The Love of the Dead (23 page)

“I am a demon. A magus. An angel.”

“No,” she said, loosening the reins on her anger. “You’re none of those things, because they are myth. You’re alone. You’re nothing. You don’t even know what you are. Kill me, but don’t bore me with any more of your shit.”

She was dimly aware of Coleridge’s breath hissing through his teeth. But it was distant. Sawyer drew the eye like he was everything in the world. But really, he was nothing. A forgotten thing of the past that was moving on, moving on into the spirit realm.

Sawyer dipped his head toward the table, drawing her eye to what he wanted her to see.

“You shouldn’t anger me. You shouldn’t.”

While he had been talking he had built a tower of cards. Two cards in a triangle, next to two more of the same, joined by a card atop. The same pattern, over and over. Triangles of his flesh visible through the pyramid.

“Fuck you,” she said, but he didn’t kill her. He smiled. Held a finger to his lips. The fingernails on his hand were long and black. Deadly.

“I made a promise to Coleridge. Did he tell you what we spoke of?”

“No.” But suddenly the cold hit her. He’d ignored Coleridge until now. She didn’t want him thinking about Coleridge.

“Are you going to get on with it?”

“Immortality has given me patience. You’ll learn it, in my service. Your eyes will be mine. Your power will feed me. It’s a great honor. Just wait a little longer.”

She tried to reply, but he held a fingernail against her lips. Foulness filled her mouth and she began to gag. Something so awful on her lips that she was unable to talk, just retch and wipe at her lips.

“Shhh, Elizabeth,” he said, and the cultured, polite tone was gone. His voice was hard as stone.

“I promised Coleridge when I spoke to him last that I’d let him lick your tasty cunt. I’m going to take his head from his fat shoulders and stick it between your legs and make him fuck you with his bloody tongue. But first I promised him something else.” He was snarling now, his wings filling the room and flapping with such power Beth’s breath was taken away.

The tower of cards didn’t shift. The wind had no effect on it. It wasn’t anything other than a house of cards, but it must have been because Sawyer drew his black blade from within it and ducked to one knee, sweeping the blade around in an arc and taking Coleridge’s foot off halfway down his shin.

Chapter Sixty-Seven

Beth screamed. Coleridge didn’t understand why but he did what came naturally to him. He pushed himself up, fast for a fat man, ready to fight.

But his foot wasn’t there. He fell to the floor with a heavy crash, cracking his head on the cold hard tiles. Then the pain hit. He looked down and saw his foot and half his shin tumbled over to the side. He screamed, high, urgent, in a pitch that could have only come from agony.

“No!” Beth shouted at Sawyer. Sawyer smiled.

“One down. One to go. Bet he’s got a fat tongue, Elizabeth. You should be grateful. Clear some of the cobwebs out of your cunt.”

“Fuck you!”

She picked up the scotch.

“You can’t hurt me. You may as well drink it.”

She spat at him. Smashed the bottle on the edge of the table.

This was what she’d been waiting for. Maybe it was what the spirits wanted, and maybe it wasn’t.

But it was her time, and she knew it.

Bottle held tight in her fist she drove the jagged end into her neck.

“No! No!”

“Fuck you,” she gurgled. Blood sprayed across Sawyer’s chest and face, coated his wings. It fountained into the air and splashed over Coleridge, his face already pale, his body shaking.

“Ah...” she said. She smiled. Free at last. She’d denied him. She saw his immense rage at his failure and it made her smile all the more. She fell to her knees, then over to her side. Her strength was fading.

Sawyer’s blade was forgotten on the floor. He beat at her with his fist, incoherent shouts falling on deaf ears as everything around her faded away, became distant. She could see Coleridge shuddering on the floor, the shock of losing his foot, maybe. Maybe he’d live. She wished for it with her dying breath, just as she laughed through the blood as Sawyer beat at her dying body.

Then she sat up and he was still there.

Her body slumped out in a pool of blood behind her.

She put her hands on Sawyer’s hard chest and pushed.

He fell back, shock on his face.

“I deny you!” her spirit shouted, and she felt a blazing light that didn’t come from her fill the room. It pushed away the darkness and blinded her, blinded him.

