The Crooked Letter (10 page)

‘I have. It’s not so bad.’

‘The novelty wears off after a few months, believe me.’

She tilted her head and smiled at him. ‘You’re too close. You don’t see him any more. That’s your problem. You’re blind to him. And he doesn’t see you in return. You both rant and rail about how you should be treated as individuals, but you don’t realise just how alike you really are.’

‘Them’s fightin’ words, El Guapo.’ He could feel heat rising to his cheeks, and he hid it by adopting a gunslinger’s stance. ‘Reach for the sky-y-y.’

She held her examining pose for a beat, then quick-drew an imaginary pistol.

‘You can make light of it all you want,’ she said as he clutched his stomach and fell to his knees before her, ‘but I know the truth.’

He refused to give her the satisfaction of a response, apart from pretending to die.

* * * *

Darkness fell, and Seth fell with it. The sound of the train accompanied him, a rhythmic pounding of metal on metal and a scream that might have been brakes, although the train wasn’t slowing. He felt, in fact, as if it was speeding up. In an embrace of metal and oil, at the whim of roaring, unnatural engines, he was swept up and hurled far away from Ellis and his brother.

The pain stayed with him. It was unlike anything he had ever experienced. For a second, he’d had no idea that the Swede had stabbed him. He simply felt the hilt jar his ribs as it hit home.
A collapsible blade,
he’d thought.
A stage knife: they’re just trying to frighten us.

Then every muscle in his body had contracted around the terrible wound, or so it had seemed, and he had known that he was going to die. He had felt the blood rush from him and his lungs collapse. The animal parts of him had taken over while his mind fled into darkness, unable to bear the agony and the horror of it.

Somewhere behind him, back in the train tunnel, he felt his heart stop. His body was still warm; electrical activity still flickered in the tissues of his brain; his muscles were still supple. All that would pass. The meat of him was already beginning to break down. It was only a matter of time before it rotted away to nothing.

Help me!

The racket and heat seemed to carry him away. Down became up; it felt as though he had been caught by a giddying thermal and flung into the sky. He’d gone airplane gliding once, on a dare, and the thrill of it was still vivid in his mind. Updraughts were like invisible hands snatching at the fragile wings, bending them, shaking the fuselage around him. This sensation had something of that moment at its heart. Then, as now, he had wanted to scream with the delight and terror of it and wished that Hadrian had had the courage to try it too ...

Hadrian!

The thought of his brother sent a thrill of panic through Seth. Was Hadrian hurt? Had the Swede stabbed him as well?

Then came the guilt: Seth had abandoned Hadrian, was being a bad brother, should have tried harder to protect him. The automatic response, drummed into him by years of parental and social conditioning, was no less strong for the death of his body.

Was Hadrian following in Seth’s wake, buffeted and shaken by mortality’s strange winds? Was he frightened?

Hadrian?

No answer. A subtle sensation tugged at him, as though Hadrian was nearby, but there was nothing to substantiate the feeling. They could have been nose to nose in this void, utterly invisible to each other — or they could have been a world apart. There was no way to tell. Seth hoped, for Hadrian’s sake, that the sensation was an illusion. The only way Hadrian could be near him was if he was dead too.

The sound of the train became echoing and faint. Seth clutched feverishly at any semblance of rational thought, remembering and dismissing what little he knew about Near-Death-Experiences. It certainly wasn’t something he’d ever expected to try first-hand. His continued existence didn’t feel like a hallucination. He hadn’t been brought up to seek answers from religion, and never felt the need to try. He still didn’t as he rose upwards into a black-as-midnight sky.

Hs life didn’t flash before his eyes, but he had plenty of time in which to consider it. He thought of his parents, the two people who had done their best to deal with the stresses of an instant family when the twins had been born. Their marriage had survived until the boys turned ten, then acrimoniously fragmented. Parental duties had been borne, from that time on, by their mother, although their father remained in touch, a distant, mournful figure. The truth was that the boys barely noticed who was caring for them. After the split — which Hadrian had blamed on himself and his brother, but Seth still blamed on his parents — the twins had retreated even more deeply into their relationship, isolating themselves from those around them. Only as they grew older and their bond stagnated did they emerge from their common shell to find themselves surrounded by strangers with whom they were forced to remain awkwardly entangled.

