Danse Macabre: Close Encounters with the Reaper Read online

  “Of what? Dying? I’m fifty-one. I’ve had more time than many and less than others. Now, do you want to learn a love song or not?”

  “There’s nothing I would rather do more. What did you have in mind?”

  I have over a hundred songs in my repertoire, and probably a third are love songs of one sort or another. Croce’s Time in a Bottle? Chapin’s Taxi? Or The King’s Fools Rush In. “One of my own,“ I said. “One I wrote for you when I was finishing up chemo the last time.”

  “Blue-Black Night?!”

  If I thought she’d lit up when she was feeling my heartbeat, then finding out I’d written Blue-Black Night for her made her go supernova. She glowed like there was no darkness left in the world, let alone the darkness that she carried with her.

  “None other. Or would you prefer something more popular? Some Michael Bublé?”

  “Your song, please.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Call me … Jill.”

  What? No, I sure as Hell didn’t see that coming. “Jill?”

  “It’s a twist on Giltinė, one of my many names.”

  After all these years I now had a name to go with the face. “Thanks.”

  I shifted my butt back to make room for her and patted the wood between my legs. Yeah, I know how rude that sounds, but it’s what I did, literally. “Sit here, please.” I swung the guitar out of the way so she could sit but she just looked over at me and raised one eyebrow.

  “Are you sure? I can see just fine from here.”

  “If we had two guitars a side-by-side might do, though I’d go for a face-to-face, but this old Yammy is all we’ve got so this is how it has to be.”

  She didn’t move.

  “Look, Jill, you’re the one who wants to learn a love song. You opened that can of worms that is my heart so let’s get past it.”

  “But—”

  “Are you afraid I’m going to try and take advantage of you? Just because my heart’s full of you doesn’t mean I’m going to be anything less than a gentleman.”

  “I don’t feel fear, Mark.” She scooted herself up and over my left leg until she was sitting on the wood stoop in the V between my open legs. She leaned left and spoke at me over her right shoulder. She kept leaning forward so only her thighs touched mine. “It’s just that this wasn’t what I had in mind when I asked you to teach me. To be honest, I was really just hoping you’d play one for me. I really needed to hear you play.”

  Damn. “Had a long day and you needed a break so you thought you’d come taunt the dying folkie?”

  “No! That’s not it at all! Well, yes it’s been a long day, but that’s the nature of what I do. No, I was at the Long Island Expressway yesterday and was just thinking about a musician I had to take a few years back.”

  “Harry.”

  “Harry. And thinking about him made me think of you and then I realized that what I needed was to hear a love song, maybe even learn to play one.”

  “So no one is dying right now because you’re here for a guitar lesson? Wow.”

  “Not quite.” She looked out into the yard and I followed where she was looking. There was a sleeping hound, a prowling tabby and two sparrows. The tabby was stopped in mid-step and the sparrows frozen in mid-air.

  “Wow. You stopped time?”

  “Something like that.” She leaned back into me, slowly, but trusting me now, for some reason.

  “How long have we got?”

  “As long as it takes to teach me, Mark.”

  She twisted around and kissed me on my unshaven cheek. Her lips were cool, but not cold. It was nicer than it shoulda been. I swung the guitar around in front of her and she placed her hands where they were supposed to be. “We’ll keep it pretty simple. Start with the easiest chords that’ll get the job done and go from there.” I put three finger tips down on the strings and strummed her a G chord. “This here’s a G and pretty much the underlying chord to the whole song. Give it a try.”

  I shifted my fingers up a fret but kept the chord shape and pretty little Death copied my finger position almost exactly. I lifted my fingers and strummed her chord. It was a bit off. I adjusted her fingers a tad to get them back from the brass fret then pressed them down a bit harder. I strummed it again and it sounded a whole lot better. “You’ve got the perfect fingers for this.”

  Then she leaned back into me and we fit together like it was pre-ordained or destined or something like that. My heart pounded, my head swam and I was thinking that I’d just died and gone to Heaven. That wasn’t the case, though. The birds were still frozen in the air and Death-who-was-also-Jill still sat in my arms, learning to play a love song. My love song to her. I took a deep breath and got back to the task at hand. I’d been waiting for Death’s arrival for a long time but now that she was here, I wasn’t ready to stop or give up. There was at least time for one more song.

