The Secret Dead (London Bones Book 1) (34 page)

2

In the underworld, the night sky churned with yellow smoke. It had been perfectly black under a thick layer of cloud: moonless and starless, on a street with every window blacked out and every street lamp dead and still.

Then the wail of air raid sirens filled the air, punctuated with the
thump thump
of incendiary bombs. Golden light from dozens of fires brightened the night. The smoke stank of burning fabric, wood, and a horrible meaty smell my mind shied away from.

In the living world, the scars of the Blitz were mostly gone, with just a scrape on a building or a neat plaque remaining to remind the world of what had been. In the underworld, it was different. No matter how much Londoners might have put on a jolly face against death and destruction during the Blitz, their souls still knew and hadn’t forgotten.

Scenes like this were familiar. I’d spent much of my childhood and most of my adolescence exploring the underworld, and everywhere a bomb hit, everywhere someone died, a scar was left on the world of the dead. The underworld was shaped by the psyche of the dead, and the Blitz had left a scar on the underworld’s version of London as thick and permanent as any of the battles and wars that had come before it.

Harpies cluttered the pavement and the tops of the houses, their tongues extended from disturbingly humanlike faces as they sucked in the pain and anguish from the air. Water lapped at the end of the street as the tarmac became the Styx.

This part of the underworld had been Eighteen Cooper Street, when a bomb had seared a snapshot of time onto the underworld. In the living world, the entire row of houses was now gone, demolished and replaced by an anonymous office block. The houses still stood here in the world of the dead, leaning morbidly against each other.

I tried to summon the courage to step off of the pavement and up the stone steps. The last time I had stood in this same spot I’d been a child. I’d never expected to go back.

But then I’d never expected to be bitten by a zombie, either. I couldn’t go back to the land of the living. My body had turned, and the moment I returned I would no longer be myself. I’d be just another rotting and ravenous automaton.

Time flowed differently in the underworld, and I had no idea how long had passed in the world of the living, but it had been too long. I wanted back. Being dead wasn’t new. I’d been doing it all my life. Staying dead, however, was a complete pain in the rear.

The answer was in front of me. In 1942, five hags died in this house when it was hit by a German bomb, slicing a population already teetering on the brink of extinction down to two—my mother Desma, and her daughter Ana.

The hags who died were all refugees from the Continent who had fled to the relative safety of England only to die while they slept. Hags may have been creatures capable of dying at will and returning to life, but they hadn't. The damage to their bodies was too much. They were
dead
dead. For women who were technically immortal, we died easily enough.

By the time I was born, the house had become a magnet for long-dead hags. They had flocked to it from all over the underworld to join their sisters, where they spent their time drinking tea, gossiping, and peeping out of the net curtains to spy on the unaware dead.

The hags inside had died multiple times over their long lifetimes. One of them had to know how I could get back.

I shifted from foot to foot. Somehow just willing myself up the steps wasn’t enough to make my overly heavy feet take that single step forward.
Stop being such a wuss, Vivia. They’re only hags. They’ll know how to do it. Just ask nicely.

Whether I would have chickened out again I’ll never know, because the decision was made for me. The front door flung open, and a small figure scuttled out. ‘Vivia! It’s Vivia, ladies.’

And just like that, I was surrounded by crones pinching at my skin and clothing. Mouths that had never known a toothbrush kissed my mouth, my cheeks. I kept my mouth closed, but put a smile on it.

A posse of old ladies swept me inside and into a Victorian-style parlour the size of a small ballroom. The edges of my vision shimmered as the underworld shifted to accommodate its inhabitants. My behind hit a hard chair with a painful thump.

‘Tea?’

I couldn’t see who had asked.
Yeeargh. No, thanks.
‘Yes, please.’

I had been deposited in the central chair—guest of honour, so to speak—with the hags spread out in front of me in a half-moon shape. There were around fifty: all olive skinned with beak-like noses. Hags weren’t identical, but we were all very similar. Only just past thirty, I didn’t have as many warts or as much facial hair, but it was only a matter of time. I did have the hag nose.

I scanned their faces, but the one I was looking for wasn’t there. Wherever my mother had disappeared to, she wasn’t there. I allowed myself a sliver of hope that maybe she had passed over to whatever came next.

The squeak of the tea trolley announced its arrival, pushed by a sallow-skinned hag I knew as Auntie Tilde.

Tilde had been one of those who had died in the house when the bomb hit. Her name was seared into my brain, along with the four others who had died, because sometime after their deaths—and after Desma had moved to the house I’d grown up in—Ana had carved their names onto the doorframe of what was to be my bedroom door. I’d traced their names with my fingers a thousand times over the course of my childhood.

Tilde had been more than six hundred years old when she’d died, and had worked for most of her long life as a midwife. While she’d always been pleased to see me and took an interest whenever Desma and I visited, it was a morbid interest that gave me nightmares.

‘Still alive?’ she’d say. ‘Oh, I am so pleased. You’re…what…five now? That’s good. Five’s a good age to get to. What about your sister? She still alive? Good, good. The humans die so fast, especially the littles. Now, you just need to make it to ten. You’ll have a good chance once you get there. All the nasty stuff—consumption, the scarlet fever, the poxes—they carry off the little ones like you quick-quick. You grow up. Make it to ten, you hear? Tell your sister, too. Ten’s the magic number.’

I half expected her to say it again now. ‘You made it to how old before you got zombie-bit? Good, good. You made it past ten. And your sister? Really? All the way to fourteen?
Well done
.’

But Tilde didn’t. Instead, she lifted the teapot with a saggy arm and trickled hot liquid into doll-sized china cups. The discoloured copper teapot gave off a sour aroma. I swallowed back the urge to gag and took the proffered cup with a smile.

