The Memory of Death (3 page)

I’d almost feel sorry for the new guy if he wasn’t the impostor that they think I am. He straightens at the door, lip torn but bloodless, the wound already closing. There's an expression of pain on his face that I’m too familiar with, and that has nothing to do with physical hurt. How does it do it? How does it look so like me?

I’m not as heartless a prick as I think I am, because yeah, I do feel sorry for it. After all, it thinks it’s me. And that’s not such a good thing to be right now.

‘We have to get out of here,’ he says.

‘You would say that,’ the other me says, the one in the Okkervil River T-shirt with the Accordion Boy on it, a classic T-shirt I like enough to feel annoyed that he’s wearing.

‘Shut the fuck up, Okkervil,’ I say, and slap him in the face.

‘Why’d you do that?’

‘You know why.’

‘But –’

I slap him again. ‘Shut it!’

The new me is considering escape. It’s wondering how it might be possible through that Iron Door; Christ, was I really ever that naive?

But I know I was. Two weeks I’ve been in here. Two weeks since pulling myself from the waves. I’d evaded a couple of guys in cheap suits, who I don’t think expected me to be as effective as I was at getting away from them. Goes to show you shouldn’t confuse weakness with will to freedom. I may have looked beaten but I wasn’t. I have to keep remembering that. I can see that memory in the new guy’s face, and it makes me burn. I don’t know whether to hate him for it, or to kiss him.

At least, I’d evaded them until they threw me in here with another imposter. I should never have come here, but I'd not expected to be captured, imprisoned by my own crew. There he is, looking all smug in his Okkervil River T-shirt, like he really knows the band, like he’s really me, like he’s seen them play five times. The fool.

Two weeks sitting here, staring at these walls, talking to someone who claims to have been here for three weeks before that. Why should I believe him? He’s also claiming he’s me.

‘Look, escaping those suits, that was never going to be difficult. I assume that’s what you had to do, right?’ He nods. ‘This … well, give that door a good kick, eh?’

The new guy does; the door rings like a bell made of three-inch-thick steel plates.

I let it sink in: takes a moment (took me longer).

‘The walls, ceiling and floor are the same. We can’t shift anymore, and even if we could, I’m sure this place is impervious to such types of travel,’ I say. ‘There’s no way out, unless they let us out.’

He jerks a thumb at the door in the far wall. ‘Where’s that lead?’

‘Bathroom,’ Okkervil says, like he owns the place. ‘Same deal there, but there’s a small window that looks out onto the Underworld. As far as prisons go this is fairly civilised. There’s even a television. And we can order pizza, and sometimes it actually arrives.’

I gesture towards the bathroom. ‘There’s a shower in there. You need to use it.’

The poor guy frowns.

‘There’s some clothes in there, too.’ Still he hesitates. ‘Look, you’re as safe here as anywhere. Do I need to spell everything out to you? No one’s going to get you, because they already have.’

‘Cut the poor guy some slack,’ says Okkervil.

Gah, I can’t even agree with myself. I raise my hands in the air. ‘All right.’ I say. ‘All right, do whatever you want!’

New guy walks into the bathroom, shuts the door behind him, not that it’s anything any of us here haven’t seen. I hear the shower running. Okkervil’s scowling at me, but then again, I’m scowling at him too.

‘Just so you know,’ he says. ‘You’re not in charge here.’

‘Are you?’

‘Why do I even bother?’ we both say at the same time.

Why indeed?

A few minutes later he comes out of the shower in an L7 T-shirt. He looks a million times better. Even with the scrappy beard. How do these copies get everything just so?

‘You put your old clothes down the chute?’ I ask.

L7 nods.

‘You try to fit in it too?’ Okkervil says, like we all didn’t, and L7 looks sheepish.

‘So tell me,’ he says. ‘Just what the fuck is going on?’

Ah, where to begin … If only I knew why this keeps happening.

Why does this keep happening?

When Steve left, when he was snatched away, I was certain we would get him back. I was arrogant; flush with the power he had given me. Death opens doors. Death closes them. And I was Death. But there are some doors that I could not open. Tim was right: the Death of the Water is a prick, his power matched only by the totality of the Orcus.

Steve had pissed him off, and the Death of the Water held a grudge like you wouldn’t believe.

We tried everything short of snatching Steve from the Death of the Water’s Underworld. You don’t start a war, not for love. I sent negotiators, Mr D (who came back with a bloody nose), Charon, Tim. I went myself and, to his credit, that watery Death gave me the floor of his court. I argued, I begged, I pleaded. But there was no give to that smug prick. We came close to getting Steve back, too.

