The Everlasting (19 page)

“Four days is a lifetime in the company of a friend, Scott.”

“That doesn't make any sense.”

Nina was silent for a few seconds, her breath hidden in the swish of the windshield wipers. “It does to me,” she said.

“So your friend went on to kill Hickok and—”

“Jack never killed anyone.”

“Then who?”

Nina was silent for so long that Scott thought she had fallen asleep. He glanced across at her, unable to see her eyes, and the third time he looked she had turned back to him. “Something else,” she said. “Jack just got the blame. So do you trust me now? You're Jack, Scott, and I've taken you in from the storm.”

“No,” he said. “I don't. And we're not friends, Nina.” He expected her to start raging, and he had no idea what an immortal could really do when provoked.

“Fair enough,” she said. “But you
will
trust me. You'll see that my cause in this is not totally selfish. I promise.”

“I hope so,” he said, and he really did. He liked
Nina. She was so different from him that he could barely comprehend her, but there was still a humanity about her—something naive and primal, something almost innocent—that drew him. Old Man had lost his way ages ago, taking to a hole in the ground to survive. Nina was still out here. For Scott, that said a lot.

After an hour of contemplative silence, Scott said, “I asked you to tell me a story, and now you've confused me more than ever.”

“Sorry,” Nina said.

“That's okay.” He drove on, wondering whether she was sorry at all.

They pulled off the motorway outside Preston and found a pub that had rooms to let. They'd come almost two hundred miles, and Scott was exhausted. Part of him wanted to carry on through the night, reach the place of the screaming skulls, and discover whether the rest of the book was there or not. After that, perhaps, would come Helen. But another part of him urged caution. Somehow it felt right, to stop, rest, and take stock. Fatigue made the decision easier.

After checking into their adjoining rooms, they sat in the bar for a while, watching people come and go. The pub claimed to be one of the most haunted in Britain, but Scott had seen no sign of any ghosts. He was glad. He'd entered his room warily, knowing that he'd never be able to sleep where a wraith played moments from the past. He was briefly tempted to take the manager to task over the brash statement, but
that seemed so crass. And besides, he had no way of backing his knowledge of the truth.

“There's never any real understanding, is there?” he said.

Nina was sipping at yet another cup of black coffee. “What do you mean?”

“People.
These
people. They don't understand very much. Their knowledge is mostly constrained.”

“You feel you know more than them already. I suppose you do.”

“I do. The Wide, the Chord of Souls. You.”

Nina brushed her long hair back behind her ear, a surprisingly vulnerable gesture. “After just a couple of days, too. Imagine how much I understand after much, much longer.”

“You haven't told me when you were born.”

“You'd never believe me.”

“I believe that you're immortal.”

“Do you?”

Scott nodded. He stared into her eyes.
Yes, I believe
.

“But deep down, you can't believe it. It's been only two days, Scott. You've seen and heard a lot, but your conditioning—”

“I was conditioned by Papa.”

Nina looked away and smiled. “Of course,” she said. “I sometimes forget.” Scott was not sure whether there was a mocking tone there or not. She had a way of making him feel so inferior, an insect in the protection of a hawk.

“What about the others?” he asked. “Tell me about them. Are they all like you? Or are most of them mad, like Old Man?”

“Madness is relative,” she said. “You have to have something to compare it to. We're unique.”

“You're sure you're the only ones? Twelve immortals, and you're sure you're unique? Nature can't like that.”

“I'm sure it doesn't. And yes, I'm sure. We've had a long time to look for others.”

“Who told you what to write in that book?”

“I've already said, you can never know. No one can. It would change everything. A change that rapid and extreme would mean the end.”

“God?”

Her expression gave him nothing.

“If it was God, and the book is proof of His existence . . . I don't know, maybe proof would be a good thing. If everyone
knew
He was there, maybe the world would be a better place.”

Nina took another drink of coffee.

