This is the story the roses tell when their heads fall, rotting, from the bush. This is the story the leaves hum when they crackle, trampled, underfoot. This is the story the frost whispers when it creeps, greedily, over the fields.
This is the story of Death and the girl they love.
Down in the holler, there were many stories about Death, and Colleen knew them all.
On Sundays, the preacher spoke of hell and heaven—of sinners doomed to torment and saints blessed with bliss—and one day, God, with a voice like thunder, would decide the fate of every human soul.
At supper after service, Colleen’s Ma would sigh heavily between sips of her black coffee. “Pay the preacher no mind,” she would say to her two terrified daughters—Colleen and her twin sister, Gloriana. “Death is just rest—just nighttime and rest. Nothing to be frightened over.” She had raised two fatherless daughters and didn’t have the preacher’s luxurious notions of good and evil. Ma picked up her stitching again, her narrow fingers making the finest lace this side of the river. It didn’t matter that it was the Lord’s day—God may have gotten a day of rest, but Ma had never rested a day in her life.
At night, Colleen and Gloriana would sit around the hearth as their Mawmaw played the fiddle, singing tales her father had carried over from the old lands. Mawmaw—despite her age—had the good fortune to be less tired than her daughter and more interesting than the preacher, so these were the stories about Death that Colleen chose to believe.
Mawmaw sang of the Otherworld—of heroes sailing west across a sea, never to be seen again; mist so thick that when it cleared, whole villages had been abandoned; portals of stone and water that bridged this world and the Otherworld. Colleen hummed along to the melodies, tasting them like honey on her tongue. Gloriana always fell asleep on the rope rug, curled by the fire with her hand in Colleen’s.
There was Life and Death down there in the holler, the two as close as the sides of a hay penny. Sure as the cycle of thaw and frost, Death, in time, came for them.
Death came for Ma one winter. A fever raged through town and, though they cooled Ma’s face with freshly melted snow, they couldn’t save her. Mawmaw lit a fire and burned her daughter’s body to ash, the ground too frozen for a proper burial.
Death came for Mawmaw that summer, when she went to bed one sweltering night and did not rise the next morning. Her old body was so swollen with heat that Colleen and Gloriana needed the neighbors’ help to carry her from the house.
And then Death came for Gloriana.
Colleen and Gloriana were eighteen; Mawmaw buried four months; Ma dead almost a year.
The first snow of the season had fallen and drifts piled up beneath the windows. At the edge of town, the pond had frozen solid. Two young men knocked on their door with ice skates in hand.
“Please, Gloriana, please come with us,” they pleaded. All of the young men in town were in love with Gloriana—her mouth round as a plum, her auburn hair the color of gingerbread, her eyes as green as the mountainside in April. No one paid much mind to Colleen, with her narrow mouth and her dull, beech bark hair.
Gloriana’s green eyes met Colleen’s. Colleen nodded.
“We would love to go.” Gloriana gave the men her warmest smile, like spring blooming in the holler. Gloriana had always talked for the sisters, while Colleen hid behind her. When Colleen imagined her own voice, she heard Gloriana’s.
Frost dusted the rippled surface of the frozen pond. The whole town seemed to be there, mittened hands passing around bottles of rye. Gloriana took Colleen’s hand—ignoring the young men completely—and dragged her onto the ice. Gloriana twirled while her gingerbread hair tumbled from under her hat. Colleen wobbled like a newly birthed calf. But Gloriana held onto Colleen’s hands, and spun her sister in slow circles at the center of the pond.
Colleen squinted at the dazzling ice. A dark shadow shifted beneath the surface. A trick of the light, Colleen thought, or she was going snow-blind.
Still, she didn’t much care for the way that shadow coiled beneath the ice—a copperhead waiting to strike.
The shadow grew darker, closer. Colleen tried to tug her sister away, but slipped.
A crack like gunfire split the air. The sound made Colleen’s ears ring and her teeth vibrate in her skull. Then a splash.
When people told the story later of poor Gloriana, they said the ice split right beneath where the lovely girl was standing. They said her plain sister reached for her as she plunged into the water. They said she sank quickly with the weight of her skirts and her skates and her coat. They said her sister was left holding one of Gloriana’s dainty gloves, soft leather with bluebells stitched at the cuff.
