The Everlasting (24 page)

“My wife,” he said, filling his head with his own voice. “Helen . . . it's all for Helen, and everyone else is involved because of themselves. Sorry, Nina, but it'll work out. It'll resolve itself.”

The ghost still looked at him over her shoulder as they walked. He only glanced at her face before looking away again. She was lost, and there were no answers there.

They reached the end of the pub's long garden, passed through a rotten wooden gate that was jammed permanently open, and entered an area of undergrowth gone wild. A stream gurgled somewhere to Scott's left and the ground turned marshy. His shoes sank with every step, sucking and popping as he lifted his feet to walk on. He watched the ghost's feet barely touching the world.

He blinked and the ghost was gone. He blinked again, thinking his vision was teasing, but he was alone, standing in a small clearing carpeted with rotten newspapers and a pile of soggy porn magazines.
There was a mattress shoved under one low, wide bush, with a few tattered sheets of polyethythene drawn across the bush's branches and pricked onto its thorny limbs. A few empty cans, a smashed whiskey bottle, and an underlying stink of waste. Scott wrinkled his nose and took a backward step, but then a shadow moved.

He squinted and peered across the clearing. Something had shifted beneath the tree over there, a shadow that had seemed merged with the thick trunk but which now stood and detached itself, walking out into the sparse moonlight.

I can hear its footsteps
, Scott thought.

“You one of them?” The voice was gruff, yet tinged with fear. Bravado went only so far.

“Are you?”

“What you think, fuckhead?” The shadow stamped on the ground, flapped its arms, slapped its own face. “Flesh and fuckin' blood, man.”

“Me too.”

“Yeah?”

“You ever heard one talking?”

The man's silence was heavy with thought. “Don't know,” he said finally. “Maybe.”

“I'm sorry I'm here,” Scott said. He started backing away, keeping the stream to his left in the hope that it would guide him back to the pub garden. Once there, maybe he could take their stolen car and head for his final destination.

“You Scott?” the voice said.

Scott froze. “You are one of them?” he asked again.

“No, man. Flesh and fuckin' blood, like I said. Look!” The man walked forward and stood outside the tree's shadow, letting starlight touch him. He was much younger than he sounded, barely out of his teens. Jeans, sweatshirt, black jacket, the beginnings of a beard, long dark hair forming a chaotic shadow-halo around his head. His face was drawn and pained, and even in this poor light Scott could make out the skin and eyes of a lost man. The smell of stale alcohol was strong. A bottle swung from his left hand, almost empty and seemingly forgotten.

“How do you know my name?”

The man shrugged and put on a mock-posh voice. “Seems I have you at a disadvantage.”

“So, how?” Scott looked around for the woman's ghost, thinking that maybe she was watching to see what would happen. But all other shadows acted as they should.

“Old dude told me. Spooky fucker. Dropped me a bottle of good stuff and twenty straights, said there'd be same again if I passed on the message.”

“What message?”

The man smiled, showing off teeth that belonged to someone three times his age. “What'll you give me for it?”

Scott shook his head and turned his back, ready to walk away.

The man was on him in a second. The bottle clunked him on the side of the head, a leg twisted in front of him, and there was a sharp push between his shoulder blades. Scott went sprawling, hands slipping
in the slime of rotting magazines, and the man dropped down onto his back. Hands reached around and clawed at Scott's face, and he almost gagged at their stink.

The man leaned down and whispered into Scott's ear, “Be a good boy for Daz, now, and you'll get your message. But it's like . . . power. I got something to pass on, you got something you have to hear, so there's a trade there, see? A fair trade. Fuckhead.”

“I don't have anything,” Scott said.

“Nothing to give?”

He shook his head, trying not to breathe in Daz's foul stench.

“Well, we can sort something out.” Daz sat up again, and Scott heard the sound of a zipper opening. “Get a load of this, mouthful and a faceful, and I'll tell you what the old dude said.”

