The Everlasting (11 page)

“Some odd things,” he said.

“I've been around a long time. I've developed certain peccadilloes.”

“Is teasing mere mortals one of them?”

Nina looked at him, her face stern and so, so old once again. “I'm not teasing you, Scott,” she said. Then she looked across the road at the pub. “It's time to go. Stay close.
We're so close
.” She whispered the last three words, speaking to herself more than him.

“If these were the pages Papa had, you could have taken them at any time.”

“He hid them. And besides, it's not only these pages we're here for. It's the clue Papa left with them that will lead us on.”

“And that's in his letter too?”

Nina stood up and brushed grass cuttings from her rump. Her trousers were stained dark with her own blood, stiffened like cardboard, but even then she appeared the image of gracefulness. “No. I just knew him. The clue will be here, because Papa left it for you.”

To begin with—before the blights came, and Scott fell, and things turned bad—events
flowed
.

It seemed to Scott that Nina had been waiting for a convergence of chances. She had closed her eyes and listened to the surge of the world, and somehow she knew how long it would take her and Scott to stand, walk across the pavement, reach the other side, pick
the lock on the pub's front door, and go inside. There were no pauses, no wasted moments, and he tried hard to work out why wasted moments should mean so much to an immortal.

Nina stood and walked out into the road. She did not stop at the curbside and look both ways. She did not alter her pace. And Scott followed. They walked through the traffic, gliding through gaps between vehicles. Nobody tooted their horns because they were not risking their lives. Nobody gave them the finger and leaned from their window, shouting about what stupid assholes they were, because Nina and Scott steered through the traffic as easily as a bird flying through a forest.

By the time they reached the opposite pavement Scott was sweating. He felt a mixture of elation and dread.

Nina did not pause. She stepped between a tall blond woman scratching her nose and a short black man talking into a mobile phone, knelt at the pub door, and withdrew the ring of keys from her pocket. Scott followed, so caught up in her confidence that he did not look around to see whether anyone was watching. If he had looked he knew what he would have seen: someone walking by, glancing at their watch just as they drew level; a driver trapped in the slow-moving traffic, changing a CD in his car stereo; someone else staring into the comic shop window next door to the pub, something about last night drawn in their wistful expression.

“Are you hiding us?” he asked.

“I just pick my moments well.” Nina was working on the lock with her skeleton keys, her hands moving delicately as she manipulated the tumblers inside.

Scott stood behind her, staring at her back.
Is she making them all ignore us, or can they just not see us?
He looked around at last and saw exactly what he knew he would see: the world continued, ignoring this brash crime in their midst.

“In we go.” Nina stood and shoved the door with her shoulder, glancing back and nodding Scott inside.

He went in and she closed the door. “No alarm?”

“Hope not.”

“You mean you don't know?”

“I'm immortal, not God.”

“You believe in God?” It came naturally, but Scott suddenly realized what a significant question that might be.

Nina looked straight at him, blinking slowly. Her coffee-colored skin looked almost too smooth to touch. “Now that really is a question for another time,” she said.

“Okay . . . another time. Right now we're in a closed pub. You think Papa hid the stone tablets in here?”

“That's what it says in his note.”

“So he chose a place like this to conceal part of the Chord of Souls.”

“What better place? No one would think of looking here. And it had to be somewhere accessible for you to find.”

Scott looked around. There were still a few dirty
glasses and overflowing ashtrays on tables, and there was a spray of crumbs on the floor by the bar. Glass cases held signed rugby shirts. A menu was chalked onto a wall board, offering standard pub food. A quiz machine glowed green where it had been left on, and at the shady rear of the pub a large white screen hung awaiting the next match. A basic city-center pub, with nothing to differentiate it from a dozen others. What better place, indeed.

“So where are they?”

