“Did he tell you the story about Santa Claus?” Jonas asked, chuckling to himself.
“Yes!” Dylan laughed. How bizarre! When she’d imagined the story, it had been modern. She’d pictured the grotto in the shopping centre downtown. Would it have been the same in the – what? – 1930s? Earlier? “He thought highly of you, you know,” she told Jonas. “When he told me your story, he said you were admirable. And noble.”
“He did?” Jonas looked pleased, smiling widely when Dylan nodded, confirming the truth of her words.
“I think he is admirable, too,” he mused. “The job he does, the way he just goes round and round. It is not fair, the hand he has been dealt.”
“I know,” Dylan mumbled.
None of it was fair. Not what had happened to Jonas, to her. Not what was still happening to Tristan. He deserved to be freed from his… well, ‘job’ just wasn’t the right word. You got paid for a job. And it was possible to resign, to walk away. No, what Tristan had was an obligation. And he’d suffered enough.
“When are you going to try?” asked Jonas, breaking into her reverie.
Dylan made a face. She wasn’t sure. Her first thought was that she would wait for morning. That would be better, giving her a whole day of light to try and make it to a safe house. But then another thought struck her. Tristan had told her she didn’t need to sleep any more – and how long had she been awake now? She still didn’t feel tired. Was there such a thing as night here? The sun still hung high up in the zenith of the sky, as it had done earlier, before they’d gone to meet Eliza.
So if time was no object, then she supposed the answer was whenever she was ready. When would that be?
Never.
Now.
She thought about what she was facing: a door that wouldn’t open; a wasteland; an army of wraiths; a hopeless needle-in-a-haystack search to find Tristan. It was a terrifying list that had her trembling.
And what could she do to prepare for it? Absolutely nothing.
Dylan experienced a moment of pure terror. Could she really do this? Her resolve wavered, the practical part of her brain fighting desperately against the idea of being obliterated, erased. The bloody skies and swirling demons that waited for her on the other side of the door. Why was she doing this?
Tristan. His blue, blue eyes. The warmth of his hand, strong around hers. The softness of his lips, burning down into her soul.
“No time like the present.”
Any door, Eliza had said. Any one would take her where she wanted to go, so long as she was sure she wanted to go there. But Dylan knew where she wanted to go. Not ten minutes later she was standing in front of it, breathing in the heady scent coming off the pots of orange and yellow flowers, squinting against the flare of light as the sun reflected off the shining brass number hanging dead square in the door. This, really, was the door that had taken her into this place, wherever it was. It seemed fitting that this was the door she used to leave it.
Dylan contemplated the little round doorknob. Jonas had explained to her how it worked. All she had to think about was where she wanted to go, and when she opened the door, she would be there. She fixed in her head a vision of the wasteland: the high, rolling hills, the frigid wind, the cloud-covered sky. Her hand began to reach forward, but then she stopped herself. That wasn’t right. That wasn’t the real wasteland. Without Tristan, she knew what she was going to see. Cringing slightly, she dredged up a different image, one that was a landscape awash with different hues of red. That was where she was truly going.
Her teeth gritted in concentration, she stretched out with her fingers again.
“Dylan.” Jonas wrapped a hand around her wrist, pulled her to a stop.
Letting out a quick sigh of relief, secretly glad of the chance to delay, even for a few moments, Dylan twisted round to look at him.
“How did you die?”
“What?” Utterly unprepared for the question, Dylan could do nothing but gape at him.
“How did you die?” he repeated.
“Why?” she asked, bewildered.
“Well, it’s just… if you make it, and I really hope you do…” He flashed her a quick smile. “…you’ll go back into your body, just as you were. Whatever happened to you will have still happened. So, I just wondered, how did you die?”
“Train crash,” Dylan muttered through motionless lips.
Jonas nodded thoughtfully. “What were your injuries?”
“I don’t know.”
