“So what do you think I should do?” said Hart.
“I don’t know,” said Old Father Time. “But it seems to me that if there are answers to be found, they lie in your past, when the prophecy was made. Why don’t you go and visit your old family home? Leonard can show you where it is.”
“Yes,” said Hart. “I think I’d like that. Can we go now?”
“Of course, my boy, of course. Though do have a little something before you go, to warm the blood and keep the cold out.”
He gestured to Mad, who produced from somewhere a tray with four small porcelain cups on it. Time took one, sipped carefully, and smiled. Ash and Hart took a cup each, and Mad took the last. She was smiling suspiciously innocently, so Hart waited for her to sip hers first, which she did with great aplomb. Hart took a healthy gulp from his cup, and his eyes bulged as a small nuke went off in his throat. His tongue curled up and died and his eyes squeezed shut like they were never going to open again.
“What is this stuff?” he gasped, eventually.
“Saki,” said Mad, grinning. “Powerful stuff, if you’re not used to it.”
Ash looked wistfully at his cup, and smiled at Hart. “Well, you can’t say you weren’t warned, James. Next time your future self tells you something, I really think you should pay attention…”
Hart glared at him through tear-filled eyes. “You talk too much, Ash.”
CHAPTER FOUR
Saying Goodbye
All Souls cemetery was a small affair, only a few hundred graves, tucked carefully away out of sight so as not to disturb anyone with its presence. Tall trees shielded it from passers-by, and there was only the one narrow gravelled path, wandering through the neat rows of headstones and out again. Shadows Fall was built around death, or at least passing through the Forever Door, but as in so many other places, no one really wanted to have to think about it until they were forced to by circumstances. All Souls was neat and tidy and efficiently laid out, with regular inoffensive rows of headstones, and no obtrusive crypts or statues or over-sized monuments. They weren’t actually forbidden by any code or by-law, it was just understood that All Souls was not the place for such vulgar ostentation. Anyone who wanted such frills and fripperies was coolly encouraged to take their trade elsewhere. There were such places, even in Shadows Fall, but polite people didn’t talk about them. All Souls cemetery was a place of peace and contemplation. Sheriff Erikson thought it was the most depressing place he’d ever been.
He stood resignedly beside Mayor Frazier and watched solemnly as Father Callahan ran smoothly through the reburial service for Lucas DeFrenz. The man who’d come back from the dead, claimed to be possessed by an angel, forgot what his mission was, and was murdered before he could remember. Now he lay at rest in a new coffin beside his old grave, waiting to be interred again, only this time, hopefully, for a somewhat longer stay. Erikson sneaked a look at his watch. The priest had been droning on for what seemed like ages, running through the special service for those whose rest had been disturbed, with more than usual care and emphasis, and even a certain sense of drama. Presumably because it wasn’t a service he got to use all that often, and he was determined to make the most of it. Returning from the dead wasn’t unknown in Shadows Fall, but it was still rare enough to be a novelty when it did occur.
Erikson sniffed, and shifted restlessly from foot to foot. He’d never liked funerals. Partly because they reminded him of his own mortality, but mostly because they bored the shit out of him. When you were gone, you were gone, and that should be the end of it. Erikson liked things neat and tidy, especially his own emotions. No doubt Father Callahan meant well, but the endless words of intended comfort had all started to run into each other, and Erikson just wished he’d get on with it. Erikson had never been one for standing around doing nothing; he needed to be active, to be occupied. It wasn’t as if he’d known Lucas all that well. But his investigations into the man’s second death had got absolutely nowhere, so all that was left was to attend Lucas’s funeral, and hope something interesting happened.