  “The chorus is the easiest part so let me just sing it for you. You watch my left hand so you can start associating chord changes with the lyrics.”

  “Okay.” She whispered it like she was afraid to break the moment, so I stopped talking and started singing, softly, in her ear, like I’d imagined ever since I wrote the song for her.

  It was a car wreck on the I-65,

  that made me stick around.

  It was the blue-black night and the light from her smile,

  That kept my feet from touching the ground.

  In the pouring rain, with the thunder growls

  I walked on into Huntsville.

  It was the blue-black night and the light from her smile

  That lights my way and always will.

  I let the last chord fade away. She took my picking hand in hers and kissed it.

  “Thank you, Mark.”

  “It’s just an old-fashioned love song.”

  “But you wrote it for me. I can honestly say that it’s a first.”

  “Not true. There are plenty of songs about you, about Death.”

  “They’re usually about obsession with Death or fear of Death or taunting Death with the immortality of Youth. Never a love song.”

  “Then I suppose it behoves me to teach it to you.”

  “That would be the highlight of my eon.”

  I have no idea whatsoever how long we sat on that stoop like lovers, close and intimate, teaching and learning and making the stolen time our own. I felt more alive than I had in a long, long time. I suppose that’s why I considered writing it all down in an old leather-bound journal I picked up in Sedona my last time through. Why? Beats me. Some nod to the immortality I didn’t think I cared about? I’ve got a few other more personal thoughts in there, mostly about the cancer stuff that I just can’t talk about to anybody. Some day someone’ll read it, or it’ll end up in a box, ignored. Either way, I won’t care ‘cause I’ll be gone. Immortality is for, well, Immortals.

  Jill stood, stretched the kinks out of her back, then turned and kissed me firmly on the lips.

  “Time to go?” I knew it was, but I had to ask.

  She took my hands and pulled me to my feet. “Shall we sing while we walk?”

  “Whatever your little heart desires, missy.”

  Then Death linked her arm through mine and we sang our love song as we strolled off into the blue-black night.

  * * * * *

  Calgary writer, photographer (& occasional musician) Timothy Reynolds was inspired by the late Harry Chapin’s song “I Wanna Learn a Love Song” and took a break from writing his latest novel to write “Blue-Black Night” especially for Danse Macabre. He says that as with many of his works, it combines a touch of the bizarre nestled within the normal, wrapped around some tiny segment of his own life.

  La Senora Blanca

  By Lucy Taylor

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sp; The bleat of a train whistle greeted the couple’s advance along the tracks, the jittering of the timber ties traveling up through the soles of their shoes, making their ankles wobble, their knees quake. In the distance, an owl mourned, crickets clacking in the tall weeds surrounding the tracks. No houses, no lights way out here. Just the Estrella del Norte headed south from Queretaro to Mexico City, right on time at 6:47 p.m.

  Naldo lifted Lupe’s hand to his mouth and kissed her fingers. “The train’s coming, my love, are you ready?”

  “Ready, Naldo.”

  “La Santa Muerte, she’s keeping her promise.”

  “I can’t wait to meet her, mi amor.”

  They sounded like nervous young lovers, but they were old now, curled and fragile as two brittle brown leaves nudged along one last time by the breeze. Lupe tottered unsteadily, pendulous breasts flopping under her loose blouse, grey-streaked hair tumbling over the knobs of her spine. Naldo clasped her hand, guiding her over the tracks in the twilight. He was squat and sinewy, with bowed legs and a flamboyant, devilishly curling mustache that flared out on both sides of his square, pitbull jaw. A knife scar pebbled the flesh at the side of his neck and faded tattoos, souvenirs from numerous incarcerations, festooned his biceps and forearms.

  “She’s almost here, Naldo!”