It had been so dark, and so quiet. And she’d had no idea at all that she was dead. If there had been light in the carriage, what would she have seen? Had her body been there, sprawled across the seat? Had she been crushed? Decapitated?
If she was that badly injured, would it work for her?
Dylan shook her head slightly to clear her morbid thoughts before they stole her nerve. She’d already decided, she reminded herself. She was doing this.
“I don’t know,” she repeated, “but it doesn’t matter.” Tristan was all that mattered, she thought. “Goodbye, Jonas.”
“Good luck.” He smiled dubiously at her and she knew he thought she wasn’t going to make it. She turned her back on his doubt. “Hey, one more thing.”
This time Dylan sighed in real frustration. “What?” she asked, not looking round, hand still held out towards the door handle.
“Say hello to him for me.” Pause. “I hope you survive, Dylan. Maybe I’ll see you again.”
He gave his farewell as he backed away down the path. Dylan felt a slight stirring of panic as she turned and watched the distance grow between them.
“You’re not staying?” she asked.
What she really wanted to ask was for him to come with her, but she couldn’t do that. Wouldn’t.
He shook his head at her, still shuffling backwards.
“I don’t want to see,” he confessed.
He gave her a quick wave and a final smile, then hurried away down the street. Dylan watched him cross the road, weaving between the cars until he disappeared inside a house. And then she was alone.
The street felt eerily quiet. Unwelcome. It was almost easy to turn her back on it and face the door for a third and final time. Heart thudding in her chest, a light dew of nervous sweat beading on her upper lip, she reached out for the doorknob. In her mind’s eye she conjured up the nightmare vision, bathed in bloody red, and as her fingers grasped the cool metal, her lips trembled, muttering, “Wasteland, wasteland,” over and over again. She gripped the circular knob, took a final breath, and twisted.
Dylan expected nothing to happen. She thought she’d meet an immovable force; a lock she could never unpick. She honestly believed she’d have to stand there for hour after hour, searching for her courage, her conviction, until she was sure, utterly sure, that she wanted to do this.
But the door opened easily in her hand.
Astonished, she swung it wide and peered through the opening.
The wasteland.
The burning, burgundy wasteland. The sky was streaked with burnt orange and violet. Already mid-afternoon. That was frightening.
The path that she’d followed on that final day with Tristan – when she’d still believed he was coming with her, when the sun was still shining down – stretched out before her. Rather than the golden brown of sand and gravel, it was midnight black. It seemed to undulate, like something bubbled under the surface. It glistened slightly, like treacle.
Holding her breath, Dylan lifted her foot and placed it gently down. The path held firm. After a moment’s hesitation, she took another pace. Her fingers let go of the door. She didn’t need to turn round to watch it; she knew when it closed. Knew to the very second. Because she was no longer alone.
Souls. The instant she was back in the realm of the ferrymen, she was surrounded by souls. They were exactly as she’d remembered them: filmy, shadowy. Like ghosts, rippling slightly in the air. They had faces, bodies, but they seemed both to be there and not. It was th
e same for their voices. When she’d watched them from the safe house, Dylan had been too far away, and protected by the cottage walls, to hear them. But now they were loud, babbling all around her. Nothing they said was clear, though. It was like listening underwater, or with a glass pressed against the wall. And then, surrounding them, intently circling, were wraiths. Dylan gasped, but the demons made no move towards her. They frightened her, though. She threw an automatic glance over her shoulder, eyed the firmly closed door. Should she go back?
No.
“Go, Dylan,” she told herself. “Move.”
Her legs obeyed, and she started forward in a stiff walk that seemed constantly on the verge of breaking into a trot. As much as she could, she kept her eyes fixed forward. Her sights were firmly set on a ring of hills in the distance. Hills that she knew skirted the edge of a lake, on the shore of which was a safe house.
