A Whisper of Southern Lights

by Tim Lebbon

  “Oh, you mean this?” Temple flickered, and his face became that of the Japanese officer, just for a second. Then he was back to the tall blond man. He had changed his clothes somewhere, and now he looked like a thousand other captured soldiers. All except the eyes. None of them could have those eyes.

  “I have something else on my side,” Gabriel said.

  “You always have someone or something else on your side. You usually lose.”

  “Usually.”

  Temple walked from the shadow of a tree and through the new bamboo growth. As he stepped on the dead man’s chest, a rattle sounded in the corpse’s throat. “See? Even the dead think you’re a joke.”

  Gabriel glanced sideways at Sykes. “Don’t look at his hand,” he whispered.

  “This?” Temple called.

  “Close your eyes if you have to.”

  “Surely he wants to see? What scares you, Sykes?”

  “Don’t look,” Gabriel said. “And when the time comes, go for the grave. I’ll meet you there.”

  “And if you don’t?” I asked.

  “One look, that’s all!” the demon called, almost cheery.

  “Then he’ll meet you there. And if he does, you can’t let him see whatever you find. You can’t!”

  There was so much in Gabriel’s eyes, so many things unsaid, frightening things that I think he’d been holding back. I did not know who to believe—the man who could change his face, or this man who told me he was centuries old. Both were unbelievable.

  “I won’t,” I said.

  “One glance, soldier boy, and all this death will seem like child’s play.” I looked, only for a second, and somehow I kept my eyes away from his hand. It was shimmering there—something was moving—but I tore my gaze away, turned and ran into the jungle.

  I looked back just once, in time to see Gabriel kneel, swing his arm around and throw his knife in one fluid movement. It struck Temple in the face, and I heard the crunch of breaking bone. He fell to his knees. I slowed, then stopped.

  Gabriel turned and glared at me, blood pouring from his eye. “Run!” he shouted.

  Behind him, Temple stood.

  I ran.

  Twelve

  I HEARD THE FIGHT BEGINNING. I did not hear it end. As I ran, I heard the screams, the battle cries, the snap of breaking bones and the animal grunts of unarmed combat. It faded the further I ran, and when I came across the small river where we had been ambushed, the sound of running water carried the fight away.

  I made my way through the water, pausing for a quick drink. My heart was hammering. This was unreal, yet it felt so immediate. My skin tingled, my hair stood on end, and I ignored my tiredness and forged ahead.

  I found the place where I had hunkered down as Meloy lobbed grenades toward the Japanese. The jungle echoed with the ghost sounds of gunfire and screams, and skeins of smoke seemed to drift between leaves, touching branches and blooms with their rank fingers. I moved a few steps, and the scene moved into the past once more; just one small shift of perspective changed everything. I listened for the sounds of Gabriel and Temple fighting, but there was nothing. Perhaps I had gone too far.

  Trying to remember where Davey had emerged from the jungle after the battle, I climbed a small hill. Where bushes grew high I crawled beneath them, and where they hugged the ground I shoved ferns and branches aside, looking around for the marker I knew Davey would have left on Mad Meloy’s grave. He’d been a religious man, and he would not have buried his friend and left no sign.

  I was terrified, and excited, and thrilled to be away from the Japanese. Even the war felt more distant than it had for the last three years. I’d been in France, plucked from the beach at Dunkirk, trained in Southern England and then shipped out here, and in all that time, I had never felt so remote from the world as I did right then. It was as if I was on another path, a road travelled by Gabriel and his demon, parallel to our own and yet barely troubled by reality.

  “Being used,” I whispered. “That’s me. Just being used.”

  Something moved behind me. I dropped to the ground and twisted around, watching a fern wave to a standstill. There was no breeze, no movement. Insects buzzed and a bird cawed somewhere above me, unconcerned at whatever might be hiding out there.

  I hurried on, still climbing the shallow hill. I came across a couple of dead Japanese and walked between them, pausing to pluck a bayonet from one of their belts. I discarded the small kitchen knives I’d brought along with me, amazed that I’d thought they could help. It felt good to be carrying a proper weapon again.

