The Crooked Letter: Books of the Cataclysm: One

by Sean Williams

  She got off the bed, and he thought then that he had pushed her too far. That he was being the stupid one now. They were all stupid, tangled up in games too complex to name.

  She walked across the room to the adjoining door. He heard it close, and he let himself sag back on the bed. Why? he asked himself. Why did he let them get to him? Why did they do it?

  He gasped with fright when her hands came down on either side of his shoulders. She was suddenly leaning over him, so close her hair brushed his left ear and her breath was hot on his face. He imagined that he could see her eyes and teeth shining in the dark.

  And then…

  He flinched violently as the door was flung open. Horror struck him full in the face and he recoiled blindly into a wall. Bouncing off it, he staggered through the darkness, not caring where he was going as long as it was away. He tripped over the stack of milk crates and they clattered noisily across the floor. He went down too, vomiting before he hit the ground. The hot, acid bile burned in his throat and on his hands, and washed away some of the horror of what he had seen—but it wasn't enough. The night was full of it, rolling out of the open door in hot, horrible waves.

  He didn't hear the click of the cool-room door shutting behind him, or Pukje's soft pad-pad across the concrete floor. He did feel the hands under his armpits, lifting him to his feet and guiding him to a bathroom. There, using water from the cistern, Hadrian washed his face. The coolness of the water forced the images out of his mind for a second or two. He could forget the staring eyes, the limbs in tangles, the reaching hands, the ripped throats…

  “Sorry about that,” whispered Pukje, “but you wouldn't have believed me if I'd just told you.”

  “How many are there?” he asked when he could speak without fear of vomiting again.

  “I don't know,” Pukje said. “Here—dozens, scores, a lot. Elsewhere—”

  “There are more?”

  “Millions, Hadrian. Everyone in the city, all sacrificed to fuel the invasion.”

  “I don't understand.” The fragile shell of his shock crumbled, exposing him to the raw horror of the situation. Of his situation. “Sacrificed how? What invasion?”

  “It spread like madness through the streets.” Pukje's voice and eyes were sepulchral. “Like a tide of deadly gas, it swept up everyone in its path. None could escape it; none were immune. The city turned inwards upon itself, became cannibal, autophage, suicidal. The few who stood and fought were slaughtered by the rest. None were spared. All are interred now, breathing dark life into the bones of the city.”

  Hadrian remembered his fantasies of a postapocalyptic bonfire and rescue.

  “The city was attacked?” he asked, trying to make sense of it.

  “Not just the city. The world. This realm we inhabit.”

  Hadrian brushed aside the gibberish Pukje had spouted earlier. “Attacked by whom? Why?”

  “At the moment, I fear you couldn't grasp the answer to either of those questions.”

  “Try me,” he hissed, grabbing the front of Pukje's mossy garments and pulling him close. “Is it World War Three? The Chinese? Who?”

  Pukje slithered free, leaving Hadrian's fingers greasy, and backed up against the door to the bathroom.

  “Can't you feel it?” The little man's eyes were intense.

  “Feel what?”

  “Things changing around us. Around you.”

  “No.” Hadrian shook his head, hearing Lascowicz's voice in the boiler room: Many things are changing around you. Do you have the slightest idea what happened to you and your brother? “I can't feel anything.”

  “You're lying.”

  “I'm not lying!” He lashed out at an insubstantial conspiracy of lunatics. One crazy cop and a deformed street dweller didn't carry much weight, but there was a cool-room of dead people and an abandoned city to think about. “This can't be happening!”

  “It is happening, Hadrian. And there's more on the way. You need to wake up or you're not going to last long.”

  Hadrian wept openly, not caring if the whole world saw. “Leave me alone.”

  A small hand gripped his shoulder. “Your brother is alive, Hadrian. If you only hear one thing I'm saying, hear that.”

  “Get away from me!” He brushed the little man aside with the back of his arm. “I don't want to hear it.”

  Pukje landed on his feet, like a cat. His eyes narrowed. “Before, you asked me not to leave.”

