The Everlasting (23 page)

It was late afternoon. They had crossed the border into Wales, and Scott was very conscious that he would soon have to consult the road atlas. And soon after that, when they approached the place where the skull was leading him, Nina would know.

If she wanted to slay him then, there was nothing he could do about it.

Over the past hour he had considered trusting her, telling her about the writing on the mirror. There was so much more going on here than he could even begin to understand, but he was also comfortable with the slight power he seemed to have right now. The more he told her—the more she took control—the less leverage he maintained. And this was all about Helen. Nothing else mattered but her.

You're in control; you have responsibility
, Papa
had said, and the same seemed to translate the other way as well.

He pulled off the motorway and stopped. Nina looked over at him, eyebrows raised.

“I need to piss.” He stood from the car and climbed a gate into a field, standing behind the hedge to urinate. He was constantly looking over his shoulder. He had seen three ghosts since leaving the scene of the accident, all of them wandering sadly across the road where they had presumably met their ends. One of them he had driven straight through. He did not want to see another one now.

Back in the car, Nina was waiting for him with the map on her lap. “How close are we?” she asked.

“A couple of hours. Maybe more. Maybe less.”

She nodded. “It'll be dark when we get there.”

“I don't think I want to go there in the dark.”

“I can protect—”

“It's not that. Not really. It's the place. If we spend a long time looking, I'm afraid of what will happen to Helen. We need to go straight there, do what needs to be done. And I don't think it's going to be easy to find.”

“Why not?”

“Well . . . it doesn't really exist.”

Nina nodded slowly, looking away from Scott. “Right.”

“But neither does the Wide.”

Nina looked down at the map in her lap, her fingers steepled against her nose.

“How old are you, Nina?”

“Old.”

“Surely you can wait another night to die?”

She looked up quickly, and he saw something he did not understand in her eyes. Was that anger? Excitement? Jealousy?

“I can wait,” she said. “But we have to be careful. This close . . . anything could happen.”

“But nobody knows—”

“This close, Lewis might take a guess.”

Could he know?
Scott wondered. The House of Screaming Skulls was a place he and Papa had read about together, but could he have mentioned it to Lewis as well? Surely not. Surely if that was the case, then Papa would have never guided Scott there.

But at the end, after so long trying and such fear over what he had accomplished, perhaps Papa really had lost his mind.

“He won't guess right,” Scott said.

“He may. I already have a pretty good idea of where you're taking us.”

Scott started the car, eased back into the traffic, and said no more. Things were coming together. This had started only three days ago, but already there was a definite sense that the end was in sight.

And if Nina thought she knew where they were going . . .

She will slay you. Lose her
.

Something would happen tonight.

They found another roadside pub. Neither of them was hungry, and they received strange glances when they booked two single rooms.

“Drink?” Scott asked. Nina looked very tired, and he knew she did not mean it when she nodded.

Coffee for Nina, as usual, and a pint for Scott. Its taste and smell brought back a sudden rush of memory, so rich and powerful that he closed his eyes to hold on to it, willing it to continue like the best instance of déjà vu.

The woman walks across the river bridge in Caermaen, a little village in South Wales, emerging from the heat haze above the river like an angel forming from light. Scott is sitting on the riverbank drinking, watching the water and the world go by. He has just been for a job interview and, pleased with how it went and glad that it finished early, he decides to have a few drinks before catching the train home. He is on his third pint. He's just entered that phase where the tastes and smells and colors of the beer combine to form an overall experience, soothing his senses and yet helping him to see clearer than ever. So she walks on, short pleated skirt and loose blouse reflecting sunlight and camouflaging her in its glare. Long hair, he can see that. Slim, fit, pert breasts, long legs—way out of his league, but it's always fine to look, and today of all days he feels more confident, more in control. Perhaps it's the fact that the interview went so well, or maybe it's just the beer talking, but he can't
help trying his luck.
And an angel appeared before me
, he says as the woman draws level with him, and she steps below a tree and out of the sun as if to offer him his first real look. She is gorgeous, as he first assumed, but there's something else about her that weakens him to the point of collapse. It's her eyes; they're stunning. Like globes of fire, twinkling with intelligence and humor and strength. She smiles, and the color of their flames changes.
I'm no angel
, Helen says, one hand on her hip, the other stroking the hem of her blouse. And ever since then he's called her Angel because, in his heart and mind, she always will be.

“Are there angels?” he asked. “Are there demons?”

Nina took a sip of coffee, and Scott wondered what memories she could be feeling right now. “There are things,” she said. “I've seen some and heard of others. I don't know what you'd call them.”

“Heaven? Hell?”

Nina shrugged. “I'm just immortal. I don't know everything.”

“But don't you want to?”

She looked at him, her eyes sad. “The more I know, the more I wish I didn't.”

“How comforting.”

“So don't ask me any more.”

He sipped more beer, she drank her coffee, and partly because he sensed she wanted to go to bed, he ordered two fresh drinks.

There was so much to ask and say, but they sat quietly in the bar. Scott remembered Helen, struggling to think of her in the present tense. He came close to
tears several times.
The beer
, he thought.
The tiredness
. But it was the fear of grief that brought those tears from him. That, and the growing idea that there was absolutely nothing he could do to help.

They went upstairs, stood outside their respective doors, and Nina gave him that look again.
She could have anyone she wanted
, he thought,
but not me.
He opened his door, offered her an apologetic smile, and went into his room.

He locked the door behind him. He hated empty bedrooms. In over twenty years together, he and Helen had slept apart only a handful of times, and never very well. He felt incomplete without his wife. Half a person.

