35
Death came wrapped in sleep and dreams.
The holding cell at the police lock-up was a dark, cramped concrete box that stank of urine and fear, its walls liberally marked and scrawled with names, drawings, prayers and arcane messages I could not decipher. I sat on the bunk, sickened and mortified, as a woman in heavy eye-glasses with only one arm, and dressed as a police officer, gave me the injection. “This won’t hurt a bit,” she said, lying through her teeth. The solution burned up my arm, and the fire spread through my body, and up into my head, where I felt it alive and bubbling behind my eyes. “Lie down,” she told me. “It hits pretty fast.”
I could hear hacking sobs from other nearby cells, and at least one male voice howling out the filthiest language I had ever heard.
How could my life have come to this? I wondered, but not for long.
As sleep pulled at me, I thought of sick dogs being put down just like this.
And, thinking that, I thought of Gordon, and what he had been forced to do because he helped me that night. The thought was unbearable.
Good God … I’m so sorry, Gordon.
I watched the woman in glasses do a surprisingly efficient job of knotting the sheet with her left hand and the below-the-elbow stump of the other. It was hard not to stare. Standing on the end of the bunk, she managed to tie a loop around the bars up on the window. It was not an elegant way to kill oneself, I reflected, now almost beyond caring.
Even as I felt my flesh burn, I could see my breath turning to fog.
My heart slowed, and slowed even more, and as it did, I grew colder, and began to shiver.
The woman in glasses took my wrist in her cold hand and checked my pulse and respiration; she had a nurse’s brass fob-watch. She smelled of cheap soap. Threads of blonde hair, escaped from under her black and white police cap, fell around her face.
“Am I really going to die?” I was finding it hard to see.
“Do you remember your briefing?”
“Hmm …?”
The burning sensation was fading.
“Do you remember your briefing?”
“Oh … ” I could no longer see her. Dreams came and took me away. Part-memory and part-fabrication, I saw things I understood and things that were odd, in the way of ordinary dreams. It is difficult now to remember the things I saw. I do recall a feeling of peace. It was the most pleasant sensation I had experienced in a long time.
Then Julia was sitting next to me. We were on a tram, and the tram was trundling and rattling through the streets of a city that looked something like many cities I knew — but when I thought I recognised a landmark, a corner, a public fountain, a tree-lined park, there were other things I did not recognise at all; it was confusing. Julia said, “So you got here in one piece, then? Jube, dear?” She held out a cellophane bag containing colourful fruit jubes. She had been through half the bag already.
“Thank you very much,” I said, relying on good manners to get me through this odd dream. The jube was red and crusted with sugar. It smelled of raspberries in a way that was almost overwhelming. The taste was exquisite. I sat there, surrounded by people I did not know, bunched together on the old wooden benches of the tram, while a raspberry explosion occurred within my mouth. It seemed to make everything else go pale by comparison.
Julia reached up and pulled the cord, and a bell rang. “This is our stop. Come along, dear.”
I got up and threaded my way between the other people. I heard an old man say, speaking to no-one, “What the hell is this? Where’s Mary? She was right here a moment ago. Have you seen her?” He was looking up at me, and I happened to catch his eye. He was dressed in loose cotton pyjamas. “Have you seen my Mary?”
The tram squeaked to a stop. Julia helped me climb down to the street. A few other passengers got off with us, and, like me, they stood there, next to the idle tram, simply staring at the surrounding scene.
On one hand, it was bright and sunny, like a spring afternoon, but the quality of the light was odd, neither the harsh yellow flatness of Australian light, nor the softer European light I knew from home. This was something else, and disconcerting.
On the other hand, the sky was a spray of stars against the infinite depth of space. I did not recognise any constellations. The stars were the wrong colours.
I could smell motorcar exhaust and horse manure and human perspiration.
The tram rattled and jingled off up the middle of the street. Other traffic, including motorcars, horses and buggies, people on bicycles, and pedestrians looking very busy, dodged around the big red trams.
