They arrived like a murder of crows on the snow-blasted field. Huddled and miserable, they tightened their overcoats about themselves, faces reddening in the bitter cold, as they stood on the austere stone steps and tried, too conspicuously to be convincing, to ignore the unnatural geometries the twin obelisks on either side of the stairs bore; the carven eyes on the temple itself, and arcane glyphs whose meanings were, they were certain, esoteric and blasphemous.
“Fool’s errand,” huffed the man, adjusting his woolen scarf, and the portly woman beside him glared with gleaming magpie’s eyes—at him, their unkind environs, their circumstances, or all three.
“Our carriage isn’t waiting too far, Father.” This, from the third and final of the trio, a lean and foxlike young man whose neat blacks contrasted brightly with a scarlet cravat at his throat, eyeing his silver pocket watch’s reflective lid rather than the time-face below it. He snapped it shut and looked flatly about at their patient audience of high pines. The snow glittered, defaced only with their tracks. “We could always return if there’s no reply.”
“We scheduled a meeting,” the woman said, wide lips curling. “And he had damn well better keep it.” She tightened her shawl.
As if at this, the stone doors ground open to a mouth of darkness. A pale figure surfaced from it as a lithe fish from the pelagic reaches, and regarded the three, dressed in mourning black, faces blotchy red, without a trace of judgment in his cold, black eyes.
Draped in black robes, gaunt and hairless, what they could see of the death priest’s flesh bore tight and intricate runes. His eyes were limned in black paint, and when he closed them, simplified eyes were visible on the lids.
“Enter,” he said, and his voice was light and gentle, not as deep as they’d anticipated. He swam back into the dark.
They shuffled in. Trailing their host by a yard, the husband murmured, “Kept us in the cold a good six minutes, he did. Bodes well for our task, certainly, when the creature hasn’t even mastered timekeeping.”
Their heels snapped decisively against immaculate black tile. The stone walls were respectably aged, but free of evidence of vermin. Braziers cast light feebly at dark corners where no arachnid architects spun their homes. The shadows ate at the light; each puddle of warm firelight seemed an island, hemmed in by the dark.
“I take it you received the…the corpse,” the woman said. The corridor swallowed her voice. Her voice was a violation here, it seemed to her, dimly. She was of a mind to impose on the silence again when the death priest answered.
“I received the honored client, yes.”
He led them around yet another corner into darkness. Man and wife exchanged a glance.
In sconces bolted to the stone walls across the length of the wall, candles flared unbidden in the wake of their host, who stepped soundless as a ghost. The three resumed following their host, after a half-moment’s hesitation.
“Parlor tricks,” muttered the father to the son. The son shrugged, uninterested.
It occurred to the woman that the labyrinthine trail their path described had consumed far more time and distance than the humble exterior of the temple had suggested. They must have entered an underground level beneath the temple, she assumed, an idea supported by the pervasive earthy scent about the place, and yet she was quite certain the hall had felt level, through and through. Her confusion gave way to ire; surely, all this leading them about was a part of his performance and unnecessary to the task they had hired him for. Another mark against him; another show of disrespect for his clients’ time.
They halted finally in a round room. In the center, a stone slab squatted on carven lions’ feet, burdened with a bundle that lay beneath a red shroud; its shape left no question as to what it obscured. Simple wooden chairs faced it in a semi-circle. The death priest gestured at these, and then stood behind the table.
The woman looked around the dim room and scoffed.
“Who is all this to impress? No god-fearing folk would take this temple in without judgement, I’ll tell you that,” she said, and harshly added, “We’re only here as a last resort, you understand. And we hardly expect it to work.”
“Speaking of—” the man started.
“As I described to you in our previous correspondence,” the death priest answered, “it is no easy task to open the gate to permit souls to re-enter; it is as opening a sluicegate in the hopes that a particular fish in all the river will hear your call and pass through it. I will guarantee success now no more than I did then.”
“We have paid you a formidable sum for this task,” the husband reminded him in a dangerous tone.
“Quite,” his wife said. She gestured at the table, adding, “And so…”
Unhurried, the death priest drew back the shroud.
There a figure lay, pale and beginning to mottle and darken at the extremities and face with rot. Hair cropped raggedly close sat brittle against the forehead, dead eyes stared defiantly up.
The husband raised a kerchief to his mouth and nose; the wife’s face curdled with disgust. The son sat straighter, eyeing the corpse with unashamed fascination.
The death priest touched the forehead gently. He drew back the hair to reveal the cold and springy forehead as one might brush away a stray tangle of his own daughter’s hair to check for a fever.
He drew a syringe, bent forward.
“Forgive me,” he said. The father waved his hand, but the death priest’s apology was not for his benefit. He did not glance in their direction as he drew a vial of sludgy, black blood. Only when it was full, the needle retracted to leave a circular incision in flesh that had lost its ability to heal, did he turn to the family of three.
“I must know why, you understand.”
“None of your business,” the husband cut in, half-rising.
The wife said icily, “She drowned. She kept running off. Ever since she could toddle, playing like a beast in the woods. And still she wore men’s breeches, spurned her place by the hearth, took long walks out in the damned wilderness alone… If I’d warned her once, I’d warned her a thousand times, for all the good it did her.” Her scowl deepened.
“Unbefitting a daughter of a family like ours,” the husband sniffed.
“Aye. We’d never marry her off like it was, at any rate. But it’s even more unseemly to have it known by all and sundry that our daughter died while scrounging in the forest like a wild creature. We’re here for another chance, you see.”
The father sighed.
