The Everlasting (32 page)

“Helen!”

“Just her arm,” Nina said. “Lots more bones left. Or perhaps her eyes next. This isn't me, Scott; you should know that. It's not my way. But I'm learning.”

“Just leave her the fuck alone.” He rose to his knees and turned to the next stone tablet. He picked it up, blew dust from it, and then heaved it as hard as he could at the wall.

The effect was staggering. He was hoping for a break, perhaps several cracks, but the tablet shattered into a hundred pieces, dust and grit exploding from it
and scraping against his skin, shards ricocheting around the chamber, and even before they had all settled on the ground, Nina was shouting.

“One for one!” Scott said. “Just one page, but there are lots left!” He held his breath. Helen was still whimpering, but there had been no fresh breaks.
They won't really harm her
, he thought.
Not badly. They kill her, and I have nothing left to live for
. But the thought of them torturing her to get to him . . .

“You're not in control, Scott!” Nina shouted.

“Neither are you. We have a trade to make.”

Nina pursed her lips, looked at the shattered pieces of stone, then nodded.
She must be wondering what is lost forever
, Scott thought. And then, looking down at the dust and stone shards, so was he.

“Clean them and stack them up,” Nina said. She moved to the slabs Helen had already stacked against the wall, swaying as she stood before them.

They're weak,
Scott thought.
They hurt Helen because they're weak. It's a pretense. I
am
the one in control here. Papa? Is that right? Am I in control
?
Am I responsible?

Scott searched for Papa's voice, but heard nothing. The tattered soul of the old man was so close, but it was also way beyond him now. Scott could save him from further suffering, but they would never again have one of their talks.
I'll miss you
, Scott thought.

He bent and lifted another slab. He sensed Nina tensing behind him as he did so.

“You can't touch these,” he said. “I know that wasn't a lie, at least.” He hefted the slab—it was
heavy, but still light enough for him to manipulate—and showed it to her. “See anything good?”

“Don't fuck with me, Scott.” But Nina was leaning forward, looking as if she were going to be sick but still fascinated, unable to help herself, staring at the stone—the page from the Chord of Souls—and grimacing at the pain it caused her.

Her mouth suddenly dropped open in wonder. “I carved that one,” she said.

“Have it back.” Scott threw the stone with all his might. He fell backward, scrabbling on the ground for a heavy chunk of the tablet he had smashed, and as his fingers closed around one the slab struck Nina.

“Helen, down!” he shouted.

Nina screamed.

Helen slumped to the floor with a groan, legs folding beneath her, and Tigre's grip slipped on her broken arm.

Scott threw the chunk of stone tablet at the scarred man's back. It sailed high and struck him at the base of the skull.

As Nina's first scream began to fade, Tigre's cut in.

Scott had no idea what to expect.
It's a ghost to us, but it's like poison also
, Nina had said about the Chord of Souls. As her second, heavier scream sliced around the enclosed space, Scott realized just how true that was.

The stone page had ghosted right through her. The movement had shoved her back against the wall, and the tablet lay shattered behind her. It had been a lucky throw; the initial impact had hurt Nina, but the
stone shattering behind her, peppering her back with rebounded shards, had driven her to her knees. “No!” she wailed again and again, and she seemed to dance as she reached for the places she had been touched.

Tigre's cry ended abruptly.

This is when he cuts me to pieces
, Scott thought. But he was wrong. Tigre was suffering in silence. Where the stone shard had struck him and passed through, an open wound grew. Blood spilled, bone shone grimly through the rent in his scarred flesh, and he hissed as he grabbed Nina's arms and dragged her from the room.

“I'm not seeing any of this,” Helen said. Her head was turned to the side, broken arm cradled in her lap.

“We have enough,” Scott said. He shoved the crumpled pages into his pockets and lifted another slab.
This could be the map to Atlantis
, he thought, and he threw it into a corner of the room. It shattered. Perhaps even these stone pages were so old that time had made them brittle. Or maybe it was the forbidden knowledge that had done that. Maybe this unexpected release was giving the Chord of Souls power to aid in its own destruction.