Colleen alone knew the truth. Two dark hands had reached up from the ice and pulled Gloriana under.
Colleen spent that night alone in their little house. Once, it had been full: Mawmaw playing the fiddle; Ma in the old chair with a basket of stitching at her feet; Gloriana snoring softly on the rope rug, her hand warm in Colleen’s own. Now, Colleen didn’t even bother to light the hearth.
Colleen paced the worn floorboards as a winter wind raked its bony fingers along the windows. She understood that Death had a time and a purpose: Ma had been sick, Mawmaw had been old. But Gloriana—Gloriana had been taken.
There had been greed in those long, shadowy fingers as they curled around her sister’s ankles. Death had reached up into their world and torn Gloriana from it.
If this had been one of Mawmaw’s songs, the hero would brave the path to the Otherworld and bring Gloriana home. Colleen remembered every song: the Otherworld was a place where challenges came in threes, where girls could be more than mortal if they were clever enough, and where a dangerous power crept at the edges of every tale.
Colleen had never seen a hero down in the holler, but she knew the way and was, perhaps, clever enough.
She would bring Gloriana back from the Otherworld.
The next day, the wind had stilled, the sky shone morning glory blue, and Colleen headed for the pond with a waxed-canvas pack on her shoulder. Spiderweb fissures stretched out from the place Gloriana had fallen. Grey water lapped at the sides of the hole, narrow claw marks gouged into the ice.
Colleen took a deep breath down into her belly and held it. Then, she stepped into the hole.
It was the act of stepping that transformed the pond into a portal. If Colleen had fallen in—not stepped, not dragged, just fallen—the pond would have been a pond, and the cold grey water would have turned her blue and bloated.
But because Colleen stepped, the pond became a portal to the Otherworld. The grey water dared not touch her, bending away so that a bubble formed around Colleen as she drifted down, deeper than ponds should go. Pale grey light filtered through the glass above. Silvery fish swam around her, elegant tail fins trailing behind them like skeins of silk.
From far below she heard laughter like skipping stones. Colleen floated closer, and soon, a faint light appeared. The pale yellow light moved in a tight circle, around and around, in a pattern so hypnotizing, Colleen grew dizzy. A fish, she realized, swimming in its orbit like a streaking star.
The fish swam before Colleen’s eyes again, illuminating, for an instant, the creature that lurked in the shadows. That single glimpse made her mouth turn dry.
The creature was monstrous in size though vaguely human in shape, except for its long tail that curled out of sight. Its silver scales shone as the golden fish swam around it. Moon-white eyes stared unseeing into the near total darkness.
The creature spoke in a voice like a raging river. “Human Child, what is your purpose here?”
Colleen opened her dry mouth but her voice hitched in her throat. Gloriana had always spoken for her. Colleen had forgotten what her own voice sounded like.
The creature grinned. In its mouth, hundreds of teeth came to a sharp, hungry point. “If you have no purpose, perhaps I shall devour you. To be my next meal would be a fitting purpose, would it not?”
The creature lurched forward, snapping its jaw.
“I come seeking Death in the Otherworld!” Colleen shouted. Her voice hummed through her body—belly, lungs, and head all dizzy with it. The sound startled her, a husky crackle like fallen leaves.
The creature laughed again. “And what right have you to seek Death? Are you so eager for Death to take your soul?”
Now that her body remembered the sensation of speaking, words fell from Colleen’s mouth like late-autumn. “Death has already taken something that belongs to me. I owe them nothing else.”
“Is that so?” The creature mused. “Tell me what Death has claimed and perhaps I’ll let you pass.”
So Colleen told the story of Ma.
She spoke of a woman who sewed as daintily as a spider. She stitched blessings into every garment—babes christened in her gowns lived into adulthood; women wedded in her dresses had sober and faithful husbands; men buried in her shrouds rested in peace, never to be seen haunting the holler. In her own home, she hung lace in the windows, sewn with delicate patterns that cast changing shadows on the floor as the sun traveled its steady path. Her daughters slept beneath blankets embroidered with the night sky.
