The Business Of Death, Death Works Trilogy

by Trent Jamieson

  Restless, and impatient, I wait for Lissa to come home. I walk through our rooms, which are empty in the most part, characterless but for some clutter, because we haven’t had time to fill them with ourselves yet. It’s hardly a soothing environment.

  Lissa had chosen the new apartment. Twenty stories up and a few streets down from Number Four. Convenient and far harder to infiltrate than a Queenslander—although pretty much anything else is, no matter what you do you can never really secure a house designed to be open to the air. The door to the apartment has been replaced with one that is more reinforced than most tanks. It once opened onto a broom cupboard that was used to imprison both Mr. D and later me, so, yes, I know it works. Though it’s been modified so I can shift in its presence. The unit’s walls, floors and ceilings are marked with enough brace symbols to make even the toughest Stirrer quail.

  It’s an easy stroll to work from here. I might be able to shift, but I enjoy the walk, and the connection it offers with my city. It would be too easy to shift from the unit to Number Four, never seeing the light, and lose contact with everything that I’m fighting for in the process. Death is meaningless without life.

  I like our new home, really I do. The first couple of months of our relationship had been spent at my parents’ house in the burbs. But that had proven to be less than ideal. My place before that was crammed full of stuff: CDs, DVDs, but Morrigan blew all of that up and I haven’t bothered collecting them again, beyond a few obvious classics. Once you’ve lost everything the appeal of accumulating stuff fades. Maybe Suzanne and I aren’t all that different after all.

  Last year I would have never understood Suzanne’s single room, now I can see myself having something similar in some distant future, if I’m allowed that—too many things become memories and too many memories grow barbs.

  When we’d sold Mum and Dad’s house I’d sold the furniture as well. The sight of it was too painful. Here we have a bed, a few chairs around a dining table. All basic stuff, because we were too tired and busy to do anything else.

  It doesn’t mean you can’t have a little art around you though. I’ve a Decemberists poster in the living room, keep meaning to frame it, currently it’s in a state of gradual fall, held up with not nearly enough Blu-Tac. But even though we don’t have a lot of stuff we’ve not avoided mess. Lissa’s managed to scatter most of her clothes throughout the flat. I resist the urge to pick them up. I guess she’s more comfortable here, that it’s a good sign.

  I admire our view and watch the bats trade places with the birds, feel the weariness of crows and sparrows seeking shelter. Some of them grumble, but they’re obedient to my will. I need every eye open. An avian catches sight of something peculiar, and I can be there in a moment.

  The river winds away below me. From this vantage point the two major bridges are visible, the iron post-industrial bulk of the Story Bridge to my left, and a hint of the white concrete of the Captain Cook Bridge to the right. These two bridges span the brown water of the Brisbane River and feed the traffic of the southern suburbs, and beyond, into the city. Seeing them both makes me ache a little. They’ve led me in and out of trouble all my life, they’ve promised the excitement of the inner city, and the boredom of the outer suburbs. From here, it’s obvious that Brisbane is a city of hills, of bends and suburbs that curl into each other like shells. It should be messy, but it isn’t. And I love it.

  There’s been a constant pressure on me to move Mortmax’s global headquarters to some more central location, or, at the very least, Sydney. But I can no more do that than tear out my heart. Brisbane has settled in me as deeply as old HD ever can.

  This is my city. And it will always be my city.

  I look from the lights, down to the shimmering river, this brown coil of water runs into the not-too-distant sea and the first problem that needs untangling.

  I hear Lissa’s beating heart before she opens the door to the unit. It’s no effort to pick it from the multitude of heartbeats, just as I’d always recognize her face.

  She’s holding a bag of Chinese takeaway in one hand. My stomach rumbles.

  “I can hear that from here,” she says.

  “And how was your day?”

  “Besides saving my boyfriend from assassination, and stalling Stirrers.” She counts them out on her free hand, “Let’s see, there was one at PA, another at the Wesley, and two down in Logan. Oh and I saw you dancing around in the nude. I’d say it was pretty normal, and you?”

  “We need to talk.”

