The Tallow Chandler – Part 5

by helenriddiough

Joe’s right eye was bloodshot from disturbed sleep, framed by the slight opening of the door and lit as if by lamplight in the glaring moon. The man, stood far enough away that Joe could see him whole, looked right into it, the strange blackness of his own an eerie, hypnotic mist. He was still, staring, just as he had been on the opposite side of the beck. A small black hole cracked open on his face.

  “I said hello, Joe.” The voice came at Joe from all angles in a delirious echo, as if muttered by 20 men stationed like soldiers around the workshop. He slammed the door closed. Something in the sound of the voice brought a pain about his head. The grain in the slats swam before him for a moment as the echo melted into the tallowed air and disappeared. It was too late for hiding now.
    Joe drew back the door again, still just a crack, his frightened eyes fixed to the floor. The boots of the man were up close now, he’d moved right outside the door with an unnatural speed that made Joe all the more uneasy.
    In the autumnal silence, against a tender breeze, he brought his face bravely up to meet Death with unsuppressed fear.
    “I knew you would come”. Death’s face was just inches from Joe’s and it was now that he took it all in.
    The skin was grey and it hung upon his skull like heavy folds of cloth thrown over his features in some hideous masquerade. Creases ran deeply across it, dried out rivers lined with an ancient silt, left behind by a moisture that had long since departed. The mouth, thin and sharp, cut across the width of his face as if sliced in by a knife. And, either side of the wide nose, his heavy hooded brow hung low over those eyes, those dark spots, those velvet rounds of magic that caught Joe in an unrelenting trance.
    Mesmerised by his ghastly face, Joe didn’t notice Death sliding his boot into the open gap of the door.
    “You took something that belongs to me.” The voice was low and muffled, as if passing through layers of dusty spider’s silk. The door rattled in its casing under Joe’s shaking hand.
    “Yes,” he whispered.
    “Will you not invite me in?” Joe panicked and tried to close the door on Death, but it was met with resistance. He saw the boot and his eyes began to water.
    “Invite me in Joe.”
    He stepped back from the door, almost stumbling over Genie who stayed tight to the back of his legs. Death followed, his walk as a glide, level and smooth. His advance pushed Joe back and back until a sharp pain between his shoulders alerted him to the wall. Shrinking down against it, he found himself sitting on the barrel behind which he had earlier crawled. Death stood before him, the smell of tallow, a usual comfort, now oppressive and pervading upon the air.
    “I mustn’t be meddled with Joe. I had waited for her.” Death began to pace in and out of the shadows set upon the floor by the cold moonlight. Genie sat down, pressed up against the barrel.
    “I hadn’t meant to…”
    “She was mine to take. Rightfully mine.”
    “I only meant to find Genie and…” Tears began to fall down Joe’s hollowed cheeks, soaking into the heavy weave of his overalls. Death continued to pace.
    “She was almost with me, moments away from my greeting, until you…”
    “It was an accident!” Joe let the words tumble from his mouth, his senses lost.
    “AN ACCIDENT?” Death swept bat-like across the workshop at his demonic speed, unsettling the layers of dust all around, and pushed his distorted face right into Joe’s. The thumping anger in his eyes drummed into Joe’s whose tears, unbridled now, were full of despair. “An accident? You deliberately brought her back, purposefully, willingly. An accident?”
    “Please, please…”
    Death grabbed the hat from his head and hurled it into the muddle of the workshop. His eyes scanned the darkness and then, like the quick spring of a hunter’s trap, he reached out and dragged Genie from beside the barrel by the scruff of her neck.
    “Genie!” Joe stood up, his long arms swiping at the air before him. Death gripped her hard and the poor dog whimpered in pain.
    “And would this be an accident Joe? If this neck of hers was suddenly to snap?”
    “Please, PLEASE.”
    “A quick, sharp snap.”
    “IT WASN’T HER TIME.”
    Death released Genie and she ran cowering to her bed. Joe, with a breath of relief, let her scuttle past to her place of security, his eyes fixed upon the ravaged man before him.
    Death rose up, the brittle, starched appearance of his forelock ruffled from his temper. “Who are you to decide upon time? Time is mine Joe,” he said, jabbing himself violently in the chest.
    “But she’s so young, she has yet to make anything of her life.” Joe slumped again upon the barrel. “She’s so very young.”
    And then something slipped away from Death. His brow unfurrowed and as he reached up to smooth back his coarse hair an aged dust fell from the sleeve of his coat and snowed silently down in the shaft of moonlight.
    “There is much for us to discuss.” In the stillness, Joe could feel the race of his heart but he was ready to hear it all. Death remained standing in the middle of the floor.
    “You are a Light Joe. There are Lights everywhere, in the City and in the provinces abroad. No one quite knows how or why they come to be, they just are. And at some time or other I will visit them all, as needs must, to warn or, if it’s too late, to admonish. What they don’t seem to understand is that I cannot be evaded. I get in everywhere; in grand houses and small cottages, in palaces and gutters, inside, outside, all sides, to families awaiting me and to those whom I take by surprise.”
    Death stopped his pacing for a moment and lifted his greying face towards the workshop window. The white moonlight paired him uncannily with some dry, crumbling stone, left to weather and age. He looked old. He looked tired. He pressed on.
    “Lights shine, gentle, bobbing glows in my vision.” Death pulled one of Joe’s candles from the inside of his coat, dragged a wrinkled finger over the wick and produced a familiar yellow flame.