She spoke of how this woman was felled by fever and of a ground too frozen to bury her. They wrapped her in scraps of unfinished lace—for who could make a burial shroud worthy of her? And they burned her.
As she spoke, the water around her stilled, and the little golden fish halted in its orbit. She could feel shadows float closer, listening. Was this Death’s power? Colleen wondered. This power to cast stillness over everything around her?
“Here.” Colleen reached into her pack and pulled out a square of Ma’s lace. “Give me your hand.”
The creature held up its hand, which was wider than the pond she had stepped through. The water parted for her so she could trace the patterns of the lace against the creature’s soft, algae-covered palms. Wordlessly, it rubbed the lace with its thumb.
“May I pass?” Colleen asked.
“I am a Guardian of the Gates, and I will let you pass,” the creature said, its voice now more like a rushing brook.
The darkness behind the creature split open, and pale white light spilled into the depths.
Colleen took a step toward it, and then stopped. She remembered Mawmaw’s old songs. She had been clever, she thought. But had she been clever enough?
Colleen turned back. “I have given you something of mine. May I have something of yours?”
The creature plucked an armored scale from the place over its heart, rippling like liquid silver, and gave it to Colleen. With the scale wrapped like a cloak around her shoulders, Colleen passed through the Gates of the Otherworld and into the land that held her sister.
Mist shrouded the Otherworld, so thick Colleen had to shoulder her way through its weight. Its biting cold nipped at her, like dogs’ teeth at her ankles, but the armored cloak kept her warm.
She did not know for how long she walked—only that she had stopped several times to eat and drink from her pack when she grew weary. Her eyes drooped and each step was labored, but she knew she could not lay down to sleep.
When her head spun with exhaustion, Colleen knelt in the mist, unable to take another step. But, perhaps, she could make the mist listen.
“Hello!” The autumn husk of her voice cleaved the damp air. “I come seeking Death in the Otherworld. Will you grant me safe passage?”
The mist responded in the voices of everyone she had ever loved and lost, speaking in dissonant chorus.
“Colleen.” Her name echoed on ghostly voices. “Turn back—daughter—granddaughter—sister. This is no place for a Human Child. Do not be so eager to give yourself to Death.”
Lost in their chorus of voices, Colleen couldn’t hear her own. She was only sure she was speaking because of the sensation of it: the rush of air from her lungs, the heat humming in her mouth. “Death has already taken something that belongs to me. I owe them nothing else.”
The ghostly voices rose up in a chorus of outrage, the unintelligible shriek of nails against glass.
“Please, may I tell you what they have taken in exchange for safe passage?” Her words scraped her throat as she shouted over the voices. She wanted to feel time hitch between every word, to feel the mist settle as she spoke. “It must be a long time since you heard a good story.”
The mist quieted. “You may—though we will decide whether to grant you passage.”
So Colleen told the story of Mawmaw.
She spoke of a woman who sang the songs the sea once sung. The music of her fiddle could fill a room with light and warmth, even in the depths of endless winters. The melodies were like a map—of where she had come from, of where she was going—and to know her songs was to know one’s place in the world. She had a voice like honey that could lull a colicky baby to sleep or make a man rise from his sick bed and dance. No matter that her knuckles swelled to the size of chestnuts, her nimble fingers leapt on the fiddle strings.
She spoke of how this woman’s big heart struggled in the summer heat. They buried her on a windless day—even the treetops mourned, knowing they would never again sway to her fiddle.
As she spoke, the mist gathered near. It pulled itself in from the vast land it covered, revealing abandoned villages and rocky paths. It gathered itself up in front of Colleen, until the dense, white cloud formed the shape of a human. Colleen made the story as long as she could, recounting every detail about Mawmaw. She stopped her telling once the road ahead cleared—only then did she release the mist from her hold.
“Here.” Colleen reached into her pack and pulled out Mawmaw’s fiddle. “I would like you to have this.”
The mist took the fiddle in its white-cloud hands and placed it on its shoulder. It played a few clumsy notes and, then, a roaring melody spilled over the abandoned land, filling it with light and warmth.
