Fiction: (How to Tell) The Danser from the Danse by Jennifer Rachel Baumer

The day sounds like silver. Wind chimes dangle from trees to light the way up the canyon. The heady smell of eucalyptus and Timothy grass rises in the heat. A haze of clouds covers the Marin sky. Morris dancers moving out of shade and shadow flicker into existence and out.

Robert holds Gwen’s hand tightly, weaving between colorful tents, handmade gowns thrown over tree branches, ceramic goddesses perched on temporary hearths, leather masks on display. Silver catches sunlight at jewelers and foundries, shines off peace-tied weapons and silver flutes. The bright air sounds with falcon cry, answered by an errant hawk watching his park consumed for the long weekend.

It’s midday, the lords and ladies growing thick in the canyon and hot beneath their Elizabethan finery; soon the faire will smell authentic. Gwen lets him pull her through the crowd, her fingers tight on his. He nearly lost her last week—or the week before; it was Saturday then and it’s Sunday now, does that make it week before last? When the semi had lost control on the bridge and the sounds had been screaming and tortured metal and flesh and the smell of fear and some broken thing from the truck or her car and the smell of the highway patrolman’s cologne that finally made her vomit over and over on the asphalt, the transport driver still motionless behind the wheel of the truck.

“Stop it,” Robert says.

It’s not like she hasn’t tried. But it sneaks up on her at the least likely moments. Or maybe they are likely—times when she’s truly happy she can’t help but think how close she came to never having those moments again.

“Will you stop?” He laughs and pulls her into his arms. A bawdy voice behind them exclaims, “My good sir! To treat a lady such in public—”

“But surely she has already lost much of her clothing,” a woman’s atrocious English accent puts in. “My girl, come to my shop. I can replace the garments this ne’er-do-well has clearly torn from thee!”

Gwen giggles. “M’lady, I would be so bold—I like the way I dress!” She’s wearing cut offs, long enough to hide the bruises from the steering wheel, and a tank top because the bruising of her breast bone is all internal. The cuts and bruises otherwise are healing. It’s summer, and she’s all but in the pink. Or in the green.

They leave the merchants behind, wander toward the food court because there are meat pies and turkey legs and chocolate covered raspberry clusters and because they haven’t decided what to buy and because jousting knights are taking a break. The Queen passes them on the way and they fall back from the path among the trees, bowing and curtseying low as the jester slips past and the bells chime, and she hears voices raised, women’s voices, as if they’re caroling the generous Queen.

“The Queen doesn’t appear to be padded,” Gwen says, still bowing. She sees her disreputable Nikes, the leaf-littered dirt that smells strong at midday, the—

“Robert?”

His hand is no longer in hers. Her fingers spasm, grabbing for him. She yanks her head around, whiplashed muscles protesting, but he’s not behind her, and she panics. This isn’t like him, Robert doesn’t just go off and leave—even if they were apart during the faire they’d have made arrangements to find each other again, and when, and where. “Robert!”

Everything hurts—arms, legs, back, hips—but she spins as fast as she can. The clearing is almost empty. Everyone else has stepped back onto the path in the wake of the Queen.

“Robert!”

One of the women on the path reaches toward her. “How old—?”

“My husband,” Gwen says and the woman looks perplexed and moves on.

“What’s wrong?”

His fingers tighten on hers. Gwen almost screams and jolts up out of the curtsey and Robert is beside her and her heart is pounding almost as hard as it did that day last week—or week before last—when there was the sound of scorched metal and the trucker sat so still behind the wheel—

“We can go any time you like,” he says. He’s moved to stand directly in front of her, his hands holding hers. She can look right at him, focus only on him, and everything else will go away. “I thought it might be too soon—”

Gwen lets out a long, long breath, relaxing back into her body. “It’s all right. I just—lost track for a minute. I’m all right. I don’t want to go.” She takes a look around and points. “Look, there’s the leather workers you wanted to see. Let me buy you a wallet.”

