Death Most Definite (Death Works #1)

by Trent Jamieson

  “You really need to be more sociable, Steve. Maybe it’s guilt or something, but we Black Sheep stick together.”

  “That’s a bit ironic.”

  Tim ignores me. “I’ve talked to Alex, and he’s got a car for you. You take that, and you get the hell out of here until it all cools down, or whatever it needs to do.”

  I don’t think it will cool down. Not in the way Tim means or hopes. “What about you?”

  “Some of us have to work for a living,” Tim says, and now he’s the one trying to sound all casual. He snorts. “Look, don’t you worry about me. I can take care of myself. It’s what I do for a living. Anyway, you think my minister could take a crap without me?”

  That’s policy advisors for you. “Maybe I will have a cigarette.” But it’s a mistake, I’m coughing after the first puff.

  “Smoking never took with you,” Tim says wryly, picking out his fourth cigarette in half an hour. “Lucky bastard.”

  Alex pulls into the park flashing his headlights. Lissa shakes her head. “You call that a car?”

  “Hey, don’t diss my wheels.” I’m not sounding that convincing.

  Even Tim laughs. “I can’t remember the last time I saw one of that… um… vintage on the road.”

  Alex opens the door and gets out of the multi-coloured, mid-seventies Corolla sedan. It’s a patchwork of orange, black and electric green. He looks from me to Tim, who is actually laughing so hard he can’t breathe. I’m not far behind my cousin. It’s the first time I’ve laughed like that in—well, in a long time.

  “What’s so funny?” Alex demands.

  21

  There’s a full tank of petrol. That’ll get you on your way. Wherever that is.” Alex chucks me a phone, and a handful of sim cards. “You’ll get one call with each of those, I reckon. Probably more, but better safe than sorry. They’ve probably got the network tapped. Morrigan doesn’t do anything by halves. Chuck them away when you’re done.”

  “I will. I’m sorry about your father.”

  Alex stops me with a look. “I know you are. Let’s just keep you alive, eh.”

  He tosses me the keys. I unlock the front passenger door and put the phone on the seat.

  God knows where Alex got the car from, probably the same place as the various other bits of contraband sitting under the blanket behind the front seat. I’ve got a feeling that if I open the glove box I’ll find half a kilo of something or other. I open it. There’s a yellowing service manual, which looks like it should be in a museum, a wad of cash that must come into thousands of dollars, a charger for my mp3 player, and a pair of aviator sunglasses. What the hell, I slip the sunnies on.

  “Well, I’ll be your wing girl, Maverick,” Lissa says, flicking me a salute.

  “Shut up, you.”

  I look at all that money. With that and the money I took from my place I have an alarming amount of cash. “If any cop stops me, I reckon I’m in trouble.”

  Alex shakes his head. “If any officer of the law stops you, you get them to call this number.” He hands me something he’s written on a Post-it note.

  “They call this number, and I’ll be fine?”

  Alex grimaces. “It’s by no means a Get Out of Jail Free card. If you drive carefully no one’s going to stop you.”

  “Don’t worry, Officer, I don’t intend to get any traffic infringements.”

  Tim chuckles, but Alex doesn’t. He looks at his watch. “I’d wait an hour or so before heading out of the city. Go with the traffic. You’ll be harder to follow.”

  “Harder to tell if I’m being followed, too.”

  Alex shakes his head. “Nah, these guys are pretty obvious. You’ll know if someone’s following you.”

  “And what do I do if they are?”

  “You drive, as fast as you can.”

  Lissa snorts. “Which won’t be very fast in that car.”

  I thank Alex for everything including the number, which I slip into my wallet. Alex’s eyes follow the movement.

  “I just hope you don’t have to use it,” he says.

  My face is raw. The only razor I could get my hands on was as blunt as a toy pocketknife, but I need to look clean-shaven. My stubble marks me more obviously than anything else, though I can’t say I like the bare face beneath. At least the hair’s looking good. I’m wired on adrenaline and cups of strong black coffee, and driving an old bomb out of Brisbane, following the Western Freeway. It’s the fastest route out of the city if you want to head toward the low mountains that make up the granite belt. Up in the mountains, as low as they are, the air will be cool, even this late in spring—and the mobile reception should be terrible.