He roared as the light hit him. His skin split and he screamed in agony, surprised, shocked. A creature that had never known pain.

Sawyer, whatever he was, could not stand that glorious light. He flapped his wings and flew into the ceiling. Plasterboard rained down and the ceiling light burst, shards of glass falling, too. He dove down, and, even though there was little room, he was heavy, a diving boulder. He hit the floor and tiles flew into the air.

Shards of tile hit the cabinet behind Beth, driven into the wood. They passed straight through her.

Dirt spewed from the hole, filling the room with that wet earth smell that reminded her of spring. Steam rose, then the last of him was gone, gone deep beneath the earth.

Down. Where he belonged.

Beth took one last yearning look behind her. Blood pumped from Coleridge leg. Her blood, his blood—the floor was covered in it. It ran in rivers toward the hole in the earth, down to his domain.

Where she had to go. Where she had to finish it.

She couldn’t do anything for Coleridge. Not anymore.

Turning away from him, she stepped up to the edge of the hole and jumped into the abyss.

Part Six

The Tower

Chapter Sixty-Eight

Peter slowed as he reached Beth’s house. He didn’t understand what he was seeing at first. He blinked, halted. There were TV crews with cameras in a rough circle behind a police barricade. Her house was protected by a huge police presence, some of them armed. Lights flashed, spotlights blazed toward the house, but they just bounced back.

Around the house a black wall, a tower, had risen so high in the sky it blotted out the moon. The spotlights, the moonlight, everything was reflected from it. A wall made from darkness so absolute it threw light away from it. Nothing penetrated. The policemen prodded it with the muzzles of their guns, a useless gesture that only succeeded in confusing them more. Peter had never seen anything like it. He doubted anyone had.

He tried to see his way through it, but Beth’s house had disappeared. He could feel Beth, though, somewhere behind the terrible wall. Calling to him.

Then he was running again, always running and always late.

He barged through a knot of reporters. One swore and fell. He didn’t have time to apologize. He shoved a policeman with his shoulder, and the man spun away.

Then he hit the darkness.

It was like running underwater, deep down where strange fish lived, ungainly creatures that never saw the light of day. He could see nothing, feel nothing. There was no sound, not of his footfalls nor his breath. It was like the world had ceased to exist around him and he was the only person in the universe, running through space for eternity.

He came through it so suddenly that he couldn’t stop when Beth’s house appeared before him. He crashed straight through the front door. He could hear someone murmuring, high pitched, incoherent with pain.

“God. No, no. Beth!”

When he rounded the corner into the kitchen he saw a fat man without a foot, bleeding steadily onto the floor. His blood merged with Beth’s, the love of his life, his anchor that would never leave him adrift.

She was dead. A jagged hole in her neck no longer bled, though, from the amount of blood on the walls, he guessed the killer had hit an artery. But then he guessed again. In death, she still clutched a broken bottle by the neck.

She had taken her own life.

But the killer had a hand in it. He didn’t doubt for a minute.

He knelt beside her and kissed her on the lips.

“Oh, Beth. Beth.”

He felt tears well behind his eyes, but nothing would come. He couldn’t cry, even with his wife dead before him.

He couldn’t cry because he was dead himself.

He knew now beyond a doubt, because his son knelt at the other side of his wife, beside his mother. He looked unbearably sad, but he reached across Beth’s body and took Peter’s hand gently in his own small palm.

Miles shone with some inner light. Bright, but beautiful.

Somehow he felt stronger than Peter, though Peter was a grown man, and Miles would always be a young boy.

“Daddy,” he said. “I missed you. Missed you so much.”

“Me, too. Me, too. I was too late. Always too late.”

“Not too late, Daddy,” said Miles. He pulled Peter to his feet with his strong hands. Peter clenched Miles’ hands tight, like he was frightened to let go, in case they never found each other again.

“Not too late. She still needs you.”

Miles pointed at the hole.

“She went after him. But she can’t win. She can’t hurt him. She needs you, Daddy.”

“What is he?”

“Something that never should have been. He has to end tonight.”

