"Klatternacht?" said the American, frowning over his reading glasses.
"Klatternacht!" the old woman in the faded headscarf repeated, reinforcing her emphatic word by thrusting her head at him, stretching out the wattles of her age-loosened neck. "Klatter!" she exclaimed, hoiking up one leg of her worn-hemmed skirt and pointing to her heavy wooden clog as she toe-heel-toe-heeled quickly on the cobbles. Kaklatr-kaklatr-kaklatr it went. "Nacht!" she jabbed her knob-knuckled finger down the twisting street towards the sun sinking behind the sagging rooftops of the mountain village. "Klatternacht!" She pointed her hard, horn-nailed finger towards the church, its mossy steeple just visible over the ring of thick-dark yews around it, a glimpse of a few of the many stone tombs possible between their trunks.
"Oh," said the American, putting his book back in his satchel. "I ... see?"
She frowned at him, her eyebrows knotting into a disbelieving line of wiry grey bristles. "Klatternacht!" With that she plucked his jacket sleeve between her fingers and pulled at him, not hard to do more than disturb his clothing but firmly enough for him to realize she was damn serious and wanted him indoors, now, before the sun set.
The American had come for a quiet holiday, out in the middle of rural Somewhereovia - he had forgotten already which tiny fragment of Central Europe he thought he was in, having come out on a Dracula tour with a map he had soon discovered to be utterly inaccurate - and was not willing to risk missing the inn's rather good suppers over such a small thing as sitting outside to read when the light was failing anyway. He let the old woman lead him to the inn door and then bundle him inside. As she shoved him into the taproom, glaring as if her eyeballs spat forth hatpins with which to fix him to the floor, the innkeeper hailed him from the behind the bar with the news that supper was ready and would he care to take his place at the table? The American went in to dine wondering if the old woman hadn't been a bit mad or if she just wanted to keep him away from some church do.
"If," he said to the Belgian next to him at the dinner table, "I were any sort of adventurous man, I would go out tonight and see what the fuss is about."
"Huh," said the Belgian, helping himself to more cheese-covered parsnips.
"Probably a local knees-up. Clog-dancing," the American continued, still resolute after four days to get some form of polite conversation out of the Belgian. After all, he thought, if he doesn't want to talk to me, why does he always sit next to me?
"Pass the salt, please," said the Belgian, examining the piece of celery speared upon his fork with a shrewd eye.
The American did and then set to his dinner. He had to wonder about the size of the chickens they grew here, since one stretched between six guests and the innkeeper, who sat at the head of the table, chewing solidly between drafts of beer. If only I drank beer, I'd be so much better off here, the American thought. If only I spoke a language other than English, I might not feel so lost. "I'm blasted if I'm going out in the cold to spy on a church dance," he muttered into his gravy. "The local girls aren't that great to look at, and the evenings here are darn chilly." The first brush of autumn was crisping the lawns at dawn and scraping tentative fingertips over his windows at night. He had left his holiday rather late this year.
After dinner, the Belgian - as was his observable habit so far - went up to his room. From the smell on the landing outside his room every evening, the American had concluded the Belgian liked his baths postprandial and heavily scented of some floral concoction. The American - feeling somewhat antisocial due to the weight of the treacle pudding in his stomach and the weight of the old woman's peculiar vehemence in his memory - decided not to stay in the taproom and converse with the landlord, who was the only other person in the village who spoke any English. He retired to his room to smoke, to read and finally to sleep.
He was well into the second of these when the noise started. At first he took it for rain on the shingles, or perhaps cats fighting in the distance, but it was too persistent and too hard. He put his book down, smoothing out the bookmark as he closed the pages, and went to the window.
Peering through the leaded panes, he saw, under the bright platter of a blue-white moon, a clear calm night, not a soul about and only a few windows lighted. The crumbling roofs of the village - still thick with medieval timbered walls, overhung upper stories and cobbled streets - presented a child's picture of a stormy ocean, their gables peaking up between the troughs of their shingled backs. All the tiles were furry with moss, camouflage-printed with lichens in half a dozen colours and most of the walls were tea-stained with damp, but in the moonlight all faded into soft black stone and the dim blue shades of off-whitewash.
