The Memory of Death Read online

  Twelve

  Charon lets me drop. I hit the branch of the One Tree, grunt and lie there a moment. It feels almost good not to be in constant motion. Charon wiggles a finger at me. I feel the anger building again.

  ‘Calm down,’ he hisses at me. ‘Calm down.’

  The Hound growls.

  ‘I will run and I will hide,’ I say.

  ‘The Hound cannot be hidden from,’ Charon says. ‘The Hound is you. It will bind you together. I made it to find you and to bind you, but you had to run away from it, didn’t you? I thought you liked dogs.’

  ‘Why did I attack Lissa?’ I know why; I think I know why. I can feel all that hatred in me. All that rage. Didn’t I save the world? Didn’t I give up everything, and who came for me?

  No one.

  ‘You were unstable. The rawest emotions came from the sea first. There was, putting it mildly, a lot of bitterness there. But twice now you’ve saved your brothers; even angry, you’re not that bad.’

  ‘I’m not doing it,’ I say.

  *

  ‘I’m not doing it,’ Rage Steve says, and I recognise the sullen tones. They’re as childish and selfish as I ever get, and that is something of a relief. Still, he turns and walks away.

  ‘It’s not just your choice,’ I – we – say.

  ‘Fuck you all,’ Rage Steve says.

  I do, we do, the only thing we can. We tackle him. Heads clang together, there’re grunts of pain and I think Okkervil is winded, but we hold him and we don’t let go. The Hound doesn’t hesitate – this time it comes in for the kill, and I only hope that Charon wasn’t lying.

  Its eyes flash. Its jaws snap, blood flows. It is the cold change coming, welcome then regretted. We struggle, all three of us for a moment, and then the pain subsides – only to be replaced by something raw and pure, and I feel a scream bunched unevenly in all my throats. Our eyes close. Hearts beat as five, the Hound and us, then one. And we’re remembering a thousand things I didn’t even know that I had forgotten.

  The first time we saw her in the Wintergarden food court. The first time we touched her. The first time she smiled. The smell of my father’s cologne, the way the waves crashed against the shore. A storm of bicycles. We’re remembering friends lost, family snatched away, my dog Molly – yes, I do like dogs. Our house exploding, my first pomp (I was ten). There’s a knife fight on the top of this tree; there’s a Death whose face changes to suit his mood, and it’s a shuttling temperament. There’re betrayals, and death, there is always death. And those fucking memories bring me to my knees.

  I open my eyes. There’s only me. Just one Steven de Selby standing on that mighty branch of the One Tree. Clash and Okkervil are gone, only their clothes remain. I straighten my rather torn and bloody suit. I feel –

  ‘You!’ Lissa shouts, and I jerk my head to the left, then drop, which is the only thing that keeps my head on its shoulders.

  She’s holding the Knives of Negotiation. And I know they could chop me up. I’ve used them, up here, before. I used them to become RM. I never expected that Lissa would wield them against me. But the top of the One Tree is a place of ritual and violence. She holds the knives expertly; they’re sharp angles of death and they’re describing cruel geometries at me. I don’t want to bleed again so soon.

  ‘Hello,’ they whisper. ‘Hello.’

  I scramble backwards.

  ‘Wait,’ Charon yells. Lissa ignores him.

  ‘Right,’ Lissa says. ‘Just you and me. The Hound wasn’t enough. But I am. I will bring you death – that is my job.’

  ‘It’s me,’ I say, and I pull my knife from my belt and yank it down across my hand. It bleeds.

  ‘Is it?’ Lissa looks from the hand to me, to Mr D and Charon, both men hovering back. Wal is fluttering between us, his hands raised.

  Mr D nods. ‘Yes, it is.’

  Lissa lowers the knives and they grumble. I can’t help smiling.

  ‘I’m back. I’m back,’ I say. ‘And I forgive you.’

  Lissa’s lip curls into a snarl. ‘You? You forgive me!’

  ‘I’m back, I can put things right.’

  ‘You were the one who put them wrong,’ Lissa says. ‘Things have changed. Neither of us are the same anymore. And there you are, offering forgiveness.’

  I take a step towards her.

  ‘Steve, you’re an ignorant bastard.’

