When the Undertaker dreams, it is always of the sun and death. He dreams of endless sands and the pitiless heat that beats down on a people clinging to life by the side of a great river.
He sees himself, young and virile, watching the women washing clothes in the shade of the trees by the riverbank, and going amongst them, to their screams of horror and delight.
He dreams of the jars. Shelves crammed with clay containers, their lids molded into the shapes of men and women, but also baboons and dogs and other things which, if they ever had names, he has long forgotten. Every jar is sealed to preserve its precious cargo, the sweet viscera of existence, taken in each case from those who could not retain their grip on it.
When the Undertaker wakes, it is to pain. The craving that comes with dawn is a thing beyond mere need. Hunger is a sharp, stabbing goad that drives him from his bed.
Wincing, he swings his legs from the cot. It will soon be winter here, in this place where the tides of time have delivered him, this damp island at the end of the world. The Undertaker has forgotten more than most people acquire as the sum of their life’s knowledge, but he has never grown accustomed to the cold here.
The Undertaker dresses and goes downstairs, obeying the unthinking rhythm of routine. He pauses by the cellar door at the foot of the stairs, but does not enter. The jars in the cool darkness below are all but empty. Each new day, he inches closer to starvation.
At the front door, the Undertaker puts on his greatcoat and battered black hat. The face that stares back at him from the hallway mirror is gaunt and old—far older than he would have thought possible as a boy apprenticed to the master embalmer, so very long ago.
He marches from the cottage to the stable, muttering at his lapse into self-indulgence. The barely recalled past is of no use to him.
The Undertaker’s horse does not look up as he unbolts the door and leads it from its stall. He refers to the animal as Rasputin, though it is just the latest of many to bear that title.
The Undertaker gave up bestowing a unique moniker on each of his horses a long time ago. For a while, he named them after the reigning monarch, as if this would help him hold on to each particular beast’s identity. Yet, he found he could no more remember if the king of the day was a George or an Edward than he could recall whether his current horse was the same one as a decade before.
It matters little. A countryman’s horse is not a companion but a tool—one to be cared for and preserved in good working condition, but a tool nonetheless.
Having brushed and fed Rasputin, the Undertaker bridles the animal and harnesses it to the cart. At an impatient click of the tongue and a flick of the reins, the horse clops out into the pre-dawn black.
Their passage takes them from the cottage and through woods by snaking lanes. The steep walls of foliage lining the path fall away as they reach the northern extreme of the new housing estate, a defiant amber corona of street lights marking its existence in the darkness.
On the periphery of the neat rows of yellow brick houses, a glass-fronted building’s interior lights are on despite the early hour. The sign above the building’s entrance proclaims the establishment as ‘Cheeseman’s Cooperative Supermarket’.
The shop’s cold, electric luminance spills into the field beyond the estate. The Undertaker squints at the glare of this harsh, artificial dawn.
A figure in a beige apron stoops at the entrance, placing a sign on the pavement. The man straightens and gives the Undertaker a wave, distant and shrouded in darkness though he is.
The Undertaker’s features contort as if tasting something repellent. His growl is scarcely audible as he names the cause. “Cheeseman.”
So entirely is his focus on the man outside the shop that he does not detect another, closer presence.
“Morning, Dick Crowe.” The voice—a man’s—comes from just beyond the wall of foliage to the left of the cart.
The Undertaker swivels, muscles taut.
A round, weather-beaten face rises from behind the hedgerow. The Undertaker’s pose relaxes. He knows this one—a local man, a farmer. They are all farmers. He sucks in a long breath, expelling it through his nostrils. He nods at the man.
“The undertaker is about good an’ early.” The fellow grins. “Gettin’ up before Mister Cheeseman to catch the corpses while they’re fresh?” He laughs.
The Undertaker blinks. He gives the man a thin smile, as if sharing in his humor, though he is not sure exactly what the jest is.
“I don’t hold with this noo estate, or the supermarket, even if it is a coo-operative.” The man is also staring in the direction of Cheeseman’s. “Them houses are all for noo-comers what all work at that university they jist built. Have you seen it? Horrible, ugly place.” He shakes his head. “The ‘white heat of technology’ indeed.”
