Papa Lucy & the Boneman

by Jason Fischer

  “Come now,” Lucy said, holding his hands up and regarding the circle of hostile prisoners closing around him. “Go back to your badminton and let the grown-ups talk.”

  The other souls fell back from this command. They struggled to overcome Lucy’s iron will but failed. Baertha hefted the iron poker, trembling slightly. He smiled at her and advanced slowly. Her arm fell, and as he gently ran a finger across her wrists, the poker fell from her grip. It rang against the flagstones, a note of defeat that made Lucy smile.

  “Baertha dear, you really must relax,” Lucy said. “This is your home now, but I must be on my way. Do be sure the other guests are comfortable during their stay.”

  Baertha fought to resist Lucy’s charms and frowned as he massaged her temples. He smiled at her with utmost confidence. She wandered away to play at boules, confused and blinking.

  Lucy turned his attention to the outer doors. That was when the girl leapt upon him and drove a knife deep into his guts. He felt it grate against his ribs and the cold flow of his soul-stuff leaking from the wound.

  It was possible to die a second death.

  “You lied, you lied,” the girl sobbed, driving the knife in again. “You were never going to save my father.”

  Shocked and gasping with pain, he recognised Jenny, last of the Riders of Cruik. She led a force of the most wasted souls, the oldest prisoners. One of them held a dog at bay, a low shape coughing up a ragged sound like barking or the distant memory of the sound.

  There was little left of these revenants, just shadow-stuff and the faintest sense of self. They ignored his commands, broke his spirit-body with shadowy fists and feet. Flailing, trying to fight free, he saw the depths of the dark colonnades and knew what fate awaited him should his soul perish inside of the Cruik.

  He sketched out a mark with one trembling finger, and then another. The souls fell back with howls of pain, and Jenny Rider writhed like a landed fish, her back arched and her feet drumming.

  Papa Lucy rose then jerked out the knife from his side. Hands shaking, he dropped it to the ground.

  “Just for that, I’m taking away your cucumber sandwiches,” Lucy said. Snuffing out a handful of the trapped souls, he forged the leftover souls into a great silver battering ram that he used to force open the doors. He left the Cruik’s house with a spring in his step, even as the walls shook and a distant voice howled with rage.

  Elated with his escape, he did not notice when another slipped out of that false house and followed him into freedom.

  Sol Papagallo passed into the Aum and found a likely spot to enter the Underfog. Where it had once taken Lucy almost a year to force his way through, Sol took a much gentler approach. He asked for permission to enter the lands of the dead.

  A way opened for him and his passage was marked. He would not be permitted to linger for long, unless he cared to stay forever. He thanked his unseen hosts, recognising them now as the opposites of the lords of Overhaeven.

  “As above, so below,” he marvelled. At its height, the Collegia had known so much, while also managing to know next to nothing. His professors in necromancy had never guessed at this hierarchy. Sol smiled as he felt a flicker of the old excitement. Once this task was complete, his education could begin anew.

  He walked the shifting roads of the Underfog, asking the way from those who lingered in this final land. Some of these spirits turned and fled, more from the sight of the Cruik than any fear of his appearance. Skeletal shapes were common down here.

  Lucy had left signs, of course. Communities of the dead lay ravaged and twisted, or set to war or mischief by his twisted whims. Scars remained from Lucy’s many attempts to exit the Underfog, but each time he had been rebuffed, pushed a little further onwards.

  Sol followed, respecting the lords of death and paying tribute when asked. Secret ways were opened to him, paths that sped his passage across the dead kingdoms. Where it had taken his brother a decade to first cross the Underfog, Sol followed in mere weeks.

  He was not surprised to find Lucy on the final boundary of death itself. What was left of his brother’s soul stood on that lonely beach, shivering before the black waves that crashed against the shale.

  The silvery stuff that was his brother’s soul had been badly treated. He wore the scars of knife wounds, and one of his arms hung at a strange angle, broken in at least two places. His hair hung in patches.

  It was possible to die twice. The second death was absolute, a trip into that undiscovered country beyond the black sea.

