dro’s. His hair streaked his forehead, plastered with sweat, and his sleeves flapped absurdly. Seeing Dro directly in front of him, he checked.