Penult (67 page)

“
No one you would ever want
to meet again,” said Jessica. “Trust me.”

***

Jessica and Izzie braced me and
brought me in the house and tucked me into a soft bed. Mrs. Ambrose
came bustling after them with a glass of ginger ale and some
biscuits.

My insides were cramping. I had no
appetite, only pain, but I managed to sip some of the ginger ale
and keep it down. I could move around a bit but got really dizzy if
I stood up too fast. And I had a horrible case of the runs that
kept forcing me to leave the bed. I refused to soil my clothes. The
Pennies might be taking my life but I was determined to die with
dignity.

My eyelids were getting heavy but I
couldn’t stop staring out the window at the knobby hilltops behind
the farms, all heath and granite and wisps of cloud. If this was
going to be my last glimpse of the planet of my birth, at least I
had been blessed with a divine setting for my demise.

The ladies took turns sitting with me.
Izzie could not stop squeezing my hand and crying. There were
constant murmurs in the hallway as they argued over how best to
handle my situation. Jessica managed to convince Mrs. Ambrose that
staying mum and not involving any health professionals or law
enforcement was the most prudent course of action. I didn’t really
care what they did with me once I was gone. That was their
problem.

37 Sraid-Na-Firrin, Drumnadrochit,
Scotland. That was the address on a letter to Mrs. Ambrose that I
found on the night stand. That was where Karla would find her
sister. Now that I had gathered the last bit of information I would
ever need from this world, it was time for me to go. The roots
wasted no time.

Chapter 69:
Falling

I had no death wish. I didn’t want to
die. This wasn’t suicide, it was murder. But with no trace of hope
left to bind me to the living world, I knew that crossing over to
the Liminality was a done deal.

One would think some other realm might
claim my soul. But feeling serious enough about killing oneself to
earn a visit to Root also seemed to condemn one’s soul to the Lim
forever, or at least until some realm one rung lower in the
hierarchy came calling. Dying in the Lim, for example, sent your
soul straight to the Deeps. The realms were nested that way. And
each soul had a unique pathway to damnation or salvation. My road
only seemed to lead down.

So it was the Lim for me for now, even
though I was not quite dead yet. But for all intents and purposes
my living was finished. I had zero hope of recovery. No chance for
survival. There was nothing left for me to do but hunker down and
die.

The roots needed no coaxing. They were
already waiting in the wings, ready to shuttle me along.

I had a hunch that something would be
different about this particular transition. I expected revelations.
Memories and life scenes flashing by. Bright lights. Flourishes.
Something, anything befitting this special occasion. There was
nothing like free falling through the clouds to remind me what I
should have been worrying about.

I had faded from the saddle of a wasp
that was no longer anywhere near the patch of sky it had previously
occupied. Creatures of habit, these roots always bring me back to
the exact same spot from which I had vanished, even if that
location happened to be thousands of feet above the
waves.

I knew this wasn’t a good thing. A
fall from such a height was not survivable in any realm, no matter
how straight I held my back and pointed my toes. Water, contrary to
popular belief, was not soft, particularly not at terminal
velocity. The Deeps beckoned.

As I clenched my teeth and girded
myself for the snap and crush of bone, a whirring sound grew and a
hulking figure appeared alongside me, matching its dive to the
speed of my fall. Striped wings. Tigger! I could hardly believe my
eyes.

I reached out my hand to him, but the
airstream grabbed it and made me tumble out of control. Tigger
adjusted his dive and caught up with me, nudging his back up
against my side. All I had to do was close my hand and I was
gripping the inch thick bristles sprouting from his carapace. I
reached for the saddle with me free hand and latched onto a
loop.

With the waves looming close, Tigger
pulled out of his dive. But he was gentle about it. An abrupt
change of course would have ripped me away. But he managed to
flatten our angle of descent gradually to give me a chance to
settle into the saddle. Soon, we were skimming the wave tops and
regaining a bit of altitude.

Back in the saddle and strapped in, I
finally had a chance to catch my breath and get my bearings. Penult
was behind us now. A lone falcon patrolled the beach we had left.
There was no sign of Ubaldo and his wasp, no trace of Mikal or
Urszula.

My hand! It was almost entirely black
now and the blackness was spreading up my arm. It moved slowly,
like spilled molasses, but inexorably.

“
Tigger, we need to
climb!”

As if words could express my will to
this bug. I banged my heels against his side and patted the armored
plates behind his head. Tigger didn’t respond immediately but I
kept on slapping and then suddenly he tilted upward and began
rising back towards the clouds.

“
That’s it! You got it
buddy! Keep it up. Keep on climbing.”

We punched through the low-level
clouds and kept rising. This time I greeted the chill with relief.
I was dying for sure now. The end had never been nearer and the
higher we got, the better would be my chances of keeping my soul
free of the Core’s influence. No one had ever explained to me how
the Core worked, but there was no questioning its power. In some
ways it was like gravity, though its range was more
limited.

I worried that Tigger, being a mere
dragonfly, could not carry me high enough out of its influence. But
he surprised the heck out of me. We were already just below the
stratum of icy cirrus that Ubaldo and Sophia had taken me before
the last fade—wispy things that roamed the sky like lost and lonely
ghosts.

Tigger’s wing beats began to stutter
and syncopate. His flight muscles were cooling. With each falter,
the dragonfly lost a bit of elevation.

“
Hang on, guy. Just a
little longer.”

Something ripped in my mind. I
shuddered, not only from the cold but from the disturbance in my
soul. A partition slid from my consciousness and I found myself
inhabiting two worlds. Tigger and I swept through icy clouds while
I lay swaddled beneath the thick covers of the bed in Mrs.
Ambrose’s guest room. The sensations and infirmities of both worlds
converged on one body.

