The 13th Horseman

by Barry Hutchison

  “Careful,” Pestilence whispered, then he clamped a rubber-gloved hand over his mouth to stop himself saying any more.

  “Of course I’ll be careful,” War said through gritted teeth. “I’m being careful.”

  War took a deep, steadying breath, then he – carefully – hooked the rope in place. The Horsemen of the Apocalypse watched, none of them daring to speak a word until—

  “Buckaroo! ” cried Famine, as the plastic donkey kicked its back legs, showering the tabletop with a selection of brightly coloured bits of plastic.

  “Bugger it,” War muttered. He looked up and met Drake’s withering gaze.

  “You quite finished?” Drake asked.

  “Aye, well, we are now,” War said. “You here to start your training?”

  “I don’t know,” Drake said. He leaned back in the chair. “I want you to explain it all to me first.”

  Pestilence cleared his throat. “Right, well, you see the donkey there?”

  “Not Buckaroo,” Drake said. “I meant explain...” He gestured around at the shed. “Everything.”

  “I know,” said Pestilence, smiling sheepishly. “Just my little joke.” He began packing the game away into its battered box.

  “Where do you want me to start?” War asked.

  “Start at the beginning.”

  War shrugged, rolled his eyes and stroked his beard all at once. “Fair enough,” he said. “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.”

  Drake frowned. “What are you talking about?”

  “And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light,” War continued. “And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.”

  “Right, stop, stop,” Drake said. “What are you on about?”

  “Genesis, chapter one,” War replied. “You said to start from the beginning. Want me to keep going?”

  “Is that the Bible?”

  “Aye,” said War flatly. “That’s the Bible.”

  “Well, what are you telling me that for?” Drake asked.

  “Because we’re Biblical characters,” War said. “You said ‘start at the beginning’, so I was starting at the beginning.”

  Drake snorted. “Biblical characters? Come off it. The stuff in the Bible’s not real.”

  There was silence in the shed. Drake looked round at three equally reproachful expressions. “It’s not, is it?” he asked weakly.

  “Of course it’s real,” War growled. “It’s all true. Well,” he added hastily, “some of the translation didn’t work out too well, but most of it’s close enough.”

  “What... Noah’s ark, the Ten Commandments, all that stuff actually happened?”

  “Well, there are only four commandments, really,” Pest said. “And they’re more suggestions than what you’d call actual commandments, but yes.”

  A nervous grin spread across Drake’s face. “Nah!” he said. “You’re having a laugh.”

  “What’s so difficult to believe?” Pestilence asked. “I mean, we’re the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse—”

  “Three Horsemen,” Drake said firmly. “You’re the Three Horsemen of the Apocalypse, plus me.”

  “Well, whatever,” said Pestilence, waving a gloved hand. “The point is, we’re living proof that it’s all true.”

  “Or you’re three lunatics living in a shed in la-la land,” Drake said.

  “Three lunatics with a flying horse,” War said gruffly. “It didn’t fly, it galloped,” Drake reminded him, although he had to admit the horse going airborne was a difficult one to explain away. “And what about those metal ball things? Don’t tell me they were from the Bible too.”

  War shifted in his seat. “No, they weren’t. We’re still looking into that one.”

  “Looking into it? They nearly killed me!”

  “Aye, nearly. But they didn’t, thanks to me. A wee bit of gratitude wouldn’t go amiss.”

  “Thank you?” Drake spluttered.

  War nodded. “Don’t mention it.”

  There was a crunching sound to Drake’s right. He turned to find Famine cramming popcorn into his mouth with butter-soaked fingers. “Don’t mind me,” Famine said, spilling a mouthful of half-chewed kernels down his front. “Carry on. It’s entertaining, this.”

  Drake looked away as Famine began scooping the popcorn mush from his stained tracksuit top and licking it from his fingertips.

  “Forget the balls for a minute,” War said. “Think about the bigger picture. Heaven. Hell. It’s all real.”

  “And not just Heaven and Hell, neither,” Pestilence said. “It’s all about belief, see?”

  “Don’t confuse him,” War said. “Let him get his head round one thing at a time.”

