Lucian’s hand stopped shaking. His knuckles became bone-white, and the face of the Reaper overtook his features. His index finger squeezed the trigger. “Goodbye,” he said.
Norman rushed forwards, pain exploding in his chest as Charlie leapt to his feet, screaming for his life.
For the briefest of moments, time itself appeared to undulate, to flow and whorl like churning floodwaters. Norman felt his voice build deep in his throat over what felt like years, but must have only been microseconds. He had time to watch Charlie launch into the air with his mouth open in a piercing yell, time to watch the revolver’s trigger slam against the cartridge.
Then, in a blurred flurry of motion, time snapped back into place:
“NO!” Charlie howled.
“Lucian, don’t!”
Click.
…
Norman blinked.
His mind was blank. His eyes surely fooled him, for Charlie’s head remained intact.
Lucian lowered the revolver to his side, his eyes calm and dim. The revolver’s barrel was free of smoke.
Charlie was absolutely still. He remained so for several moments before lowering his arms. However, he didn’t dare turn around. “What…?” he managed.
Lucian took a step forwards and leaned close. “Close your eyes and walk a thousand steps, and then you can open them again. I’ll be watching.”
“What?”
“Go. Get out of here. Never come back.”
Charlie remained frozen, his mouth working. “But…you…,” he gasped. “You’re not going to kill me?”
Lucian stepped away. “Go.”
Charlie remained for a moment more before turning his head. His eyes softened as he finally met Norman’s gaze. He looked from his face to his wobbling cane, and his mouth formed a thin white line.
He nodded, and then closed his eyes.
Norman ambled towards Lucian as the young man began his solitary journey down the street, towards the horizon. Together, they stood for a long time, watching as Charlie hobbled away in silence, until his body was no more than a distant speck.
“The gun wasn’t loaded, was it?” Norman said after a while, not looking away.
Lucian glanced at the revolver in his hand. “I couldn’t. I just wanted him gone.”
“Then why the theatrics?”
Lucian glanced at him. His eyes were bloodshot. “In the end, we all have to pay for our mistakes. All of us.” He lowered his head and muttered, almost to himself, “In the end…”
Norman nodded slowly.
Would he ever know what that meant?
Maybe. But something told him that this was only the first thread of a vast web of secrets, one so tangled that he might never reach its end.
They watched until Charlie was gone from sight. “You know that he’s probably going to be picked up again?” Norman said.
Lucian nodded. “I know.”
XIII
Charlie crawled. His leg dragged behind him as he scaled the hill on his stomach, tearing at the soil. The wind ripped at his clothes, drying the tears on his cheek as he inched closer to the tree line.
The streets of that cursed city were behind him, but he still felt eyes upon him, watching.
He’d counted each of those thousand steps he’d taken away from the barrel of that revolver, expecting a bullet to find its way into his back at any moment. But no shot had come.
Instead, he’d been left to the elements. No quick death, no mercy. Instead, condemnation to a long, savage decline. A boiling hatred rose in his gut at the thought of the grey-haired monster. His fingers curled into the mud, and a gurgling snarl rose in his throat as he hauled his broken body skyward.
By the time he reached the shadows of the forest canopy, the wind had kicked up, icy and vicious. Shivering, he pushed on into the cool, wet mud beyond the tree line, whimpering, ashamed, lost.
There was nowhere to go. Nobody would find him, nor help him. There was no food, no water, and no shelter—nothing.
There was nothing for him out here but death.
He stopped, propped himself against a tree, and wept.
When he finally stopped, the wind was alive with the sound of footsteps. Charlie opened his eyes and tried to stifle his sniffling, turning this way and that, searching for the source of the noise. With a grunt of fright he fixated on a shadow as it emerged from the depths of the forest.
The figure drew closer and resolved into focus. Charlie had time to take in the sight of long, tattered clothes, eyes of searing intent, and a face obscured by a dark balaclava.
“What do you want?” Charlie breathed.
The figure grew closer still. Emerald eyes stared down at him, piercing, hypnotising. Charlie pressed himself against the trunk at his back as the figure crouched down beside him and reached out a hand invitingly.
SECOND INTERLUDE
James looked out over the London skyline in awe. In the midday sun the city was ablaze with light, glass glittering and steel shining.
The waters of the Thames had risen since the End. The city’s great Barrier, broken and useless, sat unused and drowned downriver, helpless to impede the progress of the floodwaters. The banks had long since burst, and so now waves lapped against the edges of street curbs, traffic lights, and skyscrapers.
These new shores rendered the great bridges useless, having flooded the low-lying roads that fed them. They were now only so many vast and ungainly islands, jutting from green tidal waters, stretching for land that could never be reached.
“I don’t see it,” James said, squinting.
They were high up upon the rooftop of a crumbling block of flats—so high that buildings he knew to be enormous appeared tiny.
Alex pointed into the sea of concrete and steel, drawing out an area far away, low and antiquated. James followed his finger, past the wreckage of the Great Wheel, and laid eyes on a series of oblongs, pillars and a grand central dome, centred in a swathe of glass.
