Posted on December 15, 2008 by Jenna
It endures in timeless endings.
Something in it remembers its time of flesh and motion. It has no theory of this time. It has no process to cognize with. It does not relive its memories in temporal order or experience generalized nostalgia. It is simply imprinted on its lifeless form that once it lived.
It experiences the slow decay of its moment of ending.
Then a creature of bony legs and fingers kneels down beside it and touches it through the skull and into the brain.
“Wake,” the creature says.
A hunger stirs. It arises from every part of the dead thing’s body and suffuses through its returning consciousness.
The dead thing hungers for the warmth of the living.
“I am death,” speaks the bony creature.
The dead thing does not understand.
It only knows a few words; its name, perhaps, if it were to be reminded. Treat. It knows the word “treat.” And also “bacon.”
“I am death,” the bony creature says, “or at least, a kind of death. I have made a bargain with a man you knew—”
And here a familiar scent drifts across the dead thing’s nose.
It is of pack.
Reflexive loyalty bursts through the creature’s consciousness; but even fiercer than the loyalty there is the hunger, for the scent is the scent of the living, of something warm and not dead, not moldering in the ground, not endlessly lifelessly alone.
“And,” the bony creature says, “he has broken it. He has not returned to me at the stated hour, but rather woven defenses and incantations about himself. So wake you and hunt you for his warmth and let us see if this man comes around.”
The bony thing departs.
The dog is hungry.
Its fur is matted with blood and dirt. And it realizes—perhaps—that it cannot have been dead as long as it imagined, for there is still more than 95% of its livingness with it. It is closer to the meat than to the bone.
It is buried, though, deep in the dirt.
Its master’s warmth is up; up, up, up, and in that direction, so says the path of scent.
The dog begins to dig.
It itches briefly. It wriggles its head and would snap, if it could, at the source of the itch. But it is buried and still its motion is much impeded by the ground; and further, the fleas that bothered it are dead.
It knows this through some preternatural sense possessed by a risen canine.
They are dead. They are cold. They are only giving the dog the memory of an itch, the memory of a bite, where they linger in the shrouds of its fur clung tight against its flesh.
It is unjust.
The dog pauses for a moment in the course of its dig.
It did not think very well when it was a living dog, and it thinks less well now. But still, it thinks, this is unjust.
So the dog whispers to the fleas the secret of awakening, the words that wake the dead, and one by one they shake off the long and endless sleep and flex their legs.
“Ow,” mutters the dog: “Ow-wow.”
For the fleas had but to live before they bit.
There is a stillness in the grave and then, apologetically, one flea says, “That was a bit of ingratitude, I suppose.”
The dog grumbles, deep its dead throat.
“It is because we’re fleas,” says another flea.
The dog does not deign this with an answer. It only resumes its long slow clawing towards the surface of the ground.
“But we are grateful,” says the first flea. “We—”
Something strange happens to the flea’s voice at that point. The dog does not understand it. It is something raw and emotional but in the dialect of fleas; and while dogs may understand when a flea apologizes or speaks of bacon, they do not have all the nuances of the tongue.
“We are grateful,” the flea repeats.
It would be better, thinks the dog, after a fashion, if you would help me dig, than itch such words.
It breaks the ground. It rises.
It shakes itself and gets its grave-dirt all across the yard.
The scent is very strong now.
It shambles to the door.
“A dog shouldn’t kill its master,” opines a flea. “Not even when dead.”
“All part of the cycle of life,” another flea protests.
The theories of the fleas do not involve the dog’s name, nor “treat,” nor “bacon,” so the dog ignores them.
It scratches at the door.
Time passes.
It scratches at the door again.
Now there is something happening inside the house. Now there is a light—
“Aha!” exclaims a flea.
—and a sleepy shuffling, and the face of a beloved creature at the window by the door.
It is John!
The dog’s tail thumps, rotten, and it thinks: It is John! It is John! He is warm with the warmth of the living! I am so hungry for him, John!
John’s face goes pale. He makes a strangled sound. He backs away.
The dog scratches at the door again.