The American squinted through the tiny diamond-shaped panes. Nothing moved. The sky was still, a deep velvet blue speckled with stars, like a darkened choir-loft wherein each singer held a candle. Between and beyond the houses the shaggy heads of trees tossed gently in their sleep, shushing one another with the rustle of their leaves.
Still the sound went on, a thin shrieking sound just on the edge of hearing underscored by a rattling sound, like stones being shaken together in a bag.
There aren't any rattlesnakes in Europe, are there? he wondered, wrestling the window open and leaning out. A clattering, a very definite clattering, and it was coming from the direction of church. What on God's green earth are they doing in there? It didn't sound that much like the old woman's wood shoe banging on the stones. The sound was harsh, energetic, rhythmic. It must be a dance in the church. Lots of clogs together. It must be a fierce sort of dance. He felt a nervous quivering in the pit of his stomach.
It occurred to him that, apart from the old woman, he hadn't seen a single person in clogs here. I suppose most of the women do wear those awfully long skirts ... but wouldn't clogs be painful to dance in? I doubt one could dance very well in clogs.
His curiosity was piqued and had quite evicted tiredness from him. He took his jacket off the back of the chair and pulled it on, accidentally jamming his thumb through the hole in one of the leather patches on the elbows. He left his glasses, found his walking stick and forget where he'd left his hat. Probably Bulgaria, he thought.
The back door of the inn wasn't locked - he suspected it was never locked, there were hardly even cars up here, let alone crime - and he let himself out into the courtyard. In the darkness of the stable-block, something large chuffed. There was a shifting, and the loud hard clop of hoof on floor. That sounds more like it, the American thought. It sounds more like they're beating the floor with hooves. He had a brief mental image of the church filled with horses, stamping amongst the pews, as a dapple mare in embroidered vestments nosed through the Bible on the lectern and knocked the unlit candles from the altar with the swish of her tail.
He walked quickly under the courtyard's archway, strode up the narrow street that he didn't believe an American car could've fitted through, turned out onto what passed for a main road in the village and heard a woman scream.
He dropped his walking stick and ran, pelting down the middle of the road towards the church. Between the close-set yews he could see movement, people running about in the churchyard. The sound was vast, filling the empty spaces, reverberating off the mountainsides - a great crackling, clattering, pelting sound, likes pebbles in a sack, like a thousand rattlesnakes. He jumped over the church gate without opening it, caught his knee on the top bar and tumbled into the gravel path.
Footsteps. People were running towards him. He pushed himself up onto his hands and knees and caught sight of those who approached him.
Their feet were bare - utterly bare, without shoe or sock or skin or flesh. Around the worm-stripped shins of one danced dirty tatters of pale cloth. The other went naked to the bones. As the American looked up, he saw them all.
Every grave was thrown open as if freshly dug. Every tomb had cast back its stone lid, the vaults stood flung wide and the doors of the church had been dragged open. The naked bones of the dead danced amongst their graves, arms around one another as they jigged in voiceless merriment. Cerecloths and shrouds fluttered like gauze around the limbs of the dancers, some crowned in wreaths of memorial flowers, some still in funeral clothes with slit backs. The bloated bodies of the recently deceased reached out with fat, dripping fingers towards the dancing bones that fled from their clumsy efforts, looking back with fixed, mocking grins and laughing eye-sockets. One who was brown-boned with age stood atop a family vault, the shreds of his shroud wrapped around him like a toga, clapping the remnants of his hands in time to the dance, and around him the corpses of children danced a-ring-a-rosies.
