The Memory of Death (7 page)

The bikes are gone. They’d never looked right in Aunt Neti’s parlour anyway. For a moment I can smell scones – I shiver – and then the scent’s gone. It’s just sweat
du Steve, and the smell of Charon – the guy still smokes the cheapest cigarettes. And the place doesn’t feel all that threatening anymore.

‘You’re safe here for now, until we finish with this. The living and the dead are attacking you because you don’t belong here and you don’t belong there. Kind of like meatballs in a vegan diner.’

‘So why am I here at all?’

‘Sleight of hand,’ Charon says. ‘But it’s getting more slight as we speak.’ He smiles, all teeth.

‘What’s next?’

‘You’re not going to like it,’ Charon says. ‘And if there was any other way, I’d … No, I’d still go with this way.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘This,’ he says. ‘I mean this.’

Charon raises one hand, spreads out his long fingers and blows across them. ‘Time, fellas. Time.’ Then he claps that hand down onto my shoulder. ‘Don’t you dare move.’

The walls hiss. They bulge, the floral wallpaper cracks and they are pouring out. Spiders, so many spiders. Of course, it had to involve spiders.

Onto the ground they scurry, a seething matt of darkness. And they are hissing.

They circle us, this mass of spiders, pulling in a closing gyre, and there is an endless stream of them. The wallpaper is all gone now, and it is just the spiders; each wall is nothing but spiders, falling in, coming towards me.

They’re running up my legs, my chest, my neck.

I struggle, but Charon’s grip is resolute. All that strength from all those aeons working the ferry. And then he slips his hands around my head, and yanks my mouth open. Spiders pour in, spiders fill me up. And I’d scream if I could. I’d scream, or vomit, or both. Hell, I’ve done that before.

My heart starts to beat. It pounds. Reality creaks.

And the spiders are gone; the wallpaper has returned, though it is slightly different. No longer the damask patterning I’m familiar with, but something angular – squares within squares. It seems almost comforting. I look at the wallpaper a moment longer and it shivers.

Charon clears his throat. ‘How do you feel?’

‘What am I?’

‘You’re a new gatekeeper. You’re Neti reborn, reconstituted, restitched with web. You’re a Power, an RE.’

Recognised Entity. Everyone used the terms eventually, even entities as old as Charon. Neti, like Charon, was capable of organising an Orpheus Manoeuvre, of letting people enter and egress Hell. A little like Pomps, though they’d been superseded somewhat by my own kind. Something Charon had been all too happy to give up, I’d always thought, and something Neti had ever been bitter over.

‘So now I’m like you?’

Charon looks at me funny, ambivalently at best. ‘Like me and the others.’

‘There are others?’

‘Of course there are. Though none of them are capable of doing what we do. There’s the One who Ties Knots, George, I think that is. There’s Sarah the Maker of Things, there’s even the God Who is Not Named because We Have Forgotten it – its name (and so has he), not the god. There’re the Caterers, you know them. I could go on, but what it means is that you aren’t dead. And you are gainfully employed, perhaps that’s enough to draw Lissa back to you.’

‘You think I’ve got a chance?’

Charon doesn’t answer: he’s already gone.

I drop onto the couch. It feels softer than the last time I sat in it. So I’m an RE. There's no elation, just a sense of time spinning out ahead of me. I feel a bit lonely. So I release Wal from my arm. The Inkling takes shape in a moment – I must be getting better. Morrigan used to be able to give his Inklings form in the living world. Not me, I could never manage it, but now, maybe now.

‘Did I miss anything?’ Wal says, and then he gives me a good hard look. ‘Hmm, someone knows how to land on their feet, don’t they, Mr RE?’

I could argue that I don’t have a clue what he’s talking about, but here I am. And I never should have got so lucky, but when have I ever really been lucky?

Wal lands on my shoulder. ‘Come on now, tell me. I’m always the last to know!’

I end up spilling my guts to him, and afterwards he smiles and then laughs.

‘Oh, to be the Inkling of a fellow like you. I hit the jackpot, I reckon. Never gets boring. Fancy a cup of tea?’

‘I could do with a beer.’

Wal shoves his head in the fridge and comes back with two bottles – and it’s good stuff, not the ash-infused beer of the Underworld. ‘You’re in luck,’ he says.

‘We both know that luck has nothing to do with it.’

We clink our bottles.

I look around the room. Not where I expected to end up yesterday when I rolled out of the sea. I’ve already checked out the bedroom, a big old queen-size bed. I gave the mattress a hard kick, to check that it didn’t contain spiders, and it didn’t. Not like me.