He glanced unobtrusively at the Mayor beside him. Rhea Frazier was dressed elegantly but conservatively in black, with a little pillbox hat and a modest veil. She looked calm and composed, but then she always did. Rhea was a great one for being in control at all times. A mouse could run up her leg and her hat could catch fire, and still it wouldn’t crack her composure. She hadn’t got around yet to explaining what she was doing at Lucas’s funeral, but Erikson was determined to get it out of her before she left. He glanced at her again, envying her cool composure in the face of mind-numbing boredom. Still, that was politicians for you; the polite smile and the hearty handshake, and a face that gave away nothing at all. He’d known Rhea for more years than he cared to remember, and he was still no nearer understanding what made her tick. The thought disturbed him. Erikson believed in understanding people; in his job, knowing which way someone would jump could make all the difference. But Rhea stood there at his side, their arms almost touching, a friend since childhood, and she might as well have been on the moon.
Erikson sighed quietly and looked about him, not even bothering to hide it. None of DeFrenz’s family had turned up for the ceremony. They’d been through the ordeal of his funeral once, and had no wish to put themselves through it again. He’d talked to them earlier, and they’d been polite but very firm. They’d said their goodbyes to the man they knew, and had no interest in the fate of the man who’d come back from the dead claiming to be someone else. One of them had sent a modest-sized wreath of flowers, but there was only the family name on it, and no note to identify the sender. It looked small and lost, standing alone by the headstone. There were no other flowers. Erikson wondered vaguely if he should have brought some. It had been a long time since he’d been obliged to attend a funeral, and he was a bit vague on the etiquette. And then it occurred to him that Rhea hadn’t brought any flowers either, and the thought calmed him. Rhea always knew the right thing to do.
Apart from the two of them and the priest, the only other observers were two gravediggers, standing a respectful distance away and passing a single cigarette back and forth between them. They were talking quietly together, their words drowned out by the priest’s loud and carrying enunciations. They were both tall and muscular, well but casually dressed, and didn’t look much like gravediggers at all, as far as Erikson was concerned. Not that he had much idea of what a gravedigger should look like, apart from a vague feeling that they ought to be leaning on shovels. As it happened, there was no sign of a shovel anywhere. Presumably such things were kept carefully out of sight until the mourners had departed, so as not to upset them. Erikson smiled sourly. It wouldn’t have bothered him if they’d turned up with a mechanical digger. He caught the priest looking at him narrowly, as though suspecting the Sheriff wasn’t paying him proper attention. Erikson stood a little straighter, put on his best official functions face, and wondered wistfully how long it was till dinner.
Derek and Clive Manderville, the gravediggers and general handymen of All Souls cemetery, and half a dozen others as well, waited patiently for the service to be over so that they could get on with their job. It was a cold day, the grey and forbidding sky promising rain and sleet later in the morning, but they knew they’d work up a sweat fast enough once they got started. It was just as hard work filling in a grave as digging it, though not many people seemed to appreciate that. There was a lot about being a gravedigger that people didn’t appreciate, as Derek often pointed out to his younger brother Clive. This was particularly true of towns like Shadows Fall (even though technically speaking there were no other towns like Shadows Fall), where you couldn’t trust a person to stay where you planted them. You go to all the trouble of digging a decent-sized hole, lay them nicely to rest and cover them over respectfully, and the next thing you knew they’d dug their way out again, and there was mud and dirt everywhere. Derek thought there ought to be a law against it, to which Clive always replied that very
probably there was, but you couldn’t expect the newly-risen dead to give much of a damn about minor inconveniences like laws. Right, Derek would say, nodding his head firmly, as though he’d just made a particularly telling point. There were times, Clive thought as he passed over their one and only cigarette, that Derek got right up his nose.
“Maybe we should have dug this one a little deeper,” said Derek, accepting the cigarette as his due. “Maybe putting another half a ton of dirt on top of him would help hold him down this time.”
“It couldn’t hurt,” said Clive.
“I wouldn’t mind, but he’s not the first one to come back on me,” said Derek aggrievedly. “That Leonard Ash was one of ours as well. You remember Ash; just over three years ago. Very nice mahogany coffin with gold scroll-work. Lovely job. Three years ago we dropped him in and covered him over, and just the other day I saw him walking around town, bold as brass. Some people just don’t appreciate what you do for them.”
