The Dead Men Stood Together (16 page)

Authors: Chris Priestley

BOOK: The Dead Men Stood Together

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The listener watches him go and stands for a while in a kind of trance before turning himself and setting off in the other direction.

The sun has set and has left a green glow in the western sky. Soon it will be dark and the old man will sleep. Not I though. I have no need of sleep; I am no longer able to be unconscious. I used to long for sleep. Now I can barely remember what it was.

The ancient mariner walks on and I walk with him, though never beside him. He knows I am there, but he never turns round until he hears me call and feels the pain, and his pain is only increased by the sight of me.

I wonder what I look like now. I can see my own hands in front of me and my feet as I walk. I can see that they are pale; they are the hands and feet of the boy I was and am still, though I am a boy with the inner life of a man who has lived hundreds of winters on this earth.

And winter comes again. Even though my feet are bare, I do not feel the ice beginning to form on the moss beneath them as I follow the old man into the oak woods that cover the hillside hereabouts.

I can hear the sea breaking on a pebbled beach way down the hill. I can smell the salt air and hear the sad cries of roosting seabirds.

The old man’s walk is so slow now he is barely moving and the staff he leans against is the only part of him that does not tremble and look fit to break at any moment.

Finally, with a great sigh, he sits down on a moss-covered root and slumps against the gnarled bark of the oak whose leafless branches crane over him, black against the velvet blue of the night sky.

Stars twinkle and, as the old man falls asleep, they are mirrored on the ground as the moon lights up the tiny crystals of frost forming in the leaf litter.

Yes – winter will soon be here, full fanged. The old man can barely move his hands as it is, so accustomed are they to grasping tightly to that staff.

I look down at him and see his faint breathing, the wisps of white breath rising up like tiny ghosts from his thin, cracked lips. His skeletal face, swamped by beard and long matted hair, is scarcely recognisable as that of the man I set out to sea with all those centuries ago.

I walk closer and stand over him, confident he will not wake. The rags he wears soak up the dampness and the cold along with it. The frost performs its silent ministry, unhelped by any wind.

I stare into the woods ahead of me and realise in a moment of revelation that these are the very woods I played in as a boy. That were I to leave the old man and walk on, I would come to my mother’s cottage.

But does it even stand there still? My mother’s bones will be dust in the churchyard along with everyone I had ever known. Why, the grandchildren of those I knew are long dead.

For the first time since I saw those dreadful creatures on the ship of Death, I feel pain and tears fill my eyes and blur my sight. The pain seems all the more raw for its novelty.

Blurred vision or not, I know this place. Sea, hill and wood. They do not look so very different. But what now? What is this new wonder?

Just ahead of me a patch of woodland is lit from above by an unearthly light and in its centre is the pilot’s boy, just as he was when I saw him holding the lifeless nightingale from my bedroom window.

Here again, he holds the broken and bloodied body in both hands. The sadness of its killing comes back to me full force despite all that has gone between. He opens his lips and this time I can hear the words he speaks.

‘Let him go,’ he says.

And I have a sudden memory – a memory I had forgotten because I must have been so young when it occurred. I had woken with a nightmare when I was little more than a baby and my father had taken me outside in the moonlit orchard and we had heard a nightingale singing.

I had placed my little hand beside my ear so that I might listen more attentively and my father’s eyes had swum with tears as he laughed and hugged me tight and held his face to mine.

Tears flow from my own eyes now. I turn to look at my uncle and find that I can hate him no longer. I look back at the pilot’s son. I see them – I see all the spirits of the air pressing in on us, forming out of the blackness of the night sky, some fearsome, others beautiful, and even those that are fearsome are beautiful in their fearsomeness.

There are thousands upon thousands upon thousands. The trees shake gently as they pass by, the frost-coated moss shudders as they swim through the air and coil among the roots.

They are whirling and flying round and round, one moment in the ivy below, the next they are playing amid the stars. They are everywhere at once: everywhere and everything.

I look back at my uncle, the ancient mariner, and I see him slipping and dissolving into the woodland floor. His hair entwines about the ivy curling round the roots, and those roots coil in turn about his arms and legs.

Ivy fronds move through his clothes and push through his sagging flesh, dried now and more like the rags that are disappearing into the moss.

His ribs are like the twigs which push between them, his skull, as brittle as a sea urchin, cracks and shatters and collapses along with every part of his desiccated skeleton, so that it is soon hard to see where he had once been sitting. No one passing by could ever know there had been a human being there at all.

And I am glad to see him go. I am glad to see his suffering at an end. And in my gladness I know that I will share his fate and, kept in this unnatural state for an unnatural span of time, we will both, together, fade.

I have no material form to turn to dust, but I know now that I will join those spirits in the air and I am happy to do so. I see the wood below me and the moon shining on the calm sea and the little harbour of my home town; and then I am air, I am breath, I am silence. I am the moment before a dreaming sleeper wakes.

Also by Chris Priestley

The Dead of Winter

Mister Creecher

Through Dead Eyes

***

The Tales of Terror Collection:

Uncle Montague’s Tales of Terror

Tales of Terror from the Black Ship

Tales of Terror from the Tunnel’s Mouth

Christmas Tales of Terror

Bloomsbury Publishing, London, New Delhi, New York and Sydney

First published in Great Britain in September 2013