0.5

Reaching for the window’s seal, Gerfast pulled it shut just as a gust of wind sprayed water about his floor. The corners of his lips twisted in a scowl at the resistance, deepening further when the window fought against his grip as he struggled to pull it shut.

“Damn you–” He wrestled with it briefly, a torrent of invectives sputtering from his wet mouth and dying in the roaring downpour. Releasing the window in anger, he stepped back and watched it bang against the wall then sway towards him and back again. 

Slam. 

Sway. 

Slam. 

Sway. 

Slam.

Several hundred miles beyond the rooftop silhouettes of the impoverished side stood mansions and buildings where the wealthy lived. The golden lights that spilled from their windows and roads were bright enough to be seen from thousands of miles away yet the derelict side of town remained plunged in a darkness that could not be remedied.

Wiping rainwater from his forehead with the back of his hand, Gerfast used his waning strength to shut the window and draw the curtains, plunging the room in a formless dark that robbed him of all basic senses.

“Damn fool of a boy,” he muttered with arms out held for balance while the vestibular calculations in his skull cranked out their reckonings. “Damn bodies…” despite having worked in the same room for thirty years, he still could not familiarise himself with the darkness. 

“Damn disease…” arms oaring about for landmarks, he felt along the table and hesitated — nearly leaping back in fright— at the subtle touch of frozen flesh.

That’s right old fool, you forgot about the body. 

Now conscious of its presence, Gerfast marched into the dark with an unreasonable fear that somehow, someway, the body might rise on the table and brush its cold lips on his freckled neck but relief briefly soothed the flare of panic in his chest as his fingers brushed along a handle. 

Drawing it open he pushed aside instruments and reached for the candle. The matchbox followed in its wake and, shaking the box to confirm a match still remained, he drew it out and struck it against the side. 

A flare of rich sulphurous light erupted across the room. 

“Damn blinding light.” Lips pinched at the corners in irritation despite the cool wash of relief through his tight chest. Gerfast cupped a palm around the tentative flame and lowered it to the candle. 

Damn the kid for ruining my day.

Damn these goddamn corpses always stinking up the place. 

The darkness be damned as well.

Perhaps the plague’s appearance was well-timed. A cleansing of filth. A baptism of the damned. 

 He cupped a palm around the tentative flame and lowered it to the candle. Once light was restored to the room, so did his confidence return with its trademark scowl and furrowed lines along his forehead.

The room is as it was: the body respectfully dead on the table. 

Setting the candle down beside her head, the mortician continued to work in that circle of light, semi-conscious of the shadowy figures that leaped and darted along the walls just beyond the light’s reach.

Pulling taut the final stitch shut, he tied and cut it then stood to wheel the body towards an open coffin already halfway across the room when a knock disrupted his movement.

The sound was delicate, barely perceptible in the roaring storm beyond the walls of his safe haven. Yet Gerfast heard it. He halted at the centre of the room with his head drooping to the side as his ears strained to capture the sound once more and confirm that it was not his own depleting sanity.

The knock came again— a rasp of knuckles on wood.

The mortician glanced at the clock overhead then back at the door. 

8.30PM, who in the gods' bloodied teeth could be knocking at a death parlour in this hour? 

The boy, he reasoned. The foolish pup must have realised the lie and returned for something.” The cart halted halfway to the coffin. Gerfast stared at the door, willing for the knock to return and when he did he grunted. “We’re closed!” 

The knock returned with more urgency.

“I said we closed! Come back in the morning.”

Dumping the body into the wooden box, he shut it and pushed the tray aside, a low growl echoing at the back of his throat as the knocking grew incessant. Grabbing the nearest item, which happened to be a poker lying against the wall, he took unsteady long strides towards the door driven by enough anger to momentarily numb the aches in his bones.

Gripping the handle Gerfast yanked it open and thrust his face into the utter void, wild-eyed and breathing harsh. 

Nothing.

With hands braced on either side of the door frame he leaned into the night and craned his head side-to-side, searching through the perpetual film of rain that bleared and weaved the landscape. 

No one was around.

I am losing it, he thought while relaxing slightly. Was this a sign of the plague?

