The Down Days

by Ilze Hugo

  Maybe Major was in on the whole thing? Maybe she’d paid him off?

  Nah. That couldn’t be it. He’d known Major for years. The guy had his quirks, but he wouldn’t throw him under the bus like that. Sans had helped him out many a time—getting that gig for his nephew, for example—and Major had hooked him up with the convent gig, without which he’d still be as broke as a joke on coke. Besides, it almost felt like he had been led behind that curtain, all the way to the book, by . . . well, her. His unicorn. Hallucination or not, he’d definitely seen her—caught a glimpse of her onyx hair when the books toppled down. He was almost sure of it. And the glow. That weird glow the book had given off. No way the dead collector could have engineered that.

  Careful not to damage the antique paper, Sans opened up the book to a random page. And realized that he couldn’t understand a thing. The diary wasn’t in English. Hell, it wasn’t in any language he’d ever seen. More like hieroglyphics. A mishmash of weird symbols, with a bunch of random numbers and alphabet soup thrown in for good measure.

  If this really was Anna’s diary, the one the librarian had told him about, and the librarian’s story added up, then somewhere within these pages was a cure. A cure to cure all. Something like that would be worth a fortune. So although the whole scheme sounded totally mental, it was totally worth checking out.

  But where was he going to find someone to decipher this lot?

  Footsteps. Major was coming back. This would be one hell of a story to try to explain to the caretaker, and Sans wasn’t sure it was worth the effort. And it wasn’t like the guy knew what he had here, right? He’d been using the book to balance his moonshine on, for fuck’s sake.

  Yeah, he’d just borrow it.

  Stuffing the book in his backpack required a bit of Tetris. The thing barely, just about, fit. But it did. Thank fuck. He clipped the top of the backpack shut. It wasn’t stealing. He was just borrowing it. To find out if it was legit. He spread the blue cloth over the restacked books. Perfect. He was willing to bet Major wouldn’t notice that his precious side table had shrunk a notch.

  There was a slow creak as the door to the hall opened. Footsteps, then the curtain pulled back and Major’s face appeared. “Hey,” said the caretaker. “What’s up?”

  “Where were you? You were gone a month.”

  “Ja, sorry. Ran into this stukkie I’m trying to woo. One of the new girls. Damn fine piece of work.”

  “Good for you, brother, good for you. Let’s drink to that.”

  “With my nephew’s finest moonshine, yes.” Major gestured to a shelf behind Sans’s head. “Just grab it, will you? There behind the Handy Andy and the bleach.”

  Sans stood up and reached for the unlabeled bottle. Passed it to the caretaker, who poured them each two fingers of respite. Sans sloshed the liquid around in his cup. Inspected it. It was thick, syrupy, and smelt like it could kill. And the color was . . . unusual. Kind of like burnt umber.

  “Hey, you’re in a better mood, brother,” said Major. “What happened? Get lucky while I was gone, too?”

  “Nothing like that,” Sans said. “Just gained some perspective on a few things, is all.”

  “Good. That’s good.” The caretaker raised his cup. “Let’s drink to that.”

  “Cheers,” said Sans. The liquid burned like hellfire as it reached his throat, but it hit the spot.

  - 61 - FAITH

  Twelve a.m. The moon was the top of a fingernail dancing on a pin.

  “Have I mentioned I’m charging extra for this?” said the sin-eater, while Faith rummaged in her bag for the key. “Breaking and entering. It’s not exactly cricket, you know.”

  “Yes, yes. Send me the bill.” She wasn’t too keen on him being here, either, but if the junkie’s crazy ramblings had even one nanobyte of truth in them, she was going to need a good ghostbuster when she got inside. Ghosts . . . what did she know about ghosts? She didn’t even believe in them. Even if they were real, she was pretty sure she wouldn’t be able to see them. Not everyone could, the sin-eater had said. You had to be sensitive to the spiritual realm and whatnot. You had to have the knack.

  So she’d brought Fred with her, for spiritual backup. But the way he was standing there whispering louder than a freight train in that flaming-orange bull’s-eye of a windbreaker, she was starting to regret the decision.