‘So what do you do when you’re not manifested here?’ I ask Wal.

‘Not a lot,’ Wal says. ‘Kind of dull in the Inkling world: mainly grey, with the occasional war. I write a lot of
Game of Thrones
fan fiction. From the TV show.’

‘How many seasons now?’

‘Three. Oh, you’ve got a lot of catching up to do my friend. I’ve written whole novels’ worth of the stuff.’

‘Slash?’

Wal clinks my beer again, and smirks. ‘Is there any other kind, my friend?’

*

I’m back from a shopping expedition, stocking up the fridge and unpacking new light globes, Nirvana cracking on about heart-shaped boxes on the stereo (yes, there is a stereo) when there’s a knock at the door. I open it to Tim, holding a leather suitcase. He doesn’t look all that great, with the black eye.

‘Hey.’ His fingers tap against the suitcase. He’s holding it so hesitantly that I can’t help myself.

‘What? You got a weapon in there, buddy?’

‘Yeah, you could say so.’

‘Hey,’ I say. ‘I’ve got some beers in here if you’d –’

‘No. Not tonight.’

I want to say that it should be tonight – it has to be. I’m back. It’s me – but I don’t.

He looks around him; I can see he notices the change in the wallpaper. ‘I used to hate coming here. Neti despised me.’

‘She despised everyone.’

‘What about you? What do you despise?’

I shrug. ‘Right now I’m not so sure.’

I should have been welcomed back as a hero, I should be with my friends and family – the few I have left – but instead I am here, and still treated with so much suspicion. Tim must read some of this in my expression.

‘Steve, we tried to get you back, and failed. Many times.’ I look at him and wonder how is it that I don’t remember any of those times. I can see the truth of them in his face, but it’s as though that part of me was stolen – perhaps it was.

‘But now you’re here and it’s like none of it happened. You have to realise how difficult that is. Everything has a cost, and this … this one will cost us big, I think.’

There’s no thinking in it; he knows this to be true and, come to think of it, so do I. Nothing I've done has ever come without its blood price. Tim and I lost most of our family just a few years back. And I still feel like it was my fault.

He passes me the suitcase, a big old heavy thing.

‘Combination’s your birthday.’

‘What is it?’

‘The Knives of Negotiation,’ he says. ‘You’re Neti’s replacement, so it’s your job to guard them. I’ve never liked having them close to me. Horrible fucking things, I can hear them mumbling in the night, and that was through the walls of a safe. If Sally had ever found out that I’d had them in the house…’ He smiles at me. ‘Oh, and I made you a couple of mix CDs. I’ll get you up to speed with streaming sometime soon, but that will help.’

‘Thanks.’ I put the case down, look at the CDs. He’s printed out the band names; I don’t recognise any of them. Twenty months under the waves are going to do that to you. And what the hell is streaming? I put the CDs down on the case. ‘Are we okay?’

‘Yeah,’ Tim says. ‘Just give it time.’

And I know he isn’t talking about us. We’re family after all. Both of us have been through a lot together.

He straightens his jacket, touches his face and winces. ‘You’ve got plenty of time,’ he says, and walks back down the hall.

I shut the door, look at the suitcase. The knives are mumbling, and now, alone, I can hear them. I look around the small room, and the doors that lead off of it.

Plenty of time? Yeah, I suppose I do.

About five minutes later there’s a knock on the door. I open it, and we’re back at the beginning, only he’s not holding a towel, or a gun.

‘There you are,’ says James. ‘I thought you’d be here.’

‘Why does everyone know more than me?’ I ask.

‘Because you don’t pay enough attention to the world.’

Fair enough. And this from a bloke who hardly knows me.

‘What are you doing here?’

He lifts his hands into the air. ‘Don’t worry, I’m not carrying a gun.’ I don't tell him that a gun won’t work now – that I’m immune to such hurts. ‘I want to talk to you. That’s all we ever wanted to do. I’m sorry we went about it the wrong way, but Charon could never quite assure us of our safety.’

I smile at him. ‘Do you feel safe now?’

‘Steven, in my line of work you never have the opportunity for safety.’ He gives me the weariest of smiles back. ‘I suppose you have questions.’

All I am is questions, and the shivering power of tens of thousands of spiders. ‘Who do you represent?’

‘Who do you think?’

‘You’re not Mortmax, that much I can tell. Suits are too cheap. The government?’

He nods. ‘Kind of. We’re a branch of the Federal police. We like to think we’re pretty independent. Maybe put that down to my arrogance.’

