Mr. Shivers

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Connelly walked for more than a day. He guessed he could not go back as all the woods close to the jailhouse were probably hunting ground, and besides, he knew if he followed the slope long enough he would eventually find water.

He did not realize how weak he was until three hours in, when he stumbled and fell down a gully. He twisted his ankle and tried to pry a dead branch off a tree for a crutch but found he had lost most of his strength. The starvation and sickness and lack of water had taken their toll and then some.

He saw and heard no animals, no other people. When the dawn rose it wove a silver forest world of mist and gray-green undergrowth. The air was fresh and thin here, perhaps due to the elevation, but Connelly was no longer sure where he was. Perhaps New Mexico, maybe Colorado. Maybe it was no state at all, just an empty land with no allegiance or creed. As all states were, if one walked long enough.

The silence was unbearable and soon the cold matched it. As the day wore on the frost wormed into his bones and his shivering made every step uncertain. He was still barefoot. He had done his best to keep his feet uninjured but now he could barely feel them.

He looked up as he stepped across another small gully and saw a thin, gray stream of smoke rising into the sky. He studied it and guessed the distance and changed his course.

He came to a rocky stream and examined the smoke again and decided they had to be camped next to the river. He stripped and washed himself first and drank deep, the water so cold it stung his lips and face. Then he limped along and saw the smoke was coming from a crumbling chimney whose snout poked above the tops of the trees, just off the river. He heard singing and he looked and saw there was a woman washing clothing in the water. She was old with skin like molasses and her voice warbled like a man playing a saw. She lurched back and forth between the stones, scrubbing down her laundry, and as Connelly approached she glanced up and grinned hugely.

“What you doing there, dead white boy?” she called.

“I’m not dead,” said Connelly.

“Sure you are. Just don’t know it yet.”

“Ain’t really a boy, neither.”

“Well, what you going to do to prove me wrong? Take your pecker out and wave it at me? That’d raise a few eyebrows, white fella doing that in front of a colored woman, wouldn’t it?” She cackled gaily.

Connelly leaned on his crutch and hobbled closer. The old woman stood up and looked him over.

“You seen some shit, white boy,” the old woman said.

“I’m… I’m hungry, ma’am. I don’t mean to interrupt, but—”

“But you going to anyways.” She sighed and clucked her tongue. “Oh, well. Set you on down by the bank there and try not to die anytime soon. I won’t have no corpse-water dirtying up my stream. You just set there and wait.”

He did so. He looked behind and saw a wide, low cabin hidden back in the trees. Its windows danced with the warmth of a hearth fire and on its porch sat three empty rocking chairs. A winding path led up through the trees to the front door. At the mouth of the path was a pile of loose odds and ends, shoes and fishing poles and even cheap jewelry. He listened to the old woman sing and toss her clothes into a wicker basket. Sometimes she would peer into the stream and dart her hand in and fish out some piece of junk, a shiny bauble that was no more than trash. Then she would caw happily and bring it over to the pile and carefully place it on the mound.

“You live here by yourself?” said Connelly.

“With my sisters,” she said. “I’m the only able one, though. They old. They old as hell. You know?”

“Sure.”

She laughed. “You don’t know.”

“Sure.”

“Boy, you every woman’s dream, agreeing with whatever fall out of her mouth.”

“I try.”

“Give me a second,” she said. “I’ll give you something that’ll put a spring in your step, maybe your trousers too.” She cackled again and shuffled up into the cabin. She returned with an old tin cup, plumes of steam pouring out the top. She handed it to him. “Careful, now. It’s hot.”

He took it and looked at it. The fluid it held was thick and brown-green and smelled strongly of mint and herbs. “What is it?”

“Pine needle tea. With mint. And wormwood. All sorts of good shit. It’s my sister’s recipe. Give it a whirl, you been freezing for God knows how long, I can tell. It lets you know you’re alive, white boy.”

He blew on it and sipped. As it dripped down his throat his insides turned cold and hot all at once. He breathed out and it burned but seemed to burn away the fatigue as well.

