Tim Lebbon - Fears Unnamed (25 page)

A hand grasped his throat and quicksilver nails dug in. “Do the dead hurt?” the familiar voice intoned.

Adam tried to scream, but he could not draw a breath.

Around him, the world burned.

“Keep still and you will not die… yet.”

“Alison!” Adam began to struggle against the hands holding him down. The sky was smudged with greasy black smoke, and the stench reminded him of rotten roadkill he had found in a ditch when he was a boy, a dead creature too decayed to identify. Something wet was dripping on him, wet and warm. One of the things was leaning over him. Its mouth was open and the liquid forming on its lips was transparent, and of the same consistency as its body. It was shedding pieces of itself onto him.

“You will listen to us,” Amaranth said.

“Jamie! Alison!”

“You will see them again soon enough. First, listen. You pledged to believe in us and to never deny us. You have reneged. Reaffirm your pledge. We gave you a gift, but without faith we are—”

“I don’t want your gift,” Adam said, still struggling to stand. He could see more now, as if this world were opening up to him as he came to. Above the heads of the things standing around him, the ragged walls and roofs of shattered buildings stood out against the hazy sky. Flames licked here and there, smoke rolled along the ground, firestorms did their work in some unseen middle distance. Ash floated down and stuck to his skin like warm snow. He thought of furnaces and ovens, concentration camps, lime pits…

“But you have it already. You have the good luck we bestowed upon you. And you have used it… we have seen… we have observed.”

“Good luck? Was that crash good luck?”

“You avoided the van that would have killed you. You survived. We held you back from death.”

“You
steered
me!”

Amaranth said nothing.

“What of Alison? Jamie?”

Once more, the things displayed a loathsome hint of emotion. “Who knows?” the voice said slowly, drawing out the last word with relish.

At last Adam managed to stand, but only because the things had moved back and freed him. “Leave me be,” he said, wondering if begging would help, or perhaps flattery. “Thank you for saving me, that first time… I know you did, and I’m grateful because my wife has a husband, my son has a father. But please leave me be.” All he wished for was to see his family again.

Amaranth picked him up slowly, the things using one hand each, lifting and lifting, until he was suspended several feet above the ground. From up there he could see all around, view the devastated landscape surrounding him—and he realized at last where he was.

Through a gap in the buildings to his left, the glint of violent waters. Silhouetted against this, dancing in the flickering flames that were eating at it even now, a small figure hung crucified.

“Oh, no.”

“Be honored,” Amaranth said, “you are the first to visit both places.” They dropped him to the ground and stood back. “Run.”

“What? Where?” He was winded, certain he had cracked a rib. It felt like a hot coal in his side.

“Run.”

“Why?”

And then he saw why.

Around the corner, where this shattered street met the next, capered a horde of burning people. Some of them had only just caught aflame, beating at clothes and hair as they ran. Others were engulfed, arms waving, flaming pieces of them falling as they made an impossible dash away from the agony. There were smaller shapes among them—children— just as doomed as the rest. Some of them screamed, those who still had vocal cords left to make any sound. Others, those too far gone, sizzled and spat.

Adam staggered, wincing with the pain in his side, and turned to run. Amaranth had moved down the street behind him and stood staring, all their eyes upon him. He sprinted toward them. They receded back along the rubble-strewn street without seeming to walk. Every step he took moved them farther away.

He felt heat behind him and a hand closed over his shoulder, the same shoulder the bug lady had grasped. Someone screaming, pleading, a high-pitched sound as the acrid stink of burning clothes scratched at his nostrils. The flames crept across his shoulder and down onto his chest, but they were extinguished almost immediately by something wet splashing across him.

He looked down. There were no burns on his clothing and his chest was dry.

Adam shook the hand from him and ran. He passed a shop where someone lay half in, half out of the doorway, a dog chewing on the weeping stump of one of her legs. She was still alive. Her eyes followed him as he dashed by, as if coveting his ability to run. He recognized those eyes. He even knew that face, although when he had first seen her, the bug lady had seemed more alive.