  In the distance, a scream.

  I paused, ducked down, and through a tangle of roots and stems I saw a rough marker stuck in the ground a dozen steps away. It was the shovel that had been used to dig the grave, stuck in the ground, handle broken. “There,” I said. I crawled, twisting my way through the undergrowth.

  It was a shallow grave dug in the frenzy of post-battle confusion. I reached across, clawed my hand and pulled back a tangle of dried roots and mud, exposing the tip of an army boot.

  “Hi, Meloy,” I said. “So, what are you hiding in there?”

  “Sykes!”

  I screamed. I couldn’t help it. I must have been so tightly wound that hearing my name hissed from the undergrowth caused me to vent my tension. The scream was short and abrupt, accompanied by the tripling of my heart rate. I rolled onto my back and scurried backward, trying to hide the grave with my body while brandishing the bayonet.

  Gabriel stumbled his way through the bushes. He was bleeding and battered, rips in his clothing matching the rents in his flesh beneath. But there was something in his expression that set my skin afire. Something like victory.

  Thirteen

  “IT CAN’T END LIKE THIS,” Gabriel said. He lay staring at the sky, the piercing blue framed by the tops of trees. Birds spotted the sky, their shadows distorted by heat. “It can’t end like this.”

  This journey had a reason. Its culmination had meaning. It was not simply another chase to reach some unfortunate assassination victim before Temple. Gabriel had been on countless quests like that, and many of them had ended badly for him. But this had been different. Amidst so much chaos and pain and death, he had allowed himself to hope. Something had muttered to him in that garden back in Italy—the land, the voice of history, or maybe God—and he had foolishly assumed that this would finally give him an advantage over the demon.

  But there was no advantage over Temple. He was a monster. As he held Gabriel down and drove the bamboo point into his stomach, he had whispered in his ear, telling Gabriel about the noises his family had made as they died, the pleas, the tears they had shed.

  Gabriel’s thrashing simply made the pain worse.

  He raised his head and looked down at the bamboo protruding from him. Two in his stomach, one through the meat of each thigh, all of them driven into the damp ground to pin him there like an exhibit. Temple had fooled him into dropping his defences. Flashed him his hand, asked Gabriel what scared him, while all the time they both knew what would appear there.

  “Bastard!” Gabriel shouted.

  He would not die. He had taken a lot more than this and survived, and something had happened to him all those centuries before to ensure that he would always be there to pursue Temple. But though he would not die, neither would he live again in peace.

  Peace. A strange idea. Gabriel guessed that if he did ever defeat the demon, he might have a day of peace before time finally caught up with him. It was a day he craved more than any in existence.

  He reached down and grabbed one of the sticks piercing his stomach. It was slick with his sprayed blood. He tried to pull, but the pain was too much, and he knew that he would be far too late.

  As Temple had entered the jungle in pursuit of Jack Sykes, Gabriel had asked him the question that had been vexing him for days: “Why did you come here?”

  “Same reason as you,” Temple had replied. “I was sent.”

  Gabriel
had never seen a ghost.

  He heard nothing, but he sensed the movement from the corner of his eye. He turned and looked across the surface of the ground. There was a body obscuring his view, the eyes long since taken away by rats or lizards. Beyond that, the air at the edge of the clearing shimmered as a tall shape appeared.

  Gabriel closed his eyes. Was he really dying? Would he at last meet his wife and children again?

  When he looked, he saw Jack Sykes standing there, dead. His eyes were wide and shocked, his throat ripped out, and his expression told that he had been driven insane before death.

  “What did you see, Jack?” Gabriel asked.

  The ghost walked across the clearing. At first, it seemed solid, but it passed through a dead man hanging low between two squat trees. It paused for a second, tilting its head as though it had heard screaming.

  Why come back here? Gabriel thought. Not for me. Surely not for me.

  He looked around, expecting to see Temple appear at any moment to revel in another victory. But he guessed that the demon knew nothing about this ghost. He was used to his victims going down and staying down. Fear did that to a soul.

  “Can you hear?” Gabriel whispered. “Can you speak?”