“God,” he said. “It’s… it’s…”

“It’s awful,” she said cheerfully. “I said it was good for you, I never said it tasted good. Things that’s good for you are never fun to swallow. Ain’t that the way,” she said to herself. “Ain’t that the way.”

She shuffled back down to the creek and picked up her basket of clothes with a grunt. Connelly rose to help her.

“Oh, sit down,” she scolded. “You in worse shape than me. Them clothes are all that’s holding you up and there ain’t much of those, neither. ’Sides, I need the exercise.”

She strung a line from the window of the house to the cedar across from it and draped her clothes over it, humming tunelessly. She stepped back, brushed her hands, and nodded in satisfaction. Then she turned to Connelly and looked at him with a keen eye.

“You been causing some serious trouble, ain’t you?” she said.

Connelly did not answer. He readied himself to run if he could and attack if he had to.

“Oh, come on now,” scoffed the old woman. “I just served you some damn good tea. Secret recipe, too. I don’t waste that on just anyone.”

“How did you know?”

“Smoke told me,” she said with a grin, and she gestured toward the chimney. “Rose on up into the sky, looked over the mountain and said, ‘Say, old Nina, I see a lot of hubbub down south of here and there’s a man coming your way carrying a lot of trouble.’ ” Her grin faded. “A lot of trouble,” she repeated solemnly.

“Yeah,” said Connelly. “I know.”

“That’s just it, ain’t it? You don’t,” she said. “Here, come on up to the house, boy. We’ll let my clothes dry and we’ll get you close to a fire. You can rummage the junk heap too, if you want. Try to find shoes. Come on.”

The old woman led the way, clucking whenever Connelly tried to help her up. As she opened her front door she shouted, “Dexy, we got company!”

“Oh?” said a voice even older than Nina’s. He rounded the corner. A shrunken old woman sat in an overstuffed chair before a guttering fire. She was so bent double her chin almost touched her chest. In her lap she was doing her best to crochet but her knuckles and wrists were swollen with arthritis. She was blacker even than Nina, her skin like cracked volcanic glass at the edges of her eyes. She stared into Connelly’s waist, then grunted and looked up at him. She worked her lips, tonguing her toothless gums, and said, “Good gods, you’re a big one. I don’t know what they fed you but they fed you too much of it.”

“He’s been starved, Dexy,” said Nina.

“Oh, no.”

“Yeah. Wandered on out of the woods like a wild child. Raised by wolves, maybe.”

“No. He looks wolfish but he’s got a boy’s eyes,” said Dexy.

Nina grunted noncommittally, like she disagreed but would not argue.

“Here, sit you down, boy,” said Dexy. “There ain’t a chair here can hold you, but just sit down on the floor if that’s all right.”

“I’ve sat and slept on worse,” said Connelly.

“That I believe,” said Nina.

The cabin was large and shabby but still comfortable. The stone floor was cracking but laid well and the rafters were kept clean of cobwebs. Three chairs sat around the fire, the empty ones on either side of Dexy. Each was made for little old ladies. On the opposite wall were three doors, two open and leading to bedrooms, the third slightly closed and the inside dark.

“Your tea is good,” said Connelly. “I had some.”

“Oh, flattery,” Dexy said, but she smiled. “Flattery. That will get you anything. What do you need, young man?”

“Just, well… I came up, and…”

“Oh, you don’t have to say no more,” she fussed. “Nina, this boy needs to eat.”

“Well. I guess I’ll feed him, if that’s the way it’s going to be,” said Nina grudgingly, and went to the kitchen.

“Here,” Dexy said to him. She held out a melted lump of wax with a small bit of wick swimming in the center. “Here, take this candle and light it in the fire, if you don’t mind. My damn eyes ain’t worth a lick anymore.”

Connelly did so, using a thin branch as a match. He set it on the table beside her and she fiddled with her crochet halfheartedly.

“I used to be so damn good at this,” she said. “Only thing that’s worse than a thing that don’t work is a thing that almost works.” She dropped her needles, sighed, and raised her head up to the ceiling in despair.

