And If The Dead Care Not For Marigolds?

The sun finished fading below the ridge of mountains like a scream’s dying fall. Twilight was fully upon the bare trees, the wet snow, and the young woman struggling along. In the lack of light, the moist bark took on a metallic quality, giving the trees the aspect of tall, straight bars of iron that hindered her escape. The young woman, Marigold, was so out of breath she could do little more than scrabble through the snow and heavy woods on all fours, but she scrabbled through the iron trees and dying sunlight light as fast as her frozen feet and frost-bitten hands could propel her.

She was moving up the slope of a short hill. Fear still drove her, but as the adrenalin began to taper, so did her fear. She began to hope she had lost him by now. Far behind her came the low, light laugh again, and she surged on.

She felt a burning in her arms and legs and was heartened by this until she realized that what she could still feel was not the increase of circulation but the deeper, more leaden burning of overwhelming fatigue. She knew that she had many cuts and bruises, but she could not feel them. Her breathing was ragged, her gait ponderous and broken. She pulled her wet hair out of her face so she could see where she was going for a moment.

She was halfway up the hill. She figured she could make it at least to the top. She put her head down and forced herself to keep moving.

At the hill’s top, she stopped to rest. Gasping and leaning heavily against a tree, she raised the object clutched in her fist up to her eyes. She could no longer feel her hand or what she was holding, but the bracelet was still there, gripped tightly in her fingers. The pale green jade almost felt warm.

Marigold looked carefully at the writing on the inside of the bracelet and tried to understand the strange script. Her mind was foggy, and the characters swam and played before her vision. She saw that her hand was shaking and that her fingers were pale, almost blue. She gasped, jerking her hand to keep it still, and the bracelet fell into the snow.

Marigold shrieked in dismay. She fell to her knees and thrust her hands through the crusty layer of snow into the white, wet mush beneath. In broad, exaggerated gestures she swept her numb hands around, not so much feeling for the bracelet as hoping to knock it into motion so her eyes could catch it.

She heard the laughter again, and it was not so far removed from where she winnowed the snow. She began to weep, but she couldn’t leave the bracelet. Motion unlike snow on snow caught her eye. She snatched up a handful of white and saw a smooth hint of green. She clumsily brushed away the snow with her other hand whose fingers were reluctant to work, and she looked at the writing on the bracelet again. The words swam into place, and she could read them. The words told a riddle. For a moment she felt a glint of hope that she would be able to find the answer; that she would discover the word that would make the bracelet work, but that hope quickly turned back into despair.

She was too fatigued to even understand what the words meant.

She struggled to her feet and tried to move forward again, but her feet were numb and she mis-stepped and fell, continuing to bump and tumble down the other, steeper side of the hill. Her already torn blouse and skirt snagged and ripped even more on the iron-black trees and sharp rocks. When she finally stopped tumbling, she came to rest against a dead log and could not make herself move. She considered giving in and staying where she was, hoping the thing would not find her, but she knew remaining where she was would be suicide.

The wind carried to her the easy, vicious merriment of her pursuer’s laughter. She thought of letting him find her and begging for her life, but she quickly dismissed the thought. She wasn’t so far gone that she couldn’t remember those cold eyes and sharp smile, no matter how briefly she had glimpsed them. That moment where she had glanced back over her shoulder as she ran had convinced her that the quality of mercy was nonexistent for this creature. Marigold was resigned to the fact that she was not going to escape him. She knew she was going to die. But she was going to make sure she was dead before it got to her.

Marigold tried, but she could not get up. She lay where she was, too tired to even weep any more. She had reached the point where terror was too much effort. She tried to will her arms to drag herself up, her legs to support and propel her, but her limbs felt like they no longer belonged to her. She wanted her father, but the only sound she could manage was the sound of her ragged breathing.

Only an hour before, Marigold remembered, she had been riding next to her father in the back of their limousine. Her mother had been there, too. Her father was smiling despite the unhappy circumstance of being escorted out of another city, and he was trying to cheer her some--or at least distract her--by showing her the green bracelet of jade and helping her work on the words inscribed on the inside of it. She was working them out, haltingly as always, but the characters were becoming more familiar every time he practiced with her. She was beginning to feel that understanding was within reach. Her father was again telling her she would get it one day. Her study of the writing would reveal the riddle, a riddle whose answer was a single word that would let her use the bracelet. She and her father were working on deciphering the characters of the riddle while her mother was quietly sitting and holding her hand, smiling the way only a certain class of wife could.

