Aurealis #135 Read online

  She gave many reasons for why she picked me, but I’m convinced that it was because I was the last to shy away when she entered the room. I’d been trying to reconcile the woman standing in front of me and the stories I’d heard of her. She didn’t look like Death’s herald, or Death’s minion, or any of the other things that were said about her. She looked like an ageing woman, tired of the world.

  Sin distorts you, I’d been taught. Sin will twist your body. Those with sin in them are abominations.

  Living in the woods, removed from society, will do things to the mind and the body. Being outcast will affect you. But as far as I can tell, nothing that ever overcame my mother or me was ever because we ate down the sins of others. Maybe that’s why others fear us: because we don’t make sense with the world they believe in. Because we don’t look like the monsters we should, they must believe that we are even more horrific monsters inside.

  * * *

  A young man was coming up the path. The only reason anyone came to our part of the woods was because someone was dying. No visits. No friends. Just Mother and me in the woods, eking out our living as best we could with the garden, the forest, and what the villages gave us in exchange for carrying their sins.

  ‘An exchange,’ Mother had told me when she began teaching me. ‘What we do is not charity. To eat sin for nothing means that we will crumple under the weight. We must receive something in return. Money. Food. A rocking chair. People offer what they can. We accept it. This is the bargain and it’s not to be spoken of directly. We do not demand. They offer. We accept.’

  On the path, the man glanced constantly side to side. As if we were going to hide in the woods and leap out, try to devour his flesh and suck the sin from his marrow. There were rumours like that. That we craved the taste of sin, and, if we caught someone alone in the woods at night, we’d do unspeakable things to them to accumulate sin in their bodies, then rip it out of them.

  Witch. They called us this when they thought we couldn’t hear.

  Mother, who was more accustomed to the needs of others, hobbled down the path to meet him at the edge of the garden. I could still hear them from where I was sweeping the stony walkway.

  ‘My brother,’ the man said. ‘He’s . . . He’s . . .’

  Mother kept her hands on her cane. ‘I’ll send my daughter,’ she said. ‘She’ll come tonight.’

  The man nodded, his face torn between fleeing immediately and thankful reprieve.

  * * *

  Taking the sins from the dying was worse than pulling them from the dead. They’re more feisty; you feel them in your body, feel them seeping into your marrow. Sometimes, with the dead, it was easy to forget I was suffusing my being with the sins of others, and that in the next life I’d be so slick with oil I would probably not be able to stand up even to see the gates of paradise. With the dying, it’s impossible to forget.

  The room was small, hot, and filled with the stink of sweat and fever. The room was lit only with fading coals in the floor’s firepit. When I entered, the family swayed between staring and trying to not let their eyes rest on me. They bowed reverently, but also shied away. Only the young man lying beneath the pile of blankets was willing to look into my eyes.

  ‘Does it hurt?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ I told him.

  He nodded. ‘I don’t think I could take any more pain.’

  ‘Soon you won’t have to.’

  Sobbing from someone in the family. The dying man smiled a little. ‘I suppose so.’

  I arranged the incense I’d brought and lit the thick bundles. The air swirled with lavender and lemongrass and cedar. They slowly overpowered the stink of dying, and wrapped around me in a way I imagine it would be to meet old friends after a short absence.

  There were four layers of blankets to peel back. With each one, his shivering grew, but I continued, then worked his shirt off. His skin gleamed with sweat, and his breathing was quick and shallow.

  I placed the piece of bread on his chest and opened the jar of salt. I sprinkled it over the bread, watching as the grains accumulated. The oil of sin held them in place, and I continued piling the salt. The pile attracted the incense smoke, swirled it around like angry storm clouds. The salt shifted its hue, darkening slightly as the sins soaked in. When the salt was piled too high, when the grains began to slide down the sides, I set the jar aside, waited. Then, I took up the bread, the salt, and I ate.

