The Everlasting (31 page)

“I want this over with,” Scott said. “This isn't for me. I don't like this. Papa was the one; he was the one always searching further, looking deeper.”

“Of course,” Lewis said. “But he needs you to save him.”

“You're here.”

“Only a mortal can touch the book.”

Scott nodded. “Nina told the truth about that, at least.”

Another scream from behind them. It seemed to be answered by many more, or perhaps they were echoes.

“We should go,” Lewis said. “Not far, I think. I'm feeling . . . I don't think it's far.”

“Will I know Papa?” Scott said, suddenly terrified at what he was going to face. The book was one thing, but the tortured soul of his grandfather, dead for thirty years yet still held here by the Skulls . . . that was so personal.

“You will,” Lewis said, smiling. “He's not far away at all.”

They moved on, passing through more long tunnels and occasional rooms. The screams harried them, echoing from deep pits, erupting behind or in front of them, and which were screams and which were only
echoes was impossible to determine. At any moment Scott expected the way to be blocked by one of the Skulls, its fleshless head gleaming in the strange light of this place older than history.

He also wondered about Nina and Tigre, and the immortal woman sliced in half outside the house.
This is far from over
, he thought. He squeezed Helen's hand again to make sure she was real, and she smiled at him.
I have Helen, but it's far from over
.

“Here,” Lewis whispered. “He's here.”

They emerged from a narrow tunnel into a wide room. Its air shimmered with strange light and shadows with nowhere to hide. One side of the room did not exist; it disappeared into the sickly haze of the Wide, vast and endless. It was Scott's nightmare of crushing space and suffocating distance come to life.

Sitting at the center of the room, on an old timber chair pitted with woodworm, an old man. Papa. His image was indistinct, and it blurred away into the Wide, as though grasped by something deep in that endless place and stretched forever. He moved, his head shifting slowly and setting the stretched image vibrating across the room.

Scotty
, a voice said, and Scott fell to his knees, crying, pressing his hands to his ears and then cupping them there to catch anything else that was said.

“Papa,” Scott said.

Hurts
.

“I'll help you, Papa.”

Hurts, Scotty
.

Scott did not know what to say. How could he comfort
someone whose soul was subject to such pain? What could he really say that would not come across as an empty platitude?
I love you
, he could say, but the old man knew that well enough.
I'll help you
, he could say again, but what if that turned into an empty promise? He had no idea what had happened here and what would continue to happen. These were laws he could never understand, and he was an ignorant among these beings: ghosts, immortals, Screaming Skulls. He was mortal. He had lived half a life, and his vision found it difficult to look any farther.

“Lewis stayed with you,” he said, and Papa seemed to sigh in response. “And so will I.” Papa's image lowered its head, bending across the room.

Scott refused to let go of Helen's hand. She had closed her eyes and covered them with her free arm, rejecting the sight. The Wide hung before them, a continuous extension to the room they were in, and Scott felt dwarfed by all around him, a mind without intellect.

Stronger than you know
, Papa said, and for the first time it sounded like the voice of the old man he knew and loved.
Chord of Souls has to go, Scott. I span the Wide. I know what wrote it
.
Don't let Nina . . . don't let
any
of them . . .
Scott felt the effort there—the pain Papa suffered in projecting his voice in that way—but Papa had done it for him.

“I'll do it, Papa. I'm not afraid. Nettles don't sting on Saturdays.”

He felt an overwhelming flow of love then, as though the whole world were smiling at him.

“Come on,” he said to Helen. “You're staying with me whatever happens.”

“They're here,” Lewis said. “They're
here
!”

Something forged along the tunnel behind them, pushing air before it and projecting screams that crushed Scott and Helen down to the ground.

Shapes emerged from the Wide, coalescing into two humanoid figures that disturbed Papa's endless image, sending ripples that caused him to add his own silent scream to the room.

Lewis cowered back against a wall, and he and Scott locked eyes.

