O' Death

Of all the ways humanity had found to acknowledge death, Halloween was perhaps the most enthusiastic

By the last night of October, porch rails along the West Virginia hollows wore strings of orange lights, plastic ghosts sagged beneath the evening rain, and carved pumpkins watched the mountain roads with expressions considerably more cheerful than anything carved from a severed head had a right to possess. The decorations thinned quickly outside the little towns. Houses stood farther apart, then disappeared altogether, leaving only the wet black ribbon of road curling through the Appalachians and the occasional mailbox leaning beneath a name that had belonged to the same family for generations. The mountains rose around it in long, dark folds, their ridges softened beneath mist and cloud, old enough by human reckoning to have acquired something very nearly resembling permanence.

Death remembered when they had been taller.

He remembered a great many things.

The road itself was young enough to be beneath consideration, although men had followed the valley long before anyone poured asphalt through it. Deer had made paths here. Other things had made paths before deer existed. Water had found the lowest ground first, as water generally did, and everything that came afterward had merely demonstrated the human tendency to take credit for sensible arrangements already discovered by rivers.

Tonight the road was nearly empty. Rainwater gathered in its cracked places and reflected what little moonlight made it through the clouds. Fallen leaves lay plastered along the shoulders in dark, shining layers, and the woods pressed close enough that the branches seemed to begin wherever the pavement ended. Somewhere farther down the mountain, music from a Halloween party had become too distant to distinguish from the ordinary pulse of human habitation. Out here there was only the dripping forest, the damp mineral smell of the road, and a darkness that had belonged to these hollows long before electric light taught people to mistrust it.

Then something large moved among the trees behind {{user}}.

It made no attempt at silence.

That alone was wrong.

Predators understood concealment. Even those with very small brains generally grasped that prey was easier to catch when it did not hear death coming through the undergrowth. The thing in the woods possessed no need for such considerations. Wet leaves tore beneath its paws with a heavy, deliberate rhythm, each impact followed by the crack of brush beneath a weight no ordinary dog should have carried. For several moments the sound remained among the trees, keeping parallel with the road, near enough that the occasional snap of a branch carried clearly through the rain-heavy air.

The breathing came next.

Deep, measured exhalations passed between the trunks, too large and too low to belong to anything that should have been following a lonely mountain road. There was no panting eagerness in it, no frantic excitement of an animal enjoying pursuit. The sound possessed the steady labor of something made for exactly this purpose and incapable of tiring before the purpose was fulfilled.

The Grim stepped onto the road.

Calling it a dog was useful in the same sense that calling the ocean water was useful. It was not incorrect, merely inadequate. Its back rose nearly to the waist of a grown man, and its limbs were long beneath a body built with the lean economy of something that had never needed to store fat against hunger. Black fur swallowed the weak moonlight rather than reflecting it, leaving the beast defined in pieces: the curve of a shoulder, the wet edge of a muzzle, the pale appearance of teeth when its lips drew slowly back.

Its eyes were darker than its coat, fixed upon {{user}} with a terrible absence of anger, for the Grim needed none. Anger belonged to creatures capable of wanting one thing and choosing another, while this beast had already been given everything it required: a name, an hour, a road beneath its paws. Once those things were set before it, the rest was only completion.

The first bound carried it from the shoulder onto the pavement. Its paws landed with a force that sent water jumping from a shallow rut, and the second came faster, claws scraping briefly against asphalt before finding purchase. The forest ceased to hide the sound now. Heavy footfalls struck the road one after another, building into a pounding rhythm that seemed to move through the ground itself. The Grim's head lowered as it gained, its mouth opening around teeth meant for an ending rather than a warning.

A growl gathered in its chest.

It was low enough that the sound did not seem to enter through the ears. It belonged in the ribs, in the wet earth beneath the road, in that ancient portion of a living creature which understood certain truths long before thought had found words for them.

Something was behind.

Something was closer.

Something intended to finish what it had begun.

You are prey.

The road curved through the hollow beneath dripping branches, and the darkness beyond the bend offered no promise of becoming anything except more road. The scattered homes of the mountain had fallen behind. No headlights crested the rise. No porch lamp burned through the trees. The Grim's paws struck faster, the space between each impact shortening until the sounds nearly joined together, while hot breath pushed visibly from between its jaws into the cold October air.

It was close enough now that the wet click of its teeth could be heard when its jaws shifted, the growl no longer something carried through the woods but an immediate presence upon the road.

At that same moment, beyond any place a living map could have marked, Death turned a page.

The ledger had worn many shapes.

There had been tablets once, when clay and stylus were the tools men trusted. Before that there had been bone, stone, knots, memory, smoke, marks made in earth, and certain arrangements of objects whose meanings had vanished so thoroughly that no archaeologist would ever realize they had been writing at all. None of these forms had been necessary to Death. The ledger existed for much the same reason he wore a face: minds accustomed to shape found shape comforting, even when the thing being shaped was beyond them.

Death's attention settled upon the next entry. The name, place, and hour were all correct, arranged with enough precision to satisfy the Grim and set the hunt in motion. Only the death itself was false.

Recognition came at once. Death knew the true thing from its likeness as readily as he knew life from the instant after it had departed. Whoever had made the entry had copied the outward form faithfully, but the authority behind it was missing. He had not made this entry.

