A moment’s silence.
‘Well, he seemed nice,’ said Dizzy.
A longer silence after that.
15
I tried putting Vic’s words out of my head, but I just couldn’t shake them.
The seeds of doubt were sown. What was Dizzy’s deal? Was he really helping me out of the goodness of his heart? Could there even be such a thing as goodness in Hell? Or did he have some other agenda? Was he leading me down the garden path? Had he been plotting my downfall since I’d shown up here?
Having left The Beehive, Dizzy and I continued our journey to the Castle. My footfalls were reluctant now though, like a miner trudging his way to the coalface. Though the route lead straight ahead, I felt as though I’d arrived at a crossroads. A choice presented itself: would I continue to let Dizzy decide my fate, blindly following him wherever he chose to take me, or would I go it alone, ditching my guide and trusting on my compass to get me where I needed to be?
My solution to the quandary, perhaps predictably, landed somewhere in between.
Turning quickly on my companion, I grabbed him by the shoulders and pushed him roughly up against a nearby wall.
‘How about you tell me just who the fuck you are?’ I demanded, my eyes drilling into his.
‘W-what?’ Dizzy stammered, taken aback.
‘I said who are you?’
‘I’m Dizzy—’
‘Don’t give me that!’ I yelled, banging him against the brickwork again. It was an OTT display, but I had to put the willies up him. Had to know the truth.
‘I don’t know what’s gotten into you,’ Dizzy replied, ‘but I’d like you to let go of me—’
‘I bet you would,’ I said, pulling my pistol. ‘But how about first you tell me what you’re doing in Hell?’
‘What does it matter?’ he cried. ‘That’s all in the past! I’m helping you now!’
Atoning for his sins, was he? I knew something about that. Still, I was going to need details if he expected me to carry on putting my life in his hands.
‘Tell me why you’re here!’ I demanded, pressing the barrel of my gun into Dizzy’s cheek.
‘Alright,’ he said. ‘I’ll tell you,’ and after that, the light seemed to go out of his eyes. ‘It was D-Day,’ he recalled, ‘and I was in Normandy with 6th Airborne, doing my bit for the landings...’
‘Did I ask you for a war story?’ I said, I ratcheting back the hammer. ‘What’s D-Day got to do with anything?’
‘Just hear me out, okay?’
‘Alright, but this had better get pertinent pretty bloody quick.’
He nodded. ‘We’d gotten our boots on the ground and taken the beach from the Krauts. After the shooting was over, the few of them that were left came out of their foxholes waving the white flag, so we took them as PoWs. We marched them to a confine—me and a couple of other paras—and waited on our next orders. I was ranking officer that day, so I was calling the shots. As we stood by, waiting to hear back from Command, I struck up a conversation with the prisoners. It turned out one of them had spent some time on our side of the Channel as a student, before the war broke out. Lived just down the road from my mum and dad’s place. He seemed nervous—as you’d expect—so I handed him a cigarette to calm him down. Him and the rest of his men, twenty-two in total, a smoke for each of them. Gave them a light too. “Danke,” they said as they passed the Zippo around. “Danke, Danke, Danke.”’
I wrapped my finger around the trigger. ‘I am well and truly running out of patience with you…’
Dizzy went on. ‘I waited for the last of the Krauts to finish his cigarette, then I swung up my Lanchester and hosed them all. Twenty-two men, dead on the ground, shot to bits.’
‘Jesus,’ I said, and you’d better believe I meant it.
‘I had to do it,’ he explained. ‘I'd seen too many good men die at their hands. So, I killed them. I killed them all. Said to hell with the Geneva Convention and murdered them in cold blood.’ He took a breath. ‘Two days later, I joined those Krauts. Stepped on a landmine on my way back to the front and wound up here.’ He shook his head, solemnly.
‘Dizzy…’
A tear ran through his grimace. ‘You asked me what I did to earn my place in Hell, and now you know.’
I was speechless. Well, almost...
