The Everlasting

by Tim Lebbon

  “No, them. The scarred one, and the woman?”

  Yes, what about them? Scott thought. And he knew that there were two possibilities. If they were of a vengeful frame of mind, they would kill him and Helen and leave their bodies down here to rot. No one would ever find them; this place barely existed. Or perhaps they had already gone, skimming back across the edge of the Wide and emerging somewhere else in the world.

  Either way, there was little he could do to affect whatever was to come.

  “I think they’ve gone,” he said. “But I can’t know for sure.” He coughed, dust harsh in his throat.

  “I’m having some thoughts,” Helen said. “Not sure . . . weird . . .”

  “Me too,” Scott said. “But we have to go.”

  They climbed back up through the tunnels. Papa’s timber chair lay broken on its side, the open pathway into the Wide closed. Now it was just another cave.

  On the way back up, guided by a light that was fast fading, they found no immortals, and nothing of the Screaming Skulls.

  Later, sunlight felt good on their skin.

  Even as Scott and Helen walked from the valley and found themselves somewhere real again, they began to talk about their ideas.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  in the blink of an eye

  The last time Scott had seen a ghost it had been his grandfather, stretched agonizingly across reality and the unreality of the Wide. He had set Papa free and walked away, and he had not set eyes on another wraith since.

  “You’re no ghost,” he said.

  “Of course not. I’m not dead.”

  “Do you want to die?”

  “Do you?”

  “What do you think?”

  Nina shrugged. It was a surprisingly familiar gesture, even though Scott had not seen it in over thirty years. “I think you’re looking old.”

  “Ha! You can talk.”

  “I don’t look old, not like you.”

  Scott smiled and lifted his hands to his wrinkled face. “You should take a look in the mirror one day,” he said. “Your skin’s smooth and your hair’s lustrous, but your eyes reveal your soul.”

  They sat quietly for a while, taking in the late-afternoon sun. The garden was alive with a sunburst of flowers, the buzzing of insects, and birdsong. Between them a bottle of wine sat on the table, two glasses almost empty.

  Scott sighed. “I love this place,” he said. “The house, the garden, the village, my wife. I love it all. And the thought of leaving it behind . . .”

  “Awful,” Nina said.

  “Awful,” Scott said. He fell silent again, looking down the garden toward the fields beyond, and the forest beyond that. “But it’s nature,” he said at last. “The way things are.”

  Nina snorted.

  “What? You’re beyond nature?”

  “I can’t say that, no.”

  “Why are you here, Nina? Helen will be home soon, and I’d rather she didn’t see you. She still has nightmares sometimes. Even with all we know, she still dreams bad dreams. So why are you here after all this time?”

  “Time? It’s the blink of an eye for me, Scott. Every day since then I’ve felt pain at what you did, but it’s still the blink of an eye.”

  “Where have you been?”

  “Here and there.”

  “Tigre?”

  “Different heres, different theres. Places you’ve seen on the news.”

  “So . . .”

  Nina stood and walked to the edge of the lawn. She squatted down and ran her hand through the grass. It needed cutting, but Scott liked it the way it was. Wild. “I’ve wondered,” she said. “Since that time, I’ve wondered whether something like the Chord could ever really be destroyed.”

  “You’ve been back?” Scott felt a brief chill even thinking about the House of Screaming Skulls. Not a good place to be. He and Helen had spent thirty years trying to forget. Though there were the dreams, of course, and the ideas. Yes, always them.

  “I couldn’t find it,” Nina said. “None of us can. I’m not even sure it’s there anymore.”

  “So live with it.”

  “I can’t die, Scott,” she said. She stared at him, and in her aged eyes he saw the pain she had always been so loath to show.

  “You didn’t want to die,” he said. “You lied to me about that. You wanted the book for everything else it contained. The ‘stuff,’ as you called it. More things. Whatever it was, that’s what you wanted.”

  “Then, yes. But things change.” She looked over the garden and into the fields.

  “So why have you come to me? You think I may have lugged some of those slabs out with me?”

  “No,” she said. “I know you didn’t. Tigre and I watched you all the way out of the valley.”

  Scott guffawed, holding his side as the pain kicked in. A year, he’d been told, maybe less. Helen had been sad, because she didn’t want to be left on her own. But they had both accepted it. It was the way of things.

  “I don’t know,” Nina said. “I just thought maybe you’d kept some of it, somehow. A thing like that doesn’t deserve to fade away.”

  Scott thought of those rubbings, and the journals of dreams and ideas he and Helen had filled between then and now, ideas planted in them from inhaling the dust of the destroyed book. They wrote them down, then closed the books. Neither had been tempted to discover what they meant, and they had enjoyed growing old together.

  “Maybe something like that should never have been written in the first place,” he said.

  “Well . . .”

  “Who spoke it, Nina? Who made you write it? When you and the others carved it all that time ago, who gave it to you?”

  Nina smiled. “So I guess we leave it at that,” she said.

  “I suppose so.”

  She nodded, smiled at Scott, and then walked down the length of his garden. She climbed the fence and strolled across the field, pausing for a few seconds at the old dead tree at its center. Nina looked back and shielded her eyes, and he waved at her, laughing as he did so. Waving her good-bye, he thought. Her poor damned soul, I’m waving her good-bye. She turned away again and walked on, and after a few minutes she disappeared into the woods.

  He never saw her again.

  That night, after Helen had gone to bed, Scott opened some of their notebooks. He started to read, but he was quickly drawn to the window. He looked up at the moon and stars, knowing that he could never be their equal. The real world was out there, disturbed by streetlights and the scar of human habitation, and he could not know it. Things Papa had told him came and went, and he shed a tear for the children and grandchildren he and Helen never had.

  Eventually he went upstairs. He stood beside their bed for a very long time, looking down at his sleeping wife.

  The next morning, sitting in the garden chair Nina had occupied just the afternoon before, Helen asked him something. “Is there anywhere special you’d like to go, babe?” The implication was understood without ever being vocalized. Anywhere special you’d like to go before you die?

  He pretended to think about it, scratching his chin and looking out at the oak tree in the field. It had been dead for a long time, but he had known it all his life.

  He had not told Helen that Nina had come. There was no need.

  “There is somewhere,” he said. “Been thinking about this for a very long time. Think you have too. Somewhere to leave the sheets and our notebooks, with all those ideas in them.”

  “Weird ideas,” Helen said.

  “Weird,” he agreed, and a shiver went down his back. So weird. Equations and poems, fractions and spells, songs and directions, a map and the way to elsewhere.

  “So?” she asked.

  He blinked the ideas away. “Edinburgh,” he said.

  “You’re sure you can find it again?” she asked quietly. She was so strong, so fit, and Scott was truly going to miss her.

  “No,” he said. “Not sure at all.”

   

  Tim Lebbon, The Everlasting