“Mind if I ask you a question?” asked Connelly.

“Oh, probably. But go on ahead if you want.”

“What are you all doing out here? It must be miles from anything.”

She grunted, turning the question over. Then she said, “Knitting.”

“Knitting?”

“Yeah. Well, that’s alls I do, at least.”

“You moved out to the woods to knit?”

“Most days it seems like I’ve always been here,” she said. “But then, it may just be my age.”

Nina came out and served him cold chicken and cornmeal. She left to get him a fork and when she returned he had already eaten most of it with his hands.

“Lord, I said you was starving, but I didn’t realize you was dead on your feet,” she said. She sat on Dexy’s right and pulled a shawl about her shoulders.

He took the fork from her. He had not used one in a very long time and it took some remembering.

“Hold it like a pencil,” said Nina.

“Been even longer since I held a pencil,” said Connelly, but he tried. The two old women watched him eat.

“Boy’s been living on the edges a while now, Nina,” said Dexy in her frail little voice.

“Ain’t that so. Long time.”

“He went out there himself and now he don’t know where he’s going.”

“No idea at all. I agree.”

Connelly looked up and saw the two old women were watching him, Nina no longer cackling, Dexy’s face no longer old and confused anymore. In the firelight they could have been carved from wood.

“What?” said Connelly.

“Hmm. Lookie here,” Nina said. “The knight errant, wandering through the forest, a-questing. Olden days he’d be cantering on a white horse. Not no more.”

“Not at all,” said Dexy. “Things change.” They looked him up and down, studying him as though he was some strange anomaly. They did not seem so old now, or so fragile.

“What’s going on?” said Connelly.

“You think we don’t know your type?” said Dexy. “We seen your type before. If we lined up all the men like you we seen, why, it’d stretch all the way down the river.”

“The man on a quest,” said Nina almost condescendingly. “Venturing out to slay the beast.”

“What monster you hunting, white boy?” Dexy asked. “What demon is it you seek to slay?”

“There is one, ain’t there?” asked Nina.

Connelly stared back and forth between them. “You know about the shiver-man?”

That surprised them. Their eyebrows rose up, crinkling the skin of their faces like butcher paper. They did not seem so dismissive anymore.

“Ah,” said Nina faintly, and nodded. “That one.”

“Who are you?” said Connelly.

“Oh, us?” Nina said, and laughed again. “We just three black bitches sitting by a river, minding our own.”

“We’re old,” said Dexy. “We just been around a while, sugar. We know a thing or two.”

“All of us,” said Nina.

“All of who? Who else is there?” asked Connelly.

Nina gestured to the shut door behind her. “Our sister, of course. She lies dreaming, as she always does. Always has. Best not to wake her. It’s what she likes.”

“And you… you know about the scarred man?”

“Everyone knows,” said Dexy. “Maybe they know in a part of them they don’t want to think is there. But they know. We just know a little more.”

Connelly shook his head. It was incomprehensible to have this happening, to have stumbled half dead from the jail and wandered here to be met by the same. Weeks ago he would have fought for a scrap of news of the gray man but now he seemed to dominate every patch of earth Connelly walked over.

“No, I-I’m leaving,” he said. “I’m going to go. I-I thank you for the dinner but I’ve had, I have had enough of this.”

“You won’t go,” said Dexy calmly.

“And why’s that?”

“Because you want to ask us questions. Because you want to know.”

He turned at the door and shook his head again. “No. No, not this, not again. Do you have any… Do you know what I’ve been through? Do you?”

“Yes,” said Nina.

“We got an idea, hon,” said Dexy.

“No you don’t!” he shouted. “Don’t you… Don’t you sit there and tell me that! Just don’t!”

There was a noise from the back of the house, a faint thud. Dexy and Nina looked at each other in fear and Nina stood to her feet. “Oh, Lord,” she said. “Oh, Lord, he woke her up. Such noise, such noise these boys make.” She pulled up the hems of her skirt and opened the bedroom door and slipped in, but before it could shut Connelly smelled stale air and the noxious scent of bile and decay. He did not know who slumbered back there but he did not think he wanted to.

