Managing Death (21 page)

The bodies jerk and spasm. Eyes flick open. Lips curl with the most cunning of smiles. ‘You’ll all be screaming by the end,’ their mouths, bearded with flies, whisper simultaneously. ‘It’s coming.’

The air is charged with a wild electricity. All over my body, hairs lift. My mobile phone crackles in my pocket. In the far corner of the room, a webwork of
electricity sighs and hisses in the air. A living, shivering net. It slides towards me; maggots pop and bubble on the floor beneath it. My first instinct is to run. Instead, I slap the nearest body hard. The Stirrer’s soul passes through me like a ball of barbed wire. And the electricity fizzles out, as though I’ve broken the circuit.

The second Stirrer snaps at my hand, ducks my strike, and somehow manages to scuttle across the ceiling. The length of the ropes that bind it limits the creature’s movement. It blows me a kiss. ‘She’ll be dead, they all will, and you’ll know what’s coming. And you won’t care,’ it hisses. It starts to chew on the ropes. But we both know it doesn’t stand a chance.

I swing a bloody fist at its face, and it’s just a body again. It’s another rough stall, though. I drop to a crouch with the pain of it. They have been in these bodies for weeks. Their souls have grown thorns and tangles. My sparrows are hard at work, too. Their pomps are quick on the tail of mine.

Lissa stumbles into the living room. She looks exhausted. ‘Now, I stayed in some dives back in my uni days, but none as bad as this. Even when I ignored the cleaning roster.’ She nods at the bodies. ‘There’s a Stirrer in every room.’

‘You got them all?’

‘The ones that your sparrows didn’t get to before me.’

‘What the fuck is going on here?’ I do my best to ignore the flashes of my Avian Pomps devouring the corpses, tugging out beakfuls of flesh.

‘Something ceremonial,’ Lissa says, distracting me from their feast. ‘Maybe the Stirrers were trying to create a life–unlife interface.’

‘Ah, one of those.’ I can almost hide the sarcasm in my voice and the annoyance at another gap in my knowledge.

Lissa shakes her head, as she binds her palm. ‘You haven’t got a clue what I’m talking about.’

I kiss her forehead. I’m just happy that she’s all right. ‘Not really. Hey, at least I’m being honest.’

She submits to the kiss. There’s a line of blood across her cheek. I brush it away as best as I can, but really just turn it into a smudge.

‘I know. Look, Steve,’ she says, ‘I’ve been doing some research. If we weren’t so distracted, so damn busy, I’d have told you by now. A life–unlife interface would draw the living to Hell, and the unliving here. Sort of like a door, more like a carousel, and the more Stirrers there are the faster it’d spin.’

‘So this would let someone enter Hell?’

‘Yeah, if they were crazy, and protected somehow.’ I think of those arcane tattoos on my failed assassin’s chest and arms. ‘They’d have to be a Pomp though. It’s a neat way of avoiding the use of one of the Recognised Entities. I mean, you couldn’t imagine Aunt Neti or Charon allowing this sort of thing.’

Maybe this explains just how Rillman came back from the dead. It would certainly explain how my
shooter managed to be hanging outside my office with a squeegee and a pistol.

‘Well, that’s one interface destroyed at least,’ says Lissa.

‘Yeah, but they’re great at hiding them. Could you feel it before you walked inside?’

‘Not at all.’

‘What’s Solstice playing at keeping this secret?’

‘Maybe he doesn’t trust us. Maybe he was curious to see what we’d do about it,’ Lissa says.

‘We’re going to have to be particularly rigorous then.’

We walk through the house, checking that each Stirrer is still. Then I start opening cupboards, Lissa behind me. There’s nothing in the kitchen, just ancient pizza boxes, and more maggots. I’ll have to hose down my boots. The bedrooms are empty too, but for the corpses above us.

‘Do we call and have this cleared?’ Lissa asks. Each city has a team set up for removing Stirrers caught out of morgues.

‘No,’ I say. ‘Solstice and his team were aware of the house. Let them clean up the mess.’

In the hallway ceiling there’s a trapdoor to the roof. I drag a chair over to it, push it open and peer into the ceiling recess. Something crashes at my head. I throw up my hands. And then it is gone, whatever it is, and the ceiling’s all wooden beams, dust and heat.

‘Are you all right?’ Lissa asks.

‘Yeah, just jumpy. Must have been a trapped bird.’ I look into the ceiling recess again. Here I can see the rough welds that hold the aerials to the roof. There’s no wiring. They’re attached to nothing but corrugated iron. And yet, I’d seen lightning dance towards me across the living room floor. I climb back down, scratch my head.