“Let me back!” he shouted at the figures receding along the decimated street ahead of him. From behind, he heard thumps as burning people hit the ground to melt into pools of fat and charred bone. He risked a look over his shoulder and saw even more of them, new victims spewing from dilapidated doorways and side alleys to join in the flaming throng.

Someone walked out into the street ahead of him, limping on crutches, staring at the ground. The figure looked up and the expression that passed across her face was one of relief. Adam passed her by—he only saw it was a woman when he drew level—and heard the feet of the burning horde trample her into the dirt.

“Let me back, you bastards!” The last time he was here—although he had been on the other side of the lake, of course, staring across and pitying those poor unfortunates on this side—he had not known what was happening to him. Now he did. Now he knew that there was a way back, if only it was granted to him.

“You are really a very interesting one,” the voice said as loud as ever, even though Amaranth stood in the distance. “You will be… fun.”

As Adam tripped over a half-full skull, the burning people fell across him and a voice started shouting again. “Tiger! Tiger!” It went from a shout to a scream, an unconscious, childish exhalation of terror and panic.

The world was on its side, and the legs of the burning people milled beyond the shattered windscreen. One of them was squatting down, reaching in, grasping at his arms even as he tried to push them away.

Something still dripped onto him. He looked up. Alison was suspended above him in the passenger seat, the seatbelt holding her there, holding in the pieces that were still intact. The lamppost had done something to her. She was no longer whole. She had changed. Adam snapped his eyes shut as something else parted from her and hit his shoulder.

Heat gushed and caressed his face, but then there was a gentle ripping sound above him, and coppery blood washed the flames away from his skin like his wife brushing crumbs from his stubble. The flames could never take him. Not when he was such a lucky man.

You are the first to visit both places
, Amaranth’s voice echoed like the vague memory of pain.
You will be… fun
.

“Tiger!”

Jamie?

“Jamie!”

Flames danced around him once more. Fingers snagged his jacket. A hand reached in bearing a knife and he crunched down into shattered glass as his seat-belt was sliced. Something else fell from above him as he was dragged out, a final present, a last, lasting gift from his Alison. As he was hauled through the windscreen, hands beating at the burning parts of him, his doomed son screaming for him from the doomed car, he wondered whether it was a part of her that he had ever seen before.

He was laying out on the lawn. It had not been cut for a long time because his riding lawnmower had broken down. Besides, he liked the wild appearance it gave the garden. Alison had liked wild. She had loved the countryside; she had been agnostic, but she had said the smells and sounds and sights made her feel closer to God.

Adam felt close to no one, certainly not God. Not with Amaranth peering at him from the woods sometimes, following him on his trips into town, watching as good fortune and bad luck juggled with his life and health.

No, certainly not God.

Alison had been buried alongside her mother over a year ago. He had not been to the cemetery since. He remembered her in his own way—he was still painting—and he did not wish to be reminded of what her ruined body had become beneath the ground. But he was reminded every day. Every morning, on his bus trip into town to visit Jamie in the hospital, he was reminded. Because he so wanted his son to join her.

That was guilt. That was suffering. That was the sickest irony about the whole thing.
He’s a lucky lad
, the doctors would still tell him, even after a year.
He’s a fighter. He’ll wake up soon, you’ll see. He’ll have scars, yes
… And then Adam would ask about infection and the doctors would nod, yes, there has been something over the last week or two, inevitable with burns, but we’ve got it under control, it’s just bad luck that…

And so on.

His wife, dead. His son in a coma from which he had only awakened three times, and each time some minor complication had driven him back under. He was growing up dead. And still Adam went to him every day to talk to him, to whisper in his ear, to try and bring him around with his favorite nursery rhymes and the secret dad-voices he had used on him when things were good, when life was normal. When chance was still a factor in his existence, and fate was uncertain.