“There,” said Dexy. “I hope you’re happy.”

“I’m… I’m sorry.”

“Oh, you didn’t know. She’s just… crabby.” She looked balefully at him. “So you done yelling?”

Connelly shrugged, then nodded.

“Hm. You made up your mind, then? You staying or going?”

He watched her for a while, then slowly lowered himself back down to the floor.

“Good,” Dexy said. “That’s sensible. Very smart of you.”

“So what are you going to tell me?”

“What you need to know, I suppose. But give us a second. We ain’t all woke up yet. Here, let me get you your tea right quick.”

She shuffled off to the kitchen. Connelly sat before her chair and leaned back. He felt comfortable. It was the first time he had been warm since he had camped with the Hopkinses. He watched the flames dance and fight and thought about how mad this all was and soon abandoned that train of thought.

He listened to the fire and his eyelids grew heavy. There almost could have been words in its crackling.

He slept.

Someone touched him on his arm and he woke. Nina was standing over him.

“It’s time, boy,” she whispered.

He stood and followed her out the back. Night had fallen and with it a thick fog had crept down from the mountains, gathering around the bases of the trees. She led him through the maze of trunks until they came to a small clearing. In the center a gray mountain ash grew and before that was a small fire. Dexy sat across from it, a small stew cooking on its flames. As he sat she spooned a little into a bowl and took a bite with a tiny spoon.

“Good,” she said with a nod. “Nice and spicy. Good to keep the chill out. Care for some?”

Connelly took his share and it was warm and buttery. Nina sat on Dexy’s left, each of them on small stone seats, Connelly on the forest floor. To Dexy’s left was another stone seat, this one empty.

“Your sister’s not here,” he said.

“She’s here,” said Nina. “She just ain’t over there.”

Connelly shrugged. “So what are you? Witches?”

“Witches, no. Bitches, maybe,” said Nina, and she laughed.

“I already had my fortune told,” he said.

“And did it answer anything?”

“Not really.”

“Well, here’s your chance. Just give me a moment,” said Nina. “Need to wake things up a little.”

With stunning speed she reached into the fire and grabbed a fistful of burning coals and flung them up into the air. Connelly raised his arms to shield himself from their hot rain, but they did not fall. Instead their ascent slowed and they came to a stop, hovering above, and then each of the little sparks began to twitch and move, dancing like fireflies. They spun in little orbits and some left the clearing to explore the woods. Then it felt like the air grew close and nothing existed but the clearing. The trees seemed to grow taller and thicker, hiding the night sky until they were towering giants. It was as though they were in some primeval version of the world they lived in now, some original version whose wildness and savagery had slowly been worn down with age until it was the complacent time they called the present.

“Now it knows,” said Dexy softly, looking about. “We got the word out. Now it knows we going to ask, we got troubles on our mind and we going to ask it.”

“Ask who?” said Connelly.

“The night. Everything. Eat some more stew.”

He did. He coughed, as its spice seemed to have increased now. The forest’s colors seemed painfully bright, liquid browns and violent blacks, and once again the sisters no longer looked like people so much as carven statues.

“What’s in this stew?” he asked.

“Good shit,” said Nina, and grinned.

“Stuff from the earth’s heart,” Dexy said. “Bit of root, bit of mud. Bit of blood of things that live down there, things that listen. Earth knows everything. Bones under your feet, they know everything. You want to know the truth of things? You got to take a bit of the earth’s heart and put it in you. Then you ask.”

Nina was still grinning, now looking like some squat, wicked shaman, some priestess of rituals that happened far from the eyes of men. “So go on, little white boy,” she said. “Ask.”

Connelly looked at them a while and said, “Who is he? The shiver-man. You know him. Who is he?”

Dexy laughed. “You mean you traveled all this way and you don’t know?”

“The farther I go the less I understand.”

“You know,” said Nina. “Don’t be fooling yourself, little white boy. Everyone know who he is. You known all along.”