He kicked another slab and it cracked in two. Stomped on one half, and that piece turned to shards. Again, and there was only dust beneath his heel. He picked them up, threw them, smashed them to pieces and stomped on the pieces until they were gravel. The dust of the Chord of Souls filled the room, and he wondered what arcane knowledge he and Helen were breathing in. Given forever, perhaps the dust could be
re-formed, a jigsaw that would take eternity to complete. But Scott felt such a sense of rightness in what he was doing that he thought the Chord would never allow itself to be discovered again.

Who wrote you?
he thought.
Who knew you? What gave you away?
He was sure he would never know.

There was one slab left. It sat against the wall beside Helen, and she had placed a sheet of paper against it and traced it. She was crying. “There's so much here,” she said.

“Maybe, but we're only human.” He picked up the slab and threw it into the far corner of the room.

And then there was a voice in his mind, so rich and vibrant that he fell to his knees with the shock of recollection.
They've stopped screaming, and they're letting me go
.

“Papa!” Scott shouted.

You're a good boy, Scotty.

“Papa, won't they come for me? Aren't they the guardians?”

Once. But time can change so much. Now they feel it; they want only release. And Scotty, release feels so good. I'm going. Slipping away. Lewis is with me . . . Lewis, my old friend
.

“But he only wanted the book for himself.”

Of course, I know that. He's only human
.

“Papa, don't go. Not yet. There's still so much to say!”

Always . . . to say . . . talk to me
. . .

“Papa?”

. . .
in your dreams
. . .

And that was all.

“He's gone?” Helen said.

Scott nodded. “And Lewis.” He felt suddenly deflated, as though something momentous had refused to happen. “What did I do here?”

“You set Papa free,” Helen said. “He's proud.”

“Not that. This.” He pointed at the mess of stones and dust around them. “Helen, what have I done?”

“I really don't know.”

They sat side by side, breathing in the dust as it slowly settled. A spider scuttled in from the tunnel, perhaps upset at finding its web broken. It scurried across the stones, paused here and there, and then found a hollow and disappeared into its shadow.

“The light's fading,” Helen said.

“We should go. We'll never find our way—”

“What about them?”

“Papa said the Skulls have gone.”

“No,
them
. The scarred one, and the woman?”

Yes, what about them?
Scott thought. And he knew that there were two possibilities. If they were of a vengeful frame of mind, they would kill him and Helen and leave their bodies down here to rot. No one would ever find them; this place barely existed. Or perhaps they had already gone, skimming back across the edge of the Wide and emerging somewhere else in the world.

Either way, there was little he could do to affect whatever was to come.

“I think they've gone,” he said. “But I can't know for sure.” He coughed, dust harsh in his throat.

“I'm having some thoughts,” Helen said. “Not sure . . . weird . . .”

“Me too,” Scott said. “But we have to go.”

They climbed back up through the tunnels. Papa's timber chair lay broken on its side, the open pathway into the Wide closed. Now it was just another cave.

On the way back up, guided by a light that was fast fading, they found no immortals, and nothing of the Screaming Skulls.

Later, sunlight felt good on their skin.

Even as Scott and Helen walked from the valley and found themselves somewhere real again, they began to talk about their ideas.

The last time Scott had seen a ghost it had been his grandfather, stretched agonizingly across reality and the unreality of the Wide. He had set Papa free and walked away, and he had not set eyes on another wraith since.

“You're no ghost,” he said.

“Of course not. I'm not dead.”

“Do you want to die?”

“Do you?”

“What do you think?”

Nina shrugged. It was a surprisingly familiar gesture, even though Scott had not seen it in over thirty years. “I think you're looking old.”

“Ha! You can talk.”

“I don't look old, not like you.”