“May I pass?” Colleen asked. The mist nodded toward the craggy road.
Colleen took a step toward it, then stopped. The Guardian had granted her its armor. What did the mist have that she may want?
“I have given you something of mine. May I have something of yours?”
Without stopping its fiddling, the mist pinched off a piece of itself and held it out for Colleen. She stopped it up in a jam jar from her pack. Behind the sticky glass, the piece of mist changed shape, stretching then snapping back together.
She tucked it in her pack and followed the road toward the shore, ever nearer to her sister.
A town on wooden stilts grew on the shores of the Otherworld, stretching out over the shallows on a web of boardwalks. Between the too-wide gaps in the boards, Colleen watched water lap at the beams. The whole town seemed to sway with the tide. Beyond the wooden paths, a grey sea faded into mist at the horizon.
Colleen had never seen this much water in her life. In the holler, a clear river ran through town, bursting its banks after the spring thaw or during summer storms. But she had never seen water like this—endless. It could swallow a woman whole.
Colleen hesitated to take the first step from solid land onto the swaying platform. The air around her stank of fish. From inside the salt-stained houses, she heard men’s deep laughter.
She opened the jam jar and took out the piece of mist. She stretched and kneaded it like dough, until it was long enough to drape over herself. The cool mist chilled her skin and clung to her woolen dress. “Let me look like a man, so I can pass through town safely,” she murmured.
The mist obliged, shifting and slithering over her skin. When Colleen peered into the grey water, she saw the reflection of a young man staring back at her—the same narrow mouth and pale hair, but with an angular jaw and neatly trimmed beard.
She stepped into the floating town.
Fishermen strode past her with full nets over their shoulders. The sky turned from a pale overcast grey to a deep blue twilight. Men with weathered faces and gnarled hands lit rows of candles along the wooden path. The pools of warm, red light were just enough to see by.
Colleen headed to the far end of town, where fishing boats of all shapes and sizes bobbed beside the docks.
“I’m seeking passage west,” Colleen said in her best man’s voice—a voice that expects to be listened to.
The fishermen muttered their apologies. Nets full of fish strained over their shoulders. They needed to get their catch to market and had no time to ferry a passenger.
A voice spoke up. “Where are you headed?” it asked.
Colleen looked around, and then down. Inside the smallest fishing boat on the dock, a young woman wearing a straw hat was mending her net. “Where are you headed?” she repeated.
“I am seeking Death across the western sea,” Colleen said. She was so relieved to see a woman in this strange place that she fell back into her own voice.
“What kind of glamor are you working here?” The fisherwoman narrowed her eyes.
Colleen removed the shroud of mist—sealing it back in the jam jar—and stood before the fisherwoman as herself.
The fisherwoman nodded and gestured for Colleen to sit on the edge of the dock. “Thousands of souls pass through here, seeking a ferry to their final rest. Why should I ferry you—still alive and well—and not a deceased soul who has earned their time?”
So Colleen told the story of Gloriana.
She spoke of a young woman with hair like gingerbread and eyes like the mountainside in April, who was still more kind than she was beautiful. Her hands always reached toward the loneliest person in the room. A single word from her, whispered on lips round as a ripe plum, could soothe even the deepest grief. Her laughter sounded like rain after drought, or sunshine after rain.
She spoke of how Death themself reached up from the ice and pulled the young woman down before her time.
“And I am going to bring her back,” Colleen said.
As Colleen spoke, the fisherwoman set down her mending. She leaned toward Colleen until the bow of the little boat dipped into the water. When the story was over the fisherwoman sighed, heavy and tired, and picked up her mending with her raw, chapped hands. Her left thumb was bruised where the large needle had punctured it.
“I wish you and your sister all the best, I really do,” the fisherwoman murmured.
Colleen’s stomach sank like a stone. She had told the story true, felt time halt between the ebb and flow of the waves.
The fisherwoman shrugged. “I don’t think I want to ferry a thief to steal from Death.”
Colleen’s body still hummed with the telling, her tongue still hot with the words. She had held the hungry Guardian enthralled; she had gathered up the greedy mist. Her voice would not fail her. She would tell the story again, and again, to whoever would listen, until someone ferried her across the sea.
