Alex Bledsoe - The Hum and the Shiver

When he finished he coughed a little, then said, “That’s someone’s dying dirge. Now who you reckon could be dead tonight?”

Dwayne almost gagged on his own blood as he said, “Not Bronwyn. I didn’t hit her that fucking hard, it was just a tap, a fucking shove. ”

The sin eater smiled, and laughed again. “If you were smart, you’d wish Bronwyn Hyatt was dead, son. No, that’s the song of Kell Hyatt, who’s dancing in the wind tonight.”

The memory of the fight, of the pure satisfaction of burying his knife in the other man’s flesh, came back to him as he comprehended. “Wait, wha… Kell’s dead ? But he…”

The sin eater came closer, so that his charnel odor washed over Dwayne. “You got so far away from yourself that you started to think all those Tufa stories about riding the night winds and songs with the power of life or death were just dumb-ass superstitions, didn’t you? But you can hear the wind tonight, can’t you? And baby, it can hear you.”

Dwayne’s laugh turned into a gag, and he spit blood on the ground. “You been smoking what I been growing, old man.”

“That’s true,” the sin eater agreed. “And you do grow a nice crop, I’ll grant you. But it doesn’t change anything. I won’t be eating your sins; you’ll tote them with you. I know what’ll happen to the Tufa part of you; as for the rest, well… send me a postcard from Hell.”

He did not move, but the shadows seemed to pull him back and reabsorb him. Dwayne threw the first rock his hand found after the sin eater, but it bounced harmlessly off a tree. He stuffed the front of his T-shirt against his face to stanch the blood and resumed moving forward. If he kept going downhill in a straight line, eventually he had to cross a road where he could flag a ride and get home. There he had guns, money, and transportation.

But he emerged from the trees and saw, stretched before him, the entire Needsville valley and realized with a start that he’d been climbing, not descending. The terrain ended at the edge of a cliff, and far below he saw the dark tops of trees waving slightly in the wind. The moon hung full and clear in the cloudless half of the sky; the other half was dark and shimmery with the approaching thunderstorm.

“Thanks,” a familiar voice said. “You saved me the trouble of tracking your sorry ass down.”

For a moment, Bronwyn appeared to have wings, the kind Tufa stories told of: big, diaphanous structures, double lobed like a butterfly’s, shimmery with rainbow-hued textures. It was how the real Tufas, the total purebloods and the ones who worked to maximize their Tufa nature, rode the night winds. As a child, Dwayne had been told he was one of them, but the world’s temptations drew him away. He finally stopped believing in their literal truth.

But now, when Bronwyn hovered in the air just past the edge of the cliff, held steady by those enormous wings made of something other than earthly matter, he could not deny the reality he’d once mocked.

Then Dwayne blinked, and she was human again, her feet on the ground. Surely she’d just used some shortcut. Man, he needed to stop smoking so much of his own stuff.

Thunder boomed in the clouds. “Kell’s dead, Dwayne,” Bronwyn said. “As a doornail. As a skunk in the road. As disco. That makes you a murderer. How does that feel?”

Dwayne backed away from her, away from the cliff’s edge, toward the safety of the forest. He raised his hands in supplication. “Aw, baby, please, it was all a mistake, I never meant to kill him.”

She put her hands on her hips. She looked tall, powerful, almost goddesslike. The air around her shimmered as if invisible wings fluttered there. “You stuck a knife in him, Dwayne.”

“Yeah, but…”

She sighed. “The saddest part is, I believe you. I believe that you really could stab somebody without intending to kill them. You’re messed up enough to think that way. But it doesn’t change the ending. My big brother is dead, my parents have lost their first child—because of you. And if you get away with it, you’ll just do it again.”

Another rumble from the storm clouds shivered through the air. He tried his best smile. “C’mon, Bronnie, you know I didn’t do it on purpose. We were just fucking around. I said something that he took wrong, and it got out of hand. I’m real sorry.” He shrugged dismissively. “It was kind of his own fault, anyway. He should’ve known better than to pick a fight with me. ”

He never saw Bronwyn actually move, but suddenly one of her hands closed around his throat and she yanked him back toward the edge of the cliff.

Bob Pafford burst from the forest just in time to see Bronwyn and Dwayne vanish over the edge. He yelled, “Hey!” and rushed forward, but they were already gone.

He stared down into the abyss. A lightning flash illuminated the whole valley below, and its accompanying thunder boomed almost immediately. The storm would be here in no time.

He heard the first big splat of raindrops on the brim of his hat. He couldn’t believe what he’d just seen: Bronwyn Hyatt and Dwayne Gitterman leaping to their deaths. He moved away from the edge, his heart pounding, feeling both cheated of his prize and, oddly, frightened. He’d have to hurry back to the road, then locate the two bodies that had to be shredded among the trees below. He could use the time to fine-tune the story he’d tell to explain both the video in his car and the murder-suicide he’d just witnessed.

He refused to give any thought to the fact that, at the last moment before the doomed lovers vanished into the darkness, they seemed to suddenly fly upward.

Dwayne clutched at Bronwyn’s arm, trying to dislodge the choking hold at his neck. She was stronger than he’d ever imagined possible. He kicked madly to find purchase, but there was no ground beneath them. They were in the sky, the stars above them and the great wide valley below, and the rushing night wind filled his ears.

He could not see her face clearly, but her eyes looked different somehow, larger and wider and utterly black. He tried to scream, but the fingers digging into his larynx silenced him.

Now he heard something else: She was singing. But her voice sounded both loud and whisperish, with a melody that seemed to touch feelings in him that had been deadened since childhood.

Tears ran from his eyes, only to be snatched away by the wind. With abrupt, terrifying clarity he saw himself as everyone else did, saw the swath of harm he’d inflicted, and realized the song was true. No one would miss him: not Bronwyn, not Terry-Joe, not his family or his friends. To most of them he’d long outlived his welcome presence. The knowledge that he was hated, despised, and feared, that no love for him existed in the world, wrenched a cry that could’ve drowned out the very wind if it wasn’t choked to silence by Bronwyn’s grip.

He felt her lips against his ear. At first he thought she was kissing him; then he heard the faint words:

“Good-bye, Dwayne.”

She took his earlobe in her teeth, then said, “If you can sing, you can fly. If you can’t, you’ll die. Which is it, Dwayne: the hum or the shiver?”

Then she was gone, and a clap of thunder rattled his teeth. The air around him seemed to glow, and he realized he was now inside the storm clouds.