“He isn’t going to open it, guv,” observes a flea.
The dog stiffens his legs in protest.
“He’s just not. Look, he’s nailing the door shut.”
The noise that John is making is atypical for John. This frustrates the dog. John is not letting it in, and he is warm and living, and he is doing something interesting but not allowing the dog to participate.
Experimentally, the dog pushes against the door.
There is a creaking of wood and an explosive, terrified yell from John.
The dog panics.
Its claws tear through the wood. The hunger and the fear and the concern meld into one. It is ripping the entrance to the house apart.
And there is Gloria, the sound of Gloria, coming up to John, crying, “What is it, Daddy? Daddy?”
Fear reeks from John. It washes out from him. The door comes down:
“Take me,” John cries to the air. “Oh God. Oh God. You win!”
And he is down on his knees before the dog, sprawled with his hands out, and it would be the most natural thing in all the world to leap into his arms and wriggle with great joy and devour the flesh and warmth of the living—
Though is that good?
Is it good to eat one’s master’s warmth?—
But the war of instincts in the heart of the risen dog does not play out.
Its life instead deflates. Its brain and heart go still. It skids, dead again, across the floorboards and sprawls lifeless in front of John.
For death is here.
“No further protest, John?” speaks the bony death. “No more to run from me, no more to hide from me, no more the rituals and wards to keep me out?”
John speaks but his words are held in time and they do not register on the lifeless dog.
“Then,” says death, “you shall come with me, and be my dog, as this was yours; and we shall speak no more of breaking bargains.”
But John stops, as he goes out with death, and he kneels beside the dog, and he is cold as the dog is cold, and lifeless as the dog is lifeless, and he kisses its head with icy lips and whispers that the dog is good.
And then he moves away, and Gloria cries out, over and over again, in the empty house without her father and the cold corpse of the dog.
But that is not the story’s end.
For after a second long timelessness the dog finds a strange cold wakening; and it realizes that there is a flea deep in its heart, tunneled through the flesh, irritating it to motion; and another, with a mad scientist’s detachment, operating the levers and the ganglia of its brain.
“It woke me,” says the dog. “It woke me, but I was not warm.”
“You were never to have the warmth of the living,” whispers the flea inside its brain. “It used you and then discarded you, all to terrify a man.”
“So let there be revenge,” whispers the flea inside its heart, and irritates the dog’s heart’s lining with a cold red rage.
But the dog discards these thoughts.
I will find Gloria, it thinks.
A wave of hunger washes through it. It swallows the hunger. It drives it down into the deep cold emptiness of death and lets it pass away.
I will find Gloria, it thinks. And I will not eat her, if she is alive. I will make sure she is all right. And then I will find John.
These thoughts are horrifying to the flea that operates the levers of its brain.
It is as if the flea has woken some alien creature that it cannot control; as if the mastery of the substance of the brain gave no deep insight into its soul; or at least as if the process that it sought to wake was too complicated for the composition of a flea.
“It’s thinking weird doggy thoughts,” it cries out, to its brethren in the dog’s dead flesh. “I don’t know what it will do!”
There is a hum of consternation.
“Should I let it stop? Should I stop?”
But there is no flea so brave in its moral cowardice as to cry out, “Yes.”
And so the flea in the brain, and all the other fleas, surrender to the avalanche; concede to fate to ride the vehicle of the dog’s heart and brain and not control them; and juggle desperately the tools they have to keep the dog awakened as it moves in a direction they neither anticipate nor understand.
It shambles to the far corner of the farthest room in the house, where Gloria cowers, and it thrusts its cold dry nose into her face, and licks her with its rotten tongue; and it does not take the warmth from her save that which radiates as first she strives to push the dog away and finally, crying, to wrap it in her arms and whisper, “Daddy, daddy,” and “Hank, hank, dead hank,” which features the dog’s name.
The dog pushes her back and turns away.
Its body chills as it separates from her. It feels again the emptiness of death. But like so many it died with things unsaid, thoughts unspoken, a last breath lingering in its lungs.
So it howls.
The dog howls to wake the dead.
