The Girl, Death

I love Halloween stories.

When I was a kid there were a hundred Halloween stories being made up by the other kids every October. The old school Annexe, where a man with a Hitler haircut and evil in his flinty heart taught metalwork, was a favourite setting for the tales about ghosts and ghouls, haunting and moaning in voices that echoed down the tall, dark, unloved corridors, waiting to snatch the unwary student and take him to some unspecified doom. We all claimed to have know the last kid who got taken, though none of the stories ever quite matched up with the others and the kid, when named, turned out to be a boy who died in his second year of school from sniffing glue that slowly stole his breath as he sat cold and alone in an alley in the bad part of town.

I never told any Halloween stories; I didn't have any to tell. I was a cowardly boy, keeping clear of the woods and the moors and the old, forgotten places where bad things lurked and for the most part I was happier that way.

But I'll tell you a tale that happened to me one Halloween, though I don't know if that makes it a Halloween story.

I saw Death, once, on the Northern Line.

I was halfway through the third column of the front page of the Financial Times. I don't know why I remember that, but I remember looking up from the paper as the carriage doors thumped closed and seeing her, Death, standing in the crush of people as though the world had just made space for her without anyone noticing, a dark flicker of reality in the middle of an hallucination.

People will tell you that Death comes in a black robe, that she's a skeleton and that she's a he. They say she carries a scythe, that she's seven feet tall, that if you see her when you're not yet due to die your hair will turn bone white for the rest of your days.

None of these is true. There was no scythe, no robe, no bones, just Death. I saw her and she saw me and I saw that she knew I had seen her for what she really was. She smiled at me and my blood ran thick and icy in my veins and my skin turned cold and tight in the stuffy heat of the tunnel.

I tried to scream, but all that came out was an empty, dry ghost of a scream; the scream of a man long dead. For a moment I wondered why no-one else was screaming. Then I realised, with the ice-cold clarity of fear, that only I could see what had entered the carriage with the morning commuters; to everyone else she was but a girl, maybe seven, with long blonde hair that clung to the shoulders of her turquoise coat. They saw a creature who would skip and sing and dance in the rain and the sun and the winter snow, a thing of light and life and exuberant joy. I saw the long, dark emptiness of the end of lives.

Death put a finger to her lips, winked at me.

The lights flickered as the train rumbled through the tunnel. When the shadows hit her, it was as though her face flickered too: one second innocent child, the next, screaming horror. Except that there was peace there too, beyond the horror, like staring over a blasted landscape at a calm grey sea.

Across from me, a pregnant woman thumbed her iPod. She looked up, saw the girl, and gave her a warm, dazzling smile. The girl smiled back. So did the horror.

Who are you here for? I asked Death inside my head. In this place, right now, for whom did you come?

She heard me, there inside my mind. She heard the question and she smiled again and the horror flashed out from under her child-mask as she showed two rows of perfect, gleaming white milk-teeth.

For each of you, she said. For all of you. For everyone.

Perhaps she saw my face fill with horror as I imagined the train being wrenched from its rails, dooming us all in the deep dark of London, for I saw and heard a little girl's giggle whilst the thing underneath leered at me with great, glassy eyes.

Silly man, she said in my mind's ear. Silly, tiny, mortal man. I am of all and of none. I come with the daylight and the starlight and the lamplight; I am forever.

The train was pulling into the station now. A squeal of breaks , a jolt of inertia. The doors rumbled open and out slipped the people, jostling and pushing and squeezing each other into nonexistence.

And the girl Death reached out one china white finger and gently, so gently, brushed a lock of hair from the forehead of the pregnant woman across the way, who closed her eyes and slipped into a sleep from which she would never wake.

I'd like to tell you that I saw something else then, the flicker of a soul leaving her body, a ghost standing in the carriage, waiting to embark on its final journey. But there was nothing. Just the woman, the girl Death and the flickering thing beneath a face of china and bone and false innocence.

Why? I asked. I didn't scream or shout; it would have done no good. I knew the woman was dead as surely as I know that you and I are alive and breathing.

Death looked at me, her eyes staring through mine, into my mind, into my soul.

It was her time, she said.

And the child? I asked.

It was his time, too. She cocked her head, as though weighing my soul and finding it wanting.

You would rather she had lived long and died rotting in her own filth, mortal man? The girl Death seemed amused by the idea. You all come to me in the end. I wonder how you will come.

I didn't answer. I could think of nothing but the dead woman and of the child dying inside her body.

We shall see, Death's voice echoed in my mind, Yes. We shall see.

She seemed content, at ease as she slipped out through the closing doors, her hair trailing behind her like a golden comet tail. She turned to watch as the train pulled out of the station; I swear she waved to me.

Goodbye, stranger, until we meet again.

I suppose I should tell you what happened next, whether I tried to do anything for the woman who seemed to slumber so peacefully in the seat across from me. Of course I didn't. What could I have done? For a moment I toyed with the idea of shaking her, of playing the would-be hero who would try so hard to revive her but who, in the end, would fail. I wondered who would tell her husband that she was dead, and then I wondered if she even had a husband or anyone else to care that she was gone.

I left the train at the next stop, didn't look back, went about my day the best I could. I walked home that night, five miles across London in the wintry blackness, watching behind me at every turn for a flash of turquoise.

I saw the woman's face on the front pages of the local papers the next day. I didn't read any of them. I didn't want to have known her; that would have made it real.

When I get on the tube now I look for a little blonde girl in a turquoise coat.

I know I'll see her some day.

 

The Girl, Death by Graham Binns is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.