by Tim Lebbon
Then feeling began to return. Cool soil at his back, moisture seeping through his trousers and shirt and cooling his skin. Something pressing into him, a hard shape in his back pocket.
A hand touching his face.
“Scott, I’m so sorry.”
He opened his mouth to speak but could only utter a groan. His throat was parched, and when he coughed it felt as though he were gargling with broken glass.
That glass I saw, scattered across the pavement. Such detail. She told me it was because I was seeing more. Now I see nothing.
“Nothing,” he said.
“Scott?” The panting lessened and the voice came closer. “Wake up, now. Come on!” Something pushed his head to one side. Again, and this time he felt the sting of the slap.
Darkness receded, replaced by a circle of weak light directly above him. Into that circle moved a face.
“Helen?”
“Nina. How do you feel?”
“Weak. Weird. Where are those things?”
“Gone. I sent them away.”
“Lewis?”
“Went with them. But . . .” The silhouette of her head shook slightly; then Scott felt hands beneath his arms, lifting.
He pushed with his hands. Both of them rested on cool, carved stone, and he remembered where he was.
“I still have it,” he said. “The thing Papa left. The clue.”
“Good. But Scott . . .”
“I went somewhere,” he said. “I fell. And everything felt . . . different.”
“Everything is.”
“Am I somewhere else? Are we in the Wide?”
“Not right now, no.” She sounded weak and sad, and neither suited her.
“What is it?” he asked.
“Let’s get you out of here.” She lifted him to his feet, and he swayed there for a while, glad that Nina was still holding his arms. Where is up and where is down? he thought. Which way did I fall? He looked up at the light and realized it was the weak cellar light shining through the doorway.
“How long have we been down here?”
“Long enough. We should go up.”
“There’s something you’re not telling me, Nina.”
“Let’s get out of this pit.”
“Is it Helen? Is it my wife?”
“Helen’s fine,” she said. “Lewis has no reason to hurt her, so long as you still have what you have. She’s his insurance.”
“That’s comforting.”
“Sorry. But his only interest in her is to get to you.”
“But he did get to me. He was there, ready to take what he wanted, and then . . . such violence. It makes me feel sick just remembering it, and I didn’t even really see . . .” He remembered something cold touching down across his chest and arm. “What happened?”
She nudged him toward the rungs set in the wall. “Up. I’ll climb behind you, push if you need it.”
“I feel fine.”
Nina was silent. Scott thought she looked away, but the light down here was poor, and he could not be sure.
He climbed, using the rusted rungs that bent beneath his hands because he did not trust himself to reach higher. He’d said that he felt fine, but he did not. Not at all. He felt weak and sick, and the farther he rose from the pit the more something seemed to stink. His vision swam, and the memory of that long fall was never far away. He wondered just what it was he was climbing toward.
Nina was behind him, and as he reached the hole in the wall she shoved him up and out, following with her usual grace.
Scott lay on the floor of the beer cellar, inhaling the stale fumes of spilled ale. He was breathing hard. His right arm hurt like hell, and his chest felt . . . light. Hollow.
“Nina . . .”
“Scott, one of the blights touched you. Only for a moment, but I couldn’t stop it. I’m sorry.”
“What do you mean? What does that mean?”
“Your arm and the top right part of your chest . . . they’re dead. The flesh there is rotting, and though blood still flows, it’s slowly being poisoned.”
“I’m dying?”
“Yes.”
Scott was silent for a while. He didn’t feel like he was dying. He was weak and dizzy, but . . . What was that smell? That’s me, he thought. That’s my flesh starting to rot.
“How long?”
Nina sat on the floor beside him and took his right hand. “Not too long,” she said. “But listen, Scott, there’s hope. There’s someone I could take you to see. Someone else like me, one of the other immortals. He took a very different path, but he might know how to help you. Or at least give you more time.”
“To get Helen back.”
Nina looked away. “Yes, to do that.”
Scott sat up and took his hand from hers. “You fought the blights?”
“I sent them back. But I wasn’t ready to do it. I didn’t know Lewis had gone so far into the Wide and come back, and he’s much stronger than I could have believed. He’s very close to what he wants. And that’s why there’s no way he can have the rest of the book. It’s such a fine balance. . . . If we don’t find the book and destroy it, he could have it soon. If we do find it, he could get it before it is destroyed.” She sat back against the wall and closed her eyes. “And even being so near makes me sick.”
“You want me to destroy it after you’ve found out how to die.”
“After, yes.”
“But I might die soon. I might be gone. I’ll be one of those things, those wraiths that Lewis seems to surround himself with.”
“I promise, Scott, that if that happens I’ll make sure you go the way your Papa went. All the way. I’d never see you tortured.”
“Heaven?”
Nina shrugged and looked away.
Scott stared at the opposite wall, trying to see through, as he had when the Wide was upon him. “I saw so much,” he said.
