Amidst the Mist and Dew
“Do these mounds ring a bell?” asked Ellie. She pulled the hay cart behind her companion, Lavinia.
“Stop harping in my ears,” the elder woman replied. Her eyes wrinkled. “Be grateful.”
“I am grateful, good Lavinia.”
“This is only for the three nights, you know.”
“I know.”
“After, go find your own tomb. I’ll need mine soon, heh, heh.”
Ellie dragged her cart, with its burden, through a frosted pool of mud. Each step crunched thin ice, and she sank to her ankles.
“Dear Owen should have warned you before he choked,” said Lavinia. She stood among three mounds, scratching her grey head and squinting. “I’d remember my own barrow with some forewarning.”
The cart thumped and rattled as Ellie jerked it over a willow root. She drew up behind Lavinia. She said nothing. She ran a hand through her own hair; it came back damp and cold with sweat.
Lavinia sneered at Ellie’s cart. “A whole box full of statues!” she mocked.
“The Earth Mother is never sated.” Ellie spoke in weary monotone.
“But so many. Afraid for your husband’s body?”
“I brought enough for all three nights.”
As Ellie glanced at her burden, the old woman rubbed her knees. “My bones are rotten…”
Ellie caught the red sun in her eyes as it sank behind the barrows. “Lavinia,” she said, pleading. “How much farther?”
“Hah! Why not come back tomorrow?”
“‘And, if a body is not guarded for the first three nights of its death, The Earth Mother will send her vampires to drink its blood and damn its soul.’”
“Don’t quote the sages at me,” snapped Lavinia. “I’ll be dead soon myself. I know litanies.”
“I still need to set the statues.” Ellie considered the rattling box on the cart. “Light the candle-”
“Look inside that barrow,” the old woman interrupted. She pointed a knobby finger at a hole in the base of the nearest mound. Ellie set her cart down, stepped ahead, and ducked into the low, dark tunnel. She emerged a second later.
“Anything inside?” Lavinia asked.
“It’s empty.”
The old woman nodded. “That was the barrow for a boy named Kharkov. I knew him when I was even younger than you are. But Kharkov’s brother - his only watcher - fell asleep the third night. Heh, the vampires didn’t even leave the bones.”
“Good Lavinia, please…” Ellie begged.
“So much moaning! I remember where we are. Stop dawdling and bring that husband along. My barrow’s this way.”
Lavinia hobbled over the frosted grass. Ellie lifted the handles of her cart and followed quickly.
Ellie lifted the wood box from the cart. She carried it in her skinny, pale arms and set it with a thump beside the barrow’s tunnel. Flipping the lid buckles, she reached quickly into one of the box’s compartments. Her left hand emerged with a long candle, marked into ten segments by nine charcoal lines. A tinderbox was in her right, rustling with char cloth and flints.
Ellie passed the items to Lavinia. “Set the candle by the table’s head,” Ellie instructed. “But don’t light it until-”
“I know the rites.” Lavinia’s snappish grumble turned hollow and echoing as she bent into the tunnel. “Couldn’t bring a spare light - making me knock my knees in the dark…”
Ellie spared a fretted glance west. The sun had sunk behind the mounds - the sky was an ocean of twilight.
Returning to the compartmented box, Ellie drew two statues of slightly-soft clay. They were in the same shape: a fat human, with folded legs, and fingers laced in their lap. The two statues had different faces.
“Blessed child, Rorey,” she said, naming the statue in her left hand and setting it on one side of the tunnel. “Blessed child, Osborn.” She set Osborn on the opposite side.
Ellie lifted the box and, half-bent, scurried into the black barrow.
The floor was cold stone. Ellie stopped at each step along the short passage, set the box down, and placed a statue or two. Each one faced the entrance. Each one had a name: “Newman”, “Levin”, “Godfrey”.
As she positioned her fifth statue, Ellie paused. Even in the twilit tunnel she could tell she’d mushed the face with her thumb.
Ellie reached into the top right compartment. In the dark she grasped a knobby, smooth wooden handle. She drew her sculpting knife. She bent over the statue to carve quick eyeholes and a mouth.