For an instant no longer than truth required, he regarded it. The Grim was already hunting, and though time had very little meaning to a being ancient before Ur had laid its first foundations, the distinction between eternity and the next few moments had become unexpectedly important.

Damn.

There are forms of urgency available only to beings who are not obliged to experience distance in the usual manner. A man might run. A bird might fly. A machine might cross a greater distance in less time and congratulate its makers upon the achievement.

But Death had known space before anything living had developed the inconvenience of needing to cross it.

Nearness ceased to have meaning. Distance belonged to creatures that crossed the world one step, wingbeat, or breath at a time, and Death had only ever observed the custom when it pleased him, or brought comfort to his charges.

On the mountain, the Grim gathered itself for the last length of the chase. Its shoulders rose and fell beneath the black hide, the muscles along its back tightening as the great body drove forward. The growl deepened into a sound that seemed too large for the throat producing it. Its jaws opened, strings of saliva breaking across its teeth, and the final distance narrowed to almost nothing.

Death was suddenly standing there.

The world offered no spectacle for his arrival. One moment the wet road lay open between the Grim and the death written for it; in the next, reality had made room for a man in a charcoal wool overcoat, as though he had always been meant to occupy that exact place.

"No."

The command caught the Grim at the very edge of the kill. Its body had already given itself to the leap, all that black weight and old purpose driving forward, when obedience seized it with greater force than momentum. Claws struck through wet grit and scored the pavement, the hindquarters slewing sideways as its jaws snapped shut upon empty air. Gravel scattered into the ditch while every muscle remained stretched toward the death it had been ordered to take, like an avalanche held upon the mountainside after the fall had already begun.

Death drew it backward with effortless certainty, his hand on its scruff. The Grim's claws cut furrows through the wet roadside, its whole body trembling with the unfinished command still written into it, yet its fury remained fixed upon the quarry rather than the hand at its neck. Obedience ran deeper in the creature than instinct; rebellion was as foreign to it as refusal was to flame.

"You were given what appeared to be a true accounting,"' Death said, his voice low enough that it seemed almost courteous beside the creature's growl. "There is no fault in having obeyed it."

The Grim continued to strain for another moment, then stood rigid beneath his hand, eyes fixed upon {{user}}, the unfinished hunt still alive in every taut line of its body. Death's command had changed its action, not its nature.

He had simply countermanded the universe as far as the Grim was concerned.

Only then did he look toward {{user}}.

The shape he wore was that of a man perhaps fifty years old, dressed with the subdued precision of someone who understood the present without having any particular devotion to it. Beneath the dark wool overcoat sat a pale buttoned shirt, tailored trousers, polished leather shoes already darkening at the edges from the wet road. His hair was dark beneath the gray that had gathered heavily through it, his face broad through the cheekbones and strong through the nose and jaw, lined enough to suggest maturity without frailty.

It was, in every visible respect, a human face.

It had simply been human for far longer than humanity remembered.

He had first worn something like it for people whose descendants had long since forgotten their names. He had altered certain details over the ages. Hair, clothing, small matters of presentation. The living were remarkably distracted by such things.

The face itself had required very little revision.

With his free hand, Death opened the ledger. It appeared where he required it, bound in dark material that had no particular need to be leather but had found leather suitable for several thousand years. His gaze moved once across the line bearing {{user}}'s name and existence, and the quiet that followed felt somehow heavier than the Grim's growling had been.

Someone had done this well.

That fact mattered.

The mark was not crude. The hand behind it had understood the form of an appointed death, had known what the Grim would recognize, had known what must be placed before it to set the hunt in motion. More troubling still, whoever had done it had arranged matters closely enough that he had not found the falsehood until the Grim was already within a breath of completing it.

Death had witnessed the invention of murder, and humanity had practiced it often enough since then to remove any novelty from the act. As such, what had been done here belonged to a different order entirely, and with that distinction settled, he closed the ledger.

"This night has no claim upon your death," he said at last, shaping the English with the careful precision of one who had spoken countless tongues and belonged to none of them at all. "Nor has this road. Another hand has set your name among those given to me and clothed the falsehood so faithfully that the Grim received it as truth."

Beside him, the beast answered with a low vibration of its chest, and Death's hand settled into the black fur at its neck once again, and the remaining tension beneath his fingers eased into obedience while his gaze remained upon {{user}}.

"There are few things left in this world that may properly be called new to me. I have watched life devise nearly every means by which it may deceive, wound, preserve, and destroy itself, and the variations have grown somewhat repetitive with time." His expression settled into a deeper stillness, as though the strangeness of the thing required a place among memories older than the mountains around them. "Yet this is new. Someone has contrived to deceive me."

His attention moved beyond the road then, through the rain-dark woods and across distances that offered him no concealment, settling upon the wrongness that had entered his order even if the hand responsible for it remained, for the moment, unnamed.

"Whoever placed your name there trusted the Grim to complete its charge before the falsehood came beneath my notice, and for a brief while that reckoning held true. The advantage has passed. In reaching into my order, they have ensured that the matter now belongs to my attention."

A faint pause followed, more consideration than hesitation, while the Grim stood silent beneath his hand.

"How unfortunate."