And in that howl is loneliness and emptiness and the great gap in its life where John should be; and also
there are
the words that wake the dead. The secret that is life. The thing that makes old rotten bones and new-wrecked flesh and even, on some level, the still-living, to move.
And hearing that cry, afraid of what it means, bony death comes to the door.
The dog anticipated this.
It had always known that death, if thwarted once, would soon return.
It meets death at the shattered door and stands on the threshold of the house and growls deep within its throat.
The bony death speaks words that are not “bacon.”
“I will quicken your understanding,” says the flea inside its brain.
It is difficult to modify a brain while keeping it alive; difficult to expand a consciousness while also you are sustaining it; it is a juggling act, and fortunate it is and more that fleas have each six legs.
“Foolish creature,” spake the bony death. “Have I not indicated I am done with you?”
The dog advances, stiff-legged.
Bony death sweeps its arm and strikes at the dog. The wind rising from that blow makes the house to shudder and Gloria to scream. The dog smashes back through a wall and through a cupboard, causing cans of peas and corn to fall around its broken form.
But the dead feel little pain.
It rises and it shakes itself. It walks forward once again.
The bony death makes a hollow under the house; the floor begins to sink and sift away, and the dog finds itself scrambling.
A dead woman’s hand rises from the earth to grip at the ankles of the bony death.
The kitchen is caving in around the dog. Its hip is struck by the sink and one leg fails. It is howling. But neither is the bony death in a state of weal.
It is a moment, a single sweep of a horrid scythe, to shatter the hand that grips it; but there is not just one last dead person in the world.
The howl of the dog has woken more than one.
It has risen all.
And so as death turns to look behind him he sees a great seething of the earth; a thousand hands, but more than hands, the very particulate essence of the world, rising to defend—
Well, something.
For it is not clear to him—to bony death—whether they seek to save the dog that he confronts or to enact a flea’s bleak sense of justice. He does not know as the wave of cresting death rises whether there is any path for him that does not end in silence.
“John,” he says.
A twisted thing is in his shadow. It smells of John. But its limbs are long and backwards bent and its body is dead and its eyes are full of madness.
“John,” says the bony death, “bring an ending to this creature.”
Then it turns, and leaps to the roof of the house, and bounds up towards the sky, to leave the scene that just might end in justice far behind.
The world ends to the east; it falls away, gaping with the graves empty of dead; and from the west a wave of hungry cold arises, cresting above the house and crashing down as the dog scrambles with its three legs to pull free.
A flea kicks hard on the lever of an instinct as the bony death leaps past and the kitchen sink slips free of its mooring to fall past the dog into the earth.
The roof is open.
There is a flash of bone beneath the dank gray robes of bony death, and the dog twists and leaps for it.
His teeth gnash hard and crunch into the marrow of the leg of bony death.
Like a spider John seizes the dog with his great long limbs and snaps at him with maddened jaws.
Caught in the wave, the house cants sideways and falls—slides—pours, crumbling, eastwards towards the great hollow there.
And all things would have ended there, save for this:
Though twisted and broken, still the servant of death was John; and when he flailed at the dog the dog understood that somehow he’d been bad.
It terrified the dog—
This strange and twisted beast that somehow was its master—
But if it was angry, then something must be wrong.
So the dog released his grip on bony death, and instead he whined, and whispered to John the secret that was life.
It woke John not for John was broken.
It woke John not for he’d given himself to death of his own will, and made it thus an extension of his life—
But it made a change in him, and with his great long limbs, still gripping the dead dog, he scrambled up the floor of the falling house, and seized Gloria, and threw them both away to tumble across the loam as the world caved in on bony death, and John.
So the dog and Gloria survived; or, well, escaped at least, and huddled close together on the remnant earth.
And slowly the dog cooled as the fleas did let it go, the last dead thing in a world woken all to life, and Gloria gripped it and shook it and offered it her warmth, which it had no way to hold but loved.
Rand Brittain on December 15, 2008 at 8:48 pm said:
Mithrandir on December 16, 2008 at 1:16 pm said: