The Everlasting (27 page)

“Go,” Scott said. “Fade away.” He reached out to touch her, drew back. She looked like no ghost he had ever seen. They usually seemed to represent the owner's soul at the time of death, either directly before or straight after their time on earth had ended. Sometimes they repeated the final seconds of their life, as if trying to rectify a flawed performance. Other times they just wandered around being wretched.

He looked into her eyes, but there was nothing to see in those dried-up things.

He reached out again and touched her jacket. It
was real. The leather was hard and dried by the wind, but it was solid beneath his fingers. He shoved, increasing the pressure until the body shifted with a crack and crackle. It had been here for a long time.

Scott looked around, wondering whether this woman's soul was another lost one. “I hope you made it across the Wide,” he said. “I hope you found it and crossed over to whatever's on the other side.” He touched the skin of her face, tracing one of the tattoos as though reading in Braille.

The ghost rose from its corpse, screaming.

Scott backed away, a small moan escaping him.

The wraith stood—feet still planted in corpse's boots—turned around, and looked down at its dead self. It screamed again. Its hands went to its face and held it, covering its eyes and trying to shut out the light.

The scream was more real than anything Scott had yet heard from a ghost.

“Are you him?” she said, turning to look directly at Scott.

“No, no, I'm just . . .” He trailed off, and the ghost glared at him.

“You
must
be him. You're here. Alive. You
have
to be.”

“I'm sorry,” Scott said.

“Then why are you here?”

“Why do you seem alive?” Scott asked. “I've seen a hundred ghosts over the past couple of days, but you're talking, asking questions. Reasoning.”

“Reasoning,” the ghost said, glancing back and down at the body it had once inhabited. “How reasonable is that?”

Scott shook his head, not knowing what to say.

“So, why are you here? This is a ghost road in a ghost valley. We're locked away in here. We have to be. We can't let just anyone—”

“I'm here looking for the House of Screaming Skulls,” Scott said.

“Why?”

“There's something there I want.”

“Why do you want the Chord?”

“Then it
is
there!”

“Why?”

“To free my wife. And destroy it.”

The ghost lowered its head sadly, looking down at where its feet touched those slowly mummifying in their shoes. “A selfish act, as ever.”

“No, no. I want to destroy it. I'm told it has to be destroyed. I've already crushed part of it to dust.”

The ghost whirled on Scott, eschewing contact with its body to move across and stand face-to-face. “You found the Lost Pages?”

“I did.”

“And . . . ?”

“They're gone.”

The ghostly woman stared at him, reached out, and placed her hand on his forehead. He almost felt her fingers touching him . . . almost. Perhaps it was subconscious.

She smiled. It was grotesque, a smile belonging to
no human, dead or otherwise. Then she cackled. “You might really be the one,” she said.

“The one?”

“The one to touch the book. Come with me.”

“But—”

The woman grabbed him. Her right hand sank into the flesh of his arm; she grunted as she exerted great will, and then she turned and started running along the road. He ran with her because he had to; her hand had formed itself around his bicep, crushing the skin and clasping hard enough to cause instant bruising.

“We'll travel soon,” she said.

“Travel?”

“Not long now. Oh, dear sweet fucking heaven and hell, not long now!”

She had left her body behind without a backward glance, and it was only then—stupidly, crazily—that Scott realized that this ghost wore no tattoos.

“What are you?” he said.

The woman did not turn. She ran on, hand clasped around his arm, her feet making a greater impact noise every time they hit the road. She seemed to be forming with every step they took, becoming more solid, and he wondered how something dead could suddenly seem so alive.

“Not dead,” she said. “That's what I am: not dead. Old. Very, very old. But soon that age will be nothing.”

“But—”

“Shut up. Follow.” She squeezed his arm harder, eliciting a scream of agony that almost made him pass out. But she dragged him upright and slapped
him across the face with her free hand. It felt very real indeed.