Her father was slipping the bracelet back on over his hand and settling it around his wrist. Her mother was saying, “It will be all right. It’s not like we haven’t endured being escorted out of a city before. It’s not like we haven’t survived being conducted somewhere new.” Her father, nodding, smiling back and answering, “Of course.”

The car stopping like hitting a wall. Her mother and her father mixed into one jumble and no way up or down or right or out of the car.

Then the laughter.

Her mother screaming. Her father shouting. The laughter. Then outside the car, and a pale green flashing from her father’s hands held high against the evening sky and wilderness and highway. An inhuman screaming and another burst of light. Then her mother falling, her father running to her. Marigold being shoved. The bracelet in her hands, coolness that burned when she touched it. Her father screaming for her, “Run!

Run!” Her running, him screaming, "Bond with the bracelet! Bond with it!" and the sudden stopping of his voice. Her stumbling off the two-lane road into the woods and snow and falling and running and freezing hands and shoeless feet but still running.

The silence, then as now. She felt the silence as the absence of everything. She no longer felt the cold of the snow or the breeze. She no longer felt the fear or the disorientation. She no longer felt her heart beat or the presence of the shadows of the winter woods. Night had almost fully fallen, and within its darkness the laughter came singing along the air like the trickle of mucky water across freshly-fallen snow--trickling, wriggling, slithering among the interlocking fingers of a thirsty, tight blanket of perfect flakes of snow.

Marigold heard the trickling continue even after the laughter had ebbed. She recognized it as the sound of real water. It wasn’t far off. She remembered that the thing chasing her couldn’t cross moving water. They were afraid of water. Moving water. It was this kind who feared water? Not the other kind with hair and paws and a man’s mind? But maybe it was both, or maybe neither. She wasn’t sure anymore of her own thoughts.

Running water. The sound pulled her out of her foggy memory, and she resolved herself to this one last hope.

She held the bracelet tightly, looked at it to make sure it was still in her grasp, and then she concentrated on making her limbs obey. She made herself crawl, and then, with excruciating effort, she rose up to stumble from tree to tree. Not even the burning in her limbs was there. She felt nothing.

The laughter sang in the air, coming from everywhere. Pure, crystalline laughter. The snow crunched underfoot in an arrhythmic refrain of her motion. She shut her mind and concentrated on the sounds of the water and moving through the snow. From tree to tree she stumbled, the by-now familiar terror newly welling up inside her and threatening to explode into a plume to fill the forest.

She was at the water’s edge and her heart sank. It was a slow river, slow and misleading as it gurgled a stream-like song along its snowy banks. It was very wide and seemed very deep. Had she been warm and rested, she could have swum it without much trouble. She cast around, thinking desperately that at least death by water was a better alternative than the death her parents had found. She thought of what she had heard behind her at the limousine when she had been running into the woods. That bodies could produce such sounds sickened her.

She edged closer to the water, resigned. She wanted to stop being so tired that it hurt and so continually in fear that it frayed her. Her eyes discovered for her another way.

Farther up the bank on her side of the river was a fallen log. Only it hadn’t fallen. It had bent itself over to touch the river with its upper branches, and where the tips touched the water far out into the river, driftwood had gathered in abundance until a small, artificial island had formed. Marigold told herself that the bracelet would be safe on that island. She would be safe on that island, safe to die cleanly and whole. Footfalls came crunching through the snow, closer than before.

Marigold made it to the log. Glancing at her hand to make sure she still held the bracelet, she crawled. She moved so slowly along the smooth, dead wood that oceans of water must have flowed beneath her for each inch she gained forward. But she was dizzy and couldn't feel the wood beneath her numb hands, so she continued to move surely and slowly.

She was halfway to the island. She could breathe better, more than just gasps, and a flow of elation already warmed her some. Here, she remembered, her follower could not come; the beast could not cross running water. She heard the laughter--real and whole and located in one spot--and she glanced back. The creature was at the end of the tree bridge behind her. He looked human in every way except for its cold eyes and sharp teeth, the same cold eyes and sharp teeth Marigold had glimpsed when fleeing the limousine. The thing was dressed in dark colors that were stained with unmentionable substances. He smiled its sharp smile to her then blew her a kiss and stepped out onto the log, one bare foot after another.

She caught her breath, bewildered. “But you can’t,” she stammered. “You can’t.”

He threw back its head and laughed. He was having fun.

Marigold let go and fell into the embrace of the water. She was under only a moment before she felt air and earth again. She could make out trees through her dripping hair, but she could not feel the one she leaned against. She could only tell that something was keeping her sitting upright. She remembered what must have plucked her from the river. In panic, she tried to move, but she couldn’t. That last surge which had gotten her to the river had spent everything she had left.