Bailey. The man’s name surfaces in the Undertaker’s mind, miraculously dredged from the silty depths of memory.
The Undertaker has a sudden, vivid image of the man’s father—George Bailey, a red-faced, drunken thief and lecher in soiled lavender britches, crying like a babe as they dragged him to the scaffold. Or maybe that was this Bailey’s grandfather, even his great-grandfather?
The fellow juts out his chin. “Don’t you worry. Let all them city types get their foo-neral plans at the co-op.” He waves dismissively at the estate. “None o’ the old families in the village want anything to do with it.” Bailey spits into the hedge. “When I goo, I’ll be buried by a Crowe, same as your old man buried my old man.”
The Undertaker frowns. He recalls burying the man’s father, his grandfather, and his hanged ancestor. Then he remembers that though he was not always this Dick Crowe, he has used the name before.
His identity as the previous proprietor of R Crowe & Son, Undertakers, was quietly retired during the confusion of the last war. After a suitable gap of years, he returned to the village in a serviceman’s uniform as Richard Crowe the Younger, who’d spent his war in a southerly land called Haustraylia.
In the decades since, no one has questioned this story. At most, from time to time, one of the old folk might shake their head, laugh and say, “I swear, yor the spit of yor ole man, Dick Crowe.”
The Undertaker fears Bailey wishes to share another observation. This is already the longest conversation he has had for some time. Wishing to be on his way, the Undertaker touches the brim of his hat. “Master Bailey.”
The man nods. “Dick Crowe.” He is already turning back to his field.
Bailey’s talkativeness is unusual, perhaps prompted by the presence of new things—estate, supermarket, university—in a life otherwise governed by the unchanging cadence of the seasons.
In general, the locals display little curiosity about other people or events that do not affect them directly. This suits the Undertaker. No one questions his presence. As far as the people of the village are concerned, he has always been here, as much a fact of life as the rise and fall of the sun.
Rasputin resumes his slow tread and the estate is soon behind them. A slight dip in the path marks the outskirts of the village. The Undertaker slows the horse to a stop and fishes in the pockets of his greatcoat, retrieving a bundle of twine with a small yellowing bone tied to one end. He holds his arm out and allows the bone to drop until it hangs suspended from the twine in his hand.
The bone spins in a clockwise direction as the tether unwinds. A moment later, its movement ceases. The bone quivers before changing direction to spin widdershins.
The Undertaker’s face creases into a lopsided half smile as the bone stops, now pointing due northeast. He clicks his tongue and the cart lurches forward.
The bone compass shifts to indicate due east as they reach the village. The dawn is now an orange and red halo above the row of thatched cottages and the spire of the church on the far side of the green at the village’s center.
The cart passes a noticeboard at the edge of the green on which are pinned a number of sun-bleached pamphlets. The most recent of these proclaims, ‘Save the village green cricket square’, another, ‘No to the new London road’. The Undertaker gives them no more than the briefest glance.
The locals’ belief that everything in the village is as it always was, that the current state of things must be preserved at all costs, is bewildering—as impossible to comprehend as the perspective of a mayfly.
The Undertaker remembers when this piece of ground they mow and roll flat to play their game on was a meadow with a pond where their great-grandparents would graze livestock.
The bone twists on its cord once more, leading to a lane where the houses taper off before the land becomes open fields once more.
Horse and cart stop outside a low, thatched building. The Undertaker dismounts and walks down the short path to the cottage’s entrance. He knocks on the wooden door. It is opened by a blotchy-faced woman.
The Undertaker touches his hat. “Dick Crowe, Ma’am.” Her bone structure and eyes mark her out as a Foulger—landless peasants all—but he pays her the respect that is her due today.
She regards him with a myopic stare. “I don’t understand.”
He nods. Grief often numbs their sense. “Your loss, my condolences.”
Her face reddens and he fears she is about to cry. “My Bill ain’t hare no more. Cheeseman’s picked him up yesterdey. He’s doo at the city crematorium tomorrer.” Her expression twists in apology. “I’m sorry, Mister Crowe, I thought you’d have heard.”
An involuntary hiss escapes the Undertaker’s lips. Now even the handful of locals who follow the Roman Pope have taken to burning their dead. The sacrilege—the sheer waste of it—is sickening.
Tears flow down the woman’s face as she starts to babble. “Bill always said he didn’t want to buy the Co-op plan, but foo-nerals are ruinous expensive, you understand. Only he should a-told you ’bout it.” She stops, eyes widening. “Oh, but why would he? He never planned on dying.” Her shoulders heave as she surrenders to sobbing.
The Undertaker gives a stiff half-bow and retreats down the path. His mouth tastes tangy and metallic.
Seated on his cart once more, he experiences a fresh wave of nausea. He sways on his perch. Unfulfilled need is a gnawing sensation in his gut.
“The dead cling to life as a drowning man clings to wreckage.” He hears the Master’s slow, steady intonation. “It is our place to see the spirit of the deceased transported to the underworld, so that they may be judged and the deserving granted eternal life.”
The boy the Undertaker was stands in the sepulchral cool of the embalmer’s workshop. He watches the Master work with a hunger born of ignorance, for the old man is frugal with the divine mysteries of his craft. “Why?”
“The gods, the dead and the living exist in a state of balance that must be maintained.” The Master speaks evenly, never taking his eyes from the jar as he seals the lid with unguent. “If the dead were not properly prepared and sent on their journey to the afterlife, it would upset the fixed, eternal order. Even Ra’s nightly passage through the underworld might be endangered. Imagine the consequences, boy, if Ra failed to rise in the sky each day.”
The boy frowns. “But why do you take something from each of the dead? I have seen you do it. You put it in the other jars, the ones you keep in there.” He points to an anteroom, the one that he is forbidden to enter.
“Be silent, I’ve had enough of your prattle today.” The Master regards his apprentice with an expression of thunder. “I took you in after the floods out of obligation. Raising an orphaned child was my duty, just as yours is to obey.”
The boy opens his mouth to ask more, but the ancient embalmer stabs the brush at him. “Plague me no more. It is not for the apprentice to determine what it is fit for them to learn. Have I not just explained that the great, unchanging nature of things relies on order? Each of us must learn to fulfill our place in it, lest that order break down and the primordial waters of chaos rise to engulf us all.”
The boy who will become the Undertaker shudders at the mention of the waters. He stills the question on his lips. Repeated beatings have taught him the old man has a wiry strength which belies his frail appearance.
The Undertaker’s head jerks upward as he is pulled from the past. He is still seated on his cart. Has he been asleep? He is not certain that is what happens when the memories take him.
The bone rattles furiously in his pocket. He retrieves it, letting it hang loose from his hand. It twists to point northwest. There has been more than one death in the village this week.
The next house is larger than the Foulger woman’s, the home of a farmer, not a field worker. The smart white front door has a brass knocker, to which is attached a wreath tied with black ribbon. The Undertaker raises a hand to use the knocker but withdraws it as if bitten. The wreath is of fresh laurel. He hisses under his breath and raps his knuckles on the wood instead.
A grey-faced man answers the door. He wears a tired suit. It will be his Sunday best. “Mister Crowe.” His brow winkles. “I didn’t know anyone had called you, the wake is yet to happen.” He speaks with the same sing-song cadence and intonation as all locals, yet attenuated, by a little schooling, perhaps.
“‘Tis best to be about such things,” the Undertaker mumbles. “A matter of public health.”
The man nods hesitantly. “Yes, of course.”
The Undertaker knows him now; not four generations removed from the Scotsman who’d come here seeking seasonal work, himself the son of a French Huguenot. What is his name—Gawain, Gulan, Guillaume?
The ashen-faced man leads him into a dining room that has been cleared of all chairs. The mirror is covered in black crepe, photographs have been turned to the wall. The body of a boy of about fourteen or fifteen is laid out on the table.
