Kill the Dead(16)

Myal Lemyal had certainly removed himself from the scene. In his own haphazard way, he was as sensitive to the atmosphere of deadalives as any ghost-killer, though failing to interpret them in positive terms, and with, very decidedly, no compulsion to engage them in battle.

His neurasthenic fascination with the whole venture had, however, increased. It was often the case with him that what frightened him most he would run headlong after—a habit he deplored but had been unable to break himself of.

Dro also fascinated and frightened him to a colossal extent. Myal, additionally, had convinced himself that Dro was an essential ingredient in the brilliant plan to find Ghyste Mortua, that—possibly—apocryphal domain of the undead.

So when the house’s sense of manifestation and emotional frenzy were epitomised in the supernatural shriek, Myal quickly pulled himself together and ran. But not very far. He had simply leaped up the nearest slope like a scared rabbit and dropped in the thick grass there, panting and appalled. Ten minutes later, when he had dared himself to raise his head, he realized with some self-blind surprise that he could still see the lopsided roof of the house below.

It seemed inspired, then, to set himself to watch the spot for further developments. The watch was not a long one. Parl Dro’s brandy and Myal’s nervous exhaustion, combined with the sprint up the slope, proved conclusive. About one minute before Dro walked out of the gate and back onto the road, Myal was sprawled, head on arms, soundly asleep.

A little after midnight, when the adolescent moon hung itself over his head like a piece of broken plate, Myal stirred, accepted the new mistake, cursed it, and fell asleep again. He too was not unused to slumbering on bare ground. But he dreamed first of his mother whom he had never known, and then of his drunken father and the leather strap known too well, and twitched and muttered and sighed.

Just before dawn, he rolled part of the way down the slope and came up against a young fir tree. Through the branches and the warp and woof of the grass, he saw a bank of pigeon-blue cloud barricading the eastern horizon, the light coming pale and mysterious above it.

There was no sound anywhere but the drift of the wind over the land, and the watery drips and trickles of birdsong. Then a door slammed like a wooden drum, below at the leaning house.

Myal stared down past the stem of the fir tree.

Ciddey Soban, white as porcelain, came out of the shadows and the trees and turned toward him. For a minute, he thought she meant to come straight up the incline, but then she went away from the house, the road and Myal’s slope, passing under the shoulders of the uplands, going north.

Myal’s heart thumped. He got up and combed his hair with his long fingers, and straightened the instrument on its frayed sling across his shoulders. With an awareness of vague dread, he walked around the curve of the hill, squinting forward until he had her pallid figure in sight again. Maintaining the distance between them, he followed her. He had a vile notion why he must, and his eyes were wet already.

She had sat in Cilny’s chair all night, and thought of Parl Dro the ghost-killer, and how she hated him.

Sometimes thoughts of Cilny, or occasionally of her own self, would interrupt these reveries. Sometimes she thought even of their father, his absurd botching together of things to sell as strange artefacts. That was perhaps inevitable. But she did not consider any of these matters for more than a second or so.

She began by wishing Parl Dro dead, and in her mind she constructed the way of it, now one way, now another. She pictured him stabbed and smothered, she pictured him buried alive in earth, or hanged, or torn in shreds by animals, wolves or bears or cats. In various of these fantasies she was physically present, instigating and directing them. Later he met deaths with slower and more subtle formulae, and then she was not there. Later still, she did not think of his death at all, only of him. He had been far younger than she had expected, from the stories. She imagined to herself his youth, his childhood, his birth even. She imagined his old age still to come; sickness and poverty, wealth and loneliness and joy—all his, and she was almost impartial now. She came, in the last descent of night, to behold him as a life, separate from her, a man, an entity. Her hate was no longer a force directed against him. Her hate had become Parl Dro. He stood like a black tree against a backdrop of pure nothingness. She could think of no other thing.

When the birds began to tell off their notes to the lightening sky, Ciddey rose. For a moment, she was unsure of where she meant to go, and why. Then she recalled, with a dry ebbing at her heart, how everything was settled, that she had no need to concern herself with plans. She had only to act.