  She pushed the key she’d gotten from the junkie into the key-shaped groove. It slid in like it fit. She held her breath, turned.

  Nothing.

  It was stuck.

  She jiggled it this way and that, but no luck. She pulled it out again.

  “Let me try,” said the sin-eater.

  She handed him the key. He slid it into the lock, fiddled with it with his stubby fingers, but it still didn’t move.

  Idiot, Faith chided herself. I’m an idiot. Coming all this way. For this. For nothing. She was about to tell him to stop trying when—

  Hold on.

  The key was turning. Actually turning. Almost.

  “It’s a little stubborn,” said the sin-eater, “but I think, it just might . . . if I put my wrist into it . . .” The key caved and did a full swing.

  The gate pivoted on its hinges with a throaty schweee. Faith winced at the sound. They slipped in through the gap and pushed it shut.

  Through the convent’s garden they skulked. Up the path and over the grass. They were walking past the ghostly Virgin whose stone eyes still trailed the ground when Faith had a flashback. A Then one. She saw herself walking ahead, with her everything in tow.

  He was dragging his feet, with his forehead scrunched up in a scowl. “Why do we have to come here?”

  “I’m your mother. I have to do everything to keep you safe. Even if it seems crazy and far-out. So let’s just do this. Get it over with quick.”

  “But Dad says it’s nonsense. Just superstitious nonsense. That you can’t keep the Laughter at bay with an electric shaver and some half-baked faith.”

  “Your dad’s probably right, but what have we got to lose? Just some hair, right? So let’s turn that scowl upside down and get it over with, quick.”

  The sin-eater had stopped. He looked back at where she was standing. “What’s the problem? Cold feet? If you keep walking, they’ll warm up.” He giggled at his own joke and Faith snapped back to reality.

  “Shush,” she said. “Nothing’s funny here.”

  “Nothing’s funny anywhere anymore,” said Fred.

  When they reached the courtyard, they stopped.

  “Which way now?” asked the sin-eater.

  “This way.” She led him down the open corridor. Predictably, the holy hall was locked.

  “The doorframe,” said Faith. “Up top.”

  The sin-eater stood on his toes, felt around, found the key. Just where the ponyjacker had said it would be. Pony Boy hadn’t been very forthcoming about the convent, but he was quite drunk when he talked to Faith at the comedy club, and after some gentle prodding, and a few more shots, he had let something slip about the caretaker being too lazy to carry around a big bunch of keys all the time, and leaving spares above doorframes.

  The big, dark hall gave her the jumps. All those bottles. All that hair. All those candles burning through the night.

  “This is such a bleddie fire hazard,” said the sin-eater. “What are they thinking, leaving them burning like this?”

  Faith didn’t say anything at first. Just stared. At the orbs. Those crazy dancing disco orbs. Everywhere.

  “The orbs. All those orbs. What are they? Some kind of trick of the light?”

  “What are you talking about? What orbs?”

  “The lights. All those lights. Don’t you see them?”

  “You mean the candlelight?”

  “No.”

  He couldn’t see them. But she could. She couldn’t see anything else. Semitransparent, the blobs of light were mostly silvery white, but also blue, orange, black, red, and green, each floating above its own bottle (thoug
h some bottles were without). They were swaying slightly, suspended in midair like helium balloons or stunned fireflies.

  Why didn’t Fred see them? Was she hallucinating? Going crazy?

  What was worse, what was totally worse, was that she had this feeling. This weird feeling. That the orbs were trying to talk to her. Hundreds of them all vying for her attention, calling out. Like a radio switching channels or something.

  Faith closed her eyes. Tried her best to concentrate on the feeling, focus it, channel it, align it with her mind and her body. Call it one of her hunches (or desperation, maybe), but she knew she had to do this.

  “Elliot,” she whispered, “I know your hair is here. I can feel it.”

  Nothing at first. Then a sound. Like a rumbling. Or a drone. Like the sound a washing machine makes, but with more jumps. A halt-and-flow sound. Like the first practice notes of an orchestra. Then it got louder. Much louder. So loud it started to hurt her ears. A huge cacophonous drone. As if a hundred voices were talking—screaming—at once.