“Ah, my dear Marigold,” said the thing. “Such a wasteful, easy death?” His voice, low like its laugh, was soft and smooth.

She tried to bring her hands up to cover her ears. She tried to huddle into a ball to protect herself and make his voice disappear. Her body was dead weight.

“You proved stronger than I thought,” he said. “This chase was amusing, but now I am an-hungered. Come, let me grant you the last kiss you should ever feel.”

She saw more than felt him bend next to her and pull the hair from her face. She saw him smile at her. He bent closer and pressed his mouth to hers. She tried to turn her head away but could not. His lips met hers, were colder than hers, and she tried to resist the distressing desire to kiss him back.

“You are a strong one,” he murmured in her ear. He unbuttoned the top few buttons on what remained of her silk blouse and pulled back the collar to bare her neck.

She leaned her head over to protect herself as much as she could.

"No more games,” he said.

He grabbed her by the hair and roughly forced her head the other way to re-reveal the unblemished flesh of her neck. He struck and drank. Somewhere inside in an unknown and shadowed recess of her wants and feelings, Marigold found herself enjoying the sensations despite her every known desire. He pulled away.

“You are so young and beautiful, though. Rather than emptying you completely, maybe I should let the change take you now that you’ve been bitten. I could just stand back and watch it happen, watch it overtake and transform you. I could use a companion to replace the one your father has killed."

She tried to speak, but all she could manage was to mew a syllable or two as she sat exposed to the thing, her back against a tree. She wanted his lips and teeth on her skin again.

His dark face reflected his thoughts. “No . . . You would prove too willful, I think. More a pest than a companion. Let us finish this now.” He bared his teeth--the canines more prominent and sharper than any man’s--and he leaned toward her. She could only barely move her hand in a feeble attempt to resist him. He froze half bent to her neck the second time, eyes locked onto the green jade against her blue fist.

“The bracelet,” he whispered hoarsely. "That's not supposed to be with you."

She saw in his eyes a fear and the reflection of the circlet of jade, and the bracelet pulsed with icy warmth which spread through her dead hand. She concentrated on that feeling which alone existed outside the cold of the snow and her surprising desire for the beast’s touch. She pulled that warmth up her arm and into her center. She willed it upward past the ache in her neck and into her dry mouth. The bracelet’s markings became clear in her mind’s eye, and she suddenly knew the answer to the riddle. She uttered the soft, short word.

When the forest rangers found her, they thought she was dead. She was cold and had no pulse, though neither condition was curious considering she had spent the night outside barely covered by a knee-length skirt and the remains of a blouse. What puzzled the rangers was the circle of trees that had been flattened out thirty feet in every direction while the one she had been found leaning against didn’t have a mark on it.

The young ranger looked away while the older ranger took off his coat to cover her up.

“You wanna go call this in, Dean?” said the older man.

“Look,” said Dean. She breathed and her eyes fluttered for a moment.

They hurriedly got her to their truck and wrapped her in blankets. Dean began to strip out of his clothes.

The older one said, “What are you doing?”

“Take it easy, Zeke,” said Dean. “She needs body heat, skin to skin.” Down to his boxers, Dean climbed under the blankets with her. He couldn't believe how cold she was to the touch.

Zeke clicked his teeth, but said nothing more as he put the car in gear and drove. He stopped the car when he heard Dean yell.

“What? What is it?” asked Zeke.

“She bit me!” said Dean.

“What?”

“She had some kind of spasm and bit me. But she’s okay now. Just keep driving.”

Dean felt the place she had bit him. She had managed to break the skin. But that didn’t bother him nearly as much as the fact that she seemed to be draining the warmth right out of him. Because this rescue was already turning out to be strange enough, he didn't want to make it any stranger, and so he ignored the fact that the jade bracelet around her wrist had its own odd heat.

At the hospital, doctors and physicians were puzzled by Marigold’s complete lack of appetite and the way her body operated just fine at a temperature well-below normal.

They could not say why the needle-point punctures on her neck refused to heal, though they administered anti-venom as a precaution.

But she did recover from her night of exposure. She seemed to improve every time the young ranger visited her. At first her progress was slow, but as she was more and more able to visit with him, the quicker her strength seemed to return.

Once, just before she was well enough to be released, the young forest ranger passed out in her room. He was admitted for bed rest and intravenous fluids and released the same evening with the admonition that he should not work himself so hard, no matter how pretty the patient he visited in the hospital was.