by Tim Lebbon
“We’ll travel soon,” she said.
“Travel?”
“Not long now. Oh, dear sweet fucking heaven and hell, not long now!”
She had left her body behind without a backward glance, and it was only then—stupidly, crazily—that Scott realized that this ghost wore no tattoos.
“What are you?” he said.
The woman did not turn. She ran on, hand clasped around his arm, her feet making a greater impact noise every time they hit the road. She seemed to be forming with every step they took, becoming more solid, and he wondered how something dead could suddenly seem so alive.
“Not dead,” she said. “That’s what I am: not dead. Old. Very, very old. But soon that age will be nothing.”
“But—”
“Shut up. Follow.” She squeezed his arm harder, eliciting a scream of agony that almost made him pass out. But she dragged him upright and slapped him across the face with her free hand. It felt very real indeed.
Scott realized with a jolt that she must be one of the missing immortals. Perhaps she had been waiting here forever.
“A hop, skip, and jump,” she said, skidding to a halt close to an ancient ruin. It was the first sign of habitation that Scott had seen, apart from the road. One wall was all that remained, an arched doorway at its center, and all around its base were the tumbled stones of the rest of the building.
“A church?” he asked, and that seemed to cause much amusement to the woman. She laughed so hard that she had to bend down, holding her stomach, yet never letting go of Scott for an instant.
“A church!” She gasped through tears of mirth. “That’s a good one. Good one!” She calmed herself and started mumbling. Scott knew the sound of those words.
He also knew the nature of the light appearing in the ruin’s doorway.
A pale, even light, sickly gray. The way to somewhere else.
“Hop, skip, and jump,” she said again. “Come on.”
She dragged Scott toward the doorway. There was nothing he could do but follow.
They went into the Wide, but it was not like the first time with Nina. She had carried him in, easing him through the veils that separated this world from the next—thin veils in places, but defying time and reason nonetheless—and guided him across the boundary of that endless place. She had protected him, trying to make the trip as comfortable and as easy as possible. It had been awful.
Now, they burst through the doorway the woman had created and emerged deep in the Wide. There was no preamble, no prelude to their arrival, no warning: one second she was dragging him across that strange ghost road toward the ruined archway; the next he had left the world entirely.
Scott’s heart stopped. He gasped: there was no pain, but the sudden absence of something barely acknowledged was a shock.
The woman dragged him across a wide expanse of nothingness, and the sense of space around them was heavy, intimidating, threatening. When he was a child, Scott had dreamed a particular dream whenever he was ill. He had found it very difficult to explain when he woke up, but it terrified him, and chased him from sleep with the mockery of something knowing it could never be changed or understood. There was something about space in there, a great, crushing expanse of potential pain that crowded in at him where he stood on top of an impossible hill. The hill was split in two by a giant wound, stitched here and there, but still gaping to show its horrible insides. The threat that this stitching would break at any second was every bit as frightening as the weight of space around him. Pressure from below, pressure from above, and he was dwarfed by it, compressed to nothing resembling a living thing. He was a grain of sand, a spit in an ocean, a sigh in a hurricane, and every single instant of that dream threatened him with becoming utterly lost.
Upon screaming himself awake he had usually found his parents with him, cooing and soothing and not understanding anything he had to say about the hill, and the sky, and the held breath of that place waiting to blow him away.
Papa had understood. He’d been there twice when Scott awoke, and both times he had seemed more relieved than Scott to see the boy rising from sleep with only tears to dab away. That’s no good place to be, Papa had said, and Scott had buried his face in Papa’s familiar-smelling shirt.
This is no good place to be, Scott tried to say now, but his breath had left him. No heartbeat, no breath, and he opened his eyes to fight against whatever was happening.
He could not move. The woman dragged him through the space, and for as far as Scott could see there were spirits standing motionless, too lost even to drift around anymore. They wailed, and their cries formed in the air around them like smoke above a battlefield. He could smell their torment.
I’m not going to be like that, he thought. He fought. He raged against the darkness and strove toward the light. He kept Helen in his mind, because she was in here, somewhere, a prisoner of Lewis, and when the idea was spawned that she was already one of these lost souls, he shoved it aside, refusing even to accept the possibility.
No! he shouted, voice silent, but the notion all there. His heart thumped and he smiled in delight.
The woman looked back and grinned. There was only pure madness there, an age-old insanity that recognized a change closing in.
And then her grin began to fade.
Scott struggled to free himself. It felt as though her hand had merged with his flesh. There was no blood, but surely his skin must be pierced, the meat of him crushed and parted?
The woman began to scowl. They moved onward and she looked back, and anger flooded her eyes.
Scott averted his gaze, but there was nowhere else to look. If he looked beyond this strange woman into the Wide he felt sick; his insides churned and tumbled, and he fell a thousand feet in a second. So he stared back, and it was then that he realized she was no longer looking at him. She was looking past him, back the way they had come. And she was furious.
Scott tried to turn, but all the forces acting on him felt wrong. When he went to turn his head, his hand flexed. If he tried to move his toes, his shoulders tensed. He blinked his eyes and sniffed, and he smelled time rotting away to nothing.
