Pass on to what? and where? and has all this already been? The star drifts backward toward me so slowly, and that other prowls sideways off to the side, unseen, breathing. Suddenly there will be no faces, no more carnival ogres, no more painted scenery: every color but absence has run away like rain, leaving a little waxen starlight over a ribbon of nowhere, and me between. In this last emptiness, three small sounds: the angry singing ahead, the calling so far behind, and the soft rough breath matching my pace. A thousand years, ten thousand, ten thousand thousand.
How can he keep calling so; how can I hear him? I lay back down in the riverbed, just for a moment, to see the other faces again, but they were gone, too. Even so, it will be hard for me to rise and walk on after the star, although I cannot grow tired. I think I wish I could be tired, could be hot or cold or angry or afraid. How good to be afraid. But I had something to do, and only the star can tell me what it is. Why did he keep calling that name?
Was I singing? Have I been the one singing, all these centuries, trudging behind my own song?
It was a children’s rhyme, but what children? Cousins, someone’s silly cousins, they used to chant that sort of nonsense. But the star? Was the star never singing, never? Was it always me, singing him back toward me, as what someone will sing me up out of the riverbed? Vegetables. She sang vegetables.
So close now that I can see that there is no star, but only the man, an old man, falling across this old, old sky. He will smile and hold up his hands, showing me the flames oozing from under his fingernails. The flames see me, too—they beckon, laughing, reaching for my hands. The man has a beautiful face, wise and eager. He spoke to me, but I can never hear his words, because the fire under his tongue gets in the way. But I did not need to hear him. I know my task now.
When I touch his hand, he will be free of the sky and the fire as well, free of whatever this pale place wants from him. We go back together then, back to the riverbed. It is quiet there, and the water will heal his burning. I stand on tiptoe to touch his flaming hand.
And then. There.
It stands between the old man and me, and its voice, its voice is all there ever was. It says, Mine.
I cannot see, I cannot think. Mine. My eyes must be bleeding, my ears, there is blood running inside my head. The voice pierced me here, here, here—Mine. Mine. Mine. Mine—until I crumble down, covering myself, trying to scream, “Yours, yes, yes, he is yours, I am yours!” But the words refused to come out of me. I have something to do, and the words know it. Mine, mine, but I cannot give in, I was not permitted. I stand up.
This is what I will see.
It looks almost human at first. It is tall, naked, hollow-chested, with big bony shoulders that tip up at the ends.
Thin smears of no-color hair. Huge eyes in a head too small for the too-thick neck: beautiful shapeless eyes like flowers, like splashes of pond water in the sun. Long three-fingered hands; no ears, none. Maggot-white skin, drawn tight and twitching around a wet blue mouth. The mouth is full of tiny raspy teeth, swirling all the way back into the throat, blue and green. Even the lips are jeweled with them, even the mildewy tongue. It cannot make words, that round brilliant mouth, yet one came slicing at me, over and over, days without end, world without cess. Mine. Mine.
I put my hands over my ears, though it will not help. I say, “No.”
Mine. A hot needle in the marrow of my bones, but I did not fall again. My bones answer, “No. He belongs to me.” No one belongs to me, because I am no one, but that is what my bones will say. “You cannot have him. I have come to take him back to his own place. Stand aside, you.”
Again I reach out toward the burning old man—again he offers me his fire-nailed hand—and again that word flays my mind as though that tongue had licked across it. Mine! But for a moment the voice itself will be somehow different—almost puzzled, almost uncertain, the demand almost a question. Another word then, a new scream in my bones. Bargain.
Someone answered. “He made no bargain. You have no claim on him.” My own voice, shivering naked at the end of everything. I reach once more to take the old man’s hand. I can hear a greedy watching in my head, but no more words, not yet.
The hand burns fiercely in mine without burning me. Pale black smoke goes up where they join, but I felt only something alive moving softly between our palms. The old man will look at our two hands together and bend his head, solemn-swift, to kiss mine. That burns, and I try to snatch my hand away, but he comes with it, part of me, grinning. He is not what I thought, not what I thought at all. Yet I still had something to do, something for him, with him—but if it is not to find the quiet riverbed again, what can it be?
I must act as though I knew. I must move. There is no left or right, up or down here—I might have spun in a circle, stood on my head, and not known it—but any road away from nothing must be the right one. Keeping a firm grip on that hand, feeling the fire beating like a bird’s heart behind the papery skin, I turned to start back the long way I came.
Fiery fingers will close on my wrist, still without hurting, but pulling me to a stop. The old man kept grinning, mocking me, waiting. Behind him, it, waiting, the round blue mouth pulsing like another kind of heart, in and out, in and out. When I look straight at it, I will feel my own heart slowing, my blood drifting backwards. They mean me fear, but I am no one, I am dead—who are they to make me afraid? I pull back on the old man’s arm, hard.
“You are to come home now,” I said, just as though he were a straying animal—or whose gentle drunken father? I say, “We are for the riverbed, you and I.”
He came quietly along with me for a few steps—while it watches, not moving—and then he will wheel on me and spread his arms wide, putting my hands aside like a child’s hands. One more smile, rustling and crawling with flame, and he explodes out of any human size, steepling up into the haze above us so fast and so high that it can barely keep him in, no more than my eyes can. He spills out, spills over, filling the night with himself, with a silent, rushing howl that swallowed me like the river. I tumble as helplessly through his unending rage as he through the pale old sky.
But he cannot harm me. I have been twice through the gates of death, once of my own choice, and whatever can harm me is not here. So I will stretch up again for his bonfire hand, and I will shout up to ears like sunset clouds, “You are to come with me. I will take you home.”
A year later, or a month later, or a few minutes, he is back at a proper human size, seeing me for the first time out of curious, terrible eyes, green as the air before a great storm. He made a queer sound, a low hiss, hoarse and warning and sad. I say, “You do not belong here, and no more do I. You know this.”