Five Stories for the Dark Months (5 page)

But by then it was too late, of
course.

The dead rose like mist from their
graves: men, women and children, all stunted and gaunt, wearing the
wounds they’d died from. Some of them were missing eyes, arms,
heads. Others were naked, bruised and bleeding. They had died in
springtime, when the bluebells blossomed, and what clothes they
wore were ragged and thin, but they did not shiver. They floated
forward, murmuring things in voices too soft to hear.

Arica had stopped short, wide-eyed.
Though her mouth was open, no sound came out.

“Come on,” Jenna said, taking her
by the arm. “They probably can’t get through the light, but I don’t
want to take the chance. It’ll be better if we can put them a
little ways behind us.”

When they had finally left the
grave mounds behind, they slowed down a little. Arica still
shuddered. She kept looking over her shoulder to where the dead
still followed them, slow and ceaseless.

“You’ve
really
never seen a ghost
before?” said Jenna.

“I mean, I
heard
stories
,
but... they’re only legends! Myths! If I’d believed in something
like that, I’d never have be able to sleep at night!” She shuddered
again. “I may never sleep again! How do you keep them from your
houses?”

“Fire keeps them
away. Uh... not fire,
specifically
, you know, but any
bright light. That’s why we keep lanterns at our doors.” She looked
up at the moon through the fog of her own breath. “And that’s why
moonless nights are the worst for traveling. If there had been a
new moon tonight, you might not have gotten me out of that house,
soldiers or not.”

Arica was scanning
the sides of the road, as if expecting to see more of the dead
wandering between the trees. There might well have
been
more, but Jenna
certainly wasn’t going to mention it. One wanted a cool head on
one’s traveling companion.

They passed through three more
cemeteries in the next hour. Each time, more spirits rose to join
their ghastly retinue. The dead moved slowly, and the girls’ pace
wasn’t too punishing, but stopping to rest was out of the
question.

After a while, Arica pulled the
half-loaf of bread from her pocket. “Shall we eat?”

“All right.” Jenna took out the
fish, split it in half, and handed one share to Arica, accepting
her half the bread in return.

Arica raised her ration in sardonic
salute. “Eat well.”

Smiling, Jenna returned the
gesture. “You know, tonight’s the solstice. We should be having sun
cakes and wine.”

“You
have sun cakes, too?”

Jenna nodded. “Filled with
honey!”

“Really? We use blackcurrant
jam.”

Jenna wrinkled her nose. “That
sounds awfully strange.”

Arica was peering through the trees
again. “What do you use for your burning tree?”

“Fir, usually. And
you?”

“The same!” Arica seemed delighted
by the similarity.

“I’m surprised
you’re allowed to have burning trees,” Jenna said. “I heard your
government is
completely
godless. No offense,” she added.

“No, you’re right. They don’t
generally approve. Sometimes they send out soldiers to harass the
people who keep the old feasts. They don’t mess much with our town,
though. We’re peasants, so it doesn’t matter what we
do.”

Her tone was light, but there was
real bitterness under it. Jenna remembered what little she had
learned about Northern society. “I thought there weren’t supposed
to be any peasants in your country. Isn’t everybody supposed to be
equal?”

“Supposed
to be, yes. That’s the grand theory.” Arica
sneered. “Funny, isn’t it, how things never quite work out the way
you plan them to?”

“Yes,” Jenna said softly.
“Funny.”

They were silent for a long time
after that. Occasionally Jenna dared a glance back at their dead
following. She kept her eyes low, hoping to avoid any ghostly
gazes. The light was so dim that she saw almost nothing, but she
never doubted that the whole procession was still behind
them.

They were halfway through their
ten-mile journey when the soldiers came.

At first the
sounds were very faint, barely audible over the creaking of the
branches: the distant jingle of harness, the
puff
of hooves through the snow. When
Jenna finally made sense of what she was hearing, she froze, and
pulled Arica to a stop. The girls listened, horrified, as the
sounds grew unmistakable.

“They’re coming,” Arica whispered,
her face a frightened mask. “We have to put out the
lantern!”

“We can’t! It’s the only thing
keeping the ghosts away!”

“Well, then what
do
you
suggest?”

“Maybe...” A shout from behind cut
into her thoughts: they had been spotted. The jingle of harness
grew louder.

Jenna tried to focus. “If we go
into the trees...” She peered into the black wall of woods beside
the road. “You can’t take horses through...”

“So? They’ll dismount, and then
they’ll catch us.”

“We have snowshoes...”

“I’m sure they do,
too.”

A thought struck. “Would they know
about the ghosts?”

“I... wouldn’t think so,” Arica
said.

The idea grew, sparks kindling
flames in Jenna’s mind. “If they were to chase us through the
woods,” she said, “they’d have to stop and put on their
snowshoes.”

There was a brief silence. “Yes,”
Arica said. “I imagine they would.”

Jenna chanced a look back. Outside
the circle of light, the ghosts swirled and wavered like mist. If
one didn’t know they were there, one might not see them at all. “Do
you see a lantern back there?” she said.

“No.” Arica’s voice was strangely
cheerful. “No, I don’t believe I do.”

They exchanged looks, then started
walking again, much more slowly.

The wait was nerve-wracking, but
necessary: they could give the soldiers no chance to realize their
danger. Arica was as tense as a bowstring, clearly poised to run.
Jenna felt both sick and excited.

At last, in a blur of snow-muffled
hoofbeats, the riders tore around the bend. “Go!” Jenna shouted,
and the girls plunged into the pitch-black woods.