She tugs him this time. A dog with a silver tankard around his neck runs between them, a trio of small children in mostly homemade dress up streak in front of Gwen, so close she goes up on tiptoe to avoid running into them. From around them she hears “G’day” and “G’morrow” and “M’lady, m’lord,” and the one crazy woman, her hair a shambles of spider webs and dried leaves, “Buy my lovely carrots, sirrah? Buy my lovely posies? Ach, what a lovely pair of dumplings, sir—” and Robert gives a squeak. Gwen guesses the carrot woman has grabbed his ass, so she must not be that crazy after all, but Gwen doesn’t stop or look back, she just runs, laughing, the teal and white striped leather worker’s tent in front of them. Masks hang from trees, ornate and fanciful, beautiful and expensive, like woodland sprites and moons and stars, faeries and animals, the masks worked elegantly with diamond eyeholes and cats’ eyes and leaf eyes. Before they reach it she hears the flutes and tambourines again, and a hollow drum this time. She goes completely still, a thrill of fear rising through her and Robert moves ahead, pulling at her hand.

“Is that the Queen again? Doesn’t she ever stay put?” When she doesn’t answer, he turns back. “What?”

“It’s not the Queen,” she says.

#

Bone flute. The shrill sound makes her own bones ache. The empty drum is the sound of a dead heart beating. The clear morning air carries the sound clearly. Long before they’re in sight she knows what’s coming.

Skeletal dancers. Hooded players. They caper and grin, rictus mouths and blank black eyes, clawed hands at their music. They move like the jester did, knees high, gestures exaggerated.

“Morris dancers,” Robert says, and then, “No, I mean danse macabre.” His hands tighten on hers. “They played to remind people that—” He falters. She can already figure out what they represent, the bone white and death black amongst the sun-warmed green glen.

“That death was passing you by and you should enjoy life.” He squeezes her hands again, as if to pull her away.

That isn’t quite it, she thinks. It was that death had passed you by but that you could never anticipate what would happen tomorrow. “Eat drink and be merry,” she says. “For tomorrow—”

But at the look in his eyes, she doesn’t finish. The dancers have almost disappeared into the glen, the wailing music fades and her heart stops pounding hard enough to break through her chest wall. Two more urchins run between them, breaking the clasp of their hands. Gwen calls over them. “Do you want—” she starts, and sees his face change, an expression of terror, eyes wide and horrified, mouth open. He reaches for her, grabs and misses. He says her name, she can see his mouth move but she can’t hear him because the music screeches so loud, so high, Gwen presses her hands over her ears and squeezes her eyes closed, sound a physical, hurting presence. “Please,” she says. One hand comes away from her ears and reaches for Robert.

A hand takes hers. Thin, brittle fingers wrap around her hand. She is pulled into motion, the music filling her like her pulse, beating through her. Her blood sings with the bone flute. Her heart pounds to the hollow drum. The tambourines drive her, eyes dazzled when she opens them to a silver world, the dark figures capering through it nothing more than shadows on a screen of liquid silver, rippling through with music, shot through with points of light. Her mouth is full of the bitter taste of ashes and she cannot speak. Past the fear, something observes, catalogs what’s happening.

They pull her forward. There are four of them, rail thin skeletons cavorting, black hooded seers spinning and gliding. She can’t tell who holds her hands and she feels her feet pick up the rhythm. She is no longer being led; she has taken up the dance.

There is no tunnel, no beckoning light. No clichés, no obvious trappings. The fear rises in her until she chokes on it but she follows, dancing, calling with no voice.

#

In the glen, just beyond the teal and white leather worker’s tent, Robert’s hands close convulsively on empty air. “Gwen? Gwen!”

A woman passing on the path between shops stops and reaches toward him. “How old—?”

“My wife,” he says.

She gives him a peculiar glance and moves on.

#

There’s a Lost & Found tent. In it are a variety of children eating ice cream. The attendants here pay only cursory attention to medieval dress. They talk like normal human beings. It’s something of a relief.

Or it would be. If she were here.

No point asking—”have you seen?” Gwen is an adult. If lost, she’d make her own arrangements to be found. If lost, she’d say so.

