Skulduggery Pleasant (4 page)

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"You think you can stop me?" he screamed as he tried to stand. His knees seemed shaky. "Do you know who I am?"

"Haven't the foggiest," Skulduggery said.

The man spat blood and grinned defiantly. "Well, I know about you," he said. "My master told me all about you, Detective, and you're going to have to do a lot more than that to stop me."

Skulduggery shrugged, and Stephanie watched in amazement as a ball of fire flared up in his hand. He hurled it, and the man was suddenly covered in flame. But instead of screaming, the man tilted his head back and roared with laughter. The fire might have engulfed him, but it wasn't burning him.

"More!" He laughed. "Give me more!"

"If you insist."

And then Skulduggery took an old-fashioned revolver from his jacket and fired, the gun bucking slightly with the recoil. The bullet hit the man in the shoulder and he screamed, then tried to run and tripped. He scrambled for the doorway, ducking and dodging lest he get shot again, the flames obstructing his vision so much that he hit a wall on his way out.

And then he was gone.

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Stephanie stared at the door, trying to make sense of the impossible.

"Well," Skulduggery said from behind her, "that's something you don't see every day."

She turned. When his hat had come off, his hair had come off too. In the confusion, all she had seen was a chalk-white scalp, so she turned expecting to see a bald albino, maybe. But no. With his sunglasses gone and his scarf hanging down, there was no denying the fact that he had no flesh, he had no skin, he had no eyes, and he had no face.

All he had was a skull for a head.

Chapter Four

Chapter Four

The Secret War

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Skulduggery put his gun away and walked out to the hall. He peered out into the night. Satisfied that there were no human fireballs lurking anywhere nearby, he came back inside and picked the door up off the floor, grunting with the effort. He maneuvered it back to where it belonged, leaving it leaning in the doorway; then he shrugged and came back into the living room, where Stephanie was still standing and staring at him.

"Sorry about the door," he said.

Stephanie stared.

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"I'll pay to get it fixed."

Stephanie stared.

"It's still a good door, you know. Sturdy."

When he realized that Stephanie was in no condition to do anything but stare, he shrugged again and took off his coat, folded it neatly, and draped it over the back of a chair. He went to the broken window and started picking up the shards of glass.

Now that he didn't have his coat on, Stephanie could truly appreciate how thin he really was. His suit, well tailored though it was, hung off him, giving it a shapeless quality. She watched him collect the broken glass, and saw a flash of bone between his shirtsleeve and glove. He stood up, looking back at her.

"Where should I put all this glass?"

"I don't know," Stephanie said in a quiet voice. "You're a skeleton."

"I am indeed," he said. "Gordon used to keep a trash can out at the back door; shall I put it in that?"

Stephanie nodded. "Yes, okay," she said simply, and watched Skulduggery carry the armful of glass shards out of the room. All her life she had longed for something else, for

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something to take her out of the humdrum world she knew--and now that it looked like it might actually happen, she didn't have one clue what to do. Questions were tripping over themselves in her head, each one vying to be the one that was asked first. So many of them.

Skulduggery came back in, and she asked the first question. "Did you find it all right?"

"I did, yes. It was where he always kept it."

"Okay then." If questions were people, she thought, they'd all be staring at her now in disbelief. She struggled to form coherent thoughts.

"Did you tell him your name?" Skulduggery was asking.

"What?"

"Your name. Did you tell him?"

"Uh, no . . ."

"Good. You know something's true name, you have power over it. But even a given name, even Stephanie, would have been enough to do it."

"To do what?"

"To give him some influence over you, to get you to do what he asked. If he had your name and he knew what to do with it, sometimes that's all it takes. That's a scary thought, now, isn't it?"

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"What's going on?" Stephanie asked. "Who was he? What did he want? Just who are you?"

"I'm me," Skulduggery said, picking up his hat and wig and placing them on a nearby table. "As for him, I don't know who he is; never seen him before in my life."

"You shot him."

"That's right."

"And you threw fire at him."

"Yes, I did."

Stephanie's legs felt weak and her head felt light.

"Mr. Pleasant, you're a skeleton."