  The Estrella del Norte blasted around the curve up ahead and roared toward them at sixty miles per hour, lights blinding, disorienting, and the engineer must have spotted them, because bells suddenly clanged and the train commenced a terrible cats-in-heat keening. The engineer was giving the brakes all he had, but it wasn’t enough. Naldo had explained to Lupe that, at the speed the train was traveling when it took the curve, the engineer would need at least a mile to stop.

  Not that either Naldo or Lupe wanted to be spared. They’d planned their suicide years before, when Naldo had just gotten out of Mexico City’s Prisión de Oriente and Lupe was being treated for a virulent cancer that nested in her uterus like a malefic fetus. They’d vowed they would survive into old age and then face death together.

  “It’s been a good life,” Lupe said.

  “The best, mi amor!”

  “No regrets?”

  “No regrets.”

  Adrenalin rocked Lupe’s heart and she shuddered — not just with fear, but with pride and love and a terrible resolve. She looked at Naldo and mouthed Te amo and leaned over to kiss him—

  —as the tracks buckled and rollercoastered into the starless black sky and the brujah-screech of the whistle rent the world as red rain spattered the front of the train.

  Lupe awoke with a howl on her lips, eyes darting wildly. Something was wrong. It wasn’t the dream that had wakened her. Something else.

  In the room next to hers, Luisa Sentavo, a buxom former librarian, huffed and moaned in her sleep. From across the hall came the contralto rumble of Olive Pattala’s snores and Vicente Montoya’s drugged mumbling. Most of the residents of Sierra House Nursing Home slept like logs. Flora Espinoza, the night nurse, dispensed sleep aids as if they were Tums, but Lupe squirreled hers away in her cheek. She wasn’t one of those old people longing to fade away in her sleep. She wanted her death to be memorable.

  From outside came a soft scuffling sound like panther claws on the linoleum floor or the rattle of chicken bones around the neck of a curandera. A broomstick-thin shadow bent to the door of Lupe’s room, peered in and then withdrew, leaving behind a heady cascade of rich odors — cigar smoke and rum and something else, the rank, pungent tang of decay.

  The banging of blood in Lupe’s chest rose so violently that she was afraid Espinoza would hear it all the way to the nurse’s station, but in spite of her fear, she slipped out of bed and mouse-crept to the door.

  Her first impression was of a roiling black thunderhead that filled the corridor and dimmed the sallow glow of the fluorescent ceiling lights. She heard a hollow tapping and saw in stark relief the outline of vertebrae snaking against an inky cloak, vivid as veins in a winter-blasted leaf.

  Lupe bit the inside of her cheek and reeled backward, so stunned by the sight that she feared her heart might crack apart on her ribs like a cheap earthen vase.

  Prowling the hall was La Santa Muerte — known to her devotees as La Senora Blanca — regal and terrible in a hooded black cloak, heavy rings on her skeletal fingers. The stew of odors Lupe had smelled before wreathed her mottled cranium like a widow’s veil.

  Holy Death, in all her glory, come to call.

  Watching Death stalk the corridor, creeping door to door with cat burglar stealth, Lupe felt poleaxed with horror and awe. At the same time, her natural curiosity flared perilously high and she was beset with a rash desire to confront Death and pose questions. She opened her mouth, but her voice failed. She realized she was drenched in sweat and shivering. After so many years of praying to her image, to encounter Death — La Senora Blanca herself — was overwhelming.

  Vividly, she recalled the first time Naldo had brought her to La Santa Muerte’s shrine in Tepita, the most dangerous, crime-ridden barrio in Mexico City. Naldo had just completed a four year stretch for robbery and had come out of prison a man in love, transformed with adoration for Holy Death, the most beloved and venerated saint in Prisión de Oriente.

  Lupe had gazed up in awe at the six-foot statue draped in velvet robes and a bride’s taffeta veil, wielding a scythe in one hand and a globe in the other. Death’s skeletal mouth seemed to twist in a cruel grin, as though she relished the terror she inspired and took pleasure flaunting her power over all living things.

