by Tim Lebbon
Smoke rose thick and heavy above the motorway. He could still see the flames at its base. They glinted from the windows of parked cars—those involved in the accident, and those that stopped to help—and the farther away they moved, the more the fire seemed to flicker.
It disappeared long before it should have.
“There’s something wrong with the air,” he said.
Nina nodded. “It’ll follow.”
“What is it?”
“A rent into the Wide.”
“So who—”
Nina took her foot from the accelerator. The car began to drift, then slowed. She stared from the windshield, mouth hanging open and head shaking ever so slightly. “Him,” she said at last, and Scott turned to see what she had seen.
CHAPTER TEN
the testimony of scars
The man was made of scars. He was naked but for a bloodred cape, clothed otherwise in a testimony of wounds that gnarled his flesh, darkened his skin, twisted his limbs, and slashed him from left to right, up and down. Shadows hid in the depths of old cuts. Some bled darkness that turned red only when it touched sunlight. His head was almost devoid of hair, and the only features that made sense were his eyes and mouth. In his left hand he carried a sword, in his right, a pistol. Strapped across his back were a bow and a quiver of arrows, and there were knives tied to his legs. The only real adornment was a silver chain around his neck. The pendant was a hand grenade.
“Tigre,” Nina said.
“You only told me about him yesterday.”
“I haven’t seen him for forever.”
He was standing beside the road, surrounded by a haze in reality. Ghosts walked by him, emerging from the haze and wisping away in the bright sunlight. He stood like a stone in a river of the damned, and though the ghosts mouthed silent pleas for peace, he had eyes only for Nina.
She stopped the car and opened the door.
“Nina!”
“It’s okay.”
“How do you know? Nina, I’m scared. If he’s behind Lewis, why is he here?”
“It’s okay,” Nina said, but Scott was certain she had not heard a word he said.
Here was the immortal attempting to die through slaughter.
Scott watched, helpless, as she left the car and walked toward the man of scars. She passed through a haze of ghosts without noticing, and their cries were as silent as ever.
He could get in the driver’s seat and go. Run them down, leave them spread across the road so that they would be out of action for a while, head into Wales and find the place of the screaming skulls. He could do that, but he was still not sure how he felt about traveling on his own. Lose her, the writing on the mirror had said, but he had no idea who or what had written those words.
Somewhere ahead of him—both in distance and time—Helen waited. If he did everything right, maybe he would have her back. He thought of her easy smile and the way she sighed against his neck when she came, the sound of her laughter and the birthmark on the top of her arm, shaped so much like the boot of Italy that they had once taken a holiday there, just in case fate was trying to guide them. They had returned, and she had not been pregnant, but they had never laid the blame at fate’s door.
“I’m coming for you, Helen,” he said.
Nina had almost reached Tigre. The two stood a dozen paces apart, and the haze around Tigre settled down, fading away to the view that should be there. Behind him Scott saw fields, a farm, some hills, all normal things, always meant to be.
The ghosts were gone again. Some I see in the Wide; some are visible here. What’s the difference? What am I seeing, and why?
So many questions. So much more to know. And if he drove away now, he would be on his own.
Scott turned sideways and exhaled onto the window. He watched as the condensation slowly faded away, but nothing was written there. “Help me,” he whispered. He breathed out again. No message. “Help me, please.” One more time with the same result.
Nina was tall and beautiful. Watching her from a distance as she talked with someone else, he truly realized this for the first time. But her beauty was a result of her presence, such a powerful sense derived from all the history she had seen, everything and everyone she had been.
Scott opened the door and stood from the car.
“Is that him?” Tigre said. Even from this far away, with cars still passing by in the opposite lanes, Scott heard those words. The man’s voice sounded as ragged and torn as the rest of his body, and Scott wondered how many times he’d had his throat slashed.
Nina glanced back at Scott and smiled. He wasn’t sure whether the smile was for him or Tigre.