“You’re not wrong,” said Clive, eyeing Rhea Frazier and wondering if she did. She looked as though she might.
Derek growled deep in his throat, and shook his head mournfully. “The way they keep coming back these days, I don’t know why they even bother nailing the lids down. They should just put in a revolving door and have done with it.”
“Are you going to hang on to that cigarette all day?”
“If you hadn’t forgotten it was your turn to bring a new pack, we wouldn’t be reduced to this. You wait your turn. At least we got this one back. What was his name again?”
“DeFrenz. Thought he was an angel.”
Derek sniffed dismissively. “Talk about delusions of grandeur. Well, I’ll tell you this, Clive, and I’ll tell you it for free. If he sits up in his bloody coffin again, I’m going to brain him with my shovel. I’m not digging another hole for him.”
Clive nodded firmly as Derek finally handed him the last inch of the cigarette. They stood together in silence for a while, listening to Father Callahan winding down the service. Lovely speaker, Father Callahan. Such inspiring words. Well; Clive assumed they were inspiring. Half of them were in Latin. But they sounded inspiring, and that was what mattered.
“Course,” said Derek, “to be fair, it’s not always the stiffs that mess up this job. Remember that time we buried an empty coffin?”
Clive winced. “Did they ever find out what happened to the body?”
“No; never did. Their own fault for having him exhumed. If they’d left well enough alone, they’d never have been any wiser, and we’d all have been a lot happier. Then there was the time we planted that guy who turned out not to be a hundred per cent actually deceased.”
“He was by the time we dug him up again.”
“My very words at the time. Didn’t go down well with the authorities. Not noted for their sense of humour, authorities.”
The service finally concluded, and Father Callahan made a series of ritual passes over the empty grave. He didn’t normally approve of introducing white magic into Church ceremonies, but the service for reinterring the risen dead was quite specific, and he knew his duty. He had a responsibility, and through him the Church, to see that the DeFrenz family were not troubled again, and that Lucas DeFrenz could sleep soundly at last. Even if he had been a Godless blasphemer with delusions of grandeur. He gestured tartly at the coffin, and white fire crawled around it, sealing it shut for all time on both the material and spiritual planes. Another gesture, and the coffin rose into the air and then slowly lowered itself into the waiting grave. It quickly disappeared from sight, rubbing gently against the walls of the hole, and Father Callahan began a series of binding and protective spells that would hold until the final Day of Judgement, or he’d know the reason why.
Sheriff Erikson realized the service as such was over, and nodded to Rhea that they could move away from the grave. They moved off a respectful distance, both their faces calm and inscrutable, as much to reassure themselves as each other. Funerals are always hard on the living; especially when the deceased’s murderer is still at large. Erikson stopped by an overgrown grave and glanced disinterestedly at the headstone. Time and the weather had worn away the stone until the inscription was barely legible.
NOT DEAD, ONLY SLEEPING.
He’s not fooling anyone but himself, thought Erikson.
“Was there something about this grave that you wanted to show me?” said Rhea.
“No,” Erikson said quickly, “But I did think we ought to have one last word about Lucas. There’s still a lot we don’t know, and I hate leaving cases unfinished. We were never even able to prove one way or the other whether he really was possessed, never mind what he was possessed by.”
Rhea nodded. “We never found out what his mission was, either. All he could remember was that it was vitally important to everyone in Shadows Fall. And when he fixed you with those cold eyes of his, it was hard to disagree. He claimed his memory had been deliberately interfered with, by persons or forces unknown, but then, he would, wouldn’t he? More and more it seems to me the man was just suffering from delusions. Coming back from the dead can’t do your sanity a lot of good at the best of times. All right, I’ll grant you he was pretty damn disturbing to be in the same room with, but that’s hardly enough to prove him an angel, and a receptacle of God’s will.”
