by Tim Lebbon
But the doubt was there. Planted, it would require little to urge it to sprout and grow. She will slay you. Lose her. Those words, simple and chilling, replayed themselves over and over in his mind as he drove. As time went on, the voice whispering them sounded more and more earnest.
“I’m so tired,” Nina said. Neither of them had spoken for a while, and the sound of the road was becoming soporific.
Scott glanced across and saw that she was crying. He had never seen that before—had not thought it possible—and it shocked him. He’d come to believe that she was immune to such displays.
“We could be close to the end,” Scott said.
Nina nodded. “We could be. Or maybe not.”
“Which number am I?”
“What?” Nina sat up straighter, but she did not look across at him.
“How many other people have you used to help you? Mortals, helping an immortal seeking death. How many?”
“Three,” she said.
“In all that time?”
“Yes. Three whom I got to know, and who claimed to know where the Chord of Souls was kept.”
“What happened to them?”
“They died.”
Silence for a while, and then Nina sniffed. Wiped her eyes. Sobbed.
Scott slowed and drifted over toward the hard shoulder.
“Don’t stop,” Nina said. “Keep going. I’m fine.” She wiped her eyes again and sat up straighter, and when he looked over Scott could see that her tears had already ceased.
“What are you sad about?” he asked.
“I’m beyond sad. Like I said, I’m so tired. I’m craving death more and more, and the closer we get to the book, the more I’m eager to end things. I had to learn patience quickly, to begin with. Took on tasks that would take a long time, just to pass the time. I once walked from Constantinople to Paris, and at every town I stopped to collect a wound. Sometimes I did it myself in whatever room or hovel I slept in for the night. Other times I invited someone to give me a scar, entertaining them with my willingness to take the knife or sword, the whip or spike. And on occasion I picked a fight. Lost on purpose. Welcomed the agony of what should have been death. It was my journey of scars.”
“So where are they?”
“Faded, with time. I used to renew them to begin with, but then I left them to disappear.”
“Is it because this is your last journey?” he said softly. He was remembering the morning’s beautiful sunrise, and wondering what Nina must have thought of it.
“Fuck, no. I don’t give a shit. If you did tell me where this place was, I’d try to get us there through the Wide. I’ve no desire to say good-bye to the world, Scott. I’ve been in it far too long to miss it.” She laughed bitterly, then rested her head back and closed her eyes.
“If I told you . . .” he said, but he could not finish.
The ghosts saw to that.
“Scott, drive on.”
“No!”
“They’re ghosts.”
“But look at them!”
Tires screeched, the car slewed to the right, horns sounded behind and around them as startled drivers braked and fought to maintain control of their own vehicles. As far as everyone else was concerned, Scott had slammed on his brakes for no reason. The drivers would be cursing him, hating him already, and perhaps some were even now imagining how they would make it from their crashed cars, find him, and punch him down. You risked my family, you lunatic. . . . You fucking idiot! . . . What the hell do you think you’re playing at? . . .
“Look at them,” he said again, because he could not tear his eyes from the forest of ghosts spanning the motorway. There were hundreds of them, all staring directly at him, and as some of their mouths fell open, the cry of burning brakes gave them voice.
“Scott!” Nina shouted, but it was already far too late.
“As long as you’re in control of your own destiny, you’re responsible,” Papa says.
Scott is climbing a tree. It’s the sort of thing his father would frown upon—he’d tell him to come down before he hurt himself—but Papa allows him to carry on. There’s little that Papa won’t let Scott try, and once or twice the thirteen-year-old has been slightly perturbed by this. They once sat in the woods drinking cider, and when Papa carried Scott home later that afternoon, Scott remembered only flashes of the argument that erupted between his parents and grandparent. Mostly he recalled only shouting, but somewhere in there was Papa’s soft, enthralling voice, trying to explain, trying to give reasons.
“Can I go higher?”
“Don’t know; can you?”
Scott looks up. The branches grow closer together up here, and they’re thinner, and he’s sure he can feel the actual trunk of the tree bending slightly as he moves. But there’s one route he can see, and at its end is an old bird’s nest. No treasure is worth anything without trials to reach it. “Think so,” he says.
“Just remember,” Papa says, “I’m only watching. It’s you who has control. If I weren’t here right now, everything would be the same. If I vanished from the world and left you alone forever, the moments between my vanishing and you coming down from there wouldn’t change. You’re climbing, you’re holding on, and you’re the one in control.”
“I’m going a bit higher,” Scott says. He doesn’t like Papa talking about not being here. He knows that one day that will be the case—Papa is growing older, after all, though in Scott’s memory he has always looked the same—but the thought of a world without Papa is unbearable.
Scott grabs a branch and angrily hauls himself higher.
The branch breaks. He falls.
“Scott!” Papa’s voice is concerned, but there’s also something else there: excitement.
Scott slips down and bangs from branch to branch, then manages to gain a handhold again. There was no risk of his falling all the way to the ground, not really. But his heart is thumping and adrenaline flows, and there’s a part of him that is thrilled at what just happened. I had control, he thinks, and I lost it and found it again. I was responsible.
