PodCastle 775: The Morthouse

* Author : Maria Haskins

* Narrator : Eleanor R. Wood

* Host : Matt Dovey

* Audio Producer : Devin Martin

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Previously published by The Deadlands #12

Content Warning for the death of a child

Rated PG-13

The Morthouse

by Maria Haskins

In her forty-two years on God’s wide Earth, Gerda has read no books other than The Bible and Luther’s Small Catechism, but once, after Sunday service, she heard the sexton say that there are places where the dead traverse a river after death, paying a boatsman to ferry them across the water. Gerda knows such a thing must be either blasphemy or fable, and she knows for certain the dead will find no passage here, not this far north in Sweden, not in January when both the creek and inlet by the village lie frozen, the murky, brackish waters of the Gulf of Bothnia slumbering below windswept ice.

Here, in winter, the dead go nowhere at all, not even into the ground.

When Gerda’s boy was taken by the fever after Yule — once he’d been washed and dressed and laid in his coffin with a page torn from the hymnal tucked beneath his beardless chin — a horse-drawn sled brought him to the morthouse by the church. That small building with its tarred-black wooden door and white plaster walls is where her boy waits still — his pinewood box set side by side with the others who died this winter. Whether they died of misfortune or fever or old age, all of them are waiting. Waiting for spring. Waiting for the ground to thaw. Waiting for the day when shovel blades will bite deep enough to dig new graves.

The morthouse sits just inside the low stone wall surrounding the church grounds and cemetery. It’s close enough to the church that you can hear the bell whenever the sexton makes it ring, quiet enough that you can make out the murmur of psalms on Sundays. Gerda knows this because she’s stood on the threshold of the morthouse every day since her boy was brought here.

Inside, the morthouse is lit only by the wan winter light seeping through the small, solitary window. So little light comes through the dappled glass that Gerda, swept in her black church-coat, grey-blonde braids covered by a black shawl tied beneath her chin, barely casts a shadow on the floorboards. She knows she should let him be. Knows she should not be here, yet she cannot go home because her boy is not there.

January’s teeth bite hard, through wood and wool and marrow. The cold makes Gerda’s fingers and toes go numb. It makes the heartwood of the birches groan. It rimes each coffin lid with a thin layer of frost. Gerda thinks of her boy, wearing nothing but the suit he would have worn at his confirmation next summer, beneath that lid. She thinks of him, as she saw him last alive, thin chest racked with cough, flustered skin so hot it burned her hand to touch him.

There is no warmth left in him now. Nor in Gerda, standing by his coffin, but wherever her boy is, that is where she must be.

When her boy’s fever worsened, Gerda thought of going to Miriam. Some in the village would say Miriam had a mean streak, that she made the cattle waste away if you crossed her, marking how she never showed her face at church. Some spoke of darker things, of pentagrams and poisons, of children strangled in the womb and Miriam’s black cat speaking in an unknown human tongue, chanting the Lord’s Prayer backwards on Good Friday. But Miriam was there when Gerda’s boy was born,