  Lissa puts the bag down on the table, her brow furrowed. “Sounds serious.”

  “Well, it is.” Doesn’t help that my stomach chooses that moment to rumble again.

  “All right. Do I need to sit down?”

  “Maybe.”

  She doesn’t, just walks towards me. And I have to reach out and touch her hand, fingers slowly stroking her knuckles. I know how sore her palms must be.

  “I’ve done bad things that I need to set right. Tomorrow I’m going to talk to the Death of the Water, and I’m not sure that I’m going to make it back.”

  “Death of the Water?”

  “Yes, I may have pissed him off when I pomped those souls in the plane crash.”

  “So that’s the bad thing? Saving those souls?”

  “It was impolitic. And I said bad things, not thing.”

  Lissa’s eyes narrow. “I got the plural, Steven. You can’t call that a bad thing. Do you know what the Death of the Water does with its souls?”

  “I know it’s not good. But I didn’t think it through. It was power as much as guilt that drove me to it. Those souls were my responsibility, and I sent them there, however inadvertently, but I think I really snatched them away because I could.”

  “So now you need to make peace?”

  “Yeah. If I don’t do this…well, we need it. We need an ally.”

  “I understand. I’m not happy, but I understand. Oh, the enemies you make—they’re of the highest caliber.”

  “Yeah, people keep telling me that. There’s something else,” I say, I clear my throat. My eyes sting, I know I’m barely holding back tears. “Rillman, I killed him.”

  Lissa doesn’t look surprised at all. “I know.”

  “But—”

  “It’s obvious. What were you going to do? Life isn’t a Batman comic, there’s no Arkham Asylum in our world—though that place was hardly very effective anyway, all they ever did was escape. You didn’t have any choice. Rillman was insane. He’d have kept coming after you until you were dead, probably killing Tim and me in the process.”

  “I strangled the bastard. I crushed his life out with my hands, and I enjoyed it.”

  “You enjoyed it, or was it HD doing the enjoying?”

  “Both, I guess.”

  “Hmm, you enjoyed killing the man who had tortured you, had threatened to repeat everything that Morrigan had done to you over again. Steven, you are a monster.”

  “But I am a—”

  “Bullshit. Have you killed anyone else lately? Are you sneaking out and slicing off heads with that scythe of yours?”

  “No.” Even if sometimes—more often than sometimes, if I’m honest—I feel it, roiling away inside me, desperate for blood, death, destruction. “No.”

  “And you never will. Steven, you contain the Hungry Death inside you. And I won’t lie to you, there are moments that I can see the homicidal prick staring out, but it’s never there for long, and it’s never alone. I know that you’re always standing behind it, or driving it back. You’re stronger than it is. You’ve proven yourself stronger than it. Don’t you see that? If after everything that had happened you had lost control, gone on a killing rampage, wiped out a continent or two, yes, then I would have a little trouble forgiving you—but you didn’t. You stopped at Rillman.” She touches my face. “You were given this thing, without wanting it at all. But I’m proud how you have stepped up. And keep stepping up.”

  “Thank you. But it still hurts
. It still shocks me that I could do it. Mr. D’s disappointment…”

  “Mr. D was the one who hurled Rillman’s wife back to Hell, and remember he once pulled off a successful Schism himself. He started all of this. He’s hardly in a position of moral superiority. You did what you had to do, and you always will.”

  She pecks me on the cheek and walks back to the food. I follow her to get out the plates. How wonderful is my girl? So forgiving, so wise, and with an appreciation of classic comics. I know how lucky I am. Maybe it’s time. I clear my throat, hands shaking as I put down the plates.

  “Killed Rillman,” she says with a wry chuckle, eyes burning into my soul. “Phew, for a minute there I thought you were going to ask me to marry you.”

  We eat dinner, barely, before Lissa drags me to the bedroom, and proves she doesn’t find me monstrous—twice.

  Afterward she lies on my chest. I can still taste her. The room smells of us. The warmth of her and her presence is so reassuring and so vital. Right now, with her holding me, I can almost imagine that I’m alive. Even HD is merely a shadow, ill-defined at the back of my cells.

