The Death of Me: A Tor.Com Original

by Howard, Jonathan L.

  “A nicety.” Cabal was recovering his composure.

  “Not at all. A fundamental point.” She held out the cards to him. Lips pursed, he cut the deck. She smiled pleasantly and started to lay them out. “Nobody knows when your time is up.”

  “You do.”

  “I don’t.” She finished laying out the cards into a fortune-teller’s spread. She saw his raised eyebrow. “No. I don’t. But when the time comes, it’s clear enough. There are always indicators. Of past” —she tapped the cards as she spoke—“present, and, my abiding interest, the future.” She flipped the card over.

  Cabal craned his neck to look. “Card X. The Wheel. That’s good, I believe.”

  “For most people who don’t do what you do, it is. Do you believe in karma?”

  “No.”

  “That’s a shame, because this card does.” She started to gather up the cards again. “I think we need to exercise some alternative technique.”

  He stopped her. “Please. Humour my curiosity.” He turned the card marking his past.

  “The Lovers, Johannes. My, my, my,” she remarked mildly.

  He sniffed and turned the card marking his present. “Card I. The Conjuror. Ha!”

  She took the card and looked at it for a moment before turning its face towards him. “Are you sure?” Cabal looked again. Card 0. The Fool.

  She slid the card back into the deck and shuffled it. “I always get them mixed up myself.”

  Cabal watched her for a moment before asking, “Why this concern? There are many within my profession, such as it is. Well, a few, at any rate. Do they all receive visitations such as this?”

  “No, Johannes. They do not. You are a special case.”

  “Special?” That sounded dangerous. “In what way?”

  But the woman wasn’t listening. Before returning the card marking Cabal’s past to the deck, she had flipped it in her hand and was looking intently at it. “Just special,” she said distractedly. She returned it to the deck and gave Cabal a look he couldn’t decipher at all. “Give me your hand,” she said tonelessly, unsmiling.

  With mild trepidation, Cabal held out his right hand. She took off her gloves before taking his hand in hers. Her skin was smooth and cool; Cabal found himself thinking of the statue of a medieval lady, buried by her husband in a church crypt that he had once visited, lady-size in marble. If the woman noticed the faint shudder that ran through him, she didn’t show it.

  “A long middle finger. Strong thumb.”

  Cabal was interested despite himself. “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning that you’re probably very good at flicking things.” Her smile returned, more mischievous than before. “Oh, and some other things, but they’re not relevant.” She turned his hand palm upwards and the smile vanished. She looked at him very seriously. “All of which brings us to my interest in you, Johannes Cabal.”

  “Yes, your interest in me,” replied Cabal evenly, while wondering how far he would get if he flung himself out of the carriage window. He had a depressing sense that the glass wouldn’t shatter.

  She turned his hand so he could see the palm and indicated an area from the web between the thumb and forefinger down in an arc to the middle of the wrist. “Do you know what’s missing from here?”

  “You know, the Gypsy Petulengro neglected to mention any…”

  She stopped him. “I’ve heard about your brand of wit. Keep it to yourself.” She indicated his palm again. “You’re walking around without a life line, Johannes. That simply isn’t done.”

  “Life line?” Baffled, he took his hand back and studied his palm. Now that she mentioned it, it didn’t look nearly as cluttered as perhaps it should. He had memories of a line running just as she had shown him, running around the base of the thenar eminence. Now, there was nothing but the expected fine geography of minute peaks and troughs. He looked up at her suspiciously. “A freakish happenstance, nothing more. Why your interest?”

  “Not just a freakish happenstance, Johannes. It’s against the rules.”

  “Whose rules?”

  “Mine. And I tend to have the last word in disputes. Now, how did you happen to lose your life line? Think carefully now.” The smile was back. Cabal had a sense of a cat trifling with a mouse, or vole, or some other small rodent, and he didn’t care for it at all, no matter who she was.

  “I dislike being toyed with,” he said sharply.

  “I know you do,” she replied, as if speaking to a four-year-old. She dropped the demeanour like a mask, but kept a colder incarnation of the smile. “I know a great deal about you. I know you think you can cheat me.”