Now
, Lewis's gaze said.
Your only chance
.

Scott saw Nina and Tigre form fully from the Wide. Nina's eyes flickered around until they settled on Scott. They were unreadable.

The Screaming Skulls burst from the tunnel, an eruption of bone and fury.

Shadowy blights flickered into existence around Lewis like negative fireworks.

Scott stood, lifted Helen to her feet, and ran for the only exit available from the crowded room.

Papa's voice followed him.
Don't wait for me, Scotty, or anyone else. Understand? Go safe
.

“How do you know it's this way?” Helen asked.

“I don't. Nowhere else to go.”

“But what if we're—”

“Look.” Scott pointed ahead at swathes of spiderwebs hanging across the tunnel. They were heavy with dust, and dried things hung here and there, wrapped in silken threads. “No one's been this way for a long time.”

“I don't like it here,” Helen said. “I really need to go home.” She was struggling to hold in her tears, strong as ever, but a single drop escaped her right eye.

Scott watched it run down her cheek and drip from her chin. “I can't do anything for us,” he said. “Not right now. I'm as lost as you are, but I need you strong. Are you strong?”

Helen sniffed, nodded. “You know I am.”

“I know you are.” Scott smiled. “You ready for this?”

“Spiders? No. Hate the little fuckers.”

Little?
Scott thought, looking at the webs. But he did not want to make matters worse.

He went first, and when he touched them the webs were surprisingly light. He felt the subtle rip as he ran his hand through them, but no spiders scurried from out of sight to bite his hand, and there were no thumps on his shoulders or cries from behind.

Helen still held his other hand. Her grip hurt. Scott squeezed, and she held tighter. It felt good.

Web was collecting around his hand and across his sleeved arm. It was all but weightless, and even the hanging dead things were light to the touch. Sucked dry, perhaps. But he tried to cast that thought aside.

The light still came from somewhere, exuded from the walls or born of the air itself. Perhaps this close to the rip into the Wide—the rent through which Papa's tortured soul was stretched—the air lit with what was beyond.

Past the webs they found a room. It was still, silent, and there was nothing there that should have felt
threatening. Yet upon entering, Scott and Helen moved sideways and pressed themselves back against the cool walls.
So old!
he thought.

Age itself seemed to have a personality. He could tell that no one had been in this room for . . . ages. Literally ages. He could feel the slick, dank air that had not been breathed, see the layers of dust that consisted of no human skin, sense the impossible age of the things in this room almost exuded as aromas, such was their power. The level light remained, though it seemed darker than anywhere else in the tunnels.
Did this room exist before we set eyes on it?
he thought.
Was it here before I pushed through the last web and we emerged from the tunnel? If so, what was it like?
As a child he had often imagined the words of his favorite stories pressed together in closed books, unreadable in the darkness between pages, and unread. He had wondered whether the stories were still there. He'd asked Papa once, and Papa had said that stories are made, created, and understood by the reader. The book is just a collection of words. It had confused him then, and it still did now.

Spread across the floor and leaning casually against the wall were the stone tablets of the Chord of Souls.

“This is it,” Helen whispered, and Scott thought, What
is it?
It was not a comforting thought. It personalized the impersonal, and he did not like that idea. Had these tablets contained anything before he and Helen appeared? Had they meant anything? He could not know.

“Lewis needs to see something of this to free Papa,” Helen said.

“No,” Scott said. “Papa told me not to wait.”

“But—”

“They have to be broken. Destroyed.”

“It's amazing,” Helen said. She stepped forward into the miasma of age and history, knelt before one slab and traced a carving with her forefinger. “It's
incredible
.”

Scott tried to pick up a slab. He pried his fingers beneath its edge, pushing through a small drift of dust that may have taken thousands of years to build up. The stone lifted with a dry exhalation. “Helen, I need to trust you,” he said.

“Scott . . .”