In the bathroom he ran a sinkful of scalding water, and returned several times to see whether there were more messages on the steamed mirror. But it remained untouched. He wrote,
Help me
, and when he returned a few minutes later, it was still there, alone, almost steamed over again but mirroring evidence of his hopelessness back at him.

He sat by the window for a long time, because he did not feel at all tired. He had turned off the light so that it did not throw his shadow outside, and he watched the darkness grow more complete as dusk settled into night.

It has to be tonight
, he thought. He would creep out and go to find the House of Screaming Skulls, and then whoever had left that message for him would help him get Helen back.

What if it was Lewis?

Then he would deal with that when the time came. Lewis wanted the book; that was all. Not revenge.

What if it was someone else? Someone even Nina doesn't suspect?

What would be, would be.

“I have no idea whether I'm doing the right thing,” he whispered, breath steaming on the window glass. It faded away to reveal a ghost standing in the pub garden.

It was a woman, dressed in dark colors that helped hide her away, but Scott could see her face. Even from this distance her sunken eyes revealed her true nature. She waved to him, beckoning him down from the room, and for a second he reached out and un-clasped the window catch. She seemed excited, agitated, and she waved more quickly. Every few seconds she glanced to her left—checking Nina's window, Scott guessed—and she began to nod as Scott stood and shrugged on his jacket.

All he knew was from Nina. Even what Old Man and Tigre had said had been explained to him by her, not them. She had stepped into his life straight after Helen was taken away, steered him, and even driving toward the Screaming Skulls he felt that she had been guiding their path. She treated him like a child. Sometimes he felt safe with her, but other times when she looked at him he felt like a rabbit in a python's glare. And what she wanted from these hidden pages of the Chord of Souls . . . he did not know. To die?
Was it that simple? For Tigre perhaps, because he seemed like a simple being: made immortal and craving mortality, he had spent centuries seeking death.

But Nina was far more complex. There were depths to her, places he had not even glimpsed that could contain all manner of desires, hopes, cravings.
What else is in the book?
he had asked, and she had replied,
Stuff
.

Before he went on, he needed to know more of what this
stuff
entailed.

He would not discover that from Nina.

He opened the door carefully, crept out onto the wide landing, glanced back at Nina's door to make sure it remained closed. And he froze in his tracks.

There were a dozen ghosts standing outside her room. They had their hands pressed firmly against the door and frame, but they had all turned their heads to stare at him. Their eyes were wide and expectant. One of them nodded, his long hair flowing as though he were underwater. Another opened her mouth to speak and Scott turned away, not wanting to read her silent words.

He walked down the curving staircase, and every step of the way he felt dead people staring at his back.

He reached the lobby of the pub's accommodation wing. The building was still silent. At the front door he slid aside a couple of bolts, turned a key, and then Nina started to shout.

“Scott! Don't go out there!”

He turned and looked up at the landing. The ghosts were still gathered at her door, and now they were leaning back, fingers and hands curled into the wood, using whatever impossible purchase they had to keep the door closed as Nina tried to haul it open from the inside. Her voice was muffled by more than the door. There was a distance there that had nothing to do with space.

“Don't go!” she said, her voice even farther away. Several of the ghosts faded and moved through the door and wall, and when she next shouted he could not even make out her words.

Exercising his own will by leaving Nina, Scott suddenly felt directed more than ever before. There was nothing he could do to help her; go back now and he would be lost. All he could do was go through with this. Fate had him in its grasp, and nothing as negligible as his own fears would distort it from its path.

He closed the front door behind him, and Nina's shouts became nothing.

It was cool outside. A breeze had risen to flap his trouser legs and pluck at his jacket. There were few cars left in the pub car park, and the road beyond was silent. A small shadow dashed across the tarmac, several more moved around one of the cars—night creatures foraging, perhaps killing. A bat flew overhead. In silence nature expressed its true, irrefutable ownership.

Scott headed toward the back garden, and as he turned the corner he came face-to-face with the ghost.

The woman looked quite normal, yet there was no doubt that she was dead. There was something about her, a sense of nonbelonging that even the darkness did nothing to lessen. And a silence. No breathing, no sighing, no sound of cloth moving against itself, no crunch of gravel or whisper of grass beneath her feet. The ghost's ties to this world were severed. It was a visitor here now, a lost soul doing its best to find its way somewhere better.

Help us
, she mouthed. The words were unmistakable. She looked at Scott as she turned and started walking, never taking her eyes from his face.

Scott followed. He watched the ghost's feet where they passed across the ground. He did not wish to see her eyes . . . those deep, desperate eyes.

Something cracked behind and above him, and when he looked up at the facade of the building, he saw something stretching out of one of the windows. At first he thought it was a gush of flame and smoke, but then it took form and he saw that it was an arm, twisting and flexing as it tried to reach farther. A voice came with it. “Scott.” It was Nina's voice, but distorted, as if filtered through a thousand other mouths. The hand opened and closed, fingers dropping sparkles of light that faded into darkness as they fell toward the ground.

“I'm sorry,” he said, but the admission made him feel worse.

The hand was drawn back inside the shattered window. It did not want to go, but something tugged at
its flesh and bone, fingers clawing, nails screeching against the glass that remained.

“Will they hurt her?” Scott asked the ghost before him. Her expression did not change and she carried on walking.
Help us
, she mouthed again.

They could hurt her, but they can't kill her,
he thought.
If they could, perhaps she'd let them
.

There were more strange sounds from behind, but Scott no longer looked. It sounded like a struggle, and below that—almost subaudible—a moan of desperation that he hoped never to hear again.