by Tim Lebbon
“You used to tell me all about the things you’ve been researching,” she said. “There was a time we’d sit out there on the volcano’s shoulder and talk for days about your latest fascinations. You’d tell me all the new secrets.”
Old Man nodded. “Look what happened.”
Nina’s smile slipped and she looked down at her hands. “What do you expect?”
“Greed. Human conceit.”
“Aren’t you human?” Scott asked.
The man smiled. It was a strange expression, both gruesome and beautiful. It made Scott distinctly uncomfortable. “Human once. Long time back. Now I’m more . . .” He shrugged.
A very human gesture, Scott thought.
Nina stood and walked to one of the book-lined walls. She took a tome down and started leafing through it, and Scott realized that they were all journals. Some were larger than the one currently sitting on Old Man’s desk, a few smaller, but if he squinted against the harsh light he could see that their spines all contained the same spidery handwriting.
“So let’s see what you’ve found since we last met,” Nina said.
“Nina . . . care,” Old Man said, and there was a hint of warning in his voice.
Nina looked up, her skin so smooth in this light. “I always take care, Old Man.”
“I’m ill,” Scott said. “I’ve been touched by blights.” He found himself unbuttoning his shirt and showing his chest.
Nina sighed. “I was coming to that. But yes, he has.”
“You want me to cure?” Old Man asked. He tapped the desk with one of his clawed hands.
“I know you can.”
“Used to be able to. Long time ago. Now, not sure.”
“You don’t forget things,” Nina said.
“No, I learn. Nothing I learn is mine. I—”
Another hiss came and another object—a burst of light, a smear of something harsher—spurted from a hole in the wall. Old Man snatched it from the air and pressed it to his mouth. Scott saw his tongue snake out and curl between his fingers; then he swallowed the object whole. He closed his eyes and nodded, leaning forward for the pen even before the glow had gone from his face.
“You’re blind,” Scott said, amazed.
“You see well.” Old Man wrote several more words into the massive book.
“Here,” Nina said. “Here. Old Man has a cure for cancer.” She lifted the book she was holding as though offering it to Scott.
“You can cure it?”
Old Man only nodded.
“But . . . why don’t you share that?”
“The cure, I stole. From . . . out there.” He waved his hand around his head, indicating nothing in particular. “Perhaps never meant to be known. I give out the cure, people get better, something much worse comes along.”
“But the suffering you could end. The pain and heartache!”
“People have to die.”
“You don’t,” Scott said bitterly. “I’m here before you dying, and you tell me you have a cure for cancer, and you’re so casual about it. Because you don’t have to die.”
Old Man leaned quickly across his table, spilling pens to the floor, reaching out and grasping Scott’s neck in his strange hooked fingers.
“And there’s the curse!” Old Man spit. “Immortal? Not good. Not natural. We found it, should have left it. Instead . . . greed.” He let go and eased back into his chair, panting slightly and obviously surprised at his own reaction.
“Apologies,” he said.
Scott nodded. “No problem.”
“Old Man, Scott is more than just a person,” Nina said. “His grandfather found the Lost Pages, and Scott believes he knows where the Chord of Souls may be.”
Old Man froze in his chair. He became utterly still, and his strange cavern fell silent. Scott could hear the thrum of blood in his ears, and nothing else. No movement. It was as though Old Man had become a still in the never-ending movie of his life: no muscle twitched, not one straggly hair on his scalp waved; even his chest was motionless, devoid of evidence of heartbeat.
Is he dead? Scott thought.
“Big claim,” Old Man said. He turned toward Nina, pointed at the book in her hands. “Put that down. Tell more.”
“He can tell.”
Old Man turned to Scott and placed his hands flat on the desk. “Human?”
“Papa—my grandfather—and his friend Lewis, they found some stone tablets in Africa during the Second World War. Brought them home, translated some of what was on them, and Papa became fearful of what they were discovering. And apparently of what Lewis would do with whatever they discovered. So fearful that he murdered Lewis and killed himself. Thirty years ago.” Scott lowered his head. Every time he mentioned Papa’s crime he was filled with a mix of sadness and shame.
Old Man nodded. “Lies.”
“No!” Scott said.
“This comes to light now?”
“He sent me a letter. I got it yesterday.”
“Yesterday.”
“We found the Lost Pages,” Nina said. “In Cardiff. Found them and destroyed them, and the only way we could have found them was by following Papa’s clues. The clues he sent to Scott in a letter, which took thirty years to arrive.”
“No human could translate the Chord,” Old Man said.
“Well, he did. Some of it, at least. And his friend was . . . not a good man. Papa realized that as they grew older, and as he approached death he knew what had to be done. They must have been so close to discovering where the Chord was kept. Papa completed the translation and killed Lewis before he could know.”
“Lewis is still here,” Scott said. “He took my wife.”
“Took her alive?”
“Into the Wide.”
“Wide.” Old Man sighed, shaking his head. “Nina, you tell too much.”
“He’s like his grandfather, Old Man. He’s able to know. All the things he’s seen in the last two days, and he’s nowhere near mad. Look at him. He could be the one who helps us . . . the one who finds the Chord of Souls. You know what that would mean? Peace, Old Man! Rest!”
