by Tim Lebbon
Maybe she’ll tell me if I tell her about the screaming skulls. But maybe not.
“Very haunted pub, this one.”
Scott handed over a fiver. “No, it isn’t.”
The barman gave him a weird look, scooped change from the till, and dropped it on the bar.
“Thanks,” Scott said. He hadn’t meant to be rude, but it was too late now. “Cheers.”
The barman nodded and offered a brief smile before going to serve someone else.
He just doesn’t understand, Scott thought. He has no idea of what’s out there. He doesn’t even know his own pub. For the first time since meeting Nina, he began to believe that a person could know too much.
Nina thanked him when he placed another coffee before her. She took a sip and sighed in appreciation. Scott did the same with his beer.
“So?” he asked.
“A dozen of us,” Nina said. She suddenly sounded keen to talk. “Some, like me, have stayed in the world. We travel. Change names and identities when the time comes. Some learn things; others simply live to experience. Cleo—that’s her name for now, last I heard—claims she’s had sex with over six hundred thousand men and women. She never tires of it. Fucks her way through time, and there are legends about her everywhere she goes.”
“Quite a responsible way to treat immortality.”
“We weren’t chosen for this, you know,” Nina said, a note of anger creeping in. “We happened to be the ones to find it and write it all down. We’re not some illustrious group handed a great purpose. There’s no moral duty because we’re immortal. Why should there be? Cleo enjoys herself, and what’s wrong with that? Best thing to do with life.” She trailed off, stroking her finger around the rim of her cup.
“You haven’t told me what you do,” Scott said.
“You wanted to hear about the others.” She glared up at him, forbidding any response, and carried on. “Three of us disappeared soon after we wrote the Chord of Souls. No one has seen them since. Perhaps like Old Man they went underground, and who knows what’s become of them? There’s no telling. Maybe they’re lying mad at the bottom of potholes, or perhaps they slink through life below the radar of civilization, doing their own thing and feeling no need to be a part of anyone else’s immortality.”
“What do you mean?”
“Some of us meet up. Every hundred years or so, six of us gather together to discuss what we’ve been doing. A couple like to . . . play games. Sometimes dangerous games.”
“Dangerous for who?”
“For the pawns they use.”
“The people, you mean.”
Nina nodded. “The people. The two who play like to pitch people against one another, either singly, in small groups or—once or twice—in armies. They play.”
“What does the winner get?”
“A point.”
“That’s it?”
“Yep.” She finished her coffee before it had a chance to cool down. “Last I heard it was level at seven hundred and fifty-three points each.”
Scott shook his head in disbelief. “You’re immortals, and you play games or travel the world fucking everything in sight. Why don’t you . . . ? What about . . . ?”
“What? Are we talking morals again here? There’re no great tasks for us, Scott. There’s just a curse that we brought on ourselves, and some of us handle it better than others. And in different ways.” She snorted. “You haven’t heard the best yet. Tigre. You’ll love him.”
“Not sure I want to know.” He swigged his beer and considered walking away. He could put down his glass and leave, go out to the car and drive to the place of screaming skulls on his own. Leave this woman behind. This madwoman, who had broken into his house searching for Papa’s note, and who ever since had been dragging him along like a pawn in whatever game it was she chose to play.
“Well, you asked, damn you! And you will know!”
A man at a neighboring table glanced across, then away again when Nina looked at him.
“One of us went mad right at the beginning,” she said, lowering her voice. “Midnight that first day Tigre tried killing himself. Slit his throat, stabbed himself in the heart . . . and he just got better. So through the night he moved on us, singly at first, and then attacking us when we came in couples or threes to see what was happening. Blood everywhere. Pain, so much pain. And the agony of not dying.
“So he fled out into the desert. We didn’t follow. We were confused, shocked, and for us it was the first and only proof we needed that what we’d done the day before had been for real. So we left him, thinking we’d never see him again. We had no concept of time back then. A few days could be a long time, but it took us a while to recognize decades and centuries and . . . They say time is unforgiving, and I’ll attest to that.
“First time he appeared again was thirty years after that first night. One of us had been wandering northern Africa and she came across a massacre. The sand was red for a hundred steps in every direction, and at the center of the blood stood Tigre. He was cut and slashed and gored with spears, but he was still alive. There were a hundred corpses piled around him. Bits of bodies. He was the only living thing in sight. He ran.”
“And since then?” Scott asked. “He continued, didn’t he? This Tigre. Carried on killing.”
Nina nodded. “Became very good at it. We never went looking, but sometimes the signs were obvious, and word often reached us. He’s been executed for his crimes at least a dozen times that I know of. Spent a lot of time locked away in places where they don’t favor execution. But he always returns to his ways. Where there’s a war, Tigre will appear. He takes sides only if it will make the killing easier. Sometimes he doesn’t take sides at all, and then he’ll become the stuff of legend and myth. Demon of the battlefield, and for some, an angel. And when there’s not a war, he finds other ways to satisfy his killing rage.”
“Why does he do it?”
