The Everlasting (28 page)

“I don't understand any of this, but I have to because of Helen. So when I start getting messages that warn me away from you, what am I supposed to do?”

“Talk to me about it.”

“I don't know you!”

“So therefore you don't trust me?”

“You're just the immortal who happened to visit
me, and who happens to have taken me with you. It could just as easily have been her.” He pointed at the woman squirming on the ground. “Or him.”

Tigre glared at Scott, his expression hard with scar tissue.

“Just because I'm immortal, that doesn't mean I'm inhuman,” Nina said.

Scott snorted and turned away, but there'd been something in her voice that struck a chord. After all, out of the immortals he had met so far, she was the most like him. She smiled and laughed, felt pain, and suffered the sting of loneliness.

Scott stared up at the house, wondering which windows hid faces and which hid something else. It was a haunted house; that much was clear. It stood in a valley hidden away behind the veil dividing the world from everything else. Perhaps it had been here forever. And inside could lie his salvation.

Save us
, he had seen the silent ghosts mouthing at him.
Help us
.

“So whom do I trust?” he asked, still looking at the house. He heard movement behind him, felt Nina's hand on his shoulder.

“I promise you I'm on your side,” she said.

“Why me? What am I? I know it's not just Papa, not just because of him. I'm something more, aren't I?”

“You're mortal, unchanged by the book's contents. You can
touch
it. To the likes of us, it's as ghostlike as the truly dead. We can't touch it, can barely see it, and being around it . . .”

“What?”

“It was horrible,” Nina said, and Scott knew that she was telling the truth.

Tears burned behind his eyes, and he was not sad that his vision blurred. Nina came in close until all he could see was her face. “So what happens now?” he asked. “What do I have to do?”

Nina looked over his shoulder at the house. “Let's knock on the door and see what answers.”

This was the House of Screaming Skulls. Papa and Scott had read about it and seen obscure mentions on late-night TV, but Scott had never believed he would ever find himself here. It was fabled, like Oz or Atlantis. A place of the world, but not within it. A story.

He rapped his knuckles against the door. There was no echo, as he had expected. There was barely any sound at all. He knocked again.

Nina stood beside him, while Tigre hung back. He had sliced the woman in two across her chest and kicked her halves apart, smearing viscera and blood across the concrete area. Since then, Scott had tried not to look at her. But he could hear wet, sticky movement behind him as she tried to rejoin herself, and her gargled threats, which were sounding more malevolent with every heartbeat.

He knocked again. Nina shifted impatiently beside
him. Glancing at her, he noticed her extreme discomfort for the first time. She was sweating, blinking quickly, and her breath came in short, fast gasps. He looked around at Tigre, but the mutilated man's face remained a feature of fights and violence.

“Maybe no one's home,” Scott said. “Who'd want to live here? Local pub must be miles away. And imagine having to clean all these windows.” He looked at the facade rising above and around him, jumped when a light curtain billowed from one of the windows. There was no breeze outside to cause that; maybe the air inside was being disrupted. “What's in here?”

“Nobody knows,” Nina said. “As far as I know, no one has ever been inside.”

“No one?”

She shrugged.

“Great,” Scott said. “Great.”

“Move aside,” Tigre said. “Let me open the door.” He hefted his bloody swords and stepped forward.

The front door clicked and opened a hand's width.

Scott stepped back. Nina remained where she was, but her shoulders tensed, hands fisted.

The air shifted slightly, as if the house were exhaling past them. It smelled stale and musty, and it carried the taint of an abandoned abattoir: no fresh blood, but plenty of deathly echoes.

“I don't like this place,” Scott said.

“The book,” Nina said, and there was wonder in her voice.

“It really is here.” Tigre stepped forward and put a
hand on Nina's shoulder, squeezing slightly. “It really is here!” Then he turned to Scott. “Ready to help, human?”

Every nerve in Scott's body, every part of his mind, told him to turn and run.
It's a brain
, he thought, and though the idea repulsed him, he could not shake it.
A brain, a mind, a consciousness without a soul. And it's barren
.

