Five Stories for the Dark Months (9 page)

“Of course it is,” said the man
beside her, a Native American in a beaded blue shirt. “Look, she
doesn’t even know where she is yet. Bet the riverman brought
her.”

He beckoned to a young black woman
who was pouring herself a drink. She approached, handed him the
pitcher, and gave Sabrina a curious smile. Beneath her calico
kerchief, her eyes were large and sad.

“What is this place?” said
Sabrina, helpless.

The wrinkled brown woman had
produced a mug from somewhere. She held it while the man in blue
poured. “It’s a party, dear,” she said, quite kindly. Her voice
creaked like ancient branches. “Haven’t you ever seen
one?”

Not knowing what to say, Sabrina
took the mug and stared at it. It was very simple, and looked
handmade—plain red clay with a clear glaze that gleamed in the
firelight. Its sides were cool, and wet with
condensation.

“Take a sip,” the old woman urged
her. Sabrina obeyed.

It wasn’t beer—she wasn’t sure what
it was. It had a strange, spicy flavor she couldn’t quite place.
Was it mead? Some kind of cider? She took another sip. “I’m
Sabrina.” It seemed suddenly important that they should know
that.

The three strangers nodded. “We
don’t use names much here,” said the girl, “but I’m pleased to meet
you, Sabrina. I was Hannah.”

“I was Tom.” The man
smiled.

The old woman smiled, too, but
didn’t give her name.

A few feet away, a girl with red
curls paused to give Sabrina a filthy look. She was very pretty,
and wore a tight sweater that showed off an excellent
figure.

“Who was that?” Sabrina said, when
the girl had moved on.

The other sighed. “That was Kelly,”
said Hannah. “The riverman brought her last year.”

“Sour grapes,” said Tom, smiling
again.

The old brown woman just shook her
head, and filled Sabrina’s cup.

Sabrina took another
drink.

Time passed in a pleasant haze.
Whatever was in the mug proved mildly intoxicating, and she didn’t
get sleepy no matter how much she drank. From time to time she
thought to look for Cyrus, but he was never nearby. He moved from
fire to fire, greeting friends and smiling mysteriously at
everyone. Once she saw him pat Kelly on the shoulder and kiss her
cheek. Another time he seemed to be exchanging secrets with a
beautiful dark woman in an old-fashioned dress. Not once did he
look at Sabrina.

She soon forgot her disappointment,
because it turned out her new friends were excellent company. They
constantly asked questions about her life, and seemed fascinated by
every answer, even things as simple as “I go to State,” or “I have
three sisters.” Soon others joined them, and greeted Sabrina like
one of their own. They all plied her with drink, and with food in
little clay bowls: deviled eggs, cornbread, muffins, brownies.
Everything was perfect, and she never felt full.

Before long she
was in the middle of a large crowd of people, roasting homemade
marshmallows over the largest bonfire. Its heat scorched her face,
and the air was rich with smoke and sugar. Someone had remembered
an old drinking song, and was teaching it to the others amid waves
of laughter. “‘
Twas on the good ship
Venus—by Christ, you should’ve seen us...’”

Halfway through the song, Sabrina
noticed that the crowd was getting a bit thin. Several of the more
flamboyant partygoers were nowhere to be found, and most of the
fires and pavilions had been abandoned.

As she watched, two Native women
who looked like sisters embraced, sighed, and disappeared
altogether. Before she could move, a little blond boy ran into the
shadows and didn’t come back. Then a person in a long white cloak,
whose face she’d never seen, bowed once to the crowd and
vanished.

One by one, the guests disappeared.
Some of them just left, walking from the torchlight into the
darkness. Others faded slowly from sight, waving sadly to their
friends. Others still were there one minute, then gone the next
time she looked for them.

She knew, in whatever part of her
brain was still active, that this was not right, but she couldn’t
make herself move. The disappearing guests seemed like someone
else’s problem—an unfortunate fact of nature that no one could
really change. Framing a comment along those lines, she turned to
Hannah—and gasped.

