Being Dead Part Six

When I started this it was to be a few short stories but it seems to have become a single tale. And it's sort of morphed away from being fantasy into fiction. Or has it?

Being Dead Part Six

Neither Megan nor I suspected it, but the wee dram that Cro had so generously offered us had been created in a different age to the one we were born into and health and safety weren’t on top of his list when it came to hygiene or any kind of cleanliness. Nor had technology progressed much further than the manufacturing of mugs or cups out of anything less suitable than dead wood.

The truth of the matter was it didn’t take long for the invisible germs tp develop in the cracked drinking vessel and seek refuge in our own bodies where it proceeded to cause havoc. And it was while Emmakins was moaning as the first pains of childbirth affected her that Megan complaining that she had felt better before she sipped it. Whatever had been hidden unsuspected and unseen inside the wooden vessel was brand new to both her lovely self and then my own flesh, and we both started shivering even though the weather was unbelievably mild for the middle of the night.

“Anyway, where are we?” she moaned, “and what’s happening to us? Who was that man with the gun, the one who shot us?”

“I’d thought he was my best friend when we were kids, and maybe he was because we got along like schoolboy chums ought to. Or maybe that version of him was nothing of the sort and I got it all wrong. It’s all so confusing,”

She shook her head. “I don’t understand,” she whimpered, “and I don’t feel very well all of a sudden.”

“You poor dear,” I whispered trying to comfort her, and it might have worked had not the other woman been moaning as if her life was coming to a painful end.

She had clearly been very pregnant and now, it seemed, a child wanted to jpoin us in the world

“I’ll ty to help her,” said Megan, rather boldly considering how she felt herself, “I always wanted to be a midwife when I left school, but then real life took over and things got boring,” she added.

She made her way to where Emmakins lay moaning and put on her best midwife voice, which was pretty good bearing in mind she was a shopworker.

“Thank goodness you’re here, sweet lady,” murmured Cro, “I’m out of my depth don't you know.”

“But then, you’re only a man,” agreed Megan, “and it takes a woman to know what another woman’s going through when she’s having a baby.” Then she smiled at Emmakins and gently rubbed her forehead.

“We need some hot water,” she told Cro, “and maybe a couple of clean towels…”

“Clean towels?” he mumbled, and actually went out of his shelter in order to light a fire by rubbing a couple of dry sticks together in the hope that friction would start a flame going before his lady had given birth, or passed away in childbirth, something I’ve been led to believe was common in primitive societies, and whatever else he might have been, Cro in his uncured leather skirt looked primitive to me despite what I perceived as his well modulated speech.

I had a cigarette lighter in my pocket though I’ve never smoked, but it was something that managed to accompany me through what we saw as different but almost identical dimensions, though neither of us really had the proper words to describe what we were going through. Anyway I used it to produce a flame, something that so impressed Cro that I thought he was going to dance the night away in awe of it.

Anywaym between us we managed to produce some almost very hot water and somehow he managed to find lengths of what looked like clean woven fabric, crude and rough but no doubt up to whatever Megan wanted it for because it was either that or nothing..

Then I retired to our seat, allowed my eyes to close and actually drifted off to sleep.

It must have been two hours before I heard the sound of a baby crying. I’d slept for most of the time though I felt head-achy and tired, what I’d describe as a bit fluey.

But after then there was no chance for me to rest my weary head any longer because Cro was c**k-a-hoop as if he’d personally produced the child. He refilled the wooden beaker that he’d given me and produced a second that he almost emptied down Megan’s throat as he sang his praises for womankind and the miracles of a new life.

The baby was a girl and despite its obviousl Neanderthal bone structure it was, for the moment, the prettiest of children. And when she opened her eyes briefly to look around her she might have been searching deeply into my soul when they touched on me, and, of course, my drinking vessel was refilled.

Night will have been well under way by the time that Cro took his Emmakins and baby Nunu (maybe that was what they called their infant, or it might have been a Cro-Magnon word for baby) to their sleeping quarters and settled down.

It was then that both Megan and I fell asleep, a strange kind of fuzzy weariness giving way to our first night in a world that was so different from our own. Or was it our own and was it just time that had slipped a few thousand years to make things so different? It may well have been because I had actually seen a picture of Cro in a school history book when I was at Junior school, and he had lived thousands of years ago.

The night might have been short but it seemed long, and during my sleep I know the alcohol served by Cro had found its toxic way back out of me because I was lying in a pool of my own vomit, and most unpleasant it was too.

I looked around for Megan and there she was, stretched out on a neighbouring pew, and also soaked with the contents of her own stomach..

But wait. A pew?

“Cro…” I managed to stutter, looking around for him. But he was nowhere near.

“Oh no,” I whimpered as my eyes took in the inside of what must have been some sort of church, though it was small and smelt stale.

Then I forced myself to stand up and look further afield, towards the front of the place and at the decomposing figure leaning against its pulpit.

He was obviously very dead, and I could see why. His face was marked as though bruised, with buboes like deathly swellings on his neck and face. And once again my education from childhood came to my rescue.

This man in his filthy clerical vestment had died of bubonic plague, better known as the Black Death.

© Peter Rogerson 29.08.24