  “What do you think the end of the world will be like?” Lissa asks.

  “I don’t know, something between radio static and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road?”

  Lissa sighs. “But that wasn’t really the end of the world though was it, just the road toward it, the road we’re all on. It’s so like you to imagine noise.”

  “What do you think it will be like?” I can feel HD uncoiling, interest growing. It’s an odd tingling sensation, not that far from arousal.

  “Beautiful and terrible at once. Nothing we can ever see, except maybe you. And it will be silent, so silent, not a breath of wind, nothing stirring, nothing moving, and nothing growing: silence given form forever.”

  “Sounds kind of nice,” I say.

  “You wouldn’t like it,” Lissa says.

  “But you would?” She’s right. I do like my noise. I think of the frozen Styx and how its silence had discomforted me.

  She doesn’t answer me. And soon she’s asleep.

  I listen to her breathing, that’s a sound I adore, her heartbeat slowing with it, but remaining indisputedly hers. Sleep really isn’t for me anymore, but sometimes, when I let them and the stars or the moon or whatever are in alignment those twin sounds can guide me there.

  Slowly and steadily I follow her breath and her beating heart.

  I dream.

  Blood, a whole sea of it, a wave crashing down on me and mine. Lissa’s motionless beside me. Her wrists are open. Her face is the blue of the dead, the recently bled. There’s no life to give her any other color. I can’t hear her heart beating. I can’t hear anyone’s. Even the waves are silent.

  Then soundlessly and slowly bicycles fall. The first one smashes down beside me, sinks into the sanguine sea. The second knocks Lissa from my hands, and I’m scrambling through blood to find her. I catch a glimpse of her face. Reach out, but she is gone.

  I wake with a jolt. Lissa wakes with me, her heartbeat thudding in my skull.

  Thank Christ.

  “It’s all right,” I say, quietly. “Go back to sleep.”

  “Another dream?”

  “Yeah, another one.” The clock by her bed, a ruby luminescence—5:30. The sky is lightening outside, though dawn’s at least an hour away. I kiss her gently on the forehead. “I have to go,” I say.

  Lissa grabs my hand. “What you told me,” Lissa says, not sounding nearly as sleepy as I would expect, “is that your last secret?”

  “Yeah, it’s my last.”

  Lissa grins. “Haven’t had time to find some new ones yet? Steve, we’re all secrets and lies and truth and love. And I know that you love me, that much isn’t a lie.”

  “And what about you?”

  “What do you think?”

  I kiss her one last time. Lissa doesn’t tell me to be careful. We both know where I’m going and there’s nothing careful about that.

  11

  Five forty-five a.m. and I’m standing on top of the Story Bridge, sipping Bundy Rum out of a flask, looking down at the sporadic early-morning traffic and the river beneath. To the left of me is Kangaroo Point, to the right Fortitude Valley—too many drunk nights spent in the pubs and clubs of the latter. Here, I am above it all, at the point where North and South Brisbane meet. There’s power here, all of it balanced on this steel bridge. And here, as night begins its transition to day, it expresses itself as an ache in my bones. HD thrashes back and forth inside me like a great white shark trapped in a goldfish bowl.

  The bridge thrums, the steel shifts, almost imperceptibly as the day begins to warm. The sun is a while off, but the bridge is getting ready for it.

  I picked the bridge because it gives me height and sight, and it’s water-bound and water-crossing without being of the sea. Seems like a neutral enough sort of location for a one-on-one with the Death of the Water.

  A wind blows down the river, somehow sharpened by the skyline behind me. The chill slices through my suit. A couple more mouthfuls of my rum and it’s not such a problem. Maybe I shouldn’t be drinking before setting up this meeting, but I can’t remember a meeting that I’ve attended in the last five months where I haven’t had at least a little to drink.

  It’s not like I don’t have it under control or anything.

  The wind drives the early morning mist before it in billowing ripples of gray. It’ll be another hour or two until the sun burns it all away. Buildings jut out of the gray like the apocalypse has already happened. Lights wink. Above me planes circle, waiting out the mist, or being redirected to the Gold Coast.