  “I have cheated you. I died. I got over it.”

  “You managed it once. Don’t get all cocky and think you can manage it again. You haven’t cheated anything at all. Only postponed the inevitable. Which brings us back”—she took his hand again and levered it over so she could see his palm. She did it with such unexpected strength that Cabal gasped involuntarily—“to this.” She smiled, without a shred of humour. “What shall we do to make things right again, Johannes?”

  She wasn’t releasing her grip and Cabal found the pain was escalating. It was hard to accept that the young—if only in appearance—lady sitting opposite him was applying the sort of pressure more usually associated with bull gorillas with something to prove. He was past pain now, tending into the foothills of agony.

  “Are you open to suggestions?” he managed without sobbing.

  “No. On this occasion, I think I already have the solution.”

  She placed the tip of her free thumb gently on the skin between the bases of his thumb and forefinger. Then, with a sudden vicious push, she drove her nail into the flesh.

  Cabal’s agony rocketed from the merely very unpleasant to the incandescent in a heartbeat. He couldn’t draw breath to scream, his feet scrabbled helplessly on the carriage floor, his free hand grabbed the edge of the seat, and his fingers dug into the upholstery. He could feel the bones crushing together within her grip, could feel them breaking and breaking again. He wanted to collapse, but she held his hand as effortlessly immobile as if she really were that marble statue, held his hand free from the slightest quiver as she drew her nail across his palm, skirting the thenar eminence, slowly and deliberately cutting his hand open. The flesh peeled back beneath her nail, sharper than any scalpel, peeled back the subcutaneous layer, the flesh beneath, musculature, blood vessels parting, down to the white bone in its red setting. Blood sluiced down his wrist, soaking his shirtsleeve.

  Suddenly he was in the road, rolling facedown in the dust. His bag landed with a thump beside his head. As he blinked away tears of pain, as he hugged and cosseted his maimed hand to his chest, he heard her say, “Remember, Cabal. You haven’t cheated anything at all. Only postponed the inevitable. Those are the rules.”

  He rolled over, spitting foul invectives in three dead languages. And found he was cursing a milestone. Of the carriage, the horses, the coachman, and the passenger, there was no sign at all.

  He was past being surprised. It didn’t surprise him that the milestone showed that his lengthy ride in the carriage had carried him less than half a mile. It didn’t surprise him that, on turning, he found himself facing a small hillock topped with an old elm. It didn’t surprise him when he risked a glance at his crushed and slashed hand that…

  He blinked. No, he concluded, actually this was quite surprising. His hand seemed unmarked, undamaged. No mangled fingers, no bloody rivulet trailing from his grip, no red-soaked sleeve, nothing at all. Except … He angled his hand to examine the palm more closely in the sunlight. Except that now he had a life line. It looked like it had always been there; it looked as if it belonged. Apart from the slight itching tingle that travelled through the skin, there was nothing to tell it apart from any other line upon his hand.

  He frowned. All this trouble for a crease in the skin? The attention of a higher power for this? He rubbed experimentally at it, but it remained.r />
  Cabal took out his pocket watch. His capacity to accept the inexplicable that morning had been raised to such a high mark that he hardly registered more surprise than warranted a slight sniff when he discovered that a little less than two minutes had passed since he last checked it, moments before the carriage had appeared. He still had time to get to the station. But, he would still have to walk. Picking up his bag, Johannes Cabal started along the road once more.

  * * *

  After he had been let into the storeroom to the rear of the hatter’s shop, Cabal dropped his bag heavily on an old worktable and leaned there, both palms upon the tabletop, while he marshalled himself.

  “I have experienced a very bad day thus far, Mr Jones. I hope you are not going to add to my sorrows.”