  It was less than most, but his eyes on me the entire time made it difficult to chew. The salt soaked the moisture from my tongue. The bread did little to help it down.

  When I’d finally swallowed, I blew out the incense, gathered my things, and turned away from the young man. His face fell from my memory. Only the accumulation of all that he’d done wrong stayed with me, a dry lump settling in my stomach slowly knotting.

  His family gave me a basket of figs. I took them back to Mother.

  * * *

  The walk home, sins churned in my stomach. They stretched their hollowing tendrils through me, sapping my strength, suffusing bone and muscle until it felt like it would be best to lie down on the path. Let the mud suck me in, cover me, and bury me away until the end of time.

  Small flashes of the man’s life flitted through my mind, brief and vague as heat lightning. A stray, dark thought. A doubt. A want. Each a tiny seed that, over time, sprouts and grows. Oozes oil to slick the spirit.

  The walk back helps settle the sin into my bones. There, it usually lies dormant, forgotten. From the dying, they writhe and wriggle for a while, caught in a death throe that expunges all their remaining oil. In me, they need to settle again, reorient themselves for more years of blooming, secreting.

  Sometimes, in the village, an unknown face suddenly looks familiar, raises in me a pang of jealousy or lust or rage so strong it can only come from some sin deeply buried. Sometimes, in dreams, images and visions from other lives rise and I can relive the sins others have thought, have done. Often, they’re nightmarish. But it ends up being the closest I will ever get to living a life like everyone else.

  * * *

  Spending a life around death, you notice when it starts sniffing around. It’d caught my mother’s scent, and her body began to burn with fevers for no reason. Her mind began to slip, her body slowed. The weight of her long life began to form long fissures through her being. She was crumbling rapidly.

  She’d spent a lifetime, like I would, pulling the sins from others to carry. And now, peering into the transition that she’d prepped others for, that I’d stood at the precipice too many times to count already, her footing was already becoming unsteady with the slickness of sin.

  I realised she would be the first person to die whose face I would remember.

  ‘Mother,’ I asked, ‘what happens to us? How will we walk up the hill to paradise?’

  Mother, staring at a place just above and behind me, said, ‘There’s no salvation for our kind.’

  It was something I must have known, intuitively, since I took the first burden of sin. That it was impossible to survive in the next world with so much sin slicking our palms and soles. No-one in this world to pay a sin eater to come to our cottage in the woods.

  And all those people out there, they were content to pass into the next life without a worry. Without a care. Their passage paid for with figs and apples. While Mother and I were left to wallow in everything they’d done.

  * * *

  Mother owed me nothing, and for a time I hated her. Hated that she had chosen me to live secluded in the woods, that I was the one she’d chosen to be damned. She’d given me a place in the world, but that place was one where others feared to go, where others would never understand. What would have become of me if I’d been left at the orphanage, without a direction? Left abandoned as I’d been before? As a child, I imagined that there would be something in my future, even if all the evidence suggested otherwise.

  ‘The world needs what we do,’ Mother said, early on, when she was teac
hing me the ways of eating sin.

  In those days, there’d always been a smouldering fire behind her words I felt in my own chest. A hatred of those who let us take the sins of their loved ones. A hatred of those who had loved ones. That had something more than their work. Yet she kept an iron grate over that burning hatred. She’d gone out in the evenings when there was sin to eat with the steady steps of one walking a straight line through destiny.

  It might have seemed selfless. Except she must have, like me, never had a choice. Only a need to survive, and only one path open to her.

  Knowing no-one chose our life, I hated the others more that they would burden us so. That they would allow her to go into death carrying the weights they had made for themselves, knowing what would happen to her, without even the courtesy of allowing her to move freely among them.

  * * *

  When Mother died, no-one walked up our long hill to call the sin eater. No-one came to say goodbye. Eventually, I’d go into the village and inform them that my mother had passed and that I was their sole sin eater. There would be no questions. They wouldn’t even know which questions to ask. They depended on us, placed us as a key cornerstone to all that they believed happened after death to allow them to rest at night knowing that their loved ones can ascend the hill to paradise, but refused to know anything about what we did.

