The Overneath by Peter S. Beagle

Author:Peter S. Beagle [Beagle, Peter S.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fantasy, Collections & Anthologies, Fiction
ISBN: 9781616962692
Publisher: Tachyon Publications
Published: 2017-07-10T14:00:00+00:00

Great-Grandmother in the Cellar

Beyond the fact that this story takes place in the world of The Innkeeper’s Song, which I sneak back to every chance I get, I can’t tell you much about it. After the fact, when I think about it, the tale might have a slight connection to a Robert Frost dialogue-poem, in which a mother and son are recounting a scary tale to a stranger, having to do with a skeleton in their cellar, which tries periodically to find its way upstairs to avenge itself on the husband who killed it. I read that poem long ago, in my parents’ living room, and I couldn’t quote it today—but that’s the only tie I can think of. Like every other story in this book, I told it to myself as I was going along.

*

I thought he had killed her.

Old people forget things, I know that—my father can’t ever remember where he set down his pen a minute ago—but if I forget, at the end of my life, every other thing that ever happened to me, I will still be clutched by the moment when I gazed down at my beautiful, beautiful, sweet-natured idiot sister and heard the whining laughter of Borbos, the witch-boy she loved, pattering in my head. I knew he had killed her.

Then I saw her breast rising and falling—so slowly!—and I saw her nostrils fluttering slightly with each breath, and I knew that he had only thrown her into the witch-sleep that mimics the last sleep closely enough to deceive Death Herself.

Borbos stepped from the shadows and laughed at me.

“Now tell your father,” he said. “Go to him and tell him that Jashani will lie so until the sight of my face—and only my face—awakens her. And that face she will never see until he agrees that we two may wed. Is this message clear enough for your stone skull, Da’mas? Shall I repeat it, just to be sure?”

I rushed at him, but he put up a hand and the floor of my sister’s chamber seemed to turn to oiled water under my feet. I went over on my back, flailing foolishly at the innocent air, and Borbos laughed again. If shukris could laugh, they would sound like Borbos.

He was gone then, in that way he had of coming and going, which Jashani thought was so dashing and mysterious, but which seemed to me fit only for sneak thieves and housebreakers. I knelt there alone, staring helplessly at the person I loved most in the world, and whom I fully intended to strangle when—oh, it had to be when!—she woke up. With no words, no explanations, no apologies. She’d know.

In the ordinary way of things, she’s far brighter and wiser and simply better than I, Jashani. My tutors all disapproved and despaired of me early on, with good reason; but before she could walk, they seemed almost to expect my sister to perform her own branlewei coming-of-age ceremony, and prepare both the ritual sacrifice and the meal afterward.

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