“I told you, he’s mad. I think he’s still trying to kill himself. Destroy his wretched soul with slaughter in the hope that his body will eventually wither away with the shame of it all. The uselessness.”
“You think he’s the one behind Lewis?”
Nina’s face dropped. “I hope not,” she said. “Scott, I sincerely hope not. I think that if it was him we’d know by now. He’d have come against us himself instead of sending Lewis and the blights. He’d have . . .”
“I’d be dead.”
“It’s all he knows. Yes, you’d be dead.”
“And so would Helen.” Scott drank some more beer, but suddenly it tasted bitter and stale.
Nina touched his arm and squeezed, and Scott felt the pressure. If she’d done that a day before, it would have been a dead part of him. He owed her that, at least.
“Helen is alive,” she said.
Scott nodded. Although neither of them could know that for sure, he took comfort in Nina’s certainty.
They ate a small dinner—Scott found that his appetite had all but vanished—and then went up to their rooms. They did not say very much. Nina waited outside her door while Scott unlocked his, and when he glanced up there was a strange look on her face. I’m married, he thought. And as if reading his mind once again she smiled, went into her room, and closed the door behind her.
Exhausted though he was, he lay awake for a long time, staring at the ceiling and trying to discern truths in the shadows of trees speckling the plaster. He thought of Papa and where he was now, way beyond the Wide. He thought of Tigre, the murderous immortal trying to kill himself through slaughter. And all the while Helen was there, innocent in all of this, stolen away by Lewis and kept in a place she did not know and could not understand. His own brief sojourn into the Wide had been bad enough; what would she be feeling?
He closed his eyes at last, but tears of guilt prevented him from going to sleep.
CHAPTER NINE
whole new world
In the morning the sun rose on a whole new world. Plants had grown
infinitesimally overnight, air had moved away and been drawn in from elsewhere, dew hung on blades of grass like brief diamonds, a new blue stained the sky, and all living things were closer to death. Scott sat on the wide windowsill of his room and stared out over the pub garden and the countryside beyond, trying to see import in the way sunbeams textured the ground and mist gave contour and depth to the morning scene. He had slept for only a few hours, waking just before sunrise and sitting here, staring out at the dark. He’d watched for shadows moving where they should not, but it was a time when even the dead were silent and still.
Next door he could hear Nina snoring. It was an incredibly human sound, unconscious and unbidden. It altered his perception of her. He wondered how long it would take before he began to take her strangeness for granted.
Papa had taught him that being different was no bad thing. He’d spoken at length about the way some people were wired differently, built by nature to make them wonder and quest, rather than think and live themselves into a rut that held false comfort and little hope. He told Scott that these people often found life difficult, because society forbore existences that went against the norm. There was a man who liked to speak to bees, Papa once said. He practiced it over the years, asking them how they could fly with such small wings, how they could steer a hive to pollen-rich areas just by performing a dance, and after thirty years of speaking to them, he said they were starting to talk back. He claimed they told him secrets, though he never revealed what those secrets were. People asked him, of course. Secrets are intriguing, even for those who aren’t wired that way. But the man said he could never betray the bees. He was considered mad by then, and when he died, he lay amongst his hives for six weeks before anyone found him. He’d decomposed, but they found the bodies of sixteen rats, a dozen birds, and a fox nearby, all stung to death. His bees had granted him natural rest, not consumption by carrion creatures. And even in death he’s still thought of as mad.
Over the years, Scott had met many people who wanted to know his secret. They’d talk about Papa and what he had done, and the majority were there simply because they were prying, craved scandal, or held some grim fascination of murder. Only a small minority asked because they perceived a story behind the story. They saw strangeness and were drawn to it, because beyond strangeness lay knowledge. These were the few he even bothered speaking to.
Wait till they ask me about this, he thought, sitting there in that wide window seat. Wait until they ask where Helen went and how I got her back. He watched a cat slink across the pub’s back garden, dew speckling its fur. And he knew that whoever asked, he would never tell.
Nina’s snoring had ceased. He heard no movement next door, and he was about to stand when there was a soft knock at his door.
Nina stood in the hallway, dressed and washed and looking as though she had never been tired before. “Shall we?” she said.
“Can you give me a few minutes?” Scott rubbed his eyes and realized how tired he still was. “Didn’t sleep too well. You?”
“The sleep of the innocent,” she said.
“Right.”
“Can I come in while you get ready?”
Scott held the door wide and Nina breezed past him. He’d never seen her carrying a bag or purse, yet she smelled of freshly washed skin and exotic perfume. Perhaps that was her natural smell.
She went straight to the window seat and sat down, looking out the window. “Nice view,” she said. “Beautiful sunrise. See anything worth seeing?”
“The view. The sunrise.”
Nina looked around the garden and beyond and, seemingly satisfied, turned back to Scott. “We’ve got a few minutes,” she said.
“Until what?”
“Until we need to go.”
“Why?”
“Nothing.” She shook her head but would not meet his gaze.
“Nina?”
“Get ready, Scott. We’ll grab breakfast on the hoof.” She nodded at the bathroom door, then turned back to the garden.