“I'm not sure I can,” he said.

“Helen,” Nina breathed. “She's out there, where you've just been. So lost. And the only way I can help you get her back—”

“I'll go,” Scott said. “Of course I'll go. But it's not a house.”

Nina shook her head. “Never thought it was.”

Tigre laughed. It was a gruesome sound, yet so unexpected that it lifted Scott's spirits. “If it'll make you feel any better, I'll go first.” He sheathed the swords and pulled a dull black object from a holster on his hip. “People used to call me Death,” he said. “It's all I've ever wanted.” He stepped to the door and kicked it open all the way.

Inside the house, out of the sun, they could have been anywhere. The entrance hallway was large and grand, but possessed a depressing taint of age. It was like a great country house that had fallen into disrepair, a mansion whose better times were decades or centuries in the past. It was a place way past its prime. Perhaps it had always looked this way.

The floor was laid with massive marble slabs, six feet square. The centers of these slabs retained their
beauty, but the edges were dulled and darkened with moisture penetration. There were rugs here and there, most of them threadbare, and their colors bled pale, a couple bearing black-edged holes as if they had been burned. The walls were lined with dark timber all around, pocked here and there with doorways. Every door seemed to be closed. A staircase began in the center of the hallway fifteen steps in, rising straight up, then splitting and curving to the left and right. The balustrade was ornately carved, the treads inlaid with individual carpet squares, the risers painted with elaborate representations of what appeared to be hunting scenes. The walls were also decorated with paintings, though much of what they depicted was hidden by a heavy sheen of dust and dirt that had accumulated over the centuries.

Some areas seemed to have been cleaned, and others had been left to gather time.

One strange affectation was a stag's head, mounted at the first stair landing where the separate stairways curved left and right. It was huge, the antlers long and convoluted, though their ends had turned dark and crumbled to dust. Its eyes glittered with reflected light. Scott stared at it, fully expecting it to blink.

Living up to his promise, Tigre went first. He moved forward across the marble floor, pausing when he stood on the first rug. He held the machine pistol down beside his leg, its short barrel resembling an extended finger. Scott hoped he was ready to point at the first hint of danger.
I can die; they can't
, he kept thinking. But he was trying to convince himself that
he was in a position of power. If he died, they would not find the book, nor be able to read the words they had written so long ago and now forgotten. It was in their interests to protect him.

“Strange,” Tigre said. He moved a few more steps, then stopped again, standing on the next rug. He lifted one foot, then the other, looking around as he did so. “Illusion,” he said.

“All of it?” Nina asked.

“Some.” He walked on.

“What does he mean?” Scott asked.

“The house isn't really here.”

Scott moved sideways and placed his hand against the wood paneling. It was cool and rough, spiky with hardened varnish spots. When he rubbed his hand across its surface it scratched his skin, tickled his fingertips. “It feels real to me,” he said.

Nina glanced back and shrugged. “Come on.” She followed Tigre, and Scott hurried to keep up.

They headed for the foot of the staircase. As they came closer, Scott could make out details on the painted risers. Starting from the first one, the pictures seemed to tell a story: a chase, a hunt, a kill, and farther upstairs there looked like revelry and celebration.

There were very few humans in the pictures.

“My God, what are those?” he whispered. The main figures in the paintings were tall, cloaked creatures with muscled arms and chests, and bare skulls atop their shoulders. Some of the skulls still carried shreds of bright red meat, and one or two still had shriveled eyes in their sockets. But most were skeletal
from the neck up, the sliced surface of their necks blackened with hardened blood.

“Screaming Skulls,” Nina said.

“But they're not real, right? Not like that?”

Again, she only shrugged.

“Around here,” Tigre said.

“Yes, I think so too,” Nina said. There was a quaver to her voice, and for a moment Scott thought someone else had spoken. He reached out and clasped Nina's shoulder, and she turned to look at him. Her eyes were wide and frightened. Her face was pale and spotted with beads of sweat. The house was cool.