His grip loosening around the poker, Gerfast began to step back when something reached through the darkness and snagged at the wet cuff of his trousers. A sound like terror tore through his throat as he stumbled back, tripping on his feet and catapulting to the floor with a mute thud. Pain shot up his tailbone. He groaned and reached behind with a trembling hand to nurse the ache which he was sure would form a blueblack bruise come dawn.

“Damnit–” His lips moved in silent agony, stopping short at the sight before him.  

A slave, no older than seventeen, lay halfway inside his shop. Her lower half still sprawled out in the night. She was drenched, strands of curly hair sleek on her forehead and cheeks which seemed gaunt and chalky beneath the brown tone. Dark sunken eyes watched him pleadingly, her mouth trembling as lips parted and shut, struggling to string coherent words together.

Gerfast watched in dumb amazement. His mind could not comprehend the sight just yet, and so he sat half propped on the heels of his hands and stared at the slave weeping and groaning and begging in a language he could only surmise to be Spanish– slave language.

She tried to speak again then stopped, her breath coming quickly forcing her to pant for air as she hunched sideways into a C with one hand resting on her midsection. Gerfast finally understood what was happening.

The bitch was birthing at his doorstep.

Outrage pumped through his veins as he began to rise, “No!” A snarl curled past his lips as he strode towards the door, “This ain’t no midwife home, get out–” His foot had drawn back reflexively, already aiming for the centre of her head, when the girl’s hand slid back into the light’s circle– a small fist unfurling like a flower to reveal a single copper coin.

Two week’s worth of wages presented before him.

Had it been any other day, one where the worries of money did not constantly plague his mind, Gerfast would be affronted by the gesture. He would have done so much more than hurt her to soothe his ego. But it was not any other day and his income was running dangerously low. 

The mortician lowered his foot and shifted his weight onto it, eyeing the girl with the cold appraisal of an auctioneer. She shivered violently as a low moan sounded from her. Gerfast scowled and glanced up and down the street ensuring that no one was watching. Crouching low, he plucked the coin from her hand and deposited it into the front pocket of his shirt then stepped back, gesturing for the slave to enter.

“Hurry it up, I ain’t got all day.”

She crawled like a wounded animal. Scrawny arms braced on the floor, the bulge of her belly strained beneath her tunic, her legs trailing behind like an afterthought. Every movement only twisted her face into something obscene as she whimpered and sobbed and bucked beneath the unendurable agony that wrapped around her abdomen, tentacles of pain rippling down her back and thighs.

Gerfast watched cooly. He pointed to the corner of his store. “Get on to the corner there, don’t need no mess in my workshop.” In truth, he had no idea how to handle childbirth. This was an undertaker’s shop. The home of death. Not life. 

The coin soaked through his shirt, a cold print over his nipple.

Turning from the sight of her he crossed the room and pulled the cover draped over the corpses, shifting it onto his forearm while the other gathered materials he could only assume a midwife used.

The girl’s whimpers had trailed off to a soft keening as she gently rolled onto her back and sank back down like a wounded bird, a shiver trailing up and down the length of her legs as her abdomen drew taut with another wave of contractions.

“Best keep it quiet,” he warned, picking the candle and crossing the room towards her. “Don’t want no nosy neighbours hearing you this late.” Setting the materials beside, Gerfast knelt and stared, unknowing of how to continue from here. Her shut eyes opened and their gazes met across the still air which wavered as the flame wickered sharply.

Fourteen, he judged, from the fairness of her youth still glowing beneath those sunken cheeks and ashen skin. An overseer must have impregnated her. It was not rare and she was not ugly by any means.

The slave broke contact first as another contraction strangled her. She lifted a hand and blindly sought for an anchor of some sort, her fingers curled around the edge of a low table and seized it tight using it as leverage to slowly lift herself up then forward in a taut bow-shape with her moaning voice breathless in his ears.

Gerfast knocked at her ankles awkwardly, “Spread them legs.” 

He did not know how to handle the bringing of life, only the taking. Dead bodies did not require much attention or delicate touches, they were cold, lifeless and indifferent to their handling. 

The slave struggled to spread her legs as she leaned far back. Her wet tunic rode up with the help of the mortician who gingerly peeled it from her skin then leaned back to examine the state of her womanhood. He had no inkling as to how close she was to giving birth. So he waited kneeling between her legs and sitting back on his heels, watching closely as myriads of expressions crossed her face like fleeting shadows.

