The Memory of Death Read online

  We ride out of town towards Princess Alexandra Hospital, then swing back on ourselves and enter the Clem Jones Tunnel. As we descend into the tunnel something dark passes above us. But we’re moving too quickly.

  We ride ‘our’ bikes down the tunnel. Okkervil and Clash together, me on my own. Down we go, until we are under the river. I can feel it above me. Through the walls of the tunnel and the bedrock. Here I can feel the remembered vibrations of the great digging machine that made this deep road, and more – I can almost hear the One Tree. There’s something magical about rivers; not as potent as the sea, but there nonetheless. All rivers lead to the Underworld, all rivers are a tributary of the river Styx. The Brisbane River is no exception.

  We pull to the side of the road. Cars beep at us, but no one stops. I get off, look at the wall of the tunnel.

  ‘We don’t have much time,’ I yell.

  I fish the chalk from my pocket and draw the door, resisting an inclination to get all fancy with panelling and whatnot. This is nothing more than a rectangle, with a circle for a handle, a bit crooked around the edges. Already a siren is ringing, lights are flashing. A dark shape is bounding down the road.

  ‘The Hound, the bloody Hound!’

  ‘Quick,’ I say. They put out their hands, though Clash puts out his with a painful hesitancy, keeping the stump by his side; I draw the blade across them, finishing with mine. Together, hands held, we bleed.

  We slap our bloody palms and stump against the door, and it becomes … it changes – where I’ve drawn the handle, a handle has grown. I turn the handle; it’s warm then cold to touch. The door opens stiffly, all those bloody crooked edges. But it opens and there is room enough for us and the bikes. I grab my bike and walk through; the others follow, and the door closes. The sound of sirens stops. Dead.

  And we’re in Aunt Neti’s rooms.

  I don’t know whether to be excited or terrified. This is the once-home of a creature that hated me. An RE, Recognised Entity like Charon, but if he was an ally, she had been an out and out enemy.

  Neti’s rooms are covered in damask wallpaper – a parlour with many doors, to other rooms and other places (none of which I have ever seen) and a front door that leads to Number Four. Walk through that and down a hallway and we’re back where we started.

  Neti had hated me. No surprise there; a lot of people did.

  Feels like the wallpaper’s watching us. Probably is. Neti was part spider and her offspring remain. I’ve had run-ins with them before. Run-ins of the ants in the pants variety. Makes me shudder thinking of it.

  But from here we can enter the Underworld proper.

  I glance down at my tattoo, the cherub I’ve had since a particularly drunken night in my late teens. Once it used to come alive in the Underworld, where it was an Inkling named Wal with a smart mouth and no pants.

  I could do with Wal’s company now. But there’s nothing.

  *

  For a moment there I heard a beat, a single heartbeat, familiar. Then it was gone and I couldn’t even be sure if I had imagined it. I still can’t understand why my Avians decided to attack Steve. That wasn’t my intent; all I wanted was to follow him, not waste their lives in some useless kind of assault.

  That they decided not to follow my command worries me. That's not how this works.

  I shift to the Clem and the sirens ringing, I look at the Hound and it looks back at me, like some sort of guilty puppy. It starts scratching behind its ear. I could almost feel sorry for it. Except I’m so angry at Charon for his ineffectiveness. That’s what you get when you put your faith in Recognised Entities. They always turn out to be trouble. Neti, now she was the worst, but Charon, he was nearly as bad as Mr D.

  The Hound sits there, scratching itself. I frown at it.

  ‘Find them,’ I say.

  And it gives me a look that is pure Steve. The hunter becomes the prey.

  ‘Go! Now!’

  And it’s off, bounding away down the Clem, heading north. I’m not even sure it knows what it’s doing. But sometimes that is the best approach. The magic around death isn’t always logical, in fact that’s the most tenuous of elements at play. Death is ridiculous, cruel and necessary all at once – every emotion concerning it is conflicting. It’s one of the reasons that we keep the pomping business on the QT. People fall into the habit of blaming the messenger; it wouldn’t stop us from doing our job, but it would make it harder. And it’s hard enough.

  I touch the chalk outline, feel a residue of Power. There’s even a hint of Steve there, which is confusing. These aren’t Steve. They can’t all be.