“What is it?”

“The Chord of Souls is very close,” she said. “It's a ghost to us, but it's like poison also. We're breathing its air. Invading its space.”

“And Tigre?”

“He just can't show the pain.”

“Do you think—”

“We need to move on, Scott. We're so close. Helen, remember? All for Helen.”

Helen
, he thought. He remembered her face, and for that he was glad. He remembered her voice and her smell, the touch of her lips against his neck and her hand on his thigh. He could remember all of that, and the memory had the power and immediacy of one that would be lived again. “We'll do this,” he said. “We will.”

A voice shouted out behind them. It was pained and distorted, but loud enough to make Scott jump.

“They're here for the book!” it said. “They're going
to destroy the book! Smash it, crush it, make it into dust!”

Scott and the others spun around, Tigre dropping to one knee and raising the gun.

The door stood open, and bleeding in through the entrance was Yaima. She had dragged her upper body across the forecourt and up the steps to the door, and now her bodily fluids added to the moisture permeating the old marble slabs. She was raised on one hand, face held high, and there was a frightening clarity to her expression as she stared at Scott. “And they have a human!” she bellowed.

The air exploded around Scott and he curled up on the floor. Tigre stood and fired another burst from the machine pistol, and when Scott looked again the woman was lying against the open door, her head shattered. Blood settled around her in a fine mist. Sunlight glimmered on the spread of brain matter spattered against the door, nestling in fresh bullet holes and slowly running down to the ground. All parts of her seemed to be drawing together, obeying some incredible attraction that would seek to rebuild her tattered form.

“So much for the element of surprise,” Scott said, and then the screams came down around them.

He had never heard a sound like it. They started as normal cries, then rose in volume and tone until they were something more, something almost solid that sliced through the air and penetrated his skull, twisting inside his ears like poisonous insects seeking escape. He clapped his hands to his ears but it had no
effect; the screams were already inside. They echoed in his skull. They pierced his flesh and resonated through his bones, vibrating each joint until it felt as if his whole skeleton were readying to burst apart.

He screamed himself, but the sound was lost. He fell to his knees, bruising them on the marble floor—it was still there, though Tigre had claimed the house to be illusory. Something tumbled into him and he saw Nina, her body twisting and face contorted with the same pain.

Tigre stood before them, legs shaking, scarred flesh vibrating, either from the noise or the fear it instilled. His arm rose. He was fighting, struggling to maintain control, railing against the onslaught of sound that came at them again and again in solid waves.

The screams went on. Scott was beginning to lose hold of his senses. Hearing was still there, torturing him with its honesty, but his sight was wavering, and though he opened his mouth to shout he could not utter a word.

Tigre clasped his right wrist in his left hand and raised it, pointing the machine pistol past the staircase at the shadows beyond.

And in those shadows . . .

The pictures on the stair risers had come to life. A dozen shapes emerged and manifested as the Screaming Skulls, flowing slowly, long robes tied open around their shoulders and falling down to pool on the floor around their feet. Their arms were bare, muscled, pale, and mottled with flowery blood-red spots. Their chests and stomachs were exposed;
similarly muscled, they flexed and squirmed as though containing a thousand lizards and snakes trying to escape.

Their heads were skulls. They wore wide necklaces of dried, caked blood, extending down from the limit of their flesh and flowing across their chests and shoulders. Above the necks, bones had been stripped clear of all flesh. The skulls were yellow, like bones left out in the sun for too long. None of them had any scraps of flesh remaining, eyes in the sockets, or mummified scalps. They were all hairless. Most still had teeth, though there were also many gaps.

Their mouths hung open as they screamed.

Tigre's machine pistol spit fire for a couple of seconds before falling empty. Three of the Screaming Skulls staggered back, clasping big hands to the wounds in their chests and arms. Then they stood upright again, and their mouths opened once more to add to the cacophony.