Penult

by A. Sparrow

  “He’s having a bad day,” said Wendell. “To put it mildly.”

  “Is he okay?”

  “Um, no,” said Jessica.

  “But … how did you guys find me?”

  “I promised not to tell,” said Jessica.

  “Gwen. It was her. Had to be. She was the only one I told. Well, it’s so wonderful to see you! I felt so bad about how I left things. I meant to stay in touch, I really did. But I was afraid I’d be followed. Things got weird in Cardiff. I had to leave in a rush. And Mrs. Ambrose, she had taken me in after Karla died. So I went back. I feel so safe here.”

  She kept looking over at me, her eyes growing worried. I wanted to say something to reassure her, but the spasms in my throat prevented me.

  “Shouldn’t he be seeing a doctor or something?”

  “Oh, don’t trouble your little head,” said Wendell. “We’ve been over this. No worries, hon. We have it covered.”

  I stayed in the back seat, unable to roust myself from the car. Isobel looked far more mature than the last time I had seen her. This was no kid anymore. She was a young woman, at least as tall as Karla, if not taller.

  “Your sister … she’s … alive,” said Jessica. “I’m not sure if you knew that.”

  Isobel looked stunned. “Why would you say such a thing?”

  “Because … it’s true. James. He brought her back.”

  “That’s impossible. You saw her. She was dead. There was a funeral. They buried her body.”

  Wendell grinned. “You should know better for someone who’s been visited by roots. Things involving souls and bodies aren’t as cut and dry as they look.”

  Isobel ripped open the car door and stared at me. “James? Is it really true? About Karla?” She still looked more doubtful than hopeful.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I had help, but yeah. She’s alive.”

  As the truth took hold she grew excited. “Is she okay?”

  “She’s fine,” I said, hoarsely. “Far as I can tell. Last time I saw her.”

  “But you’re not well. No, not at all. Obviously.”

  “No, he is not,” said Jessica. “He’s not long for this world. He’s been poisoned.”

  Isobel looked horrified.

  “Then why did you bring him here? Get him to a hospital right away!”

  “I urged the same,” said Jessica. “These gentlemen assure me that it’s of no use. There’s no antidote for what he’s been given.”

  “But why not?” Isobel began to sob.

  The tightness in my throat eased a bit, allowing me to speak more freely for the time being.

  “It’s just the war, Izzie. The other side, they wanted me gone from here. Though, I don’t know why they think that will stop me. But … your sister’s fine. She was down in Cardiff. Living on the street, I guess. Looking for you.” I paused for breath, and could not seem to fit enough air into my lungs. “She’s in the Lim a lot. I’ll try to get word back to her if I can. You just stay put for now. Be easier for her to find you. At least you have an address.”

  “Are you sure you don’t want us to fetch you a doctor?”

  “It’s no good, Iz. This is it for me.”

  “Well, that’s … terrible.” Her voice cracked.

  “Preposterous is what it is,” said Mrs. Ambrose. “What could you have possibly become poisoned with that would not be reversible?”

  “Ricin,” said Wendell, flatly.

  That momentarily rendered Mrs. Ambrose speechless. She looked stunned, but quickly regathered her senses. “Well, we can’t just leave him lying in the car. Let’s at least get him into a bed.”

  “Nah,” I said, panting. “Just sit me down in the grass. You don’t want a strange man dying in your bed.”

  “For goodness sakes, why not? Mr. Ambrose certainly didn’t think twice about doing so.”

  Jess and Izzie helped me out of the back seat.

  “Okay guys, so … uh … I guess I’m gonna get going,” said Wendell. “Gotta catch a flight back to the States. Looks like business might be starting up again.”

  “What about our ride?” said Jessica.

  “I’ll get you wherever you need to go,” said Mrs. Ambrose. “I suggest we let this gentleman leave.” She muttered under her breath. “The sooner the better.”

  “Cool, and … uh … thanks again, James. For your service. Isn’t that what they always say to service folks?”