“I’m okay!” he shouts. He turns to look down at Papa, and the old man is shading his eyes from the sun as he looks up, grinning from ear to ear. “I’m going back up.”
Scott climbs higher than he had intended. He goes right to the top. By the time he reaches the ground again he’s slipped twice more, and his trousers are torn, and there’s a cut on his calf that needs stitching, though he hides it from his parents and it eventually heals into an ugly scar.
Usually the memory stops here, but on the way home now Papa says to Scott, “I’ve only ever lost control once. I slipped and stumbled, but I quickly started putting things right, and now if you’ll help me we can finish this thing together.” In the memory he turns around and Papa is not talking, but his voice is stronger—and closer—than it has ever been before.
“You can’t die!” Nina screamed, and Scott thought, How nice of her to be so concerned.
He struggled to keep the car straight, just as he tried to take his foot from the brake. But he could do neither. Instinct said, You can’t just run those people down, while good sense screamed at him, They’re ghosts! They’re dead already! By the time he tried to separate those disparate voices the car started to spin, the tires shredded, the wheels threw up a gush of sparks and pained squeals, and the car flipped over onto its roof.
Something struck them and set them spinning. Scott’s senses were attacked and, because everything was so overpowering, they felt almost dulled by the onslaught. The noise the heat the taste of burned rubber the feeling of his body being buffeted the sense of metal crunching as something else hit them arrested the spin and started the car rolling . . .
Something grabbed Scott. Hands clawed into his shoulders and neck, holding on tightly, and even through the chaotic movement of the crash he felt them pulling. He opened his eyes and saw Nina before him, kneeling astride his braced legs with arms outstretched, eyes slitted almost closed, mouth w
orking as she muttered something he could not hear. She appeared immune to the crazy forces the car was subjected to, and though her hair rose and swayed manically, her body remained still and in control.
She’s in control, Scott thought. She’s responsible.
His surroundings changed quickly. The movement calmed, the noise and smell withdrew, and somewhere in the distance there was an explosion of fire, heat, and noise that should have been much louder.
When all movement and noise and terror ceased, Scott opened his eyes. There was a man standing in front of him. One side of his face was bruised black, and his shoulder drooped at an odd angle, and for a second Scott thought he was a victim of the crash. Then he opened his mouth and only silence came out, and Scott knew he was a ghost.
He sat up and looked around. He’d obviously been thrown from the car. He was sitting on a steep bank, and the car was farther down in the ditch, steam gushing from its ruptured front end. It curled above road level, and a breeze dispersed it to the atmosphere.
There was a small fire below the car, flaring now and then when gasoline dripped from somewhere and gave it more fuel.
Nina, Scott wanted to say, but nothing came from his mouth. He realized that he could not hear anything.
More wraiths appeared around him, joining the man in his blank-eyed stare. There was a woman with a burned face wearing charred yellow dungarees, a teenage girl holding a little boy’s hand, a man carrying something red on his back, an old woman using two sticks to stand upright on the stumps where her feet should have been . . . they all came to him, talking silently and ignoring the chaos of the accident. These were the people he had braked to avoid, these and hundreds more. These were the ghosts.
He tried to ask what they wanted, but he could not speak. He could not even hear the blood in his ears, the click of his throat, the hiss of breath forcing in and out of his bloodied nose.
He watched their faces and tried to read what they were trying to say in the movements of their mouths, the hopelessness in their eyes. Help me, the young boy seemed to mutter. Only you can help, the old woman mimed. Save me, the woman with the burned face said, and Scott looked away because all of these were wrong. He was seeing words that would not be spoken, and reading into them impossible ideas. He closed his eyes and leaned forward, but something touched his eyelids and forced them open again.
The young boy was kneeling before him. The teenage girl—his sister?—stood behind the boy, hands on his shoulders. He’d used his thumbs to lift Scott’s eyelids.
The boy spoke, and somewhere in the distance Scott heard the faint breeze of his voice. Don’t just leave us here, it said. The boy started to cry, and when he leaned back into his sister’s embrace, Scott’s eyes stayed open.
He held out his hands, shook his head, and tried to ask them what he could do. His voice was still absent, yet his actions seemed to make sense. The ghosts—and there were more joining them every minute—all raised their arms and pointed to the southwest. They said two words, and in their unity their voices became audible: Screaming skulls.
There was a disturbance farther back in the crowd. The ghosts swayed and scattered and the disturbance rushed closer, barging through them as though they were little more than forgotten last breaths.
Scott cringed back, trying to claw his way up the bank, pushing with his feet, and remembering the image of Lewis hovering above him while the blights formed in the impossible distance. “Get away from me!” he shouted, and his voice was shockingly loud as it burst through the bubble of silence.
More ghosts faded, merging with the air like steam from the crashed car.
Nina came up the hillside, looking around at the ghosts, up at the sky, and then straight ahead at Scott. She was covered in blood. A slab of her scalp had been torn off, one eye socket had shattered and was leaking down across her face, but even as she climbed closer Scott could see that strange reversal already beginning in her wounds.
She reached Scott and held out her hand. “Quickly!” she said.
“What’s happening?”
