Geirolf stalked after him. The drow did not move fast. Hauk sped behind and pounced on the broad back. He seized an arm of Geirolf's and twisted it around. But the dead cannot feel pain. Geirolf stood fast. His other hand groped about, got Hauk by the hair, and yanked. Live men can hurt. Hauk stumbled away. Blood ran from his scalp into his eyes and mouth, hot and salt.
Geirolf turned and followed. He would not tire. Hauk had no long while before strength ebbed. Almost, he fled. Then the moon broke through to shine full on his father.
"You shall not go on like that," Hauk mumbled while he snapped after air.
The drow reached him. They closed, grappled, swayed, stamped to and fro, in wind and flickery moonlight. Then Hauk hooked an ankle behind Geirolf's and pushed. With a huge thud, the drow crashed to earth. He dragged Hauk along.
Hauk's bones felt how terrible was the grip upon him. He let go his own hold. Instead, he arched his back and pushed himself away. His clothes ripped. But he burst free and reeled to his feet.
Geirolf turned over and began to crawl up. His back was once more to Hauk. The young man sprang. He got a knee hard in between the shoulderblades, while both his arms closed on the frosty head before him.
He hauled. With the last and greatest might that was in him, he hauled. Blackness went in tatters before his eyes.
There came a loud snapping sound. Geirolf ceased pawing behind him. He sprawled limp. His neck was broken, his jawbone wrenched from the skull. Hauk climbed slowly off him, shuddering. Geirolf stirred, rolled, half rose. He lifted a hand toward Hauk. It traced a line through the air and a line growing from beneath that. Then he slumped and lay still.
Hauk crumpled too.
"Follow me who dare!" Leif roared, and went forth across the field. One by one, as they saw nothing move ahead of them, the men came after. At last they stood hushed around Geirolf who was only a harmless dead man now, though the moon shone bright in his eyes and on Hauk, who had begun to stir.
"Bear him carefully down to the hall," Leif said. "Start a fire and tend him well. Most of you, take from the woodpile and come back here. I'll stand guard meanwhile though I think there is no need."
And so they burned Geirolf there in the field. He walked no more.
In the morning, they brought Hauk back to Leif's garth. He moved as if in dreams. The others were too awestruck to speak much. Even when Alfhild ran to meet him, he could only say, "Hold clear of me. I may be under a doom."
"Did the drow lay a weird on you?" she asked, spear-stricken.
"I know not," he answered. "I think I fell into the dark before he was wholly dead."
"What?" Leif well-nigh shouted. "You did not see the sign he drew?"
"Why, no," Hauk said. "How did it go?"
"Thus. Even afar and by moonlight, I knew." Leif drew it.
"That is no ill-wishing!" Grim cried. "That's naught but the Hammer."
Life rushed back into Hauk. "Do you mean what I hope?"
"He blessed you," Grim said. "You freed him from what he had most dreaded and hated his strawdeath. The madness in him is gone, and he has wended hence to the world beyond."
Then Hauk was glad again. He led them all in heaping earth over the ashes of his father, and in setting things right on the farm. That winter, at the feast of Thor, he and Alfhild were wedded. Afterward he became well thought of by King Harald, and rose to great wealth. From him and Alfhild stem many men whose names are still remembered. Here ends the tale of Hauk the Ghost Slayer.
IN OUR BLOCK
by R. A. Lafferty
Chosen by Neil Gaiman
In a typically quirky piece, accompanying the photo of himself in Patti Perret's book The Faces of Science Fiction, R. A. Lafferty said, of himself, "When I was forty-five years old, I tried to be a writer I became the best short-story writer in the world. I've been telling people that for twenty years, but some of them don't believe me."
He was right. For a while in there, he was the best.
His stories brimmed with ideas that no one had ever thought before. The use of language was uniquely his own a Lafferty sentence is instantly utterly recognizable. The cockeyed, strange, and wonderful world he painted in his tales often seems nearer to our own, more joyful and more recognizable than many a more worthy or more literal account by other authors the world stopped to notice. "This is how it is!" you tell yourself on discovering Lafferty, delighted, awed, changed.
His science fiction story "Slow Tuesday Night" (which, like "In Our Block" can be found in Nine Hundred Grandmothers, Lafferty's finest collection) seems more and more relevant as the rate of change in the world out there grows ever-faster, ever-weirder. But some things don't change and that's what this story is about. Here Lafferty paints a blue-collar portrait of aliens (if that is what they are) in an American city. It's a tale of immigration and integration, and it has a measure of sly humor and wonder in there with which to be getting by.
Neil Gaiman
There were a lot of funny people in that block. A "You ever walk down that street?" Art Slick asked Jim Boomer, who had just come onto him there.
"Not since I was a boy. After the overall factory burned down, there was a faith healer had his tent pitched there one summer. The street's just one block long and it deadends on the railroad embankment. Nothing but a bunch of shanties and weed-filled lots. The shanties looked different today, though, and there seem to be more of them. I thought they pulled them all down a few months ago."
"Jim, I've been watching that first little building for two hours. There was a tractor-truck there this morning with a forty-foot trailer, and it loaded out of that little shanty. Cartons about eight inches by eight inches by three feet came down that chute. They weighed about thirty-five pounds each from the way the men handled them. Jim, they filled that trailer up with them, and then pulled it off."
"What's wrong with that, Art?"
"Jim, I said they filled that trailer up. From the drag on it it had about a sixty-thousand-pound load when it pulled out. They loaded a carton every three and a half seconds for two hours; that's two thousand cartons."
"Sure, lots of trailers run over the load limit nowdays. They don't enforce it very well."
"Jim, that shack's no more than a cracker box seven feet on a side. Half of it is taken up by a door, and inside a man in a chair behind a small table. You couldn't get anything else in that half. The other half is taken up by whatever that chute comes out of. You could pack six of those little shacks on that trailer."
"Let's measure it," Jim Boomer said. "Maybe it's bigger than it looks." The shack had a sign on it: Make Sell Ship Anything Cut Price. Jim Boomer measured the building with an old steel tape. The shack was a seven-foot cube, and there were no hidden places. It was set up on a few piers of broken bricks, and you could see under it.
"Sell you a new fifty-foot steel tape for a dollar," said the man in the chair in the little shack. "Throw that old one away." The man pulled a steel tape out of a drawer of his table-desk, though Art Slick was sure it had been a plain flat-top table with no place for a drawer.
"Fully retractable, rhodium-plated, Dort glide. Ramsey swivel, and it forms its own carrying case. One dollar," the man said.