  Mother’s body waited in her bed, where she’d been unable to leave for the last few days of her life. I missed the moment of her death. I’d gone out to the garden, and when I’d returned, she’d slipped away.

  I stood for a long time looking at her, trying to see her as I had every other that had been dead before me. But she was different—her face was already carved in my mind. My memory was filled with her.

  ‘The exchange,’ Mother had always said. ‘It is important that we’re given something for our efforts. Take a sin for free, and it will be like a thorn deep beneath your skin. It will fester and rot.’

  I had to believe she’d already paid me.

  A short lifetime of care, even if I didn’t understand what it was she thought to accomplish by taking me out of the orphanage and teaching me a reviled trade. Perhaps she believed in her work more than anything else. Maybe she hadn’t cared for me in the slightest, only in the work, and would have taken anyone, so long as the work continued.

  But if it was truly only the work she’d loved, even though I still don’t understand it, don’t understand the need to aid those who despise us, it was the one thing that she had, without question, imparted to me.

  I gathered and lit the incense, chasing away the smell of death. I brought down an old loaf of tough bread and cut a slice. I brought out the salt. I stripped my mother down and placed the bread on her withered chest, poured the salt.

  One grain for each sin. The salt piled higher and higher. A pyramid that could never collapse. The bread was buried beneath the granules, but they still didn’t roll away freely, glued together with all the oil of sin.

  There was so much salt I needed to get a spoon and scoop it into my mouth. One gritty mouthful at a time. When it was gone, I piled the salt again and kept eating, even as the granules ripped my throat raw. I ate the salt, working my way down to the bread, so that my mother could have a chance to arrive in paradise and face all those who would never have made the journey without her.

  The Author: Michael Kellichner

  Michael Kellichner is a writer and poet originally from Pennsylvania, USA, but has been calling South Korea his home for quite a while. While not teaching ESL to young children, he’s kept busy by his daughter and trying to find time to write. Other short fiction of his has appeared in Black Denim Lit, Trigger Warnings: Short Fiction with Pictures, and Three Crows Magazine. Some flash fiction has appeared in Angels: A Divine Microfiction Anthology and Horror Tree’s Trembling with Fear.

  Story Behind the Story

  Two main ideas were brushing against each other while I was working on this story. One was how there are many roles that are pivotal for a society’s functioning, but those who take those roles are often seen as lesser individuals unworthy of respect. How these roles are pointed to by those who are better off as the terrible outcome awaiting their children if they do not study hard enough or take life seriously enough. The other related idea was how we’re often taught truths about the world that don’t survive scrutiny, but such scrutiny is actively discouraged. I wanted to explore what the world looks like to someone who lives outside the normal cultural narrative, someone whose life suffers in order to keep others comfortable.

  The Artist: Matt Bissett-Johnson

  Matt Bissett-Johnson is a freelance cartoonist, caricature artist, illustrator and animator. His work can be seen at mattbj.blogspot.com and mbjsgeekyfreak.blog.

  Back to Contents

  CONQUIST

  Part 9

  In the Halls of Demons

  Dirk Strasser

  What Has Gone Before

  Ithilia gives birth to Rodrigo’s child and Padre Núñez’s pleas to baptise the baby are ignored. The Padre falls into deep despair after succumbing to the temptations of Ariathe. Rodrigo has finally found the hidden valley and, with the duendes’ help, they attack. The ñakaq crossbows prove effective and the conquistadors are forced to retreat. One of the fallen duendes, Eleria, is still alive and Cristóbal insists that she be spared. The duendes attack the valley again, this time with flaming arrows, and the canopy is ablaze. Tagón leads the escape through a hidden passage under the forest floor to a giant cavern.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE

  Feast and Reward

  Rodrigo was glad to be invited back to the Feasting Hall again. He sat next to Ithilia in the centre of the spiral table and, if anything, the food was even more lavish than it had been the first time.