  “No, tell me it all,” Drake insisted. “I want to know.” Pestilence’s eyes darted in War’s direction. Eventually, War gave a shrug. “Right, fire on.”

  “OK, well, you know parallel dimensions?” Pestilence began enthusiastically. “The idea that there are these other realities running alongside this one, sort of the same, but a bit different?”

  “Like, alternate universes and stuff?” Drake asked. “Yes, exactly!” Pestilence clapped. “Well, it’s all complete nonsense. There’s only this universe.”

  “Oh,” said Drake. “Then why are you telling me?”

  “Because there’s only this universe, but there are many afterlives. There are no parallel Earths, but there are parallel afterlives.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “There’s Heaven and Hell, obviously,” Pestilence continued, “you know about them. But there’s also Valhalla, afterlife of the Vikings; the Greeks had Hades and the River Styx and all that... Which reminds me, Mount Olympus, where the Greek Gods live – you will love it! Trust me.” Pestilence pressed a hand to his chest, as if clutching at his heart. “It’s gorgeous. Do you like wrestling? If you like wrestling, then—”

  “No, I don’t like wrestling,” Drake interjected. “Can we crack on?”

  “Right, sorry,” Pestilence said breathlessly. “Well, let’s see, there’s Yaxche, the cosmic tree of contentment where Mayans believed they would spend all eternity relaxing in the sun. There’s Adlivun, the undersea domain of Sedna, the She-Cannibal.”

  “Sedna the She-Cannibal?”

  “Oh yeah, she imprisons the souls of the wicked, apparently,” Pestilence shrugged. “We’ve never met her, but by all accounts she’s a right cow.” He looked to the others for help. “Who believes in her again?”

  “What do you call ’em?” slobbered Famine. “The ice ones.”

  “Polar bears?” Drake guessed.

  “Inuit,” War grunted.

  “That’s the one,” Pestilence said. “The Inuit people believe in Sedna, and other people believe in other things,” he continued, “and here’s the thing: they’re all right. All of them. All those things exist, and they exist because enough people believe – or believed – that they exist. It’s like they say, ‘Faith can make mountains’.”

  A hazy, half-remembered Sunday School lesson raised its hand at the back of Drake’s mind. “I thought it was move mountains?”

  “Bad translation,” War grunted. “You can’t move a mountain, I don’t care how much faith you’ve got. Once you stick a mountain down, it’s going nowhere.” He glanced briefly at Pestilence. “You might as well tell him the rest.”

  Pestilence gave a cough and cleared his throat again. He smiled self-consciously, and Drake saw a red rash spread up the horseman’s neck. It was either embarrassment or psoriasis, Drake couldn’t tell which.

  “Faith can make... other things too,” Pestilence began. “If enough people believe in something, then, sooner or later, it’ll turn up.”

  Drake wasn’t following. “Like what?”

  “Well,” Pestilence said, giving the word two sylla
bles, “you’ve probably heard of the Tooth Fairy.”

  Drake blinked. He looked across the faces of the three men, expecting to see them trying to contain their laughter. Instead, their expressions were deadly serious.

  “There’s not a Tooth Fairy.”

  “Yes, there is,” Pestilence said.

  “No, there isn’t,” Drake insisted. He looked at War. The giant nodded his confirmation. “Right,” Drake scoffed. “And I suppose there’s an Easter Bunny too?”

  Pestilence shot Famine an accusatory look. “Well... there was.”

  “What? Not this again,” the fat man protested. “He was made out of chocolate!”

  “He was carrying chocolate,” War said. “There’s a big difference.”

  “Not from where I was standing,” Famine mumbled. He rubbed his blubbery stomach and stared wistfully into space, lost in a fond memory.

  “Anyway, all these afterlives and mythological kingdoms,” Pestilence continued, “they’re all separate, but they’re all connected. Certain beings – of which you are now officially one, yay! – can travel between them.”

  “I don’t believe that,” Drake said. He crossed his arms across his chest.

  “Which bit?” Pestilence asked.

  “Any of it. All of it, whatever,” Drake told him. He shrugged. “I don’t believe any of what you just said.”

