An Excerpt from
Darker Angels
by S. P. Somtow
(Tor, 1998, $24.95)
It was a bright night. Not quite a full moon, but the whole sky were lit up, not just by the moon and stars but something else, too, a soft glow that spread upward from the earth, mayhap from this very house. And it was warm, warmer I think than the season. I walked from that room clad only in the nightshirt, out onto the porch, where the chiggers hummed and the skeeters sang, and the lady of the house were still a-rocking back and forth, back and forth, but this time Clytaemnestra, the mammy, was fanning her, and driving away the bugs from sheer ugliness."Have you come to summon me that angel?" said Valerie Knight, looking up at the clear bright sky. "Oh, but I am glad you did."
"Reckon so, ma'am," I said.
"And will that angel be coming?"
"Don't rightly know," I said, "for you can't hurry 'em."
"I remember," she said, "an ancient Greek fable...of an aged couple with peculiar names, somewhat like Phyleemon and Bauxis, living in a cottage, simple shepherds. Like me and my daughters, ordinary folks, a little bit saved away for a rainy day, maybe, and a dozen slaves, but nobody fancy. Mrs. Beaumont, our schoolteacher, told us this tale, though she said, of course, it were written by them that had not yet heard the blessed name of Our Lord, and so are condemned to perdition for getting themselves born in the wrong century; nevertheless, she told us, she did, that the ancients still had good things to teach us, morals and manners and such. Well, Phy and Bo, these ancient Greeks, who should come a-walking into their simple abode one day but Jupiter, King of the Gods, and Mercury, his messenger, disguised as plain old peasants. They gone all through the country, and not a soul would take them in, for there's warn't a drop of Christian charity among them. Not that Christian charity had been invented yet, but we may stretch the tale a little bit to fit our situation. So at length the gods came to the poorest house in the land, and the old folks, Phy and Bo, why they took them in, and gave them to eat and drink--gave of the last food and drink they had in the cottage, and bade them rest in the finest bed of the house, which was but a pallet of straw, whilst they themselves slept the night on the earthen floor. Well, in the morning, the gods told them who they really were; and they told Phy and Bo how blest they were to have offered hospitality to the gods...and they offered them any boon in the world; but Phy and Bo just said, 'We don't ask for nothing at all, just happy to have been doing our duty.' But when the gods pressed them, they said, 'We pray that we may die as we lived, always together, always loving.' And then, when the time come for them to die, why, the gods granted their request, and turned them into one great twin-trunked tree, rooted to the land, but pointing up to heaven. 'Twas a Roman poet who penned that story...for we are not without refinement here in the hinterlands, you know, sir, there be some that still know their Greek and Latin--it's a fine tale of love, and fidelity, and the need to be a gracious host, do you not think?"
"Why," I said, "it's a lovely story, ma'am."
"And that is why our door is always open to any stranger that comes by," said Mrs. Knight, "and that is why the Johnsons came to wed my daughters, for we have all, does not the evangelist say, entertained angels unawares... and that is why you come to me tonight...oh, sir, it has been hard. Do you understand how hard? I have a little book that tells me how to make our meager provisions into something that harks back to more genteel times; do you wish to hear?
"To one small bowl of crackers, that have been soaked until no hard parts remain, add one teaspoonful of tartaric acid, sweeten to your taste, add some butter, and a very little nutmeg ... there's your apple pie sans apples, sir, for there was some warn't quite so kindly as the Johnsons, and they took away the apples as well as our ladies' virtue...."
Well, the lady was mad, to be sure, but there were a kind of crazed logic to her ravings, and it was easy for me to fall into that way of thinking, where one things calls to mind another, and pretty soon every blame object and thought and idea in the whole universe seems all linked up to every other, like pearls in a necklace, like laborers in a chain gang, and so I started to improvise along with her, "Yes, the apple, ma'am, the apple that started us all on that big old journey from sin to redemption -"
"The apple that was meant for the fairest; sir, do you know that story?"
"All's fair in love and war," I said, for I once heard a captain say that after dumping his woman for a richer.
"War, war, war!" cried Mrs. Knight. "To make artificial oysters, take young green corn, grate it in a dish, to one pint of this add one egg, well beaten, a small teacup of flour, two or three tablespoonfuls of butter, some salt and pepper, mix 'em all together; a tablespoonful of the batter will make the size of an oyster; fry 'em light brown, and when done butter them. Cream if it can be procured is better."
I could see that the lady was lost to the world. What was I to do? I left her, with her putrefying daughters embracing at her feet, and walked down the pathway a ways, thinking to clear my mind.
The dead niggers had been standing watch around the house, swaying now and then. But I didn't see hide nor hair of 'em. But as I entered the thicket of peach-trees, I became aware that they was present all right. Sometimes I could hear a sound like dry twigs crunching. Betimes came a slurping, gurgling sound. I didn't want to think what it could be, but I saw soon enough. For the hanged boy was missing from the tree, and when I turned a corner I saw him lying in the gravel, and one of the zombis was pulling out his gut, unwinding it with care, as you might unwind a ball of yarn; another zombi was kneeling over the boy's head, hitting it over and over with a stone; I heard the skull crack, then saw the undead darkie reach into that skull to dislodge small handfuls of brain; these he devoured; not with relish, but in a lethargic way, staring dully ahead the while. The chawed foot was now completely off. A third zombi was nibbling on it beneath an overhanging branch. Oh, but the smell of it all was rank, yet leavened a little by the sweet fragrance of ripening peaches.
None of them made any move to touch me. Perhaps they only partook of their fellow dead; perhaps the old man had woven a protective spell around me. I did not wait to find out, but walked hurriedly on. But at the next bend in the pathway I saw more ghoulishness. The laborer with the hoe now lay in twenty or thirty pieces, arranged on the ground in a grotesque version of the holy cross of Our Lord, excepting that the head stared up from where the private parts should be, and a dead man was a-chewing on his tongue. The baby that I'd seen split in two before was now put back together, but turned backward on itself so that its head stared in the same direction as its hindparts. Oh, Lord, I was sick from the sight of such deformity, and sicker still from the sounds, for the dead men spoke not while they sucked and slurped and swallowed. What a feast of the damned it was! Hurriedly, I walked on further, toward the barn where the zombis was supposed to be bedded down; but at the barn door I saw old Joseph, a-sitting with folded palms, and his eyes closed as though looking on the face God. But I was too skeert to wait on his awakening.
I shook him by the shoulders and cried, "Joseph, Joseph, the dead are eating the dead!" He smiled and did not open his eye. "Why do it matter, honey?" he said. "They all dead, one way or t'other; they don't feel nothing. But I, I, you beau-pére, I feel. I feel my woman, she coming down from that luminous sky."
"Your wife? The leopard?"
"Quiet yourself, monché, and listen."
Copyright © 1997 by S. P. Somtow. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
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