‘What I want to know is how they managed to get into the living world without us feeling them,’ Lissa says.

‘Thunderstorms,’ I say. ‘We’ve been having a lot of thunderstorms. The electrical activity can shield almost anything. And look where they set up house.’ I point out a window at the transformer station nearby. ‘That and the aerials have gotta pump out a lot of distortion. What did Alex say they called it? A grid? Suggests to me there are more of them.’

Lissa leans over and pecks my cheek.

‘What’s that for?’

‘You seem to be learning things at last.’ Then Lissa’s eyes widen. ‘Where is Alex?’

A dog’s barking somewhere, and then it stops. A shot rings out from the backyard.

We both spring to the back door. It’s bolted shut.

I try and fix on my Avian Pomps, but they’re gone. The three crows and dozen sparrows I had out there aren’t watching Alex anymore. I realise, then, that they’re dead. I try and catch their memories, but there’s nothing. In the confusion of battle I’d not noticed I’d lost track of them.

The door might be dead bolted but it doesn’t look too sturdy. I kick it hard. On the third leg-jarring belt with my boot the door bangs open.

Two Stirrers have cornered Alex in the backyard. My Avian Pomps are bloody lumps of feathers around him. A Stirrer has Alex by the wrist with one hand and it’s swinging out at him with a knife. Alex is doing his best to keep his distance, but the Stirrer’s pulling him in. The other Stirrer reaches out a hand to grab him. This one must be newer; its movements are clumsy, its hair and neck draped in spiderwebs.

Lissa and I race down the stairs from the back door towards Alex. I take the one with the knife, slap a bloody hand around its neck, another around its waist, and jerk it backwards in some mad parody of a dance.

The other Stirrer gets a moment’s notice and it swings its head towards Lissa. Alex punches out with his now free hand, and as it stumbles, Lissa stalls it. The Stirrer falls.

Mine shudders in my grip. I hold on as its rough soul scrapes through me. It’s a dreadful sensation; this Stirrer’s been around for a long time. Once it’s hurled back to the Deepest Dark, I drop to my knees.

‘You OK?’ I demand, looking at Alex.

‘You took your bloody time.’ Alex is shaking, but he manages an unsteady smile.

‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘I didn’t expect the strongest Stirrer to be out here. There’s been more than a few surprises today.’

‘The bastard just dropped from the roof and took out your birds. They tried to protect me, but it was too fast. And then the other one appeared, stumbling out from under the house. Shit, I thought I was dead.’

There’s no point in brooding, in being too scared. Alex is a mate, I have to kill this fear right away. I wish I was better at this.

‘So, Alex. You doing anything on Christmas Day?’

‘No.’ Well, that’s surprised him. ‘Mum’s whooping it up on a cruise ship in the Pacific, and –’

Yeah, his dad’s dead, I don’t want him going there. ‘Well, you are now. Our place. Ten-thirty.’

Alex’s grin broadens. ‘You bloody Pomps. Just like my dad. Nothing unsettles you.’

I only wish that was true.

I
f someone is opening and closing the doorway to Hell then I need to know just how that might be done. I’m sick and tired of being in the dark about this stuff. I try calling Charon, but he’s out of the office. So instead I decided to visit Aunt Neti.

Tim stops me at the opening to her hallway. ‘I heard you had some trouble in the field today.’

‘If you call Stirrers generating lightning, and nearly stabbing Alex to death, then yes.’ I give him a rundown on the house, and what we found there. ‘Lissa thinks they were building a gateway between the lands of the living and the dead, and I figure that gateway may have been open for a while. And who has been using one lately? Rillman, and whoever the hell it is who’s been tailing me.’

‘You think they’re connected?’

‘They have to be, don’t they?’

Tim shuffles me a little deeper into the hallway and lights up. There are no smoke detectors here.

‘If Alex hadn’t found out about the house it would still be there. And it would still be doing whatever the
hell it was doing.’ I jerk a thumb down the hallway. ‘If anyone can tell me about that it will be her.’

Tim takes it in. ‘You want me to come with you?’

‘Only if you don’t have a Death Moot to help me plan.’

He nods, relieved. ‘The Caterers are coming tomorrow. That should be interesting.’

Tim walks back the way he came, and I take a deep breath and head towards Aunt Neti’s residence. Wal starts to stir on my biceps. Wings flutter. With every step he takes a more 3D form.

