The Edge of Life and Death
What if you lived close to Death? Would everything stay dead?
Our village is called Last and is on the border between Life and Death.
Let me address two things:
On the name of the village – it’s apparent to me that our founders were either profoundly lacking in creativity or believed that the peculiarity of the location was best served by a simple name.
On Life and Death – Death is very much a place.
Last sits near to the edge of an imposing plateau, that drops so cleanly and sharply you’d think someone sheared the end off with a blade. Perhaps they did. Who am I to say? But where the plateau ends, that’s Death. It’s a little anticlimactic if I’m being honest. No wailing moans and shrieks or cosmic darkness. It’s all vague and foggy like our ideas of what happens when you cross that line.
Most spirits on their way to Death don’t even get close to us. A few do though and we’ve had to fight them out. Strange things are commonplace and sometimes our dead just don’t seem to stay as dead as they ought to.
I’d only recently come back to Last after a long stay in the capital and the slow pace of life here now felt alien.
I was standing on the sidewalk of the main street staring out at the distant grey fog of Death not listening to stout older woman beside me, who was jabbering away about nothing in particular. When suddenly, the hanged man started to speak.
“Oh, hush you!” chided the older lady.
“Damn thing has been chatting up a storm lately, more than usual, I don’t know what’s gotten into him.”
I pulled my eyes away from the edge of the plateau and looked into the hanged man’s scarred face. It was a thin one, pinched, like someone had squeezed his head between their hands when he was still young and malleable.
He was one of the spirits who ended up in Last on their way to Death. One afternoon, about five years ago, he rolled in with a purposeful tread, noose and all, and before anyone could stop him, he hung himself up right in front of the butcher’s shop.
The whole village gathered to look at him and Mr Frizwell, the butcher, decided he was good for business and the hanged man had been there ever since. He has a good view of Death where he is, which to me seems masochistic.
For a dead man, he was often keen on conversation. If you got him talking about his death, he’d never shut up, but he doesn’t often speak without someone starting him up.
“What’s that Clive?” I asked. We’d taken to calling him Clive. Don’t ask me why.
He rolled his droopy, kicked puppy eyes down to look at me.
“Something’s coming,” he wheezed.
“He’s been carrying on with that nonsense lately. After the first oh, five or six times, he said it I told him ‘Clive, stop your noise, nothing’s coming’,” said the older lady, Marva, the butcher’s wife.
“Something’s coming!” he wailed loudly, rolling his crushed neck, looking around wildly.
He reached down and grabbed the top of my head, digging his sharp fingers into my hair.
“Clive!” I shouted, “let go of me.” I tried to pry his fingers loose, but I might as well have been trying to get a statue to change shape.
“Clive, that hurts. Let me go,” I repeated firmly, tears coming to my eyes as some of my hair pulled from my scalp.
“Please, listen to me,” Clive said, his desiccated voice quavering. “Please. Something is coming.”
He let me go and I stumbled and fell to one knee catching myself with my right hand. When I looked up angrily, I saw that he was crying, well at least as well as one can cry with no tears.
I’m one of the village hunters. I can read tracks and follow an animal out in the wild parts of the plateau even in darkness. So, when I felt the faintest rumble make its way up from the dirt beneath my palm, I knew the hanged man wasn’t spouting the random words of someone long dead. Something was coming.
I jumped to my feet and grabbed him. “What is coming?” He shivered and closed his eyes.
“It’s too late,” he moaned.
Sudden thunder erupted from the border with Death. Everyone in the street stopped. Then the midday sun was swallowed by night.
© Stephanie Koathes. All rights reserved.