"Ah yes, back to the crux of the thing. Yes. I am, as you say, a skeleton. I have been one for a few years now."

"Am I going mad?"

"I hope not."

"So you're real? You actually exist?"

"Presumably."

"You mean you're not sure if you exist or not?"

"I'm fairly certain. I mean, I could be wrong. I could be some ghastly hallucination, a figment of my imagination."

"You might be a figment of your own imagination?"

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"Stranger things have happened. And do, with alarming regularity."

"This is too weird."

He put his gloved hands in his pockets and cocked his head. He had no eyeballs, so it was hard to tell if he was looking at her or not. "You know, I met your uncle under similar circumstances. Well, kind of similar. But he was drunk. And we were in a bar. And he had vomited on my shoes. So I suppose the actual circumstances aren't overly similar, but both events include a meeting, so . . . My point is, he was having some trouble and I was there to lend a hand, and we became good friends after that. Good, good friends." His head tilted. "You look like you might faint."

Stephanie nodded slowly. "I've never fainted before, but I think you might be right."

"Do you want me to catch you if you fall, or . . . ?"

"If you wouldn't mind."

"No problem at all."

"Thank you."

Stephanie gave him a weak smile, and then darkness clouded her vision and she felt

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herself falling and the last thing she saw was Skulduggery Pleasant darting across the room toward her.

Stephanie awoke on the couch with a blanket over her. The room was dark, lit by only two lamps in opposite corners. She looked over at the broken window, saw that it was now boarded up. She heard a hammering from the hall, and when she felt strong enough to stand, she slowly rose and walked out of the living room.

Skulduggery Pleasant was trying to hang the door back on its hinges. He had his shirtsleeve rolled up on his left forearm. Ulna, she corrected herself, proving that her first year of biology class had not gone to waste. Or was it radius? Or both? She heard him mutter; then he noticed her and nodded brightly.

"Ah, you're up."

"You fixed the window."

"Well, covered it up. Gordon had a few pieces of timber out back, so I did what I could. Not having the same luck with the door, though. I find it much easier to blast them off than put them back. How are you feeling?"

"I'm okay," she said.

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"A cup of hot tea, that's what you need. Lots of sugar."

He abandoned the door and guided her to the kitchen, and she sat at the table while he boiled the water.

"Hungry?" he asked when it had boiled, but she shook her head. "Milk?"

She nodded. He added milk and spoonfuls of sugar, gave the tea a quick stir, and put the cup on the table in front of her. She took a sip--it was hot, but nice.

"Thank you," she said, and he gave a little shrug. It was hard discerning some of his meanings without a face to go by, but she took the shrug to mean "Think nothing of it."

"Was that magic? With the fire, and blasting the door?"

"Yes, it was."

She peered closer. "How can you talk?"

"Sorry?"

"How can you talk? You move your mouth when you speak, but you've got no tongue, you've got no lips, you've got no vocal cords. I mean, I know what skeletons look like--

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I've seen diagrams and models and stuff--and the only things that hold them together are flesh and skin and ligaments, so why don't you just fall apart?"

He gave another shrug, both shoulders this time. "Well, that's magic too."

She looked at him. "Magic's pretty handy."

"Yes, magic is."

"And what about, you know, nerve endings? Can you feel pain?"

"I can, but that's not a bad thing. Pain lets you know that you're alive, after all."

"And are you alive?"

"Well, technically no, but ..."

She peered into his empty eye sockets. "Do you have a brain?"

He laughed. "I don't have a brain, I don't have any organs, but I have a consciousness." He started clearing away the sugar and the milk. "To be honest with you, it's not even my head."

"What?"

"It's not. They ran away with my skull. I won this one in a poker game."

"That's not even yours? How does it feel?"

"It'll do. It'll do until I finally get around to getting my own head back. You look faintly disgusted."

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"I just ... Doesn't it feel weird? It'd be like wearing someone else's socks."

"You get used to it."

"What happened to you?" she asked. "Were you born like this?"

"No, I was born perfectly normal. Skin, internal organs, the whole shebang. Even had a face that wasn't too bad to look at, if I do say so myself."