Even down this end of the hall I can smell the cooking. It’s a delightful and homely sort of smell – scones again, at a guess.

I close a fist to knock on the door, and the door swings open. I don’t know why I bother.

‘Is that you smoking, Mr de Selby?’ Aunt Neti’s broad, many-eyed face peers down. She squints past my shoulder, checks up the hallway.

‘No, I quit smoking a while back. It never stuck with me.’

‘Well, it stinks on you.’ She jabs a thumb at Wal. ‘Smoking cherubs, you’re all class.’

Wal shakes his head furiously. ‘Whoa, it wasn’t me. I don’t even smoke cigars, well, hardly … ’

‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘My cousin Tim – my Ankou – gets a bit nervous in this hallway. You know how it is.’

‘Well, he should be if he keeps up with the cigarettes. I was waiting for you,’ Aunt Neti says, and smiles,
revealing teeth as dark as the space between the stars, and gums far too bright a red. There’s a flash of an even redder tongue behind them.

I clear my throat. ‘I expected as such.’

Aunt Neti titters. ‘Now, you come inside, young man. And we’ll have ourselves a little chat.’

I close the door behind me and enter the cloying warmth of her small parlour, hoping to avoid her embrace. No luck, though.

Aunt Neti’s eight arms enfold me. She all but pulls me off my feet. I peck her on the cheek. Mr D had insisted I do that, and she beams at me again. I get another glimpse of all those teeth.

I’ve heard rumours that she eats human fingers. Her room leads onto a garden of immense proportions and I peer through the door that leads out to it. Part of it must be connected to the living world because it is so verdant. ‘Fed on blood and bone,’ she says, watching me, clapping her eight hands together. ‘Plenty of it around here.’ She says that far too enthusiastically.

There are other doors – leading to the other regional headquarters – but all of them are shut. Shadows move behind one of them. There is a scraping and a scratching behind another. How many people have come into this drawing room and not come out? How many live between the walls, between the realms of life and death?

Well, I’m not a person in that sense. So I’m safe here. At least I tell myself that I’m safe here. And I can sort of believe that.

The tiny spider in the corner has grown considerably. It casts a large black shadow onto the wall, and it watches me with the same intensity it did last time.

Neti passes me a plate of scones after cutting them into halves and slathering first butter, then jam, then cream all over them. ‘Just out of the oven,’ she says. ‘And I’ve just opened a new jar of blackberry jam.’

Mum used to make blackberry jam. Dad would make the scones. And as Mum used to say, ‘Steven would make a mess.’

Wal pokes me in the ribs.

‘Thank you,’ I say quickly. I pick up a scone; take a nibble at its edges. Then a decent bite. ‘It’s delicious.’

Aunt Neti beams. ‘Of course it is, dear. I always make scones when people come with questions. I find it loosens the tongue.’

‘I need to know who has been crossing over lately,’ I say.

Neti frowns. ‘There’s been nothing peculiar, as far as I can tell. The last really odd crossing, well, it was you, dear. Since then, we’ve had nothing but the occasional blip, you know, of a soul not that happy about moving on. And when I say not happy, I mean raving, barking, madly unhappy. Has to be, to make a blip. But that’s all. Now, eat up. I spent a considerable time on those scones. Do you know how hard it is to make the flour of Hell palatable?’

I don’t ask how, just nod my head. ‘This really is delicious.’

Aunt Neti beams at me. Eyes as predatory as a hawk, waiting, waiting for the right moment. The right moment for what, I’m not sure, but it’s making my skin crawl, at least as much as when she put her arms around me.

I clear my throat. ‘What do you know of Francis Rillman?’

‘
The
Francis Rillman?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘He was highly ambitious. He came to see me once. About something … Oh, it was a long while ago. Let me think …’

‘It’s really quite important.’

‘Oh, I know that, dear.’

‘He died recently.’

Aunt Neti raises an eyebrow. ‘Really, I don’t think so.’ She stands up and walks over to one of the closed doors. She’s in and out in a heartbeat. I don’t get much of a chance to see what lies beyond, but think of a scream made manifest, and you’d be partway there. She drops a book on the tiny table before her, and flips through the pages.

I try to get a look inside it.

‘No, no. There is nothing as far as I can see.’ She passes it to me, and I can see my name there, the last entry, written in neat printing, the letters OM next to it. ‘This is my list of those who crossed over and back. It’s a tiny book because it doesn’t need to be that long. He’s only here once, like you.’