Besides, she is not among the ice cream eaters.

“Gwen,” he says aloud. His voice is wistful. The wistfulness scares him.

“How old is she?” The girl wears an official yellow T-shirt and a pseudo Edwardian vest over it. Her bright yellow hair is in braids.

“My wife,” Robert says, distracted.

“Try the gate,” the girl tells him. “Lots of couples meet there.”

Like a dating service, he thinks, confused. He blunders into the tent flap and has a moment’s claustrophobic panic before he’s free. A small child just outside the entrance looks up at him with lost eyes and says, “Daddy?”

“No,” Robert says. Shouldn’t she know?

#

Gwen is not at the gate. Ribbons dance in the wind there. Flags snap over the tents where wenches take Master Card and Lord Visa and tie plastic bands around celebrants’ wrists. Someone gives him a lemon yellow hand stamp before he leaves the event. Robert runs, white legs flashing under shorts. One of the shuttles passes him in a noxious roaring cloud of natural gas fumes. They parked almost a mile away.

And why would she have gone back to the car without you?

Because she panicked. She’s not all right yet. It’s only a week since the accident. Cut her some slack.

He runs.

#

In the silver world, she sees the bridge again. It beckons, just past the canyon where the Ren Faire is. And that’s wrong, Gwen thinks, but she doesn’t have time to worry about it. The shadow dansers pull her along quickly and the music takes up residence in her head. Her thoughts idle. Her feet move. She knows this dance, as if it’s part of her, and the fair-goers part before them, letting the Danse Macabre through.

There, in front of them, a young mother and her baby, the child decked out in sunflowers and leaves, the mother beaming, grinning. Gwen winces as they pass. The woman was diagnosed with breast cancer, barely beat it. Every day she checks, obsessive, a morning ritual driving her apart from her husband but she can’t stop.

Death passed you by, Gwen thinks. One of the seers prances close to the young woman and her smile dips, becomes uncertain. She holds the child closer and it cries, discomforted, but the seer moves on, blind eyes hidden under the hood of the robe, eldritch fingers clearing a path through the fog they dance through.

One of the other seers moves beside her, all thin arms and brittle fingers, takes her hand. A thrill of nausea wracks her but her body is light, strong. Gwen dances, dances, watches the people along the paths fall back, some laughing, others repulsed. None of them are Robert. She needs to find him soon. Before he starts to worry. She’s clung so close this last week.

The dance moves forward. A young man in leathers in front of them doesn’t turn or move, doesn’t seem even to hear them. Gwen squints, the bone flute so loud it hurts, the drum so hard it beats inside her: she couldn’t not dance if she tried. They wail and spin, closer now, and he only turns at the last minute. The flautist is first there, legs high, fingers arched atop the keys of his silver flute, he passes through the man whose expression changes from dullness to terror in an instant.

Gwen balks, pulling back against the seer’s bony hand. She flails and shouts, desperate that someone along the path might see she needs help and pull her free.

The seer hisses and throws her forward brutally. Gwen trips and falls, her hands out in front of her, so they slide through the man, Gwen stumbling free of him with a snap and tug, as if she pulled herself free of mud. The man behind her now. The man on the ground, bloody hands scrabbling at blood caked asphalt, helmet rolled free, hands broken, legs, back. Head injuries. Internal injuries. Asphalt and the sound of the traffic that hasn’t stopped yet, almost comforting compared to the blaring radio and the concerned looks of drivers, the still form behind the steering wheel, the—the—motorcycle, wheels bent, too many injuries, we couldn’t— He shouts something suddenly and Gwen snaps back into herself. Into the dance. They are all around her, shadow shapes, shadow dansers. The dance feels so good, to move, to live, but she has to get free, get away, get back to Robert—

#

“Come on, Gwen, pick up. Pick up.” She had her phone, he’d made certain she brought it. He was the one without today, the one off in the parking lot at a payphone, calling, searching the whole time. Had she turned it off or set it to vibrate? But she had it in her pocket, he remembered she had peered in the mirror at it and said something about it looking like a pack of smokes. It was set to vibrate because she couldn’t turn it off anymore, something had happened to it in the accident and the battery shorted—when she turned it off she had to remove and replace the battery to make it work again.