Scott closed his eyes and thought of Helen. He could conjure no memories—could not even picture her face—but the idea of her was there with him, strong and comforting and warm with love. He smiled into the mud and sent his own love back to her.

Daz shuffled forward, one hand reaching down to turn Scott's head to the side, the other beating rhythmically between his legs.

Scott lay loose and weak, letting Daz turn his head. He opened his eyes.

“Here you go, fuckhead. Get some of this; here you go. Old dude said I should give the message so you remember it, so here you go. Fuckhead.”

Scott tensed his shoulders and arms and lifted up,
twisting his body at the same time, throwing Daz off his back and standing in one movement.

Daz shouted and went sprawling across the mound of moldy newspapers.

Scott kicked something, bent down, and picked up the whiskey bottle. He went after Daz before he had a chance to stand, swinging the bottle high and hard and wincing as it connected with the man's forehead. It rebounded with a dull thunk, somehow remaining whole, but Daz's struggles slowed.

Scott threw the bottle into the dark and dropped down astride the man, pinning his arms to his side. He punched him in the face. He hadn't punched anyone like that since he was eleven years old and got into a fight with the school bully. Back then the sensation of his fist connecting with someone else's nose had frightened him with its primal violence, but now it felt good. He did it again.

“Fucking pervert!” he said, striking out again and again, face and neck and chest. Daz tried to mutter something, and Scott punched him once more, though some of the anger had gone out of him now, leached away and already turning into a crimson shade of guilt.

“Enough?” he asked. Daz was not struggling; nor did he make a sound. He simply stared up at Scott, the stained whites of his eyes catching starlight. He nodded.

Scott stood and backed away, letting the man come to his knees. He was struggling to tuck his flaccid
cock back into his trousers, a pathetic, pitiful action that made Scott look away.

“The old dude,” Scott said. “Tell me what he said. I've got a twenty here for you if you tell me. Buy yourself a few bottles. Better still, some deodorant. But tell me now, or I'll get fucking angry again.”

“Man, I'm just flesh and blood, you know?”

“And what does that
mean
?” Scott felt his anger rising again, unfamiliar and disconcerting.

“Guys has his needs, man.”

“His needs? So you try to stick it in my face to satisfy your needs?”

“Old dude said—”

“Just what
did
he say?” Scott stepped forward, and Daz flinched away, falling onto his back and holding up both hands. Scott's shoulders sagged and he shook his head. “Damn it, Daz, just tell me. I need to get out of here. You have no idea, no inkling.”

“I do,” he said. “I seen them. Thought I had before, for years, but I seen them tonight, plenty of them. Walking around as if they're lost. None of 'em talk to me. Finished the bottle and they still didn't go away. And they only came after the old dude went.”

“What did he look like?”

Daz shrugged. “Old.”

“And he said . . . ?”

“Okay, gimme a sec.” Daz sat up and rubbed at his mouth. There was a dark trail leaking from it, blood blackened in the starlight. He coughed, spit, touched his forehead, and winced.

“Waiting for me to apologize?” Scott asked.

“No, man.” Daz looked up at Scott, sad and wretched. “So, the old dude said: ‘There's a guy called Scott who you'll meet. Give him a message from me. Tell him to lose Nina, go on his own, find the book.' ” He looked away and shook his head.

“That's it?”

“No, trying to remember . . . Yeah, find the book. And stay with it. It has more things in it, dude said. Then he said, ‘Everything will come together. Things will work out. Be explained.' ” He nodded, frowned. “Yeah, that's it.”

“Sure?”

“Yeah.”

“More things?”

“That's what he said.”

Scott dug out a rolled-up twenty-pound note from his pocket and dropped it onto the mass of torn, wet newspaper.

“Oh, hey, man . . .”

“Give you something to do,” Scott said. “Sort yourself out, Daz.”

“Will they leave me alone now?” the man asked. He sounded desperate for the right answer.

Scott thought about lying. Giving this wretched excuse a scrap of hope. But right then, he couldn't find such benevolence within. It had been driven too deep, and he left with a comment that chilled him even as he spoke. “No,” he said. “They're always here. Always have been. Always will be.”