Scott realized with a jolt that she must be one of the missing immortals. Perhaps she had been waiting here forever.

“A hop, skip, and jump,” she said, skidding to a halt close to an ancient ruin. It was the first sign of habitation that Scott had seen, apart from the road. One wall was all that remained, an arched doorway at its center, and all around its base were the tumbled stones of the rest of the building.

“A church?” he asked, and that seemed to cause much amusement to the woman. She laughed so hard that she had to bend down, holding her stomach, yet never letting go of Scott for an instant.

“A church!” She gasped through tears of mirth. “That's a good one. Good one!” She calmed herself and started mumbling. Scott knew the sound of those words.

He also knew the nature of the light appearing in the ruin's doorway.

A pale, even light, sickly gray. The way to somewhere else.

“Hop, skip, and jump,” she said again. “Come on.”

She dragged Scott toward the doorway. There was nothing he could do but follow.

They went into the Wide, but it was not like the first time with Nina. She had carried him in, easing him through the veils that separated this world from the next—thin veils in places, but defying time and reason
nonetheless—and guided him across the boundary of that endless place. She had protected him, trying to make the trip as comfortable and as easy as possible. It had been awful.

Now, they burst through the doorway the woman had created and emerged deep in the Wide. There was no preamble, no prelude to their arrival, no warning: one second she was dragging him across that strange ghost road toward the ruined archway; the next he had left the world entirely.

Scott's heart stopped. He gasped: there was no pain, but the sudden absence of something barely acknowledged was a shock.

The woman dragged him across a wide expanse of nothingness, and the sense of space around them was heavy, intimidating, threatening. When he was a child, Scott had dreamed a particular dream whenever he was ill. He had found it very difficult to explain when he woke up, but it terrified him, and chased him from sleep with the mockery of something knowing it could never be changed or understood. There was something about space in there, a great, crushing expanse of potential pain that crowded in at him where he stood on top of an impossible hill. The hill was split in two by a giant wound, stitched here and there, but still gaping to show its horrible insides. The threat that this stitching would break at any second was every bit as frightening as the weight of space around him. Pressure from below, pressure from above, and he was dwarfed by it, compressed to nothing
resembling a living thing. He was a grain of sand, a spit in an ocean, a sigh in a hurricane, and every single instant of that dream threatened him with becoming utterly lost.

Upon screaming himself awake he had usually found his parents with him, cooing and soothing and not understanding anything he had to say about the hill, and the sky, and the held breath of that place waiting to blow him away.

Papa had understood. He'd been there twice when Scott awoke, and both times he had seemed more relieved than Scott to see the boy rising from sleep with only tears to dab away.
That's no good place to be
, Papa had said, and Scott had buried his face in Papa's familiar-smelling shirt.

This is no good place to be
, Scott tried to say now, but his breath had left him. No heartbeat, no breath, and he opened his eyes to fight against whatever was happening.

He could not move. The woman dragged him through the space, and for as far as Scott could see there were spirits standing motionless, too lost even to drift around anymore. They wailed, and their cries formed in the air around them like smoke above a battlefield. He could smell their torment.

I'm not going to be like that
, he thought. He fought. He raged against the darkness and strove toward the light. He kept Helen in his mind, because she was in here, somewhere, a prisoner of Lewis, and when the idea was spawned that she was already one
of these lost souls, he shoved it aside, refusing even to accept the possibility.

No!
he shouted, voice silent, but the notion all there. His heart thumped and he smiled in delight.

The woman looked back and grinned. There was only pure madness there, an age-old insanity that recognized a change closing in.

And then her grin began to fade.

Scott struggled to free himself. It felt as though her hand had merged with his flesh. There was no blood, but surely his skin must be pierced, the meat of him crushed and parted?

The woman began to scowl. They moved onward and she looked back, and anger flooded her eyes.

