Stingy Jack’s Last Trick — A Halloween Tale - 7. Chapter 7 The Last Trick

I had known, from the first hour I rose from whatever bed a soul rises from who has been refused both gate and pit, that some nights carry a different weight than others, though I could not always have told you, in the moment of their arriving, from what quarter the weight came. I knew it that morning, the last morning of October, before ever I came to the glass. I knew it in the manner a man knows weather is turning before the sky has troubled itself to confirm the knowledge, an ache low in whatever remained to me of bone, a stillness in the bare trees that the ordinary wind did not trouble to disturb.

The cold that gathered where I stood, when I came to him that evening, did not merely hold, as it had held through all the nights since the storm. It pressed. I felt the glass itself, thin as it was, thinner I think than it had ever been in all my long watching, as a man feels a door he knows is about to give way beneath a weight leaned too long against it. And behind me, though I had grown almost accustomed by then to marking such things only after the fact, the lantern burned steady and entire, no flare and no dimming, but a single sustained brightness such as I had never once known it to hold.

I understood, standing there, that whatever had been promised me at that crossroads so long ago, whatever thinning the season carried toward every soul condemned to wait upon it, had arrived at last to its full and terrible measure.

I had meant, that whole month, to tell him what I was. I had told myself there would be time enough for the whole of that telling before this very night came, and had found, evening upon evening, some gentler word to give him instead, some smaller truth that cost less than the whole truth would have cost, and called the withholding mercy, though I had known, even as I called it so, that it was rather more nearly cowardice wearing mercy's coat. I could no longer, that night, afford myself the coat.

He came to the glass early, sensing, I think, some part of what I sensed, for he had grown, across that borrowed handful of nights, remarkably quick to read the particular quality of the cold I brought, as a farmer's wife learns to read the particular quality of a coming storm from nothing more than the color the sky goes an hour before the rain.

"You feel different tonight," said he, and there was no humor in the saying of it, none of the armor he wore so habitually against his own plainer feeling. "Colder. Or not colder. Bigger, maybe. I don't know how to explain it. Jack. What's happening tonight."

I wrote it to him slow, the whole of it, across a fog that did not fade between one word and the next as it had always faded before, so that for the first time I found I might set down more than a single word before the glass demanded I begin again. I have a story I have not told you. I am afraid, if I do not tell it tonight, I will not have the courage left to tell it any other night.

He was silent a long while, reading it, and then he said, quiet, "Okay. I'm listening."

I gave it to him whole. I gave him the wall, and the peddler's boy, and the crossroads, and the cold gentleman with his cigar and his bargain and the name he had branded me with out of a wounded pride I had not then understood and did not deserve. I gave him Obadiah, the ridge, the fist that had found me in the dark, though I own I gave that part of it gently, not sparing the truth but sparing, where I could, the particular cruelty of it, for I did not wish him to hate a frightened boy dead now these many years for a fear I had come, in my long wandering, to understand better than I had understood it at nineteen. I gave him the ash-boy last, and the kiss, and the drift of gray that had once been, however briefly, however falsely, something that loved me, and I gave him, last of all, my own death, unwitnessed, in a winter not so very different from the one now bearing down upon his own bright, doomed world.

He did not speak for a long while after I had done. I watched him sit upon the edge of his bed, his face turned half from the glass, and felt, in the watching, a fear greater than any I had carried to that window in all my long attendance upon it, that I had, at the very last, given him too much, that a boy already spending the whole of his own strength merely to survive his ordinary evenings might have no strength left over for the carrying of a dead man's whole ruined history.

"Okay," he said, at last, and his voice, when it came, was not the voice I had feared to hear. It was not horror. It was something nearer grief, grief for me, offered so plainly and so entirely that I did not, in that first instant, know what to do with the plain fact of being grieved for by a boy who had every reason, having heard the whole of it, to be afraid instead. "Okay. That's. God, Jack. That's the worst thing I've ever heard, and I've had a genuinely bad year." He laughed, once, thin and wet, not really a laugh at all. "You've been carrying that this whole time. While I was making jokes about you looking like a hot British actor."

"I did not mean to keep it from you so long," I wrote, and the fog thinned faster now, faster than it had any evening before, as though the glass itself grew impatient with my slowness. "I told myself it was mercy. I have since come to think it was fear only, dressed poorly."