In the last few minutes, Hannah’s
lovely oval face had shriveled like a month-old apple. Her dress
hung from her body like a tablecloth, and she smelled of sweat and
illness. She seemed to be dying of some wasting disease.

“What happened?” Sabrina
said.

Hannah smiled faintly. “You know, I
almost made it,” she whispered. “I got as far as the river—then I
broke my leg. So...” With a sigh, Hannah disappeared.

Tom, next in line, was covered in
blood. It poured from a fist-sized wound in the center of his
chest, which must have taken out at least one vital organ.
“Bastards were waiting at the river.” Blood flowed through his
teeth as he spoke. “We—” Then his eyes widened, and he too faded
away.

Desperate, Sabrina turned to the
old round woman, who was watching her sympathetically. “What’s
going on? Why—”

“Don’t worry, dear.” The woman
patted her hand with broad, soft fingers. “They’ll all come back
next year, you know. You will, too.”

“I...” Her brain was spinning. She
shook her head, but couldn’t clear it. “What do you
mean?”

“Well, it’s just the one night,
you know—before the winter starts. When the veils are thin.” She
yawned, smiled apologetically, and stood. “But I’d probably better
go, too—I’m getting sleepy. Lovely to meet you...”

“Wait,” Sabrina said, reaching for
her hand. “Please—”

But the old woman was already
strolling towards the torches, nodding goodbye to the few remaining
guests. Her wide back swayed, and her brown skirts rustled across
the ground like leaves. Before Sabrina could stand, the woman had
left the campground, and vanished into the darkness of the
woods.

In a few minutes, all the other
guests had left—fading like mirages, or simply walking away.
Sabrina could only watch, pinned in place by shock or confusion or
whatever she’d been drinking. Finally, as the sky began to lighten,
she was alone, still sitting on her log beside the abandoned
fire.

Or almost alone. There was Cyrus,
standing at the edge of the campground, surveying the site with
satisfaction.

As if a spell had broken, Sabrina
finally stood. “Cyrus! What happened?” She ran over to him,
tripping on feet gone suddenly numb.

He smiled distantly. “Hello,
Sabrina. How’d you like the party?”

“It—where is
everybody?”

“Oh, they all went home. Back to
where they died, you know. It’s almost sunrise.”

“To where...” Her voice guttered
like a candle.

Cyrus laughed. “Oh, come on. Don’t
tell me you didn’t guess?”

“You mean they were...”

“Sure.” He gave her a pitying
look. “You already knew there was no one over here—no one human,
anyway. Where’d you think they all came from?”

Sabrina shook her head, sure there
must have been something in the drink. “But... How do I get
home?”

“Oh, you don’t.”

“What?”

“You
are
home, now.” Cyrus
gestured around him at the abandoned campground. “You paid the
toll, remember? Drank the brew, ate the food? It’s a one-way
trip—you’re one of them now. If I were you, I’d just get used to
being dead.”

“I...
but...”
Dead.
The
word echoed in her mind like a church bell. “But... you
didn’t...
I
didn’t... why did you bring me here?”

“Because you wanted to come,” he
said, smiling. He leaned close, and pressed a chaste kiss against
her cheek. “I’m an equal-opportunity ferryman—I’ll take anyone
over, as long as the toll gets paid.” He patted her cheek, then
stepped away. “And it was a good party. But it’s over,
now."

Her mouth opened. The words fell
out of her head, and she just stuttered. “I—but—we—”

“It’s not so bad, being dead—from
what I hear, anyway. And you picked a good place. The river’s
lovely, and you might even find some company if you look. If all
else fails, you’ll see them all at the next party.” Then he yawned,
stretching his exquisite muscles like a sleepy cat. “Afraid I’ve
got to go. Got a drowning to take care of tomorrow—today, that
is—and then a suicide after that. No rest for the ferryman.” He
grinned. “Later, Sabrina.”

She reached for his hand, but he
was already gone.