“Well . . .” Scott drained his drink and stood to get another. He looked around the pub. A family sat in one corner, parents trying to keep their kids occupied while their dinner was prepared. A few couples were sitting here and there, a scattering of lonely men drinking lonesome pints, and a large family group sat around the other side of the bar, playing some sort of quiz and enjoying one another's company. It was an attractive place, but laced with the trappings of chaindom:
stock menus, familiar wood and chrome fittings, and pointless beams newly cut to look old. “I'll get us another drink,” he said. “And then I'd like to hear about the others. If that's okay with you.” He walked across to the bar without waiting for Nina's reply.

I want to hear, because one of them has Helen
.

“What can I get you?” The barman glanced across at Nina, then back at Scott.

“Abbott, and a black coffee, please.”

And I think she already knows which one it might be
.

“Here on holiday?”

“No.”

“Right.” The barman looked at Nina again as he poured the pint, eyes twitching up and down as he sized her up.

Maybe she'll tell me if I tell her about the screaming skulls. But maybe not
.

“Very haunted pub, this one.”

Scott handed over a fiver. “No, it isn't.”

The barman gave him a weird look, scooped change from the till, and dropped it on the bar.

“Thanks,” Scott said. He hadn't meant to be rude, but it was too late now. “Cheers.”

The barman nodded and offered a brief smile before going to serve someone else.

He just doesn't understand
, Scott thought.
He has no idea of what's out there. He doesn't even know his own pub
. For the first time since meeting Nina, he began to believe that a person could know too much.

Nina thanked him when he placed another coffee before her. She took a sip and sighed in appreciation. Scott did the same with his beer.

“So?” he asked.

“A dozen of us,” Nina said. She suddenly sounded keen to talk. “Some, like me, have stayed in the world. We travel. Change names and identities when the time comes. Some learn things; others simply live to experience. Cleo—that's her name for now, last I heard—claims she's had sex with over six hundred thousand men and women. She never tires of it. Fucks her way through time, and there are legends about her everywhere she goes.”

“Quite a responsible way to treat immortality.”

“We weren't chosen for this, you know,” Nina said, a note of anger creeping in. “We happened to be the ones to find it and write it all down. We're not some illustrious group handed a great purpose. There's no moral duty because we're immortal. Why should there be? Cleo enjoys herself, and what's wrong with that? Best thing to do with life.” She trailed off, stroking her finger around the rim of her cup.

“You haven't told me what you do,” Scott said.

“You wanted to hear about the others.” She glared up at him, forbidding any response, and carried on. “Three of us disappeared soon after we wrote the Chord of Souls. No one has seen them since. Perhaps like Old Man they went underground, and who knows what's become of them? There's no telling. Maybe they're lying mad at the bottom of potholes, or
perhaps they slink through life below the radar of civilization, doing their own thing and feeling no need to be a part of anyone else's immortality.”

“What do you mean?”

“Some of us meet up. Every hundred years or so, six of us gather together to discuss what we've been doing. A couple like to . . . play games. Sometimes dangerous games.”

“Dangerous for who?”

“For the pawns they use.”

“The people, you mean.”

Nina nodded. “The people. The two who play like to pitch people against one another, either singly, in small groups or—once or twice—in armies. They play.”

“What does the winner get?”

“A point.”

“That's it?”

“Yep.” She finished her coffee before it had a chance to cool down. “Last I heard it was level at seven hundred and fifty-three points each.”

Scott shook his head in disbelief. “You're immortals, and you play games or travel the world fucking everything in sight. Why don't you . . . ? What about . . . ?”

“What? Are we talking morals again here? There're no great tasks for us, Scott. There's just a curse that we brought on ourselves, and some of us handle it better than others. And in different ways.” She snorted. “You haven't heard the best yet. Tigre. You'll
love
him.”

“Not sure I want to know.” He swigged his beer and considered walking away. He could put down his
glass and leave, go out to the car and drive to the place of screaming skulls on his own. Leave this woman behind. This madwoman, who had broken into his house searching for Papa's note, and who ever since had been dragging him along like a pawn in whatever game it was
she
chose to play.