When every hag had her cup, drinking was allowed. Despite their near identical looks, each drank differently. Auntie Tilde threw hers back like a shot of hot tequila. I touched the rim of the teacup to my lips, careful not to let the liquid touch my skin, then set the cup, still full, back on the tea trolley. Auntie Tilde glanced at it, and then at me.

The tea ritual was important, but I knew the story of Persephone and the pomegranate seeds. I wasn’t going to get stuck in the underworld for the price of a rank cup of tea.

‘You think we’d trick you like that, girl?’ The corners of Auntie Tilde’s mouth turned up in a smirk.

I shrugged. The room had turned quiet, all eyes on me. ‘Perhaps.’
I don’t trust a single one of you.

Auntie Tilde’s eyes narrowed. ‘Drink the tea.’

‘No.’

‘You are the youngest. Do as you are told.’

‘Times have moved on, Auntie,’ I said. The rest of the hags might have come from a time when junior members of the family were expected to show absolute obedience. I hadn’t.

‘Desma was too soft with you.’

I let out an involuntary bark of laughter. ‘Not quite.’

‘You won’t drink the tea. You sit there like Little Miss Priss looking as though the sight of us makes you sick. What do you want?’

‘I don’t want to be dead anymore.’ The words came out sounding more plaintive than I’d intended. ‘I’m not properly dead. It was a zombie bite. I want to go back.’

To my surprise, she roared with laughter. ‘Who doesn’t? Being dead not good enough for you?’

‘No.’

‘You have tried going back to the living world? That should rewind your clock. Or did you just get bit and come crying to us?’

‘I died and went back. I was still a zombie. It didn’t work. ’ I had. The irony was that I’d died so many times while I’d been alive. The hag part of me made returning to life easy. Somehow it had never occurred to me to worry about the day when death would be permanent.

She gave me an up-down look. ‘Must be because you’re too young. Power comes with age. You’re still a tadpole.’

‘I’m not going to get any older if I stay dead.’

She grinned, displaying a mouth of rotten teeth. ‘All right, then. I may be able to help, but first, come with me. I want to show you something.’

The other hags melted away.

We were back on the street in front of the house. The air raid siren still wailed in that peculiar up-and-down manner that meant no matter where I was in the underworld, I could never mistake it for anything else.

A dead man, his face blackened with smoke, scuttled past me. A dead woman—some kind of shifter, to judge by the way the fire flashed yellow in her eyes—ran past him towards the public bomb shelter at the end of the street, a not-real child in her arms. Another small not-real child trotted behind her, holding the edge of the dead woman’s nightgown with one hand, thumb of the other firmly stuck in its mouth. My eyes followed the woman. Over the half century that had passed since she’d died, how many times had her spirit run down this road to safety, playing the same old scene over and over again? I deliberately put her out of my mind. There was nothing I could do to help her. She had to work through it on her own.

The
whump whump
of the landing bombs couldn’t be heard over the siren, but the ground jolted with each impact.

Tilde took my hand in her gnarled one, and mouthed something at me. ‘Come.’

The unlocked front door opened onto an unfamiliar hallway, and the sound of the siren diminished. The house stank—the death stink of the hag I’d been so sensitive about while alive, but multiplied by seven, along with the distinctive odour of a group of people who’d been born in a time when bathing was considered optional. I held my nose.

Tilde led me up stairs littered with the detritus of the living—shoes, bags, coats.

She turned left at the landing and pushed open a door. The room was filled with not-real hags, but only one dead one. Hags came in two shapes—tall, skinny, and ugly (my mother and I), or short, squat, and ugly (Ana and Tilde). The hag lying on her back on the bed was one of the latter. Hair sprouted from the warts on her chin and quivered as she snored. I didn’t recognise her.

I gave Tilde a quizzical look.

‘Her name’s Ingeborg.’

Ingeborg.
The fourth name on the list carved onto my bedroom door.

‘What is she doing here?’ There were plenty of negatives to being a hag: the warts, the excess hair, the anti-hag prejudice that seemed to infect so many humans; but death wasn’t one of them. Hags knew when they were dead. They weren’t supposed to spend a half century living out their deaths like the humans did.

Tilde’s mouth turned down at the corners. ‘Silly cow hasn’t realised she’s dead yet. Me and the others, we knew we were dead straight away. Daft creature’s been asleep ever since. At least we don’t have to relive being blown to bits. Four against one, our reality overrules hers, but it means we all have to stay here until she wakes up. I’m not leaving her to die over and over, but we just can’t seem to snap her out of it.’

‘Why not?’

‘I don’t know. She always was a little simple. Could be that.’

There was an unspoken
or
. I voiced it. ‘Or?’

‘Or she’s boiling mad about the same thing I’m boiling about. She just doesn’t
want
to move on yet. She has to come to terms with her death.’

‘It’s been more than seventy years,’ I said. ‘She’s a hag. She should have come to terms with it in minutes.’

‘Unless there is something unresolved.’

‘What’s to resolve? The house got hit by a bomb. Sure, it’s bad luck, but it’s not complicated.’ I said. The hag in the bed hitched her breath, snorted twice then turned over.

Tilde glanced at her then gave a snort of her own.

‘You’re a hag. You tell me.’

I closed my eyes and concentrated. The room felt like death. The hag on the bed felt like death, as did Tilde beside me. It made me all too aware of the spark within me—the spark that said it wasn’t too late. There was still something inside me that was capable of crossing back. I reached out with the hag part of me and sent a tendril of hag magic towards the sleeping woman.

Information flooded into me. She was dead. Her mind was firmly stuck in the death dream. Her body had been buried and was now nothing more than dry bones. She—

The tendril jolted back.