Dead Boys (12 page)

Clearing the cluttered anxieties from his mind was no easy task, but Jacob did his best to honor his ward’s wishes. Calm had never come easily to him, so he kept still and did his best imitation of someone relaxing. His gaze wandered to the Living Man’s face, where an expression of suffering seemed, if anything, to be more pronounced now than ever. Unsettled, Jacob lifted his gaze to the alcove walls, and had just descended into a level of boredom that bore a passing resemblance to serenity when Remington broke his concentration.

“Oh!” said Remington.

The crow cawed, took flight, and landed inside his skull, and Remington unclasped the headless’ hands to lay his own on the Living Man’s temples.

Remington made no sound, but his body jerked as if he’d received an electric shock. With a terrible creaking, the Living Man’s head wrenched open its mouth and began, in a voice as strong and constant as Lethe, to scream.

CHAPTER SEVEN

The Living Man’s Remains

T
he scream began as the hoarse complaint of a man roused from catatonia by shock treatment, then widened into a roar as its utterer slowly returned to awareness. His throat-shredding bass was soon joined by Jacob’s oboe-tones and Remington’s earnest alto, additions that managed, in a few minutes, to transform his roar into a howl of disbelieving angst, and then, when it was clear to the screamer that his tormentors had no intention of letting up, into a brief moment of silence that led them to cry out in excitement.

Their joyful noise was short-lived. What followed was an outpouring of speech more ragged and emphatic than the scream, but no more coherent: he was cursing them, that much was clear, but in what language Jacob could not begin to guess. It sounded at first like the religious rush of glossolalia, but proved too discrete and consistent for babble. The sonic torrent was unsettling, but more so was the Living Man’s visage: the severed head, gnawed by shadow, raking the walls with its shriveled eyes, its skin fluttering around a jaw loosing an endless stream of syllables, gave Jacob bone-chills. Though it shamed him to do it, he led the company out of the cave to reconsider their strategy.

“We’re sunk,” said Jacob, sitting heavily on the bank, bowed beneath his soggy knapsack. “We’ll never get back to the city without being audible from miles away, and what are the chances we’ll find a translator abroad?”

“We don’t need a translator,” said Leopold, peering upstream. “That’s not his mother tongue, nor any other man’s. I’ll bet you my favorite bone that your Living Man is speaking a language of his own invention. Leave him to me and I’ll have him chirping straight before we’re caught loitering in the path of our pursuers.”

“What are you going to do?” called Remington.

“I’m going to talk some sense into him,” said Leopold and strode into the murk at the mouth of the cave.

“Well,” said Jacob, staring despondently at Remington’s toes, “what harm can it do? Things can’t get much worse for him, the poor sod. He suffered through years of consciousness in the Tunnels, according to my informant.”

“Who’s that?” said Remington, plopping down beside him. “Your informant, I mean.”

“A fair question. Nearly everything I learned about the Living Man was told to me by a dried-up drunkard in the Parleyfields, a wide expanse of open land on the bank of the river opposite Dead City. While most of the corpses who occupy that territory do nothing but gossip, retelling the same stories, again and again, to every unoccupied ear they can find, there are some true philosophers out there, too, attempting to work through the problems of existence one extended jaw-session at a time. The Parleyfields are to conversation what the Tunnels are to drink, and this man, a one-time habitué of the bar where Ma Kicks once worked, was attempting to replace one of these vices with the other.

“‘I need to keep myself on the straight and narrow. All I desire,’ he said when I’d offered him the world, ‘is a stool strong enough to sit upon for a decade or two,’ and so I spent a small fortune finding him one. When he’d been better situated, he told me as much as he could bear to recall. ‘No stories. No memories. I was there, my conscience is as dirty as hers, and that’s enough. I’ll tell you that he went round the bend, after. I’ll tell you that he babbled, and that the woman Clarissa, Ma Kicks they called her after, used him as her crystal ball. But no more. I could stand his voice no more. I could stand his incomprehensible accusations no more. I could bear the weight of our actions no more. It’s worse to think of them now than ever it was. Each day drives the memories deeper. My thanks for the stool, but may I never see you again. You’re now one more reminder of what we’ve done.’

