“Yes,” said JC.
“Then go back,” said Kim, kindly but firmly. “There’s no sense in both of us being dead. So far, I haven’t seen anything to recommend it. You have your whole life ahead of you. All the years that were stolen from me. So go back, find someone else, someone with a future, and love her. Forget me, and be happy.”
“I could no more forget you than I could forget me,” said JC. “It wouldn’t be living, and it wouldn’t be love if it wasn’t you.”
“Now that is crap, and you know it,” said Kim. “You hardly know me. And no-one ever really dies of a broken heart. You will forget me, and you will move on, because that’s what people do.”
“It’s not what I do,” said JC. “Don’t give up, Kim. Because I won’t. I will follow you wherever this force takes you. I will find you wherever he hides you, and I will break you free and take you up out of this place and into the light again. Because that is what I do.”
“And then what?” said Kim. “I’ll still be a ghost. What kind of life could we have together?”
JC grinned at her. “I’ll think of something. Don’t push me; I’m still working this out as I go along. Never give up hope, Kim.”
“Never,” she said.
Kim started to drift backwards again. JC went after her at his own pace, refusing to be hurried. Kim’s speed remained the same, and JC smiled inwardly. It seemed he’d achieved some measure of control over the situation.
And then she and he rounded the corner into the next passageway, and JC stopped abruptly. Kim kept going, floating slowly but steadily backwards down the corridor, her feet dangling a good few inches above the thousands of razor blades covering the floor. Jammed in sideways, their glistening sharp edges pointing upwards. Thousands of them, covering the floor from one end of the corridor to the other, blue steel gleaming brightly in the fierce electric light. Kim kept going until she reached the far end, then stopped. JC’s heart sank as he realised there was no way past the razor blades and no way round them.
His shoes wouldn’t protect him for long. The blades would slice through the soles in half a dozen steps, then there would be nothing between his feet and the razor-sharp blades. And once he fell . . . it would be a bad way to die, crawling across the razor blades, bleeding out slowly.
He looked at Kim, held motionless at the end of the corridor, and she seemed miles away. Once again the chase had been stopped, so she could watch him suffer and die because of her. This unseen enemy really did love his mind games. It was saying to Kim, How much is this man prepared to do, how far is he prepared to go, how much will he risk to come after you? And JC had to wonder: Why does the enemy care? Why doesn’t it just kill me?
JC knelt before the first row of razor blades, hardened his mind against all illusion, and stretched out a single finger. The nearest steel blade sliced into his fingertip so gently he didn’t even feel it until he saw the blood welling up. Then he felt the pain and snatched his hand back to suck thoughtfully at the wounded finger. So, real blood and real pain. If this was an illusion, it was such a powerful one his body believed in it. JC frowned, concentrating, remembering how the Institute had taught him to walk barefoot across live coals. He’d protested about that very loudly at the time, demanding to know when such a thing would ever come in handy. But the Institute had insisted, and he’d learned. It was all about faith, and balance. JC smiled briefly, took a slow, calming breath, and stepped lightly up onto the first row of razor blades. He stood there, for a moment, centring himself, then walked slowly and deliberately forward across the sea of razor blades.
He took his time about it, letting each foot come down calmly and naturally, never once looking down but always straight ahead, at Kim. She was smiling widely, hardly daring to believe what she was seeing. He walked on, and it felt like walking on solid ground. He took no damage, and he felt no pain. Knowing all the time that if he flinched, or lost concentration, even for a moment, he would stumble and fall, all his weight crashing down onto the tightly packed steel blades.
And he would not rise again from a fall like that.
Thunder exploded in the narrow corridor, close and huge and deafeningly loud. The sheer sound of it vibrated in his bones and shuddered through his flesh. Lightning stabbed down out of nowhere, melting patches of razor blades into puddles of molten steel. The lightning was close enough to JC that he could feel the tingling on his skin, but it never hit him. The storm roared all around him, but he walked steadily right through the raging heart of it. The air was blisteringly hot, then bitingly cold, and Kim convulsed in the air before him, crying out as though tormented. But JC would not allow himself to be disturbed. Inside his head he was calm and serene, untouched by the untrustworthy world, his concentration fierce and unyielding. The enemy was playing games with him, and that thought made JC calmly, coldly, implacably determined to press on, rescue Kim, and take his revenges.