  When he received no reply, he turned his head to look at the nervous hatter. Jones hardly seemed to be listening. He was at his habitual place at the window, twitching the blinds. Cabal bit back his frustration with the man’s lack of focus. It had taken a long time to cultivate Jones, to make him trust Cabal enough to use his peculiar talents to supply Cabal’s needs. As it was, Cabal was coming to the conclusion that the whole line of investigation might be fundamentally flawed and that he would be bringing it to a halt soon enough anyway. Still, it was worth the extinction of a few dozen more fluttering woodland types to be sure. When Cabal had read Peter Pan as a boy, he had found himself thinking, Yes, I do believe in fairies. But I still want you to die.

  “Well, enough of the pleasantries,” said Cabal when he still had no reply. “Have you gathered my supplies, Herr Jones?”

  Jones still did not reply. “What precisely are you looking at?” Cabal asked, joining him at the window. They gazed down into the dusty, uninteresting street. It looked uninteresting, but for the dustiness. Cabal felt unilluminated and strangely out of sorts. He’d felt unpleasantly detached from the full experience of reality ever since that nonsense in the carriage with…

  He looked down at his life line. He hadn’t even noticed that it had gone. When he had—for the lack of a better term—died that time, the state of his palm print on returning from that Dark Vale of—ironically enough—No Return had not been of much concern. Now, he couldn’t stop sneaking faux-casual glances at his palm.

  “I fear death, Mr Cabal,” said Jones quietly, his eyes still upon the empty street.

  The words so closely matched Cabal’s own thoughts that he was hardly aware that they had been spoken at all. “I was dead once,” said Cabal distractedly, his attention upon his hand. He didn’t see Jones’s sudden, frightened glance at him. “Years ago. An experiment. I suspended my vital signs for nine minutes and forty-four seconds. I was looking for inspiration, an understanding.” The sight of his restored life line fascinated him. “I didn’t find one. The laboratory grew dark, and then I awoke. Only my instruments assured me that I hadn’t simply fallen asleep.”

  “Did … did you see anything?” Jones was terrified to ask, terrified not to.

  “No. Nothing at all. No afterlife. Although … There is a Hell.”

  “Hell? How do…?”

  “I’ve seen it. Visited. I was alive on that occasion. It wasn’t a pleasant day trip. It wasn’t a pleasant year.” He frowned. This was a conundrum. “I wonder how it was that I didn’t see anything? I would have certainly … Oh. Of course.” He smiled to himself, how had he forgotten that small detail. “I had no soul.”

  It was a small omission. If he had continued the sentence a little further to include “but I have one now,” things might have turned out differently. Cabal realised that later when he analysed the day’s events, but—right then—it seemed an unimportant point. A tiny bit of happenstance that, for scientific reasons, he had seen fit to sell away his soul and that later, for scientific reasons, he had seen fit to recover it.

  He certainly didn’t appreciate its significance at the time, when it might have done some good. The sight of Jones going quite mad with fear unduly distracted him from that conclusion.

  “You!” said Jones, backing away. “It’s you!”

  “Of course it’s me,” replied Cabal.

  This, he was later to realise, was exactly the wrong thing to say at that juncture.

  Jones spoke, but it was in such a paroxysm of dread and terror that the words fell over one another and became shrill, sobbing gibberish. Cabal watched him, utterly nonplussed. What had got into the man?

  Perhaps, Cabal conjectured with a growing sense of threat, Jones’s paranoia had gone too far. Perhaps he, Cabal, had asked Jones to risk his neck once too often. Perhaps Jones had been keeping himself busy between excursions and the rare occasions when anybody actually wanted a hat by constructing an imaginary world of menace and conspiracy—a world that Cabal had accidentally tapped into with his apparently ill-omened comment.

  What happened next happened quickly and Cabal was hardly aware of the chain of events even as they occurred. He simply responded to stimuli, reasoned rapidly and without reflection, and acted upon that reasoning.

  Jones continued to move away from him until he reached the end of the table. His eyes flickered down and he reached for the handle of one of the table’s drawers. Cabal watched him with cautious curiosity, but no real sense of danger.

  Then the pain began.

