All through the nights in which their mother lay dying, his sister recited to him the fable of the night archer. She told it to the boy to scare him, he knew that. But it wasn’t until he was grown that he realized she had only wanted to scare him with it so as to distract him from his mother’s dying. At first, they had lain each in their own beds, his sister’s bed against the outer wall, his own against the wall adjoining his mother’s room, listening to their mother struggling to breathe. After a few nights of that, though, his sister had felt sorry for him and swapped beds. And then, a night later, she dragged his former bed away and up against the other bed so they both would be as far away from their mother as they could be.
Their father had fled. It had been—so their mother told them early on, back when she was able to respond—too much for him. It isn’t that he doesn’t love you, she claimed, only that he can’t stand to watch me die.
But if he, a grown man, couldn’t stand it, the boy wondered, then how can we?
As soon as they were out of the room, his sister told him that what his mother had said was a lie. If his father really had loved them, she whispered urgently, he would have goddamn well found a way to stand it.
Your sister is old enough to take care of you, his mother had said, and his sister seemed to agree with this. But his sister also made it clear that not everyone would agree, that if they didn’t want to be taken away from their mother, it was best not to tell anyone their father had fled or how sick their mother really was.
“But what if she dies?” the boy asked.
“She will die,” his sister said, looking at him like he was stupid. “She doesn’t have long left. We’ll figure things out when we have to.”
Maybe their father would come back, the boy speculated. Maybe he did love them just enough to come back once their mother had finished dying. Or maybe, when someone did take them away, they would take both him and his sister away to the same place. But his sister said little in response to these speculations, which made the boy doubt the likelihood of any of them.
“Tell me a story,” he asked her one night. “Like mom used to do.”
“I don’t know any stories,” his sister at first claimed, and then, when he persisted, “Do you mean a tale? I’ll tell you a tale if you’d like.”
“What’s the difference between a story and a tale?”
In the darkness, he heard her rustle in her bed. Perhaps she was shrugging her shoulders while lying down. Perhaps she was simply shifting, getting more comfortable.
“A story,” she finally said, “is something that isn’t true, at least not in a real way. A tale isn’t true either, except in a real way.”
“A real way?”
“Except in a real way,” his sister repeated. And then she began.
Do you know the tale of the night archer? his sister asked, her voice asked, from out of the darkness.
The night archer? he said.
He hunts at night, his sister continued. He is dressed in boiled leather that has been dyed black, unless it is naturally black: there are different opinions about this. He wears a peaked leather cap, the inner band of which has been sewn into the skin of his forehead so that the hat will never fall off. Because he can never remove his hat, he can never enter a church, nor can he ever sleep.
He prowls through the darkness on the back of a gigantic black stork with a bill as black and shiny as a slick of oil but sharp as the tip of a pick. He carries a bow made of yellowed bone and strung with human sinew, and a quiver of arrows tipped with jagged bits of mirror. He travels with one hand cupped to his ear, always listening.
What is he listening for? the boy asked.
I’m the one telling this tale, his sister said. Be quiet and listen.
The night archer listens for the sound of someone summoning him to the hunt. He lives for the hunt. Those who know to call him know they must go to the fireplace when the flames are guttering and thrust their head in, not minding the smoke or heat, and stare up the chimney. They must take a coin and tap its edge three times against a brick.
“Night archer!” they must hiss up into the chimney. “Night archer! Hunt for me!”
And then they must wait. Will they see the night archer? No, no one ever has. At most they will glimpse a disturbance of air at the top of the chimney, the damping out of stars, the deepening of the night.
If you are lucky enough to glimpse that, you can be assured the night archer is there, hand cupped to his ear, awaiting your instruction.
“Hunt for me,” you must whisper again. And then, “Now, hunt.” If you like, you may whisper what sort of creature you prefer him to hunt. Or what person. But, be warned: he will not always bring the prey you request.
That was how the story—the fable rather—always began, with those words or something near to them. After that, the rest differed with each new telling. His sister would tell of this one or that one who called the night archer to the hunt. For some—a few anyway—this went well, and the night archer brought them the prey they requested, which they broiled and happily ate. Most, though, ended up with prey they had not asked for, and then had to either make do with what they had been given or suffer. A very few, who would not or could not make do, eventually became prey themselves.