He thought that if this ride continued for much longer, the woman may as well leave him here. He would be dead, lost, doomed to wander the Wide forever, and forever wondering whether Helen was still alive.
The Wide began to darken. Scott closed his eyes and his senses screeched as input hit him once again. He struck a hard surface, smelled age and mold, heard the impact of his body against stone, tasted blood as he bit down on his tongue, and then there was a long, high scream from somewhere above him, and the next taste in his mouth was someone else’s blood.
Before now, Scott had only ever tasted his own blood. This new blood was stale, sickly, rancid. It smelled bad. Perhaps the blood of all immortals was like this.
He rolled onto his side, sat up, and looked around. He was sitting on a large paved area in front of a tall, wide house. The house had three stories, and each story held eight windows across its length. The facade was otherwise bland and unremarkable: bare stone, no ostentatious features or aesthetic flourishes. There was an arched doorway, and some of the windows on the top floor were fronted by small cast-iron balconies. Several of the windows were open, curtains billowing. He could not tell whether or not anyone watched from inside.
The woman who had dragged him here through the Wide was sprawled on the patio a dozen steps from him. Tigre stood over her, legs planted wide, brandishing a short sword in each hand. The side of his head glittered with blood, but it was not his own.
The woman was gashed in a dozen places. Blood spewed from her wounds, finding the natural low points of the patio. The stone was sun-bleached, and the blood formed strange, squared patterns on the ground.
“I thought I’d lost you for sure,” a voice said.
Scott turned and saw Nina standing a few steps behind him. She was shaking. Sweating. Her eyes looked watery, those eyes usually so dark and unreada
ble. “Someone told me you’d kill me,” he said.
“Who?”
“I’m not really sure. Not anymore. I thought maybe it was Lewis, but then I met her. . . .” He nodded across at the slumped shape. The woman started moving, pulling an almost-severed arm back against her chest, raising her head so that blood-soaked hair drooped heavily to the ground.
Tigre lashed out with his swords. They made meaty impacts as they penetrated flesh and struck bone. He stood on her back and forced her down as he withdrew the swords. More blood flowed, and she was still once more.
Scott flinched away, turned to look at Nina. “Why is he doing that?”
“It’s what he does.”
“But who is she?”
“We think she’s Yaima. One of us. One of the originals.”
“An immortal,” Scott said, stupidly pleased that he had been right.
“I haven’t seen her for six thousand years,” Tigre muttered. He knelt beside the tattered body and thrust his sword deep into her chest. “Her heart’s still strong, Nina. Want to collect?”
“Are you okay?” Nina ignored Tigre, seeming genuinely concerned as she knelt beside Scott and touched his face.
“I’m really not sure.” He glanced up at the house. Was that a face he saw at one of the windows, stepping back into shadow as he looked? “I don’t think so.”
“She was brutal with you,” Nina said. “She didn’t care. Straight into the Wide, and that’s just not right. That’s no place for you to be.”
“You took me there.”
“I was careful.”
He remembered the time Nina had taken him through, and compared it with the trip he had just survived. And he nodded, because she was right. Before he had come out feeling disconcerted and upset; now . . . he was utterly unnerved.
“Why did you run?” she asked.
“I thought you wanted to kill me.” He looked at her carefully, trying to read her reaction. She’d had a long time to practice hiding her feelings.
“Why would I possibly want to kill you?” Nina said.
“Why wouldn’t you?”
Nina shook her head, confused. “I don’t understand the question.”
“I don’t understand any of this, but I have to because of Helen. So when I start getting messages that warn me away from you, what am I supposed to do?”
“Talk to me about it.”
“I don’t know you!”
“So therefore you don’t trust me?”
“You’re just the immortal who happened to visit me, and who happens to have taken me with you. It could just as easily have been her.” He pointed at the woman squirming on the ground. “Or him.”
Tigre glared at Scott, his expression hard with scar tissue.
“Just because I’m immortal, that doesn’t mean I’m inhuman,” Nina said.
Scott snorted and turned away, but there’d been something in her voice that struck a chord. After all, out of the immortals he had met so far, she was the most like him. She smiled and laughed, felt pain, and suffered the sting of loneliness.
Scott stared up at the house, wondering which windows hid faces and which hid something else. It was a haunted house; that much was clear. It stood in a valley hidden away behind the veil dividing the world from everything else. Perhaps it had been here forever. And inside could lie his salvation.
Save us, he had seen the silent ghosts mouthing at him. Help us.
“So whom do I trust?” he asked, still looking at the house. He heard movement behind him, felt Nina’s hand on his shoulder.
“I promise you I’m on your side,” she said.
“Why me? What am I? I know it’s not just Papa, not just because of him. I’m something more, aren’t I?”
“You’re mortal, unchanged by the book’s contents. You can touch it. To the likes of us, it’s as ghostlike as the truly dead. We can’t touch it, can barely see it, and being around it . . .”
“What?”
“It was horrible,” Nina said, and Scott knew that she was telling the truth.