Scott smiled and lifted his hands to his wrinkled face. “You should take a look in the mirror one day,”
he said. “Your skin's smooth and your hair's lustrous, but your eyes reveal your soul.”

They sat quietly for a while, taking in the late-afternoon sun. The garden was alive with a sunburst of flowers, the buzzing of insects, and birdsong. Between them a bottle of wine sat on the table, two glasses almost empty.

Scott sighed. “I love this place,” he said. “The house, the garden, the village, my wife. I love it all. And the thought of leaving it behind . . .”

“Awful,” Nina said.

“Awful,” Scott said. He fell silent again, looking down the garden toward the fields beyond, and the forest beyond that. “But it's nature,” he said at last. “The way things are.”

Nina snorted.

“What? You're beyond nature?”

“I can't say that, no.”

“Why are you here, Nina? Helen will be home soon, and I'd rather she didn't see you. She still has nightmares sometimes. Even with all we know, she still dreams bad dreams. So why are you here after all this time?”

“Time? It's the blink of an eye for me, Scott. Every day since then I've felt pain at what you did, but it's still the blink of an eye.”

“Where have you been?”

“Here and there.”

“Tigre?”

“Different heres, different theres. Places you've seen on the news.”

“So . . .”

Nina stood and walked to the edge of the lawn. She squatted down and ran her hand through the grass. It needed cutting, but Scott liked it the way it was. Wild. “I've wondered,” she said. “Since that time, I've wondered whether something like the Chord could ever really be destroyed.”

“You've been back?” Scott felt a brief chill even thinking about the House of Screaming Skulls. Not a good place to be. He and Helen had spent thirty years trying to forget. Though there were the dreams, of course, and the ideas. Yes, always them.

“I couldn't find it,” Nina said. “None of us can. I'm not even sure it's there anymore.”

“So live with it.”

“I can't die, Scott,” she said. She stared at him, and in her aged eyes he saw the pain she had always been so loath to show.

“You didn't want to die,” he said. “You lied to me about that. You wanted the book for everything else it contained. The ‘stuff,' as you called it. More things. Whatever it was,
that's
what you wanted.”

“Then, yes. But things change.” She looked over the garden and into the fields.

“So why have you come to me? You think I may have lugged some of those slabs out with me?”

“No,” she said. “I know you didn't. Tigre and I watched you all the way out of the valley.”

Scott guffawed, holding his side as the pain kicked in. A year, he'd been told, maybe less. Helen had been sad, because she didn't want to be left on her own.
But they had both accepted it. It was the way of things.

“I don't know,” Nina said. “I just thought maybe you'd kept some of it, somehow. A thing like that doesn't deserve to fade away.”

Scott thought of those rubbings, and the journals of dreams and ideas he and Helen had filled between then and now, ideas planted in them from inhaling the dust of the destroyed book. They wrote them down, then closed the books. Neither had been tempted to discover what they meant, and they had enjoyed growing old together.

“Maybe something like that should never have been written in the first place,” he said.

“Well . . .”

“Who spoke it, Nina? Who made you write it? When you and the others carved it all that time ago, who gave it to you?”

Nina smiled. “So I guess we leave it at that,” she said.

“I suppose so.”

She nodded, smiled at Scott, and then walked down the length of his garden. She climbed the fence and strolled across the field, pausing for a few seconds at the old dead tree at its center. Nina looked back and shielded her eyes, and he waved at her, laughing as he did so.
Waving her good-bye
, he thought.
Her poor damned soul, I'm waving her good-bye
. She turned away again and walked on, and after a few minutes she disappeared into the woods.

He never saw her again.

That night, after Helen had gone to bed, Scott opened some of their notebooks. He started to read, but he was quickly drawn to the window. He looked up at the moon and stars, knowing that he could never be their equal. The real world was out there, disturbed by streetlights and the scar of human habitation, and he could not know it. Things Papa had told him came and went, and he shed a tear for the children and grandchildren he and Helen never had.