Nobody seemed to be noticing this strange exchange. No cars came from the direction of the accident, but the traffic on the other side was still moving, slowly now so that the rubberneckers could get a good look at the carnage a mile behind them. Scott saw people looking from car and coach windows, but there was only a vague interest in their eyes. Most of them were straining to see ahead, find the fire, see sights that they would have nightmares about later and probably never forget.
How many of them will be able to close their eyes? he thought. It would not be many. People just weren’t made to look away.
“Your wife?” Tigre growled.
Scott walked to Nina and faced the man. Up close his wounds were even more grotesque, but Scott tried to maintain eye contact. It was impossible. Tigre’s eyes had seen so much, and though dead as stone, they held such power that it almost hurt to look there.
“Helen,” Scott said. “A man called Lewis took her, and I want her back.”
Tigre laughed. It was so unexpected that Scott found himself letting out a giggle as well, and Nina was also smiling.
“Good for you,” Tigre said. He nodded, staring at Scott, and Scott realized that it was impossible to tell what he was thinking. No smile was possible in this mangled flesh. No delicate expression, no intricacies of appearance. His face was a mask of scar tissue, destined always to look cold and hard.
“Where is she?” Scott asked.
“I don’t know.”
Scott looked at Nina. She seemed bewitched. There was half a smile on her face and a dreamy look in her eyes. It did not suit her at all, and Scott nudged her arm. “What’s happening?” he said.
“What’s happening is, Tigre has come to visit.”
Scott remembered her tales of his slaughter, a mad immortal using his own gift or curse in an attempt to cultivate the death of his soul. Looking at this thing before him, he wondered whether he had succeeded long ago.
“Can you help us?” Scott asked.
“Help?”
Scott waited for Nina to speak, but she said nothing. She was simply staring. They stood that way for a time, listening to traffic passing them by, the wails of distant sirens, and out over the fields the lone cry of a buzzard.
“Then I’ll go on—”
“Is it really you beneath all this hurt?” Nina said. It was as if she had not even heard Scott speak. She went on, slipping into a language he did not know, but the subtleties of her voice were evident. There was something here that he had yet to really hear from her: compassion.
Tigre answered in the same language, and they were both silent again.
Scott turned and walked back to the car. Every step of the way he expected a hand to fall on his shoulder, or a bullet to sever his spine. He climbed into the driver’s seat and slammed the door, and Nina and Tigre still stood facing each other. Nina’s hip was tilted to one side in eternal provocation.
Even when he started the engine, neither of them looked his way.
She will slay you, those words had said. A secret message from a secret benefactor? Scott slipped the car into first gear, and a bullet shattered the headrest beside his ear.
He shouted, fell forward, took his foot from the clutch, and stalled the car. He touched his ear and felt hot blood seeping from a dozen tiny wounds. When he sat up again and looked through th
e windshield, Nina and Tigre were no longer there. A neat bullet hole sat directly in his line of sight.
Scott turned and saw Nina beside the car. She’d just opened the driver’s door, standing back as if to allow Tigre to view him. Tigre was standing by the concrete divider. Tensed. Ready for flight or fight, and Scott knew which.
“Does he really need to see the lengths I’ll go to?” Tigre asked Nina.
“I don’t—” Scott began.
“Scott!” Nina hissed.
Tigre stepped over the divider and held up the pistol, aiming it at an oncoming bus. His red cloak fluttered in the breeze from passing traffic.
“Does he?”
“No,” Scott said. “I don’t need to see.”
Tigre hesitated for a few seconds, tracking the bus as it passed him by. Then he lowered the gun and came back across the road.
More sirens wailed, but Scott knew there would be no help there.
“I’ll be there,” the scarred man said. “At the end, I’ll be there.”
“I want what you want,” Nina said, and Tigre laughed so long and loud that even Nina seemed uncomfortable.
And then the scarred man walked away. Scott watched him go, trailing ahead of them and then turning down the embankment. He disappeared for a while, then came into view again in a field, walking slowly, his direction wavering, as though he wasn’t exactly certain where he needed to go.
Nina watched him as well. Scott stole a glance at her, and her expression had slipped. Where before there had been nostalgia, now there was a quiet sadness.
