Kill the Dead Read online

  “They’re weak,” Dro said. “They couldn’t stand too much specific truth of this nature. Left to itself, any ghost will eventually die. It may take centuries, it still happens.”

  She stared at the luminous lightless revenant of the town. She even glanced at Myal.

  “Why don’t you,” she said, “go down and take the instrument and get out the tooth and tread on it. I’ll tell you which bit of ivory it is.”

  But Myal only flinched aside. He walked away and leaned his forehead against one of the ghostly houses. He did not intimate what he thought or meant to do, but he remained, perhaps unconsciously, in earshot.

  “I am ready to go away,” said Ciddey to Dro. “I’m tired. I want to. Why can’t I just leave, without the tooth being smashed?”

  “Once you’ve availed yourself of a link, the bond’s established. You’re tethered, till it’s destroyed.”

  “You do it,” she said imperiously.

  He smiled. He looked old and very handsome. Like a sculpture of a man, not a man. The stain of blood on his shirt had disappeared into its blackness.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “I don’t understand,” she said. “And yet—”

  “Please,” he said, an elegant, cold plea for tactful silence, which she ignored.

  “You,” she said. Her eyes flamed with amazement and knowledge. “Charlatan.”

  “Not quite.”

  “Impostor.”

  “Very well.”

  “Damn you,” she said, “how dared you—”

  “How dared you?”

  She shut her mouth. She smiled, her lips closed.

  “I feel,” she said, “serene. I don’t care about you anymore. I want to go to sleep. Or won’t it be sleep? I don’t mind. Let me go away. Please, Parl Dro.”

  “Myal,” Dro said, not looking at him, “go and climb the tree and fetch the instrument.”

  Myal turned his head, trying to push it through the transparent wall, somehow not able to.

  “Go to hell,” Myal muttered.

  “There isn’t any hell,” said Ciddey reflexively. She laughed. It was a girl’s laughter. “Perhaps I’ll find Cilny,” she said. “She could punish me. And then we could be reconciled. Oh, I’m tired of being here. Can I get the instrument and break the link?”

  “I don’t know,” Dro said.

  “I hated you,” she said. “How I hated you. My motive for coming back. But you.”

  “Please,” he said again.

  She shrugged.

  “Oh,” she said. She glanced again at Myal. “Him, I suppose. I thought you’d have to follow him into Tulotef,” she said, “because you were in love with him.”

  “I am,” said Dro, “in love with him. He’s my son.”

  Three things happened in a neat and tasteful choreography.

  The girl widened her eyes, started to question in a gesture of hands rather than words; that was the first thing. Secondly, very, very slowly, Myal wrenched himself off the wall and began struggling toward them in a kind of brainless lurch. The third thing negated all previous actions. It was a sound. The sound of tearing cloth. The frayed sling, all that held the heavy musical instrument to the rough rods of the tree, parting.

  The three incorporealities left on the ghost street were transfixed. A last, abbreviated dim wail, one single note, drifted up to them. Then the crash of wood on jagged rock, a wild twanging of wires, scuff of stones, dull dreadful bouncing, slamming, sliding. The soft little rush of shale, a sharp crack. The second crash, total. Feathers of silence came drifting down.

  Ciddey spun like a cobweb, the skirts of her dress fanning out, forming insectile wings.

  “I wanted it,” she said. “I think I made it happen. I’m glad,” she said. She wept, not the beads of the cold fish stream, only tears. “I want to—” she said. “I want to—”

  The darkness spun like a wheel, spinning her away with it. Sometimes it was possible to comfort, to smooth the path. The going through could be calm, even in some cases blissful, thankful.

  But Dro stood and looked at the night, feeling only an intense and acrid shame, a rejection of everything he had ever done in the name of his so-called profession.

  Automatically, not really meaning to, he put up his arm to block Myal’s blow when it came flailing for his jaw. Automatically, Dro returned the blow, light as a cat. Myal sat down on the street, cursing him.

  Though he dreaded it, Parl Dro now had his own confession to make.

  “You can’t, you couldn’t be my rotten father. Unless you started very young. I suppose you could have. I was too scared to—there was never any opportunity —no, I was too scared. A carter’s wife seduced me when I was twenty. Twenty. She was the first. I was grateful. You must have been at it when you were fourteen. Or less. And with a mature woman. That doesn’t seem very salubrious. Did it with her and strolled—sorry, hobbled—off and left her. Left her with my drunken pig of a father—only he wasn’t. No wonder he hated me. Whenever he thumped me, he was thumping you. I don’t blame him. I’d like to smash your head in. Father. Travelling ghost-killer. Can do clever tricks with knives. You’ll have to teach me that one. Padding, metal plate, fake blood. Or is it the knife that’s the trick, the blade bends or something? You really will have to teach me, Daddy. You owe me something. If it’s even true.”

  “It s true.”

  “Well I’ve only got your word for it. And either way, what’s your word worth? I’ve lost the only thing that was any use,” said Myal. “It’s down the slope, in pieces.”

  “Where you originally tried to throw it to save me from Ciddey and Tulotef,” said Dro. “I realised then, you’d have to be told.”

  “I don’t want to hear anything else,” Myal said.

  “And, frankly, I don’t want to tell you anything else,” Dro answered.

  “Great. We’ll keep it that way.”

  Myal got up. His head bowed forward, eyes on the ground, he strode away, long fast strides that Dro’s crippled leg should have some trouble competing with. And then Parl Dro was standing directly in front of him. Myal pulled up, eyes swimming.