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, putting away my gun and smoothing down the lapels of Dizzy’s jacket. ‘I shouldn’t have done that. Can you forgive me?’
He nodded solemnly, and without returning to the matter, we continued on our journey.
What was I thinking?
Listening to Vic Lords?
16
Dizzy was right, there was no clear path to the Castle.
‘There,’ he said, aiming a finger into the distance.
I could make out the tips of four smoke stacks, pointing to the sky like the legs of an overturned table. ‘Battersea Power Station?’
‘In Hell it’s called the Castle.’
How about that, huh? Every day’s a school day.
Getting to the prison would be no mean feat though, cut off as it was by a giant wall of rubble standing fifty feet high.
‘How do we get through that mess?’ I asked.
‘That’s where I come in,’ Dizzy replied.
He escorted me to a barely-standing building, half-buried in the rubble embankment. Having checked the coast was clear, he then reached down and pulled aside a sheet of corrugated iron to reveal a hole in the ground. ‘After you,’ he said.
I reluctantly got to my knees and crawled into the hole with Dizzy at my rear. It lead to a tunnel that quickly opened out into a large, murky auditorium.
We were inside the ruins of an old theatre.
I took a couple of wary steps across the rotting floor boards, pacing the aisle between two rows of rotting seats. My footsteps echoed all around, bouncing from walls that had shed their paint like moulting snakeskin. Fat motes of dust hung in the air, illuminated by stripes of starlight that squeezed through the building’s sagging rafters.
I didn’t recognise the place, but then I’ve never been much of a theatre buff.
‘Used to be a hospital back in the day,’ said Dizzy. ‘Before it was turned into a playhouse.’
‘How’s this our way to the Castle?’
‘There’s a tunnel,’ he explained. ‘They stored old props down there in the theatre days, but back when the place was a hospital they’d use it to transport bodies privately to a nearby morgue. The tunnel goes right under the wall and comes out on the other side. I came through here going the other way: it’s how I got away from the Castle.’
‘Alright then, let’s do this. Show me the way.’
‘I have to open the stage trapdoor to get us into the tunnel. The lever’s up there.’ He pointed behind us to an elevated control booth. ‘Wait here a mo and I’ll take care of it.’
While Dizzy went to work, I made my way to the front of the theatre and vaulted onto the stage. As I waited for my companion to pull the lever, I trod the boards, pacing between the wings to pass the time, and performing a couple of turns and bows for my imaginary audience.
The red velvet stage curtain hung ragged and torn, clinging tenaciously to the proscenium, despite years of neglect. Eventually, curiosity got the better of me, and I decided to pull aside the curtain and take a peek backstage, curious as to what I might find. What I found came as some surprise. Instead of set dressings or stage furniture, the first thing I saw was a dead body.
The carcass of a middle-aged man with a knife buried in his chest, right up to the hilt.
The corpse was fresh, a few days old at the most.
On the wall behind it, scrawled in the body’s own blood, was a word.
LIAR.
‘What the fu—’
I was just about to call out to Dizzy when I noticed the corpse had something clutched in its fist.
I slowly reached down and pried open the fingers to find—
—a
medal.
A military medal.
The one missing from Dizzy’s uniform.
So what did that mean?
I was struggling to put the pieces together, when—
A cacophony.
A deafening operatic number blared from the theatre’s speaker system, a crescendo so loud that I was forced to clasp my hands over my ears. So loud that I couldn’t even hear the sound of my own swearing.
A racket like that was sure to draw the Eyes to us.
I rushed out onto the stage and looked up to the booth to find Dizzy stood at the sound board.
‘What are you doing?’ I screamed.
He stood there, looking down at me with maudlin eyes, then turned the volume even higher.
‘Shut it off!’ I demanded.
Instead, Dizzy simply mouthed back the words, I’m sorry.
I was about to sprint up there and shut the noise off myself, when at the back of the auditorium I saw the silhouettes of three figures.
The Eyes.