“For some. For others, perhaps war.”
“War?” Scott asked.
“Not all immortals want the same thing,” Nina said.
“But war?”
“Who stands behind Lewis?” Old Man asked.
Scott shook his head. “I don’t understand.”
“We don’t know,” Nina said.
Old Man nodded.
“Why is anyone behind him?”
“Human ghost, immortal power. Not on his own.”
Scott looked at Nina and she shrugged, but he realized that she had known this all along. She’d hinted at it, true, suggesting that someone was helping Lewis. But it felt like yet another way she was simply playing him for her own ends.
“My wife,” Scott said. “I don’t give a fuck about all of this. Keep your cure for cancer and your Linear A, whatever that is. All I want is to get my wife back. She’s the whole world to me, not all this.” He waved his hand at the wall of journals to his right. “She’s been taken away and I want her, and I’ll do anything necessary to get her back. Anything!”
Old Man pointed at Scott. “You seek your wife.” He pointed over his shoulder at Nina. “You seek the gift of death.” Then he pointed to himself. “I seek all answers.”
“I know where it is,” Scott said.
“How?”
“Papa left a clue.”
“And how did he know?”
“We don’t know,” Nina said.
“All a lie. Go. Search. Find the lie.”
“It isn’t a lie!” Nina said. “It can’t be. The stone tablets were where he said they’d be, and they were real, Old Man. I couldn’t touch them, felt sick around them, and Lewis appeared with the blights as soon as—”
“Lewis carried blights?”
“Directed them.”
Old Man nodded, but his face was grim. “Proof. Not on his own. Guided
by someone, just as you are guided by Nina, human.”
“We’ll move on,” Scott said. “We’ll get out of your way and leave you in your hole, finding secrets and keeping them to yourself. I don’t give a flying fuck. Do what you want. Sit here and jerk off for eternity if you must, but we came here because Nina said you may be able to help me. I know where that damn book of yours is, and if you don’t help me I swear I’ll carry that knowledge to my grave.”
Old Man leaned forward again and smiled, displaying those gruesome teeth. “There, you’ll never be safe,” he said.
All three fell silent again. Old Man closed his eyes. Nina glanced across at Scott, then went back to browsing the journals, running her finger along the spines. None of them seemed to surprise her.
Scott felt a wave of queasiness sweeping through him, prickling cold sweat from the back of his neck and churning his guts. The pains in his arm and chest waved in again, a sick, rotten heat.
“I can cure,” Old Man said. “For a price.”
“What price?” Nina asked.
“Chord of Souls comes to me.”
“What about Helen?”
“I can help with that. Give advice. Lend knowledge. But the Chord comes to me.”
“No,” Nina said.
“Yes,” Scott said.
“Scott, you have no idea—”
“Human knows I could torture,” Old Man said. “Torture the truth.”
“You’d never do that,” Nina said. “I’ve never known you to hurt a soul.”
“Been a long time, Nina. We’ve all changed.”
“The book comes to you,” Scott said. “Now help us. Help me. Please!”
Old Man pointed to his messy cot in the corner of the room. “Lie down.”
Scott did as he was told. There were a million questions buzzing around his head. How do you survive? Where does the electricity come from? What do you eat? Do you go out? Where do all those holes lead to or come from? But he was tired, and the thought of Old Man helping them was suddenly the most important thing he could think about.
He cures me, we go on, he gets the book, he thought. And on top of that, he realized that he knew absolutely nothing about what was going on here. Nina might well be playing him, but she was guiding him as well. Without her, this would end very quickly, and Helen would be gone forever.
“Nina?” he said.
She offered her enigmatic smile. Nodded. “Go on,” she said. “It’s a small price.”
“Small price for Helen, or for death?”
That same smile.
Scott lay down on the cot and closed his eyes.
CHAPTER SEVEN
real memory
Someone rustled around the cave. Muttered conversation. The sizzle of static, then the smell of something like cooking pork.
“Lesson in everything,” Old Man said, and Nina snorted.
Scott opened his eyes.
Old Man was sprawled on the ceiling above him, hands and feet hooked into cracks, head turned completely around so that his blind gaze met Scott’s exactly.
“Best you sleep for this.”
Scott closed his eyes and found it easy to oblige.
He and Papa walk past the edge of their village and enter the woods. Instead of the familiar paths and streams and clearings, however, they find themselves in a blank landscape made of fog. There is no up or down, no left or right. Scott—barely into his teens—is startled, but Papa seems unconcerned. “This way,” he says, and Scott follows.
They walk on nothing, and there is no way to gauge how far they have gone, neither distance nor time. Papa does not stop speaking, but Scott cannot understand what he is saying. He hopes it’s not important.
Papa pauses, and as he turns around the forest appears around them again.
“This will do,” Papa says. “It’s a delicate operation. It involves all sorts of arcane methods and practices. I really don’t think your mom and dad will be very pleased.” He smiles the cheeky boy’s smile that sets him apart from so many other old people. It’s a smile that communicates a sense of wonder that most lose when they hit puberty, accepting cynicism and self-obsession instead of the ability to dream and imagine beyond the confines of their own mind.