  Wendell winked and put his car back in gear, executing a three point turn, in the process, crushing a rose bush and squashing a bed of mint on the fringe of Mrs. Ambrose’s herb garden.

  “Who is that man?” Mrs. Ambrose asked as the Bentley tore away down the packed clay of the drive.

  “No one you would ever want to meet again,” said Jessica. “Trust me.”

  ***

  Jessica and Izzie braced me and brought me in the house and tucked me into a soft bed. Mrs. Ambrose came bustling after them with a glass of ginger ale and some biscuits.

  My insides were cramping. I had no appetite, only pain, but I managed to sip some of the ginger ale and keep it down. I could move around a bit but got really dizzy if I stood up too fast. And I had a horrible case of the runs that kept forcing me to leave the bed. I refused to soil my clothes. The Pennies might be taking my life but I was determined to die with dignity.

  My eyelids were getting heavy but I couldn’t stop staring out the window at the knobby hilltops behind the farms, all heath and granite and wisps of cloud. If this was going to be my last glimpse of the planet of my birth, at least I had been blessed with a divine setting for my demise.

  The ladies took turns sitting with me. Izzie could not stop squeezing my hand and crying. There were constant murmurs in the hallway as they argued over how best to handle my situation. Jessica managed to convince Mrs. Ambrose that staying mum and not involving any health professionals or law enforcement was the most prudent course of action. I didn’t really care what they did with me once I was gone. That was their problem.

  37 Sraid-Na-Firrin, Drumnadrochit, Scotland. That was the address on a letter to Mrs. Ambrose that I found on the night stand. That was where Karla would find her sister. Now that I had gathered the last bit of information I would ever need from this world, it was time for me to go. The roots wasted no time.

  Chapter 69: Falling

  I had no death wish. I didn’t want to die. This wasn’t suicide, it was murder. But with no trace of hope left to bind me to the living world, I knew that crossing over to the Liminality was a done deal.

  One would think some other realm might claim my soul. But feeling serious enough about killing oneself to earn a visit to Root also seemed to condemn one’s soul to the Lim forever, or at least until some realm one rung lower in the hierarchy came calling. Dying in the Lim, for example, sent your soul straight to the Deeps. The realms were nested that way. And each soul had a unique pathway to damnation or salvation. My road only seemed to lead down.

  So it was the Lim for me for now, even though I was not quite dead yet. But for all intents and purposes my living was finished. I had zero hope of recovery. No chance for survival. There was nothing left for me to do but hunker down and die.

  The roots needed no coaxing. They were already waiting in the wings, ready to shuttle me along.

  I had a hunch that something would be different about this particular transition. I expected revelations. Memories and life scenes flashing by. Bright lights. Flourishes. Something, anything befitting this special occasion. There was nothing like free falling through the clouds to remind me what I should have been worrying about.

  I had faded from the saddle of a wasp that was no longer anywhere near the patch of sky it had previously occupied. Creatures of habit, these roots always bring me back to the exact same spot from which I had vanished, even if that location happened to be thousands of feet above the waves.

  I knew this wasn’t a good thing. A fall from such a height was not survivable in any realm, no matter how s
traight I held my back and pointed my toes. Water, contrary to popular belief, was not soft, particularly not at terminal velocity. The Deeps beckoned.

  As I clenched my teeth and girded myself for the snap and crush of bone, a whirring sound grew and a hulking figure appeared alongside me, matching its dive to the speed of my fall. Striped wings. Tigger! I could hardly believe my eyes.

  I reached out my hand to him, but the airstream grabbed it and made me tumble out of control. Tigger adjusted his dive and caught up with me, nudging his back up against my side. All I had to do was close my hand and I was gripping the inch thick bristles sprouting from his carapace. I reached for the saddle with me free hand and latched onto a loop.

  With the waves looming close, Tigger pulled out of his dive. But he was gentle about it. An abrupt change of course would have ripped me away. But he managed to flatten our angle of descent gradually to give me a chance to settle into the saddle. Soon, we were skimming the wave tops and regaining a bit of altitude.