“What are you watching for?”
“Nothing.” Her voice echoed from the cool glass and sounded strangely flat.
Scott wanted to say more; he felt a tension in the room now, something sharp that could hurt if he struck it the wrong way. But he went into the bathroom, ran a sink of hot water, and started to wash.
When he stood up and wiped his face, there was writing in the condensation on the mirror: She will slay you. It was written in large, spidery letters. Water ran from the letters’ lowest points, dribbling down and pooling on the mirror’s rim. They had just been written.
Scott dropped the towel and spun around. He scanned the bathroom. It was small, but he looked into all its corners, high and low. There was nothing behind the shower curtain, no shape cowering in the bath, no slip of something that should not be there, hiding beside the closed door.
He picked up the towel and wiped the mirror, then ran more scalding water.
“Almost done?” Nina called from beyond the door.
“Two minutes.” Scott glanced at the door handle, half expecting to see it moving as Nina tried to enter. It remained still. He put his head to the door, closed his eyes and concentrated, but he could not hear her moving about. When he looked at the mirror again there were more words drawn there: Lose her.
Nina tapped on the door. “Scott, we need to go.”
“Just a minute!” he called.
“Scott . . .” She knocked again.
He flushed the chain and looked around; there was one window, painted shut and too small for him. No other way out than through the door.
Who’s talking to me? he thought; then he whispered the same question, so low that his words were hidden by the sound of water filling the tank. He watched the mirror, waiting for the response—a name, perhaps, an explanation. But there was nothing new. Only those words, Lose her, fading.
How was he supposed to trust them?
“Papa?” he whispered, but nothing proved him right.
Why would Nina slay him? He did not know. He knew virtually nothing other than what she chose to tell him, and that could have been skewed for her own reasons. But there was Old Man. He existed, and fantastic though the other things Nina spoke of sounded—immortals playing games with the world’s armies and fighting lovers, another who tried to kill himself through murder—there was no reason to suspect that she lied.
“Scott!” Nina said. “I’m coming in.”
“Hang on, I’m—”
The door burst open. Nina came in and looked everywhere before seeing Scott.
“You ready?” She glanced at his bare chest; what did she think of the gray hairs there? How did the evidence of aging really sit with her?
Scott nodded as he slipped on his shirt. If he was going to tell her about the writing, now was the time. And he should. Perhaps she would understand. But something held him back. Not a suspicion that the writer was right—not yet, at least—but doubt.
As they left the building and got in the hired car, Scott was more aware than ever of the rubbings in his back pocket.
“Why are we leaving so quickly?” he asked. Nina was sitting in the passenger seat, tense and twitchy. She had adjusted the wing mirror on her side so that she could watch behind them as they drove. “What are you looking for?”
“Just a feeling.”
“What sort?”
“That we’re being followed.”
Oh, yes, not far wrong there, he thought.
“Who’d be following us?”
“If I knew I might not be so worried. Just drive. I’ll watch.”
Scott drove. He was heading south, and quite soon he would have to get the map out and start planning the end of their journey. That would be when their destination became clearer to Nina, and whoever else might be following them. The farther they went—the more time that passed—the closer they drew to the Chord of Souls.
She will slay you, the words had said. Why? Nina could not touch the book herself
—none of them could, so she said—so surely she needed him?
“When this is over,” he said, “and you’ve got what you want from the book and seen it destroyed . . . what about me?”
“You’ll be back with your wife.”
“If we can get her from Lewis.”
“We will. I’ll help you.”
“Yes, but . . . I’ll know. I’ll have seen the book. Read some of its pages. I know about you, and I know about Old Man in his hole in Edinburgh.”
“What are you hinting at?”
“What happens to me?”
“I’ve told you, you go home. Your wife goes with you, and you do your best to carry on. Forget this happened. Consign it to your dreams.”
“That’s too much of a happy ending. Things like that don’t happen. There’s always pain to carry forward, and trouble tends to tag along too. I can never see Helen and me sitting in our living room, watching a movie on DVD and sharing takeout. There’ll always be something else beyond our window. I’ll always remember those faces at the glass. And I see them now.” They had just passed a cluster of ghosts beside the road, victims of some long-ago accident. Two parents, two children, just standing there as though waiting for a bus to the afterlife they had always been promised.
“I’ll make sure that fades with time,” Nina said. “I know words that will shield that part of things for you.”
“Consign me back to normalcy?”
“But that’s what you want, isn’t it?”
Lose her, the words had said. And much as that made no real sense right now, still the adventure of it excited him. “I’m not sure, Nina. I’m not sure I’ll be able to do that. It’s not the way Papa made me.”
“I know.” Nina suddenly sounded terribly sad. “But I’m doing my best to make sure things turn out well for all of us.”
Scott nodded and drove on, his mind in turmoil.
Nina sat back and seemed to relax. She raised her knees against the dashboard and crossed her hands over them, still glancing at the mirror every few seconds. He didn’t trust her, but he did like her. Though they had been together for only three days, she had told him much more than a few words scrawled in steam.