  ‘But –’

  ‘I still can’t hear a heartbeat,’ Lissa says.

  ‘Does that mean I’m dead to you?’

  Lissa shakes head. ‘It means you aren’t you. You’re not my Steve.’

  Her Steve. My face flushes.

  Lissa looks at me intently. ‘See, I don’t understand how that works. Your heart isn’t beating – you’re not alive, you’re not dead.’

  I want to reach out a hand and touch her, but her face says no. So I don’t.

  ‘Neither are you.’

  Lissa seems almost wounded by that. ‘I know what I am. I know what you made me. My heart may not beat, not in the way that it used to, but I know the difference between living and dead. And you’re neither, Steve. You’re wrong, and not in a good way. Even now, looking at you, you’re wrong.’

  ‘Trust me; you’ve trusted me before. I’ve trusted you.’

  ‘And where has that got us?’

  I remember again the first time I saw her. The first time I felt a burst of something that was more than lust. She’d been dead, and not dead, and I’d never felt more alive.

  Her first word to me: run.

  And we hadn’t really stopped running since. We’d fought Stirrers, we’d died for each other and found rebirth in each other’s arms. Lissa had forced me to grow up because I suddenly realised that I’d had to, that she deserved the best that I was capable of. Except growing up had only made things more complicated.

  ‘I really thought I would have you forever,’ she says.

  ‘We don’t always get what we want. But …’ I reach out a hand towards her, despite the knives.

  ‘No, and a thousand times no!’ She disappears, shifts right out of there. Leaving me, Wal, Mr D and Charon on the great branch of the One Tree.

  Wal passes me a tissue, pulled from somewhere. I press it into my bloody palm.

  ‘I don’t think you should have said that whole “we don’t always get –”’

  ‘Really?’ I glare at him, and Wal glares back.

  ‘So where do we go from here?’ Wal asks, changing the subject.

  ‘You have to come with me,’ Charon says. ‘This isn’t over with. Not yet; the worst is still to come.’

  ‘What can be worse than this?’

  *

  I’m buzzing, there is so much me. I haven’t felt this, well, this Steve-ish until now, and I suddenly realise what I’ve been missing. There’s an energy, a joyous energy, that you can only ever notice when it’s been absent, like coming out of a terrible flu. I clench my hands into fists, punch at the air and laugh.

  ‘I’m Steven de Selby,’ I say.

  ‘Yes, you are,’ Charon says. ‘But we need to get you to Neti’s rooms fast.’

  ‘Why?’ And then I’m bending over, coughing, and I can taste blood.

  ‘You’re unstable. There’s more binding to be done.’

  ‘What if I don’t want it?’

  Charon flashes me a smile. And reaches out a hand. I look at it, and he sighs.

  ‘Better to get it over and done with, believe me.’ He gestures behind me. ‘Or you could deal with that if you like. I could only stop the first wave.’

  Wal’s face is a big ‘O’ of horror.

  I turn around.

  The dead are standing on the branch, walking slowly towards us. ‘Not allowed here,’ one of them says.

  I can see that the walking dead are about to become the running dead, and then the biting dead. All the sorts of not-suitable-verbs-for-dead of which I’d rather not be on the receiving end.

  ‘Call in your Inkling!’ Charo
n yells above the cries of the hordes. ‘You’re going to need all of you for this.’

  I draw poor Wal back onto my arm and grab Charon’s hand. ‘Let’s get going then.’

  Thirteen

  The bikes are gone. They’d never looked right in Aunt Neti’s parlour anyway. For a moment I can smell scones – I shiver – and then the scent’s gone. It’s just sweat du Steve, and the smell of Charon – the guy still smokes the cheapest cigarettes. And the place doesn’t feel all that threatening anymore.

  ‘You’re safe here for now, until we finish with this. The living and the dead are attacking you because you don’t belong here and you don’t belong there. Kind of like meatballs in a vegan diner.’

  ‘So why am I here at all?’

  ‘Sleight of hand,’ Charon says. ‘But it’s getting more slight as we speak.’ He smiles, all teeth.

  ‘What’s next?’