  Even now Lucy was attempting to escape. A loan body stood ready, a scarecrow of beach stones stacked into a rough man-shape glued together with the last of his magic. The veil between Underfog and Aum was heavily scratched, but so far Lucy had been unable to force a way through.

  Only the greatest force of will kept Papa Lucy from walking into the dark ocean. The sorcerer clung to existence tenaciously, even as death drew him in by inches.

  “Sol.” Lucy sobbed. “You came.”

  The skeletal sorcerer maintained a safe distance, resting on the Cruik. The staff squirmed a little at the sight of its former puppet, but Sol stilled it with a twitch of his wrist.

  “Quickly, brother,” Lucy said. “I don’t have much time. Give me the Cruik.”

  “No,” Sol said.

  “No? You kill me and then this? After all I’ve done for you.”

  “What you have done? This…this you deserve, my brother. John and I spoke, and he told me a lot of things. How you brought about the doom of Before. Used the power stations to fuel your first assault on Overhaeven. That was news to me.”

  “So what?” Lucy scoffed, his face suddenly drawn and pale as his feet slipped another inch across the slick rocks. “I’d do it again. It nearly worked. I would have brought you with me. We were almost gods, Sol. Gods!”

  “You’ve killed an entire world, Lucy! You’ve lied with every breath in your body and hurt everyone who ever cared about you. What makes you think you have the right to live?”

  Papa Lucy opened his mouth, but all of his glib responses and clever words fell away. He simply could not answer his brother’s question. They stood in a long silence, death’s waves almost deafening as they lashed the coast mercilessly.

  “But you are my brother,” Sol said. “I will help you.”

  “Yes,” Lucy said, a tear of gratitude sliding down his grey spirit-face. “Thank you, thank you Sol.”

  Sol stepped forward, carefully navigating the cracked shoreline. His bony feet had trouble getting purchase on the slippery stones, and death reached for him greedily.

  “Quick, give it to me.” Lucy reached for the staff. A wave broke, and this time the spray struck him. He howled in anguish as the substance of his soul began to melt away.

  Keeping low, gripping a stone as tightly as he could, Sol reached out with the Cruik, the staff quivering as Lucy’s hand got closer to it.

  Then Sol jammed the Cruik into his brother’s solar plexus. Lucy fell backwards, arms wheeling as he sought to keep upright. His eyes were wide with terror as the obsidian waves closed around him.

  Sol stood on the edge of death as Papa Lucy screamed. He watched as his brother’s mad thrashing slowed and then finally stopped. Lucy’s head sank beneath the dark water, and then he was finally dead.

  “Someone acts like a bad dog, you gotta put ’em down,” Sol said mournfully. He held the Cruik in his skeletal hand for a long moment, considering something, and then he cast the staff into the water too.

  It flopped around like a frightened eel, magnesium flashes painting the dark beach as thousands of souls were suddenly released from captivity. Then the Cruik bobbed away like driftwood, until a barrage of waves folded it out of sight.

  Sol turned around and began the long trek towards the lands of the living.

  When Lanyard finally got to loot the Waking City, he took no joy from it. The man poked through the intact buildings, always with a worried eye to the golden towers.

 
One full day, John Leicester had promised them. Then the glass towers would sink back into the earth, dragging the lesser buildings through in their wake. When the lords of Overhaeven reversed Papa Lucy’s ambitious bleedthrough, anyone caught filling their pockets would be killed.

  At his heels, Tilly pushed a wheelbarrow loaded high with everything they would need. But there were no books here, no music discs. Lanyard gathered bullets, provisions for travel, food in tins and packets. Clothes that would wear well on the road, for himself and for the Carpidian girl.

  He took a carton of cigarettes, and Tilly took a pile of gaudy jewellery. When he raised his eyebrows, she said, “For trading, stupid.” Lanyard held in a smile when the girl wore everything at once, slim arms loaded with the jangling wealth of a dead world.

  Tilly wore her father’s slouch hat now. Her eyes were red-rimmed from crying. Before he had made the offer, the Boneman delivered John Leicester’s message, words from her father now seated in his bloody hall.