“That vague confession wasn’t much to go on, but it led me to Ma Kicks, and from there to here. And from here, I’ve begun to suspect that what happened with the Living Man down in that pub had something to do with the secrets he holds, secrets that will one day enable me to return to the Lands Above. Whatever went wrong down in that bar, it trapped him here. And we’ll be the ones to right that wrong. Assuming, that is, that Leopold has talents he hasn’t yet revealed.” For a time they listened to the voices echoing from the cave, both equally inscrutable. Recognizing that this might be their last moment alone, Jacob leaned close. “Speaking of what our floppy-necked friend may be hiding,” he said softly, “I hope it has occurred to you that he can’t be trusted.”

“Oh, sure! I like Leo, but he only thinks about himself.”

“That seems not to bother you, which is admirable, in its way. I would, however, ask you to remember that the Living Man is our responsibility. Mostly mine. But you are becoming—a fuller partner in this enterprise.”

“That’s true. I
am
the one who woke him up.”

“Then let us agree,” Jacob whispered, “to help one another keep an eye on Leopold. We don’t yet know what he’s planning.”

Remington stood and saluted, flanked by Adam and Eve, who held their flattened hands up to empty air. “Aye-
aye
, sir! We’ll be the best spies you’ve ever seen, just you wait!”

“Well, and that’s that!” cried Leopold, strutting out of the cave. Jacob jumped, then relaxed: Leopold was too fluffed up with pride to have paid the slightest attention to their conversation. “The head hates me more than the Magnate does, but at least the horrid thing is talking sense now. I’ll accept your lavish praise any time, gentlemen.”

Jacob leapt to his feet, wobbled dangerously, then froze. “Is it true?” he cried, listening intently to the silent cave. “But how?”

“Have you ever wondered how I paid for my drinks during my tenure in the Tunnels? It wasn’t with time, I’ll tell you that for free: I was employed as a bouncer, ridding the pubs of their most abhorrent customers in exchange for swill. But I never used force, or even threatened it. Rather, I provoked others to attack
me
, a violation of underworld protocol so severe that any barroom would unite in ejecting the offender. In short, I have never met a corpse I couldn’t annoy into action, and so my plan for rendering the Living Man sensible was to do what I do best: I insulted him. I couldn’t be sure what language he spoke, so I cycled through as many as I could recall.

“I’ve studied the dozens from some of history’s preeminent practitioners of the pejorative, after all, and our bodiless friend was the beneficiary. In Italian, I told him, ‘The sperm that found your mother’s egg had no tail.’ In Arabic: ‘My left testicle weighs more than your mortal remains.’ In Hindi I compared the head to a kidney-stone; in Swedish to a fishing lure; and in Japanese I called him a disgrace to the category of the sphere. In French, I expressed my doubts that the head had ever possessed functional reproductive equipment, and in Spanish I wondered if he might be useful as a shot-put. Tiny breaks in his babble followed each of these jabs, so I dug deeper, into a store of languages I can barely recall, spewing insults in halting Hebrew, mangled Mandarin, and execrable Urdu, at last provoking a heavy sigh, then silence.

“I had only one arrow left in my quiver, which I’d learned from a crumbling professor of ancient literature at a pub called the Drunken Boat: it was the Persian word for ‘homeless,’ and as it struck home, the head spoke his first comprehensible word.”

“What did he say?” asked Remington as they scrambled for the cave.

“He may be a bit—confused,” Leopold admitted. “I believe he was asking for his grandmother.”

Jacob was trembling as he stepped into the murk of the cave, where the Living Man’s consciousness washed over him like a wave of heat from the door of a burning building. He forced himself to hold his hero’s gaze.

“There should be nothing left to tear down,” said the head, his voice as tremulous as a dry leaf on the branch. “There’s no hide to pierce, no wrist to slap, no heart to break. All that’s left of Etienne is a little ball of bone.

