The Everlasting

by Tim Lebbon

  He should not have been doing this. It was not his place.

  “Something’s wrong,” he said. Nina was standing behind him now, and he could feel her eyes on the back of his neck. He turned. “Nina.”

  She was sweating, wringing her hands together as if to squeeze out fear. “They’re so close!” she said.

  “You wrote them, Nina. Why can’t you touch them?”

  “Just the way things are. I don’t make the laws; I just follow them.”

  “Does that include armed robbery?”

  “I mean the real laws,” she scoffed.

  “So what happens when we find them? How do we carry them out?”

  “You can. But it’s the clue that’s more important. Your grandfather would have left something, some hint. . . .”

  “Maybe not. Maybe he never wanted the book found at all.”

  Nina stared at him without answering.

  Scott went back to work, and soon the whole metal seal was ripped away. He set to work on the wood, breathing in air heavy with dust. He wanted to cough, but he was afraid that once he started he would not be able to stop.

  The board was jammed in tight. He pushed the screwdriver through between the top of the board and the wall, encountering gritty resistance that soon crumbled when he twisted the tool from side to side. He felt like Lord Caernarvon gaining his first look into Tutankhamen’s tomb, and he held his breath for a few seconds lest this buried place also carried a curse.

  It’s Nina who’s cursed, he thought, but he wondered whether that was entirely true. Eternal life? Many would kill for that.

  Some already had.

  The wood popped out without warning, falling against his legs and scraping his knees. He stepped back and let it clatter to the floor.

  Nina moaned behind him. He turned to see what was wrong, and turned back when he saw that she was looking directly into the hole in the wall. It was totally dark in there, as though a huge space extended back beyond the new doorway.

  Scott stepped aside to allow light access, and he reached out and touched Nina’s arm, urging her aside as well. He realized that it was first time he had touched her.

  “I can’t see anything,” he said.

  “They’re there. I can feel them.”

  “Where?”

  “Deeper.”

  “We’ll need a torch.” Scott left Nina in the cellar, dashing upstairs to the pub, vaulting the bar, and looking around for a torch. He found one behind a row of dusty pint mugs, obviously unused. Perhaps it had been a locals’ place once, but modern city life had bled the pub’s personality.

  Back past the toilets, downstairs, and when he reached the basement Nina had gone.

  He paused for a moment, wondering whether he would spend the rest of his life haunted by ghosts.

  Then he heard the scrambling sounds coming from the hole in the wall. He hurried to it and shined the torch inside. It illuminated a bare earth wall three feet away, the far edge of a vertical pit. Deeper, Nina had said. And deeper she had gone.

  Scott leaned in and shined the torch down. There were metal rungs set in the wall, along with the remains of timber boards still buried in the earth here and there. Others had rotted away. This was an old place.

  Nina looked up. “They’re down here, Scott. Come down!”

  “What if I don’t want to touch them for you?”

  “Then you don’t want Helen back.”

  Who’s using who? he thought, but he shoved the idea aside. He had to believe that they were helping each other.

  He climbed through the hole and started down the metal rungs, holding the torch in his left hand. The rungs were badly rusted in places, and a few had already bent beneath Nina’s weight. He was heavier. He tried to avoid damaged rungs where he could, because he was very conscious that they had to climb back out this way.

  “I’m down,” Nina said below him. Her voice was strangely deadened by the walls of the pit.

  Did Papa really go to these lengths? he thought. Did he come here and dig? If not, what was this place before? Someone must have known about it. He can’t have just come here and found—

  “Oh, no,” Nina said.

  “What? Nina?” Scott leaned sideways and shined the torch down. He could see the top of Nina’s head, and around her a deeper darkness where the pit opened up into a wider room. At her feet, set into the earthen floor of this place, were seven stone slabs. He could see the carvings on their faces from here; the torch made shadows that danced in the grooves and cuts.

  Nina looked up at him. “Scott, I didn’t know.”

  “Didn’t know what? Is that them?”

  “Yes, they’re here. But I had no idea how far Lewis had traveled in the Wide. I had no inkling. Scott, listen to me. We have a few heartbeats before something arrives. I feel it closing. Don’t let them touch you. Got it? Whatever happens, do not . . . let them . . . touch you.” She was staring up into his eyes, her own eyes heavier and deeper than any pit could be.

  Scott descended the last few rungs, stood beside Nina, and shined the torch over the walls. He looked down at the stone tablets splayed around his feet. Considering that they supposedly contained part of the secret of eternal life, they looked fairly innocuous.

  “I don’t see what you’re talking about.”

  “You’re about to. They’re called blights.”

  And then there was something else in the pit with them, and Scott’s world opened up wider than ever before.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  broken chords

  The torch flickered out and darkness vanished. The light that came from somewhere else flooded the hole. No shadows were cast, no shades of light and dark. It was as if the air itself were on fire.

  Behind the fire came the blights.