  There’d be no searching for Fos Carpidian in the Waste, no hope of finding anyone. Her whole family was dead by their own hand. Tilly tried to tell Lanyard about the rite of sacrifice, how her people served a bloody but fair god, but here the words failed her.

  “Leave it,” Lanyard said. “Leicester released you from his service. You’re mine now.”

  The Jesusman and his new prentice stood at the edge of the Waste, a smouldering and broken city behind them. The glass towers began to shudder, the light within them failing. The buildings in the centre of the city began a rumbling descent as a cloud of dust spread outwards.

  “Time to go,” he said. He deftly sketched out the marks that Sol the Boneman had taught him. The Jesusmen had been using an old method for centuries, a roundabout sorcery deemed good enough for those who served Hesus.

  The last of the Overhaeven sigils hung in the air for a long moment, and then the doorway opened. The Greygulf lay on the other side, a buckled shadow-road that was solid enough to stand on.

  Lanyard had learned that these hidden ways were far from set. The next trick was to call the shadow-roads to you wherever you were. Something else his predecessors had never figured out.

  “C’mon, girl,” and with that he stepped out of the Now and into the world between worlds. Tilly Carpidian followed. She kept her mind—the only qualification needed for her new career.

  When he’d finished throwing up his breakfast, Lanyard got to his feet. Tilly’s education as a Jesusman began here in the Greygulf. He explained the Realms, the ways that connected them, and the sinister creatures that crept from world to world preying on the innocent.

  “That’s what Sol was worried about,” Lanyard said. “See there? After all the damage Lucy caused, the world veil is as thin as tissue paper. Anything could step through that and find a way into our world. Nasty things, hungry for flesh or worse.”

  Tilly nodded and rested her hand against the pistol on her hip. Lanyard smiled grimly.

  “Good. Now step quickly, the bossman is watching,” he said, pointing up to the silver heavens. A giant pair of hands fluttered across the sky. His skin crawling with fear and awe, Lanyard nodded at Hesus.

  “Let’s go be Jesusmen,” he said and led his prentice into a new and most violent life.

  — AUTHOR’S NOTE —

  It feels surreal to be writing this, almost a decade to the day since I finished writing the first draft of Papa Lucy and the Boneman. This book has been on a long and weird road since the start, and there were times when I was almost convinced that the story was cursed, that I should abandon it and work on something a bit more accessible. Being a literary cross-genre piece made the path to publication damn hard, but I’m glad it came through in the same bizarre glory as the short stories I’d earlier written in the same setting. For the eagle-eyed collector the stories of Lanyard the last Jesusman originally appeared in Aurealis Magazine in the early 2000s/late noughties.

  No writer is an island, and I am eternally grateful to everyone who has backed me in this endeavour. My beta readers, numerous writer friends who kept my spirits up, Arts SA for funding the production of the first draft, my agent Angel Belsey (you will always have this victory!) and Outland Entertainment for finally giving it a great home. Above all else, my family, who have adopted this writer and kept him from going completely feral.

  Lanyard will return in volume 2 of the series, THE DAWN KING, and I promise you, it’s going to be a wild ride.

  Meanwhile, keep watch for things that don’t belong. Try not to lose your mind when you pass from one place to another. Know that an enemy is always watching, licking its chops, ready to step into your world and lay a waxy hand upon you…

  From the Before to the Now,

  Jason Fischer,

  Adelaide, Australia

  — ABOUT THE AUTHOR —

  Jason Fischer is a writer who lives near Adelaide, South Australia. He has won the Colin Thiele Literature Scholarship, an Aurealis Award and the Writers of the Future Contest. In Jason’s jack-of-all-trades writing career he has worked on comics, apps, television, short stories, novellas and novels. Jason also facilitates writing workshops, is an enthusiastic mentor, and loves anything to do with the written or spoken word.

  Jason is also the founder and CEO of Spectrum Writing, a service that teaches professional writing skills to people on the Autism Spectrum.

  He plays a LOT of Dungeons and Dragons, has a passion for godawful puns, and is known to sing karaoke until the small hours.