Death Follows All

Steve ’s footsteps crunched as his boots broke through the frozen crust of snow that covered the ground. It was only 5:00 but it was already quite dark, and the lights of the houses that backed on the park glowed golden and inviting that winter evening. The view from the path along the skating pond looked like a Christmas card; all that was missing was a light snow to complete the scene.

“Steve?!” The call was soft but the voice seemed familiar. Steve stopped walking but did not turn.

“Steve?!” It was slightly louder this time and closer. “STE-VEN!”

Slightly annoyed, Steve looked from left to right and as far over his shoulder as far as he could see. No one was visible. As he did so, a conversation he had had with his grandfather some time before suddenly came into his mind. They had been sitting in the living room watching an old episode of The Munsters when something in the show that Steve could not longer recall triggered one of his grandfather’s old country warnings.

“You must never answer if you hear someone call your name but you can’t see them,” his grandfather had said.

“Come on, Grandpa. This isn’t Transylvania, or wherever you come from, in the 1800s,” Steve had joked. His grandfather did not come from Transylvania (although the Munsters did), but to Steve, a village near the Black Sea was the same thing.

“Don’t mock me, Young Man,” said his grandfather sternly. “You just remember what I told you.”

“All that stuff is just made up to scare people,” Steve protested.

“The world is very strange, Steve,” his grandfather told him seriously. “There are plenty of things we can’t see or even feel, but they’re there just the same.”

“Your Grandpa is in good company,” Steve’s father put in. He was marking student essays. “Shakespeare said ‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’”

His grandfather was always telling him things like this, so Steve put the warning out of his mind and turned back to the show. It occurred to him that his grandfather was a lot like Al Lewis on the old TV program, except he didn’t have a mad scientist’s lab in the basement.

“STEVEN!” The voice was insistent.

Steve could not see anyone around, but the sky was overcast, and the lights on the streets were too far away to provide much illumination.

“What?” Steve yelled in annoyance. “Where the Hell are you?”

He turned fully around and, for the first time, saw what appeared to be an old man approaching him. He immediately regretted having said ‘Hell.’ It was clearly one of his grandfather’s friends out walking his dog. All the old men his grandfather knew had dogs they walked in the park.

The figure dressed in a dark overcoat came slowly toward him. After a moment, Steve saw the man was younger than he first thought. Perhaps it was one of his friends’ fathers or even someone’s older brother. The figure walked up to him, and Steve realized it was another teenager, one who was wearing the same winter jacket as he was. Looking closer, Steve saw the stranger had the same wool hat he did and a striped scarf just like the one his grandmother had knit for him in the colors of his high school team. His stomach lurched horribly in a combination of terror and shock. The smiling face of the stranger was his own.

An article in the newspaper two days later described how a local boy had tragically drowned in the skating pond just after dark. He had been walking home through the park and, because of the snow, didn’t realize he had strayed from the path. Only Steve’s grandfather, in sorrow and confusion, realized that Steve had literally met his Death when the ice broke.