They danced around the church, ringing it thrice in moving bone, partner clasping partner cheekbone-to-cheekbone, ribs interlaced and the dust of their bones mingling on the trampled grass. They danced on the tomb-lids and the vaults, their foot-bones clattering upon the stone, setting up the rattling that filled the night. Dancers peeled off in wild spinning pairs, waltzing amongst the further graves, shadowy couples vanishing in and out of the thickets of nettles, returning with their grave-clothes torn by brambles and stuck with goose-grass. The remains of a man in a once-grey suit, a yellow rose between his soil-stained teeth, clasped the bones of a woman in white silk and pearls and a garland of fresh-plucked daisies in their own private tango, lost in each other's eye sockets.
Atop the oldest tomb stood a figure wrapped in black cloth, tall and narrow and dark as the yew trees. The spotless robe spilled down him, pooling around his sandaled feet, and spread out in a great hood around his head and shoulders. His arms were utterly naked, and in his moon-pale finger-bones he held two pipes joined together at the mouthpiece, through which he blew the thin squealing music. It was a tune without a rhythm, made of reedy shrieks like the scream of a half-strangled vixen, made of shrill double-notes breathed out by a dead man.
The American leapt up, plunging forwards to avoid the outstretched arms of the dancers who ran towards him, and found himself without an escape. The gaps between the yews were too narrow and he had to keep running to keep away from his pursuers. Every other step he had to leap over a grave, and those too decayed to dance reached up to grab at him with fingerless hands. Five crumbling men who sat upon a ruined tomb and played dice with their teeth threw down their cup and shook their fists at him when he ran through their game.
Out of the corner of his eye he saw a flash of white, far too pale for soil-stained cerement. He risked a look - it was a woman, a dark-haired woman in a long white nightshirt, clasped in the arms of a dancer. His bone fingers dug into her pale flesh, his hand gripping her wrist so hard her hand bent back lifelessly as he whisked her around, and she hung limp - fainted? dead? - dragged over the stones and the open graves.
Heart in his mouth, the American dashed between the dancers in the outermost ring, running as best he could towards the woman and her captor although his heart was already bursting and his breath came in great gasps. The dancer - an old bone-man, yellow and smooth, in a rotten suit made foul by a day-old carnation in the ruin of his top hat - saw him and turned towards him, opening his mouth in a soundless cry. A long-dead mouse fell from his jaw.
Hard narrow arms closed around him. The American was yanked from his feet, dragged forwards, stumbling to keep up as a figure of off-white bones and dirty white linen pulled him into the dance. She - her throat ringed in lace, her dark hair still clinging to her yellow skull, her ragged coffin-gown mildewed and turned to lace by the crawling worms - clasped him as close as a lover. He screamed and tried to shove her away, pushing at her face and shoulders even though his stomach turned at her touch. Her grip around his waist was a band of iron. She caught his left wrist in her right hand, holding him like a vice, and yanked him close as she spun him on, twirling through the tombs and vaults, around the church widdershins. His unyielding partner rested her head on his shoulder, bringing the smell of soil and corruption into inescapable closeness, and dragged him on.
Around and around - seven, eight, nine times about the church, 'til the steeple swung above him like a pendulum and the shoes were torn from his stumbling feet. Around and about, and his socks were torn off, his feet bled and the stars changed their places, becoming new constellations - great chimeras, leering down, pointing and mocking at such a small speck of life tossed about in the grip of the dead.
A shotgun bellowed and the night shattered.
The stellar beasts leapt from their posts, the sky swam back into shape and the American fell to the ground. He lay on his side, clutching the stitches in his chest and gasping for the breath as the dead scrambled over him. They dived for their graves, frantically shoving one another side to find their resting places. The entombed heaved their stone lids back over like stiff blankets, the family elders ushered their progeny inside and locked up their vaults like manor houses. Loose soil rose like water in the open graves. For a second, over the heads of the panicked dancers, the American saw the piper standing over them like the church steeple over their graves. The dead man in the grey suit and his bride rushed over him, he bracing her with his arm as they leapt into a double grave beside him, and he lost sight of the piper.
Suddenly, the churchyard was empty except for the echoes of the church door slamming shut.
