Kill the Dead(69)

Parl Dro did not know it, knew only agony. He fell away from his assailant, and in a sudden panic, the assailant let him go. He turned his horse and fled and soon enough had the wagon on the road again, driving back into the south country. The gold-haired woman, whom he had struck unconscious as his very first deed, before even going for the cleaver, regained her senses in that moving wagon. By then the blood and the weapon had been tidied. She assumed her man’s vengeance had been visited on her alone, or had wished to assume so.

On the mountain, having rolled into the narrow channel, Parl Dro lay until his intelligence went out in pain and blood loss. And after awhile, he bled to death. Unequivocally. Completely. He was dead.

He had come to think, when he lived, that he understood almost all a man could learn of the foibles, motivations, methods and devices of the deadalive. How they were jealous of the living, returned for retribution, sucked energy from those who loved them—particularly kindred—hid their wounds usually from others and themselves, or, very occasionally flaunted those wounds to inspire terror and guilt. That rain did not moisten their garments, which were always those of the hour of their deaths. That they came by night, because the darkness aided in masking the flaws of their physical disguise, but also because their superstition made them chary, unless abnormally strong and self-assured, of the brilliancy of the sun. All those things he had known. They had been helpful. But most of all Tulotef had helped. Not only because it had been his goal on the day he died— Ghyste Mortua, that essential pilgrimage of so many ghost-killers, the ghost town of ghosts who pillaged mortals—but because, along with a motive for return, it had insured that he had previously learned certain disciplines. Believing the thesis that only in the astral form could a man enter the Ghyste safely, Parl Dro had set himself to acquire the skill of trance, and the subsequent psychic release of the spirit body out of his flesh. By the time he died on the mountain, he had been a master of the technique some months. And so the thing occurred which he, with all his understanding of the undead, would never have supposed possible.

A battle began, on some extra-physical plane that had to do with the world and with some other place beyond it. The battle was between the two entities into which Parl Dro had split. One entity was furious to live, to seek Tulotef and destroy it—now an ironical desire indeed. This entity, armed with its psychic disciplines, knew it could reproject itself into the world in a whole and perfect astral form, the most lifelike and undetectable ghost that had ever resisted its death. But the second entity had remained an exorcist, and this entity fought the first, trying to drive it away into that otherworld to which now it rightfully belonged.

If Tulotef had been the only drawing force that called him back into the world of flesh, it was likely Dro the killer of ghosts would have won that ultimate war against his own revenant. But, of course, there was the link, also. An irresistible link. Something that had belonged to him. But better than a bone or a glove, better than a tooth or a hank of shining hair. Much better. Much more enduring.

Probably at first she had convinced her brutish man that he was responsible. He would have turned to her now and then, as if to the beerskin or home cooking. Eventually, after her death, and as the child grew, the showman would have seen certain things. The light build which was hers, but the height which was neither hers nor his, the hair which was her colour but a tone or so darker, the eyes which went sometimes black. The face, too, which by curious turns became piercingly good-looking. And the genius, which came out in music with a talent the showman had never possessed. Myal. Parl Dro’s seed. Seed which had grown into an embryo, a child, a boy, a man. Something, nevertheless, which Dro had left behind in the mortal world. Myal, his son: the link.

On the plane where the two entities of Parl Dro fought each other, ghost-killer with ghost, there was no time. But in the world, time passed. And as it passed, so Myal, growing into adulthood, became a link which, more and more strongly, called Dro back to life. In the end, the deadalive Dro had won. Then the calling was reversed. He called to Myal blindly, seeing, if it could be described even as “seeing,” only the link. Myal, who was psychic, and joined also by kinship, reacted to that tug, not knowing it. Still not knowing, he wandered back from the south, into those woods and over that mountain. He went by his father’s decayed and crumbled bones, and naturally did not know that either. He wandered into the valley village and waited, unknowing, for Dro to win the final victory, and come back through the gate to apparent mortality. And Dro, galvanised by Myal’s physical proximity, roused. In stasis, he was the same age as at the instant of death, thinking the events of twenty-six-odd years before had happened two or three days ago. Accordingly, he sought the wagon in the wood and failed to find it, and next he resumed his interrupted—how interrupted!—journey over the mountain.