grass that grows there, picking out the wild leeks, of which they’re particularly fond. Sheep, for crying out loud, not dead men at all. I guess they knew really, all along, and the stuff about dead men was to keep you indoors at night, keep you from wandering out under the stars (though why you should want to I couldn’t begin to imagine). Or at least, at some point, way back in the dim past, some smartass with a particularly warped imagination made up the story about dead men, to scare his kids; and the kids believed, and never figured it was sheep, and they told their kids, and so on down the generations. Maybe you never figure it out unless you leave the farm, which nobody ever does, except me.
As a matter of fact, I was just beginning to drift off into a doze when the thumping started. Clump, clump, clump; pause; clump, clump, clump. I was not amused. I was bone-tired and I really wanted to get some sleep, and here were these fucking sheep walking about over my head. The hell with that, I thought, and got up.
I opened the door as quietly as I could, not wanting to wake up the household, and I stood in the doorway for a little while, letting my eyes get used to the dark. Someone had left a stick leaning against the doorframe. I picked it up, on the off chance that there might be a sheep close enough to hit.
Something was moving about again. I walked away from the house until I could see up top.
It wasn’t sheep. It was a dead man.
He was sitting astride the roof, his legs drooping down either side, like a farmer on his way back from the market. His hands were on his hips and he was looking away to the east. He was just a dark shape against the sky, but there was something about the way he sat there: peaceful. I didn’t think he’d seen me, and I felt no great inclination to advertise my presence. If I say I wasn’t scared, I wouldn’t expect to be believed; but fear wasn’t uppermost in my mind. Mostly, I was interested.
No idea how long I stood and he sat. It occurred to me that I was just assuming he was a dead man. Looked at logically, far more likely that he was alive, and had reasons of his own for climbing up on a roof in the middle of the night. Well, there’s a time and a place for logic.
He turned his head, looking down the line of the roof-tree, and lifted his heels, and dug them into the turf three times: clump, clump, clump. (And that was when I realized the flaw in my earlier rationalization. Three clumps; always three, ever since I was a kid. How many three-legged sheep do you see?) At that moment, the moon came out from behind the clouds, and suddenly we were looking at each other, me and him.
My host had been right: he was purple, like a grape. Or a bruise; the whole body one enormous bruise. Swollen, he’d said; either that or he was an enormous man, arms and legs twice as thick as normal. His eyes were white; no pupils.
“Hello,” I said.
He leaned forward just a little and cupped his hand behind his left ear. “You’ll have to speak up,” he said.
Words from a dead man; a purple, swollen man sitting astride a roof. “Tell me,” I said, raising my voice. “Why do you do that?”
He looked at me, or a little bit past me. I couldn’t tell if his mouth moved, but there was a deep, gurgling noise that could only have been laughter. “Do what?”
“Ride on the roof like it’s a horse,” I said.
His shoulders lifted; a slow, exaggerated shrug, like he didn’t know what a shrug was but was copying one he’d seen many years ago. “I’m not sure,” he said. “I feel the urge to do it, so I do it.”
Well, I thought. One of the great abiding mysteries of my childhood not quite cleared up. “Are you Anthemius?” I asked. “The schoolmaster?”
Again the laugh. “That’s a very good question,” he said. “Tell you what,” he went on, “come up here and sit with me, so we can talk without yelling.”
In the moonlight, I could make out the huge hands, with their monstrous overripe fingers. How tight the skin would have to be, with all that pressure against it