Tears burned behind his eyes, and he was not sad that his vision blurred. Nina came in close until all he could see was her face. “So what happens now?” he asked. “What do I have to do?”
Nina looked over his shoulder at the house. “Let’s knock on the door and see what answers.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
fabled screams
This was the House of Screaming Skulls. Papa and Scott had read about it and seen obscure mentions on late-night TV, but Scott had never believed he would ever find himself here. It was fabled, like Oz or Atlantis. A place of the world, but not within it. A story.
He rapped his knuckles against the door. There was no echo, as he had expected. There was barely any sound at all. He knocked again.
Nina stood beside him, while Tigre hung back. He had sliced the woman in two across her chest and kicked her halves apart, smearing viscera and blood across the concrete area. Since then, Scott had tried not to look at her. But he could hear wet, sticky movement behind him as she tried to rejoin herself, and her gargled threats, which were sounding more malevolent with every heartbeat.
He knocked again. Nina shifted impatiently beside him. Glancing at her, he noticed her extreme discomfort for the first time. She was sweating, blinking quickly, and her breath came in short, fast gasps. He looked around at Tigre, but the mutilated man’s face remained a feature of fights and violence.
“Maybe no one’s home,” Scott said. “Who’d want to live here? Local pub must be miles away. And imagine having to clean all these windows.” He looked at the facade rising above and around him, jumped when a light curtain billowed from one of the windows. There was no breeze outside to cause that; maybe the air inside was being disrupted. “What’s in here?”
“Nobody knows,” Nina said. “As far as I know, no one has ever been inside.”
“No one?”
She shrugged.
“Great,” Scott said. “Great.”
“Move aside,” Tigre said. “Let me open the door.” He hefted his bloody swords and stepped forward.
The front door clicked and opened a hand’s width.
Scott stepped back. Nina remained where she was, but her shoulders tensed, hands fisted.
The air shifted slightly, as if the house were exhaling past them. It smelled stale and musty, and it carried the taint of an abandoned abattoir: no fresh blood, but plenty of deathly echoes.
“I don’t like this place,” Scott said.
“The book,” Nina said, and there was wonder in her voice.
“It really is here.” Tigre stepped forward and put a hand on Nina’s shoulder, squeezing slightly. “It really is here!” Then he turned to Scott. “Ready to help, human?”
Every nerve in Scott’s body, every part of his mind, told him to turn and run. It’s a brain, he thought, and though the idea repulsed him, he could not shake it. A brain, a mind, a consciousness without a soul. And it’s barren.
“I’m not sure I can,” he said.
“Helen,” Nina breathed. “She’s out there, where you’ve just been. So lost. And the only way I can help you get her back—”
“I’ll go,” Scott said. “Of course I’ll go. But it’s not a house.”
Nina shook her head. “Never thought it was.”
Tigre laughed. It was a gruesome sound, yet so unexpected that it lifted Scott’s spirits. “If it’ll make you feel any better, I’ll go first.” He sheathed the swords and pulled a dull black object from a holster on his hip. “People used to call me Death,” he said. “It’s all I’ve ever wanted.” He stepped to the door and kicked it open all the way.
Inside the house, out of the sun, they could have been anywhere. The entrance hallway was large and grand, but possessed a depressing taint of age. It was like a great country house that had fallen into disrepair, a mansion whose better times were decades or centuries in the past. It was a place way past its prime. Perhaps it had always looked
this way.
The floor was laid with massive marble slabs, six feet square. The centers of these slabs retained their beauty, but the edges were dulled and darkened with moisture penetration. There were rugs here and there, most of them threadbare, and their colors bled pale, a couple bearing black-edged holes as if they had been burned. The walls were lined with dark timber all around, pocked here and there with doorways. Every door seemed to be closed. A staircase began in the center of the hallway fifteen steps in, rising straight up, then splitting and curving to the left and right. The balustrade was ornately carved, the treads inlaid with individual carpet squares, the risers painted with elaborate representations of what appeared to be hunting scenes. The walls were also decorated with paintings, though much of what they depicted was hidden by a heavy sheen of dust and dirt that had accumulated over the centuries.
Some areas seemed to have been cleaned, and others had been left to gather time.
One strange affectation was a stag’s head, mounted at the first stair landing where the separate stairways curved left and right. It was huge, the antlers long and convoluted, though their ends had turned dark and crumbled to dust. Its eyes glittered with reflected light. Scott stared at it, fully expecting it to blink.
Living up to his promise, Tigre went first. He moved forward across the marble floor, pausing when he stood on the first rug. He held the machine pistol down beside his leg, its short barrel resembling an extended finger. Scott hoped he was ready to point at the first hint of danger. I can die; they can’t, he kept thinking. But he was trying to convince himself that he was in a position of power. If he died, they would not find the book, nor be able to read the words they had written so long ago and now forgotten. It was in their interests to protect him.
“Strange,” Tigre said. He moved a few more steps, then stopped again, standing on the next rug. He lifted one foot, then the other, looking around as he did so. “Illusion,” he said.
“All of it?” Nina asked.
“Some.” He walked on.
“What does he mean?” Scott asked.
“The house isn’t really here.”