“Down.” Nina followed the L-shaped bar to the rear of the pub, turned the corner, and pushed through a door marked with male and female toilet signs. The light was poor back here, supplied by a rooflight covered with a decade's worth of moss and city grime. Male toilet on their right, female on their left, but Nina chose a third door with a heavy padlock locking the hasp and staple latch. She went to work with her key ring again.

“What were you in jail for?” Scott asked.

“Armed robbery.” The padlock fell to the floor and Nina opened the door.

“Great.” Scott was not sure whether or not he wanted her to elaborate. She said no more. He felt around on the wall for a light switch, and by the time he'd found it Nina was already at the bottom of the stairs. Scott went down and stood beside her.

They were in the beer cellar. It stank of spilled beer, a sickly, stale caramel stench that seemed to coat the inside of his nostrils in seconds. A dozen barrels, stacked two high, lined the wall on one side. The opposite
wall was piled with boxes and crates of bottles, some of them opened and half-empty, others full. A few bottles lay smashed and disregarded on the floor, the largest glass chunks kicked to one side. The light down here was not very good, but Scott could still see the handful of rodent traps scattered beneath barrels and between boxes, a couple of them bearing dead, rotting mice. The stink of their demise was evident below that of spilled drink: old rot, dried fur.

“So where are they?” Scott asked.

“Where do you think?” Nina turned to him, a strange look on her face.

“Are you all right?”

She nodded. “Fine. So where do you think Papa would have hidden them?”

“You're asking me? Don't you know?”

“It was you he was hiding them for. I'm just curious. Wondering whether—”

“You told me you wanted to die.”

Nina frowned. “I'd like the knowledge of how to end my curse, yes.”

“But you're still curious. If you're tired of life, I can't imagine you being curious about anything.”

“Don't try to second-guess me, Scott. You'll never understand. Now . . . where do you think they are?”

“I have no idea.”

“Sure?”

“Nina—or whatever your real name is, or will be, or was—I have no fucking idea. Please stop playing games. I'm afraid. My wife has gone, I'm afraid, and I want to get her back as soon as I can.”

Nina looked down at her feet. “Of course, I'm sorry. Truly.”

“Deeper,” Scott said. “I think he'd have buried them deeper.”

“I think so too.” Nina did not offend him by smiling, but he could see the satisfaction in her eyes as she walked to the end of the long, narrow room.

At first glance the wall looked solid, but as Nina ran her hands across the painted surface her fingers seemed to draw the outline of something buried. Scott frowned, glanced slightly to the left and right, closed his eyes. When he opened them again a few seconds later the door was more than apparent.

Seeing more
, she had said.

“We need to find something to open this,” Nina said.

“How long will it take? Someone could be here anytime.”

“Then let's hurry.”

Scott searched the few shelves on the wall beneath the stairs, feeling by touch because the light barely reached that far. He returned to Nina with a screwdriver and claw hammer, though half the hammer's handle had snapped off. “All I could find.”

“It'll do.” Nina set to work. First she ran the screw-driver's point around the outline in the wall, clearing powdery plaster from a sunken seal. She stepped back, breathing heavily, and it was then that Scott noticed she was panting.

“What is it?”

Nina shook her head, reaching out for the hammer.

Scott stepped back. “What's wrong?”

“I can't touch them,” she said. “Even being near them . . . it's like I can taste the end of time.”

“That's why I'm here?”

She nodded.

“Well . . . thanks for being honest.”

“Scott—”

He moved beside Nina and pried the hammer's claws beneath the edge of the seal. It was metal, rusted into the plaster, weak, and a few wrenches on the hammer saw a foot-long section of lining pop from the wall. It brought a spread of plaster with it, filling the air with dust and exposing a timber board behind the wall. He worked around the board, breaking the seal easily enough, scoring the surface of the wood, getting closer and closer to whatever lay behind. And it felt all wrong.

He should not have been doing this. It was not his place.

“Something's wrong,” he said. Nina was standing behind him now, and he could feel her eyes on the back of his neck. He turned. “Nina.”