Gwen’s phone rang a sixth time without voice mail picking up and that was when he knew something was really wrong.

Knew it, or finally admitted it.

#

The seer wouldn’t let go of her hand. Twilight had begun to filter into the glade. September days, at equinox, were short. The year was turning. Dying. She panicked again at the word and pulled again at the seer, pulled free but the music buoyed her up, the steps carried her forward, the flautist behind her now, prancing with endless energy, driving her. They swirled, bone-white masks, rictus grins, black dresses and robes flying from them and Gwen caught up again, dancing. She watched the people along the path, searching for Robert, danced and spun and people stepped back from the Danse Macabre, small children pulled aside by mothers, couples held hands and ran before them, laughing. Until the old man, white hair, blue eyes. His wife had turned aside to look at sheet music beside the harpist’s tent, and he stood, relaxing in the late day sun, unaware of them, the dansers closing in. For just an instant Gwen could see the face of the seer, blind and eyeless but malignant. Not blank, not hooded, but actively evil, staring at the man, avid, greedy. Gwen spun, an extra step, fast and graceless, felt between the seer and the old man and saw in that instant his love for his wife, their house, small and cluttered, their cats, fat and spreading. They had grown children, grandchildren, had a small nest egg, guilty pleasures, ice cream despite her diabetes, an occasional potato chip despite his blood pressure. They still laughed together and slept spooned up on cold nights and—

“You can’t have him!” Gwen shouted, angry, angrier than she’d been since the truck came screaming across from the wrong lane on the bridge, barriers broken, sound of screaming and tortured metal and the end of the world sound of metal and glass, exploding rubber, breaking concrete, the smell of the cop’s cologne and her own vomit. The lights in her eyes that blocked out the sight of the still, still semi driver in the twisted, torn cab of the truck, the pen lights and the voices— “Clear!” And the pain and the thudding bone-flute rhythm of her heartbeat, the throbbing drum cadence of the blood in her body again.

“Thought we lost you,” someone said, a voice too close to make sense, and now she thought it had been a question, malignant, ugly, a hissing voice, “Thought we lost you?” But she had been on the cold wet bloody asphalt, she had been trying to breathe around crushed ribs, she had been reaching even as the medics pulled back far enough for the jolts from the paddles. Reaching for the cell phone. Because it was Robert. She knew it was Robert. Calling her back as they couldn’t have. “Thought we lost you,” the medics had said.

And Gwen had reached for the cell phone that stopped ringing then. The cell phone that had startled her the instant before her car swerved and jumped the barrier, and there was the sound of air brakes and the scream of tires and the driver of the semi, unmoving in the cab. Forever unmoving.

“No.”

“We don’t lose people,” the seer said.

Gwen wrenched free. Again. That bony grip. Those dry, scaly fingers. She pulled away. She pulled away. She pulled—lost, over and over, not quite back yet, hadn’t Robert said something about that, still shocky, still so afraid? Danse Macabre meant death had passed you by. But what if instead you had run? What if, instead—

—and the whole week. Lost as if dreaming. She woke screaming at night. She jolted into reality by day. Caught somewhere in between, in a place where men and women in masks and robes could move through and between people who didn’t sense them.

“I didn’t die!” Gwen shouted, and pulled the cell from her pocket. It showed new messages, several, more coming, Robert frantically trying to reach her. She’d never felt it vibrate. Danse Macabre came closer. They walked now, the dance forgotten. Somehow worse. A threat. They were around her. “Please,” she said and the phone in her hands rang. Gwen startled, fumbled the phone, caught it and tried to say hello.

But there was no breath in her lungs. It had been knocked out when she jolted forward, connected with the steering wheel and flew back, her neck whiplashed, cheekbone deeply bruised, her ribs crushed, hands all but broken against the steering wheel and every muscle bruised and sprained.

