The Last Aerie (82 page)

Trask and the others were battering at the doors again, calling out to Nathan, asking if he was all right. He was aware of them—of their voices, strangely distant, as if they reached him from a very long way away—and also aware that he wasn’t alone in the eerie blue glow of the place. There were …
combatants
here, too. For this was to be the final confrontation.

Combatants, and an audience. But never such a silent audience in the history of competition. For they were all of them dead. As were the phantoms they had come to watch.

The previous inhabitants of this place sat on their metal caskets in a ring that encircled the figures of two men: John Scofield and Tod Prentiss. Nathan could tell them apart from the start, for he knew what Prentiss had looked like; his bestial face was unmistakable, and his squat, froglike figure—hunched now in a defensive crouch, or shrunken into itself in fear—seemed likewise to cry his identity. Grave-dirt clung in clods to his hairy body.

As for John Scofield: he was of medium height, sparsely-fleshed, clean-limbed. Both men were naked, and the contrast
was
stark: darkness against light, good against evil. Whether it was an accurate physical representation or simply Scofield and his mortal (or immortal?) enemy as seen from Scofield’s point of view, Nathan couldn’t say. But he knew which side he was on. And he was even more sure when suddenly Tod Prentiss rounded on him and grunted:

Cunt! Rabble-rouser! This dumb bastard thought he had me—until you and your dead friends convinced him otherwise!

Then Nathan saw that while Prentiss’s basic emotion was definitely fear, indeed terror—of John Scofield presumably—he’d managed to suppress it to allow for a bout of vicious, homicidal rage. Survival, Nathan supposed. For during his life of theft, rape, and finally murder, Prentiss had been a survivor. As in life, so in death; his instincts were unchanged. Prentiss was
still
the survivor. He had survived … how many of Scofield’s attempts to be rid of him? In his incorporeal state he always would survive them, for men only die the true death once.

Nathan’s thoughts were deadspeak, and Tod Prentiss heard them, “naturally”.

Dead right, shithead! Living men
only die the true death once. And you’re alive, right? For the moment you’re alive, anyway … you dumb fuck!
Prentiss’s sudden lunge in Nathan’s direction might have taken the Necroscope by surprise, but not John Scofield. And not the ring of sad, silent observers.

As Prentiss came loping—leaning menacingly forward, with his long arms reaching and his wet lips drawn back from straining, grimacing yellow teeth—so the corpses moved to intercept. They weren’t creaking, groaning cadavers but bodies of the freshly dead, and in these metaphysical moments of Scofield’s and the Great Majority’s creation they were “alive” and mobile as life itself. Blocking the way, they turned Prentiss back, brought him face to face with Scofield again.

And seeing Scofield’s cold, stony expression, Prentiss shrank down, whimpered like a whipped dog, and backed off. He knew why he’d been called up, why he was here: to die again. And he knew who would be his executioner.

Then Scofield said:

I wanted to show you, Nathan, what I’ve been up against and why I can’t stop. Myself, wife and child, we’re here in an afterworld devoid of body, but not of mind. And I for one refuse to share it with such as this! One way or the other I will be rid of him, but until then I can’t stop. For the moment—perhaps a brief moment—I suppose, I hope, you would call me sane. But I know that sooner or later the very thought of this creature still existing, in however limited a capacity, is bound to drive me mad again.

Scofield paused as Tod Prentiss suddenly stopped whining, drew himself upright, shouted a curse and sprang at his enemy head on, jaws gaping as if to bite him, savage him like a mad dog. Scofield paused and held up a hand; simply that … but it was as if he’d erected a wall.

A telekinetic wall that Prentiss slammed into, flattened against, and slid down groaning to the floor. At which Nathan remembered something, indeed several things:

In life Scofield’s true talent had been telekinesis, and it still was. The power to move things at will, with the mind alone. The power to build an invisible wall, or visible spirits from the memories and thoughts and dreams (or nightmares) of what had been. The power to crush, enclose … contain?
Such
power that the ebb and flow of its field produced those “poltergeist” effects which threatened the sanity of a world. Well, and the dead were sometimes a threat in Nathan’s world, too, and the undead even more so. But the Travellers of Sunside had their own ways of dealing with such threats.