He came at last to the end of the corridor and stepped down from the last of the razor blades. Kim was yanked suddenly backwards, hauled out of sight around the corner into the next corridor. JC went after her. There were no more razor blades before him, and he didn’t look back. The air was still and quiet and normal. But when JC rounded the corner, the corridor ahead was packed full of spider-webs.
“Aren’t you repeating yourself?” JC said loudly, but there was no reply.
Kim hung in the air at the far end of the passage, and between her and JC, huge masses of dirty grey spider-webs filled up all the space. They hung down from the ceiling and clung to both walls: thick sticky strands, trembling slightly, and thick grey veils that pulsed slowly. And before JC, hanging in mid air, strung up in thick and nasty cocoons, were Happy and Melody. Or at least, what was left of them.
JC’s breath caught in his throat, and his heart hammered painfully in his chest, but he wouldn’t let any of it show in his face. He wouldn’t give his unseen enemy even that small satisfaction. JC moved slowly forward. Happy and Melody were both dead. They had to be dead. They were . . . shrunken, desiccated, what was left of their faces little more than skin and bone. As though all the living juices had been sucked out of them. Deep dark holes had been burrowed into their guts, great areas of flesh eaten away. As JC watched, a single dark spider pulled itself out of Happy’s empty left eye socket and scurried quickly across Happy’s unmoving features. JC stood before what was left of his good friends and colleagues, and could hardly breathe at all.
You shouldn’t have left us behind. You shouldn’t have left us alone. We didn’t stand a chance, without you. If you had stayed, we’d still be alive. This is all your fault.
“Shut up! You aren’t dead!” JC said loudly. “You can’t be dead. I would have known. I would have felt it.”
He lurched forward, tearing the grey veils apart with his bare hands. They clung to his fingers and stuck to his face, but he brushed them roughly away and kept going. He plunged through the webbing, refusing to be slowed by it, but when he came to the two cocoons holding what was left of his friends, they remained stubbornly firm and solid, and he had to push and force his way between them. The webbing seized him from all sides, resisting his progress and tearing only slowly and reluctantly. JC pressed on, refusing to be stopped, but in that moment when he was caught between the two cocoons, shouldering them aside to get past, Happy and Melody opened their eyes and looked at him. Three dead eyes, bereft of feeling or Humanity, but full of awful, hard-won knowledge. JC paused despite himself, and Happy and Melody spoke to him in the soft whispering voices of the dead.
“I hate being dead,” said Melody. “I can’t stand it. Everyone cries here.”
“They should have told us what it was like,” said Happy. “They should have warned us. They should have told us about the Houses of Pain.”
“You’ll be with us soon,” said Melody. “You won’t like it.”
“They keep a special place here, for people like you,” said Happy. “For those who betray their friends.”
&nb
sp; “You’re not Happy and you’re not Melody and you’re not real!” yelled JC. He tore at the webbing with desperate hands, forcing a way through, leaving the figures and their cocoons behind. They stopped talking, but JC could still hear them crying. He fought his way through the webs to the end of the corridor, then it all went suddenly quiet. JC didn’t look back to see if the webbing and the cocoons had disappeared.
Kim moved on, and JC went after her.
* * *
Maybe it ran out of corridors, or maybe it ran out of tricks, but eventually JC followed Kim through a particularly low-arched entranceway and found himself on an unfamiliar platform. He stopped to get his breath and looked around, wondering why he felt so strongly and obscurely disturbed. He didn’t recognise anything. Not only had he never been on this platform, he wasn’t sure anyone had. Everything looked different, felt different . . . subtly alien, as though he’d stepped out of the world he knew and into some new and very dangerous place. It was a Tube station platform, but more like Oxford Circus seen through a distorting mirror. The overhead lights flickered, plunging this part of the platform and that into patches of impenetrable gloom. The station’s name wasn’t Oxford Circus. Instead, daubed on the far wall in old dried blood, was a single phrase.