Colleen rose, brushed the splinters from her dress.
“Here.” She reached into her pack and pulled out Gloriana’s glove. Her husky voice crackled like a bonfire. “As a gift for listening.”
The fisherwoman admired the soft, worn leather and the embroidered bluebells on the cuff. She slipped it onto her left hand, over her bruised thumb, and took up her mending again. After a few stitches, she smiled to herself. She stretched her gloved hand.
“Fine.” She extended her hand to Colleen. “I will ferry you to Death.”
The fisherwoman rowed Colleen across the sea. Inky night pooled around them. Not a single breath of wind disturbed the limp sail.
With every stroke of the oar, Colleen’s head bobbed against her chest and her eyelids fluttered closed. Sleep pressed in around her, tucking itself under her chin and wrapping itself around her shoulders like a worn blanket.
“Drink this.” The fisherwoman nudged Colleen’s shoulder. “Don’t fall asleep, or you’ll be dead before you reach Death’s shores.”
Colleen fumbled for a leather waterskin. The drink burned like fire against her lips. Smoke curled in her mouth and filled her head. Flames licked through her veins. Colleen coughed and spluttered. But she was alert, shrugging off that shroud of sleep.
“Thank you,” Colleen murmured.
The fisherwoman rowed through the night until a crimson dawn burned at the horizon, setting the mist alight. They sailed right into that mist and landed on a sandy shore.
Colleen thanked the fisherwoman and tried to pass the waterskin back. The fisherwoman shook her head. “You’re going to need it,” she called as she rowed away.
Colleen stood on Death’s shores. The damp morning smelled of staunched blood. She took another swig of the fisherwoman’s fiery drink and pulled her scale-armor cloak tighter.
She walked inland until she could no longer spy the sea when she glanced over her shoulder. The mist began to clear. Now, Death’s lands unfurled around her. Red iron soil covered rolling hills dotted with lush plants in colors for which Colleen had no name. Trees, with low hanging fruit so ripe they burst when they hit the ground, provided shade from the glaring white sunlight.
Among those trees, creatures lurked. She could not see them, only glimpsing them from the corner of her eyes—the flick of a tail, the curl of a horn. But she heard them.
“Human Child, are you lost? Human Child, are you frightened?” Their voices rustled like the tree leaves.
Colleen removed the mist from her jam jar and spread it over herself. She willed her shape into something different, something new, something that would frighten the creatures away.
The next time they called to her, Colleen spoke in a voice like the first thundercrack of a summer storm. “I am no Human Child. My power rivals that of Death, or else how would I have made it this far?”
Her voice carried across the rolling hills, scattering the birds in the rotting trees, sending the creature slinking deeper into the shadows. The whole land around her seemed to part. The road flattened and trees bent away from her, until she could see a palace like bleached bone.
Colleen strode toward it, the fisherwoman’s drink fiery in her belly, the mist’s disguise clinging to her skin, the Guardian’s scale impenetrable around her shoulders. But those were not the powers that drove each sure footfall. It was the power of being listened to, of flattening the land with a single word, of making time stand still. It was the power of her voice.
She did not knock on the palace doors. “Open,” she spoke, and they opened.
The doors swung shut behind her, taking with it the last of the glaring sunlight. Darkness fell over Colleen’s eyes like a heavy veil.
A voice rumbled around her, crashing against her and pulling her into the undertow. “Who enters this place?”
Colleen balled her fists. “I have come to set things right.”
She felt a tug deep in her belly, an invisible string pulling at her navel. Colleen followed the sensation through the corridors of the palace. A rush of cool air grazed her face, and Colleen imagined doors opening on silent hinges.
“Who enters this place?” a voice repeated, closer now.
“I am Colleen, and I have come for my sister.”
“Colleen?” Another voice cried. “Is that really you?”
Colleen’s heart leapt in her chest. “I’m here, Gloriana—it’s all right,” she murmured.
Gloriana wept at her sister’s voice. Colleen stumbled in the dark, guided by the sound of her sister’s crying.
“Do not approach my bride.” Death’s voice rattled the room.