“What was that?” Scott asked.
Nina turned, and for the briefest moment she looked at him with such contempt that he thought she was going to lash out. Crush him beneath her boot, perhaps, as one would crush a slug. He was a nobody, a nothing, a simple necessity, and though she might be immortal, she already seemed bored with his company.
She looked down at her feet and shook her head, sighed. “He wanted to talk,” she said.
“He brought all those ghosts. He made me do that . . . because he wanted to talk?”
“Maybe he thought I was driving.”
“He thought . . . ?” Scott looked in the mirror, seeing fire still glinting behind them and smoke billowing skyward. Somewhere in that smoke, perhaps, the ashen remains of dead people. There were flashing blue lights there now as well, and he wondered how long it would be before a man told the police about the injured woman stealing his car.
“He wanted to make sure we were doing the right thing,” Nina said. “If we weren’t, he’d have shown you what he can do.”
“Is he just walking away?”
She shook her head. “He’ll be watching. He needs us to find the book for the same reason I do . . . except that he’s wanted to die from the moment we were made immortal. Imagine.” She spoke the final word to herself, whispering it again and staring after Tigre.
“He laughed when I mentioned Helen.”
“Just one woman. This is so much larger.”
“Not to me.”
“No, not to you. Good. Keep it that way. There may be those who try to persuade you otherwise.”
She will slay you. “I’ve already been warned,” he said without thinking. It seemed the right thing to say at that moment, a comment to draw her out or pull her closer to him.
“And?” She didn’t even ask what he had been told, or how, or even by whom. Perhaps she already knew.
“And I have to trust you.”
Nina nodded, walked around the car, and sat in the passenger’s seat. “Good,” she said. “But there’s still a lie in there. Trust me enough to tell me where we’re going? We can be there much faster.”
“No,” Scott said. “This is about Helen, that’s all, and the skull key ring is my map to her.” He started the car and pulled away. The bullet hole in the windshield whistled as they picked up speed.
“Tigre wanted to take you into the Wide—properly kill you—and get it out of you there.”
Scott shivered. Those eyes, sizing me up. “Why didn’t he?”
“We need you. None of us can touch the Chord of Souls.”
“Nice.”
Nina sighed. Scott sensed a blizzard of memories around her, and her silence seemed to confirm that. So he drove on, and with every mile that passed beneath the wheels, trust became something farther removed than ever.
Scott turned on the radio to see if there was any news about the accident. His memory kept returning to that woman in the yellow dungarees, her head burned and mouth hanging open, and how she was somebody’s mother or wife, daughter or sister.
I caused that. However much he tried to persuade himself otherwise, he could not alter the truth.
He was instantly grateful for the chatter. Nina seemed to be asleep, though he sensed her attention focused directly on him, and the Mondeo purred efficiently along the motorway. The local radio deejay tried valiantly to be amusing, and it wasn’t until the hourly news came on that there was the first mention of the crash.
Scott slowed as he listened to the report, trying to put himself there. But through all that he heard, he could not find a connection. They described the accident and its aftermath—vehicles involved, the fires, the traffic queues and disruption—and it could have been anywhere.
All but the numbers. These he used. He whipped himself with the rough edges of five dead to inflict wounds on his soul, scored shameful trails across his mind with the sharp realities of a dozen wounded.
“Hear that?” he said. “Five dead. My fault.”
“Tigre’s fault. I doubt he’ll even add them to his tally.”
“And what is his tally? How many has he killed?”
“I have no idea.”
“Does he?”
“Oh, I’m sure.”
“I have a tally: five dead.” Scott pressed the accelerator down, edging over a hundred miles per hour and imagining plunging the car into every bridge they passed.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
the loyalties of flesh and blood
It was late afternoon. They had crossed the border into Wales, and Scott was very conscious that he would soon have to consult the road atlas. And soon after that, when they approached the place where the skull was leading him, Nina would know.
If she wanted to slay him then, there was nothing he could do about it.