She was sweating, wringing her hands together as if to squeeze out fear. “They're so close!” she said.

“You wrote them, Nina. Why can't you touch them?”

“Just the way things are. I don't make the laws; I just follow them.”

“Does that include armed robbery?”

“I mean the
real
laws,” she scoffed.

“So what happens when we find them? How do we carry them out?”

“You can. But it's the clue that's more important. Your grandfather would have left something, some hint. . . .”

“Maybe not. Maybe he never wanted the book found at all.”

Nina stared at him without answering.

Scott went back to work, and soon the whole metal seal was ripped away. He set to work on the wood, breathing in air heavy with dust. He wanted to cough, but he was afraid that once he started he would not be able to stop.

The board was jammed in tight. He pushed the screwdriver through between the top of the board and the wall, encountering gritty resistance that soon crumbled when he twisted the tool from side to side. He felt like Lord Caernarvon gaining his first look into Tutankhamen's tomb, and he held his breath for a few seconds lest this buried place also carried a curse.

It's Nina who's cursed
, he thought, but he wondered whether that was entirely true. Eternal life? Many would kill for that.

Some already had.

The wood popped out without warning, falling against his legs and scraping his knees. He stepped back and let it clatter to the floor.

Nina moaned behind him. He turned to see what was wrong, and turned back when he saw that she was looking directly into the hole in the wall. It was totally dark in there, as though a huge space extended back beyond the new doorway.

Scott stepped aside to allow light access, and he reached out and touched Nina's arm, urging her aside as well. He realized that it was first time he had touched her.

“I can't see anything,” he said.

“They're there. I can feel them.”

“Where?”

“Deeper.”

“We'll need a torch.” Scott left Nina in the cellar, dashing upstairs to the pub, vaulting the bar, and looking around for a torch. He found one behind a row of dusty pint mugs, obviously unused. Perhaps it had been a locals' place once, but modern city life had bled the pub's personality.

Back past the toilets, downstairs, and when he reached the basement Nina had gone.

He paused for a moment, wondering whether he would spend the rest of his life haunted by ghosts.

Then he heard the scrambling sounds coming from the hole in the wall. He hurried to it and shined the torch inside. It illuminated a bare earth wall three feet away, the far edge of a vertical pit.
Deeper
, Nina had said. And deeper she had gone.

Scott leaned in and shined the torch down. There were metal rungs set in the wall, along with the remains of timber boards still buried in the earth here and there. Others had rotted away. This was an old place.

Nina looked up. “They're down here, Scott. Come down!”

“What if I don't want to touch them for you?”

“Then you don't want Helen back.”

Who's using who?
he thought, but he shoved the idea aside. He had to believe that they were helping each other.

He climbed through the hole and started down the metal rungs, holding the torch in his left hand. The rungs were badly rusted in places, and a few had already bent beneath Nina's weight. He was heavier. He tried to avoid damaged rungs where he could, because he was very conscious that they had to climb back out this way.

“I'm down,” Nina said below him. Her voice was strangely deadened by the walls of the pit.

Did Papa really go to these lengths?
he thought.
Did he come here and dig? If not, what was this place before? Someone must have known about it. He can't have just come here and found—

“Oh, no,” Nina said.

“What? Nina?” Scott leaned sideways and shined the torch down. He could see the top of Nina's head, and around her a deeper darkness where the pit opened up into a wider room. At her feet, set into the earthen floor of this place, were seven stone slabs. He could see the carvings on their faces from here; the torch made shadows that danced in the grooves and cuts.

Nina looked up at him. “Scott, I didn't know.”

“Didn't know what? Is that them?”

“Yes, they're here. But I had no idea how far Lewis had traveled in the Wide. I had no inkling. Scott, listen to me. We have a few heartbeats before something arrives.
I feel it closing.
Don't
let them touch you. Got it?
Whatever happens, do not . . . let them . . . touch you.
” She was staring up into his eyes, her own eyes heavier and deeper than any pit could be.