“You been in his wake all this time, so what’s he left behind?” said Dexy. “Each place you go to that he been, what’s there waiting? Why would he show up in the country in these famished times?” She chuckled, exasperated. “Boy, what has he marked you with and every other soul he meets?”

Connelly stared into the fire and thought. Thought about Molly, dancing and laughing. About Roonie and Jake and Ernie and every other soul lost along the road, and those blank, black eyes and the joyless grin.

“He’s Death, isn’t he,” said Connelly.

“Death,” snorted Nina. “That just a word. Might as well be writing in the sea or the sand, for who can name nothing? Should you try it would surely eat that word as well.”

“He has a thousand names and each one catches but a part of him,” Dexy said.

“He is the Harvester, the Sickle Man,” said Nina.

“The Night Walker and That Which Devours.”

“The Skullsie Man, the Star Reaper, the Grinning Bone Dancer.”

“He is the Black Rider, the great beast below all and beyond all.”

“Fenrir Wolf-End, the Sightless Hunter, Forest Stalker and Singer of Ends.”

“The Red Axis, the Forgotten Plowman, Destroyer of Worlds.”

“Pale Conqueror, the Crownless King.”

“Death?” Dexy scoffed. “Death is but a term. To say he is Death is to call night a mere shadow. He bears a dread weapon in his hands, that thing we call nothing, and he brings it down as a blade. Cuts under all, plows it all up, turns it over. That is what he is.”

“But you knew that, didn’t you, boy?” Nina asked him. “You knew it all along.”

Connelly thought about it. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I think I did.”

“ ’Course you did. You’re slow, but you ain’t stupid.”

Connelly looked down and set the bowl aside. He stared into the fire a great long while.

“Can I kill him?” he asked.

Nina and Dexy looked to the blank seat, then up at the sky.

“To kill death,” said Nina. “Ain’t that a thing man’s hungered for since he looked about and saw where he was.”

“Could death be so great a thing that death itself could die?” asked Dexy.

“And were it to come about, what would follow? More death? More suffering? Perhaps. Who can say save he himself that has seen the deaths of thousands, of millions, the deaths of all?”

“Well?” said Connelly. “Can I?”

“Yes,” said Dexy. “Yes, he can be killed. But not easily. With great effort and sacrifice, it may be done.”

“I sacrificed plenty already,” said Connelly. “Little more won’t matter much. But he can die?”

“Yeah. But you knew that already, too, didn’t you?” said Nina. “Otherwise you wouldn’t been chasing him at all.”

“I guess so. I saw him scared. Scared of me. Don’t know why, but… He looked like a man who knew he could die.”

“And he can,” said Nina. “Listen—he weakens now, before the new dawn. He races to stop it. He knows it is driving him back, driving him down, ending the old and bringing in the new. He fears it. More than anything, he fears it, and the birth it brings.”

“All right,” said Connelly.

“But consider your actions, white boy,” Nina said. “Consider what you doing. Why you doing this, first of all? For everyone? For yourself?”

“Not for me,” said Connelly. “For my little girl. It wasn’t right. I got to make it right. And if the world refuses to be right then you just have to force it. You have to make it. Beat it until it listens.”

“Death will always be a part of this world, though,” Dexy said softly. “One way or another. I can’t say how but it’s always going to be here. Remember that.”

“It defines all men,” said Nina. “Starts it. Ends it. What defines a country or a civilization ain’t how it lives life, but how it ends it. How it conquers and controls. How it reaps what it needs. He going to be there for that. He going to be there. You know?”

“I do,” said Connelly. “And I don’t care. Anything’s better than him. Folks shouldn’t go the way they do out here. Shot down in the night, cut in half by trains. Scared and alone. It ain’t right.”

The sisters nodded to themselves.

“I asked him something,” said Connelly quietly. “I asked him something last I saw him. I asked him why he took my little girl. And he just said so she’d die. Which wasn’t any kind of answer at all. So I’m going to ask you. Why did he kill my little girl?”

“Boy,” said Nina, “do you not know where you are? Are you but a year old? What fool looks Death in the face and asks ‘why?’ and expects an answer? Perhaps even Death does not know why he comes to those who die. Perhaps there is no motivation, no driving force, no intent.”