“Well, you asked, damn you! And you
will
know!”

A man at a neighboring table glanced across, then away again when Nina looked at him.

“One of us went mad right at the beginning,” she said, lowering her voice. “Midnight that first day Tigre tried killing himself. Slit his throat, stabbed himself in the heart . . . and he just got better. So through the night he moved on us, singly at first, and then attacking us when we came in couples or threes to see what was happening. Blood everywhere. Pain, so much pain. And the agony of not dying.

“So he fled out into the desert. We didn't follow. We were confused, shocked, and for us it was the first and only proof we needed that what we'd done the day before had been for real. So we left him, thinking we'd never see him again. We had no concept of time back then. A few days could be a long time, but it took us a while to recognize decades and centuries and . . . They say time is unforgiving, and I'll attest to that.

“First time he appeared again was thirty years after that first night. One of us had been wandering northern Africa and she came across a massacre. The sand was red for a hundred steps in every direction, and at the center of the blood stood Tigre. He was cut and slashed and gored with spears, but he
was still alive. There were a hundred corpses piled around him. Bits of bodies. He was the only living thing in sight. He ran.”

“And since then?” Scott asked. “He continued, didn't he? This Tigre. Carried on killing.”

Nina nodded. “Became very good at it. We never went looking, but sometimes the signs were obvious, and word often reached us. He's been executed for his crimes at least a dozen times that I know of. Spent a lot of time locked away in places where they don't favor execution. But he always returns to his ways. Where there's a war, Tigre will appear. He takes sides only if it will make the killing easier. Sometimes he doesn't take sides at all, and then he'll become the stuff of legend and myth. Demon of the battlefield, and for some, an angel. And when there's not a war, he finds other ways to satisfy his killing rage.”

“Why does he do it?”

“I told you, he's mad. I think he's still trying to kill himself. Destroy his wretched soul with slaughter in the hope that his body will eventually wither away with the shame of it all. The uselessness.”

“You think he's the one behind Lewis?”

Nina's face dropped. “I hope not,” she said. “Scott, I sincerely hope not. I think that if it was him we'd know by now. He'd have come against us himself instead of sending Lewis and the blights. He'd have . . .”

“I'd be dead.”

“It's all he knows. Yes, you'd be dead.”

“And so would Helen.” Scott drank some more beer, but suddenly it tasted bitter and stale.

Nina touched his arm and squeezed, and Scott felt the pressure. If she'd done that a day before, it would have been a dead part of him. He owed her that, at least.

“Helen is alive,” she said.

Scott nodded. Although neither of them could know that for sure, he took comfort in Nina's certainty.

They ate a small dinner—Scott found that his appetite had all but vanished—and then went up to their rooms. They did not say very much. Nina waited outside her door while Scott unlocked his, and when he glanced up there was a strange look on her face.
I'm married
, he thought. And as if reading his mind once again she smiled, went into her room, and closed the door behind her.

Exhausted though he was, he lay awake for a long time, staring at the ceiling and trying to discern truths in the shadows of trees speckling the plaster. He thought of Papa and where he was now, way beyond the Wide. He thought of Tigre, the murderous immortal trying to kill himself through slaughter. And all the while Helen was there, innocent in all of this, stolen away by Lewis and kept in a place she did not know and could not understand. His own brief sojourn into the Wide had been bad enough; what would she be feeling?

He closed his eyes at last, but tears of guilt prevented him from going to sleep.

In the morning the sun rose on a whole new world. Plants had grown infinitesimally overnight, air had moved away and been drawn in from elsewhere, dew hung on blades of grass like brief diamonds, a new blue stained the sky, and all living things were closer to death. Scott sat on the wide windowsill of his room and stared out over the pub garden and the countryside beyond, trying to see import in the way sunbeams textured the ground and mist gave contour and depth to the morning scene. He had slept for only a few hours, waking just before sunrise and sitting here, staring out at the dark. He'd watched for shadows moving where they should not, but it was a time when even the dead were silent and still.