The same Eyes that had been tracking me since the moment I got here, drawn to Dizzy’s signal like Gollum to his Precious.
There were three of them left now, three Eyes, two brown, one Big Blue.
Dizzy shut the music off and slinked down from the sound booth, head hung low, face drawn.
‘What’s going on?’ I asked.
But Dizzy wouldn’t meet my accusing gaze. ‘I had to do it, Jake. It’s the only way they’d let me out of that hell hole.’
I felt like I’d been punched in the gut. Vic was right. Dizzy was a fink. A stool pigeon. A dirty fucking grass. He never escaped the Castle, he was let go on the proviso that he helped the Eyes track down loose souls. From the moment I’d met him, he’d been scattering a trail of breadcrumbs in our wake, leading death to my door.
‘I don’t get it,’ I spat. ‘Why didn’t you just stab me in my sleep?’
‘I’m not a murderer.’
‘Oh, yeah? Tell that to the carcass laying back there with this in his hand…’
I held up the war medal.
‘That was an accident,’ Dizzy insisted. ‘I was waiting on the Eyes to show up, but the bloke got wise at the last minute and came at me. I only did what I did in self-defence.’
I’d heard enough, and apparently the Eyes had too. Big Blue dismissed Dizzy with a nod of his oversized peeper.
‘I’m sorry, Jake,’ Dizzy pleaded, ‘I really am.’
Then he slipped away into the wings like the coward he was.
Stabbed in the back by my own partner. I suppose I should’ve been used to it by this point. I’d been betrayed by Father O’Meara after all, back when I was alive. By my own wife too. By my sister, my mum, and especially my dad. By everyone.
The Eyes took to the stage and surrounded me.
Stood there on my own, I felt like the star of a West End show, soaking in the spotlight, ready to bring the house down with my closing number.
Three Eyes.
One bullet in the chamber.
Should I take one of them down with me, I wondered, or should I plug my own skull and deny them the satisfaction of rubbing me out? Not a great selection of choices, I’ll grant you, but I was only working with what I had.
As I stood there, gun raised and shaking in my hand, Big Blue nodded to his underlings, who came to a halt either side of me. Don’t ask me how a guy with an eyeball for a head managed to look smug, but somehow he pulled it off.
After a short, satisfied pause, Big Blue looked back to me and drew a thumb briskly across his throat.
I saw the irises of his brown-eyed subordinates widen, ready to blast me with their death rays, but as I turned to the side, unable to face death head-on, my own eyes fell on something in the wings—
—a lever.
And that’s when I realised where I was standing.
Right on the stage trapdoor.
Using the scant moments I had left, I swung my pistol to the lever and took aim.
Was this the lever that activated the hatch leading to the theatre’s underground tunnel?
Only one way to find out.
I uttered a quick prayer and squeezed the trigger.
You probably want to hear that the bullet struck home and everything came up smelling of roses, right? I know I did.
It didn’t.
Instead, the shot fell short of the lever and rang off a metal pipe with a sharp whine.
Thankfully for me though, the bullet—escalating from a thousand-to-one shot to a million-to-one shot—ricocheted off the pipe and hit the handle of the lever.
I couldn’t have pulled that trick off again if I had all the bullets in Texas.
The trapdoor under my feet swung open and I dropped out of my executioners’ crosshairs.
I caught the briefest flash of two Eyes exploding, caught in their own lines of fire, then smashed into a pile of padding beneath the stage.
I saw it as I rolled onto my feet, the tunnel, the way through the wall. Before I took off though, I couldn’t help but cast one last look back up at the way I came.
I saw Big Blue there, peering over the edge of the trapdoor, his giant eyeball gazing down at me with unholy malice.
I ran, but not before flicking the boggle-eyed prick two fingers.
Elvis has left the building.
17
I emerged from the mouth of the tunnel and made good on my toes, barrelling through the graveyard streets, no longer needing the bearings of my compass. The Castle was in my sights. Not far now, a mile, two at most.