Scott averted his gaze, but there was nowhere else to look. If he looked beyond this strange woman into the Wide he felt sick; his insides churned and tumbled, and he fell a thousand feet in a second. So he stared back, and it was then that he realized she was no longer looking at him. She was looking
past
him, back the way they had come. And she was furious.

Scott tried to turn, but all the forces acting on him felt wrong. When he went to turn his head, his hand flexed. If he tried to move his toes, his shoulders tensed. He blinked his eyes and sniffed, and he smelled time rotting away to nothing.

He thought that if this ride continued for much longer, the woman may as well leave him here. He would be dead, lost, doomed to wander the Wide forever, and forever wondering whether Helen was still alive.

The Wide began to darken. Scott closed his eyes and his senses screeched as input hit him once again. He struck a hard surface, smelled age and mold, heard the impact of his body against stone, tasted blood as he bit down on his tongue, and then there was a long, high scream from somewhere above him, and the next taste in his mouth was someone else's blood.

Before now, Scott had only ever tasted his own blood. This new blood was stale, sickly, rancid. It smelled bad. Perhaps the blood of all immortals was like this.

He rolled onto his side, sat up, and looked around. He was sitting on a large paved area in front of a tall, wide house. The house had three stories, and each story held eight windows across its length. The facade was otherwise bland and unremarkable: bare stone, no ostentatious features or aesthetic flourishes. There was an arched doorway, and some of the windows on the top floor were fronted by small cast-iron balconies. Several of the windows were open, curtains billowing. He could not tell whether or not anyone watched from inside.

The woman who had dragged him here through the Wide was sprawled on the patio a dozen steps from him. Tigre stood over her, legs planted wide, brandishing a short sword in each hand. The side of his head glittered with blood, but it was not his own.

The woman was gashed in a dozen places. Blood spewed from her wounds, finding the natural low points of the patio. The stone was sun-bleached, and
the blood formed strange, squared patterns on the ground.

“I thought I'd lost you for sure,” a voice said.

Scott turned and saw Nina standing a few steps behind him. She was shaking. Sweating. Her eyes looked watery, those eyes usually so dark and unreadable. “Someone told me you'd kill me,” he said.

“Who?”

“I'm not really sure. Not anymore. I thought maybe it was Lewis, but then I met her. . . .” He nodded across at the slumped shape. The woman started moving, pulling an almost-severed arm back against her chest, raising her head so that blood-soaked hair drooped heavily to the ground.

Tigre lashed out with his swords. They made meaty impacts as they penetrated flesh and struck bone. He stood on her back and forced her down as he withdrew the swords. More blood flowed, and she was still once more.

Scott flinched away, turned to look at Nina. “Why is he doing that?”

“It's what he does.”

“But who is she?”

“We think she's Yaima. One of us. One of the originals.”

“An immortal,” Scott said, stupidly pleased that he had been right.

“I haven't seen her for six thousand years,” Tigre muttered. He knelt beside the tattered body and thrust his sword deep into her chest. “Her heart's still strong, Nina. Want to collect?”

“Are you okay?” Nina ignored Tigre, seeming genuinely concerned as she knelt beside Scott and touched his face.

“I'm really not sure.” He glanced up at the house. Was that a face he saw at one of the windows, stepping back into shadow as he looked? “I don't think so.”

“She was brutal with you,” Nina said. “She didn't care. Straight into the Wide, and that's just not right. That's no place for you to be.”

“You took me there.”

“I was careful.”

He remembered the time Nina had taken him through, and compared it with the trip he had just survived. And he nodded, because she was right. Before he had come out feeling disconcerted and upset; now . . . he was utterly unnerved.

“Why did you run?” she asked.

“I thought you wanted to kill me.” He looked at her carefully, trying to read her reaction. She'd had a long time to practice hiding her feelings.

“Why would I possibly want to kill you?” Nina said.

“Why wouldn't you?”

Nina shook her head, confused. “I don't understand the question.”