  War’s chair scraped across the floor. He stood up, but had to duck his head to avoid bumping it against the roof. “Right, then, in that case we’ll just have to prove it.” He looked down at Drake. The small patch of face Drake could see behind the big man’s beard seemed to darken.

  “Tell me,” War growled. “What do you know about Limbo?”

  THE HARSH WINDS of nothingness whistle around him as he streaks through realms undreamed of by the minds of men. He sees the birth of planets and of suns and of vast, sprawling galaxies, and he pays them no heed.

  He is there for the other end of creation too. He alone bears witness to the deaths of other worlds, other stars, other universes. For these he does pause, just briefly, to admire the end of all things.

  He crosses each dimension between the beats of his black heart. Each one he travels through brings him closer to his goal. Every realm he passes across, from the ancient to the new, brings him one step nearer to his destiny.

  And one step nearer to the shed.

  IT HAD BEEN nine years since Drake had been to Sunday School, and even then he’d only gone twice.

  The first time he’d gone because he’d heard there was going to be a puppet show, and Drake liked puppets. He particularly liked Bert and Ernie, from Sesame Street. Or, at least, he liked Ernie, the fun-loving one with the rubber duck. He wasn’t all that fussed about the po-faced Bert, if he were completely honest, but even back then he’d instinctively known the two came as a package.

  The Sunday School show didn’t feature Bert or Ernie, though. It didn’t even feature a rubber duck. Instead, the puppet show was about some guy called Jesus healing something called ‘the leper’.

  Drake hadn’t really known what a leper was, but he’d been disappointed by the build quality of the puppet. Every time it moved, bits kept falling off. By the time Jesus got round to healing it, it was little more than a torso with a head.

  The second time Drake went to Sunday School was to pick up his coat, which he’d forgotten to take home the previous week. It was during this second session, that he had heard about Limbo. And the bit about moving mountains.

  Limbo, he had been told, was a place of absolute emptiness, somewhere between Heaven and Hell. It was sort of a neutral territory – a place for souls who hadn’t done anything bad enough to earn themselves a ticket to eternal damnation, but who equally hadn’t impressed the man upstairs enough to be allowed into Paradise.

  At least, that was how Drake remembered the lesson. There was other stuff too, but he’d been busy looking for his jacket by that point, and hadn’t really paid all that much attention.

  Which was probably just as well, since more or less everything the Sunday School teacher had tried to tell him was wrong.

  Drake stood in the doorway of the shed, looking out on to a vast expanse of sand. Overhead, the sky was a wishy-washy sort of blue – nice, but with a chance of scattered showers later.

  He turned away from the door and looked to the three men standing behind him. “How did you do that?” he asked, his voice shaking. “Where’s my house?”

  “The house is where we left it,” War assured him. “It’s the shed that’s moved. We’re no longer on Earth. We are in Limbo.”

  Drake looked out at the copper-coloured sand. Despite everything, he felt surprisingly calm. “It’s like... Mars or somewhere.”

  War and Pestilence stifled a laugh. “‘Mars’,” War smirked. “Now who’s living in la-la land?”

  “I could just go a Mars,” Famine panted, salivating slightly. “Don’t suppose anyone’s got one?”

  Drake stepped out on to the sand. It wasn’t hot, like he’d expected. In fact, the sand wasn’t really anything, temperature-wise. Nor was the air, he noticed. He was neither hot, nor cold, but he didn’t feel just right, either. It wasn’t that he was at the perfect temperature, it was more the case that there was no temperature to speak of.

  He looked out across the vast plain. It stretched out as far as the eye could see. Desolate. Bare. Empty.

  “Hello, ’ello!”

  Drake spun, kicking up a cloud of sand that quickly settled again without a breeze to keep it afloat. A blond-haired man with a goatee beard poked his head round the corner of the shed. He gave Drake a friendly wave.

  “Um... hello,” Drake said.

  The stranger stepped out from behind the shed and looked Drake up and down. At the same time, Drake studied him. The man wore black trousers with a matching black polo neck top and a charcoal-grey waistcoat. His black shoes looked as if they had once been polished, but the sand had taken its toll and now they were scuffed and dull.