The Undertaker takes out his measuring tape. The man lingers in the doorway. The Undertaker closes the door on him. “I’ll take no more’n a few minutes,” he tells the man gravely. Respectfully. His trade is all about respect.
The boy is perfect. The Undertaker’s breath becomes rapid and shallow as he measures the body. In two days he will return with the coffin. Then the boy will be on the table in his cottage.
His heart thuds painfully as he pictures the leather roll containing his instruments: the flensing knives which will pierce and part the flesh, the tongs with which he will remove the organs, and then finally, the unmatter—that dark fruit that he will pluck and place in his jars. The boy’s essence will feed him for months—certainly until winter when more deaths in the village are assured.
He pauses and sniffs. Something is awry. The boy is curiously bereft. The Undertaker lowers his tape and stares at the corpse.
The boy’s soul has departed. No morsel, no lingering trace of it remains.
The Undertaker curses the walls in a language that no other person has spoken for a hundred generations. No written record of this tongue remains, so utterly forgotten that no history book will admit its existence. He curses the boy and his family. He curses Frenchmen, bastards all, like those damned Normandy bookkeepers who came here demanding every cow and every crow be counted.
The door to the room opens. The owner of the house peers around it. “Is everything all right?”
The Undertaker puts away his tape and takes his leave with a mumbled word of condolence.
Outside the house, he shudders, drawing in a lingering breath.
“What’s the matter, Jack Frost?” A short, shriveled woman stands by his cart, feeding Rasputin an apple from her wicker basket. Normally, anyone attempting to feed the evil-tempered horse by hand risks losing their fingers, but the beast placidly munches the treat, leaving her digits intact.
The Undertaker’s eyes narrow as he places her: Cora Boxwood, the local ‘laying out’ woman. Hers is a role from a tradition of mourning that has all but disappeared. She is an old foe, though one he has not seen for some time. No wonder—she is decrepit. The end cannot be far off now.
“Thought you was dead’n good riddance,” he says.
She laughs, wagging a finger at him. “Oh, I’m not so near death yet, though I’m old, same as you, Jack Frost.” She sighs. “Another summer gone and winter just round the corner. But then, it shall be spring again, and, well—we’ll see, shan’t we?”
The Undertaker peers at the crone, somehow struggling to focus on her. Yes, she is old—far older than she’s any right to be. Yet, she is also rosy-faced and swollen, heavy with child. The next moment, she is pale and slender, a maiden ripe for the plucking. Now she is all three figures, blurred and overlapping.
He blinks and she is just Cora Boxwood, an old woman and an irritant—nothing more.
“Take more’n a wreath of twigs to keep me out of a house.” He ladens his words with studied scorn.
She laughs again. “Oh, I’m sure of it, Jack Frost, you wicked old sinner. The laurel keeps away bad souls, but you lost yours a long time agoo.”
“My name,” he says, “is Dick Crowe.”
“Is that so?” She cocks her head to one side in a birdlike pose as her bright eyes study him. “I s’pose it is—for now, anyway. Well,” she straightens, patting Rasputin’s nose. “I’ll be seeing you then, Dick Crowe.”
Cora Boxwood marches away at a sprightly pace. The Undertaker glares at his horse before doubling up as he experiences a fierce jabbing pain.
The need for sustenance is like some insatiable parasite growing within him. He pictures it pushing out necrotic tendrils, extending itself into every part of him like a cancer, sucking the marrow from his bones until there is nothing left but skin and bile.
The Undertaker hauls himself onto the cart where he sits, lungs heaving for air.
He considers killing the Boxwood woman, but the brief satisfaction he experiences from the idea is immediately displaced by a confused series of vignettes, like pictures in a seaside penny slot machine. He sees himself drowning the young nymph Cora, having had his way with her by the river. He strangles the rosy-faced matron in her kitchen. He places a pillow over her aged face as she lies in her sickbed.
The Undertaker’s face creases with the effort of considering these parallel, contradictory images.
He has no idea if any are true. Is it possible he has killed her many times already? His mercurial, fractured memory will neither deny nor confirm it.
