by Tim Lebbon
“Are there angels?” he asked. “Are there demons?”
Nina took a sip of coffee, and Scott wondered what memories she could be feeling right now. “There are things,” she said. “I’ve seen some and heard of others. I don’t know what you’d call them.”
“Heaven? Hell?”
Nina shrugged. “I’m just immortal. I don’t know everything.”
“But don’t you want to?”
She looked at him, her eyes sad. “The more I know, the more I wish I didn’t.”
“How comforting.”
“So don’t ask me any more.”
He sipped more beer, she drank her coffee, and partly because he sensed she wanted to go to bed, he ordered two fresh drinks.
There was so much to ask and say, but they sat quietly in the bar. Scott remembered Helen, struggling to think of her in the present tense. He came close to tears several times. The beer, he thought. The tiredness. But it was the fear of grief that brought those tears from him. That, and the growing idea that there was absolutely nothing he could do to help.
They went upstairs, stood outside their respective doors, and Nina gave him that look again. She could have anyone she wanted, he thought, but not me. He opened his door, offered her an apologetic smile, and went into his room.
He locked the door behind him. He hated empty bedrooms. In over twenty years together, he and Helen had slept apart only a handful of times, and never very well. He felt incomplete without his wife. Half a person.
In the bathroom he ran a sinkful of scalding water, and returned several times to see whether there were more messages on the steamed mirror. But it remained untouched. He wrote, Help me, and when he returned a few minutes later, it was still there, alone, almost steamed over again but mirroring evidence of his hopelessness back at him.
He sat by the window for a long time, because he did not feel at all tired. He had turned off the light so that it did not throw his shadow outside, and he watched the darkness grow more complete as dusk settled into night.
It has to be tonight, he thought. He would creep out and go to find the House of Screaming Skulls, and then whoever had left that message for him would help him get Helen back.
What if it was Lewis?
Then he would deal with that when the time came. Lewis wanted the book; that was all. Not revenge.
What if it was someone else? Someone even Nina doesn’t suspect?
What would be, would be.
“I have no idea whether I’m doing the right thing,” he whispered, breath steaming on the window glass. It faded away to reveal a ghost standing in the pub garden.
It was a woman, dressed in dark colors that helped hide her away, but Scott could see her face. Even from this distance her sunken eyes revealed her true nature. She waved to him, beckoning him down from the room, and for a second he reached out and un-clasped the window catch. She seemed excited, agitated, and she waved more quickly. Every few seconds she glanced to her left—checking Nina’s window, Scott guessed—and she began to nod as Scott stood and shrugged on his jacket.
All he knew was from Nina. Even what Old Man and Tigre had said had been explained to him by her, not them. She had stepped into his life straight after Helen was taken away, steered him, and even driving toward the Screaming Skulls he felt that she had been guiding their path. She treated him like a child. Sometimes he felt safe with her, but other times when she looked at him he felt like a rabbit in a python’s glare. And what she wanted from these hidden pages of the Chord of Souls . . . he did not know. To die? Was it that simple? For Tigre perhaps, because he seemed like a simple being: made immortal and craving mortality, he had spent centuries seeking death.
But Nina was far more complex. There were depths to her, places he had not even glimpsed that could contain all manner of desires, hopes, cravings. What else is in the book? he had asked, and she had replied, Stuff.
Before he went on, he needed to know more of what this stuff entailed.
He would not discover that from Nina.
He opened the door carefully, crept out onto the wide landing, glanced back at Nina’s door to make sure it remained closed. And he froze in his tracks.
There were a dozen ghosts standing outside her room. They had their hands pressed firmly against the door and frame, but they had all turned their heads to stare at him. Their eyes were wide and expectant. One of them nodded, his long hair flowing as though he were underwater. Another opened her mouth to speak and Scott turned away, not wanting to read her silent words.
He walked down the curving staircase, and every step of the way he felt dead people staring at his back.
He reached the lobby of the pub’s accommodation wing. The building was still silent. At the front door he slid aside a couple of bolts, turned a key, and then Nina started to shout.
“Scott! Don’t go out there!”
He turned and looked up at the landing. The ghosts were still gathered at her door, and now they were leaning back, fingers and hands curled into the wood, using whatever impossible purchase they had to keep the door closed as Nina tried to haul it open from the inside. Her voice was muffled by more than the door. There was a distance there that had nothing to do with space.
“Don’t go!” she said, her voice even farther away. Several of the ghosts faded and moved through the door and wall, and when she next shouted he could not even make out her words.
Exercising his own will by leaving Nina, Scott suddenly felt directed more than ever before. There was nothing he could do to help her; go back now and he would be lost. All he could do was go through with this. Fate had him in its grasp, and nothing as negligible as his own fears would distort it from its path.
He closed the front door behind him, and Nina’s shouts became nothing.