But close isn’t a releasing of chains, an unlocking of doors.

What’s worse, he had Steve watch our failures. A Steve so broken it tore at my heart, made me doubt that what we would be bringing back would even be the Steve that I loved. And I hated the Death of the Water for it. But what surprised me more was that I hated Steve too.

Steve had made a deal. And in typical Steven de Selby fashion it was unambiguously weighted against him. My love had such a will to self-destruction. I couldn’t set him free, couldn’t steal him away; to do so would be to destroy the world that we had saved. It had been a deal forged between two grand Deaths and it was ironclad.

Steve had fucked himself over, and me.

Saved the world, undeniably, but if we had talked this through, I’m sure we could have negotiated something different. The Death of the Water is all fairytale logic, and there’re ways to trip that shit up. But he didn’t, he hadn’t, and I was left to see him rot.

So I mourned.

The Sad Lady, they called me.

And all the Powers travelled to visit me. Powers I hadn’t even known existed in some cases: the Knot-tiers of Logan, the Toothless Folk and the Camera-Shy among them. Weird wonders and minor godlings who came to see the Sad Lady, and offer tribute to my loss. I got far too much Roses chocolate. I don’t even like chocolate.

But I was also the incredibly busy Regional Manager leading a corporate body into a new age, a dangerous one where our enemy was essentially toothless – thanks to Steve – which meant all we had to fight was ourselves. I was the Death of Australia. I didn’t have time to mourn. We’d saved the world but people don’t stop dying, and the odd rebel Stirrer still came through and they were easy enough to find and stall. I got on with my job, I moved on. I lived this odd and powerful life, an ear to the faltering heartbeats of my region, part of the web of thirteen RMs: the diffuse Orcus, the Hungry Death that Steve had contained and then released, in portions, to the rest of us.

I refused to be defined by mourning. I refused to be that person. I’m damn fine at my job; Steve had once said that I was better at it than him, and he was right.

Fourteen months along and I had even started dating. But really, it’s never easy when you can tell how long your date has to live, when you’re looking at the long path of immortality, and the brevity of their own existence is being shoved in your face. Oh, and I’d made some very suspect choices before I’d started dating Steve. I was in no hurry to go down that route again. After all, I had all the time in the world.

And then, two months ago, the Stevens started appearing.

It was my Steve, and yet it wasn’t. I embraced the first one. And it attacked me. Tore out my throat. Painful, but I am not what I was. I fought back.

That one escaped, shifting into some sort of tenuous shadow form. We’re still hunting it. But the rest. They kept coming.

Three now. Three Stevens.

Faber Cerbo sits across from me. His face filled with concern or a good facsimile thereof, as though he’s read my thoughts, understood the momentary vacancy in my eyes.

We’ve known each other a while, well before he was America’s RM, back when he was an Ankou like Tim. I don’t trust him, and he doesn’t trust me. But we’re both good at our jobs. I look up at him, dressed in his grey pinstripe suit, hat perfectly placed on his head, dressed as elegantly as anything Don Draper ever managed on Mad Men. I called him in here because he isn’t as emotionally tied to this as Tim and I. And, I guess, I want to show him I have it all under control. Absolutely, utterly, under control.

He looks as if he’s waiting for a response to something.

I frown. ‘What did you say?’

‘
We need to remove them,’ Cerbo says.

‘
And by remove, you mean …’

Cerbo looks at me, and it’s a face as hard as an RM can manage, though there is a certain gentleness as well. He’s no villain. None of us are. He touches my arm. I feel his power ringing in that touch, echoing mine, born of the same source, the madness of the Hungry Death.

‘
You know what I mean.’

‘
We are not executioners of men,’ I say. The Hungry Death was, which is why it was broken into thirteen parts, ingested and taken all over the world by the first Great Women and Men, the Thirteen. And those thirteen became the first Regional Deaths. One thirteenth of madness is far easier to manage. Easier, but not easy.

Cerbo nods. ‘These aren’t men. They’re something less, and more, and they’re dangerous.’

I close my eyes. I sense all the heartbeats in Australia, the great regional pulse of the living, and I untangle them one by one. Steve’s heartbeat isn’t there. Not one of the three Stevens has a pulse, certainly not as I recognise them.

‘
No, they’re not. But it doesn’t mean I can kill them.’