The Undertaker closes his eyes, pressing calloused fingers against the lids.
When he opens his eyes, he is tramping through heavy mist, wrapped in a cloak to insulate him against the damp, alien climate. He is part of an army of Illyrian-speaking Dalmatians fighting under the banner of Rome. They march to exterminate the Brythonic tribes who live hereabouts.
They burn yet another village, killing all adults—not only the males. For a single moment, amidst the chaos of atrocity, he is sure he glimpses the maiden Cora, standing at the outskirt of the settlement, watching the carnage yet somehow remaining apart from it. She witnesses the slaughter unflinchingly, like a figure carved into a sarcophagus. When she turns and runs towards the line of trees marking the end of the village, he gives chase, but she is swallowed by the woods and is gone.
Then it is another age and a period of miserable, animal subsistence in the freezing marshes. He preys on the farmers who settle here, for the longest time too much at odds with their guttural Germanic tongue to pass amongst them.
Several times he steals up to the wood and mud huts on the extremes of the settlement, only to find the way barred—a sprig of yew or laurel nailed to each door. Is the old woman behind this? He is not certain.
The Undertaker drives his bony fist into the cart with such force that he yelps with pain. The sensation is good. It centers him, drawing these fragments of himself fully into the present.
The idea of Cora Boxwood is maddeningly ephemeral, a will-o’-the-wisp that refuses to be held to a specific time or place. Yet, if she has persisted alongside him all this time it’s unlikely she is the cause of his current, parlous state.
However elusive his memories of Cora Boxwood, they are accompanied by a renewed and long absent clarity; he has ever hunted in this place—well before the village stood here in its current form—and never been threatened as he is now. What has changed?
No hunting animal will abide a competitor to prey on its territory. Yet, this is what he has allowed to happen. His long years as an unchallenged predator have made him soft—lost to chaotic recollections—and in his weakness, he has permitted a rival to establish themselves.
Hateful purpose grips the Undertaker as he recognizes his true enemy. “Cheeseman.”
His jaw muscles clench. He is going to kill the shopkeeper.
The sun is high by the time he reaches the estate. The clop of Rasputin’s hooves meeting tarmac echoes around the empty parking space. The inhabitants of the estate will all be at their labor in the city by this hour.
Cheeseman stands at the shop’s entrance. He nods, as if the Undertaker’s arrival is by prior appointment. “Good morning again, Mister Crowe,” he calls, beaming. He is shorter than the Undertaker, red faced and balding. Thick framed glasses magnify his oddly colorless eyes to enormous proportions.
The Undertaker dismounts the cart and strides towards his nemesis. He holds his hands at his sides, long fingers flexing. “Cheeseman.” The sound is nothing more than a hissing breath.
The little shopkeeper looks startled, then laughs. It is the chuckle of a kindly uncle indulging some childish conceit. “My, but did your old master never find time to teach you manners while you were stuffing souls into clay jars?”
The Undertaker halts, hesitating. His twitching hands are held out before him, grasping at the air between them.
Cheeseman’s smile is a thin, unpleasant thing. “Yes, I know you: embalmer, mercenary, thief, murderer, aberration.” He wags a finger at the Undertaker. “You’ve been a great many things, Dick Crowe, and no wonder. You’ve stolen life, many times more than your allotted share.”
This is wrong. He had foreseen the shopkeeper blubbering, begging for mercy as he placed wrathful hands around the man’s fat neck. Not this.
Cheeseman peers at him, pupils vast and black behind his thick lenses. “You’re a fixed thing, something that should not be, Dick Crowe. There’s no place for you in this modern age. Change,” he waves an arm, gesturing at the yellow buildings, “change is the natural way of things. Soon, we shall have a new road through the village. A beautiful dual carriageway, bringing motor cars and lorries past here day and night. The estate will grow to swallow the village, and eventually meet the city outskirts as they expand ever outwards.” His voice rises. “Then we shall have high-rise buildings too. Think of it: wonderful concrete towers, twenty floors high and more, and electric street lights on every corner to banish the night. Modernity!” He pushes his glasses back onto the bridge of his nose and smiles. “There will be no dark, forgotten corners left where strange old men can hide from death.”