“I see it!” James said. “It looks big.”
“It is.”
“There must be a lot inside.”
“There is.”
James frowned. “How do we save it all?”
Alex laughed. “We can’t. Even if we could, there would be nowhere to put it. It’s safest to just leave it all there for the time being.”
“Won’t it all rot?”
“It’s been stored better than we could manage.”
James nodded. His legs began to quiver with excitement as he drank in the enormity, and grandiosity, of the great city. He thought of all of the pictures he’d seen of the treasures that lay waiting in that distant dome, of all the things that waited to be seen, the wonders that waited to be rediscovered.
“Can we go inside?” he said.
Alex smiled. “That’s why we’re here.”
They descended to the streets and walked in silence, too sensitive to the echo of their own voices to strike up conversation. The capital’s streets had a habit of amplifying even idle chitchat to a ghoulish, disembodied rumble.
Instead, they were content to merely let the scenery pass by, fascinated by the monstrous scale of it all and the desolate stillness.
To most, it was disturbing. For all the land’s emptiness, the countryside at least carried on unhindered; grass and branches danced in the wind, birds flocked in the sky, and great herds of sheep trampled the land. In the country, there was life.
London, however, had been stone dead since the End. It almost appeared vacuum-sealed, wrapped in protective sheeting and stored away for a distant future. All debris had been swept away by the wind and waves, and the food waste had been consumed by giant bird flocks and swarms of vermin in the Early Years. Perfectly sanitised and lifeless, the streets sat dormant, waiting to be traversed by bustling crowds that would never come.
Underfoot, clothing still smothered the pavement. James weaved around blouses, work shirts, square-shouldered black jackets and denim jeans, stepped over necklaces, r
ucksacks, and briefcases emblazoned with strange words: ‘Prada’, ‘Levi’s’, ‘Armani’ and ‘Louis Vuitton’. He wondered for the millionth time whether the stories the others told were really true: that these things had once belonged to people—real, breathing people. Millions of them.
It was almost too absurd. It boggled his mind.
Though the great city had to have come from somewhere, James was sure that it could only have been crafted by departed gods. The perfect geometric shapes and gargantuan heights could only have been forged by creatures of unimaginable power.
The people he knew, as great and kind as they had been to him, were not omnipotent, and they were certainly not gods. And yet, supposedly, they were descended from those who had built every crevice that he saw before him.
He looked to Alex, frowning. “Did people really build all this?” His voice boomed back at him a hundred times in echo, filling every alley and room for hundreds of metres. But he ignored the racket. His eyes were fixed on Alex.
He needed to know.
A strange expression crossed Alex’s face as he met James’s gaze. “What?”
“People?”
“Yes.”
“And there was nothing here before them?”
“Just the land, like where we live.”
“And they built it all from nothing?”
“Of course they did. Who else could have built it all?”
“Others.”
Alex’s face contorted into a confused smile. They walked for a while as he mused, tilting his head. “You don’t think that people can build these things?”
“How could they?”
“Builders built, architects designed, electricians wired. People spent their entire lives mastering a single thing.”
“And where are they all now?”
“Gone.”
“I don’t think that’s it,” James said. “I don't think that people can do those things anymore.”
“Books can teach you anything.”
James shook his head. “A book can’t teach you how to ride a bike,” he said.
Alex stopped and looked down at James. His frown had grown deep and his eyes forlorn, troubled.
“I read that in a book,” James said. He felt that he might have said the wrong thing, but wasn’t about to apologise. In their classes, Alex had always said it was more important than anything to speak his own mind.
Alex started walking again, but this time he looked away, across the river, and didn’t speak for some time. James trudged alongside, staring at the floor, waiting for his reticence to wane.
They passed a set of black gates and arrived at the steps of the great building they had seen from the rooftop. James took in the sight of its marble pillars and the entrance beyond, and any thoughts of his indiscretion were forgotten in an instant. The two of them exchanged a glance. Alexander’s eyes were alight, and reflected in them James could see his own giddy smile.
They hurried up past the pillars and took their first hesitant steps inside. Within, it was cool, dusty, and dark. They walked past the unattended reception and stepped into a cavernous space. There, they both stopped, agape.
The court of the British Museum lay before them, bathed in amber light that struck down through a roof of tessellated glass panels. Portland Stone surfaces sat gleaming, untouched by time’s hand. To James’s eyes, Olympus itself would have paled in comparison.
“You were right,” Alex said. In the vast space his voice was rendered an endless echo, louder than cannon fire. “We can’t do this anymore.”
James saw something grow hollow in his gaze.
But the sadness was brief. Within moments it had passed, and an infectious smile played upon his lips. The two of them dashed into the building’s depths, feverish with excitement, marvelling at passing wonders, unwilling to leave any individual piece for fear of neglecting it, making countless oaths to return to ornate ancient statues, tablets, tombs and sarcophagi. Dashing from exhibit to exhibit, and from room to room, they spent the rest of the day hopelessly wrapped up in their own thoughts, often on opposite sides of the museum. On several occasions they lost each other completely and were forced to make their way back to the entrance to rendezvous.
