A tiny brown creature stood at her feet, barely a finger high. She was brown all over, the color of a nut-husk. Only her lips were red. Her hair was long, covering most of her body like bark. She seemed very young. She wore a smart acorn cap.
“She’s just for show,” breathed the wee thing.
“Who are you?”
“I am Death,” said the creature. “I thought that was obvious.”
“But you’re so small!”
“Only because you are small. You are young and far from your Death, September, so I seem as anything would seem if you saw it from a long way off-very small, very harmless. But I am always closer than I appear. As you grow, I shall grow with you, until at the end, I shall loom huge and dark over your bed, and you will shut your eyes so as not to see me.”
“Then who is she?”
“She is…” Death turned her head, considering. “She is like a party dress I wear when I want to impress visiting dignitaries. Like your friend Betsy, I, too, am a Terrible Engine. I, too, have occasional need of awe. But between us, I think, there is no need for finery.”
“But if we are so far apart, why are you here?”
“Because Autumn is the beginning of my country. And because there is a small chance that you may die sooner than I anticipated, that I shall need to grow very fast very soon.”
Death looked meaningfully at September’s hand. Within the green jacket, her arm had now shrunk into one long, knobbed branch from shoulder to fingertip.
“Is that why the Worsted Wood is forbidden? Because Death lives here?”
“And also Hamadryads. They are very boring to listen to.”
“Then the Marquess sent me here to die.”
“I do not make such judgments, child. I only take what is offered me, in the dark, in the forest.”
September crumpled to the ground. She stared at the winter branches of her hand. A great orange tuft of her hair flew off-she was nearly bald now, only a few wisps of curls clinging to her head. She sniffed and cried-or tried to cry, but her eyes were dry as old seeds, and she could not.
“Death, I don’t know what to do.”
Death climbed up into her lap, sitting primly on her knee, which had already begun to darken and wither.
“It’s very brave of you to admit that. Most knightly folk I happen by bluster and force me to play chess with them. I don’t even like chess! For strategy Wrackglummer and even Go are much superior. And it’s the wrong metaphor entirely. Death is not a checkmate… it is more like a carnival trick. You cannot win, no matter how you move your Queen.”
“I’ve only ever played chess with my mother. I wouldn’t feel right, playing with you.”
“I cheat, anyway. When their backs are turned, I move the pieces.”
Slowly, a hole opened up in September’s cheek, just a tiny one. She rubbed at it absently, and it widened. She felt it widening, stretching, and was so terribly afraid. She trembled, and her toes felt awfully cold in the mushroomy mud. Beneath her skin, twigs and leaves had begun to show. Death frowned.
“September, if you do not pay attention, you will never get out of this wood! You are closer than you think, human girl. I guard the casket.” Death’s tiny eyes wrinkled kindly. “All caskets are within my power. Of course they are.”
September yawned. She didn’t mean to. She couldn’t help it. A twig in her cheek popped, turning to dust.
“Are you sleepy? That’s to be expected. In Autumn, trees sleep like bears. The whole world pulls on its nightclothes and snuggles in to sleep through all of winter. Except for me. I never sleep.”
Death climbed up onto her knee, looking up at her with hard acorny eyes. September tried very hard to listen to her Death, instead of the sound of her slowly opening cheek. “I have terrible nightmares, you know,” Death said confidentially. “Every night, when I come home from a long day’s dying, I take off my skin and lay it nicely on my armoire. I take off my bones and hang them up on the hat stand. I set my scythe to washing on the old stove. I eat a nice supper of mouse-and-myrrh soup. Some nights, I drink off a nice red wine. White does not agree with me. I lay myself down on a bed of lilies, and still, I cannot sleep.”
September did not want to know. The moon moved silently overhead, making gape-faces at them.
“I cannot sleep because I have nightmares. I dream all the things the dead wish they had done differently. It is dreadful! Do all creatures dream so?”
“I don’t think so… I dream sometimes that my father has come home, or that I have done well on my math exams, or that my mother’s hair is all made of candy canes and we live on a river of cocoa on a marshmallow island. My mother sings me to sleep, and only once in a while do I dream of awful things.”
“Perhaps it is because I have no one to sing me to sleep. I am so tired. All the world earns its sleep but me.”
September felt sure that she was meant to do something. That, like Latitude and Longitude, the Worsted Wood was a kind of puzzle, and if she only knew how the pieces were shaped, she could manage the whole thing handily. Lost in thought and terror at her own nightmares, September’s Death curled, small and feral, on her knee, her cloak of barkish hair wrapping her like a blanket. With her good hand-a relative thing, really, since it was blackened and rough as a hawthorn branch already, and showing sap under the fingernails, September gathered up her Death and laid it in the crook of her arm. She did not quite know what to do. September had never had a brother or a sister to rock to sleep. She could only remember how her mother had sung to her. She felt as though she were in a dream. But she brushed Death’s hair gently from her face and sang from memory, softly, hoarsely, for her throat had gone rough and dry:
Go to sleep, little skylark,
Fly up to the moon
In a biplane of paper and ink.
Your wings creak and croon,
borne aloft by balloons,
And your engine is singing for you.
Go to sleep, little skylark, do.
Go to sleep, little skylark,
Fly up past the stars
In a biplane of sunshine and ice,
Past comets and cars, past Neptune and Mars
Still your engine is singing for you.
Go to sleep, little skylark, do.
Go to sleep, little skylark,
Drift down through the night
In your biplane of silver and sighs,
Slip under the light,
come down from the heights
For your mother is singing for you.
Go to sleep, little skylark, do.
September reached the end of the song and began again, for Death’s eyes were sliding just the littlest bit closed. Her mother had sung that song, not since she was small, but since her father had left. When she sang it, she curled September in her arms just as September now curled Death and sang it close to her ear so that her long black hair fell over September’s brow just as the remains of September’s hair now fell on Death’s brow. She remembered her mother’s smell, the comfort of it, even though she mainly smelled of diesel oil. She loved that smell. Had learned to love it and settle into it like a blanket. When September got to the part about Neptune and Mars again, Death relaxed in her arms, her bark-brown hair falling delicately over September’s elbow. She kept singing, though it hurt her, her throat was so shriveled and sore. And as she sang, an extraordinary thing happened:
Death grew.
Death stretched and lengthened and got heavier and heavier. Her hair curled and spread, and her arms grew to the size of September’s own arms, and her legs grew to the size of September’s own legs, and in no time at all, Death was the size of a real child, and September held her still in her arms, slumped, sleeping, still.