There was a sudden blur of movement. Lazarus yelled. Arielle had grabbed his right arm, swung him round, and pinned him to the wall with a strength that shocked him, her right hand gripping his throat, pushing his head back. The woman was thin, fragile-looking. Lazarus would’ve been surprised if she’d have been able to push him over, never mind slam him against a wall.
Arielle shoved her left hand firmly on Lazarus’s chest, and he felt very aware of the sword; it was now way too close for comfort. Lazarus smelt the taint of alcohol on her breath as she leant in. Her voice, still and quiet, asked, ‘How do you know about the land of the Dead? Who told you? Your father? It was not your time to know – not yet! He knows that!’
Lazarus felt Arielle’s grip tighten. ‘No!’ he choked. ‘Dad doesn’t say anything to me about anything. It was someone else. Called himself Red. Looked like he’d been in a road accident.’
‘Red was here? He was the other old friend?’
Lazarus nodded.
‘When?’
Lazarus couldn’t be bothered to hold anything back. What was the point? He wasn’t going to argue with a woman boozed up and holding a sword to his neck. So he told Arielle everything. It sounded like total gibberish, but he was beyond caring. When he finished speaking, Arielle eased her grip and let him go. Lazarus staggered back.
‘What’s this all about?’ he croaked, rubbing his neck. ‘If you know something, if you know what’s going on, then tell me. Is Dad in danger? Am I?’
‘Your father has disappeared, Lazarus,’ Arielle said. ‘And Red is not the only one to have noticed that the Dead are stirring. We all did. And trust me when I say that this is bad.’
‘What do you mean by we?’ said Lazarus. ‘Who is Red? Who are you?’
Something about the look Arielle gave Lazarus made him more uneasy than ever.
‘Keepers do not disappear, Lazarus,’ said Arielle, taking a step forward, her voice soft and sad. ‘I have no choice but to assume the worst.’
‘Assume what?’ said Lazarus, eyes drawn again to Arielle’s sword as he backed away.
‘I’m sorry, Lazarus,’ said Arielle and she took another slow, deep slug from her hip flask before sliding it back inside her coat. ‘What I’m about to do … what I have to do …’
Lazarus heard sadness in her voice. It didn’t reassure him. ‘Where’s Dad?’ he pleaded.
Arielle’s eyes were on him. ‘Only a Keeper can keep the Dead at bay, Lazarus, and seal the veil should it be broken. Close it …’
‘You’re sounding like Red,’ Lazarus replied, tears threatening to burst from his eyes now. ‘But it still doesn’t mean anything to me! I don’t know what you’re talking about! I really don’t!’
Lazarus saw just how tired she looked. He also saw a determination that made him realize, were he to even think about trying to escape, she’d be on him in seconds.
He was screwed.
‘Lazarus,’ said Arielle, moving closer still and sheathing the sword, ‘it should not happen like this … I am sorry, but I have no choice ... I would ask you to trust me, but with what I’m about to do, it is impossible. But you will understand eventually. You have to.’
Frozen with fear, Lazarus watched Arielle reach into her coat, pull out an enormous revolver and push it into his chest.
He felt the muzzle of the barrel stab into him.
No time to react.
‘I’m sorry,’ Arielle whispered.
In the darkness behind her, Lazarus was sure he saw the grey silhouette of wings silently unfold.
Then she pulled the trigger.
12 Torn to Shreds
The first thing Lazarus saw was his own body, still dressed in the pajama bottoms he always wore, lying on a hospital gurney. Wires and tubes were attached to it. A heart monitor was to one side sending out a weak erratic beep.
For a split second he thought he was awake during an operation, staring up at a mirror, which was why he could see his body and all the medical machinery attached to it.
Then the truth of the moment blasted into Lazarus with the force of a plutonium warhead. He wasn’t looking up at all.
He was looking down.
He tried to move, thrashed his arms and legs about, but his body didn’t move. It just lay there beneath him, still and pale except for the very obvious and bloody bullet wound in his chest.