"Yeah, well." He pressed his palm flat against the glass, in the place he had learned, across those nights, was nearest to wherever I stood. "Join the club. I've been doing the exact same thing to you, if it helps even a little."

I did not understand him, in that first moment.

"I haven't told you," said he, "what I actually wanted. Before you. I've been making jokes about that too, because it's easier than saying it out loud to an empty room, except it turns out the room wasn't empty, so." He stopped, and I watched him gather himself, the way a man gathers himself before a labor he has put off a long while precisely because he knows it will cost him something to perform. "I used to write it in my notes. Never said it. Something like, someone who'd notice if I stopped answering. Someone who'd actually care if I didn't wake up one morning, and not in the sad way, not in the way where people are sad because it's the correct thing to be sad about. Just, someone who'd actually miss me. Not the idea of me. Not the sick kid they felt bad for. Me."

He looked at the glass then, straight on, and there was nothing left in his face of the deflection I had come to know so well.

"I want that," he said. "I've wanted it the whole time I've been sick, and probably longer than that, if I'm honest, and I never thought I'd get to say it to someone who could actually hear it, and now I'm saying it to a hundred-and-fifty-year-old ghost through a bedroom window, which is, genuinely, the most on-brand thing that has ever happened to me. But I mean it. I'm not joking. I want you. Whatever that means. Whatever's possible. I would rather have this, whatever this is, than go on the way I was going on before you got here."

I had asked, at my own crossroads, one soul, given freely, who might stand where a peddler's boy had stood and not simply pass on down the road and leave me to the silence. I heard, that night, my own long-buried asking answered back to me, in a different voice, in a different century, by a boy who did not know he echoed it, and I understood, hearing it, why the old tale had named its Jack stingy, for I had gone the whole of my long exile believing myself too poor a thing to be asked for in return, and here, at the very last, I was being asked for entire, and found I did not know how a man, or whatever remained of one, was meant to receive so plain a gift without breaking beneath the accepting of it.

I did not answer him in fog that time. I do not fully understand, even now, by what faculty the veil permitted what came next, save that it was, by every account my own long wandering had ever offered me, the one night such things were permitted at all.

"Julian," I said.

I do not know which of us it startled more.

He came up off the bed as though struck, one hand at his own mouth, his eyes gone wide and bright in the dark. "Oh my God. Oh my God, you have a voice. You have an actual voice. Say something else. Say anything else."

"I am here," said I, and felt the whole of my long silence break upon those three small words like a wave long gathering finally permitted its shore. "I have been here the whole time. I did not know, until this very hour, that I would ever be given the means to tell you so."

He was crying, I think, though he covered it, as he covered so much, with a laugh that did not quite hold together. "Okay. Okay, this is the worst and then the best night of my life, in that order now, please keep talking, I've been imagining what you'd sound like for two weeks and reality is doing something extremely unfair to my heart rate right now."

It was into that laughter, that half sob, that undefended gladness, that the cold about me changed its character entire, no longer merely pressing but parting, as a curtain parts before a hand not my own, and the room's ordinary dark deepened past any dark the season alone could account for, and I felt, before ever I marked its cause, the particular sweetish scent of scorched tobacco arrive where no tobacco had any earthly business arriving.

"Well," said a voice I had not heard in a great many years, and had hoped, God forgive the hoping, never to hear again. "Isn't this touching."

He stood, that Halloween night, not at any crossroads this time but in the very room I had watched so long and never once entered, coat dark and well cut as it had ever been, cigar trailing its sweet corrupted smoke, and I marked, with a dread that ran through whatever passed now for my blood, that the streetlamp beyond Julian's window had gone dark at his arriving, and that the dead leaves upon the lawn below had risen, all at once, and hung a long moment upon air that carried no wind at all to hold them there.

Julian went very still. "Okay, that's. That's not you, is it. Jack. That's not you."

"No," said I, and heard my own voice shake for the first time since it had been given back to me. "That is not me."

"How rude," said the Devil, and turned his slow, unhurried study upon the boy, "to be mistaken for the help." He drew upon the cigar, and let the smoke curl toward a ceiling it had no business touching. "You will forgive me the intrusion. I do not often trouble myself to attend the small anniversaries of my own old debts, but this one, I confess, has grown interesting enough to warrant the visit." He turned his gaze upon me then, and I felt it settle over me as cold as the crossroads itself had ever been. "So long a wait, Jack, and you have found, entirely unassisted, entirely without my gift or my design, the very thing I spent that whole long patience making certain you would never be permitted to keep. I confess myself put out. I am a scrupulous man in the matter of my own entertainments, and I do not care for surprises in them."