  They grew from an impossible distance. Scott saw them coming in, and he must have been looking into the earth, through soil and rock, old sewers and other buried things. The blights were moments of nothing in the timeline of what was happening, patches of absence—no sound, no feeling, no sight or smell. They moved closer without traversing the spaces between there and here. And yet they moved as though they had a purpose.

  There were three of them. Each seemed as large as Scott’s head, or perhaps they were a mile away and the size of a house.

  “Don’t let them touch you,” Nina said again, her voice seeming to come from very far away.

  “What will they do?”

  “Just don’t.” He sensed her moving beside him, coming closer and holding on to his arm. “I can’t touch the tablets, so you have to turn them and find what Papa left here for you.”

  The blights closed in and the hole grew larger.

  “What are those things?”

  “Death.”

  Scott turned to look at Nina, but she was staring down at her feet, shaking, sweat dripping from her nose and splashing clean, dark spots on the ancient stone tablets. She was standing on her toes between two of them, muscles in her calves and ankles straining as she tried not to touch the stone.

  What happens if she does? Scott wondered.

  Something brushed past his head, a cool breath on his ear, and the hairs on the back of his neck stood up. He spun around and saw a blight fading away before him, drifting into the wall of the pit.

  I can see through the walls. I can see farther. In the distances around him there was mist and sunlight, darkness and snow, and other places bathing in weather he could not really understand. Another blight closed in and hovered before him. He stared into it, seeing nothing. Not just darkness, but an absence, a void in his wider view of the world. It was as though a piece of reality had yet to be sketched in, or had been rubbed out altogether.

  Nina threw a punch at the blight. Her fist disappeared and came out the other side, and the blight moved back slightly.

  “You touched it!”

  “I’m immortal.”

  But Scott could see the pain on Nina’s face. Her skin turned gray and her eyeslids droop
ed, and he slapped her across the face. “Please stay with me. I’m scared! I don’t know what to do.”

  “Do as I said. Search. And try not to let them touch you.”

  Scott knelt down and felt the massiveness of space moving around him. It dizzied him for a moment, and he reached out on both sides to steady himself. His left hand met dirt, but his right hand touched stone. Even without looking he could feel the etchings of ancient words of wisdom and magic against his fingertips. Here’s immortality, he thought. Part of it, at least. Here it is.

  Something screamed. He looked up, terrified that it was Nina, but she was still standing astride one of the stone tablets, apparently throwing punches at the air. The scream rose in volume and pitch.

  Scott looked back down at the stone tablets. He worked his fingers into the soil beside one and started to lift.

  Something passed by close to his face, and Nina’s knee knocked against his head. This time he did not bother looking up.

  The stone lifted, and from beneath came a waft of coolness. Trapped breath? Scott thought. Papa’s trapped breath? He inhaled but smelled no tobacco or coffee.

  The tablet was about the size of a road atlas, and a couple of inches thick. It was heavy, but its weight gave comfort, while all around the air seemed to be lighter than ever, the basics of distance and perspective skewed.

  The scream was coming from the blights.

  “They’re taking form!” Nina shouted.

  “I thought they were already here!”

  “Not even close . . . those are just their shadows. Keep looking, Scott! You don’t have very long.”

  There was nothing beneath the stone except for soil, packed hard and smoothed over three decades. Papa was the last one to touch this, and Scott took some comfort in that as the world came apart around him. He wiped at the underside of the slab, saw nothing there, lowered it back to the ground. He crawled across it to the next tablet and blew dust from its surface.

  The carvings did not resemble any sort of language he knew. There were shapes in there that could have been insectoid, swirls and curlicues that may have formed letters, and in places the stone had been raised instead of lowered, as though it was the space around the carvings that really meant something. Some of it reminded him of shapes in the letter, but much more was unseen. I should take these, he thought. These are important.

  “Scott!” Nina shouted. He looked up at her and she looked so old. Her dark hair was gray . . . or perhaps the strange light was making it look that way. Shadows danced on her face and gave her wrinkles, even though the light was constant. “Hurry!”

  He almost looked around at what was scaring her, but somehow he turned his attention back to the ground. Papa had told him about deep breathing and concentration—meditation on the move, he’d called it—and Scott tried that now. He closed his eyes for a few seconds and thought of the one safe place he had always known: the presence of his grandfather. Papa smiled at him, and Scott kept that moment in his mind, breathing deeply, opening his eyes, and feeling the old man’s influence guiding his hand toward a stone tablet just out of reach.

  He crawled forward, away from Nina, and stretched out to touch the stone farthest away. It felt just as cold as the first, just as old, but when he blew dust from its surface he knew that something was different. There were only three symbols carved there. And though the representation of people seemed strange—they were too tall, their limbs too long to be human—it was clear that it was a set of instructions.

  “Don’t concern yourself,” Nina said in his ear. “Just find the clue.” There was no threat in her voice, yet she had bent down to shout at him. Taking her attention from the blights. Offering her back to those things that she had called death.

  Scott worked the fingers of both hands beneath the stone and heaved.

  The train-scream came in again, louder than before. He could not help but look up, and what he saw froze the moment and turned it into forever.