The American forced himself to sit up and to look around. The woman in the nightshirt lay on the ground nearby and he crawled to her on aching limbs. His torn, stone-filled feet sent telegraphs of pain up his legs with every movement.
She was in her forties, coarse-featured and dark-haired, and still breathing. He took her pulse, felt the chill in her flesh with hands almost as icy, and then saw the blood that ran from her shredded feet. The soles of her feet were flensed down to the bone, ripped tendons glinting amongst the mess of blood and flesh. Three of her toes were torn off and two more stuck out at odd angles, swollen and purple. He felt in his pockets for a clean handkerchief to staunch the bleeding, still panting for breath.
Two hard fingers grabbed his ear and twisted, yanking his head back. The American gasped for the air to scream with.
"Klatternacht," the old woman said, shaking her head. Over her other harm hung the shotgun, smoke still curling from one barrel. The American was not reassured to see that the other barrel still held a cartridge. She pushed him away as she knelt to bind the feet of the unconscious woman with her headscarf, with strips she tore from her skirt, with the sleeves she ripped from her blouse.
Forcing himself to ignore the pain, the American got to his feet in stages. He didn't dare to use a gravestone to help push himself up. Then he felt the old woman's hand on his arm, and - encouraged with hatpin-jabs of her steel glare - he helped her lift the unconscious woman and carry her out of the graveyard. His feet burned with pain, his stomach rolled at the smell of grave-soil that still clung to his clothes. His left hand was still numb, his fingers rigid and icy. The gravel path was torture to walk on, the gate was an agony to negotiate and the cobbles froze him to boot.
As he closed the gate he looked back into the graveyard. All was calm chaos, the remnant of any party - memorial flowers scattered and their vases smashed, gravestones kicked awry. The grass was torn and the gravel kicked about, stones mixed with toe-bones and mislaid teeth. The yew hedge was hung with tatters of cloth it had snagged for its own decoration and the bushes were stripped of every flower. Atop the most ancient tomb stood the piper - no ... just a stone angel whose wings were long ago broken off, who was robed in shadow, who held a double pipe to marble lips.
For a moment he wondered if, despite the pain and the stones in his skin and the stench on his clothes, it had been a fit of madness, too unreal to be true. At his side, the shadows fluttered. The American half-turned and looked and his entire body froze like marble. His feet welded themselves to the ground, his fingers became nails in the gate and his blood went to ice water.
The piper stood there against the yew hedge, silent, waiting for him to stand back and let him through the only gap in the yew hedge. The American mouthed silently, half a thought of a stammered prayer against this figure clad in coarse-cut night, the wooden-double pipes held in one hand of white bone. He was the shadow of a yew-tree given shape as the remains of man. Below the broad hood, the American could see the mocking smile of fleshless teeth.
The piper raised his left hand and set it upon the gate, and the American leapt back with a cry of fear lest the figure come any nearer. The old woman cursed him with guttural words than choked into a descending wail as the piper swung open the gate and strode out, his long robe rasping on the gravel and footfalls soft on the worn leather soles of his old sandals. He stepped over the fallen woman, who shook and cried in pain without opening her eyes as his robe flowed over her. The piper walked past them, sparing neither a glance, and turned up the street away from the moonlight.
As the American watched, the piper strode into his own shadow, robe one with the darkness, and vanished.
The old woman dropped to her knees, cradling the young woman's head in her lap, and the American crouched down with them, shivering. The young woman's face was pale, grayish, blue hues gathering at her lips. Her eyes were open, rolled-back diamonds of milk-white between black lashes. Her flesh was cold, her heart was as still as a stone and her breath was gone. The blood flowed slowly from her feet, black upon the cobbles.
The old woman wept, rocking upon her knees, stroking the dead woman's hair back from her face. She cried, her tears running down the creases in her face, her words a long chain of soft and alien sounds. She leant forward to kiss the cold face of her daughter, and as she did one of her clogs slipped off. It clattered upon the cobbles, falling from the cloth-bound stump of an ankle once danced down to the bones.