James’s mind had all but ground to a halt at the sight of such richness. He did his best to absorb all he could, but knew that he could only take in a thimble’s worth—at least on this visit—and hoped to high heaven that the day would never end.
Eventually, they made their way into a large room close to the great court. They looked at the unusual objects in the same manner as they had looked at everything over the past hours: with a burning desire to allocate a week to each exhibit.
Their fascination, however, was nothing compared to what they felt when they laid eyes on the isolated glass capsule and the broken tablet that sat within.
They approached slowly, unspeaking, unflinching, lured inexorably forwards. In the glass’s reflection their eyes were round as saucers, bulging from their heads. Side by side, they spent the longest time looking at the stone, and the three passages of mysterious, unintelligible writings inscribed upon it.
The top was smeared with the most striking of the three, the letters in fact tiny drawings of birds, eyes, staffs and ankhs; the middle scrawled in strange, complicated glyphs; and the bottom a more geometric, aesthetic script.
James had seen all three passages before in his reading, just as he had seen the stone. He and Alex had studied it for many weeks. “Is this it?” he said.
“This is it.”
James grinned, wide enough to make his cheeks ache. “It’s beautiful.”
Alex smiled along with him. “It is.”
“We’re going to save this?”
“One day.”
Alex gestured towards it with a grand sweep of his arm. His eyes were alive, his body in constant motion. “This is the key,” he said, hushed. “All of these things are. These are the things we have to rescue, the things that are going to teach us the future.”
James leaned forward, instinctively reaching out to balance himself by pressing against the glass. Before he could complete his ascent onto tiptoes, Alex had caught his wrist in an iron grip and squeezed hard.
“Don’t touch it!” he hissed.
James gasped and collapsed back, catching a fleeting and sudden fury in Alex’s eyes. He backed away, seeing for the first time a monster, born of obsession, lurking under his brother’s skin.
The look was gone before James could blink. Now Alex’s eyes were wide, and his mouth was ajar. “I’m sorry,” he said, blinking.
James cradled his crushed wrist, taking a step back.
“Did I hurt you?”
James swallowed and stopped. The pain in his arm dulled at the sight of such sincere shock. “I’m fine,” he said.
Alex rushed forwards and took him into a crushing embrace. James stood uncomfortably between his arms. Alex was shaking his head. “I shouldn’t have done that,” he said. “I shouldn’t have.” He pulled James to arm’s length and sighed. “You know I’d never hurt you.”
James nodded. “I know.”
“It was instinct. These things are just too old and delicate for us to be putting our fingers all over them. They’re too important.” Alex’s face took on that odd glaze yet again. His voice grew hazy, distant. “They’re too important, even more important than you or me.”
XIV
Norman sat with a sigh, back in Alexander’s study. A strange medley of sensations was at war within him: exhaustion, burgeoning guilt, and a distant throbbing emanating from his extremities.
The fire still roared in the grate. Warmth permeated the darkened room, and a gentle wind whispered at the windows.
He looked down at the faded green book that Alex had laid in his hands, taking note of the title’s delicate golden lettering. “Alice in Wonderland?” he said.
Alex smiled, thin-lipped. He looked more drawn than Norman had ever seen him. Speaking at the
funeral must have taken its toll. “Give it a try,” he said. “You might like it.”
“Why are you giving me this?”
Alex looked still more distant. “Tradition.”
Norman frowned, but let it pass, resting the book in his lap.
“The boy is gone, then?” Alexander’s slouched position made his figure hard to distinguish in the flickering light, his face hard to read.
“Yes. He just let him leave.”
A light smile wandered over Alexander’s features. “Where’s Lucian now?”
“Guard duty, with Robert.”
Alex nodded, and said no more for some time. When he finally spoke, he sounded no more present. “How’s your chest?”
“It hurts.”
“Heather told me to watch you for any strange behaviour. I thought I’d just come right out and ask.”
“Ask if I’m seeing pink elephants?”
Alex glanced at him. “Are you?”
Norman smiled, but felt it grow tight on his face as the memory of his dream flashed before his eyes yet again—
The storm. The city. The yelling faces. The leering stranger.
Each time he remembered it, the details seemed that much clearer, that much more forceful.
And yet, it had been just a dream. Hadn’t it?
It was probably nothing. Yet, despite himself, he cleared his throat and caught Alexander’s gaze. For a moment he merely sat and listened to the crackling in the grate, and then he spoke. “When I was out, I had a dream…only I don’t think it was a dream. I think that I was remembering something. From before you took me in.”
Alex’s silhouette was deathly still amidst the shadows. He said nothing, just waited for Norman to continue.
“I remembered a storm. It was raining hard. Everything was flooded. It was a city—I think London. I was lying on the ground. You and Lucian were leaning over me, yelling… I’d hurt my head. I’d hurt my head badly.” He paused and shivered as the image in his mind’s eye sharpened once more, so much so that he could almost taste something awful, something stagnant. He thought of mentioning the marble-faced, leering figure—
Ruin (The Ruin Saga Book 1) Page 28