As he walked back through the bushes he heard Daz somewhere behind him, moaning and crying as he nursed his bloody wounds and bruises. Just someone else whom Lewis had used, abused, and left shattered. A lost soul in waiting.

“Hey, Scott!” Daz called as Scott reached the gate back into the pub garden. The voice was muffled and confused by the vegetation, but Scott still heard. “One more thing the old dude said. Me, I hope it's true. I hope it fuckin' happens to you, man. Said she'll gut you soon as she's finished with you. Yeah. Sounds good to me, fuckhead.”

Scott worked his way around the perimeter of the pub garden until he reached the car park. He kept his ears open in case Daz had decided to follow and his eyes on the pub. There was no movement and no sounds of pursuit.
Where will Nina be now?
he thought.
Still trapped in her room? Still hemmed in by ghosts?
He was running blind, and the more he heard and saw, the more confused he became.

She'll gut you as soon as she's finished with you
.

Surely Lewis had not written those words on his mirror? He was more direct than that, more intrusive, like introducing Scott to Daz to pass on a message. But if it had not been him, then who else was warning him away from Nina?

“Need to do my own thing,” he whispered to the night. It did not reply.

Climbing into the car, he saw a ghost standing against the wall of the pub, so still that it might have
been painted there. It watched him leave. He felt its eyes on him, and as he accelerated quickly toward whatever fate had in store, he wondered to whom the ghost would report.

More things
, Daz had said.
It has more things in it
. Scott remembered the quote from
Hamlet
, and he wondered just what
more things
could entail.

As he drove, Scott began to feel incredibly exposed. Though darkness accompanied him all the way into Wales, held back only by the twin spears of the car headlights, he felt as though a thousand eyes were watching. He was the center of attention for many people he could not understand. He sensed the minds of things focusing upon him, and he kept glancing left and right, as though expecting to see something monstrous lunging out of the night.
More things
, he kept thinking, and he wondered what more things in heaven and Earth could be.
Stuff
, Nina had called the rest of the book. But she had refused to state who or what had told her and the others to transcribe the Chord of Souls in the first place. Perhaps they had received it in their minds, projected there by forces or presences way beyond humanity's comprehension. Or maybe something or someone had dictated to them,
sitting there day after day as Nina and the other eleven immortals hacked and chiseled the book into solid stone slabs, bringing it into being for the first time. The travel writings of some vast, ancient spirit, or the musings of the last of a long-lost civilization. Nina had said that to reveal where the Chord of Souls came from would change everything.

“God?” Scott muttered. The car headlights dimmed and brightened slightly, as though the darkness had pulsed inward for an instant. “Maybe it really was God, and the book is proof of His existence.”

Scott was a casual believer. He never prayed or went to church, but he had always been content in his belief that there was more to life than living: there was dying as well, and what came after. What he had seen since Helen had been taken confused him, though he had not even begun trying to make sense of what it all meant. It confirmed that there was some sort of existence beyond death—at least, he thought it did—but it also seemed to hint at a truth he found almost too painful to bear: that after death, there could be pain. Fearing God was all about looking for your own salvation, wasn't it? Looking forward to an eternity of heaven?

If so, then what was the Wide? If there
were
different routes to heaven, and many who never made it there, Scott really did not wish to know. He did not want to face the prospect of being lost in the Wide, skimming its outer fringes or wandering its endless depths forever. He saw lost souls and the echoes of
those long gone, but there had been nothing yet to show him what these wraiths really were.

He and Helen enjoyed talking religion, and approaching it from diverse angles.
What would happen
, she had once suggested,
if God revealed himself to everyone? If the world was given incontrovertible, undeniable proof of His existence, would it make it a better place?
Scott had argued that it was impossible; that proof was unworkable if richness of faith were to be maintained. But Helen had shaken her head and run with the idea, and Scott now remembered the long, heated discussion it had initiated.