Remembering those ways, he now asked Scofield:

Where is Prentiss now? His body, I mean?

What does that matter?
Scofield turned his head to look at the Necroscope, at which Prentiss climbed to his feet again and once more adopted his defensive or threatening crouch.

Scofield shrugged.
He was buried close by, else I might have
difficulty calling him up. His remains are still there, in the ground, but he is here. This is him.

Using deadspeak thoughts and pictures, Nathan showed what he intended—at which Prentiss went wild! For he was able to see, hear and understand Nathan’s deadspeak scenario as well as Scofield and the rest of the teeming dead. And even knowing what his fate was to be—or more properly because he knew—his instinct for survival rose up in him one last time.

He hurled himself headlong at Scofield again, and again was met by the wall of the other’s mind. Except that this time it wrapped around him and folded him in, enveloping him like a fly in a spider’s cocoon: the invisible cocoon of a dead man’s telekinesis enhanced by his undying hatred. But unlike a spider’s cocoon, this one was designed to contain a malignancy.

Then, slowly but surely, John Scofield crushed Prentiss and shrank him down. The ectoplasm which was Prentiss’s “body” assumed a compressed, spherical shape, in which the grotesquely
liquid
contents had his features, but features which gradually melted into the globular blob of the whole. And such was the efficacy of Scofield’s telekinetic bubble of pure thought that as it shrank, so Tod Prentiss’s frantic screams shrank with it.

The process wasn’t necromancy; it involved no “pain” as such, only the terror of absolute finality. Prentiss’s terror. And search as he might, Nathan could find no pity within himself for the subject of this, John Scofield’s final exorcism. For that is what it was: the casting out of a devil, the removal of a morbid tumour which had infected the flesh of the living but would no more suppurate in the minds of the dead. Let it be a warning to all such: death is not the end, and it isn’t the end of justice.

Within the thought-bubble Prentiss continued to shrink. His outline was completely spherical now, domed head sliding into bloodhound jowls, into hunched shoulders, into fat arms and vast flat hands which enclosed a bulb stomach, hips and groin that crushed down on concertinaed legs and monstrously curving, crumpled feet. And as the bubble shrank so any semblance of life was likewise diminished; what flesh-tones had been present disappeared and were replaced by a green rottenness, the evil light of Tod Prentiss’s soul, concentrated within a small place and shining that much brighter, or so much more lividly.

The telekinetic sphere of containment was less than eighteen inches in diameter now; shrinking more yet it gave a last, frantic wriggle, like a soap bubble disturbed by a current of air, so that for a moment Nathan thought Prentiss was about to break out. But no; he had tried, certainly, but it was his last desperate attempt. Scofield’s talent was too strong, too terrible to resist.

And down went the bubble, smaller and smaller, and Prentiss’s screams, still furious, less than whispers on the psychic ether. Until at last they were inaudible. Then:

I don’t know … how long … I can hold it together
, Scofield said, his own voice small now in Nathan’s deadspeak mind. What
you promised, do it now. For once I’m
spent it
will be a long time before 1 can build up to anything like this again.

Nathan saw how close to exhaustion he was. And now, speaking out loud to the teeming dead: “Help him! Give him all the help you can. Hold Prentiss until I can see to it, or all this is for nothing.”

They understood, added the “weight” of their incorporeal minds to Scofield’s and helped him cram the pulsing green glow which was Prentiss into an even smaller space; in the end into no space at all, merely a nucleus of sick green radiation … which Nathan plucked from the air and put in his pocket!

It was as easy as that. He could do it—he was the only one who
could
do it—because he was the Necroscope, because to him death and everything connected with it is different. And now that the Great Majority had played their part, it was up to him to see it through.

The dead and their casket seats faded into blue mist which itself faded into nothingness; the room darkened, but momentarily, before the doors crashed open; Trask and the others stood framed in the dim light from the corridor, their breathing making grey funnels in the cold air. And from some near-distant place in the quiet city, the chimes of midnight rang out, penetrating even here.