"So what happened?"

Skulduggery leaned against the counter, arms folded across his chest. "I got into magic. Back then--back when I was, for want of a better term, alive--there were some pretty nasty people around. The world was seeing a darkness it might never have recovered from. It was war, you see. A secret war, but war nonetheless. There was a sorcerer, Mevolent, worse than any of the others, and he had himself an army, and those of us who refused to fall in behind him found ourselves standing up against him.

"And we were winning. Eventually, after years of fighting this little war of ours, we were actually winning. His support was crumbling, his influence was fading, and he was

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staring defeat in the face. So he ordered one last, desperate strike, against all the leaders on our side."

Stephanie stared at him, lost in his voice.

"I went up against his right-hand man, who had laid out a wickedly exquisite trap. I didn't suspect a thing until it was too late.

"So I died. He killed me. The twenty-third of October, it was, when my heart stopped beating. Once I was dead, they stuck my body up on a pike and burned it for all to see. They used me as a warning; they used the bodies of all the leaders they had killed as warnings, and to my utter horror, it worked."

"What do you mean?"

"The tide turned. Our side starting losing ground. Mevolent got stronger. It was more than I could stand, so I came back."

"You just. . . came back?"

"It's . . . complicated. When I died, I never moved on. Something was holding me here, making me watch. I've never heard of it happening before that, and I haven't heard of it happening since, but it happened to me. So when it got too much, I woke up, a bag of bones. Literally. They had gathered up my bones and put them in a bag and thrown the

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bag into a river. So that was a marvelous new experience right there."

"Then what happened?"

"I put myself back together, which was rather painful, then climbed out of the river and rejoined the fight, and in the end, we won. We finally won. So, with Mevolent defeated, I quit that whole scene and struck out on my own for the first time in a few hundred years."

Stephanie blinked. "Few hundred!"

"It was a long war."

"That man, he called you Detective."

"He obviously knows me by reputation," Skulduggery said, standing a little straighter. "I solve mysteries now."

"Really?"

"Quite good at it too."

"So, what, you're tracking down your head?"

He looked at her. If he'd had eyelids, he might well be blinking. "It'd be nice to have it back, sure, but ..."

"So you don't need it, like, so you can rest in peace?"

"No. No, not really."

"Why did they take it? Was that another warning?"

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"Oh, no," Skulduggery said with a little laugh. "No, they didn't take it. I was sleeping, about ten or fifteen years ago, and these little goblin things ran up and nicked it right off my spinal column. Didn't notice it was gone till the next morning."

Stephanie frowned. "And you didn't feel that?"

"Well, like I said, I was asleep. Meditating, I suppose you'd call it. I can't see, hear, or feel anything when I'm meditating. Have you tried it?"

"No."

"It's very relaxing. I think you'd like it."

"I'm sorry, I'm still stuck on you losing your head."

"I didn't lose it," he said defensively. "It was stolen."

She was feeling stronger now. She couldn't believe that she'd fainted. Fainted. It was such an old-woman thing to do. She glanced up at Skulduggery. "You've had a very unusual life, haven't you?"

"I suppose I have. Not over yet, though. Well, technically it is, but ..."

"Isn't there anything you miss?"

"About what?"

"About living."

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"Compared to how long I've been like this, I was only technically alive for a blink of an eye. I can't really remember enough about having a beating heart in my chest to miss it."

"So there's nothing you miss?"

"I ... I suppose I miss hair. I miss how it . . . was. And how it was there, on top of my head. I suppose I miss my hair."

He took out his pocket watch and his head jerked back. "Wow, look at the time. I've got to go, Stephanie."

"Go? Go where?"

"Things to do, I'm afraid. Number one is finding out why that nice gentleman was sent here, and number two is finding out who sent him."

"You can't leave me alone," she said, following him into the living room.

"No," he corrected, "I can. You'll be perfectly safe."

"The front door's off!"

"Well, yes. You'll be perfectly safe as long as they don't come through the front door."

He pulled on his coat, but she snatched his hat away.

"Are you taking my hat hostage?" he asked doubtfully.