    “Their special glow tracks me to them. I’m the shadow on their heels, and when I catch them up…” he took the wick between his finger and thumb and the flame was put out.
    “There are others? Like me?”
    “There are renegades of course, those who wish to fight me, those who don’t care to understand my complexities. And those who choose to know better come to know me better, quickly, and without remorse.” Death rolled the candle across the floor until it came to a gentle stop somewhere in the depths of the workshop, clicking like dice against the stone wall. Joe heard nothing but the slow turn of questions looping around inside his head.
    “You are a Light Joe, of that there is no doubt, but I am darkness, and darkness will always eclipse light.”
    “Darkness”
    It flooded into Joe’s head, warm and painful like blood-rush.
    “Darkness will come for you.”
    He was back in the alley with his father; foggy, cold, afraid.
    “They will come for you, you’ll be persecuted.”
    He could feel the grip on his shoulders, the residual heat in the palms of his hands from the departed rat, his father’s panicked voice.
    “Darkness will come for you.”
    “It was you.” Joe found his feet. “You were the one he feared, the one he wanted to protect me from.”
    “It was but a glimpse.”
    “A glimpse?” Joe was still, suspended in the air, his long arms and legs angular and contorted.
    “When I came for your mother.” Joe’s mouth dropped. “He was crouched over her as she began to step away, wetting her face, already damp from the effort of labour, with his tears. As she rose up, by some curious confliction of the light, I was seen. And he feared me, then and there.” Joe turned slowly to the bench and keeled against it in his sorrow, his face in his hands. He felt the nudge of Genie’s cold nose nuzzling his cheek in concern. His seams had unravelled and all that had pushed against them now fell out, tumultuous, into the workshop.
    “He spoke always of darkness, spoke of it as if it were a man who may snatch me from my bed or stalk me down the street,” his voice was broken with sobs. “It consumed him and he, in turn, consumed me with the very thought of it. I remained divided in my belief; were they the confused ramblings of a mad man? Was the darkness he so feared nothing but his own lunacy, driven into him from my actions? Or, as my own plight had made evident to me, was there something spectral that had made itself known to him? But he was clear of mind, all along. Oh how terror must have plagued him.” Joe wept in his realisation. Death was silent. He offered no comfort or sympathy or alleviation. Despair was an old friend to him and he let it gorge on Joe like a starved wolf.
    “His advice to you was wise Joe. You went against his wishes.”
    “I didn’t mean to save Catherine,” his voice but a whisper.
    “The prospect was set; a chance walk alone, a high wind, a torn hem catching on a wicked bramble. The creepers had bound and the water had filled. And then, you.”
    “And what of afterwards?” Joe stood up wiping his eyes on his grubby cuff. “She saw something, of you or of me, Mrs Froggart spoke of it.”
    “You retreated in haste and I approached with caution, an amalgamation of us both, in her confusion.” Joe cast back, pulling out the memories he had tried so hard to bury over the last days. He found himself again at the top of the slope, gasping for breath and fearing what he’d left below.
    “It was all I could do to run. Everything was muddied, the realisation of what I had done, knowing I had been seen, my father’s words, the fear that had forever been a quiet companion to me now an outspoken and brutish leech. I had need only to run. It hunted me, through the night and into the next when I could feel it stalking me, all the way to Millard’s and…” Joe cut himself off, another memory triggered.
    “The hares.” He looked again to Death. “The hares that night?”
    “Victims of circumstance,” Death replied, waving his hand dismissively. “I was undone, foiled, thwarted, however you care to think of it. What should have passed to Catherine remained with me and as I followed you from the field, so it followed too, where it dispatched upon on the next life it found.”
    “Lives.” Joe began to resent his flippancy. “There were seven.”
    “Seven, twenty, one-hundred. Animals matter not.” Joe stepped protectively in front of the bench under which Genie lay quietly.
    “It was her time Joe.” Death began to shake out his coat and hunt for his hat in the manner of a man preparing to leave.
    “I could not leave her there.” The panic had returned to Joe’s voice, he had yet more answers to find.
    “It is a delicate balance, who are you to question when and how?” Death recovered his hat, balanced it precisely on his head, and once again he was an outline across the beck. “Nothing is left to chance. There is a course for us all.”
    “Then what is my course? Why do I have this…affliction,” Joe took a breath, “this faculty, if it must not be used?” Death once more turned his forbidding black eyes on Joe.
    “There are other ways to use your gift. You take from death to make a living, mutton butchered and boiled and shaped into tallow. Perhaps your living can help at death.” And upon such a riddle Death moved, in his peculiar glide, towards the door, pulled it aside and without looking back, stepped out into the night.

The next morning Catherine Kingsley was found dead in her bed and her mother’s cries could be heard all about. The villagers talked of course, grinding and selling their rumours. It was said her heart had just stopped, suddenly and finally, as if the great hand of Death himself had pressed down upon it.
    Had they looked out from their latticed windows that night their eyes would have fallen upon a stranger approaching her cottage door, slowly and without sound. A stranger in a gentleman’s hat.

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Copyright © 2014 Helen Riddiough