by Tim Lebbon
“Oh, hey, man . . .”
“Give you something to do,” Scott said. “Sort yourself out, Daz.”
“Will they leave me alone now?” the man asked. He sounded desperate for the right answer.
Scott thought about lying. Giving this wretched excuse a scrap of hope. But right then, he couldn’t find such benevolence within. It had been driven too deep, and he left with a comment that chilled him even as he spoke. “No,” he said. “They’re always here. Always have been. Always will be.”
As he walked back through the bushes he heard Daz somewhere behind him, moaning and crying as he nursed his bloody wounds and bruises. Just someone else whom Lewis had used, abused, and left shattered. A lost soul in waiting.
“Hey, Scott!” Daz called as Scott reached the gate back into the pub garden. The voice was muffled and confused by the vegetation, but Scott still heard. “One more thing the old dude said. Me, I hope it’s true. I hope it fuckin’ happens to you, man. Said she’ll gut you soon as she’s finished with you. Yeah. Sounds good to me, fuckhead.”
Scott worked his way around the perimeter of the pub garden until he reached the car park. He kept his ears open in case Daz had decided to follow and his eyes on the pub. There was no movement and no sounds of pursuit. Where will Nina be now? he thought. Still trapped in her room? Still hemmed in by ghosts? He was running blind, and the more he heard and saw, the more confused he became.
She’ll gut you as soon as she’s finished with you.
Surely Lewis had not written those words on his mirror? He was more direct than that, more intrusive, like introducing Scott to Daz to pass on a message. But if it had not been him, then who else was warning him away from Nina?
“Need to do my own thing,” he whispered to the night. It did not reply.
Climbing into the car, he saw a ghost standing against the wall of the pub, so still that it might have been painted there. It watched him leave. He felt its eyes on him, and as he accelerated quickly toward whatever fate had in store, he wondered to whom the ghost would report.
More things, Daz had said. It has more things in it. Scott remembered the quote from Hamlet, and he wondered just what more things could entail.
CHAPTER TWELVE
in the gaze of the real world
As he drove, Scott began to feel incredibly exposed. Though darkness accompanied him all the way into Wales, held back only by the twin spears of the car headlights, he felt as though a thousand eyes were watching. He was the center of attention for many people he could not understand. He sensed the minds of things focusing upon him, and he kept glancing left and right, as though expecting to see something monstrous lunging out of the night. More things, he kept thinking, and he wondered what more things in heaven and Earth could be. Stuff, Nina had called the rest of the book. But she had refused to state who or what had told her and the others to transcribe the Chord of Souls in the first place. Perhaps they had received it in their minds, projected there by forces or presences way beyond humanity’s comprehension. Or maybe something or someone had dictated to them, sitting there day after day as Nina and the other eleven immortals hacked and chiseled the book into solid stone slabs, bringing it into being for the first time. The travel writings of some vast, ancient spirit, or the musings of the last of a long-lost civilization. Nina had said that to reveal where the Chord of Souls came from would change everything.
“God?” Scott muttered. The car headlights dimmed and brightened slightly, as though the darkness had pulsed inward for an instant. “Maybe it really was God, and the book is proof of His existence.”
Scott was a casual believer. He never prayed or went to church, but he had always been content in his belief that there was more to life than living: there was dying as well, and what came after. What he had seen since Helen had been taken confused him, though he had not even begun trying to make sense of what it all meant. It confirmed that there was some sort of existence beyond death—at least, he thought it did—but it also seemed to hint at a truth he found almost too painful to bear: that after death, there could be pain. Fearing God was all about looking for your own salvation, wasn’t it? Looking forward to an eternity of heaven?
If so, then what was the Wide? If there were different routes to heaven, and many who never made it there, Scott really did not wish to know. He did not want to face the prospect of being lost in the Wide, skimming its outer fringes or wandering its endless depths forever. He saw lost souls and the echoes of those long gone, but there had been nothing yet to show him what these wraiths really were.
He and Helen enjoyed talking religion, and approaching it from diverse angles. What would happen, she had once suggested, if God revealed himself to everyone? If the world was given incontrovertible, undeniable proof of His existence, would it make it a better place? Scott had argued that it was impossible; that proof was unworkable if richness of faith were to be maintained. But Helen had shaken her head and run with the idea, and Scott now remembered the long, heated discussion it had initiated.
God as an object or process, not a belief. A definite fact, like gravity, the sun, or electricity. Scott’s take was that life was ruled by faith, and that gravity and evolution were still only theories that many believed in. He had faith that when he turned a corner in the car, there would not be a wall of glass built across the road. He had faith that when he blinked his eyes, they would open again onto the same scene he had been seeing when he closed them. He had faith in many things, and perhaps the strength of that faith was exactly what made them so. If he truly believed that, when he next blinked, he would open his eyes onto a bloodred landscape with towers of carbon issuing clouds of flying demons, then maybe that would be so.
If that’s the case, Helen had said, then God exists in six billion different forms.
“I don’t care,” he told the darkness. The car rumbled on, and around the next corner there was only road. “All I want is Helen back.” He blinked, and the view remained the same. “Leave me alone.” He sighed, then shouted it again: “Leave me alone!”