  ‘You’re not going to like it,’ Charon says. ‘And if there was any other way, I’d … No, I’d still go with this way.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘This,’ he says. ‘I mean this.’

  Charon raises one hand, spreads out his long fingers and blows across them. ‘Time, fellas. Time.’ Then he claps that hand down onto my shoulder. ‘Don’t you dare move.’

  The walls hiss. They bulge, the floral wallpaper cracks and they are pouring out. Spiders, so many spiders. Of course, it had to involve spiders.

  Onto the ground they scurry, a seething matt of darkness. And they are hissing.

  They circle us, this mass of spiders, pulling in a closing gyre, and there is an endless stream of them. The wallpaper is all gone now, and it is just the spiders; each wall is nothing but spiders, falling in, coming towards me.

  They’re running up my legs, my chest, my neck.

  I struggle, but Charon’s grip is resolute. All that strength from all those aeons working the ferry. And then he slips his hands around my head, and yanks my mouth open. Spiders pour in, spiders fill me up. And I’d scream if I could. I’d scream, or vomit, or both. Hell, I’ve done that before.

  My heart starts to beat. It pounds. Reality creaks.

  And the spiders are gone; the wallpaper has returned, though it is slightly different. No longer the damask patterning I’m familiar with, but something angular – squares within squares. It seems almost comforting. I look at the wallpaper a moment longer and it shivers.

  Charon clears his throat. ‘How do you feel?’

  ‘What am I?’

  ‘You’re a new gatekeeper. You’re Neti reborn, reconstituted, restitched with web. You’re a Power, an RE.’

  Recognised Entity. Everyone used the terms eventually, even entities as old as Charon. Neti, like Charon, was capable of organising an Orpheus Manoeuvre, of letting people enter and egress Hell. A little like Pomps, though they’d been superseded somewhat by my own kind. Something Charon had been all too happy to give up, I’d always thought, and something Neti had ever been bitter over.

  ‘So now I’m like you?’

  Charon looks at me funny, ambivalently at best. ‘Like me and the others.’

  ‘There are others?’

  ‘Of course there are. Though none of them are capable of doing what we do. There’s the One who Ties Knots, George, I think that is. There’s Sarah the Maker of Things, there’s even the God Who is Not Named because We Have Forgotten it – its name (and so has he), not the god. There’re the Caterers, you know them. I could go on, but what it means is that you aren’t dead. And you are gainfully employed, perhaps that’s enough to draw Lissa back to you.’

  ‘You think I’ve got a chance?’

  Charon doesn’t answer: he’s already gone.

  I drop onto the couch. It feels softer than the last time I sat in it. So I’m an RE. There's no elation, just a sense of time spinning out ahead of me. I feel a bit lonely. So I release Wal from my arm. The Inkling takes shape in a moment – I must be getting better. Morrigan used to be able to give his Inklings form in the living world. Not me, I could never manage it, but now, maybe now.

  ‘Did I miss anything?’ Wal says, and then he gives me a good hard look. ‘Hmm, someone knows how to land on their feet, don’t they, Mr RE?’

  I could argue that I don’t have a clue what he’s talking about, but here I am. And I never should have got so lucky, but when have I ever really been lucky?

  Wal lands on my shoulder. ‘Come on now, tell me. I’m always the last to know!’

  I end up spilling my guts to him, and afterwards he smiles and then laughs.

  ‘Oh, to be the Inkling of a fellow like you. I hit the jackpot, I reckon. Never gets boring. Fancy a cup of tea?’

  ‘I could do with a beer.’

  Wal shoves his head in the fridge and comes back with two bottles – and it’s good stuff, not the ash-infused beer of the Underworld. ‘You’re in luck,’ he says.

  ‘We both know that luck has nothing to do with it.’

  We clink our bottles.

  I look around the room. Not where I expected to end up yesterday when I rolled out of the sea. I’ve already checked out the bedroom, a big old queen-size bed. I gave the mattress a hard kick, to check that it didn’t contain spiders, and it didn’t. Not like me.

  ‘So what do you do when you’re not manifested here?’ I ask Wal.

  ‘Not a lot,’ Wal says. ‘Kind of dull in the Inkling world: mainly grey, with the occasional war. I write a lot of Game of Thrones fan fiction. From the TV show.’