Nina nodded. “You did. And you’ll find it’s a different world up there now.” She came to him and helped him up, and together they climbed the stone steps back into the pub. He sat at one of the tables and Nina went behind the bar. She poured two generous glasses of single-malt and returned to the table. By the time she sat down most of her drink had gone.
“Scott—”
“I’ll go back down.”
“You don’t have to.”
“We can’t just leave them, can we? And you say you can’t touch them.”
“You doubt me?”
“No, no.” He shook his head, but he could not convince himself that easily. There’s so much she hasn’t told me.
“You can give me what you found, if you like.”
Scott’s hand went around to the box in his back pocket. He had not opened it yet, and he had no idea what was inside. “You could run.”
“If I wanted to do that, I’d just take it off you anyway.” She stood and went to the bar to refill her drink.
Scott sipped his whiskey and relished the warmth coursing down through his body. “You said things would be different now that I saw . . . whatever I saw down there.”
Nina glanced back at Scott, then nodded toward the corner of the pub.
There was an old man. He seemed completely unaware of their presence. A beer glass stood before him, half-empty, and as Scott watched he brought it to his mouth and took a long drink. When the glass touched the table again the level had not changed.
“Ghost.”
Nina nodded. “A lost soul.”
“We’re in the Wide right now.”
“At its very edge, yes. So go back down for me, Scott. Destroy what’s there. Then we have to follow Papa’s clue to the rest of the book.”
Scott stood and walked slowly across the pub. His arm ached, and the right side of his chest felt numb. I’m dying, he thought. But she won’t let me be like him. The old man raised his drink again, looking around the pub and seeing nothing that Scott could see. Memories, perhaps. Or visions he could never touch again.
Scott took
the tobacco box from his pocket and placed it carefully on the bar. “How do you know I’ll be safe down there?”
“Lewis finds it difficult coming through. He’ll be weak. I sent him back weaker.”
“You fought?”
“We fought.”
Scott nodded. “I’ll be back up in a few minutes,” he said.
“Make sure they can never be put back together. Make them dust.”
He found what he wanted in the cellar: a lump hammer, used to wedge or unwedge barrels from the old racks. And he found something else he’d been hoping for as well: a pile of old invoices. They were printed on one side only, folded and shoved out of the way on a high shelf. Beside them was the stub of a pencil.
Scott took them all down.
He took a rubbing from each stone tablet. He pressed lightly on the paper, taking care not to drive the pencil right through where it passed across dips and scrapes in the stone. The light was still poor down in the pit, but good enough to see that the rubbings had been quite successful.
He and Papa had used to go to the village church with a ream of paper and a handful of charcoal. They’d take rubbings from some of the interesting headstones, and inside the church they had found an old stone column with strange markings circling it, curling counterclockwise from the floor up. They took impressions of these, too, and for a while Papa had persuaded Scott that he’d been studying them every evening, and he believed them to be the work of the Knights Templar. The Grail could well be here, he had told Scott, a wonder of the world, buried beneath our feet as we’re taking impressions of old headstones. Scott had been enraptured. Papa had soon admitted that he did not really know what those strange carvings meant, and Scott had found that even more fascinating. They could mean anything, he said. They probably do, Papa had replied.
“Look what I have, Papa,” he said, holding up the final piece of paper. “I don’t know why, but something like this can’t just be destroyed. There’s so much I don’t know about it. Maybe I’ll find out, given time.”
Then he went to work breaking up the stone tablets.
With the first strike of the hammer, the first slab broke into three large pieces. He gasped and held his breath. What have I done? The pit remained gloomy, no strange light intruded, and the shadows did not move. Scott’s shoulder was hurting, though he could barely feel his right arm. He looked at his hand and tried to move his fingers. They shifted only slightly.
“I’m dying, and I’m destroying part of the Chord of Souls. I’m shunning immortality.” But then there were the sheets of paper folded into his back pocket, replacing the feel of the metal tobacco box that had been there so briefly. And somehow, that felt right.
He smashed the other stones into smaller pieces, broke them down again, the hammer rising and falling, rising and falling. Nina must have been able to hear from where she sat up there in the bar. He wondered what she was thinking as she listened to him destroying something she had carved so many years ago. How long, I wonder? Hundreds of years? Thousands? Tens of thousands? How old is she, really?
When the stones were broken into shards and dust he mixed the mess together, kicking it around the base of the pit and stomping it into the soil. He smashed up the few remaining larger pieces and then had to sit down, dizziness overcoming him. He closed his eyes and dropped the hammer, and sweat ran onto his eyelids. Helen used to kiss him there like that; butterfly kisses, she called them. Tears joined the sweat on his face.
“I have no idea what’s going on, angel, but I promise I’ll get you back.”
On the way back up he noticed a deeper shadow hunched in the corner of the beer cellar. Looking closer, he made out the ghostly pale echo of a man. The ghost looked up at him pleadingly, but Scott did not know what it wanted, and he left it on its own.
He heard the sound of something clinking against glass as he went back into the bar. Nina looked up and offered him a weak smile.
“Is it done?”