Lazarus remembered Arielle, the gun.
He tore at himself, pulled at his hair, anything to bring him out of this awful nightmare. Nothing worked. Was he dead? He couldn’t be; dead was dead, wasn’t it? That’s what he’d always thought, always believed. One life and all that. No forever after. But if that was the case, how could he possibly explain this?
As philosophical questions threatened to drown him, a calm swept over Lazarus. The panic he’d felt at seeing his own body beneath him dissolved in an instant. And, most strange of all, he felt peaceful.
Yes, he realised, I’m dead. And you know what? It’s not that bad.
Watching his body, listening to the heart monitor and his own breathing, Lazarus thought about what Craig would have to say. Was it one of those NDEs he was always on about: a Near Death Experience? He laughed. Craig would go nuts if he ever got the chance to tell him about this.
The door to the room opened. When Lazarus saw who had just walked in, his laughter died and he felt cold.
It was Arielle.
The woman who’d shot him strolled over to the operating table to stand at the top of the bed near his head. Lazarus yelled, screamed for help, for someone to come in and get this murdering nutjob away from his body, but it did no good – no one could hear him, and even if they had, he guessed they wouldn't have been able to see him. He was a ghost.
Arielle reached into her coat. Lazarus saw her pull out the large hip-flask he’d seen her drink from just moments before she’d shot him. He felt his whole spirit crawl as he remembered the smell of alcohol on her breath when he’d been pushed up against the wall.
Arielle looked up at Lazarus and nodded, raised the flask to him in a faint salute.
She can see me! realised Lazarus as she drank. Oh God… Questions thumped into his mind like torpedoes. What is she here for? To make sure I’m dead? Is that it? The sick bitch! He had never felt so helpless in his life.
Arielle winked and turned back to Lazarus’s body. She tucked her flask away and placed her hands directly over the bullet wound. Lazarus heard her voice. It slipped up to him like steam from a kettle. He tried to grasp the words, work out what Arielle wanted, what she was doing, but whatever language Arielle was speaking it certainly wasn’t English. It had a musical edge to it, and a rhythm that seemed to spin the words along so they danced into each other.
Lazarus felt warmth spreading from his chest across his body. It didn’t burn, just tingled, like someone had rested a hot-water bottle on his chest. A moment or so later, Arielle slipped her hands away. Lazarus watched as she pulled what looked like an envelope from a pocket and slipped it under his pillow.
What had she done? And why did Lazarus now feel strangely drawn to his body, like he wanted to jump right back into it? He noticed another sound: a distinct, clear, regular beep. It was the heart monitor. But it was no longer erratic and weak; it was strong. And his chest wound looked different, Lazarus thought: less bruised, less life-threatening.
Lazarus could feel himself sinking now, slipping through the air down towards his body. Arielle, the woman who’d shot him, had healed him. At least, that was the only thing that could explain what had happened. How? Why? And was there any way his life could get weirder?
A sound made Lazarus turn. Arielle was back in the room. She flicked something into the air. Lazarus saw it clear as day – a bullet. Somehow, she had removed it from his chest.
Arielle pushed open the door and slipped silently away.
The sound of the gunshot exploded in Lazarus’s mind like a land mine. He sat bolt upright, back in his body again, heart crashing against his ribs
, breathing hard and fast, his hands grabbing at his chest. It was covered in bandages.
He rubbed his eyes, shook his head, pushed the sound of the bullet as far away as he could. Then he looked around.
The room was white. Wires and tubes led into and out of his body. A heart monitor beeped to one side. He lay there for a minute, not moving, half expecting something bad to happen. But nothing did.
His body ached, but that hardly surprised him, considering everything that had taken place over the past forty-eight hours. He tried not to think about it all, blocked it out, thought of something else. It didn’t work. Not even a little.
Lazarus grabbed hold of his pillow and pulled it over his face. As he did so, he felt something hard knock against the back of his head. He twisted round to see a brown envelope with a number scrawled on it lying underneath his pillow. He remembered Arielle, remembered her putting something under his pillow before she left.