As she scratched the tip across the face for the mouth, Ellie’s wrist slipped. The knife swished along her thumb’s outer knuckle skin. She felt the sharp sting. Ellie grimaced, but the cut wasn’t deep. She set the statue down, set the knife back in the box, and held her thumb against her coarse shirt. “You’ll have a little birthmark then,” she said to the statue. “Blessed child, Tomnshend.”
Privately, she thought, ‘After all, it can only help.’
Ellie entered the central chamber. The creeping, small outer light only made a vague shape of the space. It was a dome of mortared blocks, with a perfectly flat, stone floor. The ceiling curved to an eight-foot peak. Dead, piled leaves and forsaken tools made lumpy shadows against the walls. At the center of the room was a gritty, umber-colored slate.
Lavinia stood at the head of the slate. She’d set the candle and tinderbox on the floor. Ellie saw the old woman fold her arms under her breasts.
Ellie placed her dozen remaining clay humans near the entrance and around the base of the long stone.
Lavinia unfolded her arms and bent to peer outside. “The mist is forming,” she said.
Ellie dropped the rest of her supplies beside the candle: mixing bowl, bag of clay, skin of precious ferrous water, sculpting knife.
“June’s bones, it’s dark,” said Lavinia.
Ellie shot for the tunnel. As she started back outside - panting - she said, “Help me pull the body.”
The lone candle set frail light within the barrow - a light so stable it seemed like yellow paint upon the body of Ellie’s husband, Owen. The candle burned at the body’s cloth-wrapped scalp, atop the slate. The short barrow tunnel ushered in cold spring air, and a nightjar’s buzz.
Lavinia sat on a blanket against the wall, between a rusted shovel and a pile of bricks. Her fingers darned a shawl.
Ellie paced. She inspected the statues, stood over Owen, or stared outside.
The candle sank by three marks.
The moon grew massive and bright. Beyond the tunnel, beneath the mist, the crusty frosted grass glimmered like porcelain fireflies.
Lavinia started snoring.
The candle burnt past another mark. Another. Another. Ellie’s eyes stung, but she kept awake.
The light spasmed. Ellie looked down the tunnel.
Limned in moonlight, the mist hung coldly still. Under the mist, some of the spiky, frozen grass had thawed. A thin streak of glossy wet blades ran under the mist, right up to the tunnel.
The candlelight sank slowly.
A crackle echoed into the barrow. Ellie’s chin had dipped onto her chest, but now she sat upright. A second crackle, and the room went black.
The candle had expired.
A faint glow, however, crept in through the short tunnel. A glow of blue and gold.
Dawn.
Ellie sighed, relieved, exhausted. She sank to her palms and knees and crawled outside. Along the tunnel, nascent dawn lit her clay statues. All were untarnished.
But as Ellie emerged, and looked to either side, she saw that the two statues flanking the tunnel - Rorey and Osborn - had crumbled to powder.
A grey shaft of sunlight slanted through the western window of Ellie’s hovel. The light struck her face where she lay on a fur by the hearth. Her face glowed pale. Her hair shone like oil, and contoured the dark lines under her eyes, which were closed.
The Starving Earth trembled, and woke Ellie. Her lids rose. From the sun’s angle through the smoke stained window, she saw that noon had passed.
Ellie’s eyes burned, but she held them open. She reached and felt the second, cold fur cushion beside her own.
Then Ellie stood, stretched, and walked outside.
Spring air licked against Ellie’s face and hands. It wasn’t cold now, but thin clouds left the sun as a pastel disk. Combined with the humidity, it promised a clammy night.
A hiss from the left turned Ellie’s eyes.
Sidwell, her gander, came waddling to the threshold. His round beak was low, but unthreatening; his hissing was soft. Ellie reached down and stroked a finger down the coarse feathers of his spine.
Ellie set out. Sidwell followed.
The village hovels hunched like nesting birds amidst hills bristling with pine trees. A rough two dozen homes were there. Most were timber, with mossy wood shake roofs, and insulated with Earth-given mud. Ellie saw a lazy ribbon of smoke still trailing from one chimney; most of the night fires had burned out.
As they marched down a packed dirt lane Ellie and Sidwell passed silently by another villager, a farmer with a crooked nose named Rowland. Rowland wheeled his plow behind him, the blade raised. He was taking it to the eldest sage’s hut, Ellie knew, to have it blessed with the Soil’s permission to furrow.