“Yes, all done.” As he walked he could feel the paper in his pocket.
“Papa left you this. He was very clever. I assume no one else but you would know the significance.” Nina looked down at the table, where she was gently tapping her whiskey glass with a small bronze skull key ring.
“Oh, my God!” Scott could not help blurting out. “I’d forgotten all about that!” On the day Papa died Scott had realized that his key ring was missing. Papa had bought it for him several years before, a secret memento of one of their long, ongoing discussions. They’d spent time reading about the skulls and catching references to them in obscure TV programs, and Scott had always found them fascinating.
Wonder what they’ve got to scream about so much? Papa used to say.
Perhaps now Scott would find out.
“So you know what this is,” Nina said.
“Yes,” Scott said. “And I know where it’s sending me. Shall we go?”
Nina looked desperate to sit him down and talk, but for the first time Scott began to feel some semblance of control. Ever since Helen had been taken away by Lewis, he had been stumbling blindly along, Nina leading the way as though he were an obedient dog. Now, with flesh dying on his bones and his blood turning to poison, he knew something that Nina did not.
“Where are we going?” Nina asked.
“To get Helen back.” Scott strode to the front door.
It opened onto another world.
CHAPTER SIX
a cool, gray day
There were ghosts everywhere. On the pavement directly in front of the pub lay an old woman, arms stretched up for help that would never come. People walked on her. Through her. Scott could see pain on her face, but it was old pain.
In the road several wraiths walked, crawled, or rolled from one place to another. Once their brief movements ended they would return to their starting places again, flickering back like bad TV pictures. One of them launched high into the air, spinning and losing parts of himself to a cool, gray day long ago. He was dressed as a soldier from the Second World War. Scott wondered how terrible it must have been to survive that conflict, only to be run over on his way home to his family.
Across the road, ghosts seemed to mill at the castle walls like windblown leaves. Some of them described very defined routes, while others wandered here and there with no apparent pattern or reason. In places several of them overlapped, existing within one another.
Nobody else saw them. A young couple was sitting on the grass verge below the castle’s wall—almost exactly where he and Nina had sat before breaking into the Mason’s Vaults—and as they ate their baguettes, the image of a child walked over the boy’s legs and through the girl’s torso and head. There was no sign that the girl felt anything at all. She smiled at what the boy was saying between mouthfuls, watched the traffic, finished her baguette, and looked up at the sun.
The child turned and walked back, emerging from the girl like her own tired soul taking leave.
“We should move from the doorway,” Nina said. She touched Scott’s back and pushed gently, urging him out into the street.
“Do you see this all the time?” he asked.
“You learn to ignore it.”
“How can you ignore it?” Scott sidled sideways to avoid the old woman on the pavement. His feet crunched through the glass spilled from the pub’s menu board, and he leaned back against the wall.
“Do you worry about stepping on the cracks in the pavement? Stepping on shadow or sunlight?”
“No.”
“Same thing.” Nina crossed the pavement and stood inside the old woman.
Scott cringed.
“They can’t feel it, Scott. Especially ones like this, repeating the same moment again and again. She’s just an old echo, a shred of a lost soul. And the others . . . even if they do see us, we can’t interact with them, nor they us.”
“There were some in my garden,” he said.
Nina nodded and frowned. “Yes, Lewis had guided them there. To disturb you.�
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“It worked. But how can he interact with them?”
Nina stared at him without answering.
“You don’t know?”
She shrugged.
“But you’re immortal. You’ve lived forever!”
“I’ve lived for a very long time, Scott. But I don’t know everything. If I did . . .”
“You’d have no need of me.”
“Right.”
Scott looked down at his arm and chest. Both were covered, and he was suddenly terrified of opening his shirt and seeing what he had become. He touched his shirt cuff, opened the button, and rolled the sleeve slightly up his arm. His wrist was pale and he could see the veins, crossed like motorways on a road map. Farther up the skin began to turn darker, and when he reached his elbow it suddenly became dark as burned sausage. He touched it with one fingertip. It was cold, and too soft.
Nina looked at him with what could have been sympathy.
“How long do I have?” he asked.
She shook her head. “I don’t know. But we need to go where I said, to see the man I mentioned.”
“Another immortal. What’s his name?”
“He has no name. We just call him Old Man.” She smiled. Then, as a ghost passed between her and Scott, she laughed.
“Old Man?”
“What, you think immortals don’t need a sense of humor?”
They walked past the castle and entered the park, and Scott knew that he would never get used to seeing so many ghosts. “What must it be like on old battlefields?” he said. “Or in hospitals?” Nina did not answer, and he supposed it was because the answer was obvious.
They walked across the park and Nina guided them toward a copse of trees. A man hung in midair, swinging from a rope tied to a tree long gone from the here and now. His face was swollen and black, but, like a picture, his eyes seemed to follow Scott as he walked by.
“In here,” Nina said.
“This is where Old Man lives?”
“In a park? Don’t be soft. No, this is where we’ll leave to go to him.”