  More rum, and I unlock my phone, clear my throat, and tap in the number. It doesn’t ring, there’s nothing but the sound of the wind blowing through my mouthpiece. Wouldn’t it be nice, for once, to get a warm greeting on a phone call with a supernatural entity? I’m the one that’s supposed to be grim.

  “Right then,” I say. “I’m ready to talk. Here, or somewhere neutral, a place of your choosing.”

  I hang up, and I know that it’s heard me at once. There’s noise before sight, the whole bridge thrums in time with it. A dim hissing that grows with each beat of the World Pulse.

  Right. This is enough.

  How dare the Death of the Water think it can waltz (well, twist) in here and start doing things like this? The sea, the ocean, that is its territory. This thread of river is mine, no matter how it feeds into the sea. It’s mine, and my opposite should know better.

  Yeah, like I should have known better when I snatched those 150 souls from the sea.

  As much as Tim would like to think not, I am aware of the statistics. There have been 149 deaths by drowning around the coast in the last few months. None of them were meant to happen—all of them were unscheduled.

  This has to stop. If I can save just one soul from going to the Death of the Water, I will. I’m stubborn, yes, but de Selbys always are.

  I quickly text Lissa, tell her I’ll be back as soon as I can. Then jump to the top of the handrail and watch the waterspout draw near. The traffic beneath me is at a standstill. The waterspout sways. It dances.

  “So you want to chat here?” I say.

  The waterspout is silent. It sways cobralike a few meters before the bridge, an angry storm narrowed to one slender point. A cold spray of water drenches me.

  “What the hell is this passive aggressive shit anyway? We’re both adults here. Surely we can…Ah, fuck it!” I don’t know I’m going to do it, until I do.

  I leap off the bridge and into the swirling water, turning my head at the last moment to catch a glimpse of my city. The buildings shine in the early-morning light, and I can’t shake the feeling that I’m saying goodbye for the last time.

  There’s a flash, a sensation of burning and stretching similar to a shift, but I’m not doing it. Then I am somewhere else. Water, colder, deeper. I know it towers above me, that it stretches away from me, from shore to shore.
A weight that would crush the life from anything of the earth. But I am not alive. Not really, I am the opposite of that. Doesn’t stop the pressure. I creak in ways alarming.

  My hands are wrenched back, hard enough that my arms are nearly pulled from their sockets. A hood slides over my head and what feel like plastic ties are tightened around my wrists. Hands grip my biceps firmly and easily.

  My lungs are painfully, but uselessly, full, and, for a moment, I panic. Then I give in to it. Stop fighting, and, while I don’t exactly breathe, something’s going on within me with enough vitality that I don’t black out. HD swells to replace my air. He’s keeping me alive, pushing against the pressure of the sea. Sometimes the homicidal bastard comes in handy

  Water all around me. Somewhere nearby whales are singing. Songs of predation, love, lust and war. In the water, at these depths, I can’t see, but I can feel vast presences slide past me. Shifts in pressure, moments of deeper cold. The small hairs rise along the back of my neck, and I remember how insignificant I am.

  I’m glad I sent Lissa a text. There’s no way this is going to go well.

  I blink sightlessly into the dark. I can’t speak. I can’t breathe, but my feet are touching the bottom of the ocean. Something nudges my back. I stumble forward.

  “Walk or stay here forever,” a voice whispers in my ear.

  Handcuffed and hooded at the bottom of the sea isn’t good. But this voice, that’s a whole new level of not-goodness.

  There’s more pushing, jabbing really, rough and cruel.

  I walk, lungs, nose, lips filled with the briny muck of the sea. The ground sucks at my boots, sometimes I sink so deep that I have to be pulled out. Things brush against me, and I stumble frequently, but I keep walking.

  I’ve a meeting with the Death of the Water.

  In that deep and heavy cold I move. Every step is a slow one. The water pushes down with a steely pressure, though sometimes I can feel a wind brushing against my face, a sense of strolling through open airless spaces.