He reached for it and tipped the contents out on to the bed. It was an old mobile phone that looked like it had been run over a few times, then thrown off a cliff.
Lazarus hammered in the number from the envelope. The voice that answered chilled him.
‘Lazarus.’
Arielle …
‘I’ll pick you up in the morning. We have a lot to talk about.’
‘That’s an understatement!’ hissed Lazarus. ‘You shot me! You tried to bloody murder me!’
He heard a shuffle of laughter down the line.
‘If it’s any consolation,’ said Arielle, ‘I did the same to your dad.’
The line was dead before Lazarus had a chance to react. He sat there for a moment staring at the phone. Then he threw the thing across the room. It slammed into the wall, fell to the floor and let out a pathetic beep.
I did the same to your dad…
Lazarus felt suddenly very betrayed. His dad was involved with – was to blame for – everything that had happened to him this past two days. And yet he’d never told him, never warned him. Just left him to deal with it on his own. Rage and confusion twisted his stomach.
Some father.
Lazarus heard the door of the room slide open. He looked up to see a nurse walk into the room. She was carrying a cloth-covered tray and smiling. He smiled back, then realised he knew her. It was Clair. She’d mentioned that she worked at the hospital – but he hadn’t been prepared to see her so soon after what had happened. And she looked so different in her uniform, like another person almost; a stranger. She’d mentioned something about going to try and find out more about what had happened. Was that why she was here, to give him some answers?
‘Hi,’ he said, his voice dry, croaky. ‘How you doing?’
Clair didn’t reply. Instead, she placed the tray on the bedside table, then walked over to the curtains, her shoes clicking lightly on the floor, and pulled them shut.
Seeing Clair made Lazarus realise just how sore his whole body felt. He hoped that whatever she was about to give him, it involved serious pain relief and sleep, and if it managed to erase the last two days from his memory as well, all the better. Being in that room was nice. He felt comfy. And it was quiet. He wanted to forget about everything. Even his dad.
But he couldn’t. Red had turned up and his life had been torn to shreds. All sense and normality had been blown apart. He’d seen things that terrified him beyond anything he could have ever imagined. He’d seen the Dead.
A flashback to that night scorched through Lazarus. It was all he could do not to panic and yell out. He tried to focus on Clair, on what she was doing in the room, but it was difficult. Fear was taking hold again.
In his mind, Lazarus was back in his living room. The Dead were coming, and Lazarus had seen them: horrifying almost-humans with a hunger in their eyes that wanted to devour him on the spot. All that he’d seen and experienced and heard and smelt was real; every moment, every terror, right down to being shot and being here.
No. He didn’t want to think about that.
Trying to get a grip, Lazarus watched Clair glide across the room and lock the door. That sound, the feel of the room, made him feel secure. He allowed his eyes to close, his body to relax.
His mind, though, refused to have anything to do with such an idea. It wanted answers, and it wanted them right now. But where was he supposed to begin? The only one who would have any answers was his dad. And he was the one person Lazarus hadn’t a clue how to find.
Thinking all this made his brain hurt. Lazarus bunched his fists into his eyes. Sparks burst in the dark behind his eyelids. When he opened them again, he felt his head spin. He needed fresh air, saw that the window was open, and started to climb out of bed to walk over.
Clair was suddenly, silently, at his side, easing him back into bed, her soft voice telling him everything was OK, that he would be better to lie down, to let himself recover. He resisted, heard himself mutter something about feeling dizzy, but his voice didn’t sound quite right. He just let Clair lie him back down, cover him up, tuck him in nice and tight.
Too tight.
Lazarus tried to move and found it difficult. The sheets were so snug around him that he felt stuck to the bed. He struggled a little, but he just didn’t seem to have the energy. Clair was being so nice, wasn’t she? Making him feel so rested, so in need of recovery that he thought that yes she had a very good point, and that lying down was a much better idea.