  My gaze lingers on the door. I peel my hand from the wall. Police cars pull in beside me. No one questions me, and I leave before anyone thinks to ask, or wonder why Australia’s Death is standing in the Clem. There’s always one or two who recognise me, but this time I don’t want that. This time it would be embarrassing; they’ve cut us a little slack after we saved the world, but I don’t want to test that.

  There’s been a truck accident on George Street, two pedestrians dead. A woman’s just died in PA Hospital. Someone’s sensed a Stirrer in Perth – still plenty of those who don’t follow our agreement. I’ve work to do.

  And these bikes, and this chalk-drawn door, aren’t any use to me at all.

  ‘Where did they get bikes from?’ I ask Tim, and he shrugs, though he’s smiling.

  ‘It’s Steven, sort of. The bugger always had a bit of a lucky streak, though I can’t remember the last time I saw him on a bike.’

  I can smell the cigarettes on him, which is annoying; he’d made such a show of giving up last year. Said he’d survived the Apocalypse, now he wanted to enjoy as much time as he could.

  ‘But not that lucky.’ I’m feeling very cross. This is my town and the three Steves have managed to escape it.

  We watch the video again. The bikes entering the Clem, and then the three Steves, one of them missing a hand (which affects me more than it should, and that also pisses me off), leaving and entering … wherever it is that they are entering.

  Eleven

  It’s a long dark corridor down which we creep, rather more blindly than I would like. Dark because the light bulb above us blew when I flicked the switch. Things scurry behind us, chitinous-sounding things. Neti’s rooms terrify me. There’s something hateful about them, something dark and cruel. I touch one wallpapered wall, only to feel it flex beneath my fingers.

  I’m so relieved when my hands find the door.

  ‘Ready?’ I say.

  ‘I was born ready,’ Clash says.

  Okkervil sighs. ‘We’ve all seen the same movies, Clash.’

  I lean against the door, and it springs open. And I stumble into Hell.

  ‘Watch your step,’ Okkervil says. Clash sniggers. I am intolerable.

  But I’ve never been so happy or more horrified to be out of there.

  The temperature drops away. The sky is ruddy above us, and in the near distance, a suburb away, through the neat streets of Hell, the great root buttresses of the One Tree creak.

  We’re standing in a garden of dead flowers near a major thoroughfare of Hell. Delightful, relatively.

  ‘I think …’ Clash says. ‘Damn, it’s happening.’

  He groans, and clutches at his arm. The transfiguration can be a bit painful, just like getting a tat. Wal tears free from his flesh with a loud thucking noise. I glance at my arm: my tattoo’s still there, damn it.

  I look over at Clash – his hand's grown back. This is Hell after all, weird shit happens.

  Wal coughs, spits. ‘All I can taste is salt. What the –’

  Clash looks pretty smug, validated. Sometimes I hate myself.

  Wal flits between us. ‘So, you three, what’s the story?’

  ‘The usual,’ Clash says. ‘Escaped the Death of the Water’s Hell through means unknown. Then we’re chased from the land of the living by a Hellhound.’

  ‘Oh, and apparently we’re evil now,’ Okkervil says
.

  Wal squints at us. ‘Don’t look evil to me. Then again, three pairs of beady eyes staring at you, that’s disconcerting.’

  ‘Disconcerting is a type of evil,’ Clash says.

  ‘It's good to see you,’ we say.

  Wal shakes his head. ‘Wish I could say the same. I was working on a story for my blog, gotta keep up the content.’ He puffs up his chest. ‘Nice to be all corporeal again, though. I missed this place, and you – one of you, anyway. A little …’

  We say nothing and Wal laughs. ‘The more the merrier, I suppose.’

  I gesture at the One Tree. ‘Do you think he’s in?’

  ‘Of course he is, what else does he have to do?’

  Mr D, my previous boss. We’d had issues, but he’d saved my life several times over. He lived in – well, on – the One Tree, right at the top. Best view in all the Underworld; from the city across the mountains all the way to the dark and angry waters of the sea of Hell.

  ‘You’re not allowed here,’ the dead man says, and I realise that this opinion isn’t something confined to the living world. Where the hell do we belong then?