“Let’s get this on with so we can return home with her. We have invested enough in this…blasphemy,” he said. “The sooner we can get it all behind us…perhaps, eventually, we’ll yet marry her off with decent prospects…”
The young man snickered, seemingly oblivious to the venomous sting delivered by his mother’s stare.
“Then you all give your consent for this soul to be raised?” the death priest said.
With his thumb, he painted sigils on the stone slab surrounding the body and on the corpse’s forehead in blood.
“We wouldn’t be here if we didn’t!” said the father. “And we’ve bloody well wasted enough time as it is. Let’s get on with it, before someone sees our carriage here.”
The death priest glanced up coolly, calmly, but the candles guttered, and the room dropped in temperature.
“A simple aye will suffice, honored sir.”
“Aye,” said the father, impatiently, tomato-red.
“Aye,” said the wife.
“Aye,” said the son, rolling his eyes, prompted by his mother’s elbow.
“Let us begin,” the death priest said.
He closed his eyes. The blood glowed in pink phosphorescence. The flames in the candles faded and changed, a dim blue light emitting from them. The mother and father shifted anxiously in their uncomfortable seats; the son grinned, gaze transfixed.
A long moment passed as a bolt of wind seemed to circle in the utterly still room, picking up speed, sounding like a winter wind howling at the walls—sounding like screaming—
—Then—abruptly—it all cut away.
The death priest lifted his head as the room became lit by mundane means again.
Opening his eyes, he stated, “You may take your leave. I will prepare the body for burial.”
The mother and father rose spluttering, both red in the face, vying for the death priest’s attention. He raised a hand.
“The resurrection will not happen. The gate remains closed. You may take your leave, madame and sirs.”
He ushered them back to the temple entrance—which took, somehow, no time at all, and husband and wife found themselves guided along despite their intentions by a gentle push from behind like a tailwind—and closed the heavy stone door as the father turned with abuses coiling to spring from his tongue.
Enraged, the father soon gave up pounding on the door and pried the heavy stone open.
They gaped at a single, empty, shallow chamber with no exit save that which they stood in, backlit by blinding snow and surrounded by the ghosts of released breaths.
Wearily, the death priest swept back to the altar.
He took a seat before the stone plinth and folded his hands in his lap; he closed his eyes.
“They are gone, my lad. You may return,” he said. “I hold the gate open.”
The air changed in the room at once, as though a light breeze brushed its way inside, and the death priest exhaled a long, slow breath as though after great effort.
The mottled face of the corpse lightened to a shade of health, with the flush of new blood pumping through its vasculature; the bloat shrank as the body healed as if from a mere bruise. Panicked maggots were shunted out of rapidly closing holes and from the nostrils and ears; they fell and squirmed blindly on the stone and the floor. The eyes, unclouded, blinked and moved about, and a quick, sharp breath was drawn.
The former corpse convulsed, and then fought to rise, taking choking, uneven breaths.
“Easy, easy,” the death priest said. “Follow.” He pointedly breathed in, waited, breathed out slowly.
The person on the stone slab imitated, ragged breaths catching but gradually falling into line, until finally both breathed gently in unison.
“Thank you,” said the figure on the slab, swinging his legs over the side. “Thank you, a thousand times thank you. I… What do I owe you? As I told you from…beyond the gate, there’s hardly anything I can do to repay you.”
He fixed the death priest with a wary stare. The death priest reclined his head a bit on the chair’s thin wooden back, apparently thinking.
“I can’t return to them, you understand,” the boy remarked.
“I would not suggest that you do.”
“I could…” the boy looked around, “Say, I could stay here. Learn from you. Become your apprentice. What say you?”
“No.”
The answer was firm, startling the boy.
“No,” the death priest said, raising his head and regarding him thoughtfully, “not yet, I think. Ours is a grim and quiet way. You’d have a great deal of scholarship before you…”
“I can read. I enjoy it.”
“That is well, but this is no life for someone so young, no matter your aptitude for it. You cannot learn what it is to live. Not here. And you have yet to live, my lad.”
The death priest drew something from within his robes—a hefty pouch—and tossed it to the boy, who looked up, puzzled.
“The price of your resurrection,” the death priest said. “Take it. Follow the road outside down to the village and hire a carriage. Choose a name. Go somewhere new. And if, after ten years, you choose to return, I’ll be here.”
The boy’s throat moved to speak, but nothing emerged.
“Ah, here,” the death priest said, remembering. He stood, and the boy hopped down, following. From the deepest shadows welling in the corner of the room, the death priest reached in—arm disappearing to the elbow as if in liquid—and produced trousers, boots, a simple shirt, a traveling cloak of thick wool.
“Can you teach me that when I return?” the boy said.
“That and more,” the death priest agreed, handing him the clothes. “Go on. The way is lit for you.”
The boy nodded.
“I’ll be back, you know. You had best expect it.”
“Very well.”
The boy donned his clothing and turned, finding the way through the winding corridors indeed lit by braziers, guiding him at intersections and through turns. He emerged into bitter cold and blinding white, the scent of winter forest and the sounds of hardy birds flitting through the quiet landscape.
The crunch underfoot of the packed snow, was, he decided, the sound of the first step of his life.
Somewhere back in the dim, impossible depths of the temple, the death priest sat in that wooden chair and thought of the scars beneath his robes, long healed. He remembered a young man very much like the boy, walking boldly into the unknown, finally alive.
| Avery Kit Malone is a recovering academic, an arthropod enthusiast, and an okay (but getting better at it) gardener. His short fiction can be found in Dim Shores, Planet Scumm, Pseudopod, and other venues. |  |