“When will it be over, Papa?” Scott asks.
Papa’s smile drops. “Oh, Scotty, it’s only just begun.” He taps a fallen tree, clearing part of the trunk of moss and ants. “Sit. Don’t worry. Papa would never hurt you.”
Scott sits and looks around the forest, taking in all the familiar sights and sounds and enjoying the fact that, as always, they feel as new as the first time.
Papa is unbuttoning Scott’s shirt.
“What’s wrong, Papa?”
“Nothing yet.” But it looks as though Papa can see something wrong, even though where he touches Scott’s skin Scott can feel nothing.
“Let’s get to work,” Papa says. He kicks aside a pile of leaves and plucks some fungi from the underside of a rotten branch. He picks up a beetle and plucks off its wings. Ants, a grub from beneath the soil, the leaf from the third-lowest branch of a nearby oak sapling. He collects them all in his hand and stirs them, careful not to mix them so well that they lose their identities. Then he reaches out and takes something from the air that Scott does not understand.
“This isn’t a real memory, is it, Papa?”
“No, Scott. Not really.”
Papa mixes the normal with the arcane, and he starts applying it to Scott’s right arm and chest.
It hurts. Scott opens his mouth to scream, but the noise is far away. He looks around the woods, wondering where the scream is coming from, and the pain kicks in deeper and harsher. He screams again, pleading with Papa to stop, and tries to jump down from the fallen trunk. But Papa is still there, crying as he presses the strange mixture into Scott, pushing it through the skin so that it becomes a part of him.
The trees begin to sway, the woods to swim, and Scott cries out. Just before he closes his eyes and faints away, everything turns to gray once more.
Scott opened his eyes, and Nina was sitting beside him on the cot. Her expression did not change, but she put her hand on his arm. Behind her, Old Man scurried here and there, catching glowing things in his hands and mouth as they burst from holes in the wall.
Scott tried to speak but could not find the energy. He closed his eyes and let sleep take him again.
Next time he woke the light had weakened. There were only a few bulbs alight now, casting shadows across the cavern that he had not noticed before. Nina was sitting in the far corner of the room, one of Old Man’s journals open across her knees. She did not even notice that Scott was awake.
Old Man hung from the center of the ceiling like a bat. His arms were folded across his chest. He twitched slightly, muscles in his legs tensing and relaxing. His eyes were open, but Scott could not tell whether or not he was asleep.
He lay there for some time, looking around the subterranean room and trying to answer some of his own questions. But this place was as mysterious as ever.
Nina turned a page and carried on reading. She was frowning and stroking her chin gently with her forefinger as she read.
“What’s that?” Scott whispered. His throat hurt as he spoke. He coughed, and Nina rose quickly to her feet. She placed the book delicately on Old Man’s desk and brought Scott a cup of water.
“Drink,” she said. “Try not to talk for a while.”
“What were you reading?” He sipped the water and sighed as it soothed his throat.
“Notes on the seventh and eighth senses.”
“Oh. Nothing too heavy, then.”
Nina smiled, and that pleased Scott. He felt so cut off from things, so alone, that her company—strange though it might seem at times—was important to him. It should have been Helen sitting by his sickbed when he woke up, loving him and telling him that everything would be all right.
“So am I better?” he asked.
She nodded. “I knew he
’d be able to help. It tired him out.”
“How long have I been sleeping?”
“A day. Maybe less.”
“A day.” He sipped more water, glad that the burning in his throat was lessening with every mouthful. Nina took the cup and he lifted the sheet, looking down at his chest. Where before there had been a spread of black skin and rotting flesh, now there was a sheen of pale scar tissue. It was almost as if Old Man had taken away the dead part of him and replaced it with something else.
“How did he do it?”
“I didn’t understand,” Nina said. “Just be grateful. I’m going out to get you some food. Stay here, rest, and as soon as you’re strong again, we have to move on.”
Scott looked at Old Man. He was asleep for now, but if he woke up . . . ?
“He won’t harm you,” Nina said.
“How do you know?”
“That’s not his way.”
“He threatened to torture me.”
Nina shook her head and laughed gently. “That’s not his way, Scott. Old Man is a man of peace. Always has been, always will be. That’s why he shuts himself away down here.”
“Because not all immortals are as peaceful, right?”
“Not all, no.”
“And you?”
Nina stared at him for a while, then rolled her eyes. “When you break all the laws of physics, do you seriously think there won’t be a price?”
“Wait,” Scott said. “Wait. Is that another—”
“Event Horizon. Cool movie, I thought. And Sam Neill is hot.”
Scott shook his head. “I don’t know you. First you’re one Nina; then you change and—”
“I told you, there were many Ninas through the years. Now, I’m going to get food. Won’t be long. Rest. Sleep. Soon we’ll go for the book and get Helen back for you.”
Scott watched her leave. He looked at Old Man, asleep and hanging from the ceiling of his peaceful hidden retreat. And he thought of Helen.
I’ve been close to death and brought back for you, he thought. Been to the edge of the route to the afterlife, and back again. I will find you.