  “I don't know what I want. Just leave me alone!”

  “All right,” Pukje said, softening, “but you'll know soon enough. And when you do, I'll be back. That's a promise.”

  Pukje's soft footfalls faded away into silence, and Hadrian sobbed in the darkness for what felt like an eternity.

  When he finally ran out of tears, the awareness of what lay just metres from him became too much to endure. He staggered out of the restaurant and ran blindly through the streets. They carried him forever, or so it felt, but he saw nothing familiar. He saw no living thing—human, plant, or animal. Just endless rows of buildings, lined up like dominoes for a god to knock down. The suggestion that there might be many more such caches of bodies made him feel like running, but there was no way out of the city. He was hopelessly lost.

  Your brother is dead.

  Your brother is alive.

  His mind told him that Lascowicz and his own eyes were right. His heart disagreed. He had tried to hide the sensation by keeping Pukje close at hand and telling himself that he had to be mistaken, but there was no hiding it now.

  He still felt Seth nearby—and admitting to that sensation was the same thing as owning up to madness.

  When the events of the day—fear, murder, desperation—finally claimed him, he found a niche out of sight in a hotel foyer, tucked down beside a brown, desiccated fern and a defunct Coke machine, and gave in to exhaustion, mental and physical.

  And he dreamed.

  He dreamed that Seth was calling to him, or trying to. A voice came to him as though from a great distance. He strained to listen but could make out no words. He couldn't even tell if it actually was Seth's voice. The more he reached for it, the further it retreated. A deep hum rose up and swamped everything. As the voice faded into the hum, he was left wondering if he had heard it at all.

  There were other whispers, though. Whispers from times past, male and female. A game called Jinx…

  On the floor of the empty hotel in a deserted city, brotherless, afraid and alone, Hadrian stirred. Even in the grip of the dream, he had the wherewithal to question what it was. Memory or imagination? Recollection or wish fulfilment? Had Ellis really kissed him then, with his brother just one room away, after tormenting him with the sounds of their lovemaking? Had she slid across him until they were lying body to body on the skinny mattress—her breasts soft against his chest; her thighs on either side of his hips—and moved against him with such languid, liquid heat that he had gasped aloud?

  Had the hand come down on his mouth then, and her voice hiss in his ear: “Not a sound, Hadrian Castillo, or he'll hear”?

  He had his name, and his freedom to speak returned with it—but if he did speak he would lose her. It was galling. All the things he had to tell her would remain unsaid.

  But was that really what had happened? Had she really kissed him hungrily, and ground down upon him, and helped him garment by garment out of his clothes so their hot skins slid and pressed together, and taken him fast and furtively in the darkness, with a wild tangle of limbs and breath that came so fast he couldn't tell whose was whose—until, all too soon, he felt as though the darkness was alive with light, and millions of imaginary photons went off in his head at the thought and feel of her with him, him in her, at long last?

  His dream dissolved into fragments: of Ellis sliding away from him and melting into the darkness; of heat turning to chill as the wintry night crept back in; of voices whispering through the closed door. There was a certain degree of confusion over whether the whispers were new or t
he same as they had been before. He could have been listening to Ellis and Seth talking again, or it could have been an entirely new conversation.

  But his brother was calling. He was certain of that. Through bone or spirit, voice or no voice, words or no words, Seth was nearby—and he had something very important he needed to tell him, right now…

  “Tombs aren't empty. Humans have always told stories of vampires, ghosts, and zombies because we know that sepulchres are as alive with possibility as any womb. There we give birth to our fears—which, like our desires, are not always pure, or entirely what they seem.”

  THE BOOK OF TOWERS, EXEGESIS 17:2

  “Do you think about home much, El Dorado?” Seth and Ellis were strolling past a cinema complex in Copenhagen, taking in the chilly autumn day while Hadrian bought postcards from a museum shop. “Do you ever wonder what your friends and family are doing without you?”

  “Never,” she said. “They're a million miles away, a million years ago.”