“It should be too small a target, but it isn’t small enough, is it? Something flinches: not Etienne Rassendren, but not his ghost. A ghost is what remains when there’s nothing left, and there’s just enough left of me to hurt.

“When the skull is dust, will you mock the dust, and watch the cloud recoil?

“This has been an experiment, hasn’t it, to see how much you can subtract from a boy before he’s not a boy any more?

“Well, we aren’t there yet, are we? Not just yet.”

Etienne’s eyes rolled over Jacob’s face, then over his shoulder to the silhouettes of Leopold, Remington, Adam, and Eve. “Look at you: too excited to be ashamed, too ashamed to be excited. You have a question, don’t you? Like all the others. You want me to find something, or tell you something about the future. Go ahead. The sooner you ask, the sooner you can be disappointed and leave me to my mourning.”

“All we want are directions,” said Remington.

“Remington, hush!” said Jacob.

“No,” said Leopold, “the boy’s quite right. I’ve browbeat this legless lump of self-pity enough, and stroking his ego won’t bring him any solace. Pay him the respect of telling him plainly why you’ve taken him hostage, Jacob.

“Remington, let’s leave these two to get acquainted. You and I are going to prepare a welcome for the Masker and his boys.”

“A trap?” said Remington.

“More of a diversion, but if a brilliant plan comes to you, you’ll find me receptive, not to mention astonished. Now come along, boy! Bring your pets—we’ll need their help.”

Gathering his calm, Jacob knelt before the head of Etienne Rassendren. “Remington speaks the truth,” he said. “I need directions. I know what you
did
, and I want to know how. I plan to cross into the world of the living.”

“Oh,” said Etienne, “one of those. Well, let’s make this quick. The world between worlds will not return you to life. The translation doesn’t work that way.”

“Nor would I want it to,” said Jacob.

“Oh, no?” said Etienne. “Do you think that your living friends will welcome you as you are? That your mother would embrace you? That anyone you knew would accept this rotting bundle of bones as someone they loved?”

“It makes no difference to me if they do,” Jacob snapped. He caught himself before he said more: giving in to his frustration was hardly going to win his case. “I need this. Let’s leave it at that.”

“Even,” said Etienne with a weary sigh, “if I were partial to the chase of wild gooses, there would be no point in chasing this one. Hasn’t it occurred to you that if there had been a way back, I would have taken it before I died?

“The way is closed, Jacob. There was a—a kind of key that opened the way, and it’s gone now. I lost it. Believe me, I’m sorrier about it than you are, but you can’t get there from here any more, not by any means I know.”

“I respect your hopelessness,” said Jacob carefully, “and, from all I’ve been told, you’ve earned it. But I beg you to return the favor: respect my hope. You may not want to return to the world of the living now, but try to remember when you did. That feeling that once spurred you is the very same that drove me to find you, to wake you, to beg you for help. And if it gains me nothing in the end? Well, then you can enjoy a chuckle at my expense. But if I’m right, and we can find a way across, you won’t have lost a thing.”

“What could I lose that hasn’t already been taken?” said Etienne. “Loss isn’t the issue, it’s absurdity. I’ve had my fill of pointless questing, Jacob, and if anything in this world could be worse than those reeking Tunnels, it’s watching you fail in my footsteps.”

“And what if—”

“Give it up!” shouted Etienne. “There’s nothing you can give me that can change what’s been done, and nothing you can threaten me with that I haven’t already suffered. I’m stuck where I am, and the best thing, the
only
thing that you can do for me is to leave me here in this cave.”

Jacob had run out of ideas, but for one. He stood, pacing around the head in a slow circle. “Do you really believe, Etienne, that
nothing
I might do could affect you?”

Etienne sighed. “Perhaps I lack imagination.”

Crouching, Jacob reached down and wrapped his hands around the wood of the plaque. It felt somehow heavier now that the head was awake. “For example,” said Jacob softly as he lifted. “If I were to carry you back—there.” He put his lips to Etienne’s ear. “To the Crowded Car. If I were to carry you back to that place and nail you right back on the wall where I found you, awake and aware.”