They never saw the night archer, either at his initial summoning or when he returned. They only knew of his existence because, on the stroke of midnight on the night after the summoning, a quarter of a carcass would tumble down the chimney, meticulously bled. This would go on for four consecutive nights, a quarter of the carcass each night, until the whole disjointed creature had arrived and the bargain was concluded.
One night his sister told of a man named Ulrich who had summoned the night archer on a whim, not really believing. This Ulrich hated his wife, for no particularly good reason. To whisper up the chimney that he wanted her hunted and ridden down was a great relief, and made him feel like he might be capable of living with her a little longer. So he tapped a brick with the edge of his coin, whispered up the chimney, experienced a rush of relief for having unburdened himself, and then returned to bed and thought no more about it.
The next night, at midnight, he lay asleep beside his wife. A clattering from the living room awoke him, his heart beating in his throat. The sound did not wake his wife but it woke him. Anxious, he got out of bed and went to see what was wrong.
“Hello?” he called from the entrance to the living room. “Who’s there?”
There was no answer. But when he turned on the light he saw that ash from the fireplace had spilled onto the floor. In the fireplace, too, lay something. When he got close, he discovered it was a woman’s leg and part of her body, neatly bled, clean.
The leg looked familiar to him. Following a premonition, he ran back into the room and turned on the light. He could see the shape of one of his wife’s legs pushing up the coverlet, but where the other had been the covers were flat.
His wife woke up, hiding her eyes from the blaze of light. “What’s the matter with you?” she said. “Come back to bed.”
His sister had tried to end that version of the fable there, at what seemed to the boy the wrong place.
“What did he do?” he finally asked. What he would have done, the boy thought, would be to take the leg and press it to the place where it belonged until it stuck again.
“He hid the leg in the cellar and went back to bed,” his sister said. “What else could he do? The next morning his wife got up and showered and made breakfast just as someone with two legs might do, only Ulrich could see that one of her legs wasn’t there. She was walking just as if it was, but it wasn’t. It made him feel crazy to see her walking calmly about and putting her weight on a leg that wasn’t there. But the following day, when she began to walk around with no legs to support her, was much worse. And the next day, when all that was left was half of her head, one arm, and half of her torso, was almost unbearable. By the time the final quarter of his wife tumbled down the chimney, he couldn’t see her anymore, but he could still hear her speaking, bustling about. So, he went to the police and confessed to killing her, just to try to get away from her.”
“Did he get away from her?”
“Let’s put it this way: if Ulrich hadn’t been in jail, if Ulrich had been at home near his fireplace, he would have tried every night to summon the night archer, to ask it to hunt and kill him. Death, he came to feel, would be the only way to escape her. And he wasn’t sure that even that would be enough.”
The world is a terrible place, the boy began to feel listening to these tales, but wondrous too. During the day, he and his sister never spoke of the night archer, and sometimes after the tale was concluded the boy struggled to fall asleep, but at least he was thinking of the night archer, not of his mother. Indeed, his mother’s breathing over the course of listening to the many tellings of the tale had come to seem like white noise, like waves. Eventually it began to lull him to sleep.
By day, the boy and his sister went to school. They pretended everything was all right, told no one how sick their mother really was. Once home, they would sometimes sit with her, and sometimes, for a few minutes anyway, she seemed to recognize them. The sister would take a small sponge and dip it into a bowl of water and then squeeze a few drops between their mother’s parted lips. The sister would try to get their mother to take a few bites of food and then would roll their mother onto her side and change her bedclothes. Later, she would cook something for herself and the boy. She would do her homework and help the boy with his. And then they would go to bed.
That might have gone on forever, or at least until they ran out of food, except that one day when they went in to sit with their mother they found her dead. The sister did not cry, though when she stopped staring at the corpse and turned around to look at him, it was as if her face had turned to wax. He did not cry either. What point was there in it? They had known for days it would turn out like this.
“What do we do now?” he asked his sister.
When his sister just shook her head, he came closer and took a better look at his mother. She did not look like his mother now: the skin had settled oddly on her bones. True, it had been a long time since she had really looked like his mother. But even so, when he looked at her now, he began to grow dizzy.