  Ithilia appeared pleased with him once more. Laughing. Offering him wine from her cup. His men also appeared to enjoy the same attentions from the duendes as they once had. Also like the first feast, Padre Núñez was missing.

  Something was different, though. Something below the surface. Ithilia was a little distant and her words had a slightly cold undercurrent.

  ‘I’m glad our search finally found the ñakaqs,’ said Rodrigo, ‘but did you come across the bodies of Cristóbal and Héctor?’

  ‘No, there were no Spanish corpses found in the valley. I believe they would have been killed with the Quechua-speakers when the rafts went over the waterfall.’

  ‘But you said you didn’t find any bodies in the water.’

  ‘No, the turbulence made it impossible.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘The deaths of ñakaqs were what was important to us. We have proof of those. Are you fearful that these two Spanish will return to threaten you?’

  ‘No, no, of course not.’

  Ithilia smiled. ‘I’ve always found that more than one no usually means a yes.’ She held out a yellow apple-like fruit for him. ‘Have you tried these? They are the sweetest fruit we have.’

  She drew closer so that it was almost touching his lips. Rodrigo bent forward and took a bite.

  ‘So, Ithilia, can we speak of the rewards you promised for our many months of hard work.’

  ‘Rewards?’

  ‘The gold you promised. The help in finding our way home.’

  Ithilia took a bite of the apple herself. ‘Now, we’re both aware you didn’t really best the remaining ñakaqs in battle.’

  ‘That’s true, but that was never our agreement. We found the hidden place where they lived.’

  ‘Well, no, you found the valley where the Quechua-speakers were hiding. The ñakaqs were only there to protect them. It wasn’t their home.’

  Rodrigo drew back. ‘Our actions gave you your victory.’

  ‘Of course. Of course.’ Ithilia touched his arm. ‘There is no question you have been invaluable. Of course, our agreement stands. I’m only saying it wasn’t quite how both of us envisaged it when you said you would bring me the head of the last ñakaq.
’

  ‘Perhaps not.’

  ‘In fact, it was actually our flight over the valley that led us to think the ñakaqs were hiding there.’

  ‘But we found the statues that pointed the way. You would have never seen them from the air.’

  ‘There’s no doubt you and your men were important in a number of ways, although we ended up losing some of our people in your attack on the ñakaqs.’

  ‘As did we.’

  ‘Yes, we both did. The only point I want to make is that nothing unfolded as we had planned.’

  ‘No, it didn’t.’

  ‘So, we could perhaps say that you didn’t quite fulfil your part of the agreement in the way we had envisaged. That would be fair to say, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘Well…’

  ‘Which doesn’t mean I won’t keep my side of the agreement.’

  Rodrigo relaxed a little.

  ‘It’s just,’ said Ithilia. ‘It’s just that we, in turn, may also not be able to fulfil our side of our bargain in quite the same way as we both envisaged.’

  ‘Why would that be?’

  ‘You see, we promised you as much gold as you could carry.’

  ‘Yes, the gold you have here in your palaces is of high quality.’

  ‘That’s where the problem lies. We can’t possibly give you the works of art we have in the High Palaces. You can see that, can’t you?’

  ‘But you could give us the gold in the crater of ñakaq helmets you showed me.’

  ‘We planned to give you as much of the ñakaq gold as you could carry.’

  ‘Then give us this gold, Ithilia.’

  ‘There’s the problem, you see. When we struck our bargain, I thought that by killing the ñakaqs in their halls, you would find their source of gold. Since you haven’t fulfilled your part of the agreement in the way we foresaw, you have made it impossible for us to fulfil our part in the way we foresaw. We still don’t know where the ñakaqs’ gold source is, so I can’t give you any of their gold.’