He drove on, still feeling watched, still believing that he was at the center of some vast web of beliefs and impossibilities. If he drove fast enough, perhaps he could escape.
In his right front pocket, the skull key ring pressed into his leg. Papa had touched that. He’d bought it for Scott after they’d talked about the Screaming Skulls, a conversation that his parents would have hated but which Papa reveled in. There had been mention of the Skulls on a TV program, and Scott had wanted to find out more. Back then there was no Internet, so Papa took him into town one Saturday and they sat in the library for the afternoon, digging out old volumes about myths and legends, unsolved mysteries and the unexplained. Even here there was only passing mention, because the Skulls were so ambiguous. Some books seemed to suggest that they had never been seen, while others printed eyewitness accounts. Some said that the last time anyone heard them scream was a thousand years ago, while one book suggested that they could still be heard today, echoing around the Welsh valley where their home had once been. A folded valley, the book said, wrapped up by magic and neglect, twisted in upon itself so that it was no longer there. But ghosts didn’t need the physical to exist . . . and on the darkest, coldest nights of the year, the Screaming Skulls cried out from their hidden home, seeking a peace that would never come.
There was no clearly defined cause for their screaming.
Scott and Papa had fun making up some reasons.
Now, Scott did not find quite so much pleasure in those memories. He could not recall any detail of the conversation he and Papa had in that library, and though he remembered taking notes, he had no idea where they were now. He could not even remember reading the notes again after writing them that first time. It was as if the Screaming Skulls were trying to remain misty in his memory, steering him away from where they were supposed to be.
But he did remember one image from one of those obscure books: a map.
“Not
far from here,” he said. He stopped at the side of the road and dug around behind his seat for a road atlas. Flipping on the inside light solidified the darkness outside, and he tried not to look up at the windows as he examined the map. He traced the route of one river to where it met another, found where the two valleys intersected, and that was where the hidden valley was alleged to be. Folded away in time and perception, perhaps it would reveal itself to Scott.
Or perhaps not.
Either way he was out here on his own, for good or bad. Nina would be pursuing him. Lewis seemed to be guiding him. Tigre wanted to see the book when it was found, and Old Man had made him promise to take the Chord of Souls to Edinburgh.
The folded papers in his back pocket suddenly felt much thicker than they were. “I could burn them,” he whispered. “Give their energy to the night.” But now that he had made them exist, destroying the papers seemed grotesque.
He had shattered those first few slabs on Nina’s say-so. Now, it was time for him to take control.
He parked and waited for sunrise.
Scott had found the place where he had always believed the valley to be. He could remember looking at the old map with Papa, and Papa saying, Here it is. There had been little fanfare and no real sense of import. But now, over thirty years later, Scott realized that had been the single most important moment of communication between the two of them. The old man must have understood that; it was not long before he killed Lewis and himself. Sitting in the stolen car, watching night sucked from the sky as the sun made its proud return, Scott could remember nothing more about that moment. Perhaps Papa had meant it that way. Hidden knowledge, locked away in the young boy’s mind to be retrieved again later, when it was most needed.
“But we only guessed,” Scott said. Outside, the emerging countryside did not argue.
Ancient civilizations used to believe that the sun was a god, forever fighting off the scourge of nighttime to return triumphant each morning, sometimes stained with its enemy’s blood. And through sacrifice, they had offered it the blood it needed to keep itself strong. As Scott watched the sun appear above a hill to the east, he wondered what sacrifice Papa had made when he killed himself. Maybe it was simply madness, but he thought not. This was much more complex and far-reaching than that.
For the first time since making them, Scott took the folded sheets of paper from his back pocket. Papa’s letter was mixed in with them, and he read that again first, seeking any new clues: a key to new memories, perhaps, or more detailed instructions of what he had to do. But there was no more. It must have served its purpose, because the letter did not strike him nearly as hard as it had the first few times he read it.
He unfolded the sheets of paper, smoothed them out, and used dawn’s early light to examine the rubbings. They were all strange. The shapes could have been images of creatures of the time, though Scott barely recognized any of them. A limb here, a wing there, but they were all unknown. Other shapes merged into one another, forming a strange symmetry that steered its way across the paper. Perhaps the language was in this symmetry instead of the shapes themselves? Few characters repeated themselves, and when two did, the repeated shape was always slightly different, as if already changed by the appearance of the first. They made no sense to Scott. He ran his fingers across the rubbings, trying to remember what touching the actual carvings felt like.
Nothing. But he did not have any understanding of such things, and immersed as he was in this strange world, there was no reason he should be able to read the Chord.
Others would, he knew. The immortals. Old Man or Tigre or Nina, or one of the others. Perhaps they would even recognize their own hand, the shapes of their own lettering from so long ago.
He had yet to decide what to do with these pages. The consensus seemed to be that the Chord of Souls should be destroyed, but this came from Papa—who undoubtedly had been badly affected by whatever he had translated—and Nina, who was immortal. Surely there were things in the book that would benefit humankind? Old Man claimed to understand a cure for cancer, and if he could acquire that knowledge through time, what greater knowledge could there be in the Chord of Souls? The idea of destroying such potential seemed ludicrous.