  The car is older than I am, though Alex assured me it would run like a dream… Yeah, a patchwork dream. Lissa’s already calling it Steven’s Amazing Technicolor Dream Car. And I must admit that the car is running smoothly. Corollas from this era are about as unstoppable as the Terminator, and every bit as ugly.

  “Any tunes?” Lissa asks.

  I try the radio. Only AM. We get a couple of stations playing classical, and a talkback radio show, all leavened with a fair bit of static. Lissa sticks her head through the front windscreen, which is quite disconcerting.

  “That explains it,” she says. “The aerial’s been broken off.”

  The stereo itself is fairly new. I link up my mp3 and we have music. Radiohead, intercut with Midlake, is a perfect soundtrack for my mood.

  The sun’s setting. Brilliant in its suspension of red dust, it’s the starkest, most beautiful sunset I’ve ever seen, and I’m driving into it like some character out of a movie, crashing into the apocalypse. Number Four and the Hill are sliding away from me. And while that should be some sort of relief, all it does is leave a bad taste in my mouth. I’m deserting my city, and this is no movie.

  • • •

  We stop at Stanthorpe, about 200 kilometers southwest of Brisbane. I get a single room on the ground floor of a boxy old hotel, best for a quick exit. The carpet is about the same era as my car, a combination of curlicues and some sort of vomit-colored flowers—why were the seventies all about vomit colors? It’s the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen, almost hypnotically ugly. But it’s a survivor; you can barely make out the cigarette burns, which is something you can’t say for the bedside table or the tablecloth which, while perfectly clean, is dotted with melty holes. There’s a no smoking sign on the wall by the door.

  The first thing I do is mark the doors and windows with a brace symbol.

  The second thing is open a beer from the fridge.

  I’m sitting there, in my underpants and a T-shirt, counting the cigarette burns on the tablecloth when I look up and into Lissa’s eyes. “What do you do when I’m sleeping?” I ask her.

  “Look at you,” she says, and I laugh.

  “Seriously?”

  “Seriously. I look at you and I think. You’d be surprised how patient you can be when all you are is thought.”

  Thought is so fragile. A strong wind could blow it away like a dandelion. That fills me with a dreadful sorrow.

  “How long’s this binding going to hold?”

  “I don’t know. Do you want to break it?”

  “No!”

  “Are you sure about that? You’ve only had grief since I came along.”

  “Less than some of my girlfriends,” I say.

  “Girlfriend, eh?”

  “It’s more of a marriage. After all, we’re bound together.”

  “Well, at least you haven’t started nagging me yet,” Lissa says, giving me a dirty look. “And the only sex we’ve had resulted in your orgasm. You didn’t even expect me to fake one. So I suppose it’s a marriage all right.”

  “Ha! I’ll have you know we de Selbys are extremely generous lovers. Besides, you’re a ghost.”

  “I still have my urges,” Lissa says, a little defensively.

  “Well, I wish you had more corporeality,” I say.

  “So do I.”

 
; We stop ourselves there. Our eyes meet, and we both turn sharply away.

  I finish my beer, then walk to the bathroom and clean my teeth with a finger and some salt. I wonder if I’m being a dickhead. Probably. More than probably. I know it with deep certainty, and I’m suddenly ashamed. This girl brings out the best and the worst in me.

  I’ve experienced more with Lissa, and with more intensity than with anyone else I’ve known, including Robyn—then I catch myself. It’s the first time I’ve thought of her in what feels like days. Well, that’s something at least. And here we are in this old hotel room which smells of smoke and cheap instant coffee, the traffic rumbling outside, the road’s endless breath. It’s the lovers’ cliché, this.

  I step out of the bathroom and look at Lissa. Those amazing green eyes hold me again. This time she doesn’t turn away.

  “You can have a quick wank if you want,” Lissa says, and smirks.