“Lewis.” She grabbed Scott’s hand and started hauling him up the bank, but his hand slipped from hers. There was so much blood.
“Nina . . .”
“I’m fine.” She glanced back at him and her eye socket was already scabbing over, the deformed bone re-forming. “Now come on!” She pulled again, he crawled behind her, and even though she had strength he had not even guessed at, still he froze when he saw what he had done.
After the brief silence following the crash—induced by shock, perhaps, or maybe the ghosts had lured him closer to the Wide for a time—the noise was tremendous. Most of it was caused by the fire. A truck transporting live chickens had plowed into a builder’s truck, and some sort of gas canister must have exploded. The truck was an inferno, and the fire had leaped to the truck as well. Chickens darted here and there, flaming across the road before the fire made them still, flapping uselessly at the air, screeching as they died and cooked. The smell was sickeningly mouthwatering, and Scott closed his eyes. Could be more than chicken flesh cooking here, he thought.
People were shouting. Someone screamed. Drivers from the other lanes had stopped and were leaping the central barrier, dashing to the several crashed cars to help. One of the vehicles was dangerously close to the burning truck, paint blistering and windshield shattering from the heat as Scott watched. Its twisted door had already been kicked open, and a man stood on the hard shoulder with his wife and two children, watching their car begin to burn.
“I did this,” Scott said.
“You okay?” A man ran across the road to them, glancing at Nina’s wounds and cringing as he saw what was left of her eye.
“Fine,” she said. “Scott . . . ?” She tugged at his hand, but he would not move. How can I leave all this? he thought.
“You don’t look okay,” the man said, face growing pale. “Come over here, sit down, the services will be here—”
“I’m fine!” Nina said again. She put her hand to her scalp, her face, and looked at the blood. “It’s slowing already.”
“You’re in shock, love,” the man said. He looked terrified, but he was a good man trying to help. “I saw this type of thing on TV once; the shock’s protecting you, but you really need to sit down and—”
“You’ll be in shock soon,” Nina said quietly. Scott could not see how she was looking at the man, but he saw the sudden doubt in his eyes. Doesn’t really know what he’s seeing here, Scott thought. He’ll remember this forever.
The man turned and left, glancing back once.
“He only wanted to help,” Scott said.
“We need to go.”
“Where? How?”
“Anywhere away from here. Can’t you feel it? Don’t you sense things changing?” She spit her impatience.
Scott felt nothing. Only the shock of the crash, the shame at seeing the pain in those ghosts’ eyes.
And then he saw the body lying a few steps from the burning truck, its charred yellow dungarees, and he would have screamed if Nina had not tugged him hard.
I caused this! he wanted to shout. I killed her.
He followed Nina, terrified now of looking back. Afraid that he’d see more bodies lying in the road or crushed in their overturned cars. A girl and her brother. An old woman. Others.
“It’s closer, much closer,” Nina said. “There’s someone strong with him. Someone who can lift the veil and keep it lifted. It’s building. Can’t you feel it?”
And now he could. The air seemed to be vibrating, thrumming against his eardrums and urging his hair to stand on end. His balls shivered and crawled.
They ran on ahead of the accident, passing stopped cars and seeing the surprised expressions of those inside and mingling on the road.
They see Nina, and perhaps some of them know she should be dead.
“We need a car,” Nina said.
“Can you just drive from this?”
She glanced b
ack and shrugged. Blood still dribbled down her face, but the wounds were closing now, the rent in her scalp already covered with fresh skin and sprouting a fine fuzz of new hair.
“You don’t know?” he asked.
“I don’t know everything.” She stopped beside a silver Mondeo. Its door was open, engine running, driver’s seat empty. “Get in.”
“We can’t just—”
“It’s only a car.”
“I’m not on about stealing. I’m on about leaving. I caused all that.” He glanced back at the accident, his eyes drawn straight to the yellow-dressed corpse. I caused that.
“No, you didn’t,” Nina said. “The ghosts did. And whoever drove them. Not you.” She opened the passenger door and nudged Scott, urging him to get inside.
A man standing beside another car turned around. “Hey!”
“Fuck off,” Nina said.
“But that’s my—”
“Fuck . . . off.” She spoke quietly, but somehow managed to project all her years into those two words. The man looked down at the ground and backed away like a cowed dog. He did not say anything else. The woman he had been speaking to closed her car door, wound up the window, and looked the other way.
Scott sat in the car and slammed the door. Nina climbed in beside him. She was looking in the rearview mirror, glancing around like a bird with a broken wing awaiting the arrival of a cat.
“I don’t see anything,” Scott said. “But I can feel it.” The air seemed to dance with potential, as if every atom were preparing to move somewhere else. Maybe it was like this before a hurricane or a tornado.
Nina pulled off, steering slowly between other cars that had stopped to see the accident behind them. When she reached open road she floored the accelerator.
Now that detail had been stolen by distance, Scott could look back. He turned in the seat, wincing as he started to discover injuries he had sustained in the impact: a sore shoulder, bruised ribs, bloody nose. But he was glad of them. In some small way, minor though they seemed, they marked him for what he had done.