The path was sulphurous. The smoking fumes that hovered in a mist above it swirled around her feet; wisps that seemed ready to solidify into grabbing hands if she stayed too long. She wasn’t sure if it was her imagination, but already her feet seemed too warm, as if heat was seeping up through the soles of her trainers. The air, too, was uncomfortably hot. It was how Dylan imagined it would feel to stand in the middle of a desert, not even a breath of wind to stir the cloying heat. It tasted like sand and ash, and already her mouth was dry. She tried to switch to breathing in through her nose and her lungs burned for more oxygen. She knew she was close to hyperventilating, but she couldn’t stop herself.
Just get to the first safe house. That was all she had to do, and she would think no further than that. Just get to the first safe house.
Clenching her fingers into fists, she set her eyes forward. She was tempted, so tempted, to look at the souls, to see who passed, but some sixth sense told her that was dangerous. Out of the corner of her eye she could see the flickering shadows of the wraiths. Without the light of a shining orb to draw their gaze, they didn’t seem to have noticed her. But if they did… she had no ferryman to protect her. She’d be easy pickings.
“Don’t look, don’t look,” she repeated under her breath as she hurried on.
Forward, forward, forward she marched, looking at nothing more than the hills in front of her, watching as they grew larger and larger, and darker and darker with the setting of the sun.
Dylan made the safe house just as the sun, glowing like a hot coal, began to nudge the razor-sharp edge of the highest of the hills. She was panting and gasping, not with exertion, although she’d walked faster and faster as she’d tried to match her speed to that of the fading light, but with the stress of keeping her eyes fixed firmly ahead. The souls had continued to stream past her thick and fast, but she’d been too frightened to stop and look at them, catching only snatches of conversation; meaningless phrases and words, occasional heart-wrenching wailing.
But the later it had got in the day, the faster she’d noticed the souls around her were trying to travel. She’d sensed their urgency, seen glimpses of stunning white light – beautiful in the gloom – in the corner of her eye, coaxing them on. These souls were flirting with danger, pushing their luck. They had a long way to go to get to the line before nightfall, and their ferrymen knew it. So did the wraiths.
They emitted a sound the like of which Dylan had never heard before. Screaming and laughing blended together. Hate and delight; despair and excitement. It chilled her to her very bones. And it was almost impossible not to look, to turn towards the source of the sound, to see what creature could be so happy and yet so tortured at the same time. She was enormously relieved when she saw the safe house, in this bloody wilderness she’d been worried that it wouldn’t be there, wouldn’t be the same. There it was, though, an oasis in the desert, and by the time Dylan threw herself in the door of the cottage she was almost crying with the effort of it.
The night passed slowly after that.
She lit a fire, lay down on the bed. Closed her eyes. She wanted to sleep. Not because she was tired, but just to hide. Just to pass the time. But unconsciousness had deserted her. Instead, she whiled away the hours listening to the wraiths’ cackles of ecstasy as they feasted on souls who had been too slow, whose ferrymen had failed.
Chapter Twenty-five
“I’m dead.”
It wasn’t a question, so Tristan didn’t bother to answer it. He just stared straight ahead, letting the flickering light of the flames lull him into a semi-trance. He hated this bit. Hated the crying and the moaning and the pleading. In truth, they’d come quite far, almost reached the valley without the woman realising what was happening. They might have made it all the way to the line – a feat Tristan had never achieved in all the thousands of souls he’d had to ferry – had it not been for the wraiths. This soul, this woman, was so timid, so docile and compliant that she hadn’t once questioned Tristan’s word. It had become almost annoying, as if she were blank paper, completely vacant. But it had been convenient.
The wraiths, though, would never let one so innocent and naive pass through the wasteland without a fight. They had dared to risk the sun, using the flimsy shadows of trees and bushes to attack. They had been easy to evade, but they’d been loud. And there had been nothing he could do to stop her looking towards the noise.
“What happened to me?” The woman’s voice was a frightened whisper.
Tristan blinked once, dragging himself back to the room, and looked at her. Her shoulders were hunched up, her eyes huge, her arms wrapped around her chest, as if she were trying to hug herself. He looked at her, at her pathetic expression, and he made himself feel absolutely nothing. Still, he was her ferryman; he had to answer.