  With utmost reverence, Naldo filled a shot glass from a pint of Patrón, La Senora Blanca’s poison of choice, and placed it on the altar. From his pocket, he withdrew a pack of Marlboros and a fat joint, meticulously rolled, which he added to the offerings. “La Flaca isn’t like the other saints,” he said, calling La Santa Muerte by one of her many nicknames — the Skinny One. “She doesn’t judge the poor people, the criminals, the putanas. She understands us best. La Flaca also appreciates the finer things. If we come to her respectfully and bring her gifts, she always answers our prayers.”

  “Always, Naldo?”

  “Always.”

  Lupe had brought gifts, too: a red rose and white candles bearing images of La Santa Muerte’s frightful countenance. She laid them on the altar and said a prayer: Keep Naldo safe. Let us grow old together. When the time comes, let us die together, too.

  It was the memory of that prayer, heartfelt and fervently uttered, that restored Lupe’s voice and snapped her out of her fear trance.

  “Senora, Senora,” she called.

  Death halted mid-stride and twisted around with a click-clacking of phalanges. An inch of limp ash dangled from the Cohiba gripped in her teeth. Lupe could sense her disbelief and outrage. No one challenged La Senora Blanca. No one had the temerity to question Death.

  Yet Lupe was a tough old bird who had lived almost ninety years, many of them in poverty and peril, so she blurted out, “Remember my husband Naldo, who was killed by drug dealers? He was a little man with a big mustache and an even bigger heart. Ever since he got out of prison, he was your devoted servant. Yet he was murdered eighteen years ago. Why did he die in such a terrible way?”

  The silence that followed reverberated like a hail of bullets from an arma automática. Lupe clutched the doorframe, legs liquid with fear. What had she done?

  Death said nothing, but regarded Lupe as if she were a half-crushed insect she was about to put out of its misery.

  Lupe wanted to scuttle back to her bed, but the thought of Naldo’s bullet-ridden body, stretched out on a slab at the Mexico City morgue, gave her courage.

  “Please, Holy Death, what happened? Why didn’t you protect him?”

  La Flaca’s gleaming cranium rotated to fix on the shriveled little woman who addressed her so boldly. Her li
mbs and torso were utterly still, but the tiny bones in her extremities crunched. The jeweled rings on her finger bones tocked together in agitation.

  “Get lost,” rasped La Flaca, her sepulcher voice somber and cold as the black of her pitiless eye sockets. Lupe heard the words as a thin hissing that burrowed its way into her flesh, the sound itself dry as broom straws sweeping a cement floor or a rattlesnake gliding through parched grass. “Be grateful I didn’t come here for you tonight.”

  Smoke from the fat Cohiba snaked out of her eye sockets as Flora Espinoza passed by, studying a chart on a clipboard and drawing Death’s attention. Espinoza was a pasty, fortyish woman with neatly bunned hair, marshmallowy arms, and dull eyes that sometimes, unexpectedly, grew twinkly as though with secret, subterranean mirth. She had a lovely singing voice, rich with consoling, and often serenaded residents of Sierra House who were ill or distressed.

  Death turned to stalk after Espinoza.

  “Please, Santa Muerte, wait!” Lupe cried.

  She fumbled in the bodice of her nightgown and plucked out a tattered prayer card that portrayed Death as a magnificent, bejeweled queen, her bones draped in a royal blue robe studded with gems. The card was torn and faded from handling and the bottom half bore rusty stains.

  “This was in Naldo’s pocket when he died — look, you can see his blood! Tell me why he had to die when he had just found you in prison a few years earlier? Naldo was devoted to you and brought you expensive gifts. He’d given up the criminal life, he was no trouble to anyone. And what about me, left to grow old alone and rot in this place, which is nothing but a prison for old people! We were going to grow old together. When the time came, we were going to ride the Estrella del Norte.”

  Death seemed to find this last remark uproarious. From her throat trilled a pinging xylophone sound that might have been a laugh. “Kissing the train — you call that a plan? That’s a death for fools! Idiotas like you and your husband imagine the train’s like a one-night stand — wham, bam, and it’s over!” She lunged at Lupe and gave a guillotine snap of her jaws. “They don’t see the ones I turn away — like chopped down trees, all stumps. Mashed flat as a tortilla from the waist down or scalped alive when their hair tangles in the undercarriage. A fast and pain-free death, my knobby ass!”