As his head touched the pillow, he looked over at her. She was still busy with his bed sheets, straightening them out, tucking them in even further.
Well, there’s no moving now, he thought, and allowed his eyes to slip shut. Sleep was coming, he could tell, and it was so totally what he needed. Lots and lots of sleep, the perfect cure.
But something made Lazarus stop. He opened his eyes again. What was it that was bothering him suddenly? He looked around the room, at the window, at Clair. It wasn’t anything he could see. No, it was something else, something faint, difficult to notice. So faint he’d almost missed it. But it was there. And when he realised when he’d last experienced it, he felt the blood drain from his face.
It was the smell.
And it was coming from Clair.
13 Bloodshot Eyes
Lazarus struggled against the sheets, but he was stuck tight like a fly in a web. Clair was standing at the side of his bed. She looked so normal, so wonderfully human. So why the smell? Why was it coming from her?
Lazarus remembered coming back into the lounge to find Clair opening the rip, and one of the Dead pushing through. He remembered how it had grabbed her, how he’d had to slam the thing with a plank of wood hard enough to knock them both to the ground to make it let go. What the hell had it done to her?
Clair’s head snapped round so hard to face him that Lazarus winced, half expecting the force of the movement to break her neck.
‘I have a message, Lazarus.’
Her voice sounded odd, thought Lazarus, like it was stretched and twisted.
‘We have your father now. Do not follow him. Do not stand in our way!’
Lazarus knew she was talking about the Dead. He also knew that it wasn’t Clair who was talking, but something else. Arielle had said something about his dad being lost, just before she’d shot him. But what did she mean?
Even if it was the last thing he wanted to do, not least because it probably involved actually helping his dad, Lazarus understood at last that he had to get to the bottom of what was going on. It scared the hell out of him, but he had no choice.
The world went black. Not like the lights had gone out, not like someone had shut the curtains, but like the world beyond that one hospital room had been erased. Lazarus had a horrible feeling that whatever happened now in that room, no one outside it would be any the wiser. Not until it was over.
Lazarus struggled again, pushed and pulled his body, but the sheets weren’t about to give. He looked back up at Clair. She was still staring at him, her bloodshot eyes wide open, like they were about to
burst out of her skull. Her skin looked strangely taut, like it had shrunk a little and was being pulled horribly across her bones. But why was she still here? Hadn’t she given him a message? What else did she want?
What Clair did next burned itself into Lazarus’s mind. She rammed her hands into her mouth, gripped her cheeks and stretched her mouth impossibly wide, pulling bloody lacerations across her skin, like she was trying to wrench her face off.
Then she screamed.
That awful sound drilled right through Lazarus. He struggled, his skin wet and slick with sweat, but still the sheets wouldn’t give. And Clair was drawing closer now, her mouth getting wider and wider.
The sheets gave way. Lazarus was able to move. Desperately, he pushed himself further up the bed. Pictures were bursting through his brain; images of things in agony being tormented by God knows what, trapped somewhere beyond imagination, the place he’d glimpsed on the night he’d found Red in the living room. Around him Lazarus felt like the room was crumbling, the walls falling apart, mortar turning to dust, bricks exploding, the whole place getting sucked into nothingness.
The screaming stopped.
Lazarus was now at the top of the bed, no longer trapped, his breathing hard and fast. Clair followed, pushed her face up to him, forced him down on to his mattress. Her face pulled out into an awful, wide-eyed grin. ‘All hope is lost, Lazarus…’
Lazarus lashed out, but she simply side-stepped. The force of his movement sent him sprawling forward. Clair followed, spoke again.
‘You cannot imagine how we have suffered …’
Lazarus tumbled off the bed and landed on the floor hard enough to wind him.
‘No hope, Lazarus. Just an unquenched thirst to live again. Can you imagine what that’s like?’
Clair was stooping over him, her body at a horrible angle.
‘We have waited so long. We needed your father. Now everything is in place. Now is the time of the Dead, Lazarus!’
The Dead Page 7