ET IN INFERNO EGO.
There was no destination map, and the posters on the wall beside him made no sense at all. The landscapes and views were alien and unsettling and utterly inhuman. Houses made out of porcelain, horribly fragile and sickeningly gaudy. Hanging gardens tumbled down the sides of ruined office buildings, with long grey fronds twitching hungrily. Seas and skies of unknown colours, and the shadows of things passing by. The scenes seemed to shift and stir, sluggishly, as though the posters were dreaming.
Kim floated in mid air at the very end of the platform, rising and falling slowly, her feet dangling helplessly above the platform, her great mane of red hair streaming away from her as though she were underwater. Her eyes were fixed only on JC, and she was still trying to smile for him. He started slowly, cautiously, down the platform, and she stayed where she was, waiting for him. He stopped before her, still careful to maintain a respectful distance, and again they talked. In quiet, low, confidential voices.
“I’m remembering more,” said Kim. “About how I died. I was murdered, wasn’t I?”
“Yes,” said JC. “I’m so sorry.”
“Why would anyone want to kill me?” said Kim, plaintively. “I’m not anyone important, or special. Or at least I wasn’t. Damn. I can see I’m going to have to work on my tenses.”
“Everyone’s important,” said JC. “First thing they teach you, in this job.”
“You’re sweet,” said Kim. “JC . . . If all else fails, promise me you’ll find whoever it was that killed me. And make him pay. I never thought of myself as the kind of person who believes in vengeance, never thought of myself as vindictive . . . but I suppose death changes you.”
“I will find him,” said JC. “And I will make him pay for what he did to you. Whatever it takes.”
“I wish I’d met you before. There was never anyone special while I was alive. Never anyone who mattered. I was young, I was enjoying myself, and I thought I had all the time in the world . . . Was there ever anyone, for you?”
“No,” said JC. “No-one special. I guess I was waiting for you.”
“I think you’ve left it a bit late,” said Kim.
They laughed quietly together.
“I love you, Kim,” said JC. “A bit sudden, I know, but . . .”
“I know,” said Kim. “We have to say what we need to say, and say it now, because who knows how much time we’ll have together. I love you, JC. However this all works out. If nothing else . . . I’ll have one good memory to take into the dark with me. Do you know where we go, when we . . . go?”
“Not for sure,” said JC.
“Terrific,” said Kim.
“It’s all a mess, isn’t it?” said JC. “We shouldn’t be doing this. Our feelings make us vulnerable. The enemy will hurt you to get at me.”
“How can he hurt me?” said Kim. “I’m dead. The worst thing that can ever happen to me has already happened. Who is this enemy, anyway? What does he want with you, and me? What’s going on here, JC?”
“Damned if I know,” said JC. “But I’m beginning to think it may be more of a What than a Who. Can you see, or feel, anything? The dead can see many things that are hidden from the living.”
“At some point you’re going to have to tell me how you know things like that,” said Kim. “Hmmm . . . I seem to see, or sense, a whole new direction I never knew was there, before. There’s something there . . . but I’m afraid to look too closely. It would be like taking a final, irrevocable step, admitting I was no longer alive and limited to the things that only living people can do. I don’t feel dead. I don’t! I still feel human things, living things; and I’m afraid to give up on them because that would mean giving up on you, JC, and how I feel about you.”
“Then don’t do it,” JC said immediately. “Look away. Dealing with things like this is my business. I’ll find out Who or What is behind all this and make them pay. That’s what I do.”
“I love it when you sound all cocky and confident,” said Kim. “It gives me hope. Tell me . . . what does JC stand for?”
“Josiah Charles,” said JC, after a moment.
“Ah.” Kim considered this, for a moment, then smiled broadly. “JC is fine.”