It was cool outside. A breeze had risen to flap his trouser legs and pluck at his jacket. There were few cars left in the pub car park, and the road beyond was silent. A small shadow dashed across the tarmac, several more moved around one of the cars—night creatures foraging, perhaps killing. A bat flew overhead. In silence nature expressed its true, irrefutable ownership.
Scott headed toward the back garden, and as he turned the corner he came face-to-face with the ghost.
The woman looked quite normal, yet there was no doubt that she was dead. There was something about her, a sense of nonbelonging that even the darkness did nothing to lessen. And a silence. No breathing, no sighing, no sound of cloth moving against itself, no crunch of gravel or whisper of grass beneath her feet. The ghost’s ties to this world were severed. It was a visitor here now, a lost soul doing its best to find its way somewhere better.
Help us, she mouthed. The words were unmistakable. She looked at Scott as she turned and started walking, never taking her eyes from his face.
Scott followed. He watched the ghost’s feet where they passed across the ground. He did not wish to see her eyes . . . those deep, desperate eyes.
Something cracked behind and above him, and when he looked up at the facade of the building, he saw something stretching out of one of the windows. At first he thought it was a gush of flame and smoke, but then it took form and he saw that it was an arm, twisting and flexing as it tried to reach farther. A voice came with it. “Scott.” It was Nina’s voice, but distorted, as if filtered through a thousand other mouths. The hand opened and closed, fingers dropping sparkles of light that faded into darkness as they fell toward the ground.
“I’m sorry,” he said, but the admission made him feel worse.
The hand was drawn back inside the shattered window. It did not want to go, but something tugged at its flesh and bone, fingers clawing, nails screeching against the glass that remained.
“Will they hurt her?” Scott asked the ghost before him. Her expression did not change and she carried on walking. Help us, she mouthed again.
They could hurt her, but they can’t kill her, he thought. If they could, perhaps she’d let them.
There we
re more strange sounds from behind, but Scott no longer looked. It sounded like a struggle, and below that—almost subaudible—a moan of desperation that he hoped never to hear again.
“My wife,” he said, filling his head with his own voice. “Helen . . . it’s all for Helen, and everyone else is involved because of themselves. Sorry, Nina, but it’ll work out. It’ll resolve itself.”
The ghost still looked at him over her shoulder as they walked. He only glanced at her face before looking away again. She was lost, and there were no answers there.
They reached the end of the pub’s long garden, passed through a rotten wooden gate that was jammed permanently open, and entered an area of undergrowth gone wild. A stream gurgled somewhere to Scott’s left and the ground turned marshy. His shoes sank with every step, sucking and popping as he lifted his feet to walk on. He watched the ghost’s feet barely touching the world.
He blinked and the ghost was gone. He blinked again, thinking his vision was teasing, but he was alone, standing in a small clearing carpeted with rotten newspapers and a pile of soggy porn magazines. There was a mattress shoved under one low, wide bush, with a few tattered sheets of polyethythene drawn across the bush’s branches and pricked onto its thorny limbs. A few empty cans, a smashed whiskey bottle, and an underlying stink of waste. Scott wrinkled his nose and took a backward step, but then a shadow moved.
He squinted and peered across the clearing. Something had shifted beneath the tree over there, a shadow that had seemed merged with the thick trunk but which now stood and detached itself, walking out into the sparse moonlight.
I can hear its footsteps, Scott thought.
“You one of them?” The voice was gruff, yet tinged with fear. Bravado went only so far.
“Are you?”
“What you think, fuckhead?” The shadow stamped on the ground, flapped its arms, slapped its own face. “Flesh and fuckin’ blood, man.”
“Me too.”
“Yeah?”
“You ever heard one talking?”
The man’s silence was heavy with thought. “Don’t know,” he said finally. “Maybe.”
“I’m sorry I’m here,” Scott said. He started backing away, keeping the stream to his left in the hope that it would guide him back to the pub garden. Once there, maybe he could take their stolen car and head for his final destination.
“You Scott?” the voice said.
Scott froze. “You are one of them?” he asked again.
“No, man. Flesh and fuckin’ blood, like I said. Look!” The man walked forward and stood outside the tree’s shadow, letting starlight touch him. He was much younger than he sounded, barely out of his teens. Jeans, sweatshirt, black jacket, the beginnings of a beard, long dark hair forming a chaotic shadow-halo around his head. His face was drawn and pained, and even in this poor light Scott could make out the skin and eyes of a lost man. The smell of stale alcohol was strong. A bottle swung from his left hand, almost empty and seemingly forgotten.
“How do you know my name?”
The man shrugged and put on a mock-posh voice. “Seems I have you at a disadvantage.”
“So, how?” Scott looked around for the woman’s ghost, thinking that maybe she was watching to see what would happen. But all other shadows acted as they should.
