The man looked at the grayness all around. “Where?” the man said. His voice, like the dead boy’s, sounded like the whisper of dead leaves stirring.
A woman emerged from the grayness. Her head was bald, too, and her body dried out. “This!” she rasped, touching the dead boy’s shirt. “I remember this!” She tugged on the dead boy’s sleeve. “I had a thing like this!”
“Clothes?” said the dead boy.
“Clothes!” the woman cried. “That’s what it is called!”
More shriveled people came out of the grayness. They crowded close to see the strange dead boy who wore clothes. Now the dead boy knew where he was. “This is the land of the dead.”
“Why do you have clothes?” asked the dead woman. “We came here with nothing! Why do you have clothes?”
“I have always been dead,” said the dead boy, “but I spent six years among the living.”
“Six years!” said one of the dead. “And you have only just now come to us?”
“Did you know my wife?” asked a dead man. “Is she still among the living?”
“Give me news of my son!”
“What about my sister?”
The dead people crowded closer.
The dead boy said, “What is your sister’s name?” But the dead could not remember the names of their loved ones. They did not even remember their own names. Likewise, the names of the places where they had lived, the numbers given to their years, the manners or fashions of their times, all of these they had forgotten.
“Well,” said the dead boy, “in the town where I was born, there was a widow. Maybe she was your wife. I knew a boy whose mother had died, and an old woman who might have been your sister.”
“Are you going back?”
“Of course not,” said another dead person. “No one ever goes back.”
“I think I might,” the dead boy said. He explained about his flying. “When next the wind blows. ”
“The wind never blows here,” said a man so newly dead that he remembered wind.
“Then you could run with my string.”
“Would that work?”
“Take a message to my husband!” said a dead woman.
“Tell my wife that I miss her!” said a dead man.
“Let my sister know I haven’t forgotten her!”
“Say to my lover that I love him still!”
They gave him their messages, not knowing whether or not their loved ones were themselves long dead. Indeed, dead lovers might well be standing next to one another in the land of the dead, giving messages for each other to the dead boy. Still, he memorized them all. Then the dead put the stick back inside his shirt sleeves, tied everything in place, and unwound his string. Running as fast as their leathery legs could manage, they pulled the dead boy back into the sky, let go of the string, and watched with their dead eyes as he glided away.
He glided a long time over the gray stillness of death until at last a puff of wind blew him higher, until a breath of wind took him higher still, until a gust of wind carried him up above the grayness to where he could see the moon and the stars. Below he saw moonlight reflected in the ocean. In the distance rose mountain peaks. The dead boy came to earth in a little village. He knew no one here, but he went to the first house he came to and rapped on the bedroom shutters. To the woman who answered, he said, “A message from the land of the dead,” and gave her one of the messages. The woman wept, and gave him a message in return.
House by house, he delivered the messages. House by house, he collected messages for the dead. In the morning, he found some boys to fly him, to give him back to the wind’s mercy so he could carry these new messages back to the land of the dead.
So it has been ever since. On any night, head full of messages, he may rap upon any window to remind someone — to remind you, perhaps — of love that outlives memory, of love that needs no names.
Ramsey Campbell
Ra*e
Ramsey Campbell is someone elsewho enjoyed a good year in 1999. No sooner had he travelled to Atlanta, Georgia, to collect the Grand Master Award at the ninth World Horror Convention, than he was back in Los Angeles receiving the Horror Writer Association’s Bram Stoker Award for Life Achievement.
Recent books by the author include the novels The Last Voice They Hear, The House on Nazareth Hill, The One Safe Place, The Long Lost and the forthcoming Silent Children, plus such collections as Waking Nightmares, Strange Things Stranger Places and Alone With the Horrors.
“ ‘Ra*e’ was another tale written to an order that proved less firm than it had promised to be,” reveals the author. “Jeff Gelb and Lonn Friend, editors of the Hot Blood series of anthologies, asked various people to write a long story about one of the seven deadly sins. You will have guessed which attracted me. Alas, for whatever reason, the project failed to find a publisher, and so although I completed the first draft of the tale in early 1996, I saw little point in revising such a lengthy piece to be touted elsewhere. For a while a second volume of Dark Love seemed imminent, and apparently both editor Nancy Collins and her publishers wanted me in it, but it too faded and vanished. The story finally appeared in my latest collection, Ghosts and Grisly Things, published by Pumpkin Books.”
You’re joking, Laura. You’re just doing your best to madden your mother and me. You’re not going out like that either.”
“Dad, I’ve already changed once.”
“And not for the better, but it was better than this. Toddle off to your room again and don’t come back down until you’ve finished trying to provoke us.”
“I’ll be late. I am already. There isn’t another bus for an hour unless I go across the golf course.”
“You know that’s not an option, so don’t give your mother more to worry about than she already has. You shouldn’t have wasted all that time arguing.”
“Wilf — ”
“See how your mother is now. Perhaps she can be permitted a chance to speak before you have your next say. What is it, Claire?”
“I think she can probably go like that rather than be waiting in the dark. I know you’d give her a lift if you weren’t on patrol. I only wish I could.”
“Well, Laura, you’ve succeeded in getting round your mother and made her feel guilty for not being able to drive into the bargain. I’m sorry, Claire, that’s how it seems to me, but then I’m just the man round here. Since my feelings aren’t to be allowed for, I’ll have to try and keep them to myself.”
“Thanks, mum,” Laura said swiftly, and presented her with a quick hug and kiss. Claire had a momentary closeup of her small pale face garnished with freckles above the pert snub nose, of large dark eyes with extravagant lashes which always reminded her how Laura used to gaze up at her from the pram. Then the fourteen-year-old darted out of the room, her sleek straight hair as red as Claire’s five years ago swaying across the nape of her slim neck as her abbreviated skirt whirled around the inches of bare thigh above her black stockings. “Thanks, dad,” she called, and was out of the front door, admitting a snatch of the whir of a lawnmower and a whiff of the scented May evening.
Wilf had turned his back as she’d swung away from her mother. He sat down heavily in the armchair beside the Welsh dresser on which ranks of photographs of Laura as a baby and a toddler and a little girl were drawn up. He tugged at the knees of his jogging pants as he subsided, and dragged a hand across his bristling eyebrows before using it to smooth his graying hair. “Better now?” said Claire in the hope of dislodging his mood.