Over the past hour he had considered trusting her, telling her about the writing on the mirror. There was so much more going on here than he could even begin to understand, but he was also comfortable with the slight power he seemed to have right now. The more he told her—the more she took control—the less leverage he maintained. And this was all about Helen. Nothing else mattered but her.
You’re in control; you have responsibility, Papa had said, and the same seemed to translate the other way as well.
He pulled off the motorway and stopped. Nina looked over at him, eyebrows raised.
“I need to piss.” He stood from the car and climbed a gate into a field, standing behind the hedge to urinate. He was constantly looking over his shoulder. He had seen three ghosts since leaving the scene of the accident, all of them wandering sadly across the road where they had presumably met their ends. One of them he had driven straight through. He did not want to see another one now.
Back in the car, Nina was waiting for him with the map on her lap. “How close are we?” she asked.
“A couple of hours. Maybe more. Maybe less.”
She nodded. “It’ll be dark when we get there.”
“I don’t think I want to go there in the dark.”
“I can protect—”
“It’s not that. Not really. It’s the place. If we spend a long time looking, I’m afraid of what will happen to Helen. We need to go straight there, do what needs to be done. And I don’t think it’s going to be easy to find.”
“Why not?”
“Well . . . it doesn’t really exist.”
Nina nodded slowly, looking
away from Scott. “Right.”
“But neither does the Wide.”
Nina looked down at the map in her lap, her fingers steepled against her nose.
“How old are you, Nina?”
“Old.”
“Surely you can wait another night to die?”
She looked up quickly, and he saw something he did not understand in her eyes. Was that anger? Excitement? Jealousy?
“I can wait,” she said. “But we have to be careful. This close . . . anything could happen.”
“But nobody knows—”
“This close, Lewis might take a guess.”
Could he know? Scott wondered. The House of Screaming Skulls was a place he and Papa had read about together, but could he have mentioned it to Lewis as well? Surely not. Surely if that was the case, then Papa would have never guided Scott there.
But at the end, after so long trying and such fear over what he had accomplished, perhaps Papa really had lost his mind.
“He won’t guess right,” Scott said.
“He may. I already have a pretty good idea of where you’re taking us.”
Scott started the car, eased back into the traffic, and said no more. Things were coming together. This had started only three days ago, but already there was a definite sense that the end was in sight.
And if Nina thought she knew where they were going . . .
She will slay you. Lose her.
Something would happen tonight.
They found another roadside pub. Neither of them was hungry, and they received strange glances when they booked two single rooms.
“Drink?” Scott asked. Nina looked very tired, and he knew she did not mean it when she nodded.
Coffee for Nina, as usual, and a pint for Scott. Its taste and smell brought back a sudden rush of memory, so rich and powerful that he closed his eyes to hold on to it, willing it to continue like the best instance of déjà vu.
The woman walks across the river bridge in Caermaen, a little village in South Wales, emerging from the heat haze above the river like an angel forming from light. Scott is sitting on the riverbank drinking, watching the water and the world go by. He has just been for a job interview and, pleased with how it went and glad that it finished early, he decides to have a few drinks before catching the train home. He is on his third pint. He’s just entered that phase where the tastes and smells and colors of the beer combine to form an overall experience, soothing his senses and yet helping him to see clearer than ever. So she walks on, short pleated skirt and loose blouse reflecting sunlight and camouflaging her in its glare. Long hair, he can see that. Slim, fit, pert breasts, long legs—way out of his league, but it’s always fine to look, and today of all days he feels more confident, more in control. Perhaps it’s the fact that the interview went so well, or maybe it’s just the beer talking, but he can’t help trying his luck. And an angel appeared before me, he says as the woman draws level with him, and she steps below a tree and out of the sun as if to offer him his first real look. She is gorgeous, as he first assumed, but there’s something else about her that weakens him to the point of collapse. It’s her eyes; they’re stunning. Like globes of fire, twinkling with intelligence and humor and strength. She smiles, and the color of their flames changes. I’m no angel, Helen says, one hand on her hip, the other stroking the hem of her blouse. And ever since then he’s called her Angel because, in his heart and mind, she always will be.