"You had no hand in this," said I, and found, in the saying of it, something nearer courage than I had owned at any hour since my own death. "I know it, if you do not care to own it. You did not send him. You did not lame any horse nor crack any wheel. He came of his own accord, and stayed of his own accord, and I will not have you claim any part of what has passed between us as your own doing."

"I claim nothing," said he, mild as milk, and smiled a smile with nothing pleasant in it. "I need not claim it. The letter of our old arrangement remains entirely mine to enforce, whatever accident of fondness has grown up around it. You are still what you are, Jack. A soul refused Heaven's gate and Hell's own patience both, walking this earth on borrowed fire that I alone provided, and I find myself, this particular evening, disinclined to extend that fire's patience one hour further than the letter strictly requires, should this boy prove foolish enough to want more of you than a window has any business granting."

"Okay, no, wait, what does that actually mean." Julian's voice had gone thin, fast, the words tripping over each other the way they did when he was scared and trying not to sound it. "Like, specifically. What's it going to cost him. What's it going to cost me. I need the real version right now, not the cryptic old-timey version, I can't do cryptic tonight."

The Devil turned the whole of his cold attention upon him, and for a long moment said nothing at all, studying him as a man studies a wager he had not thought to see placed.

"I will say only this," said he, "since even I permit myself, once a century or so, a moment of instruction." He turned the whole of his attention now upon Julian, and something in the turning made the boy go very still. "A crossing such as the one you contemplate is not a kindness I extend lightly, nor cheaply, nor without a price attached that neither of you has yet the wit to properly calculate. Souls have been spent on lesser wagers than the one you are about to make, boy, and I have collected every one of them in full, whatever sentiment the spender imagined might soften the collecting."

He drew once more upon the cigar, unhurried, savoring, I thought, the plain fear that had begun to show now in Julian's face. "You believe, I expect, that you are choosing a great romance. You may be choosing instead the exact manner and the exact hour of your own dying, and I promise you nothing gentle in the terms, only that the terms will be honored to their very letter, as they have always been honored, by me if by no one else in this whole wide and disappointing creation." He looked to me last, and the old cold amusement had returned entire to his face, no weariness in it now at all. "I have waited a hundred and fifty years to see what you would do with a second chance, Jack. I find I am rather looking forward to watching you lose it twice."

He was gone before I could answer him, the streetlamp flaring back to its ordinary sodium glow, the leaves settling all at once to the ground as though they had never risen, the room's unnatural dark thinning back to the plain dark of an ordinary Halloween night. I understood, standing in the wake of his going, that he had left us nothing resembling a blessing, nor even a fair warning honestly meant to protect us, but only the truth, cruelly delivered because cruelty was the only fashion in which he knew how to deliver anything, that whatever we chose that night, we chose it with the whole of the price still entirely unknown to us, and no mercy waiting on the other side of it to soften what we did not yet understand we were agreeing to pay.

"Jack." Julian's voice, when I turned my whole attention back to him, was low, and steady, and entirely without its usual armor. "He said a crossing was possible. Tonight only. What does that mean. Tell me exactly what that means, because I need you to actually tell me, not write me a poem about it, I need the actual thing."

I had spent a great many years learning precisely what it meant, in the abstract, in the theory the old tales half remembered and got mostly wrong. I did not know, that night, with any certainty, what it would cost either of us in the plain particular. I would not, having watched two people be taken from me by choices made on my behalf and not my own, both by the same devil's design, permit myself to make this choice on his behalf either.

"I do not know the whole cost," said I, honest, for I owed him that much honesty if I owed him nothing else in the whole of the world. "I know only that it is yours to weigh, and mine to abide by, whatever you decide. I will not ask it of you. I will not so much as hope for it aloud, though God knows I have hoped for little else since the evening you first spoke my name back to me through this glass. Whatever you choose, Julian, I mean to let it be entirely your own."

He was quiet a long moment, his hand still flat against the glass, his eyes bright and steady upon whatever shape of me the thin veil let him see.

"Okay," he said, at last, soft, and something in the word carried the whole weight of a decision already made and only waiting now to be spoken. "I choose you, Jack. Whatever it costs. I choose you."