  The ghost ignored him. It moved across the clearing and paused before a man crucified against a tree. Gabriel could not see the spirit’s face, but it seemed to be examining the corpse. Then it reached out.

  “I’m here,” Gabriel said.

  The ghost continued to ignore him. Its hand passed into the chest of the dead man, sinking to the wrist, and then it moved its arm, head still tilted to one side.

  It looked as though it was listening. And writing.

  Finished, the ghost moved back across the clearing. It paused here and there to stare nowhere, its face still twisted by the madness borne by its soul at the point of its murder.

  “I’m sorry, Sykes,” Gabriel said. He had no idea whether or not the dead man heard. The ghost vanished back between the trees, forever lost.

  It took Gabriel until sundown to remove the bamboo stakes. He was beyond exhaustion, beyond thirst and agony, and as the last stake slid out, he felt something like hope bleeding from his body.

  The only thing that had prevented him from lying there, pinned to the ground and waiting to see what time would bring, was the thought of Sykes’s ghost wandering into the clearing and touching the corpse.

  He sat up, fighting a wave of nausea that threatened to knock him out for the night. He bit his lip and pinched the webbing between thumb and forefinger, the pain surprisingly sharp beneath the agony of the bamboo piercings.

  Eventually, he managed to stand. He made his way across the clearing, sidestepping the ragged corpse of a dead soldier. Roots conspired to trip him, and fatigue almost brought him down. But the sudden vivid memory of that whisper in Italy—breeze, dust and leaves—drove him on.

  He reached the body hanging on the tree and tugged at its boots until it fell.

  Behind it, scored into the tree’s thin bark by the fingers of a dead man, was the secret from Mad Meloy’s grave. A secret that Temple now knew as well.

  One word: “Armageddon.”

  And a date.

  About the Author

  TIM LEBBON is a New York Times bestselling writer from South Wales. He’s had more than thirty novels published to date, as well as hundreds of novellas and short stories. His latest novel is the thriller The Hunt, and other recent releases include The Silence and Alien: Out of the Shadows. He has won four British Fantasy Awards, a Bram Stoker Award, and a Scribe Award, and has been a finalist for World Fantasy, International Horror Guild and Shirley Jackson Awards. Future books include The Rage War (an Alien/Predator trilogy), and the Relics trilogy from Titan.

  The movie of his story Pay the Ghost, starring Nicolas Cage, is out now, and other projects in development include Playtime (an original script with Stephen Volk), My Haunted House with Gravy Media, The Hunt, Exorcising Angels (based on a novella with Simon Clark), and a TV series proposal of The Silence.

  Find out more about Tim at his website: www.timlebbon.net.

  Also by Tim Lebbon

  (selected bibliography)

  THE ASSASSIN SERIES

  “Dead Man’s Hand”

  Pieces of Hate

  The Hunt

  The Silence

  Shadow Men (with Christopher Golden)

  The Heretic Land

  Coldbrook

  Echo City

  THE SECRET JOURNEYS OF JACK LONDON

  The Wild (with Christopher Golden)

  The Sea Wolves (with Christopher Golden)

  White Fangs (with Christopher Golden)

  TOXIC CITY

  London Eye

  Reaper’s Legacy

  Contagion

  Star Wars: Dawn of the Jedi—Into the Void

  Alien—Out of the Shadows

  Predator: Incursion

  Alien: Invasion

  30 Days of Night: Dear of the Dark

  Hellboy: The Fire Wolves

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  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  About the Author

  Also by Tim Lebbon

  Newsletter Sign-up

  Copyright Page

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organization, and events portrayed in this novella are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  A WHISPER OF SOUTHERN LIGHTS

  Copyright © 2008 by Tim Lebbon

  Cover art by Gene Mollica

  Cover designed by Christine Foltzer

  Edited by Lee Harris

  All rights reserved.

  A Tor.com Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

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  New York, NY 10010

  www.tor.com

  Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

  ISBN 978-0-7653-8450-8 (ebook)

  ISBN 978-0-7653-9023-3 (trade paperback)

  Originally published by Necessary Evil Press, 2008

  First Tor.com Edition: May 2016

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