  Back in the saddle and strapped in, I finally had a chance to catch my breath and get my bearings. Penult was behind us now. A lone falcon patrolled the beach we had left. There was no sign of Ubaldo and his wasp, no trace of Mikal or Urszula.

  My hand! It was almost entirely black now and the blackness was spreading up my arm. It moved slowly, like spilled molasses, but inexorably.

  “Tigger, we need to climb!”

  As if words could express my will to this bug. I banged my heels against his side and patted the armored plates behind his head. Tigger didn’t respond immediately but I kept on slapping and then suddenly he tilted upward and began rising back towards the clouds.

  “That’s it! You got it buddy! Keep it up. Keep on climbing.”

  We punched through the low-level clouds and kept rising. This time I greeted the chill with relief. I was dying for sure now. The end had never been nearer and the higher we got, the better would be my chances of keeping my soul free of the Core’s influence. No one had ever explained to me how the Core worked, but there was no questioning its power. In some ways it was like gravity, though its range was more limited.

  I worried that Tigger, being a mere dragonfly, could not carry me high enough out of its influence. But he surprised the heck out of me. We were already just below the stratum of icy cirrus that Ubaldo and Sophia had taken me before the last fade—wispy things that roamed the sky like lost and lonely ghosts.

  Tigger’s wing beats began to stutter and syncopate. His flight muscles were cooling. With each falter, the dragonfly lost a bit of elevation.

  “Hang on, guy. Just a little longer.”

  Something ripped in my mind. I shuddered, not only from the cold but from the disturbance in my soul. A partition slid from my consciousness and I found myself inhabiting two worlds. Tigger and I swept through icy clouds while I lay swaddled beneath the thick covers of the bed in Mrs. Ambrose’s guest room. The sensations and infirmities of both worlds converged on one body.

  It was not natural to be in two places at once. I only had one soul. One will. Hence, my soul oscillated back and forth. I could not fix my location at first, but my will prevailed to drag most of me back to Scotland. This was not a fade. This was something different. Part of me remained back in the Liminality with Tigger.

  Back in Scotland I was weak and barely conscious. An intense queasiness gripped me, but I had long since puked out all there was to puke.

  Isobel, Jess and Mrs. Ambrose hovered around the bed. I could barely keep my eyes open, so I kept them shut. Someone daubed at my brow with a warm wash cloth.

  Jess placed her fingers against my throat to check my pulse.

  “We’re losing him.”

  Mrs. Ambrose leaned in close, her lips trembling. “James. Can you hear me? Are you still with us?”

  I nodded.

  “Tell me, who should we notify? When you pass?”

  I took a long, deep breath.

  “Nobody,” I gasped.

  “Don’t you have some next of kin?”

  “No. There’s … nobody.”

  “But what should we do with … your remains?”

  “I don’t know. Bury me someplace nice. So if people visit, it’s a nice place to be. Find a willow tree. I like … willows.”

  Jessica started to snuffle and sob. Izzie remained fierce and calm. Mrs. Ambrose kept calm. She had faced more death than any of us. She was closer to it herself than anyone in the room but me.

  “How are you feeling, son?” said Mrs. Ambrose. “Any pain?”

  My soul began to drain away into the Lim, slowly, like a pinhole in a bike tire.

  “I’m not … here.”

  “Say what?”

  A pressure built in my skull. It felt like giant fingers prodding and prying, trying to gain leverage against my soul. And then it happened. My head began to spin, like bathwater spiraling around a drain. The wind vanished. The chill vanished. All went black.

  The end came to me as if like someone had spun a dimmer switch on my consciousness, dialing my senses down to zero. I felt, saw, sensed nothing. I had no attachment to anything physical. All that remained was my consciousness. I had given up the ghost.

  No bright lights beckoned to me. If there was a tunnel, that dark remained dark. It was like walking into through pitch-black basement, feeling my way along, not knowing what spider webs or trip hazards stood in my path.

  This was not the Singularity. I had no awareness of any other consciousness but my own. I was just a bundle of thoughts and memories with no vessel to contain them. And just as I thought they would all blow apart and vanish, the wind came blasting through my hair and I heard the deep thrum of a dragonfly’s wings as we skimmed the underside of a thick bank of clouds.