No longer, he thought bitterly, although his end was taking much longer than he had any right to expect. The void sucked at him; its emptiness demanded to be filled, and the turmoil inside him needed release. He shouted, sobbed, screamed, swore. His thoughts didn’t seem to be slowing down or shrinking; they were blowing up to fill the entire universe. He felt as though he was floating up from the bottom of an ocean trench, through lightless depths that could crush steel; or he was hanging in the emptiness of space, with nothing around him for billions of light years.

He thought of Ellis. If the Swede had killed her, then she was in exactly the same situation as Seth and his brother. They were all dead, and he would happily lie down and die — let everything he had ever been and ever dreamed of being dissolve forever into the void — if only his thoughts would let him.

At the same time, he wished that there could be more to the end of his life than waiting for the last brain cells to die and his thoughts to unravel. People wrote of the dignity of death, lauding it as the great definer of the human condition. He wondered if they would say the same if they knew that death came in darkness, locked in the coffin of a skull.

He pictured Hadrian’s body slumped next to his. Perhaps their heads were touching. How frustrating it was to be so close and yet utterly unable to communicate as they died. It was like being on another planet.

What would he say if he could communicate? There were no words for what hung between them.
I love you and I hate you. You get in my way, and I can’t live without you. Being dead doesn’t change a thing.

I’m sorry, Hadrian,
he said into the void of his demise.
I’m sorry we argued. I’m sorry things went badly with El. I’m sorry I didn’t listen to her about the Swede. I’m sorry I wasn’t there to help you when you needed it.

He waited for the end to come, wishing that apologies would make him feel better about it. The truth was, it didn’t. He was still angry with Hadrian — and with Ellis. The hurt of discovering them together was as hot and piercing as the pain of his death. He was angry with the Swede for sticking that damned knife in his chest, and with the Swede’s sidekick for holding him down. He was angrv with himself for not doing something to stop it, for not calling for help, for not reacting fast enough. He was young and strong, with so much left to live for.

He was angry with himself for dying.

Why now? Why at all?

He waited for the end to come with rage and betrayal burning inside him, praying only to be put out of his misery.

* * * *

With a soundless and utterly surprising thud, he hit something. Something hard. Like a scuba diver trying to surface but finding the boundary between air and water suddenly impermeable, Seth flailed helplessly against the void’s end.

A rush of physical sensation accompanied the impact. He could feel his body, and through it the space around him. He was dressed in the same jeans and sweatshirt he had been wearing when he had stormed out of the hotel in Sweden. There was no sign of the wound to his chest.

He had no trouble obtaining purchase on the unexpected surface. It seemed to clutch at him in the way of gravity, although a vast drop hung below him, back the way he had come. He felt like a bug clinging to a ceiling.

Where the hell am I?

He ‘stood’, planting his feet firmly and stretching himself warily ‘upright’ so that his head pointed down into the void.

He tried taking a step and sent himself floating precipitously away from the ceiling like an astronaut in very low gravity.

Great,
he thought to himself, fighting vertigo.
I can set some long distance records while waiting to croak.

A sound — harsh and metallic, like the scrape of blades against each other — came from somewhere to his right. He crouched and made himself small. The darkness was thick and cloying, and the thought that there might be something else out there changed everything. Although a void might try to suck his brains out or drive him mad, at least, by definition, it was empty of things that could hurt him.

But what would hunt a dead man? Of what possible nourishment was the soul?

The sound came again, this time from his left. Seth swiveled to face it but could still see nothing. He froze, convinced something was there.

On the very edges of his vision, two tiny points appeared. Mere motes, they hung motionless before him. one slightly above the other. A hint of light gleamed off them, like eyes in a cocked head — tiny pinprick eyes that glowed silver-grey and might have been looking right at him.