And then his sister had him by the arm and was helping him out of his mother’s room. Once they were out, she reached back in and locked the knob from the inside. She pulled the door shut, then rattled the knob to prove to him, and to herself perhaps, that it was locked, that their mother couldn’t get out.
And so they did nothing about their dead mother. They had been pretending to others that their mother was not sick. It was not a far stretch to move from that to pretending that the mother was not dead.
At least not at first. Where before they had been haunted by the mother’s labored breathing, now they began to be haunted by the absence of it. The boy would wake up at night not hearing it and wonder what was wrong, and then he would remember that the mother was dead. The weight of his mother dead there on the other side of the wall was almost too much for him to bear.
By day they kept going to school, kept pretending everything was normal, but the way he caught his teacher looking at him made him suspect he was not doing as good a job pretending as was needed. His sister’s pale face and glazed eyes made him think the case was the same for her.
“We need to do something,” he finally told his sister.
She shook her head. “There’s nothing to be done.”
That was that, then. They would simply go on pretending until they ran out of food or were caught.
At the time it felt like he and his sister lived on in the house for months after his mother’s death, but it was probably only a few weeks, not long enough anyway for the school term to reach its terminus and summer vacation to begin. Long enough, though, that the smell of the air in the house became different, particularly the air close to his mother’s room.
Once when his sister was in the bathroom, he crept out of their shared room and pressed his ear to his mother’s door. He heard a dim humming—probably flies, he told himself, though that was not the image that came first into his head. Just in case, he began walking past the room as silently as possible, so as to escape notice.
That was how it was then, the two of them waiting for whatever life they were living to end and for them to become, as his sister had phrased it once, wards of the state. In a manner of speaking, that earlier life had already ended. It was just that the next life hadn’t yet begun.
Or maybe, the boy began to think, they could live on here, just him and his sister, becoming a complete family in a way that would feel normal and natural. If it felt natural to them, nobody outside would notice anything amiss. But for that to happen, he knew, they would have to get rid of what was left of the mother.
For a long time he lay there, pretending to be asleep, a silver dollar clutched tightly in one fist. For a long time, his sister was restless and not asleep, and then perhaps asleep only lightly. It was hours, or what seemed like hours, before her breathing grew regular enough for him to risk getting up.
As quietly as he could, he left the bed and crept toward the door. He eased it open and slid into the hall and moved toward the stairs, the smell of the air shifting to tell him he was passing the door to his mother’s room. He negotiated the stairs in the darkness, one palm brushing along the wall.
At the bottom there was one step more than he remembered. He stumbled and nearly fell, the silver dollar slipping from his grasp and tinking its way across the parquet floor. He fell to his knees and searched for it, sweeping his hands across the wood. How far had it gone? Why couldn’t he find it? Had it fallen into the heating register? Just when he was ready to give up, his fingers brushed across it and he had it again.
The living room was far enough away from his and his sister’s room that he felt safe sliding the dimmer as low as it would go and turning on the light. There it was, the fireplace. He approached. Did it matter that there was no fire in the grate, that there had never been a fire in it? In the tale, there was always a fire. But he didn’t have any wood, no matches either. No, he tried to convince himself, all that mattered was that it was a fireplace and that it had a chimney he could speak into.
He crouched down and stuck his head in. He couldn’t see anything but darkness higher in the shaft. Maybe that meant the night archer was already there, crouched over the opening, ear cupped, listening, waiting.
He tapped the silver dollar against the brick, three times. It made less noise than he had imagined it would.
“Night archer,” he hissed. “Night archer! Hunt for me!”
He waited but heard nothing. “Hunt for me,” he whispered again. And then he thought about how to phrase what he wanted done.
He knew from the tales his sister had told that when you asked something of the night archer, you had to do it with great care. But he could not think of how else to phrase it except the words he had originally settled on. “Hunt for my mother,” he finally said. “Hunt for her, even though she is already dead.”
After that, there was nothing to do but wait. Either the night archer would hunt for his mother or it would refuse and hunt for something else. If his mother, she would tumble down the chimney in quarters over four consecutive nights and her body would disappear piece by piece from the room it was sealed in now. Like that, sectioned into quarters, he and his sister could manage to gradually carry his mother out of the house and get rid of her. And if the archer brought them something else, at least they would have meat to eat. As long as that something else was an animal, and not another human.