  Another dead figure turns towards us. And another.

  ‘Look,’ I say. ‘I’m just passing through. I’ve been here before. I used to run the joint.’

  The dead man seems to hesitate; I’m holding my hands out in a conciliatory way, looking as harmless as possible.

  He smiles at me, and then tries to tear out my throat with his teeth. Clash kicks him in the chest. Okkervil grabs him around the chest and throws him to the ground, and those jaws keep snapping.

  There’s a whistling hole in my throat. I put my fingers to it, nearly faint dead away. But I manage to keep upright. Clash looks at me, and I don’t like his expression. I know when I’m trying to hide how worried I am.

  ‘Doesn’t look good,’ I wheeze.

  He pats my hand. ‘You’ll be right.’

  Not exactly. Hell isn’t the place for things turning out all right.

  I shake my head. Then remember the hand I am holding in the plastic bag. ‘What do I do with this?’

  ‘Keep it,’ Clash says. ‘You’ll never know when it’ll come in handy.’

  Another snort from Okkervil.

  ‘You’re not allowed here,’ someone cries in the not too distance.

  We look at each other. Then towards the One Tree.

  ‘We need to get up there,’ I say.

  Wal grimaces at the dead soul approaching. ‘And fast,’ he says.

  We run through the streets of the Underworld Brisbane, heading towards Mount Coot-tha and the great buttress roots of the One Tree that are planted there. Okkervil takes the lead; Clash and I alternate leaning on each other.

  We’re attacked twice more. But we manage to break free, leaving a bunch of angry dead in our wake.

  By the time we’re starting the climb up the steep steps, there’s quite a few behind us. Quite a few hundred winding around the trunk of the one tree. I swear they’ve got more wobbly. There’s no rail, just trunk on one side, drop to basement of Hell on the other. In Hell the worst has happened, so no one really cares about the safety of a set of stairs. OHS has become irrelevant.

  I stop at the beginning of a particularly steep rise, and look back. There’s a darkness following us up the tree, just behind the undead. We move fast, but they’re moving faster, getting nearer. I can almost hear what they’re saying. Not that I need to.

  Wal flies back to get a better look, hovers there a moment, then shoots back to us.

  ‘It’s you, or something like,’ he says, flicking a handful of sweat from his brow. He doesn’t sit on my shoulder, and I feel a stab of jealousy. Not that I’ve ever really appreciated his naked bum resting that close to my face. ‘Called out my name in your voice.’

  ‘How do we avoid it?’

  ‘There’s no real avoiding it. Keep running or turn and face it. How do you lot know it means you harm anyway?’

  ‘It’s a vibe,’ I say. Wal raises an eyebrow. ‘Yeah, an “I’m going to cut you into tiny pieces” sort of thing.’

  Wal looks back over his shoulder. ‘You better run then.’

  We’re all panting by the time we reach the top of the One Tree.

  Mr D looks up from his book. Mr D, a man who had saved my life on more occasions than I could bother to count.

  ‘Oh, it’s you,’ he says.

  ‘Yes,’ we say.

  ‘I’d better call Lissa, then,’ he says, getting up from his chair.

  ‘No you don’t,’ I say, puffing up my chest.

  Mr D smiles, gestures at me and I fall on my bum. The other two and Wal snigger a bit.

  ‘And what are you going to do about it?’ he says. ‘All of you?’

  That stops them laughing.

  While Mr D is hardly effusive in his greeting, I understand why – after all, I could possibly be some sort of psychotic revenant. But, hey, Mr D was worse than that when he was alive. He can come across as an affable, avuncular sort of chap, but he is anything but; if you scratch the surface, what you get are holes into a darkness bleaker and deeper than the Underworld, when he’s not giving you all sorts of fatherly advice.

  He was once my mentor, the Death of Australia before me. And while you could accuse him of being a rather inefficient RM (there had been two Schisms tried on his watch, run by two of his closest friends and both those men were now dead) he was still, if not alive, then kicking.

  In fact he looked about to kick me, or run to his bicycle. He was a man very fond of bicycles.

  ‘We need help,’ I say.