Half an hour passed. The candle melted to a stub the size of his thumb.

She moaned and prayed in Spanish, begging for relief… from whom? The gods? Which god would accept a bastard slave-child?

Gerfast leaned close and peered at the dilation of her cervix, the small appearance of a dark head forcing its way as an insidious tear ripped downwards. Her scream nearly earned her a sharp smack across the mouth. “Quiet!” He snapped, “and push that goddamn thing outta ya.” 

The first push tore a line down her vulva. A splatter of blood leaked onto the floor, pooling about her dress and soaking into his knees. Gerfast had not noticed all this. “Push.” he demanded of her, eager to have the bastard out, eager to have the girl gone. 

The dark head broke through in an alarming welter of blood. She sobbed weakly.

“Damn you woman, push!” He did not want to touch it, afraid that its colour was a sign of the plague, but when it became increasingly apparent that her reservoir of energy was rapidly depleting to weak surges that could hardly press the child past its shoulders, Gerfast gingerly clasped the back of its neck and brought it free.

The child was hot to the touch. Its scrawny body covered in a thin film of slime which he pinched from its face. He leaned over its half-formed visage and waited on the cry but none came. Without preamble, the mortician sealed his lips over the babe’s nose and sucked hard, a sludge of mucus filling his mouth as the liquid emptied from the child’s lungs only to be replaced with a rush of bitter cold air.

Only then did it wail.

The mortician turned and spat on the floor then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “I ain’t got no time left,” he said with the babe outstretched in his hand to the mother. Gerfast turned when she didn’t take it, unaware of the utter silence save for the child’s keening.

Lifeless eyes gazed back at him as the girl lay slain in her blood without remedy.

He hadn’t noticed her death during childbirth.

The child remained suspended between them both, still crying and shifting naked in his grip, slippery as an eel. Gerfast set it down and leaned forward to place an index finger just beneath her jawline in search of a pulse.

There was none.

He acted quick and without hesitation: reaching for the bundled blanket which he unrolled hastily, watching the butcher knife appear gleaming wickedly sharp with a light of its own. He cut open her belly and replaced the butcher knife with a small hunting knife, carefully cutting out each prized organ; her kidneys, her heart, her liver, her spleen… pillaging from her body what had been denied him by the others. 

When all was packaged for transportation at dawn and what remained of her was the dilapidated outer shell, Gerfast bundled the baby in a frayed blanket and tucked it into his jacket cradling it close to his heartbeat. Grabbing her ankle, he dragged the body across the room towards the open door.

A streak of watery blood and amniotic fluids trailed from the ropey placenta still attached to her uterus. He made a mental note to clean it up at dawn.

Out in the heart of darkness he disposed of her body by the side for the death cart to collect during their nightly ventures and took the shortest path into the outskirts of the town, bypassing alleyways ridden with figures huddled in corners, peering out at him idly from malnourished skulls. 

The warm rain hit the sidewalk and steamed back up, forming little eddies of mist around Gerfast’s ankles. He felt the babe shift within his jacket, its little arms flailing and its mouth turning reflexively in search of a nipple. Steam boats hoot and trudge past through the black river all alight like little cities adrift.

Halting at the farthest alley from his home, the mortician steps into the foetid darkness with one hand cupped over his nose and removes the child from his jacket, setting it inside a large garbage bin. He stepped back and watched dumbly as cold rain fell on its naked form while it howled red-gummed at the night and the stars and the gods that did not listen. The blanket fell away from its frail form, short legs pedalling in the air viciously, small hands beating at death knocking on its door.

“You ain’t for this world,” he muttered with a sad shake of his head, “you ain’t gon’ survive anyhow… I'm doing you a favour… you see.” Still it cried. Hitching up the lapels of his coat to ward off the sharp gusts of cold, the mortician turned and lumbered away without looking back.

Come dawn the child will be dead. Someone might find it before the rats do. They might bury it or stuff it beneath bags of trash, regardless, it would be dead and that is all that mattered.

But it will not die.

Someone will find the whimpering babe in all its frailness and hand it in. 

It will live through the plague and see the mortician’s body among those dead by the streets in its early years, but the kid will not know the connection.

Neither will it know the significance of its life and the prophecy that marked its path until the very end.

For the second its life began in blood, so too shall it end in blood.