  “Please,” she tried again. “I don’t understand. You’ve got to help me.”

  There. On her left. Close to the door. Was it her imagination, or was one of the orbs glowing brighter, the light pulsing, contracting and expanding in a slow waltz? No, she wasn’t dreaming. This was real.

  She made her way towards the orb, intending to scoop up the tiny vial underneath it, but before she got to it, something happened. As if a channel were switched, the orbs changed.

  Defined.

  Sharpened.

  Came into focus.

  She was wrong. She could see that now.

  They weren’t orbs. They were faces. Hundreds of them.

  - 62 - SANS

  Sans opened his eyes. There were tendrils on the bed. Black tendrils snaking from his feet across his stomach to his neck, touching his skin.

  No, not tendrils—strands. So many strands. And not just black anymore, either. Blond, white, brown, auburn, strawberry blond, copper, red . . . Thick strands, thin strands, straight strands, curly strands. A thousand different ponies, all slithering and snaking up to his neck, twisting around his throat. Around. And around. A necklace of hair. Coiling tighter. Tighter.

  Choking. Choking. Choking. Him.

  Try . . .

  . . . ing

  to . . .

  . . . breathe.

  He woke up, for real this time. Curled over in a coughing fit. It was 3:00 a.m. The devil’s hour. He scrambled out of bed, lit a candle, poured himself a glass of water. Sat down at the desk next to his bed.

  His apartment was a blank space. Bare but solid. Safe. His own small patch of terra firma in this wild, sick, dark-as-damn-dark but also light-as-a-puff-of-dandelion-fluff city. No dragons here.

  Sure, he could have upgraded. Moved to squat in some abandoned mansion against the mountain in Higgovale with an Olympic-sized swimming pool and a sauna and tennis court. But he liked it here. What the apartment lacked in size it made up for in being his. Fair and square. He’d bought it a decade ago with the money he got from the Road Accident Fund. That was back when there still was a Road Accident Fund. There had been an accident. It had been raining. The road was wet. The rain was one of the few things he could still remember from that night. Or at least he thought he did. Maybe someone had told him afterwards, or his mind had embellished that bit. Wasn’t it always raining in stories about car accidents? Wasn’t that how it went? Hey, maybe his was the first one. The first cliché to set up all the rest and point the way in the curved trajectory of his whole damn cliché-ridden life, causing a kind of follow-on domino effect. Who knew? What he did know was that the truck driver who came too fast around the bend and lost control of the wheel was drunk.

  He’d waited in the crumpled origami heap for six hours before someone came upon the wreck and called the ambulance who brought the Jaws of Life to cut him and his mom out. He was sixteen years old. The accident fucked up his leg, killed his father, and opened the door to all the crazy in his mom’s head. (This was before that guy walked into her office and shot himself and the crazy just started to spill out with nothing to plug the leak anymore.) While this was all true and factual for sure, it had also gotten him this flat. And it was a good flat. Small but functional. Nice.

  All this was when property ownership still meant something, before the clock reset and turned the city into one giant free-for-all. Now the title deed was just a piece of paper. A dead tree. But who cared. It was his dead tree. His own patch of blank space. Flag planted. Fair and square and solid. No foul play required.

  The couch was comfortable, the bed wasn’t small, the mattress soft but firm. There was a computer on a desk in his bedroom next to his bed. Not a laptop, but a big fat old-school monstrosity dressed up all in black. He liked to play games on it, liked the way the games made his mind go blank. He preferred vintage shoot-’em-ups, but he’d play anything he could get, provided it shut up his brain for a sec.

  Now he sat at the desk, holding a candle to the book, wishing his apartment had solar panels on the roof. He could barely make out a thing in this light and he had no idea when the power would be back on. Fucking electricity. The government was apparently working on a new plan to use the grinners and the ash factories on the Flats to power parts of the city. But they’d hit a few snags: a few grieving morons were protesting, saying it was disrespectful to use the dead to power toasters or some such sanctimonious rubbish. Idiots.