Seth’s legs went from frozen to aching to run in an instant. He tensed to spring. The pinpricks swayed, grew marginally brighter, then seemed to retreat, as though they were stepping back to take stock. They were hard and cold, and definitely not human.

Imaginary or not, he didn’t want to find out what sort of creature had eyes like that.

He leapt, pushing outward from the wall with all his strength. As he launched into the void, he saw the eyes loom out of the darkness at him, growing from points, not into circles, but lines — gleaming silver edges that flashed at him with the same vicious scraping sound as before. They weren’t eyes, he realised in horror, but the tips of scissor blades as long as his arm; evil points built to impale and slice flesh into ribbons. The blades snapped and stabbed at him, cutting the air in two. He spun wildly away from them, unable to do more than windmill and hope for the best. The blades snipped and missed. He screamed as the creature on the other end of the blades came out of the darkness. It was long-limbed, glass-eyed, and as grey as the metal it wielded. He saw, as it lunged for him a third time, that it
was
the scissors. Its arms terminated in two giant sets of blades that snapped and clashed at him with a sound like cymbals exploding.

He tried to swim through the air, and only succeeded in adding twist to his tumble. The creature, sensing his helplessness, brought the blades together.

Pain seared in Seth’s left wrist. The creature leered in triumph, revealing a mouth full of sharp black teeth. Desperately, refusing to let the pain get the better of him, Seth kicked against the metallic flesh and pushed himself away. The monster’s eyes widened in surprise as though it had not expected such an elementary tactic. It howled as he shot out of range of its frantically snipping blades.

The pain caught up with him as the creature vanished into the void. Tumbling erratically, he wrapped himself around his wrist and discovered to his horror that his left hand was gone. It had been neatly, completely, severed. He could feel the stump of bone where his forearm terminated and a thin wrap of flesh loose around it. He tried clenching his fingers and only ghost memories responded. There was no blood.

He screamed in agony. The creature caught and echoed the sound on a rising note. Another shriek answered it, then a third. Seth’s trajectory took him in a long, flat arc across the roof with a cacophony of inhuman calls following him. The sounds were terrifying, no less so for their wordlessness. He felt as though he was flying over the Big Cat enclosure of a zoo. He couldn’t see the animals, but he could hear them. He was floating over them in a balloon, and the balloon was beginning to sink. As it sank, the cats began to stir. Blinking, growling, scratching at the air, they woke to see him descending toward them, a tasty meal conveniently dropping out of the sky.

Sparks flickered on the roof and burst into flame. Torches lit in long, guttering lines, creating geometric patterns uncannily like the streetlights of a vast, flat city. Seth saw shapes moving among the lights, feeding them, tending them, using them to hum for him. Not big cats at all, but far worse. Angular, twisted limbs pointed up at him, waving threateningly. Some jumped into the air in clumsy attempts to catch him before he landed. Fights broke out among scrawny winged creatures with holes for eyes and tubular mouths. He kicked out and up again to protect himself from a fat beast with too many arms and claws as sharp as the Swede’s dagger, but that was the only one that came close. The greater threat remained on the ground ahead.

As the roof approached, its apparent smoothness resolved into detail. He saw structures open to the void decorated with curved hooks and grapnels glinting evilly in the dull light. Tunnel mouths gaped in the roof itself, surrounded by squat, upside-down battlements. Inverted bridges spanned wide cracks that spread across the surface of the roof in jagged lines, their depths — heights, Seth corrected himself — shrouded in darkness. In the distance, three needle-thin towers loomed, piercing the void like dangling icicles. Their bases were invisible. As Seth watched, light flashed from the tip of one and was answered from another. The third chimed in a moment later, issuing a series of rapid, stuttering signals that set the other two off again.

Then there was no more time to sightsee. The closer he came to the torches, the faster they streamed by. Steadying himself like a skydiver — never questioning exactly how the physics of it worked — he swung his legs beneath him. The ground ahead was mercifully clear of creatures, consisting of low walls and steps with a ruined look to them. As the rugged surface rushed at him, he tucked his injured arm under the opposite armpit and held up his good hand to protect his face.