  “What—how did you manage that?”

  “The same way I managed the knife. The same way I got from Sable’s hovel in the forest to this hill in less than a minute.”

  “You tranced yourself, after all,” said Myal. “You’re here in the astral, just like I am.”

  “There’s a low wall behind you. Sit on it.”

  Myal retreated a step, and the wall caught the backs of his knees. He sat, not entirely meaning to. “All right.”

  “Now,” said Dro, “if you can keep quiet, I’ll explain. Despite the fact I may not want to, and you may not want to hear.”

  Myal gripped his hands together, and stared at them trembling.

  “Why do it, then?”

  Dro did not reply. He sat on the wall half a yard away and presently began to speak in a low still voice that did not hurry or slur a single word.

  Parl Dro, from the age of seventeen a practicing exorcist, had turned forty when he walked into the wood below the mountain in the dusk, and found a woman with Silky’s golden hair, a woman who was Silky, still alive and matured to an age that was just a few years less than his own. He had not loved her, but he had found her. And she, responding to some resonance of that finding, or to the simple hunger of her own sparse existence, had come to meet him on the inevitable road. The outcome might have been anything, a parting, or a continuance. But the outcome had not been permitted to create itself, it had been forced by the arrival of the showman with the drunkard’s face and belly and the inappropriately stylish musician’s hands. He had been away that night, bargaining for the unique musical instrument which that other drunkard, Soban, had offered him. The showman had meant to bed in a brothel, but in the end the price of drink, and the price of the instrument, had taken all his cash. With the prize in a leather sack, he careered home, all the while wondering if he had been a fool, to his
wagon and his wife. And discovered someone had called in the night. “Come on, I don’t care,” the showman had said. Maybe in those moments, with the philosophical detachment of liquor, he did not. But sobering and caring caught him up. He climbed into the wagon then and selected a weapon. It was actually a meat cleaver. He got back on the horse and went after Parl Dro, up the mountain, tracking him by pure animal instinct born of hate. And when he reached Dro, the showman swung the cleaver with an unerring intuition, attacking the weakest point, Dro’s crippled leg. The razor-like blade sheared straight through flesh, sinew and bone, as it was its job to do. The leg was severed just below the knee.

  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.

  By the time Parl Dro walked over that mountain, and toward the Soban house, he had become truly the King of Swords, Death, an emperor of ghosts. And of deception. The deception of others, and of himself.

  For here was a deadalive who had been trained to know every pitfall, every giveaway. He made no mistakes. The rain dampened his garments. The dust brushed over him. He paused to eat and drink. He slept. He made love. He could bleed, and scar, briefly. Though not, of course, die. He walked in agony on a whole but ruined leg, remembering only the ghoul on the bridge—yet, covering such distances—climbing rocks, and trees.... He would lever up the catch on a door rather than pass straight through it. And often, though maybe not always when there was no one by, he would manifest in daylight. He could even fool his fellow dead.

  A true ghost, he had fed from the living. And he had fed from Myal. He, not Ciddey, had begun to drain him. Though presently, Dro had unconsciously recognised what he did, and tried to pull away, just as Myal, as frantically, kept after him, attracted, making excuses, snared. And then, from some well of discipline and will inside himself, Parl Dro had managed yet another feat to which ghosts did not generally apply themselves. He had ceased drawing off Myal’s living energy. Dro had begun to build a facsimile of that force instead, as with all his other extraordinary powers, within himself—a self-perpetuating flame. Even in retrospect, he was uncertain when this transfer had taken place. Like all ghosts, he obscured, at that time, his own nature from himself, as he had obscured his need of Myal before.

  Myal was psychic. He had inherited that from Dro. It had enabled him to follow Dro, when Dro had truly meant not to be followed, or seen, or found. Myal had other qualities besides, qualities Dro had never had time to accumulate, and which Myal had not had the scope to develop. Myal, who could be more stupid and ineffectual than Dro could ever have dreamed of being, live or dead, had some glimmering sequin inside him, brain or spirit, that had sprung out of the soul of the world. Dro could not destroy that, whatever he might now feel about his own condition.

  Some part of him had known always, of course, that he was dead. However powerful and extraordinary, still dead. He had gone after the ghost of Cilny with an unlawful dedication—the dedication of one who slays the plague victim in terror of perceiving the same symptoms in himself. The Ghyste had been a similar fixation. But now that he had confronted himself and what he was, now he knew he should be going, as Ciddey had gone at last so blithely and with such grace, shaming him—now he could not leave the world. For the link must be metamorpho
sed—burnt, crushed, dissolved. Dro’s link was Myal. In order to be free of his own imitation life, Dro would have to take Myal’s life. Dro would have to kill his son. It was Myal’s apparent death that had first shocked Dro back toward self-realisation. He could not face that death again, not even with his own as the result of it.

  One alternative remained. To get away from Myal now and forever. For though he did not need to feed from Myal’s life force anymore, Myal was the motive, the rope that bound Dro to the world, or rather to which his deadaliveness clung. Cinnabar had grasped that fact, while not even comprehending it. Unless she had. She had thrust Myal into Ghyste Mortua as Dro’s safeguard, his mental anchor in the midst of supernatural chaos. Yes, probably she had known it was a demon lover in her bed sixteen seas deep. Just as she had known he saw Myal’s mother in her. Just as she had known it all.

  Myal was sitting now, staring at the earth. He cried easily, not necessarily a flaw, though plainly he himself categorised it as such, for he attempted to hide the crying from the weird dead father at the other end of the wall.