Julia watched the flow of traffic and led me to the footpath. We were an island of calm as a river of other people flowed by in both directions, everyone talking at once. Julia looked around, a seasoned observer, and pointed at things. “That’s the Urquhart Building. It used to be one of the tallest buildings here, until the last few years. This is Greathelm Street, I should point out, one of the main shopping districts. If you go down this hill to the corner, you’ll be on Cogsworth Street, which leads to the High Street to the ewst and up to Government House to the wast. Over there, next to Sweetling’s Book Emporium, there’s Purvis’s, the department store.”
It was a pounding rain of new information. It was confusing and frightening. I had never imagined an afterlife like this.
“I say, dear, feeling hungry?” Julia smiled at me.
“I’m asleep. I remember.”
“Follow me, dear.”
She took me back across the busy street and led me into Purvis’s department store. It was thick with busy people, many carrying bulging paper bags which bore the stylised P I recognised from outside. Many of these people also had children following them around; the children looked confused and upset, even as they ate ice-cream cones and sugared doughnuts that smelled delicious. The noise in here was extraordinary. People raising their voices to be heard over other people doing the same thing — combined with occasional public announcements from overhead speakers, alerting shoppers to special sales and discount offers. The press of busy, grumpy people was hard to bear. “Where are we …?”
Julia pulled me towards an ornate wooden staircase leading up and down. We headed down. I kept holding the varnished banister as we descended two whole levels, each as frantic and noisy as the last, until we reached the basement. There was a cafeteria down here. The noise was bad, but different; the change was a blessing. Around me were scores of small tables, most occupied by family groups that didn’t look quite right. There was an intense rattling of steel cutlery on china plates that jarred in my ears.
Still bewildered by the stunning press of hundreds and hundreds of busy people, I followed Julia, clutching her hand the way I imagined I must have done as a small child when my governess took me for walks on the common or by lake, when she told me stories about faeries and elves and brave but doomed knights. The memory of those walks bloomed and filled my mind for a long moment; I tripped over someone’s foot and fell to the polished wooden floor. My knees and left elbow hit hard and I wound up sitting on my backside, embarrassed. People nearby stared at me and made arch remarks to those with them about “idiot new chums”. Suddenly I felt upset and thought I might cry, just to make this intense experience — so like something bad from childhood — complete. The entire journey so far did indeed remind me of my first visits to London, when I was only perhaps six or seven years old. I remembered my father, leaning forward in the carriage, smelling of fragrant pipe smoke, with me on his lap, pointing at things through the windows. It seemed cities were made of vast ferocious-looking buildings, smelly horses, crowds of unhappy people, and soot and smoke and noise. It was fascinating but also frightening — just like this new place.
We were seated at a table by ourselves, up against a wall. Julia was sipping a cup of fragrant tea. She had provided me with a plate of ham and cheese sandwiches on fresh white bread, and a glass of cold water. The bread smelled warm. She said, “I would have given yo
u milk, but it’s been known to react poorly in the stomachs of the newly arrived. Hope you don’t mind.” She smiled warmly, and set about her own sandwich, which looked like something involving chicken and mustard, and smelled wonderful.
As I ate my sandwich, which was very good — and I was surprised that food here should be so good — I felt my mind beginning to wrap itself around these new surroundings. Things seemed at once only too familiar, but also subtly wrong. This conflict of impressions was disturbing, but I was starting to see. Julia said, at one point, “You see what you’re accustomed to, Ruth. Not everyone sees the same thing. This city is so crowded, however, because so many people these days live in big cities. They’re comfortable in this sort of world. Do you see, dear?”
I chewed this over and took a sip of water. The water tasted off somehow, and I put the glass back on the table. “How … real is all this?”