  It was the living echo of the agony he had felt earlier that same day, burning across his hand as if the flesh was being laid open with a blade of frozen vitriol. He gasped with its suddenness and gripped the stricken hand with the other as he looked down at the open palm. What he saw first confused, then horrified him. His life line was shortening before his eyes, burning like a fast fuse across the skin. He could see the crease vanishing in a bead of boiling blood, leaving nothing but smooth skin behind it.

  He looked up: Jones had the drawer open, looking furtively at Cabal as he searched in it.

  Cabal reached for his bag, undid its strap and buckle in two fast twitches, shook it open.

  Jones had found what he was looking for, closed his hand around it.

  Cabal reached into the bag with his right hand, ignoring the pain. When his hand closed around the butt of his Webley, the cool wood and metal seemed to ease the burning. He let the bag fall, lifting the gun and thumb cocking its hammer at the same time.

  Jones had a knife, an ugly, large thing made of some crudely refined metal and placed in a lightly coloured wooden handle. The expression of panicked hope in his face dissolved as he saw the gun. He whimpered and Cabal shot him.

  The shot was placed to kill instantly and it could hardly miss at that range. Jones was dead before he even started to fall. By the time his head cracked against the floor, Cabal was already preparing his departure.

  He gathered up the particular materials he had come to buy, wrapped them in a large square of butcher’s paper, and packed them into his bag, placing the revolver upon the top of it in case it was needed in a hurry again. He strapped the bag shut and made as if to leave. Instead, he paused and looked back at Jones. Poor, paranoid, very dead Jones.

  At least, he assumed Jones was dead. He’d never heard of anybody surviving a Boxer .577 round delivered at close range to the interorbital space, but that wasn’t to say he should take it as a given. He stood over Jones and looked at the damage. On examination, it appeared very much like one could take death by Boxer .577 round delivered at close range to the interorbital space as a given. Cabal sighed. He disliked killing, doubly so when it represented a nuisance to him quite apart from the judicial ramifications. He was quite adept at running away from the police and bribing the few that lasted the course. The loss of Jones, however, made gathering the specialist materials Jones had been supplying quite difficult. Speaking of which.

  Cabal knelt and picked up the unwieldy knife Jones had made to attack him with. The blade was of some form of barely refined metal, certainly not steel. Iron? he wondered. But why? It wouldn’t hold an edge for long, it would rust easily, and it simply didn’t make much sense for anybody
to…

  Suddenly reaching a conclusion can bring a bolt of pleasure or a stab of dismay. This was definitely the latter. Cabal reached into his pocket and found the small piece of meteoric iron he kept with him and held it alongside the blade. While not the most thorough of metallurgical tests, there was still an undeniable similarity.

  With a sinking heart, Cabal looked at his right palm. There was his life line, just as it had always been there. Of course it was.

  Cabal stood, placed the metal in his pocket, put the knife into his bag to lie alongside his revolver, and left Jones’s hat shop for the last time. He had killed once today in self-defence. He strongly suspected that he would kill again before the day was out, but this time it would be in revenge.

  * * *

  As anticipated, the train trip passed without incident. Also as anticipated, the walk home didn’t. As he walked past a small hillock topped by an old elm, he suddenly found himself in shadow. He turned expecting to find the black landau, the black horses, the black-clad coachman sitting and waiting. Thus, Cabal was not disappointed in most of his expectations. The coachman, however, was far more proactive than at their last meeting. As Cabal turned, the coachman grabbed his wrist, tore his Gladstone bag from his hand, and tossed it to the verge of the road as if it were dripping pus. Before Cabal could protest, the coachman had opened the landau’s door, picked Cabal up by the scruff of his jacket, and thrown him in. The adjective unceremonious occurred to him as he landed face-first on the carriage’s floor. Disconcerting as his first entrance to the carriage had been, it seemed greatly preferable to the second. He heard the door slam shut.

  “Are you all right down there?” she asked.

  “Oh, good,” he replied as he climbed into the seat facing her. “Insult to injury. Why no legerdemain this time? Run out of pixie dust or just couldn’t be bothered? After all, you’ve won your little game, haven’t you?”

  She looked at him, silent and serious, for several seconds. “Not a game, Mr Cabal. No game at all.”