“I thought so,” said JC.
“Why is life so unfair? Why did I have to die to find true love?”
“Life’s like that,” said JC. “And death, too, sometimes.”
From out of the darkness, at the end of the platform, there came the sudden thunder of an approaching train. It beat on the air like the roar of some great, hungry, beast. JC moved forward automatically, to put his body between Kim and the approaching train, to protect her. Kim giggled, despite herself.
“JC, sweetie, I’m a ghost, remember? I don’t need protecting.”
“Being dead doesn’t necessarily mean you’re beyond all harm,” said JC.
“What?” said Kim. “I’m not safe even now I’m dead? How unfair is that? And exactly when were you planning to tell me that?”
“I just did. Can we concentrate on the on-coming threat, please?”
“We will have words about this later,” said Kim.
“Oh joy,” said JC.
The growing roar of sound became too loud for further conversation, then the train slammed into the station. The compressed air blasted ahead of the engine stank so badly that JC actually recoiled from it. The train roared past him, dripping blood, as though it had been doused in gallons of the stuff, and behind it came cars covered in graffiti, daubed in fresh blood. Some of it was still running down the steel sides. As the cars slowed to a halt in the station, JC recognised some of the graffitied words, and he winced despite himself.
“What?” Kim said immediately. “What is it, JC? Do you know that weird writing?”
“Yes,” JC said reluctantly. “It’s Enochian. An artificial language created in Elizabethan times, so men could talk with angels and demons and spirits of the air.”
“Enochian? I never heard of it.”
“Not many have, and it’s better that way. It’s not a language for everyday conversation. The name comes from Enoch, the first city of men, according to the Old Testament.”
“Never mind the history lesson, sweetie. Can you read it?”
“No. I really should have studied more. Though I doubt very much it’s saying anything we’d want to know.”
Steam curled up around the long line of cars, thick and rancid, smelling of brimstone and bitter honey, blood and shit and sour milk. Kim pulled a face.
“What is that awful stench?”
“Trust me,” said JC. “You really don’t want to know. Wait a minute . . . you can smell that?”
“I can see and hear,” said Kim, defensively. “Why shou
ldn’t my other senses work as well?”
“I’m going to have to get back to you on that one,” said JC.
The doors slammed open, one after another, all down the long row of cars, sounding like firecrackers in Hell. Suddenly every car was illuminated from within by a fierce blood-red glow; and in that hellish light, demons glared out the windows and through the open doors, all their glowing eyes locked onto the living man and the dead woman. And then the demons laughed, a harsh, awful sound that hurt the ears of the living and the dead. They laughed and howled and stamped their misshapen feet, seething together in their packed cars like maggots in an open wound.
JC’s blood ran cold at the sight of them. His heart lurched in his chest, and he could barely get his breath. These were no traditional, medieval demons, with scarlet skin and barbed tails, claws and fangs and batwings. No simple distortions of Humanity, like those old familiar monsters carved into stone on churches and cathedrals all over Europe. These were the real thing, low-level demons made flesh and bone so they could operate in the material plane. The dregs of the damned, the gutter sweepings of Hell.
They wore forms calculated to horrify, intended to disgust. Shapes that held only a little Humanity, the better for Humanity to be mocked and insulted. Sin made plain in flesh and bone, stamped with the imprint of all the evil they had ever done. Monsters, in the flesh and in the soul, they all bore the mark of the Beast upon them. There were claws and fangs, cloven hooves and membranous batwings, distorted forms and exaggerated sexual characteristics, barbed tentacles and needle teeth crammed into round lamprey mouths . . . but that was incidental. All you had to do was look into their eyes to know all you needed to know. That they were evil, and they gloried in it. Some stamped impatiently on the floor, some scuttled along the windows, some hung down from the ceilings. And some crawled back and forth over and across the others like oversized insects.
Hell had come to town, looking to play.
They laughed and howled and leered at JC and Kim, held back only by some unheard command, some unseen authority. JC glared right back at them.
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