“I have made it this far. I will not be turned away now,” Colleen snapped. A cold wind swept through the room, as though the palace itself had gasped.
Colleen found her sister in the dark, huddled on the floor with matted hair and a damp face. Colleen rocked and shushed her. “I’ll get you home,” she murmured into her sister’s hair.
“I am here to free her. Let me offer you something in exchange,” Colleen demanded.
Death’s voice was hot against her ear. “You can try.”
So Colleen told the story of herself.
She spoke of a young woman who had lost everyone she ever loved: her mother, who stitched lace like spider-silk; her grandmother, who sang stories of the Otherworld; her sister, who was so kind and beautiful that Death themself stole her away to be their bride. The young woman traveled to the Otherworld trading stories and gifts, earning passage and boons. Her voice grew louder with each telling so that now, when she spoke, she felt the whole world listening.
She spoke of how she craved that feeling of fire on her tongue, the stillness of a held breath as she concluded a tale. In that moment, she held time between her teeth—and what was immortality if not that?
As Colleen spoke, Death, who had always lived in darkness and silence, thought they saw a flicker of light in the young woman’s mouth, burning like a beacon. They pressed themself close to her, marveling at the white light of her tale.
Then, the story finished.
Death waited for the next word and was met with silence.
Eternity ripped down the middle, into the time before they had heard Colleen speak and the time after. They recoiled from the shock of pain—they had never known grief before.
“I have given you a story,” Colleen said. “Now let my sister go.”
“No—no,” Death wailed. “It is not enough. You must tell another. Please, please.”
The next words were already in her mouth, burning on her tongue. She smiled—a crescent moon of light shining in the darkness. Death had watched humans for all eternity, and they knew the look of one drunk with their own power. Colleen wanted the same thing that they did—they need only offer.
Death curled themself around Colleen’s shoulders and breathed into her ear. “Stay in your sister’s place. Fill my halls with stories, and your sister will return, unharmed, to the world of the living.”
The answer came in a rush, the word blazing on her tongue.
“Yes.”
“Colleen, no!” the sister protested. “No! I will stay. Please—please don’t—”
“You do not belong in darkness,” Death spoke. “Go, I release you.”
The sister wept harder. “I cannot leave you here,” she begged.
“I want this.” Colleen’s husky voice snapped like a sudden frost.
She handed her sister all of the boons she had earned and helped her to her feet. “These will get you home safely. Now, go on. I love you.”
Death had heard those words before, wept over sickbeds as humans passed into their hold. They had never heard them uttered like this—so certain, so powerful. They could feel the sister fortifying herself on them. Her spine straightened, her shoulders pulled back, her head held high.
Death hoped Colleen would say those words to them one day.
Death guided the sister out into the glaring sunlight of the Otherworld. When the doors shut again, they were alone with Colleen. They thought perhaps she would start to weep with the calamitous realization she would spend eternity in darkness.
But Colleen did not weep. Instead, she smiled, her mouth alight. “What story would you like to hear first?”
Death reached out and held Colleen’s balled fists. She opened her hands, letting their weight weave between her fingers.
Death whispered, “Tell me what happens next.”
The stories say that Death’s lady, Queen of the Otherworld, spins such enchanting tales that mortals have been known to walk willingly into Death’s realm. When she speaks, her words illuminate even the darkest corners of the Otherworld, until all is bathed in pale light. She is the memory-keeper to Death’s oblivion. She holds time between her teeth for the souls whose stories she tells.
Some humans revile her. Some revere her. All have renamed her and tried to reclaim her.
But the roses say her true name when their heads fall, rotting, from the bush. The leaves hum her true name when they crackle, trampled, underfoot. The frost whispers her true name when it creeps, greedily, over the fields.
Listen.
| Erin Keating earned her B.A. in creative writing and literature at Roanoke College and her M.A. in history at Drew University, mostly so she could continue to surround herself with old books. She currently works as a grant writer at an arts education nonprofit. Her fiction has appeared in Cosmic Horror Monthly, Tales to Terrify, and anthologies from Quill & Crow Publishing House, among others. Find her online at erinkeatingwrites.com. |  |