“Oh, quite real, I assure you. I say, are you staying here or are you heading out into the countryside once you’ve become acclimatised? I should have asked you before, but …well, you know what it’s like when you first arrive, don’t you? Some poor folk just about keel over a second time, just from shock! ‘I say,’ they say, all confused and indignant, ‘where’re all the angels, and where’s God and whatnot?’ It’s something of a trial explaining to some people that it’s not so much an afterlife, but another life. Do you see?” She went on for some time about some of these people she’d encountered, writhing on the ground, suffering “afterlife shock”, as she called it.
Something was wrong about all this, though. There was something I needed to be doing, and it wasn’t stuffing my face like this and trying not to inhale the rich perfumes of the ladies lunching around us.
I finished my sandwich and dabbed my lips with the paper napkin provided. Julia was still talking, regaling me with hard-to-follow accounts of her first visits here, and the trouble she had coming to grips with it all, and the famous people she’d come across, not all of whom handled the transition with the sort of poise and aplomb for which they were famous in life. The more she went on, talking about her encounters with actors, politicians, artists, “altogether too many soldiers”, even horse-race jockeys and famous opera divas, the less I listened. My attention was drawn to what I assumed was a clock on the opposite wall. This clock sported the traditional circular dial, but only one hand, and — I squinted — fourteen numbers. The time at this moment was something after one o’clock, presumably in the afternoon.
How long had I been here now? I thought back as far as I could, and determined that perhaps twenty minutes had already passed — and all I had done was eat a sandwich and feel confused and embarrassed.
“I’ve got to find Father William,” I said, interrupting Aunt Julia’s deadworld memoirs.
She blinked and peered across at me. “Is that right?”
I got up. “You might say I’m on a tourist visa. I’m here to find that swine and then I’m heading back, erm, home, so to speak.”
Julia looked disappointed. “You say you’re looking for this Father William? I was talking with him just recently. I sent you that message, did you get it?”
“Yes I did. What happened? Do you know where he’s gone?”
She looked surprised at my keen interest. “He saw through my cunning ruse and fled, dear. I am sorry. It’s just I’d rather hoped you would get back in touch with me.”
“A bit of a problem there, Julia. I had no way of reaching you. The telephone has its limitations, somewhat.”
“What about that nice Mr Duncombe? Wouldn’t he lend his services?”
“That nice Mr Duncombe, I’m very sorry to say, is not currently speaking to me — and I do not mean because I’m dead. We had something of a falling out.” It was still bothering me.
Julia was shocked. “What on Earth happened? You two were such chums!”
“I honestly don’t have time to explain.”
“Don’t be silly, Ruth. Of course you have time.”
“Pardon me for saying so, Julia, but I really do not have time. I’ve already used up about twenty minutes!”
“How long do you have?”
“They told me one day is the best they can manage.”
“That’s not too good.”
“No, that’s right. So I need to get moving.”
“Did they say one day there or one day here, dear?”
I stared again. “Pardon?”
“Time, dear. It’s not the same here as it is back there. Bit of a funny story …”
“What’s the difference?” I managed to interrupt before she launched back into anecdotes.
“Hard to say,” she said, sounding a little miffed that I had not wanted to hear the story. “It just works differently here. There’s no direct correspondence, as one might expect, and it seems to vary rather a lot. Makes it all very hard to keep appointments and so forth.”
“Well, how much of a difference might be involved?”
“An hour back home could last half an hour here, or possibly as much as a year or so.”
I blinked. “A year?”
“Yes. Do try to keep up. It all depends on a variety of factors. A very clever and rather fetching scientist chap named Garson Somebody once tried to explain it to me over cocktails, and I must confess I rather felt the eyes glazing over after only a few minutes of it.”
I was staring at her now. “A year?”
“Or more, dear. It’s all quite up in the air. Who knows?”
“Good God … ” I needed to hold my head.
“Ruth?”
“Headache forming. Nothing unusual. Though I must say I had rather hoped headaches would be a thing of the mortal flesh.”