He looked across at the house. It was big, bought with Alison’s life insurance, their old home sold for a good profit to the couple who had wanted it so much. This new property had an acre of land, a glazed rooftop studio with many panes already cracked or missing, a Mercedes in the driveway—a prison. A Hell. His own manufactured Hell, perhaps to deny the idea that such a grand home could be seen as fortunate, lucky to come by. The place was a constant reminder of his lost family because he had made it so. No new start for him.

The walls of the house were lined with his own portraits of Alison and Jamie. Some of them were bright and full of sunshine and light and positive memories. Others contained thoughts that only he could read— bad memories of the crash—and what he had seen of Alison and heard of Jamie before being dragged out from the car. The reddest of these paintings hung near the front door for all visitors to see.

Not that he had many visitors. Until yesterday.

Howards had tracked him down. Adam had let him in, knowing it was useless to fight, and knowing also that he truly wanted to hear what the old man had to say.

“I’ve found a way out,” he had whispered. “I tried it last week… I injected myself with poison, then used the antidote at the last minute. But I could have done it. I could have gone on. They weren’t watching me at the time.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“Well… I’ve come to terms with it. Life. As it is. I just wanted to test the idea. Prove that I was still in control of myself.”

Adam had nodded, but he did not understand.

“I thought it only fair to offer you the chance,” Howards had said.

Now, Adam knew that he had to take that chance. Whether Jamie ever returned or not—and his final screams, his shouts of
Tiger! Tiger
!, had convinced Adam that his son had been the twitching shape on the burning cross—he could never be a good father to him. Not with Amaranth following him, watching him. Not when he knew what they had done.

Killed his wife.

Given his son bad luck.

Yesterday afternoon he had been lucky enough to find someone willing to sell him a gun, the weapon with which he would blow his own brains out. And that, he thought, perfectly summed up what his life had become.

“Oh, look,” Adam muttered, “a four-leaf clover.” He flicked the little plant and sighed, pushing himself to his feet, stretching. He had been laying on the grass for a long time.

He walked across the lawn and onto the gravel driveway, past the Mercedes parked mock-casual. Its tires were flat and the engine rusted through, although it was only a year old. One of a bad batch, he had thought, and he still tried to convince himself of that, even after all this time.

He entered the house and passed into the study.

Two walls were lined with moldy books he had never read, and never would read. The portraits of the people he loved stared down at him and he should have felt at peace, should have felt comforted, but he did not. There was a large map on one wall, a thousand intended destinations marked in red, the half dozen places he had visited pinned green. Travel was no longer on his agenda, neither was reading. He could go anywhere on his own because he had the means to do so, but he no longer felt the desire. Not now that his family was lost to him.

He was about to take a journey of a different kind. Somewhere even stranger than the places he had already seen. Stranger than anyone had seen, more terrifying, more—final. After the past year he was keener than ever to find his way there.

And he had a map. It was in the bureau drawer. A .44 Magnum, gleaming snakelike silver, slick to the touch, cold, impersonal. He hugged it between his legs to warm it. May as well feel comfortable for his final seconds.

Outside, the fourth leaf on the clover glowed brightly and then disappeared into a pinprick of light. A transparent finger rose from the ground to scoop it up. Then it was gone.

“Well,” Adam said to the house, empty but alive with the memories he had brought here, planted and allowed to grow. “It wasn’t bad to begin with… but it could have been better.”

He heard footsteps approaching along the gravel driveway, frantic footsteps pounding toward the house.

“Adam!” someone shouted, emotion giving the voice an androgynous lilt.

It may have been Howards, regretting the news he had brought.

Or perhaps it was Amaranth? Realizing that he had slipped their attention for just too long. Knowing, finally, that he would defeat them.

Whoever. It was the last sound he would hear.

He placed the barrel of the gun inside his mouth, angled it upward and pulled the trigger.

The first thing he heard was Howards.

“… bounced off your skull and shattered your knee. They took your leg off too. But I suppose that won’t really bother you much. The doctors say you were so lucky to survive. But then, they would.”