The Undertaker’s features twist into a sneer. He’d briefly thought the shopkeeper his nemesis. The man is just a weak-minded fool. No one would choose to live in his vision of the future.
Cheeseman raises an eyebrow. “Make no mistake, the people will want this.” He sniffs. “Oh, they’ll complain and protest at first: when we demolish their village and pave over the fields, but in the end they’ll see was all done for their own good. We shall give them central heating and double glazing, fridge freezers, motor cars, color television and computers. They’ll not live like medieval serfs anymore, yoked to the passage of seasons and the rising and falling of the sun. Once they’re no longer slaves to the land, they can shed the need for quaint rural superstitions and folk tales.” He purses his lips as if the words leave a bad taste in his mouth. “They shall finally be free of nature’s tyranny.”
The Undertaker stares at his outstretched hands. Coarse and calloused, they have only ever known labor, even when their task was murder. He shakes his head. “That ain’t the way of things. A man has to work.”
Cheeseman’s sour smile does not alter. “Do not pretend you care what happens to them. What are these people to you, except cattle?”
Behind the Undertaker, Rasputin releases a restless snort and stamps a hoof.
The shopkeeper’s eyes narrow. “Please ensure that animal doesn’t foul the parking area.”
To object to a horse doing what a horse will is the mark of a city dweller. An unfamiliar rattling emerges from the Undertaker’s throat. He realizes that the sound is laughter. “Maybe I do take my food from the folks round here, but I’ve never pretended to know better than them and I ain’t never tried to change’em.”
The Undertaker is assailed by images of the shopkeeper: Cheeseman’s face is that of the regional nomarch’s man—a scribe—witnessing the destruction as soldiers subdue the river settlements in the name of their distant pharaoh. His is the satisfied smile of the Roman finitor overseeing the toil of legionaries and slaves as they construct the new road to Camulodunum. He is the Norman census-taker, meticulously noting in Latin the particulars of people who cannot read, so the French-speaking King in London may be paid his dues.
Cheeseman is the harbinger of destruction and misery. He is an infection, a parasite.
A screech like the complaining movement of rusted hinges emerges from the Undertaker’s throat. He lunges at the hateful shopkeeper.
Cheeseman deftly steps aside, grasping one of the outstretched limbs and wrapping his other arm around the Undertaker’s neck. His strength is terrible.
The Undertaker loses his hat as Cheeseman’s weight pulls them both down. Together, they sit heavily on the tarmac, the Undertaker’s throat still wrapped in the other man’s tight embrace.
The Undertaker thrashes uselessly in Cheeseman’s lap like a landed fish.
“Shhh now,” the shopkeeper coos, stroking the Undertaker’s matted, thinning hair with his free hand. The other arm increases the pressure around his neck. “Don’t fret. In a godless universe, there’ll be no Hell waiting for you, Dick Crowe, just oblivion.”
The Undertaker bucks and bellows his fury—but the only noise that escapes his throat is a wet gurgle, before even this is extinguished by the roar of blood rushing in his ears. Then this too is undercut by other sounds—the clash of blades, shouting, the crackling of dry reed roofing and wooden structures ablaze
He is in the Master’s sanctum. Outside, soldiers from the northern delta are destroying the people’s homes, slaughtering every male and taking the women, all in the names of their ruler and their hawk deity.
The Master works frantically, urging the boy to load items onto a small hand cart faster. His teacher is not concerned with preserving his worldly wealth, only the canopic jars and their precious secrets.
So preoccupied is the old man that he does not see the boy approach him from behind and raise the stout club. The Master utters no sound at the impact which caves in the back of his skull. Nor does he react to any of the subsequent blows the boy deals him as he lies on the cool stone floor, for he is already dead.
His rage spent, the boy drops the club, breathing hard. He retrieves a roll of material from the handcart, unravelling it to reveal the Master’s tools.
A loud crash from one of the neighboring buildings is accompanied by a woman’s keening. The boy knows he cannot tarry. He will take what he needs and leave.