With the scantest shared nod, Ellie and Rowland went their separate ways.
Ellie stopped along the road where it curved against the town’s Scratch River. She stepped off the path, over the grass, down the hard dirt slope. The small creek choked through banks still frozen at their edge by winter’s last chill.
Ellie cupped some of the cool water in her hands and splashed her face. For a moment, she breathed deeply.
Then Ellie caught the reflection of the dimmed sun on the ice.
Ellie quickly climbed back to the road.
On the village’s opposite side she approached Lavinia’s door. The pines loomed high against the western wall of the hut. Ellie knocked. There was no reply.
“Good Lavinia?” she called at the crack. “I thought we could go together and gather fallen lumber. Lavinia? I have an axe. We can make ourselves a fire tonight. Lavinia, are you home?”
Finally a croaking voice spoke within. “Go away.”
“Please Lavinia. Owen must lie for two more nights.”
“What stops him?”
“He-”
Lavinia’s voice cut Ellie short. “Go alone. Why pester an old cripple?”
“You would make me sit in your barrow alone? With the mist and the body?”
Ellie called twice more, but Lavinia gave no reply. Finally the young woman looked back to the village. It was past noon. Only a few souls roamed the roads - none that Ellie knew well.
Beside her, Sidwell honked.
The wooden poles of her cart ripped from Ellie’s hands as the right wheel broke through a frozen puddle. The cart tilted. She heard crashing, like breaking windows, as the whole load toppled over the side and shattered the crust.
“Cankers on a donkey,” Ellie cursed, examining the mess. The firewood she’d gathered, the three new statues she’d molded and carved - all of it had sunken into the icy mud. The firewood was wet, the sculptures destroyed.
Sidwell waddled over and ducked his beak into the cool water.
Ellie looked to the sky, but stiffening clouds hid the sun. She only knew that noon had long passed.
Slipping off her shoes and wool socks, Ellie stepped into the puddle. The mud grasped her feet like dead fingers. She rolled up her sleeves and plunged in. Her hands finally closed around a smooth cylinder. She fished up the candle. Thankfully the wax hadn’t snapped. She shook off the mud - the wick was fine, the charcoal marks visible.
Ellie squelched free and wiped her feet and hands on the grass. Gooseflesh quickened on her pale skin. She grabbed the cart poles and heaved. The ice and mud held it. She jerked, leaning with her small weight, but the wheel was stuck.
The common nightjars began their buzz in the dwarf pines on the barrows. For now, they were the only birds making song.
Ellie gave up. She picked up the candle and her socks and shoes. The rest of her supplies were at the barrow. She moved on through the mounds, quick and barefoot. Sidwell fanned his wings to keep pace.
The mist soon swallowed Ellie’s haycart.
A bead of molten wax drizzled down the candle, washing the last charcoal mark. Ellie’s thoughts ran with the wax, her eyes simmered like the wick.
One hour left.
Ellie leaned against the long edge of the body slate. She forced her hands to keep shaping the statue in her lap. At her hip, Sidwell slept.
A thought punctured Ellie’s mind fog: the air was silent. No trilling nightjars.
Ellie looked up.
She couldn’t see the other mounds, couldn’t even see down the short tunnel. The mist pressed in like a solid grey wall, tinted orange by the candle.
It stopped at the outermost statue, Argyle.
And a voice seemed to stir the vapor:
“Ellie…”
Before the mist, Argyle wilted. The tunnel echoed a sputter. The clay figure’s glossy surface turned matt, cracked, then the figure crumbled to powder - like an apple switching from ripe to rotten in a second.
Ellie shot upright. She woke Sidwell, who hissed, sputtered, flapped around the barrow. Ellie felt her head turn dizzy with rushing blood. She woozed.
The wall of mist pressed closer. Closer. It stopped before the second statue, Gideon.
Ellie snatched the unfinished figure from the floor. She started reshaping the legs, which had deformed when she dropped it. She reached and dragged over her mixing bowl of dry clay. She unstopped her skin of ferrous water. She poured a dollop into the bowl. She started kneading.