“Old dude told me. Spooky fucker. Dropped me a bottle of good stuff and twenty straights, said there’d be same again if I passed on the message.”
“What message?”
The man smiled, showing off teeth that belonged to someone three times his age. “What’ll you give me for it?”
Scott shook his head and turned his back, ready to walk away.
The man was on him in a second. The bottle clunked him on the side of the head, a leg twisted in front of him, and there was a sharp push between his shoulder blades. Scott went sprawling, hands slipping in the slime of rotting magazines, and the man dropped down onto his back. Hands reached around and clawed at Scott’s face, and he almost gagged at their stink.
The man leaned down and whispered into Scott’s ear, “Be a good boy for Daz, now, and you’ll get your message. But it’s like . . . power. I got something to pass on, you got something you have to hear, so there’s a trade there, see? A fair trade. Fuckhead.”
“I don’t have anything,” Scott said.
“Nothing to give?”
He shook his head, trying not to breathe in Daz’s foul stench.
“Well, we can sort something out.” Daz sat up again, and Scott heard the sound of a zipper opening. “Get a load of this, mouthful and a faceful, and I’ll tell you what the old dude said.”
Scott closed his eyes and thought of Helen. He could conjure no memories—could not even picture her face—but the idea of her was there with him, strong and comforting and warm with love. He smiled into the mud and sent his own love back to her.
Daz shuffled forward, one hand reaching down to turn Scott’s head to the side, the other beating rhythmically between his legs.
Scott lay loose and weak, letting Daz turn his head. He opened his eyes.
“Here you go, fuckhead. Get some of this; here you go. Old dude said I should give the message so you remember it, so here you go. Fuckhead.”
Scott tensed his shoulders and arms and lifted up, twisting his body at the same time, throwing Daz off his back and standing in one movement.
Daz shouted and went sprawling across the mound of moldy newspapers.
Scott kicked something, bent down, and picked up the whiskey bottle. He went after Daz before he had a chance to stand, swinging the bottle high and hard and wincing as it connected with the man’s forehead. It rebounded with a dull thunk, somehow remaining whole, but Daz’s struggles slowed.
Scott threw the bottle into the dark and dropped down astride the man, pinning his arms to his side. He punched him in the face. He hadn’t punched anyone like that since he was eleven years old and got into a fight with the school bully. Back then the sensation of his fist connecting with someone else’s nose had frightened him with its primal violence, but now it felt good. He did it again.
“Fucking pervert!” he said, striking out again and again, face and neck and chest. Daz tried to mutter something, and Scott punched him once more, though some of the anger had gone out of him now, leached away and already turning into a crimson shade of guilt.
“Enough?” he asked. Daz was not struggling; nor did he make a sound. He simply stared up at Scott, the stained whites of his eyes catching starlight. He nodded.
Scott stood and backed away, letting the man come to his knees. He was struggling to tuck his flaccid cock back into his trousers, a pathetic, pitiful action that made Scott look away.
“The old dude,” Scott said. “Tell me what he said. I’ve got a twenty here for you if you tell me. Buy yourself a few bottles. Better still, some deodorant. But tell me now, or I’ll get fucking angry again.”
“Man, I’m just flesh and blood, you know?”
“And what does that mean?” Scott felt his anger rising again, unfamiliar and disconcerting.
“Guys has his needs, man.”
“His needs? So you try to stick it in my face to satisfy your needs?”
“Old dude said—”
“Just what did he say?” Scott stepped forward, and Daz flinched away, falling onto his back and holding up both hands. Scott’s shoulders sagged and he shook his head. “Damn it, Daz, just tell me. I need to get out of here. You have no idea, no inkling.”
“I do,” he said. “I seen them. Thought I had before, for years, but I seen them tonight, plenty of them. Walking around as if they’re lost. None of ’em talk to me. Finished the bottle and they still didn’t go away. And they only came after the old dude went.”
“What did he look like?”
Daz shrugged. “Old.”
“And he said . . . ?”
“Okay, gimme a sec.” Daz sat up and rubbed at his mouth. There was a dark trail leaking from it, blood blackened in the s
tarlight. He coughed, spit, touched his forehead, and winced.
“Waiting for me to apologize?” Scott asked.
“No, man.” Daz looked up at Scott, sad and wretched. “So, the old dude said: ‘There’s a guy called Scott who you’ll meet. Give him a message from me. Tell him to lose Nina, go on his own, find the book.’ ” He looked away and shook his head.
“That’s it?”
“No, trying to remember . . . Yeah, find the book. And stay with it. It has more things in it, dude said. Then he said, ‘Everything will come together. Things will work out. Be explained.’ ” He nodded, frowned. “Yeah, that’s it.”
“Sure?”
“Yeah.”
“More things?”
“That’s what he said.”
Scott dug out a rolled-up twenty-pound note from his pocket and dropped it onto the mass of torn, wet newspaper.