“Your house was robbed. The burglar stabbed you while you slept.”
“And those… things outside, what are they?”
“Demons, wraiths.” He said no more than that. He did not want to have to make any long explanations.
“What will they do to me?”
“If they catch you, they’ll devour your soul and you’ll become one of them.” Tristan looked away so he wouldn’t see the terror on her face. Despite himself, he was beginning to feel sorry for her; and he couldn’t afford that. Not again.
There was a silence that lasted for so long Tristan almost turned to read the woman’s expression. He could hear the slight hitch of her breathing, though. She was crying. That was something he didn’t want to see.
“I thought that you were going to rob me at first, you know,” she said quietly, her voice steadier than he would have expected. She huffed a humourless laugh. “When I saw you outside my house, I thought you were one of the neighbourhood thugs, come to steal from me. I was going to call the police.”
Tristan nodded without looking at her. He’d seen that in her face as she’d peeped through the window at him and he’d been concerned for a brief moment. It was the way he was dressed; his age, face. It was all wrong for this woman. He should be older, someone gentlemanly. The type of man she would trust. He should not be the same boy who had been sent to collect Dylan from the train.
Why hadn’t he changed? It didn’t make sense. He’d never held on to a form before. And then, as they’d been leaving her street, he’d sworn he’d seen someone looking at him. He didn’t understand it, but he didn’t like it. It made it harder to try to forget about Dylan this way; to leave the pain behind.
“What would have happened,” she said at last, “if I had tried to run away from you?”
He spoke into the flames. “I would have stopped you.”
There was silence whilst the woman considered this. Tristan tried to lull himself into a trance, but he couldn’t shut his mind off. He found himself wishing for the woman to speak, just to break the silence. She obliged a moment later.
“Where are we going?”
Of course she would ask that question. Tristan had compiled a stock answer to this one many years ago.
“I am guiding you across the wasteland. When you finish the journey,
you’ll be safe.”
“And where will I be?” she prompted.
“On.”
On. They always went on. And he went back. He had long since reconciled himself with this great injustice and it had ceased to bother him. Not until…
He opened his mouth, his thoughts half forming a message. The woman had an eternity ahead of her, surely she could spare a few moments of that to seek out a soul for him? But before he’d even decided what he wanted to say, he closed it again.
Dylan had gone where he could not reach her. Not his hands; not his words. And what point was there in sending a message when there was no way she could ever send one back?
He sighed.
“Tomorrow we have a dangerous journey to make,” he began.
The valley would be treacherous. He needed to focus. He needed to be the ferryman.
The wasteland was no cooler in the early light of dawn. Dylan stood on the threshold of the cottage. She’d been there for a while, fighting with herself. There were wraiths outside already, swooping across the surface of the lake like birds. Again, though, they hadn’t come near her. The safe house seemed to be holding. She could stay here. Stay here, be safe, and wait for Tristan. But what if he didn’t make it this far? What if the soul he was ferrying was too old, too slow? Besides, she was aching for him. The idea of waiting, for however long, was excruciating. She had to go and find him.
But the lake. She had almost drowned here. Tipped into the water, she’d floundered. Creatures in the deep had toyed with her, tugging, pulling, ripping. If it hadn’t been for Tristan snagging the hem of her jeans and hauling her to safety, she’d never have left the water. She remembered the taste of it. Foul, stagnant, polluted. It had been thick, like oil on her tongue. And that had been in her own heather-covered wasteland.
In this new burning wilderness, it was worse. It churned, poisonous and smoking. The surface was a haze; it didn’t look substantial enough to take the weight of the dilapidated dinghy, but the boat was there, bobbing gently on the surface. That was a relief. It had capsized so she’d been worried that it might have sunk, or washed up dashed to pieces. But there it was, though, right where she’d left it.
Ferryman Page 20