  The man hooked his thumbs through the belt loops of his trousers and rocked back on his heels. “So,” he said, still smiling, “who are you, then?”

  Drake glanced sidelong into the shed. Or, at least, he tried to, but the door was now closed.

  “Drake,” he said. “Drake Finn.”

  “Alfred Randall,” said Alfred Randall, “of the Alfred Randall X-perience.” He took one of Drake’s hands in both of his and shook it vigorously. He went on like that for several seconds, showing no sign of stopping. Eventually, Drake pulled his hand away.

  “So, what you doing in this old thing, then?” asked Alfred, giving the shed a pat. “They in?” He stepped past Drake and tried the door handle. The handle turned, but the door remained firmly closed. “Yoo-hoo! Anyone home? It’s Alfred Randall. The Alfred Randall X-perience.”

  There was silence inside the shed. Alfred turned, his eyes suddenly narrow with suspicion. “Here, you haven’t nicked it, have you?”

  “No, I haven’t nicked it,” Drake replied. “They’re in there, look.” He knocked on the door. “Stop mucking about, there’s someone here who wants to talk to you.”

  At first, Drake heard nothing from beyond the door. Then there was the sound of War muttering below his breath, and the door slowly creaked open. Pestilence emerged first. He wore a floppy white hat and blinked in the sudden glare of the light. War came out next, still muttering. He fired Drake a look of contempt as he stepped on to the sand.

  Famine shuffled out next, keeping one hand on the shed wall for support.

  “There’s the lads!” Alfred cried. He held up a hand for a high-five. When it was clear no one was about to give him one, he clicked his fingers, pointed, then let his hand swing down by his side again. “The lads, the lads, howay the lads!”

  “All right, Alf?” War said, with the tone of someone who’d been through this too many times before.

  “You can come out, Brian,” Alfred shouted. “It’s just the lads, right enough!�
�

  “Hello, lads,” beamed another man, leaning his head round the corner. The rest of him followed close behind, and Drake realised he was dressed identically to Alfred. He had the same black trousers, shoes and polo shirt, and the same charcoal-coloured waistcoat. He had the same goatee beard too, although his hair was a silvery grey, not blond like Alfred’s. He looked older than Alfred, by two decades at least.

  “Brian,” said Pestilence. He forced a polite smile.

  “You’re missing one, I see,” Alfred said, taking a peek inside the shed and finding it empty. “Where’s himself?”

  “He’s gone,” War said, giving nothing away. “This is his replacement.”

  “Hear that, Brian? This is the new you-know-who!” He shook Drake’s hand again. “Pleasure to meet you. Alfred Randall, the Alfred Randall X-perience. But then, I expect they’ve told you all about that?”

  Drake glanced over to the Horsemen. They nodded encouragingly.

  “Uh... no,” Drake said. He heard Pestilence stifle a sob. “Actually, they haven’t.”

  A flicker of pain passed behind Alfred’s eyes. His lips pursed together so tightly they virtually disappeared.

  “But it’s my first day,” Drake added quickly.

  Alfred smiled. This seemed to satisfy him.

  “Well, that explains it,” he said. “I’m Alfred Randall, and we” – he put an arm round Brian’s shoulder and pulled him in – “are the Alfred Randall X-perience, Limbo’s premier barbershop quartet. And, by the way, that’s X as in the letter X,” Alfred explained. “X-perience.” He grinned too broadly. It was the grin, Drake thought, of a man on the edge. “It’s not exactly the traditional spelling, but then again, we’re not exactly a traditional barbershop quartet, are we, Brian?”

  Brian shook his head. “No. There’s only the two of us, for a start.”

  “And we do the twiddly bits, don’t we, Brian? Show him your twiddly bits.”

  Brian opened his mouth and made a sound quite unlike anything Drake had heard before. He imagined it was the type of sound a camel might make, were it to attempt to gargle a cat.

  Alfred held his hands out at his sides, his point apparently proven. “Let’s see the Acapella Afterlifers do that, eh?” he said, between snorts of laughter. “Not a friggin’ hope!”