He passes me a card. I consider throwing it back in his face, and it’s nothing to do with the use of Comic Sans. ‘The Closers!’

To say we had history was being kind. Tim had suggested their formation years ago, as a kind of balance to Mortmax, and then they’d been set up after he left the government. They were shut down when their leader tried to kill me, with his razors made of shards of the Knives of Negotiation; turned out he was a little crazy. Neti’s death, too, had been a result. Sliced to pieces by the Knives of Negotiation – when he had got a hold of them. Those damn knives were nothing but trouble, sharp slice-and-dice-the-universe trouble. And the Closers – well, I thought I was rid of them. I scowl at him.

‘And you expect me to work for you?’

He’s throwing his hands in the air again. ‘You weren’t the only one betrayed. A lot of us thought we were doing good work. The government thought we were too, so we’re official now. As official as anything like this gets. Someone needs to keep you lot in line.’

‘Us lot?’

James laughs. ‘Typical Pomp.

‘I’m not a Pomp anymore.’

‘But you still think like a Pomp,’ James says. ‘That’s a blessing and a liability. You, the ones who lead folk to the Underworld – you’d think you’d be open to all the strangeness of this one. There’s the Knot Makers, the Shadows, the Half-Whispered Things – and let me tell you, those Whispers can claw your heart out. And that’s the merest sample; since you saved the world, all manner of … entities have come to light. You lifted a rock, my friend, and things came crawling out from beneath it. Some of them are very angry – they liked the rock.’

I reach into the fridge, pull out a beer and open it. ‘You want one?’

James clears his throat. ‘If that’s what it’s going to take to get you to listen to me, then yes.’

‘Don’t let me twist your arm or anything.’

James laughs.

He’s already halfway through his beer by the time we sit down at Aunt Neti’s – I mean my – table, made of the First Wood, apparently; something you’d expect to see a wardrobe to Narnia fashioned with. It’s solid and ornate, Victorian-looking until you realise the carvings that cover its legs are of spiders dismembering tiny people. Surprisingly, it’s a bit wobbly.

James stares at those carvings, and shivers. ‘We need you. Your power, that’s something we can kind of comprehend. You’ve the knives, yes, I know about those, and more importantly, you’ve time on your hands.’

‘You didn’t approach Charon?’

‘Yes, and your name came up.’ Charon has his fingers in too many damn pies. Including mine. I don’t want those damn long fingers anywhere near my pie.

‘But how did he know that I was available?’

James nods. ‘We needed you. We made deals, Charon made deals. It turns out that the Death of the Water has a sense of humour.’

‘Oh, he has a sense of humour, all right,’ I say.

‘Don’t take it personally.’

‘Everything to do with that bastard is personal. So, I was brought back to be your dog?’ I’m still thinking about that damn Hound, which was kind of me – or I was kind of it? It all gets too confusing, really.

‘No. No. No, we want you to work for us, as a real employee. I know you have this job, but you’ll have time, Charon says, to work with us too. I mean, Orpheus Manoeuvres, how many of those happen a decade – one, maybe two?’

‘You still want me to work for you guys, after what I’ve done to you?’ I was responsible for their shutdown, even if it was temporary.

James smiles thinly. ‘That’s exactly why we want you. It’s all water under the bridge, believe me.’

‘And if I don’t want to?’

James puts his beer down. Stands up.

‘Don’t insult me,’ I say. ‘Finish your beer.’

James gives me a look, drains the rest of his beer, looks like he could easily drain a yard glass. ‘Please, consider it.’

He puts the bottle down on the table, and the card next to it. ‘That’s my number.’

‘Why Comic Sans?’

‘I like the font!’

‘But Comic –’

‘Enough. Just think about my offer.’

‘I will give it my utmost consideration, mate,’ I say. ‘Now, if you don’t mind.’ I gestured at the door.

‘We’ll be hearing from you, then?’

‘Yes, you will. I take it there is some urgency.’

‘The caseload is growing, yes. The Carnival in Logan for one thing, but –’

Carnival? ‘I will consider it.’

James opens the door. He leans against it a moment, then smiles. ‘Steve, there really isn’t anyone else like you.’

‘Yeah, I’m one of a fucking kind. You ever try any of the other REs?’

‘They’re all crazy. Even Charon. Too difficult to deal with.’

‘Ah, you hardly know me.’

He gives me another smile that contains a high percentage of disappointment. I’m familiar with that smile; I’ve been familiar with variants of that smile since I was a little boy. ‘That remains to be seen. Good day to you, Mr de Selby, and if you don’t call me, well, I’ll be in touch,’ he says.

He shuts the door behind him.