  Earlier Sans had gone up to the roof. There was a chick there who had a satellite dish, some batteries, and some solar panels. She knew stuff about computers and had one stashed in a wooden garden shed on the roof. Anyway, the chick had internet, most of the time, a lot of the time, so he’d gone and asked her if she could look something up for him. She had a hair thing going. A self-professed diva, always changing her look. So he’d promised her a fresh pony in return.

  The website was a kind of conspiracy-theory site about the Laughter. It was over the top, sensationalist, but it was the only reference she could find that mentioned the diary. And it basically confirmed the librarian’s story. Running his fingers down the spine of the book now, he thought about his unicorn. He’d seen her today in the processing room. He was sure of it.

  He thought about a book by Stephen Hawking he’d read once. Hawking said the afterlife was a fairy story for people who were afraid of the dark. Sans was inclined to agree with him. That’s why he didn’t think his unicorn was a ghost. But a seer seeing across time, somehow making her shape known to him to get some kind of message across—now, that was a thing he could maybe get his head around if he tried. He also remembered reading an article in which Hawking talked about wormholes and how you could travel across time through them, but you could only go forward, not backwards. There were some other caveats, but Sans couldn’t remember them; he hadn’t exactly been taking notes. But that was then. And this was now. And now he was cursing himself for not paying more attention.

  Anyway, what if that was what was happening here? That this freed slave librarian chick with her perfect, perfect unicorn hair was reaching across time to talk to him? To tell him about her diary? To tell him that the thing held the cure?

  Maybe.

  Maybe not.

  Maybe it was all bull and he was just drinking too much.

  Or was he just going crazy, turning into his mother? Was that what this was all about?

  He tried to focus on the book again. The script was tiny. He went through it, page by page, hoping for something written in English, or maybe a drawing or something at least halfway legible or digestible, but no luck.

  What had he been thinking, stealing—borrowing—this moth-eaten thing? It was useless. Useless. He was no better off than before, only now he was a guy who’d stolen from someone who could, arguably, be called his best friend. Being a thief was fine, but a thief who stole from his own—that was a problem. A line. One of the few he hadn’t yet crossed.

  A low hum. The power was ba
ck on. Sans opened his cupboard, took out an old T-shirt and wrapped the book up in it, placed it in his backpack, and then switched his computer on. His package for the week had arrived courtesy of one of Mickey’s gumbooted, skateboarded couriers that afternoon.

  He scrolled though the content, clicked on yesterday’s edition of an online newspaper he read when he was feeling like he gave a shit. There was an article on the postbox riots sweeping the city. How anger was brewing after an article in the Daily Truth claimed the postbox meds were inducing hallucinations.

  Halle-fucking-lujah. This was it! The answer he’d been looking for! Screw that fat bastard with his bullshit theories, screw his bloody beautiful unicorn. He wasn’t crazy, he wasn’t sick, he wasn’t seeing dead people—he was just going postal with the best of them! Thank the fucking government for bad meds! Everything was going to be A-OK.

  But wait.

  That wouldn’t explain the book, would it? That thing was real. There was no denying it.

  - 63 - FAITH

  Hundreds of faces. Hundreds. And one of the faces was glowing so brightly it seared. Faith was burning. Melting. Cracking. Falling apart. It was him. Her everything. Right there in front of her unbelieving eyes was the face of her everything.

  The space around Faith’s heart was a wall. So solid, so impenetrable that it would take a thousand armies a hundred years to crack one brick. But now the whole damn thing was crumbling, and she with it. With not a single army in sight. Just the husk of one small boy. One single soul. Glowing so brightly that her whole damn being was going nuclear for it.

  She was drowning. Gasping for air, her body caving in on itself, crumpling to the floor in a heap. She’d heard stories about sailors lost at sea who said they saw the Virgin Mary while drowning. (Although she wondered how they could have told anyone about that if they’d drowned. Maybe it was those who survived to tell the tale?) Apparently the brain does something strange when it gets deprived of oxygen. People start to see things. Like mermaids. Or ghosts.