  I grimace. “I’m going to sleep.”

  After switching off the light there’s half an hour of restless tossing and turning on a mattress that’s firm and soft in all the wrong places.

  Lissa chuckles. “Go on. You’ll feel better for it,” she whispers in my ear.

  “Shut up.”

  22

  I never sleep well in strange places, and that’s all I’ve had these past few nights. At least the hotel is better than a highway underpass or a stormwater drain. My sleep is light and dream-fractured. There’s a lot of running. I keep seeing the faces of my family and they’re yelling at me, but I can’t hear what they’re saying. All I get is the urgency. And then there are a couple of nightmares on high rotation. I’m dreaming of:

  Bicycles. They’re tumbling from the sky.

  Wheels spinning, gears shifting, and when they strike the ground they make skullish craters, the orbits of which cage vivid green eyes. Every death’s head skull stares at me with Lissa’s eyes.

  It’s not that far away, a voice whispers.

  A bicycle strikes me hard. Gears grind down my arm. I drop to a crouch, cover my head with my hands. Warm blood trails from my wrist.

  Duck and cover doesn’t work anymore. It never really did.

  I recognize the voice, it’s—

  I remember the first time I saw Mr. D. I was about ten and Dad had taken me to work. Even then I had a clear idea of what my parents did. Death was never such a big deal in my family. Cruelty, unfairness, rugby league—these were often spoken of—but not death, other than in the same way one spoke about the weather.

  So I guess I was in something of a privileged position. Most kids my age were just starting to realize that such a thing as their own demise was possible, where I already considered it a natural part of existence.

  Dad had told me it was time, but I hadn’t really understood until he took me into Number Four. There was Morrigan, who scruffed up my hair. Number Four tingled around me with all the odd pressures of multiple worlds pulling and pushing at my skin like ghostly fingers. It was a peculiar sensation, and unsettling.

  Then I saw Mr. D and he terrified me.

  “Is this your boy, Michael?”

  Dad nodded. “This is Steven.”

  “My, he’s grown.”

  I realized that he must have seen me before. Well, I knew that I hadn’t seen him—how could I forget? His face, it shifted, a hundred different expressions in a second, and yet it was the same face. He crouched down to my height, and smiled warmly.

  “You were just a baby when I saw you last. Have you had a good life so far? Do you want to be a Pomp like your father?”

  I nodded my head, confused. “Yes, sir,” I said.

  “Oh, none of that. Mr. D will do fine. The age of formalities is deader than I am.” He looked up at Dad. “He’s certainly your boy,” he said. “Very brave.”

  I didn’t feel brave at all.

  He looked back at me, and I saw something in his eyes, and it horrified me. There, reflected back at me, was a man on his haunches, face covered in blood, howling. And a knife: a stone knife.

  I let out a gasp.

  Death held my hand, his fingers as cold and hard as porcelain in the middle of winter, and he squeezed. “What’s wrong?”

  “N-nothing.”

  “Not yet, anyway,” Mr. D said, and he smiled such a dreadful and terrible smile that I have never forgotten it.

  And I dream of it still, even when I don’t realize that’s what I’m dreaming of. Shit, that grin creeps up on me when I’m least expecting it. There was a bit of the madness of Brueghel’s “Triumph of Death” in it, though I didn’t know that at the time, and something else. Something cruel and mocking and unlike anything I’d ever seen.

  I have spoken to Mr. D since, and nothing like that has happened again. Of course, it doesn’t matter anymore, but it did then, and it haunted me for over a decade. It’s true, isn’t it? You drag your childhood with you wherever you go. You drag it, and it sometimes chases you.

  I wake, and then realize that I’m not awake. The sheets cover me, and then they don’t. I’m naked, standing in the doorway, and they’re out there, a shuffling presence, a crowd of wrongness rapidly extending through the country.

  You need to hurry, Steven. I can feel every single one of them. They shouldn’t be here. But of course they are, there’s no one to stop them.

  You wait out here, and it will be too late.

  You have to call me.