  I wasn’t sure if we had been high enough away from the Core, but if I was here and not in the Deeps, it must have worked. I had my skin again, and it was unblemished. The scar on my palm when a glass broke and I gashed myself washing dishes? Gone. The crooked knuckle that developed after I broke a finger falling off a skateboard. Straight. My soul was free and I felt great, flush with energy and vitality and alertness I had rarely felt in actual life.

  No question about it, I was now a Freesoul. But it also meant I was dead. That realization made my stomach sink. Any fleeting sense of exhilaration over my restored body pretty much evaporated. Needless to say, my feelings were decidedly mixed about the whole deal.

  ***

  Tigger descended leisurely to a much balmier altitude. Once he thawed out a bit, his wings began to purr again. He regained his groove as we cruised over the silvery sea.

  I slumped forward in the saddle and laid my head down on the cushy padding, grateful despite Urszula’s mockery that I had chosen this ‘fat man’s saddle’ built for comfort. I proceeded to spend the next few hours mourning myself.

  It’s not easy being dead, no matter how alive you feel and how conscious you remain. The door out of life is a pretty heavy door to get slammed on you.

  Yeah, I knew from experience that it was theoretically possible to pry it open from time to time, but Karla’s resurrection had been a freak occurrence, driven more by the Horus than anything I did. I’m not sure it was anything I would want to repeat—exposing myself to a destroyer of souls for the off chance of walking the planet of my birth again.

  Urszula’s resurrection had been way more curious and less dramatic. She had simply piggy-backed onto my fade, a much less risky endeavor. Could any Hemisoul fading back do the same to any Duster? Considering that Dusters were essentially a special category of Freesoul who had escaped the Deeps, could I have done the same for any Freesoul? More importantly from my perspective, could any Hemisoul do the same for me? I hoped it didn’t have anything to do with my being ‘special.’

  For the time being, I would have to resign myself to remaining dead. One the bright side, it just meant access to one less realm than before. And from what they tell me, there are scores of realms in the afterlife and though parts
of it were quite nice, the Liminality was not even in the top tier. But the realm I had just lost access to was the one I knew best. Losing it stung real bad.

  ***

  A change in the wind brought a resinous note to the air. Trees! I lifted my head off the saddle to find an unfamiliar shore before me, with golden sands and sinuous, wave-sculpted sandstone ledges.

  There were boats on the beach, and a scattering of Pennies surrounding them. No Cherubim. These guys seemed mostly upper management—Hashmallim and a few Seraphim from the looks of their garb. And they seemed to be loading these boats, not disembarking. Where the heck were the Cherubim?

  A lone falcon patrolled overhead but it came nowhere near us. Good thing, because Tigger was oblivious. He acted like he owned the sky. I would have preferred that he detour a little farther away from this beachhead, but he had his compound eyes riveted on a swarm of giant gnats buzzing over a lagoon. He dove abruptly and ripped through the swarm snatching two victims on the wing.

  I had no idea where we were. The trees here were taller and denser than the place our raiding party had bivouacked. And there were many more ponds and creeks. This was all new territory for me.

  I put my trust in Tigger’s sense of direction, however unwise that might be. How much could this bug know? He had only hatched out a few weeks ago? But he sure acted like he knew where he was going, so I let him do his thing. Not that I could ever get this stubborn creature to listen to me, anyhow, even if I knew where to go.

  It was not as if I was in a hurry to get anywhere. I Being dead is sort of like being unemployed with no prospects of ever finding a job. You just went with the flow.

  Gripping the struggling gnats in his forelegs, Tigger chomped on them as he cruised. Leg parts and head capsules went tumbling into the canopy as he snacked. I was feeling hungry myself but there was nothing in the saddlebags but a few crumbs of manna, which were mushy and stale. I nibbled them anyway.

  ***

  We had cruised for hours when a dark object just above the horizon suddenly altered its course to intercept us. I reached for a sword I no longer possessed.