The lantern swung wildly, sending
crazed arcs of light around them as they wove between the trees.
Behind them, Jenna heard the riders wheeling to a stop. She heard
curses, then shouts, then the cocking of guns.

She knew the very second the
soldiers saw the dead. The shouts abruptly ceased, giving way to
frantic orders and then to a storm of gunfire. Suddenly hoofbeats
rose and faded: panicked horses, leaving their riders
behind.

At last, the gunfire gave way to
clicks as chamber after chamber ran out of ammunition. Then came
screams—then moans—then silence.

Jenna tried to peer back through
the darkness towards the road. She could see nothing beyond the
circle of feeble light. She supposed that was a blessing. “I almost
feel sorry for them,” she said. “If I didn’t know they were coming
to kill us...”

Arica didn’t answer. Turning, Jenna
saw that the Northerner was looking the other way, deeper into the
woods. Her face was very still.

Jenna felt a chill. “What’s wrong?”
she said. “What do you see?”

Arica pointed.

At the very edge of the dwindling
light stood a multitude of the risen dead. As Jenna watched, more
filled in around the circle, until the girls were completely
surrounded.

“No,” Jenna groaned. How could
there be so many?

“There must have been a battle
here,” Arica said softly. Her face was still blank.

“I don’t know of one,” Jenna said,
but she knew that didn’t necessarily mean anything. The war had
been a bloody, chaotic time, and thousands of people had been
reported missing and never found. “There might be another mass
grave somewhere nearby,” she said. “We might even be standing on
it, for all we know.”

They both looked uneasily at their
feet.

The lantern flickered again. It
seemed about to die.

“What are we going to do?” Arica
whispered. The ghosts were pressing closer now, as if they knew
that they had almost won. “Do you think we can make it to
town?”

Jenna shook her head. “It’s five
miles, and we might not have five minutes.” She thought longingly
of Goldenfield—the neat rows of houses, the little grocery store,
the wide town square where her mother had taught her to snowshoe.
Everyone would be gathered there tonight, singing bright songs in
the light and warmth of the—

Oh.

Oh.

“What?” Arica hissed, as Jenna’s
expression changed. “Did you think of something?” She looked
desperate enough to go along with almost anything.

“Look for a dead tree,” Jenna said
urgently. “Dry as you can find.”

“How would I know? They’re all
bare!” Arica said. Panic was edging into her voice.

“Look at the bark! If the bark is
peeling... or if there’s a fir with dead needles—”

“Oh!” Arica cried, and pointed
triumphantly. “There—look!”

The tree was perfect: a broad,
brittle brown fir, at least ten feet tall and tapered like a lady’s
gown. It wore most of its needles, and so couldn’t have been dead
for long, but Jenna thought it might be just dry enough. “Come on,”
she said, and carried the light forward through the whispering
circle of ghosts. “If we can keep a fire going until dawn—it should
be only a couple of hours—then they’ll go back to their graves and
we can go home.”

“What if more soldiers
come?”

“It won’t matter either way if
we’re dead.”

The light dwindled lower as the
girls pushed their way through the ranged ranks of the dead. The
ghosts seemed to realize that they were about to lose their prize,
for they began to murmur and moan, reaching out with tatter-sleeved
arms as if they could break through the light and seize the living.
Jenna thought she could almost feel their icy fingers on her skin,
even through her borrowed coat. It took every scrap of nerve she
had left to make it to the fir tree.

“Quick,” she said, “a song!” A
manic energy was pulsing through her veins. “A burning song, the
best one that you know!”

“A—!” Arica caught on, and started
to laugh (only a little hysterically). “You’ve got to be
joking!”

“I am entirely
serious.” Jenna pulled the little straw star from her pocket and
hung it on one of the dry brown branches. The ornament was slightly
bedraggled, and it looked rather sad all by itself among the
needles, but it was as much as they had and
much
better than nothing. “Go on,”
she said, “sing! And you’d
better
still have those matches.”

Now Arica was
really laughing. “
You
are
insane
,”
she said—but she pulled out the matchbox and handed it to Jenna.
“You know we don’t really need a song.”

“True,” Jenna said, “but I want
one. I think we deserve one after all this, don’t you? And anyway,
it’s supposed to make the wood burn longer.”

“But why
do
I
have to
sing?”

“I brought the ornament!” She made
shooing motions with her hands, glancing at the circle of vengeful
ghosts. “And you’d better hurry, before the lantern runs out and
they all tear our eyes out. Go on!”

So, with a last nervous glance at
the frustrated spirits, Arica began to sing a solstice hymn. Her
voice was low and rough, hoarse from the cold and shouting and
probably sickness—but the song she sang was beautiful. It rose and
fell along an eerie scale that Jenna had never heard before, and
the words were in the dialect the soldiers had used—Arica’s home
tongue, she realized with a start. Jenna couldn’t make out much of
the language, but even so the themes were clear: friendship,
safety, home and family, light in darkness, warmth in winter.
Feeling safer than she had any right to, and happier than she’d
ever thought she would, Jenna smiled, struck a match, and lit the
star on fire.

~}*{~

Sans
Merci

June 2012

Table of Contents

Paul had found the café a year
before, when he and Wendy had first moved into the new apartment.
Well, “found” was probably an overstatement: the place was a little
out of the way, but it was hardly hidden. It was tucked into the
back streets behind their apartment complex, cool and quiet, and
for some reason it was never crowded though the menu and décor were
the latest in coffee-shop chic. Paul liked to duck in from time to
time, on the rare occasions when he wasn’t busy, and drink his
coffee at a table beside the window, watching pedestrians pass
outside and pretending he was ten years younger.