When he was done, he extinguished the light and groped his way back upstairs. His sister was still asleep. He climbed up onto his bed from its foot and settled in.
Tomorrow he would know if the summoning had worked. Either part of his mother would tumble down the chimney or something else would. Or maybe, if the night archer had not heard him, nothing would happen at all.
He was very tired now. Now that the task was done, sleep was catching up to him. And then it caught and took him.
He dreamt that he was back in the living room, the dimmer very low, alone again. Where the entrance to the room was normally lay a cloud of variegated darkness, ruffled as if made of feathers. When he walked into it and tried to leave the room, he found himself walking not out of the room but back into it.
After a few times of this happening, he began to become afraid.
He tried the room’s solitary window, throwing up the sash and pushing the screen out with the flats of his hands. He could hear the chirp of crickets outside, could vaguely see the screen in the darkness where it had landed in the bushes below the window. And yet, when he climbed up into the open window and squeezed through and out, he ended up not outside in the bushes but back on the living room floor.
The only way left was the chimney. Perhaps he could climb out.
He moved toward it, but before he reached it there was a thump and a cloud of ash. Lying on the grate he saw a child’s leg and part of a hip. He could tell the child had been a boy. He took another step and there was another thump and puff of ash and the other leg and hip had arrived now too.
By the time he reached the fireplace, the rest of the body had fallen. He found himself looking at the stacked pieces. At one extreme of the topmost piece was the pale and startled half-face of a boy that looked exactly like him.
He awoke with a start. It was morning. Someone was in the room with him and his sister, sitting on the foot of his bed. Fleetingly he thought the night archer had come for them.
“Hello, son,” said his father.
His sister was already awake and sitting up in her bed, clutching herself in her own arms.
“It’s nice to see you,” said their father.
Neither he nor his sister said anything.
“I’ve wanted to see you for a while,” he said. “If your mother will allow it, we can spend the day together. Would you like that?”
Beside him, his sister hesitated, then briefly nodded. The boy, though, held perfectly still.
“All right, then,” said their father slowly. “I’ll go work it out.”
He stood and left the room.
They heard his footsteps move down the hall then stop outside their mother’s door. He knocked, and called her name.
When there was no answer, he called again, a touch of irritation in his voice now.
And then he must have caught a whiff of the smell, because when he called her name the third time, his voice was very high and laced with panic.
The boy heard a thumping noise. He heard it again, and again, and suddenly understood his father was kicking the mother’s door down. He turned to his sister to tell her, and saw from her face that she had already understood.
They heard a loud crack followed by the sounds of their father retching and stumbling. Soon he was back at the entrance to their room, hiding his face in the crook of his arm, breathing heavily, leaning against the doorframe.
When he lifted his hand away, the look the father gave them was the look of someone who wanted desperately to flee. The boy, knowing he would need only a little encouragement to do so, returned a look that was expressionless, no look at all. His sister, he was sure, was doing the same. Together they stared, blank-faced, waiting for him to either come and gather them up or turn and flee.
If he comes to them, well, they will see how it goes. It may be possible for the three of them to start a family again, now that their mother is dead. It just depends on whether their father can learn to love them enough.
But if the father flees, as the boy fully expects him to do, the boy will have to take matters into his own hands. He imagines himself rapping a quarter against a brick of the fireplace below. Night archer, he sees himself saying, hunt for me.
The night archer will be waiting there at the top of the chimney, hand still cupped to his ear. Will the boy have a specific prey in mind? Yes, of course he will—he already does. The person who has abandoned them not once but twice. Make my father your prey, he will say. Now hunt. 
Brian Evenson is the author of a dozen books of fiction, most recently the story collection Song for the Unraveling of the World (2019), which was the winner of the Shirley Jackson Award. He has also recently published the collection A Collapse of Horses and the novella The Warren. His novel Last Days won the American Library Association’s award for Best Horror Novel of 2009. Another novel, The Open Curtain, was a finalist for an Edgar Award and an International Horror Guild Award. He is the recipient of three O. Henry Prizes, an NEA fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. His work has been translated into more than a dozen languages. He lives in Los Angeles and teaches in the critical studies program at CalArts.
Illustration: Mike Reddy