  I turn to see who is talking, and I know, and am not surprised.

  Mr. D is a broken doll on the floor. He’s a drip in the ceiling. A patch on the floor. He’s smiling.

  And then Lissa’s there and she’s gripping an axe. The smile on her face is no less threatening than Mr. D’s, and it’s saying the same thing. Death. Death. Death. In one neat movement the axe is swinging toward my head. I hear it crunch into my face and—

  I wake to dawn, feeling less than rested. My face aches and I know I’ve come from some place terrible.

  “Not a good sleep?” Lissa’s looking down at me.

  The image of an axe flashes in my mind. It takes a lot not to flinch.

  “What do you think?” I rub my eyes and yawn one of those endless yawns that threatens to drag you back into sleep. It’s early, no later than 5:30, but I don’t want to return to my sleeping. I don’t want to slip back into those dreams.

  “You talk a lot in your sleep, you know,” Lissa says.

  “I have a lot on my mind.”

  “And you drool all over your pillow.”

  I wave feebly in her direction, then drag myself out of bed and stumble to the bathroom. There’s a hell of a lot of blood in there, more blood than any portent has given me before.

  I don’t know where the blood comes from, even now. I’ve never found a satisfactory answer, which is fine, when most of the time it’s only a splatter here or there. But this bathroom has more in common with an abattoir. I almost throw up.

  “Come and have a look at this,” I say.

  She’s by my side in an instant. “Oh, that’s not good.”

  “What the hell is going on?”

  “I don’t think Morrigan has everything under as much control as he would like.”

  That’s an understatement. I grab the showerhead and start hosing the blood away. I feel like some mafia hitman cleaning up after a brutal kill, only there’s no body, thank Christ. It’s gone fairly quickly but the stench remains and, with it, the feeling of things coming. A dark wave on the verge of breaking.

  I shower, soap myself down, rinse and do it all again. Maybe fleeing the city wasn’t such a good idea after all. But if that portent is correct there is a stir happening somewhere near, a big one.

  “I have to do something about it,” I say.

  “He may be able to track you, if you do.”

  “My job is to facilitate death,” my voice sounds high and unfamiliar in my ears, “not to allow murder, and if I don’t stop this stir, I’m a party to it.”

  “How many stirs do you th
ink are happening now, right around the country?”

  I glare at her. “I know, but I’m near this one.”

  23

  I get dressed and take a drive.

  It’s easy to sense, more than ever. The Stirrer’s presence is a magnet, and I follow the line of least resistance toward it. It’s as though the car has a mind of its own. I barely have to turn the wheel.

  Lissa’s silent the whole way, and I don’t know if she’s angry with me or worried, maybe a bit of both.

  We end up at the local hospital, almost in the center of Stanthorpe.

  The staff there let me through when I raise one hand to reveal the scars criss-crossing it. They look harried and frightened. I guess that there have been a lot of things going bump, and then murderous, in the night lately.

  One of the senior doctors meets me near the reception desk.

  “I’m here to deal with your problem,” I say.

  “Thank Christ. We’ve never had to wait this long.”

  I can tell. Everyone here is strung out and weak. The Stirrer is drawing their essence away. There’s a vase of dead flowers by the reception desk. The doctor looks at that.

  “Not again,” he says, tipping the dead things into a bin. “Keeps happening.”

  And there’s no stopping this, until I do something about it. Soon, the sicker, older patients will pass on, and more Stirrers will appear, and more life will be drawn out of the world. It’s reaching tipping point and I’m gripped with a sudden urgency to get this thing done.

  “Where is it?” I ask. I hardly need to, I can feel it.

  “The Safe Room,” he says.

  Out here in the regional areas it can take a day or so before someone is available to pomp a Stirrer. They don’t make a big fuss about it, but most regional hospitals have ways of dealing with their Stirrers.

  We walk through the hospital, descending a level by way of a narrow stairwell. With every step, the sense of wrongness increases. The air closes in, grows heavy with foulness.

  Another senior doctor’s waiting by a door. He mops at his sweaty brow with a handkerchief.