Gideon disintegrated. Over his clay the mist rolled. Orange shadows danced on the walls as the low candle fluttered.
Ellie’s breath misted. Sidwell screeched, knocking over a shovel, churning dead leaves into the air, beating his wings. Ellie tried to focus. Shape the knee. Shape the foot. Focus.
Another hiss of collapsing earth; Lodowick. Another; Kinsey. Ellie couldn’t breathe. The air seemed thick as water, and filled with noiseless chuckling.
Ellie looked up. She let the unfinished clay slide from her fingers. She watched the last statue, Duncan, fall to dust. The mist slipped into the hollow chamber. Ellie felt the damp on her cheeks.
And then the light went out.
Outside, faintly, a lone nightjar buzzed.
Slowly, the mist began to thin.
Ellie’s eyelids dropped like stone-weighed bodies tossed in a lake. Her chin dipped. Her body told her to abandon her current sculpture, and sink into her soft fur bed.
She felt a tremor beneath her, the ground rumbling minutely.
Ellie leaned over a bucket she had filled from the Scratch River. She dunked her head. Icewater needles prickled her skin. She came up, gasping, cold, a little roused.
Dawn blushed beyond Ellie’s hovel. Inside, it fell slantingly through the north window; an unobstructed cone glaring across the packed oil-dirt floor. Ellie watched dust motes dance in the pure light. She realized she was drooling, and wiped the corner of her lips with a cuff.
No wind creaked against the walls, and the birds of the morn lay unusually quiet. In the stillness of her home, for a moment, Ellie heard the voice again. The voice from the barrow.
“Ellie…”
Ellie focused on the statue.
The window light seemed to creep perceptibly towards Ellie. The slanting ray slid west to east across her floor, like a butcher’s knife sliding down a suspended elk carcass.
Ellie set her third finished statue, David, to the side. She picked up the bowl of clay and the stoppered skin of precious ferrous water, got up, and went outside.
The pre-noon sun shed little warmth on Ellie’s cheeks. No clouds obscured the sky, but the day seemed stiff, remote - as if the light were hurt. Ellie sat on her stoop to work. She scanned the clearing, glancing at Sidwell’s pen, but the gander was not in sight.
Probably Sidwell was at the creek. Ellie wondered if she should go there herself. The cold running water was deep enough in spots that she could strip down and submerge completely in the current. A bath might wake her. And cold washing of that sort, Ellie felt, cleansed the mind as well as the body. One joined with the river water; memoryless for a time, freezing and thawing; like the wet grass of the barrow mounds.
Ellie looked up and realized that noon had come and gone. Beside her, four more statues sat with legs crossed. Seven statues total.
Ellie figured out she could keep her eyes open - her thoughts awake - by moving them around. She forced herself to look across the village every now and then. Folk went about their daily chores. Few acknowledged Ellie. They seemed to avoid her eyes.
Ellie knew she looked horrible. Owen would have scolded her: mud stains on her white ritual shirt, dirt under her fingernails, greasy hair, bloodshot eyes. “How,” Owen would have shouted, “could she be so careless?”
Outside now, it was no longer the daylight cone which slid perceptibly, but shadows. The posts of the fences, the pines - each stretched a finger of shade, which turned about their bases like the blades of a mill.
Ellie smacked her face. A villager passing beside her home stopped, stared, then walked on.
“You must make surrogates,” Ellie told herself. She carved a smile on her eighth sculpture. She named it Comor.
Reaching for a cloth to wipe her hands, Ellie realized she was still holding the knife. She dropped it. The cloth was white linen. She’d cut it from the same bolt used to wrap Owen’s body. She thought about Owen, as she poured another dram of precious ferrous water into her mixing bowl. Owen sowing the field of yams behind the house. Owen lying in the dark barrow. Owen saying she’d made watery soup. Owen saying she’d wrapped his shroud too tight. Owen saying she’d left him alone on the clammy stone table…
Owen rose.
Ellie had been staring at the tunnel, and the eleven statues she set on guard. Comor. David. Humphrey. Howell. Jeremiah. Matson. Price. Simon. Stephen. Whitton. Willoughby. They sat facing the door. Each blessed child. Each surrogate.
But now, where Ellie stood on the table’s opposite side, the body blocked her view. She watched the body squirm in its shroud. That made sense to Ellie - Owen was claustrophobic.
