The Sheet Moves

The first of the drovers to wake did so without knowing why. He came up out of sleep the way a man comes up out of water, suddenly, and lay for a moment without moving, listening to the dark.

The storm had dropped. The fire was a red pulse in the ashes, giving off no heat. The room was very quiet. He told himself he had woken because he needed to turn over, and that there was nothing in the dark he had not seen when he fell asleep.

Then he saw, in the faint glow of the embers, that the sheet over the long table had moved. It had not fallen; it had shifted, as though something beneath it had shifted, turning in its rest. The drover held his breath.

He told himself the draft from the door had done it. He told himself this the way he told himself everything he was afraid of: quickly, and with conviction, and before he had looked. He looked.

The sheet was still now. But one corner of it had drawn back from the table, and in the gap, in the red light, he could see the feet of the dead girl. They were small feet, the feet of a young woman, and they were bare, and they were pointed toward the floor as though she were trying to stand.

The drover did not move. He was a brave man, in the ordinary way, but bravery in a warm room by daylight is a different thing from bravery in a dark room with a corpse that has moved its feet. He lay and watched the feet, and the feet did not move again.

He thought of waking the others. He opened his mouth to call out, and then he did not, because if it were nothing, waking four tired men in the middle of the night would make a fool of him before the whole road. He closed his mouth. He would wait a little, he told himself. He would make sure first.

It was the worst choice he could have made. A cry, even a foolish one, would have woken the whole house. The innkeeper would have come with his lantern, and the women would have wailed, and the body would have been covered again, and the morning would have come. Instead, he waited.

The fire sank. The red light on the dead girl's feet went out, and the room went nearly black. He lay in the black, and he listened, and the thing he listened for was the thing that does not happen to a corpse: a sound of breathing. He did not hear it. He told himself he was glad.

Then the sheet slid. It slid the way a sheet slides when a person underneath sits up, slow and unwilling, as though the body beneath were not used to its own weight. The drover heard the linen whisper. He heard the wooden table creak, very softly, as it took the weight it was not meant to take.

He had meant to be brave. He had meant to call out. But the sound of that linen and that old wood broke what was left of his nerve, and he did neither. He lay frozen in his corner, his eyes wide in the black, and he waited for the thing under the sheet to finish sitting up. He did not have long to wait.