  ‘How many seasons now?’

  ‘Three. Oh, you’ve got a lot of catching up to do my friend. I’ve written whole novels’ worth of the stuff.’

  ‘Slash?’

  Wal clinks my beer again, and smirks. ‘Is there any other kind, my friend?’

  *

  I’m back from a shopping expedition, stocking up the fridge and unpacking new light globes, Nirvana cracking on about heart-shaped boxes on the stereo (yes, there is a stereo) when there’s a knock at the door. I open it to Tim, holding a leather suitcase. He doesn’t look all that great, with the black eye.

  ‘Hey.’ His fingers tap against the suitcase. He’s holding it so hesitantly that I can’t help myself.

  ‘What? You got a weapon in there, buddy?’

  ‘Yeah, you could say so.’

  ‘Hey,’ I say. ‘I’ve got some beers in here if you’d –’

  ‘No. Not tonight.’

  I want to say that it should be tonight – it has to be. I’m back. It’s me – but I don’t.

  He looks around him; I can see he notices the change in the wallpaper. ‘I used to hate coming here. Neti despised me.’

  ‘She despised everyone.’

  ‘What about you? What do you despise?’

  I shrug. ‘Right now I’m not so sure.’

  I should have been welcomed back as a hero, I should be with my friends and family – the few I have left – but instead I am here, and still treated with so much suspicion. Tim must read some of this in my expression.

  ‘Steve, we tried to get you back, and failed. Many times.’ I look at him and wonder how is it that I don’t remember any of those times. I can see the truth of them in his face, but it’s as though that part of me was stolen – perhaps it was.

  ‘But now you’re here and it’s like none of it happened. You have to realise how difficult that is. Everything has a cost, and this … this one will cost us big, I think.’

  There’s no thinking in it; he knows this to be true and, come to think of it, so do I. Nothing I've done has ever come without its blood price. Tim and I lost most of our family just a few years back. And I still feel like it was my fault.

  He passes me the suitcase, a big old heavy thing.

  ‘Combination’s your birthday.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘The Knives of Negotiation,’ he says. ‘You’re Neti’s replacement, so it’s your job to guard them. I’ve never liked having them close to me. Horrible fucking things, I can h
ear them mumbling in the night, and that was through the walls of a safe. If Sally had ever found out that I’d had them in the house…’ He smiles at me. ‘Oh, and I made you a couple of mix CDs. I’ll get you up to speed with streaming sometime soon, but that will help.’

  ‘Thanks.’ I put the case down, look at the CDs. He’s printed out the band names; I don’t recognise any of them. Twenty months under the waves are going to do that to you. And what the hell is streaming? I put the CDs down on the case. ‘Are we okay?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Tim says. ‘Just give it time.’

  And I know he isn’t talking about us. We’re family after all. Both of us have been through a lot together.

  He straightens his jacket, touches his face and winces. ‘You’ve got plenty of time,’ he says, and walks back down the hall.

  I shut the door, look at the suitcase. The knives are mumbling, and now, alone, I can hear them. I look around the small room, and the doors that lead off of it.

  Plenty of time? Yeah, I suppose I do.

  About five minutes later there’s a knock on the door. I open it, and we’re back at the beginning, only he’s not holding a towel, or a gun.

  ‘There you are,’ says James. ‘I thought you’d be here.’

  Fourteen

  ‘Why does everyone know more than me?’ I ask.

  ‘Because you don’t pay enough attention to the world.’

  Fair enough. And this from a bloke who hardly knows me.

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  He lifts his hands into the air. ‘Don’t worry, I’m not carrying a gun.’ I don't tell him that a gun won’t work now – that I’m immune to such hurts. ‘I want to talk to you. That’s all we ever wanted to do. I’m sorry we went about it the wrong way, but Charon could never quite assure us of our safety.’

  I smile at him. ‘Do you feel safe now?’

  ‘Steven, in my line of work you never have the opportunity for safety.’ He gives me the weariest of smiles back. ‘I suppose you have questions.’

  All I am is questions, and the shivering power of tens of thousands of spiders. ‘Who do you represent?’

  ‘Who do you think?’