“If he cannot say, surely we cannot either,” Dexy said. “Certain questions can never have answers.”

“Dammit,” said Connelly softly. “Goddamn it. Goddamn it all.”

A breeze blew through the little clearing, pulling the flames this way and that. Dexy and Nina looked at the blank seat once more. Then Nina scowled as though having heard some foolishness and Dexy shook her head.

“Well, Lord, Lord,” Dexy said. “First time for everything.” She turned back to Connelly. “Ask another.”

“What?” said Connelly.

“Ask another,” said Nina. “Ask another question. First time in a long age since we were asked beyond the three. But we couldn’t answer the last, and so you can give us another.”

Connelly thought about it for a long while. Considered what he was doing, perhaps for the first time. Considered his life after death and the lives of others.

“What’s going to happen if I win?” he asked.

Dexy peered into the fire, her eyes sifting through the flames, and said, “The same thing that always happens after death. Rebirth.”

“The wounded and injured and dead rise again, fully healed,” said Nina. “That which came before rises up and goes on. Whole. As it was before. Perhaps greater.”

“And I’ll go home, right?” said Connelly. “Then I can go on home. And rest.”

“Maybe,” said Dexy. “But if not, white boy… If what was lost never could return, would you still do this? Would you still hunt this creature down?”

“In a heartbeat,” said Connelly. “Without a second’s thought.”

“All right, then,” said Nina. “All right. Your mind’s made up.”

Dexy glanced at the empty seat and tilted her head as though listening. Then she said, “Are you certain of what you want to do, boy? Understand that you are not merely attempting to kill a man, or even a god, but a thing that perhaps holds the endings of men and gods in his hand.”

“He looks like just a man to me,” Connelly insisted.

“And so he is, in a way. I suppose that is his weakness. I suppose that’s what gives you a chance to succeed as well as what makes you so sure.” She sighed and the clearing seemed to grow and the trees to shrink. The dark was no longer so close, nor did he feel so little.

“All right,” said Nina. “Enough of this. We’re done. I’m tired.”

“I got what I wanted,” Connelly said.

“You like things simple, don’t you, boy?” Dexy asked.

Connelly shrugged.

“Well,” she said. “They ain’t going to be for long.”

Nina spat through her teeth, the glob of saliva arcing out through a gap and landing yards away. She sniffed and said, “It’s cold as hell out here. Get on back up to the house, boy. We got some talking to do and you look like you could use a year of sleep.”

Connelly rose and did as she asked. When he looked back the women were gone, but he thought he saw their figures moving into the trees, and unless his fatigue was playing with his eyes he thought there were three of them.

He slept before the hearth and in the morning Dexy awoke him with breakfast. She served him chicken once more, now with rye bread. Neither of them spoke. Nina rose and went to the third room to tend to the last one’s waking.

“I suppose I’ll get going,” said Connelly once she came out.

“Yeah,” she said.

He went to the junk heap out front and picked through it. He found two old boots worn raw with age and a thick black coat, streaked with gray mud. He washed it off in the stream and let it dry before putting it on and going out. They packed him a small bag of dry foods and a canteen of water, its punctured skin roughly patched with old bandages. He slung it over his shoulder and walked out front.

The mist had receded. Sunlight sparkled on the crinkled waters of the stream. Dexy and Nina came to watch his departure and he was not sure but he thought he spotted a dark shape move in the far window.

“I thank you for your hospitality, and for your advice,” he said.

“Didn’t give you no advice,” said Nina. “Just told you how it was going to be.”

“Well. I thank you anyways.”

“Wasn’t anything.”

“I hope I see you again,” he said.

“You won’t,” Dexy said. “Boys like you are always running off chasing one thing or another. They never know when to sit still.”

“Maybe.”

They bid their farewells and he walked upstream and turned north through a passage of hills. Each time he turned around he expected to see the stream of smoke was suddenly gone. But it was always there, threading up into the sky. Watching him, perhaps, and frowning.