But at last, no less than the city, the Nightmare Zone was quiet too …

In the Duty Room, Nathan wasted no time. “Prentiss was buried quite close to here.”

“That’s right,” Trask nodded. “Is it important?”

“Yes,” Nathan answered curtly. “We have to dig him up and burn him—and tonight!”

“But —”

“No buts, not if you want to be rid of the Nightmare Zone forever. Listen, time to explain later. But right now … can it be arranged?”

There were few things that the Head of E-Branch couldn’t arrange. “Yes, if I can get to a telephone.”

“Then let’s get to one …”

The exhumation of Tod Prentiss was a speedy and less than dignified affair, and his cremation in an industrial furnace at an engineering plant on the outskirts of the city took place without ceremony—except for one small incident. Just before the bodybag went into the fire, Nathan stepped forward and unzipped it six inches along one side. And taking some unseen thing from his pocket, which
couldn’t
be seen by anyone but him, he thrust it deep into the bag where it belonged.

Thus Tod Prentiss became one with his remains, and was one with his ashes when they had cooled.

In the grey morning, the first three airplanes out of Gatwick, and three more out of Heathrow, carried, along with their more orthodox passengers, E-Branch agents on a special mission: to disperse Prentiss’s ashes across the world, scattering them far and wide, so that nothing of him could ever come together again.

Also by first light, the remains of John and Lynn Scofield, and those of their son Andrew, were exhumed and cremated, under circumstances and in a manner which were very different. And in the Kensington Garden of Repose, Ben Trask, Zek Föener and Nathan stood with heads bowed as a short but solemn ceremony took place …

Later, when the three walked in the grounds of the place under a grey sky, Nathan told the others: “This may be strange. It may even frighten you a little, but it shouldn’t worry you. And it is what they want.”

He carried an earthenware urn, which suddenly he held out at arm’s length.

“What…?” Trask said.

But Nathan was talking to someone else now.
John, are you sure? This is what you want, right?

Oh, yes.
The answer came back at once.
And it has to be now. Whatever power I have left, it
will only just suffice. I know it. I drained myself keeping Prentiss in his place until you could scatter him far and wide. And now it’s for me to find a better place for my family. But even if we don’t make it, if we’re scattered on the winds, we’ll be together at the end and at peace with ourselves. We are at peace with ourselves, Nathan, thanks to you. And now … do it.

Nathan did it: dropped the urn, which crashed down onto a red brick herringbone pathway and shattered. And for a moment there was a confusion of bouncing, clattering pottery shards, and grey dust springing up in a cloud. Then—

The cloud drew itself together into some sort of tenuous whole, which despite the graveyard’s blustery crosswinds maintained a kind of cohesion as it rose up and made off in a single body across the perimeter wall, up over the rooftops, and quickly vanished into the distance. And:

“Gone,” said Nathan sadly, in a little while.

Trask nodded, and croaked: “Gone, yes. I’m not sure what you’ve done, but —”

“But we’re sure it’s for the best,” Zek finished for him.

“For the best, yes,” Nathan agreed.

The best for the living and the dead alike,
Keenan Gormley sighed in Nathan’s deadspeak mind
. And the dead know it. Nathan, you have what you wanted. You’ve made yourself a lot of new friends. Now be sure you use them wisely …

Trask arranged for Garvey and Smart to have a week off duty, simply to rest up. Then he handed over his own duties as Head of Branch to David Chung for a week, so that he could drive up to Scotland with Zek and Nathan. It would give Nathan a break; Trask too, and Zek … would be with them. But in his heart of hearts, Trask knew why he wanted her along.

They stayed in Edinburgh for three days, where Nathan took great pleasure in standing in Princes Street and looking up at the Castle on the Rock. “Men built it!” he would whisper, awed by the thought. “In Turgosheim it wouldn’t be much; it doesn’t seem a lot bigger than Trollmanse, Lorn Halfstruck’s stump of a stack in the bottom of the gorge. But
men
built this!”

“You should see the pyramids,” Zek had told him, smiling.

“Or the Great Wall of China,” Trask had put in.

“Or the Empire State Building!” Zek had finished it, as was her wont. “Men have built a good many things.”