Ellie picked up her shaping knife from beside the candle. She cut a deft slit between the right arm and torso. Owen tore free, shrugging off the wrap. He turned to her.
Owen’s face did not look as if someone had smashed it to gore with a carpenter’s hammer. He looked healthy, beard full, cheeks full, both flushed. His eyes were like two grease bubbles.
“Ellie…” Owen spoke her name in his usual coarse voice, “did you remember the dough for Reigentide?”
“It’s the last of the grain, Owen,” she answered softly. “I thought you’d want-”
“Slackwit. Why do you always undermine me before the elder sage?”
“I’m sorry,” Ellie demurred.
“Ellie… we will have to dance on empty stomachs.”
Owen slid his legs off the table and stood on the opposite side. The wrap fell away. He turned, they touched - his hands felt like iron in winter.
They circled the candlelit slate in rhythm.
The floor felt sticky under Ellie’s feet. She glanced down in the midst of the dance. Her feet were bare, and the floor was covered in a glossy water sheet. Her face, reflected, was white like sawn ivory.
Ellie noticed the candle flickering. “Should we invoke the Reigen outside?” she asked? “So that-”
“Shh!” Owen’s hiss cut Ellie’s nerves. In a whisper he added, “Ellie… you’ll draw the Starving Earth’s ire.”
They spun ‘round the table. Faster. Faster. As the pace increased - their heads rocking side to side, their arms churning the air like spider legs - Owen’s face relaxed.
And then, Ellie realized that there wasn’t any music. She couldn’t hear any sound at all. Not even nightjars.
Ellie bolted upright, her forehead cold where it had rested on the stone table. Owen’s body lay on the table still, linen-wrapped. The candle guttered as if in a gale. Behind Ellie, Sidwell ran back and forth, hissing, panicking.
Ellie stared down the tunnel.
The wall of mist hung right up against the entrance, just before the eleven statues. Comor. David. Humphrey. Howell. Jeremiah. Matson. Price. Simon. Stephen. Whitton. Willoughby.
Comor… drained.
David… drained.
Humphrey, Howell, Jeremiah, Matson, Price, Simon, Stephen, Whitton, Willoughby…
Drained.
The mist gushed in. Ellie flung herself over Owen as the corpse twitched. The mist swelled over the table, nearly dousing the dancing candle. Air crashed. Dead leaves swirled. The body flopped like a beach fish.
“Stop,” Ellie screamed. “Please!”
The mist bunched, eddied, crashed over Owen’s body like waves. Ellie felt it trying to shove her. She snatched her sculpting knife, slashed a heavy vapor swell. The knife passed through air. The mist butted like a ram.
Ellie thought she saw forms of man behind the undulating mist. She thought she heard voices, incredibly light and high. Sidwell, hissing and flapping invisibly, made it impossible to tell.
The mist clumped for another strike.
Ellie dropped her knife. She plucked the skin of blessed ferrous water off the ground. As the mist lunged, Ellie tore the cork with her teeth. Flicking her wrist, swinging, Ellie poured the precious contents around the table.
The mist crashed… and stopped before the circle.
Over and over the mist crashed against the circle of blessed water. Like waves battering a vessel in a black ocean storm, the vapor sprayed and slid. But the water held stable on the perfectly flat floor.
Ellie watched, breathing heavy. Owen’s body lay still beneath her. The candle warmed her cheeks.
The mist settled. Leaves swirled to the floor. Ellie saw only a mist shroud, concealing the barrow’s walls and tunnel. Sidwell fell slowly silent.
Within the grey obscurity, the mist took blurry and undulating shapes. Shadow men. Vampires. That same breathless voice she’d imagined earlier seemed to murmur all around her now, from far, far below.
The silhouettes started circling around Ellie, Owen, and the table. Ellie recognized the synchronized twist of hips, how a shadow arm would flash like a horse whip. They were dancing the Reigen.
Searching the floor within the circle, Ellie spotted her mixing basin. It still held a little clay. Ellie picked it up and set it on the table beside her. She took her flask and poured - a last dreg of the ferrous water trickled into the bowl. Ellie carefully set the flask down. She began to knead and shape the clay. She kept glancing up, hoping for some glimpse of Sidwell.
