He came late in the day, just before sunset. Had I not known he was coming, I might well have been reluctant to swing wide the door, or at least would have opened it with hatchet raised and cocked back for the swing. He was a large man in broad-brimmed hat and long coat, wearing what once would have been called driving gloves.
“I have been sent to you,” he said. “They claimed perhaps you could help me.”
And so I ushered him in. I gestured to a chair near the fire. I placed my tobacco pipe and pouch within easy reach. I invited him to remove his gloves, his coat, his hat.
To this point there had been a certain inexorability to the proceedings, each moment a tiny and inevitable step toward the time when I would, without either fear or rage, raise my hatchet and make an end of the fellow.
And yet, when he was freed of hat and coat and gloves and I saw the bare flesh of his hands, his arms, his face, I suddenly found everything grown complex. What I had seen as a simple deathbound progression now became a sequence of events whose ending I could not foresee, one in which, from instant to instant, I could not begin to divine what would happen next.
What was it that had thrown me into such uncertainty? Had I, as in the dead art of a dead past, glimpsed in the lines and the contours of his visage the face of a long-lost brother? A long-lost lover? No, nothing as simple or as clever as that. Rather, it was the fact that his hands and arms, his face and skull, had been completely epilated. Like me, he had lost all his hair. Had he been a brother or a lover, it would not have been enough to confuse me. But this, somehow, was.
He came in, he sat. His hat and coat I hung from a hook beside my door. His gloves he paired and smoothed and laid gently over his knee once he had sat. His name was Halber, he claimed.
“And who was it sent you?” I asked, though I knew the answer.
Your leader, he claimed. Who had said that I would adjudicate for him.
“Adjudicate?” I said.
Yes, he claimed, since that was my role in the community or so he had been told by Rasmus.
I nodded for him to go on.
The story he unraveled was one of the utmost wrongheadedness. He had once, it seemed, so he claimed, owned all of this property, but when the conflagration had come he had traveled quickly and hurriedly to try to throw his body in the path of his parents’ death. He had of course mis-thrown himself; they had died despite him, his mother going mad so that in the end he had had to be the one to kill her, and his father simply having his skin slough off until the bone was showing. Upon which he thought to return, but the world being as it was, he had spent many months just keeping alive, and only now had he begun to manage.
What he wanted, he stated, was not to reclaim his land. He understood well enough the degree to which everything had transformed. All he wanted was to be given a small plot of land and be allowed to farm it, so he could be back in a place that he knew, and to be accepted into the community. He had said this to Rasmus and the council, and they had deliberated for three days as he awaited their decision. At last they had sent him to me, the adjudicator.
Adjudicator, I thought. Well, that’s one name for it.
I thought, too, with sudden insight, Normally they would kill him themselves, and perhaps have done so with others in times past. But because, like me, he is hairless, they have sent him to me. They are frightened.
And this made me think, too, of what they must have thought of me, and why they had chosen to admit me into the community. And I could not but think it was out of fear or because I was already there, and perhaps it was only because there were those among them who believed I was charmed or cursed and could not die. And perhaps soon, once I had done away with Halber and proved that a man like myself could be killed, they would see no reason not to do away with me as well.
“Please tell them,” I said, “that I have thought carefully and have adjudicated in your favor. You shall join us.”
He stood and awkwardly embraced me, an operation I suffered only with great reluctance. And then after gathering his things he left, leaving me to ponder why I had done what I had done, and what would be its dark consequence.
I was not to wonder long. Late that night I heard shouts and, as I roused myself, a banging had begun at my door. “It’s Halber!” a man was screaming, his screams enough to curdle the blood. “It’s Halb! Let me in!”
And indeed I almost did. I might well have, had I not heard the other voices and sounds that followed, the grunts and indifferent, dull sounds of metal slipping into flesh, and heard the pounding suddenly stop. I climbed onto the bed and looked down through the high window. In the pale moonlight I saw him, dying and staring, being dragged away by the legs. Had it been only a pack of the dead and the dying, I would have perhaps opened the door and commenced to lay about me with my hatchet, as I had done in the past when the dead came for the living. But as it was, seeing that the faces were those of the living, Rasmus’s face among them, I hesitated just long enough to feel that it was too late.
And perhaps it is there that the story should have ended. Perhaps, had I said nothing, done nothing, kept to my house, then my reputation, the myths surrounding me, would have been enough for Rasmus and his council to decide to let me be. Perhaps they would have grudgingly levied a fine, remembered my usefulness in other ways, and life would have gone much as usual, if anything can be described as usual in these days. But we both of us made mistakes that made this impossible.
The mistake I made was in not staying to my house for a few days, deciding instead to tend to my crops, to go about the business that needed to be attended to on my farm. This, under most circumstances, would not be considered a dire mistake. Or, to be frank, in most conditions, even a mistake at all.
Their mistakes were more severe. Tired of dragging the body, they abandoned it in a ditch halfway between my and my neighbor’s farms. And instead of tearing the head free of the corpse and incinerating it, they left the hairless Halber lacerated but more or less intact.
With every disaster, I have come to believe for my own personal reasons, comes a compensation, a certain balancing of the accounts — not spread evenly about but clumped here and there, of benefit to very few. I heal, as I said, very quickly — or at least I do now; before the conflagration I did not. There are rumors I cannot die. Not having died, I can neither confirm nor deny these rumors, nor am I curious enough to uncover the truth that I feel compelled to slit my own throat. But from what I have seen of what is happening to Halber, I fear these rumors might well be true, and hardly in the way one would hope.
So, we have reached the day after Halber was hauled away, my door clawed and scratched on the outside, the bloody marks of his dying smeared there and on the threshold. I stare at the door a moment, checking to see whether my hatchet is with me. Outside, there are always things to attend to, things to do to keep the farm going. I do them, wondering all the while when, if ever, the little poultry and livestock remaining in the area will start to breed again and if I will ever be able to afford my own chickens. I irrigate my fields again, just enough, then sit on a stone near the border of the field, and smoke.
That is when I begin to hear it, a slow and distant whistle, a soft wind. At first I think nothing of it. But when it persists, I become afflicted with the disease of curiosity.
I stand, trying to ascertain where it is coming from. I follow it in one direction, then another. It slowly becomes louder, just a little louder, just a little louder, a moan now.