It was not natural to be in two places
at once. I only had one soul. One will. Hence, my soul oscillated
back and forth. I could not fix my location at first, but my will
prevailed to drag most of me back to Scotland. This was not a fade.
This was something different. Part of me remained back in the
Liminality with Tigger.

Back in Scotland I was weak and barely
conscious. An intense queasiness gripped me, but I had long since
puked out all there was to puke.

Isobel, Jess and Mrs. Ambrose hovered
around the bed. I could barely keep my eyes open, so I kept them
shut. Someone daubed at my brow with a warm wash cloth.

Jess placed her fingers against my
throat to check my pulse.

“
We’re losing
him.”

Mrs. Ambrose leaned in close, her lips
trembling. “James. Can you hear me? Are you still with
us?”

I nodded.

“
Tell me, who should we
notify? When you pass?”

I took a long, deep breath.

“
Nobody,” I
gasped.

“
Don’t you have some next
of kin?”

“
No. There’s …
nobody.”

“
But what should we do with
… your remains?”

“
I don’t know. Bury me
someplace nice. So if people visit, it’s a nice place to be. Find a
willow tree. I like … willows.”

Jessica started to snuffle and sob.
Izzie remained fierce and calm. Mrs. Ambrose kept calm. She had
faced more death than any of us. She was closer to it herself than
anyone in the room but me.

“
How are you feeling, son?”
said Mrs. Ambrose. “Any pain?”

My soul began to drain away into the
Lim, slowly, like a pinhole in a bike tire.

“
I’m not …
here.”

“
Say what?”

A pressure built in my skull. It felt
like giant fingers prodding and prying, trying to gain leverage
against my soul. And then it happened. My head began to spin, like
bathwater spiraling around a drain. The wind vanished. The chill
vanished. All went black.

The end came to me as if like someone
had spun a dimmer switch on my consciousness, dialing my senses
down to zero. I felt, saw, sensed nothing. I had no attachment to
anything physical. All that remained was my consciousness. I had
given up the ghost.

No bright lights beckoned to me. If
there was a tunnel, that dark remained dark. It was like walking
into through pitch-black basement, feeling my way along, not
knowing what spider webs or trip hazards stood in my
path.

This was not the Singularity. I had no
awareness of any other consciousness but my own. I was just a
bundle of thoughts and memories with no vessel to contain them. And
just as I thought they would all blow apart and vanish, the wind
came blasting through my hair and I heard the deep thrum of a
dragonfly’s wings as we skimmed the underside of a thick bank of
clouds.

I wasn’t sure if we had been high
enough away from the Core, but if I was here and not in the Deeps,
it must have worked. I had my skin again, and it was unblemished.
The scar on my palm when a glass broke and I gashed myself washing
dishes? Gone. The crooked knuckle that developed after I broke a
finger falling off a skateboard. Straight. My soul was free and I
felt great, flush with energy and vitality and alertness I had
rarely felt in actual life.

No question about it, I was now a
Freesoul. But it also meant I was dead. That realization made my
stomach sink. Any fleeting sense of exhilaration over my restored
body pretty much evaporated. Needless to say, my feelings were
decidedly mixed about the whole deal.

***

Tigger descended leisurely to a much
balmier altitude. Once he thawed out a bit, his wings began to purr
again. He regained his groove as we cruised over the silvery
sea.

I slumped forward in the saddle and
laid my head down on the cushy padding, grateful despite Urszula’s
mockery that I had chosen this ‘fat man’s saddle’ built for
comfort. I proceeded to spend the next few hours mourning
myself.

It’s not easy being dead, no matter
how alive you feel and how conscious you remain. The door out of
life is a pretty heavy door to get slammed on you.

Yeah, I knew from experience that it
was theoretically possible to pry it open from time to time, but
Karla’s resurrection had been a freak occurrence, driven more by
the Horus than anything I did. I’m not sure it was anything I would
want to repeat—exposing myself to a destroyer of souls for the off
chance of walking the planet of my birth again.

Urszula’s resurrection had been way
more curious and less dramatic. She had simply piggy-backed onto my
fade, a much less risky endeavor. Could any Hemisoul fading back do
the same to any Duster? Considering that Dusters were essentially a
special category of Freesoul who had escaped the Deeps, could I
have done the same for any Freesoul? More importantly from my
perspective, could any Hemisoul do the same for me? I hoped it
didn’t have anything to do with my being ‘special.’

For the time being, I would have to
resign myself to remaining dead. One the bright side, it just meant
access to one less realm than before. And from what they tell me,
there are scores of realms in the afterlife and though parts of it
were quite nice, the Liminality was not even in the top tier. But
the realm I had just lost access to was the one I knew best. Losing
it stung real bad.

***

A change in the wind brought a
resinous note to the air. Trees! I lifted my head off the saddle to
find an unfamiliar shore before me, with golden sands and sinuous,
wave-sculpted sandstone ledges.

There were boats on the beach, and a
scattering of Pennies surrounding them. No Cherubim. These guys
seemed mostly upper management—Hashmallim and a few Seraphim from
the looks of their garb. And they seemed to be loading these boats,
not disembarking. Where the heck were the Cherubim?

A lone falcon patrolled overhead but
it came nowhere near us. Good thing, because Tigger was oblivious.
He acted like he owned the sky. I would have preferred that he
detour a little farther away from this beachhead, but he had his
compound eyes riveted on a swarm of giant gnats buzzing over a
lagoon. He dove abruptly and ripped through the swarm snatching two
victims on the wing.

I had no idea where we were. The trees
here were taller and denser than the place our raiding party had
bivouacked. And there were many more ponds and creeks. This was all
new territory for me.