It was getting lighter, and fog was
rising from the dawn-touched river. Sabrina watched the moon set
behind the trees, and listened to the calls of awakening birds. The
torches went out one by one, and the embers of the bonfires slowly
turned to ashes.

~}*{~

Boon

October 2012

Table of Contents

The Blue Child’s great audience
chamber was a cavern underneath the ground. Its walls and floor and
ceiling were all thick with ice, and at the back an enormous hole
opened into darkness: the door to the underworld, whence the Blue
Child and his family had come.

Bleak as it was, the hall was
stuffed with courtiers, who watched the human petitioners go by as
if this were a holiday.

Perhaps it
was
a holiday, for them.
Magda really didn’t know what they did, for they were never seen up
on the ground.

Most of courtiers here were
Iubar—the Shining Ones—half corpse and half angel, with gemstone
eyes and odd, mechanical expressions. They were said to fly the
heavens at night, too high and dark for human eyes to see, and
bring the Blue Child news: the doings of his family, his enemies,
and his wretched human subjects.

Some of the courtiers, though, were
humans themselves—scattered through the crowd like bone fragments
in a sugar bowl, perfumed and powdered to hide the odor of their
living bodies. They were finely dressed, some more sumptuously than
the Iubar, but their faces were pinched and watchful. They looked
like starving wolves, afraid they’d be devoured if they let their
attention stray for a second.

The Blue Child sat on a throne of
ice in the center of the hall. He wore a short silk tunic, sandals,
and a gold ring around his arm that looked like grave goods. Though
his fine youthful body was tinged a hypothermic blue, he didn’t
shiver, and lounged indolently across his icy throne as if
perfectly comfortable.

He smiled condescendingly as Magda
knelt before the throne. “Well, then, woman—have you a petition?”
His sweet, treble voice rang like struck crystal.

Magda bowed. “Yes, my
lord.”

“Then pray, speak—but speak
quickly, for Petitioners’ Day is nearly over.”

Several of the courtiers tittered.
Magda gritted her teeth, concealing her anger, and
began.

“My lord, on the day when the ice
melted, and the door to your mother’s kingdom was uncovered... just
before you, and all your brothers and sisters, stepped out into the
sunlight and raised your perfect faces to the sky—before the Winter
of Winters had begun...” She swallowed, finding that her throat was
full of tears. “In those days, I was newly married, and expecting
my first child.”

When she looked up, the Blue Child
had leaned forward, setting his elegant face on the knuckles of one
thin hand. One could almost imagine that he found her story...
diverting—but Magda had been watching him, and knew that he used
the same face with every petitioner.

“On the last day, sir, the baby
was three months along, and I was walking with my husband at the
seawall. We were... happy...”

“Ah,
happiness
.” He made a
vaguely derisive gesture, and his courtiers tittered. “So sweet; so
fragile. Continue.”

“When the skies turned black,”
Magda said, “and the great shriek rent the air... when the
lightning flashed, and the oceans died, and the whales floated up
from the depths to lie on the sea like bladder-wrack...” Her mouth
kept speaking, but in her mind’s eye she saw it all again—birds
falling from the sky, crops withered in the field, and Peter...
“When the ninety-nine were killed, and the hundredth left to
mourn... I lost my husband, and the baby, at the same
time.”

She remembered how Peter’s face had
looked in the moment before the seizures—how he’d reached for her,
and tried to touch her cheek, before he’d lost control of his
muscles and flopped on the ground like a suffocating fish. Even
then, before he’d died, his groans had sounded like the bellow of a
thrall—and as she’d taken his hand, the pain had
begun...

“The pregnancy could not survive.”
Her own voice sounded oddly clinical, as if she were listing off a
litany of griefs that had afflicted a total stranger. “I
miscarried. There was no one to help—we were far from the
village—and I had to...” She paused, breathed, continued. “After...
it was born, I went for help, but everyone in the village was dead,
or screaming. So I went back and buried them myself, beside the
seawall.”