“Maybe, if Michael really was an angel, he’ll come back in another body,” suggested Erikson, and Rhea pulled a face.
“That would be all we needed. You know, the DeFrenz family wanted Lucas’s body cremated, specifically so that it couldn’t be repossessed, but Time said No. Very loudly and very emphatically. No reason given, of course. Heaven forfend that Old Father Time should start acting in a reasonable manner, and deign to let us lesser mortals in on what the hell is going on. Mind you, if he ever does I think we should all run for cover, because it probably means the end of the world is nigh.”
They both looked across at the clockwork automaton standing elegantly by a tree, some distance away. It had already been there when they had arrived for the service, but it had made no attempt to join the ceremony. It just stood there among the trees, half hidden in shadows, with no emotions on its painted face, seemingly as lifeless as the grave before it. But its eyes were Time’s eyes, its ears Time’s ears, and just the fact that it was there was significant. Old Father Time could have watched the funeral through one of the portraits in his Gallery of Bone, but instead he had sent one of his clockwork children, the physical reminder of his presence and authority in Shadows Fall.
He knows something, thought Rhea. He wouldn’t allow Lucas’s body to be cremated, and he wants us to remember that. Why?
It could have been worse, thought Erikson. He could have sent Jack Fetch.
Rhea and the Sheriff studied the automaton for a while, but it made no move either to acknowledge or to ignore them, and eventually they turned back to watch Father Callahan perform his brisk magics over the open grave. So they never noticed the second watcher in the trees; a tall thin man dressed in black, hidden in the depths of the shadows. He watched Rhea, Erikson and Callahan through a pair of miniature binoculars, and now and again made a note on a pad. There was a handgun in a holster on his hip, and a rifle leaned against the tree beside him. There was something in his face that might have been anger or fear, or both. And also something very like disgust.
“It might be an idea to keep an eye on every death in Shadows Fall from now on,” said Rhea, with the easy assurance of one who knew she wouldn’t have to do the job herself. “Just in case Michael comes back through someone else.”
“I had already thought of that, actually,” said Erikson. “Are you and the town Council ready to authorize the extra money it’s going to take to pay for extra Deputies and round-the-clock surveillance?”
Rhea winced unhappily. “I’ll have to get back to you on that. The budget’s a little tight this year.”
“The budget’s a little tight every year,” said Erikson dryly. “Especiall
y when I want something.”
Rhea laughed softly, and Erikson had to smile. They’d fought more than their fair share of battles over money in the past, on one side or the other and sometimes both. For sheer complexity and vicious infighting, there’s nothing quite like small town politics. Except possibly piranhas in a feeding frenzy. The Sheriff and the Mayor smiled uneasily at each other, bound together by shared memories, neither of them sure if they wanted to pursue the sudden intimacy. The events of the past few weeks had brought them closer together, almost despite themselves. Erikson searched for something to say, and winced mentally as he realized the only subject he had wasn’t one likely to make things any easier between them. But it had to be said. If only because it was his job, and it might just be important.
“Speaking of the newly-returned, I saw Leonard the other day. He looked good, all things considered. Did you know he’s taken up with James Hart?”
“Yes,” said Rhea. “I know. As if things weren’t bad enough, James bloody Hart is back, and all anyone wants to talk about is the old prophecy. There must have been something else that could have happened that would have muddied the waters even more thoroughly, but I’m damned if I can think what. Sometimes I get the distinct feeling that everyone in town must have shot an albatross. These things come in threes, you know. First the murders, then James Hart’s return. What next? The entire town being wiped out by a giant bloody meteor?”
“Hush,” said Erikson. “Don’t give Fate ideas.”
“I was thinking about Leonard anyway,” said Rhea. Her voice was cool and calm and perfectly steady. “Today’s funeral reminded me of his. There weren’t any mourners there, either. Just you and me and his parents. It was wet and windy, and the florist had sent the wrong flowers. Not much of a way to say goodbye.”
“You should talk to him,” said Erikson.
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