“We thought we’d lost you,” a voice said and she forced her eyes open fast, terrified the other voice would follow. Terrified she was back here—it’s been a week, more than a week, it already happened, I lived, I lived, damn it—

And then the phone rang again, Robert, surely Robert, and she reached for it without thinking, somewhere down around her thigh beside her on the cold, hard, wet, bloody asphalt, the medics seemingly not even phased by this and—

“She’s going into arrest!” someone shouted, sound of footsteps, someone crying her name, it sounded like Robert but that was impossible, he wasn’t here, the sound of the phone and someone yelled, “Shit!” and then, “Got it, clear!” and the pain, like lightning jumping through her ribs, the pain that sent her screaming clear of her body.

And into the clearing.

The Danse Macabre stood around her.

You cheated, the seer who had pulled her said directly into her mind. The voice was silver and cold. You stole. He was alive when they first reached him. The driver in the semi cab, so still. Already cold. Colder than could be explained at autopsy. As if he’d been dead for several hours. Or had the life ripped from him.

Not true. She was still herself.

“Come.” Their hands out toward her. The music stilled. They stood around her, waiting.

The cell phone rang. She clutched it. Magic charm. Lifeline. Robert.

“No. You got your victim. If that’s what you think. One lived, one died. I’m alive.”

The seer blurred, spun too fast to follow. Gwen squeezed her eyes closed. “He only had another week. Crank. Speed. Downers. He only had another week.”

Rage makes her dizzy. “That doesn’t mean me.”

The seer starts to speak. But a boneman steps forward in her place. “Then who? You stepped between us twice. You’ve chosen a proxy before. Choose now.”

The sound of the voice is bamboo wind chimes rattling before a storm. She makes her choice almost without thinking. She won’t be cheated again. The old man with the ice blue eyes and snow white hair is safe from her. She’s given him a few more years of ice cream and stolen potato chips with his wife and children and grandchildren and those fat, fat cats. She’s made her choice and the silver world around her wavers and starts to collapse, everything falling at her faster and faster, the danse around her, insanely loud and fast and she screams for Robert, the phone in her hands ringing—

“Daniel,” she says, when she wants to say Robert. The phone is wrong, one of the new, flat kind, not her friendly, shorting-out flip phone. The child in her arms stirs and says, “Daddy,” around a wet thumb. The body is too short and aches in unfamiliar places. Part of it is missing, removed, replaced, unnatural.

“No,” Gwen says. “No.”

“Jessica,” says the voice on the phone. “There you are.”

She recognizes it now. Daniel. Of course. She’s—Jessica? Gwen.

What life would you take?

No. “No,” Gwen says. She didn’t mean to trade. On the phone, Daniel laughs.

#

Robert stays past the close. He stays until there’s no one there but staff. He stays while sheriff’s deputies are called, until men with flashlights and dogs straining at leashes go into the woods, searching, calling, crashing through the underbrush. He stays until true night has fallen and receded, silver shadows lifting off the glen, individual trees appearing from the murk, twilight in reverse; dawn. He stays until Sunday officially starts, the bread baking, the coffee brewing, the Ren Faire people in bawdy costumes scatter new hay, walking around him gingerly as if they’ve all been briefed on the man who lost his wife.

Or his mind. Did she ever come home? Did he lose her that hateful day when she reached to answer her phone on the bridge because she knew it was him and her Bluetooth was broken and he was the only one she’d risk that ticket for, the only one to make her look away and fumble for her phone and look back up only to find—

No. She’d come home. He’d held her while she’d cried. He’d bathed her wounds and gotten her into a hot bath. He’d watched as they told him to for signs of concussion. He’d thanked every power that might be for giving her back.

And he’d spent a week with her, wondering if she’d come all the way back. A confused and confusing week with a woman who wasn’t quite the same.

Robert went still, standing on the path outside the leather worker’s tent, the turquoise and white tent, the last place he’d seen her. Just before the dancers came.

“Not all the way back,” Robert whispered. Danse Macabre meant death had passed you by.

He looked at his watch. The Faire was limbering up for the day. The dancers would be here soon.

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