Around Ellie the man-shapes locked arms. They bobbed their heads in unison, ducking sideways all at once. Every few steps they stopped and stomped. Ellie, sitting atop Owen’s wrapped body, felt it shiver each time.
The statue took shape under Ellie’s practiced fingers. First the chest, then the head and the smooth neck, then the folded legs. Ellie tried to ignore the murmuring beneath her, and the way the shadows danced even though the candle had stopped flickering, and now burned perfectly still. Ellie tried to think they were illusions.
Like Ellie and Owen in the dream, the shadows quickened. Twisting. Writhing.
The air felt cold as January midnight. Colder. Each of Ellie’s shallow breaths formed a vapor cloud. She had the sudden insane urge to blow out the candle. She resisted.
The shapes stopped. Stock still.
Then they began jumping. Up-and-down the mist shades leapt. Rising in unison. Crashing together. Crash. Crash. Crash. Each crash made Owen tremble.
As they landed on the 20th jump, a rumble shook the barrow. The shadows stopped.
Ellie recognized an earthquake.
There came a sudden clap. Ellie leaned out and looked down.
A fissure split the perfectly flat floor. Ellie watched as the blessed ferrous water drained away - the dark, thin crack seemed to guzzle it.
Ellie heard the murmur rise clearer as the water disappeared.
“Ellie… surrender the blood.”
The mist attacked. It slammed Ellie, knocking her off Owen. She broke her fall with the flat of her back. The stone floor tore the breath from her throat.
A white tornado flashed on the edge of Ellie’s vision. She heard Sidwell, alive, hissing. His wing smacked her face as he passed.
Ellie forced herself onto her elbow. She rose - and so did Owen. The body lifted off the stone, she saw, on a congealed mist bubble.
“Please,” Ellie gasped. “Earth, Vampires: wait for his soul to leave!” She got up, ran forward. She pressed on Owen’s chest.
One of the mist figures shot forward. A shadow hand cuffed her shoulder. She felt the touch. Ellie stumbled back, and her foot caught on the mixing bowl. She slipped, fell, and the fissured floor again stole her breath. Pain flashed from her tailbone.
The shadows hardened. They closed in. They circled again, dancing right against the table. Ellie watched two shades stuff their hands right through Owen’s wrapping. They lifted his body by the armpits. The corpse stood, limp, suspended by shadows. The linen wrapping around the legs tore, and Owen’s mangled foot strode toward the tunnel.
Ellie spotted her shaping knife. She grabbed it, rose, ran. She took the blade between her hands and stabbed into one of the shadows.
The knife slid through empty air. The heavy black limb slapped her again, weighted like the kick of a mule. Ellie flew. She struck the wall beside the tunnel, bones juddering.
Sidwell stormed over. His beak found the crook of Ellie’s arm. She grabbed and held him, while her face cracked with tears and sobs.
Owen’s body took another stagger toward the tunnel. And another.
A trickle of crimson slid over Ellie’s right eye. She touched her scalp, and her palm came down sticky with blood. She flicked it onto the stone.
The blood sizzled, evaporating. Owen stopped.
Ellie stared.
Owen stepped toward the exit.
Ellie grasped Sidwell tight and twisted the gander around. She brought the knife to his long neck. Sidwell screeched and writhed in terror. Ellie held the edge at his throat, trembling.
Two steps. Owen, surrounded by shadows burying shadows, stood before the tunnel. The Blood Starved Earth trembled.
Ellie threw Sidwell away. She swished the knife across the palm of her free hand. Pain like fire burned up her arm. She squeezed, then flung a ribbon of her blood. Owen swayed; Ellie’s blood sizzled like an egg on a baking stone.
Ellie squeezed again, tossed another crimson spatter over the floor. The mist and the Starved Earth drank. Owen’s body stood, shuddering.
Ellie flicked again. Blood sizzling. Body shuddering.
Flick. Sizzle. Shudder.
With a bang like a gunshot the candle flicked out.
Ellie breathed long and silent.
Owen’s body fell with a thud. The shadows vanished. The earth stilled, the mist thinned.
Outside, night melted to a whip-poor-will’s song.