  “What if one of them died? Would you regret being here, with us?”

  “Why would I do that?” She took his hand in hers, and swung it as though they were children. “If I worried about that sort of thing, I'd be like my brother. I'd never leave the cave.”

  This was the first time she had mentioned a brother. “Doesn't get out much?”

  “A real computer nerd. Smart as anything but people-stupid, if you know what I mean. He wrote me a birthday card in Klingon, for crying out loud.” She laughed, and it warmed him more than the weak sun.

  Taking the opportunity, he pulled her to him and kissed her. Her lips were soft. She smelled of the perfume she'd tested in a department store that morning: unseasonably floral and summery.

  “Hadrian says he might have Asperger's syndrome,” she said when they separated.

  Seth felt a slight twinge. How had Hadrian come to diagnose this person that, until just a minute ago, Seth hadn't even known existed?

  “Yes, well, Hadrian would know.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Obsessive, dependent, socially inept—”

  “You're too hard on him,” she said. “He's not like that.”

  “No? You should try living with him.”

  “I have. It's not so bad.”

  “The novelty wears off after a few months, believe me.”

  She tilted her head and smiled at him. “You're too close. You don't see him any more. That's your problem. You're blind to him. And he doesn't see you in return. You both rant and rail about how you should be treated as individuals, but you don't realise just how alike you really are.”

  “Them's fightin’ words, El Guapo.” He could feel heat rising to his cheeks, and he hid it by adopting a gunslinger's stance. “Reach for the sky-y-y.”

  She held her examining pose for a beat, then quick-drew an imaginary pistol.

  “You can make light of it all you want,” she said as he clutched his stomach and fell to his knees before her, “but I know the truth.”

  He refused to give her the satisfaction of a response, apart from pretending to die.

  Darkness fell, and Seth fell with it. The sound of the train accompanied him, a rhythmic pounding of metal on metal and a scream that might have been brakes, although the train wasn't slowing. He felt, in fact, as if it was speeding up. In an embrace of metal and oil, at the whim of roaring, unnatural engines, he was swept up and hurled far away from Ellis and his brother.

  The pain stayed with him. It was unlike anything he had ever experienced. For a second, he'd had no idea that the Swede had stabbed him. He simply felt the hilt jar his ribs as it hit home. A collapsible blade, he'd thought. A stage knife: they're just trying to frighten us.

  Then every muscle in his body had contracted around the terrible wound, or so it had seemed, and he had known that he was going to die. He had felt the blood rush from him and his lungs collapse. The animal parts of him had taken over while his mind fled into darkness, unable to bear the agony and the horror of it.

  Somewhere behind him, back in the train tunnel, he felt his heart stop. His body was still warm; electrical activity still flickered in the tissues of his brain; his muscles were still supple. All that would pass. The meat of him was already beginning to break down. It was only a matter of time before it rotted away to nothing.

  Help me!

  The racket and heat seemed to carry him away. Down became up; it felt as though he had been caught by a giddying thermal and flung into the sky. He'd gone airplane gliding once, on a dare, and the thrill of it was still vivid in his mind. Updraughts were like invisible hands snatching at the fragile wings, bending them, shaking the fuselage around him. This sensation had something of that moment at its heart. Then, as now, he had wanted to scream with the delight and terror of it and wished that Hadrian had had the courage to try it too…

  Hadrian!

  The thought of his brother sent a thrill of panic through Seth. Was Hadrian hurt? Had the Swede stabbed him as well?

  Then came the guilt: Seth had abandoned Hadrian, was being a bad brother, should have tried harder to protect him. The automatic response, drummed into him by years of parental and social conditioning, was no less strong for the death of his body.

  Was Hadrian following in Seth's wake, buffeted and shaken by mortality's strange winds? Was he frightened?

  Hadrian?