“How can I kill him?”

“With that,” Miles said, and pointed to the blade on the floor. Peter saw it for the first time. It was black and sheer. It seemed sharp enough to cut light, cut dark. He saw the fat man’s foot, severed cleanly, bone and flesh neatly cut in two.

He stooped and picked the dark blade up. He struggled, used both hands. It was far heavier than it should have been. It was little more than a long knife, and yet it weighed...

“It doesn’t weigh anything,” said Miles. “No more than we do.”

Peter remembered he was dead. This wasn’t a real knife, in the world he left behind. It was a dead blade, and he could lift it easily.

He put a hand tenderly on his son’s cheek.

Miles turned his head into his father’s hand, taking comfort in the touch he’d been missing for so long. The light within him blazed brighter, and Peter’s hand glowed where he had touched his son.

“Will I see you again?”

Miles smiled and nodded. “If the big spirit wills it.”

“Can we win?” Peter asked.

Miles shrugged. “It’s not the winning that matters,” he said.

Peter turned away from his little boy. With the light at his back and darkness ahead, foreboding running through him even though he knew he was dead, he stepped down into the earth.

Into the tower.

Chapter Sixty-Nine

Beth plummeted through the earth, her clothes plastered flat against her body by the wind, her hair whipped behind her. Her eyes stung from the wind and the heat and the stench.

She felt no fear. What was there to be afraid of? She was dead already. She had denied him. Now to finish it.

She put her arms out as she saw the bottom of the pit rising up toward her. Stopped herself with her will alone and landed on her feet, walking as soon as her soles touched the earth. Her steps were dignified, her gait strong and confident. All her doubts washed away.

But she was facing the angel of death. He didn’t want her before him, head held high. He wanted her filthy and broken, her back bent in supplication. The walls closed in on her, the ceiling got lower, until she walked stooped. At first she passed through rock, the edges rough-hewn and jagged. They could not cut her, but then the tunnel changed.

The walls started to drip, began to run with vile fluids that she could feel on her skin as though she were alive. Fat insects crawled along the walls, inches about her head, between her feet. Bloated sickly things that popped when she trod on them, ichor burning her bare feet and squelching obscenely between her toes.

Her shoes were gone. She wasn’t wearing the clothes she’d died in. She wore a long sheer dress. It had probably been white when she fell. Now it was grimy with rock dust, dirt, and all the foulness that seeped from the walls and dripped down on her.

She had been made afresh when she died, but this was his realm. The tower. The end of things, and he was its architect.

The walls swirled as she walked, colors shifting, blood red, yellow bile, pale semen, other base colors. Perhaps he thought she would balk at his depravity, but she did not stop. She opened her eyes wide, taking it all in. Using it to strengthen her resolve.

She passed deeper, and within the walls she saw grossly deformed creatures fucking and tearing at each other’s flesh in some nightmare orgy. She laughed.

“Is that it? Is that your best shot?”

His response was a tableau of children spitted on pikes, their bellies yawing open with wicked wounds. She didn’t laugh, but she did shake her head. He was nothing but an illusionist, a mesmerist, his nightmares projected on the walls. They didn’t touch her in the way he expected.

The tunnel became so narrow, so low that she was reduced to crawling forward on her knees.

Would he eventually close the tower to her, keep her in eternity bowed low beneath the rock?

She didn’t think so. He was a creature of pride. He would want her begging. He could never believe that she could defeat him.

And she knew it was true. In spirit, she knew strength of heart that she’d never had in life, but she was a mortal spirit. He was an immortal spirit, something bestial and angelic at the same time. Terrible to look upon, powerful beyond imagining.

But she had taken a leap of faith. She had no choice but to keep falling.

Coleridge was gone. Peter, Miles, all the people who had tried to help her. She was alone. She neither saw nor sensed any other spirit. They would not, perhaps could not, come to this place.

But she could, because she was damned beyond redemption.

He had built this tower, inverted beneath the earth. But she belonged here as surely as he did. She belonged in the earth, among the fires and the screams. An eternity of pain awaited her. There was no redemption for the thing she’d done.