“Please, Angel. I mean it. I need to
trust
you.” He took the folded exercise book from his front pocket. The pencil fell out and clattered onto the stone he was trying to lift, rolling into a carved channel.

“What are you doing?”

“Something secret. Will you help?” He plucked the pencil from the stone and leaned the slab against another, bent forward, closed his eyes, and blew. Dust and grit pricked at his face, and he wiped it from his eyes before looking again. The stone was bare, begging to be read. He tore a sheet of paper from the book and pressed it to the stone surface. When he inclined the pencil and rubbed, impressions emerged from the tablet.

“I'll help you,” Helen whispered. She reached out and he gave her the exercise book. Their fingers touched briefly. She started tearing out its blank pages.

“I don't know if I'm doing the right thing,” he said.

Helen shook her head. “Maybe with this there is no right and wrong.”

They started taking rubbings of the stones. Scott was crying, and at first he attributed it to the dust. But then he scolded his dishonesty and thought back to that image of Papa, trapped from here and across the Wide by the Screaming Skulls. It had seemed like a faded representation of him, lacking the vitality and intellect of the man and yet still so certainly Papa.

“How dare they?” he said.

Helen did not answer. She was being methodical, clearing dust from slabs, handing paper to Scott, then stacking the traced tablets against the far wall.

There were over forty tablets, but they worked quickly together.

“Nearly done, Papa,” he whispered. He hoped that he
was
doing the right thing. Even unable to read or translate what was before him, Scott could feel the potential radiating from these pages.
Maybe I'm affected by them even as I see them,
he thought.
Perhaps Helen and I will be changed by this forever
.

Helen glanced over, a twinkle in her eye. And he knew that he was right. Every second that passed changed both of them. He only hoped that when this was over, they could still recognize each other. And themselves.

They worked on. Scott traced; Helen pocketed the finished pages. And time started to fade. In a place this old, perhaps it had little meaning. Scott had a crazy vision of time sprinting onward way above them; cities rising and falling, empires fading to dust and new ones
rebuilding themselves from the rubble of the old, people being born, living and dying in endless cycles that sometimes seemed so futile, but actually meant so much.

For a moment he circled a position of such complete understanding that he gasped and fell onto his back. He stared at the ceiling and knew that the truth was there, just beyond his sight. He reached out, almost able to touch it. “Have you ever felt as if you know almost everything?” he said, and Nina was above him, glaring down into his eyes and reaching out to hold his shoulders.

She pressed him down into the stone and leaned in close. “Not yet,” she said. “But soon.”

Helen screamed. Scott turned his head and saw her held back against the wall by Tigre, the man of scars. He looked back up at Nina, her face upside down above his.

“I trusted you,” Scott said. “For a while, at least.”

“I never meant to harm you,” Nina said.

“What do you mean?”

She looked around then, and he saw an animation in her eyes that had been so lacking. It was as if coming into this room of frozen time and painful history had brought her to life. “Things have changed,” she said.

“Let Helen go.”

“Not yet. The book. I need the book, need to
read
it, and then you and Helen can go free.”

“And what then?”

“Sit up,” Nina said.

She moved her weight from his shoulders and Scott
sat up, slipping the pencil beneath his leg, glancing across at Helen.
It'll be okay
, he tried to communicate, but she had her eyes closed against the man holding her.

“What?” Scott asked again. “You read the book, remember what you were told, and then eternity becomes a much more attractive place. Is that it? More power, more knowledge?”

“It's probable that once you leave here, you'll never see us again,” Nina said. “There's such power in these pages, but it's above the knowledge of mere humans.”

“You're weak,” Scott said, and he could see it. Her eyes were hazy once again, her skin pale and mottled, and even Tigre's legs were shaking. “You shouldn't be here.”

“Tigre.” Nina uttered his name so casually that at first Scott was not aware of what she had done. But then he heard the sickening snap of breaking bone, and Helen screamed, and Tigre looked at him with something in his eyes that could have been a smile.