Limits

by Donna Glee Williams

When did Len first see how far the path would take her son? No Far Walker had been born in Home Village for many years. But everyone knew Shreve Far Walker, from Third Village Down, who often passed through as she carried loads between High and Low. When nightfall caught her near Home Village, she would stay over, taking dinner and giving back news. She wasn’t by nature a talkative person, but she understood the duties of a guest. Len would crowd with the others to hear Shreve’s account of the Far Villages.

So Len had some notion of the life of a Far Walker, though her own range was a modest seven villages. When Cam began to show unusual aptitude for climbing high and descending very low, she wondered. Like all parents, Len had observed Cam closely from his earliest tottering steps as he followed her to First Village Up. She had shared discreet smiles with the other parents as their young ones tried on the new costume of adulthood to see how it would fit them, daring each other to range ever farther from Home Village on spurious errands

There would be a jaunt proposed, a clamor of assent, and a rush like a group of startled goats when Cam and his friends hurried off. No packing or planning was needed as they carried no real loads and it was understood that they would stay in whatever village they were closest to when night fell. Families who housed a youth from another village tonight knew that their own children would find food and a pallet where they needed it tomorrow, and the balance would be kept.

The Ghost of Christmas Possible

by Tim Pratt and Heather Shaw

I was asleep: to begin with.

The hour was just before midnight on Christmas Eve when a ferocious knocking woke me from my slumber. My first muddled thought, or rather hope, was that some specter or spirit stirred beneath the cramped rafters of my newly rented accommodations. Such a prospect aroused in me no little excitement — for though I am well versed with the actions and habits of apparitions, ghosts, and hauntings of all sorts, I have always had to seek out such extraordinary creatures in situ, as it were, and their attentions had never been initially directed toward me. I thought immediately of the incident of the Knocking Well, when I helped lay to rest the unquiet spirit of a lost child in Somerset, and so I leapt to my feet and pulled on my dressing gown to begin my investigation. I followed the sound of knocking, now ever more ferocious, through the corridor and down the narrow stairs.

Alas, it soon became clear the knocking was of an entirely ordinary sort, attributable to some visitor pounding upon my front door — though the lateness of the hour did suggest some manner of emergency or alarm. When I opened the door, a wild-eyed creature, with a ghostly white aura about his head and loose robes that flapped wildly in the wintry winds, forced his way inside, and I reconsidered my assumption that he was a mortal man. I had certainly never encountered an apparition polite enough to knock — however vigorously — before entering, and when he spoke, I was crushed by the mundane quality of his voice, which possessed none of the eerie harmonics I associated with those few spectral beings who deigned to speak.

“Mr. Hodgson, I presume? I have immediate need of your services, man!”

He was a frightened old man, and I was acquainted with such; I had met the terrified, the dread-filled, and the desperate over and over during my researches into the occult.

This Strange Way of Dying

by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Georgina met Death when she was ten. The first time she saw him she was reading by her grandmother’s bedside. As Georgina tried to pronounce a difficult word, she heard her grandmother groan and looked up. There was a bearded man in a top hat standing by the bed. He wore an orange flower in his buttonhole, the kind Georgina put on the altars on the Day of the Dead.

The man smiled at Georgina with eyes made of coal.

Her grandmother had warned Georgina about Death and asked her to stand guard and chase it away with a pair of scissors. But Georgina had lost the scissors the day before when she made paper animals with her brother Nuncio.

“Please, please don’t take my grandmother,” she said. “She’ll be so angry at me if I let her die.”

“We all die,” Death said and smiled. “Do not be sad.”

He leaned down, his long fingers close to grandmother’s face.

“Wait! What can I do? What should I do?”

“There’s not much you can do.”

“But I don’t want grandmother do die yet.”

“Mmmm,” said Death tapping his foot and taking out a tiny black notebook. “Very well. I’ll spare your grandmother. Seven years in exchange of a promise.”

“What kind of promise?”

“Any promise. Promises are like cats. A cat may have stripes, or it may be white and have blue eyes and then it is a deaf cat, or it could be a Siamese cat, but it’ll always be a cat.”

Georgina looked at Death and Death looked back at her, unblinking.

The God-Death of Halla

by Tina Connolly

Halla got halfway out the window, stolen brooch in hand, and then the dizzies hit.

She swore as the world rocked around her. She kicked off the sandstone wall by instinct and thumped to the ground. The gold plate stuffed down her shift knocked her ribs and all her breath whooshed out. She gasped like a fish in the humid air.

Voices.

Halla stumbled over the cut stone and clover of the landowner’s garden. Her breath rushed back with loud wheezes and she flung herself into the ubiquitous bamboo groves dividing one house from the next. A bamboo leaf sucked into her mouth and she spat.

Once her family had been guests at this very house. Her father, one of the elite liaisons between the landowners and the holy, had been deeply honored…and feared. Halla had sat on that very bit of stone in a starched white shift, praying that she wouldn’t disgrace herself. But that was ten years ago and several classes above. That memory wouldn’t save her fingers if she were caught this morning.

The landowner was a heavy woman, whose flesh swung through the gaps in her chiton as she thudded around the side of the house. Two maids trailed her. “I heard someone!” she panted. “Search the house!”