  Mr D grimaces, puts away his book on a small case made of old bones, and splinters of the One Tree. He looks at his phone there on the top shelf, then shrugs. ‘I’d say that’s very obvious. There’s something not right about any of you. Like you’re all square blocks being booted into a triangular hole. Hmm, looking at you I feel almost like I’m staring at Stirrers. But I’m happy to see you, the bit of me that isn’t swelling with a killing rage.’

  ‘It doesn’t look like you’re very happy to see us.’

  ‘I prefer my de Selbys in the singular.’ At least he doesn’t look like he wants to kill us, despite what he says.

  ‘We’re not going to hurt you.’

  Mr D sniffs. ‘You already have. I should have been the first person you saw, the moment you returned from the Death of the Water. After all, you went against my advice, you dealt with the Death of the Water, and I bet you barely even glanced at the contract.’ He looks at each of us in turn. ‘One of you hardly even glanced at the contract.’

  ‘You were in my thoughts,’ I lie, and obviously not that convincingly. ‘And there’d never been a written contract, just a verbal one.’

  ‘That’s how he gets you.’ Mr D pats my arm. ‘Well, you’re here now.’

  ‘And I do need your help.’

  ‘Of course you do. Of course you do. Now,’ he says. ‘I have a theory about what you are. Or, at the very least, who.’

  ‘We’re Steven de Selby.’

  ‘If only it was that simple.’

  ‘You’re not meant to be here,’ someone says.

  ‘You’re not meant to be here.’ A whole host of someones.

  Mr D gives a surprised sort of grin, then turns. ‘And when were you going to tell me about this?’

  *

  The dead are all pointing at me, and Suit and Okkervil.

  Chaos.

  A man twice my size grabs at me. I push him away, turn to run; something else is gnawing at my calf and has got a damn good grip, and I trip, landing hard on my face.

  ‘You don’t belong here.’

  ‘You don’t belong here.’

  If I don’t belong here, where do I?

  Suit throws me the bag with the hand in it. My old hand. it's curled into a fist, I swing out, knock one of the dead backwards. Try and get another swing in and hands close around my throat. I'm yanked away by … me. The ragey, shadowy me. The dead
fella at my calf gets a good chunk of meat, and that doesn’t feel good at all.

  ‘Don’t trust any of them,’ Rage Steve says, to himself, to me, I'm not sure, I don’t think he is either. ‘Least of all this fucker.’ And he pushes me from the guy chewing on my calf, and I can breathe again. Seeing spots. My leg is bleeding from the bite wound.

  ‘You’re making me angry.’

  ‘Why?’ I say.

  ‘That's my favourite T-shirt, and you’re about to get your blood all over it.’

  No it’s not, maybe it is. I don’t know.

  There is death all around us, angry death, and Rage Steve only has eyes for me. Why do I always get the crazies as a dance partner?

  ‘Time to die, Clash,’ my shadow says.

  The other two are down, smothered in biting dead. It’s just me and him.

  ‘I can take you,’ I say, getting my fists up, keeping my face protected. He punches me in the gut.

  Maybe not.

  I gasp like that fish in the video to Faith No More’s ‘Epic’, trying to breathe, just flopping and flapping uselessly. Rage Steve kicks me in the throat.

  ‘One of us got the rage,’ he says. ‘And rage trumps everything.’ He swings out a boot again, only someone is holding him by it. Someone very tall.

  ‘Enough,’ Charon says. ‘Enough.’

  He lifts Rage Steve by the foot and whistles.

  Somewhere not that distant, a Hound howls. And the dead still, their eyes dim. Charon gestures right and left, and the dead walk to the edge of the branch and tumble away. A lemming-like fall of death.

  The other Steves crawl towards me. The closer they get, the more pain I feel.

  ‘Good,’ Charon says. ‘Now I have your attention. Listen up.’

  ‘Let me go,’ Rage Steve growls.

  ‘Then listen, and I will. You’re all Steven de Selby, but only bits of him, fragments. You need to come together.’

  ‘And how do we do that?’

  Charon whistles shrill and loud. The Hound bounds onto the branch, its gaze flicking from each of us and back again, as though it isn’t sure where to start, its big jaws slavering. Honestly, I don’t want to be bitten again, ever.

  ‘With the glue,’ Charon says.