  No answer. A subtle sensation tugged at him, as though Hadrian was nearby, but there was nothing to substantiate the feeling. They could have been nose to nose in this void, utterly invisible to each other—or they could have been a world apart. There was no way to tell. Seth hoped, for Hadrian's sake, that the sensation was an illusion. The only way Hadrian could be near him was if he was dead too.

  The sound of the train became echoing and faint. Seth clutched feverishly at any semblance of rational thought, remembering and dismissing what little he knew about near-death experiences. It certainly wasn't something he'd ever expected to try firsthand. His continued existence didn't feel like a hallucination. He hadn't been brought up to seek answers from religion, and never felt the need to try. He still didn't as he rose upwards into a black-as-midnight sky.

  His life didn't flash before his eyes, but he had plenty of time in which to consider it. He thought of his parents, the two people who had done their best to deal with the stresses of an instant family when the twins had been born. Their marriage had survived until the boys turned ten, then acrimoniously fragmented. Parental duties had been borne, from that time on, by their mother, although their father remained in touch, a distant, mournful figure. The truth was that the boys barely noticed who was caring for them. After the split—which Hadrian had blamed on himself and his brother, but Seth still blamed on his parents—the twins had retreated even more deeply into their relationship, isolating themselves from those around them. Only as they grew older and their bond stagnated did they emerge from their common shell to find themselves surrounded by strangers with whom they were forced to remain awkwardly entangled.

  No longer, he thought bitterly, although his end was taking much longer than he had any right to expect. The void sucked at him; its emptiness demanded to be filled, and the turmoil inside him needed release. He shouted, sobbed, screamed, swore. His thoughts didn't seem to be slowing down or shrinking; they were blowing up to fill the entire universe. He felt as though he was floating up from the bottom of an ocean trench, through lightless depths that could crush steel; or he was hanging in the emptiness of space, with nothing around him for billions of light-years.

  He thought of Ellis. If the Swede had killed her, then she was in exactly the same situation as Seth and his brother. They were all dead, and he would happily lie down and die—let everything he had ever been and ever dreamed of being dissolve forever into the void—if only his thoughts would let him.

  At the same time, he wished that there could be more to the end of his life than waiting for the last brain cells to die and his thoughts to unravel. People
wrote of the dignity of death, lauding it as the great definer of the human condition. He wondered if they would say the same if they knew that death came in darkness, locked in the coffin of a skull.

  He pictured Hadrian's body slumped next to his. Perhaps their heads were touching. How frustrating it was to be so close and yet utterly unable to communicate as they died. It was like being on another planet.

  What would he say if he could communicate? There were no words for what hung between them. I love you and I hate you. You get in my way, and I can't live without you. Being dead doesn't change a thing.

  I'm sorry, Hadrian, he said into the void of his demise. I'm sorry we argued. I'm sorry things went badly with El. I'm sorry I didn't listen to her about the Swede. I'm sorry I wasn't there to help you when you needed it.

  He waited for the end to come, wishing that apologies would make him feel better about it. The truth was, it didn't. He was still angry with Hadrian—and with Ellis. The hurt of discovering them together was as hot and piercing as the pain of his death. He was angry with the Swede for sticking that damned knife in his chest, and with the Swede's sidekick for holding him down. He was angry with himself for not doing something to stop it, for not calling for help, for not reacting fast enough. He was young and strong, with so much left to live for.

  He was angry with himself for dying.

  Why now? Why at all?

  He waited for the end to come with rage and betrayal burning inside him, praying only to be put out of his misery.

  With a soundless and utterly surprising thud, he hit something. Something hard. Like a scuba diver trying to surface but finding the boundary between air and water suddenly impermeable, Seth flailed helplessly against the void's end.

  A rush of physical sensation accompanied the impact. He could feel his body, and through it the space around him. He was dressed in the same jeans and sweatshirt he had been wearing when he had stormed out of the hotel in Sweden. There was no sign of the wound to his chest.

  He had no trouble obtaining purchase on the unexpected surface. It seemed to clutch at him in the way of gravity, although a vast drop hung below him, back the way he had come. He felt like a bug clinging to a ceiling.