  The blights had come. Their shadows were still there, attached to three tall, multilimbed things that stood swaying at the fringes of where the pit should have been. Beyond them, strange landscapes faded into infinity. Shadows floated in the distance, wraiths and the hints of wraiths. Some had faces and traces of limbs, but most were too pale and faded to resemble anything more than a shaped drift of mist.

  “All those people,” Scott said, and the first of the blights came at him.

  Nina stepped before it, arms raised, hands flat in a warding-off gesture. “He’s not for you,” she said. Her voice was strange, as though it had risen from her whole body, not just her mouth. She shimmered before him.

  The blight’s many limbs whipped at the air, but none seemed to touch Nina. She stood solid between it and Scott, and one fierce look over her shoulder told him how close he was to death.

  Don’t let them touch you, she had warned.

  He turned the stone over, and there, pressed into the soil beneath it, was something he recognized instantly: one of his grandfather’s old metal tobacco tins.

  A flood of recollection hit him, and a memory of intense love as he grabbed the box. “Papa,” he said, and smiled. Touching the tin felt like completing a small circle in the large course of his life.

  “Scott!” Nina said. And there was something about her voice . . .

  Scott let the tablet drop and stood, slipping the box into his back pocket.

  “That’ll be mine,” a voice said, and Scott knew him.

  “Fuck you.” He backed away from Nina and the blight, glancing around to place the others, and Lewis hung above him, floating horizontally as though reclined on a bed of air.

  “I’ll have it, Scott. Papa would have wanted it that way.”

  “Where is my wife?”

  “Not far away from me,” Lewis said. He smiled a comforting old-man’s smile. “But an infinity away from you. And there she’ll stay, confused and sad and afraid, until you hand over to me what is rightfully mine.”

  A blight closed in on Scott’s left, another on his right. Their limbs flickered at the air like tongues of negative flame, and he could not be sure how close they were, nor how far away.

  “Papa killed you to keep you from this. Why would I be so keen to hand it over?”

  “Because your wife is alive in a place of the dead.”

  “Papa knew what he was doing.”

  “Helen will not die, Scott. I’ll never kill her. There’s far, far worse that I can do.”

  “Don’t listen to him, Scott!” Nina was grappling with the blight and staring at the other two. Where its tendrils touched her, her skin was almost white, flaking, peeling away from her flesh like curled leaves. She looked at Scott and pleaded with her eyes, but he really had no idea what was happening.

  “Don’t listen to her!” Lewis said.

  “Fuck you,” Scott said again. “I’m alive, and there’s nothing—”

  A blight moved in, reaching for him.

  Nina screamed.

  There was movement all around, things clashing above and below, shadows where there should have been none, and an impression of pure violence that Scott had never before experienced. This was primal fury, not just anger. He closed his eyes and fell. He seemed to fall a very long way, and the more time passed, the less inclined he was to open his eyes. Above him he sensed the real things of the world receding, held within a small, neat box that he had come to know as life. There was waking and sleeping, walking and eating, loving and being loved, and hardly a moment spent wondering. There were reality TV shows, car ads and celebrity news. There were the trivial concerns of everyday life blown out of all proportion, worries over spilled milk while another hundred children died from starvation in Africa. And rarely ever any real wonder.

  There went life. And the farther away it was, the more pitiful it all seemed.

  Below him—the way he was falling—Scott sensed nothing. But not because there was nothing there. He knew that he was approaching some wider truth, skirt
ing below the thin veil of his existence and discovering the first grainy visions of reality.

  He sensed nothing, because as yet he had no frame of reference.

  There’s Nina, he thought, but she was only a woman who had lived forever. There were greater wonders ahead.

  There were the blights, but they were merely wayward stains of death drifting to and fro at Lewis’s command.

  There was Lewis. The half ghost of a dead old man—an evil man, if what Scott had seen and heard was to be believed.

  And there were Papa and Helen, and with them came true love. Helen was alive, and he had no doubt at all that he would see her again, but . . .

  “There’s always Papa,” he whispered. His voice was loud, because suddenly everything else was silence.

  When he hit the ground he felt the metal box in his back pocket. I still have it. Lewis hasn’t got it. I still have it.

  Something cold and final fell across his arm and chest.

  Helen . . .

  More violence, things moving too quickly for him to comprehend.

  Helen . . . ?

  Scott went elsewhere. Papa came for him, an old man walking out of memory and holding his hand. Together they left a dark, dangerous place somewhere in the fields and found themselves on a country lane. All the best memories were here waiting for him. They picked blackberries until their fingers were purple, built a dam across a stream and packed it with mud, collected frog spawn and waited for the tadpoles to hatch, found empty bird eggs and placed their delicate shells in a shoe box stuffed with tissue. Papa never spoke, but Scott knew that he was there. He could feel him.

  Papa was always there.

  Someone was panting close by. Their breath was fast and light, the result of intense physical exertion. Scott tried to open his eyes, but when he did there was nothing more to see. Darkness crowded in. He listened for other sounds—the screams of the dying, perhaps, or the lost moans of the recently dead. But there was the panting, and nothing else.