Scott rooted around in the car’s glove compartment. There was the usual car service guide and instruction books, but he also found a reporter’s notepad and a short green pencil. The first few pages of the pad were taken up with a kid’s scribbles, but the rest was blank.
“Here’s potential,” he said. He folded the rubbings and put them into his back pocket, while the folded notebook and pencil went into his front pocket.
He felt armed.
When dawn had burned away much of the darkness and pulled a soft mist from the ground, Scott stepped from the car and started walking.
It was cold, quiet, the air filled with the chill potential of a unique new day. Papa would have loved this. They had often gone walking together in the early morning, when the only vehicles around were milk wagons and farmhands driving to work. The silences between these intermittent vehicles had been what Papa called—
“It’s the real world.” Birds chatter all around them, the volume of their song seeming to increase every time Papa and Scott pause. “Stop. Our footsteps aren’t real.” They stop and lean against a gate. The field beyond is a sea of mist, marred here and there by ghostly cows. The mist moves slowly, like a blanket covering the waking ground. There is not a breeze in the air. The gate is cold and beaded with moisture, and Papa touches the water and puts his fingers to his mouth. “Taste the morning,” he whispers. Scott does so, and it is forbidden and mysterious.
They wait there for a few minutes, seeing and hearing the world waking around them. “Why do you call it the real world?” Scott asks at last. He thinks he has an idea, but he wants to hear it from Papa’s mouth. The old man has a way with words.
“Well, it’s not really,” he says. “Not as real as it could be. We’re here, for a start, and though we’re still we’re tainting the scene. Our hearts are heard by something; something else smells us. And their fear of humans changes their behavior, which changes the scene. But it’s as close to real as we can get, and that’s good enough for now.”
“But we’re part of the world.” Scott watches Papa watching the cows. The old man doesn’t reply for several minutes, and Scott becomes a large part of the silence. He opens his mouth and tries to breathe lightly, remaining as still as possible so that his clothes don’t rub together. Eventually a motorbike roars in from the distance and passes them, startling the cows and causing a slight ripple in the air that upsets the mist.
“We weren’t a part of it long ago, and one day we won’t be again,” Papa says. “One day, all people will be gone. It’s inevitable. While some of us are doing our best to make sure we live on, there are others striving to end it all. And it takes only one of them to succeed. There’s that old saying: we have to be lucky all the time, and they have to be lucky only once. So we’ll end, and the world will go on, and that will be the real world once more.”
The cows calm down and the mist starts to settle, but the disturbance has been set, and it slowly floats and billows away. “I don’t understand.”
“We’re just visitors here, Scott,” Papa says.
“I don’t—”
“Let’s get home, son.”
“Papa?”
Papa looks down at him, reaches out, and touches his forehead. His hand is warm. He smiles. “Let’s get home.”
In that remote Welsh valley, there were no human-made sounds to break the reality. Scott paused every few seconds to give the solitude of the place its freedom. Even footsteps broke the magic. To the south lay a large mountain, ridges rising up on either side like wide shoulders. Its summit was hidden in a heavy mist, and wisps of mist also wandered its lower slopes. To the north—Scott’s right—lay a range of hills, and in between was a wide, gently sloped valley, evidence of the last great ice age. The road curved its way down
into the valley and along its base, and here and there he saw the white blocks of farms. He was willing to bet that they were deserted. He saw no signs of cattle, and the fields themselves seemed to be given over to natural growth. The hedgerows marking their limits had burst out of orderliness, hemorrhaging into the fields in wild abandon. Of course they wouldn’t stay here, he thought. They’re close to another world, and that’s enough to scare anyone.
A hundred steps farther on he saw the first ghost. It was a man dressed in clothes Scott did not recognize from any history book. He was standing out in a field, looking up at the mountainside as though awaiting the arrival of someone or something. The wraith was weak and forlorn. He glanced back at Scott but looked away again.
Scott paused and watched the ghost. It waited for a while longer, then drew its sword, knelt, placed the point against its sternum, and fell forward. Scott gasped and stepped back. The ghost fell to the ground and quickly melted away, as though Scott were viewing months of decay in the space of seconds. Then it manifested again, standing and watching the mountain for someone or something that had never—and would never—come.
“There’s another valley,” Scott shouted. He felt vaguely ridiculous talking to this ghost—an echo—and he did not like the sound of his own voice spoiling the peace.
The ghost turned and started walking toward him.
Scott backed away, suddenly wishing he had simply carried on along the road. The apparition approached, legs passing through the long grass without disturbing it at all. The man was short and wiry, heavily bearded, and sporting a leather tunic studded with strange metal sigils. His cheeks and forehead were scored with harsh tattoos, the skin raised and scarred where the designs had been clumsily carved.
Scott recognized some of them. What the hell is this? he thought.
The ghost came closer, and it had no eyes. They had been torn out, leaving sickly strands hanging over its cheeks. Blood ran over the designs there, giving them the promise of color.