There was one thing I hadn’t accounted for though, and that was the Thames River, or more accurately, the lack of any way across it.
London Bridge, Westminster Bridge, Waterloo Bridge, even Tower Bridge; all of them, disintegrated, caved in, collapsed.
The other thing I hadn’t accounted for was the Thames itself, which—rather than flowing with liquid pollution as it usually did—gushed with red hot lava.
A giant, endless, red snake, slithering off into the horizon, blocking my path from east to west.
I stood there on the riverbank, hands on my hips, considering the impassable body of lava as it steamed by me, its heat evaporating the moisture from my eyeballs. I’d come all this way, trekked across the dusty wastes of Hell, just to be foiled by this? A river I could pass right over back home, only here in Hell presented the same insurmountable challenge as it did to a North London cab driver.
Fucksake.
Talk about falling at the last hurdle. I’d beaten killer maggots, deadly teddy bears, stone sphinxes, demonic cage fighters, murderous eyeball monsters, and now, inches from the finish line, I’d been defeated by a bit of lairy geology.
Prudence’s kid brother was locked up in that prison—the one I was looking right at, just a stone’s throw away—and there was no way I could get to him. It was over. All my efforts, scuttled to fuck. No choice now but to pack it in and go home.
I plucked the envelope containing my return ticket from the inside pocket of my jacket. There was a wax seal on the back of it, suggesting that opening the thing was a one-way street. I traced my thumb along the flap and tucked a nail beneath it, ready to lever it up and break the seal, when I heard a familiar, booming voice.
‘The hour has struck, Jake Fletcher! The bell tolls for thee!’
I turned to see a figure pulling up beside me, riding the red river, kept afloat on the lava by a raft of human bones. He wore a long, black robe and had a skull for a face. Great, just what I needed. The Grim bloody Reaper.
The two of us were already acquainted. Very much so, in fact. Not from the time I’d died—which you’d be forgiven for thinking—but from the time I got into a barney with him as a ghost and, well, there’s no easy way to put this… killed the bloke.
I know, I know, how does one go about killing Death?
Well, it’s a long and incredibly exciting story.
Suffice to say, I probably wasn’t number one on his friends list.
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‘Listen,’ I said, backing away, ‘I’m not in the mood for this, mate, so how about we forget we bumped into each other and you paddle off that way?’
The Reaper stared at me with his hollow eye sockets, head thrown back, finger pointed at me like his hand was made of metal and I was a great big magnet.
Then he laughed.
A great big, thigh-slapper of a laugh.
‘Chill out, dude,’ he roared, ‘it’s all good!’
That was unexpected. Bantz with the Grim Reaper? Last time we’d had words, he was all, “I am Charon! Death incarnate! The Rider of the Pale Horse!” Now he sounded like some surf bum sucking on a doobie.
‘Who put the smile on your skull?’ I asked.
‘You did!’ he cried, clapping his bony fingers together, ‘when you did me in and packed me off to this place!’
I was confused to say the least. Hell was no one’s idea of a holiday hotspot. Not even the Grim Reaper could make a beano out of this place, surely?
‘What’s your game, ferryman?’ I asked, eyes narrowed.
‘You said it yourself, bud; I ferry people! That’s my game.’
‘So… you punt souls across this river all day, do you?’
‘Too right I do, and I never would have gotten the gig if it wasn’t for you!’
How about that? There was me thinking I was trying the destroy the guy, when all along I was setting him up with a job promotion. ‘Well, I’m glad you’re happy,’ I said, actually meaning it.
‘Never been happier, dude. I’m back to my roots. Back to the way it was before everything went all modern. Now I’m old school! I’m telling you, man, me and this place are like that...’ he said, crossing the bones of his middle and index fingers.
‘I have to say, you do look the part,’ I replied, admiring his ensemble.
‘I know, right? I should never have been working for Him Upstairs in the first place. I don’t know what I was thinking there. This is much more my speed, and the new boss is a real mensch.’
‘You get a lot of work out this way then, do you?’
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