Soon, everything that made his people who they were will be gone, all evidence of their existence erased by a force as implacable as the floods that orphaned him.
There is no bond of blood or redoubt of stone that can resist the tide of history. Only the jars contain the promise of persistence.
The boy takes one of the empty clay containers from the shelf. He picks a wickedly sharp blade and a pair of tongs and crouches over the Master’s body.
The hand bringing the blade edge to the corpse’s flesh is shaky, unpracticed. The boy expels breath until his lungs are empty and his hand is stilled. He knows well enough where to begin and what must be done. The eyes, after all, are the window to the soul.
He cuts.
The Undertaker breathes in. He lays spreadeagled on the warm tarmac outside Cheeseman’s Co-operative Supermarket. The sky above him is a vast, pale blue canopy. His vision is blurred, but the crushing pressure of Cheeseman’s arm is gone. He tries sitting up. A shadow blocks his view of the heavens.
“My, Dick Crowe, what sort of trouble are you in now?” The voice is feminine, mocking.
The Undertaker blinks. The dark figure swims and coalesces into the features of the young Cora Boxwood. She reaches out a hand. After a moment’s hesitation, he takes it and she helps him to his feet. He looks around for Cheeseman, but his foe is nowhere in sight.
Cora in her aspect as the nymph laughs and shakes her head. “No point worrying about that now, Jack Frost. Why, but you’re as dead as dead can be.”
The Undertaker looks down. An emaciated, craggy-faced man in a filthy, tattered black coat lies prostrate on the tarmac. The body looks more like a scarecrow than a human being.
His eyes narrow. “What now?”
Cora takes his arm and threads it through hers. “It’s a fine day, Jack Frost. Why not walk me down to the river?”
He frowns. “Why j’ya always call me that?”
She pats his arm and starts to walk. “Jack Frost is the Holly King who comes alive in Winter, just like you. Only, of course, the Holly King is supposed to die in Spring so he can be reborn as the Oak King—but you’ve never been that keen on dying, have you?” She glances up at him and winks. “You’ve had a fair long winter now, Jack Frost. It’s time to let the Summer come. That’s the way of things.”
The way of things—hadn’t he said something similar to the shopkeeper? He glances back at the supermarket. Cora takes his face in her hand and gently turns it back in the direction they are walking. “Don’t you worry ’bout old Cheeseman. He’s always been here— and one way or another he always shall.”
This makes little sense, and he wants to say so, but she puts a finger to his lips. “He’ll get his way with his nasty old road and his concrete, I’m sorry to say. He does so believe he knows what’s best for people.” Her eyes leave his to fixate on some faraway point. “Poor old Cheeseman, his curse is to always think he just arrived. He never remembers it’s all happened before, so he’ll never learn.”
They are in the woods now, approaching the shaded, chattering stream that the locals call a river, though the Undertaker sees now that it is also the banks of the great river. It is his birthplace, where the people are born, toil, love, and die under the pitiless sun.
Cora takes his hand in hers, and they walk down to the water’s edge. She steps into the river, turning to beckon him to join her. The Undertaker hesitates, then, closing his eyes, he steps into the river and gasps. He wades in till he is waist deep, watching Cora as she raises her arms and allows herself to be carried away by the waters.
He teeters as the currents threaten to drag his feet away from under him. He experiences a brief surge of unthinking, animal panic. For a moment, he fights against the current, before wondering why he does. His struggles cease and he lies back in the water, spreading his arms wide. He stares up at the vast, empty sky, feeling the baking sun warm his skin.
The instant he surrenders to the river’s pull, he understands. As it carries him away, the Undertaker smiles at this one final secret: for everything that has ever been shall be forgotten in time and washed away by the river. Yet, like the sun’s passage across the sky, the waters are eternal and nothing carried by their current is ever truly lost.
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Rob Gillham is a British author of weird and dark fantasy short fiction. Rob’s stories have appeared in Clarkesworld, Escape Pod, and Cosmic Horror Monthly amongst others. You can find links to all his published work and social media at his website: robgillham.com. |