We got up and left the cafeteria and wound up outside Purvis’s on the footpath under the wide marquee. Standing there in the midst of the churning pedestrian traffic, my head felt very sore indeed. I wondered if the shops here carried Compton’s Aches and Pain Relieving Salts. Julia popped another fruit jube in her mouth and chewed thoughtfully for a few moments. “So we need to find that Father William again,” she said, studying people going by as if one might be Father William in a bad wig.
“Well, I do, at any rate.”
“What happens if you don’t find him before your time expires, dear?”
I had not considered this. Of course, I had had no notion of what to expect here in the deadworld, and no sense of what might be involved in locating someone who did not want to be found. I suppose, in my imagination, the deadworld was some sort of twee storybook sort of land in which everyone was ever so happy, don’t you know, and villains would be relatively easy to flush out of their strongholds. I had not been ready for all this. But what would happen if I failed? The most obvious answer also seemed the most likely: why would Mr Brown’s people even bother reviving me? If I failed, I might as well stay dead.
“Where,” I said to Julia, “was the last place you saw Father William?”
“He was a guest at my home for afternoon tea, of course.”
“You have a home here?”
“I do live here now, Ruth,” she said, smiling indulgently.
“And you wanted to meet him, even though his note hurt you that time? You weren’t worried about what he might …?”
“Ruth, dear. I am not without resources of my own here.”
“All right. Is it far?”
“Just outside the city. Let me hail us a cab.”
And so we went to Aunt Julia’s house in the deadworld.
36
Julia lived in one of a row of picturesque two-storey white stone terrace houses on the outskirts of this immense city. The street was broad and lined with great old fig trees with spreading canopies that met overhead. The eerie sourceless sunlight dappled through the dense leaf cover; an old man with a slight limp could be seen sweeping the wide footpath on the far side of the street. A young woman walking an odd-looking white dog was further up the street. Opposite Julia’s house a cricket pitch was
spread out, green and well manicured. A few strapping young men in creams practised their bowling and batting in the nets. It was like a scene lifted whole from the golden summers I spent at Cambridge. Julia saw me marvelling. “You could do worse than live here, Ruth.”
Julia paid the driver; we climbed out; the cab clopped off.
“Well, here we are, Number Five Stonecastle Boulevard. What do you think?”
She had planter boxes by the door and in the windows; they were all blooming with colours more vibrant than any I had seen back home. Indeed, I did not recognise these flowers at all. They looked even stranger than the plants of Australia, whose strangeness was legendary amongst British botanists. As Julia opened the door, I said to her, “How do you manage to have such a house?”
“I am not entirely certain, dear. It simply worked out that way. Come on in! You must be exhausted.”
Julia’s house was very much like the homes back in England: dark and crammed with heavy, heirloom furniture, and with expensive carpets over the floorboards. It did not smell musty, but there was a familiar sense of age and time-worn traditions that seemed etched into everything. It was difficult simply threading my way between overstuffed armchairs and side-tables and bureaux and cabinets and bookcases, which were also crammed with leather-bound volumes, locked behind ornate glass doors. There was a persistent aroma of expensive furniture polish and elbow grease. “You have staff, Julia?”
“Actually, no. It’s just me and Merlin, wherever he might be. He’s always lurking somewhere.”
“Merlin?”
“My cat. A very fat, spoiled white cat.”
“There are pet shops here?”
“None that I have seen. Merlin was simply here, along with the house. I can’t quite explain it all.”
I thought about the time. It had taken about an hour in the cab to get here, so that gave me perhaps twenty-three hours — unless the problem with time Julia had mentioned to me was indeed in effect, and I could have … days or months or more, or perhaps much less. That was a difficult thing to think about. It rather reminded me of those faery stories I read, where hapless humans got trapped in the world of faery, and time moved very differently indeed for them. For that matter, it also reminded me of the time-dilation effect predicted by relativity. Travel fast enough, close to the speed of light itself, and while one might age at the usual rate, people back home would zoom through time. Was something like that occurring here, I wondered? Or was it faeries? I suspected, on balance, that it was something stranger still.
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