‘
You don’t have to. I can do what needs to be done.’ Cerbo immediately realises that he’s said exactly the wrong thing. ‘What I mean is … of course you can do what needs to be done as well.’

‘
Damn right I can,’ I say.

Just because I wanted his advice doesn’t mean I have to like it, or even agree with it.

I lean back in my chair, throne, whatever, and gesture at the door.

‘
I will consider it.’

Cerbo sighs. ‘There’s ten months until the next Death Moot; you get all the Orcus together like that and it will be brutal.’ Though never as brutal as that last Moot – nothing could be. ‘Don’t make this an issue for all of us. Those Moots go on long enough as it is. Do you really want people to have another reason to complain about the Australian branch? Problems have a reputation for getting a little too big in this office.’

‘
I will consider it,’ I say, though I really want to say a lot more, and some of it with my fists.

‘
That’s something, I’m sure,’ he says, sounding like it’s actually nothing at all. And then he’s gone, shifted back to his offices in Boston on 1st Avenue. Where things are no doubt calmer than here, no problems fattening up.

And how dare he say that! We’ve saved the world at least once, and been manipulated several times by other offices, including his own. We’ve spiralled out of control while other offices have stood by and watched, and it looks like they’re happy to do it again.

Death is a very competitive industry. Parochial. All too ready to point the finger, and blame (or laugh at) the rest of the world and the way their fellow RMs run it. Steve tried to change that. It was a shame he wasn’t up to the task. But there were centuries of tradition clogging up the company. Centuries of bloodshed. That doesn’t wash away in a few months.

‘
How do you kill what isn’t alive?’ I ask.

‘
I think I have an answer to that,’ comes a sere old voice beside me.

I turn my head; I’d been waiting for him to speak. You can always smell his cheap cigarettes. The odour clings to him.

‘
It’s you,’ I say.

Charon the boatman looks at me, and smiles. ‘I’m always here to sort out the mess.’

Water everywhere, and I’m thrashing towards the light. Nearly there. Nearly there. My hand touches the seabed. Hard. Oddly enough there’s a chessboard in front of me. I hate chess. I absolutely fucking loathe it
.

‘
Your move,’ someone says.

I catch a motion in the corner of my eye, and spin. A mouth, all teeth, splits wide, dark eyes roll back into white, and it hits me, grabs me all at once with implacable pressure: starts to bite down, just as hands tear at my limbs.

I can hear my skull creaking until I can’t.

There’s a chessboard in front of me. I hate chess.

‘
Your move,’ someone says.

I’ve been here before.

I catch a motion in the corner of my eye, and spin. A mouth, all teeth, splits wide, dark eyes roll back into white, and it hits me, grabs me all at once with implacable pressure: starts to bite down, just as hands tear at my limbs. Joints pop. Flesh bursts.

‘
Your move,’ someone says.

I wake, curled foetal-tight and screaming, hands around my head, a long thread of drool dangling from my chin. Hardly my most dignified moment.

Two Steves staring at me, both giving me looks of sympathy.

Clash hands me a napkin, and I wipe at my face.

‘The dream,’ they say in unison.

‘You’ve had it?’

‘Yeah, we still have it. The seabed, the scrambling, the biting,’ Okkervil says. ‘The repetition.’

‘I’ve had it go round and round all night,’ Clash says.

‘Doesn’t end nearly fast enough,’ I say.

Okkervil nods. ‘We think it’s psychic residue from our escape.’

‘Escapes,’ Clash says. ‘You’re not the only one, buddy.’

I look over at Clash. ‘Where did you wash up?’

‘Sunshine Coast, in October, around Noosa. It was an almost perfect day till that government prick put a gun in my face.’

‘James?’ I say.

‘Yeah, that’s the guy.’

‘And you?’ I ask Okkervil; he’s nodding his head. We all are.

‘I was washed up in WA, in November. Same guy, same gun. They hired a private jet to get me back here. I’m surprised they could afford it what with all the cutbacks.’

‘Cutbacks?’

‘All they did was complain about them on the flight. Didn’t stop them ordering plenty of drinks.’ Okkervil laughs. ‘One them crashed the car on the way back from the Brisbane Airport. I got away in all the chaos.’ He folds his hands behind his head and smiles.

‘Did they tell you anything?’

Okkervil shakes his head. ‘Other than they were some sort of recruitment agency, working for the government.’

‘Which government? State, Federal?’

Clash shrugs. ‘Who knows?’

‘When does a government body need to shove guns in your face?’

‘When it’s fighting a war, or starting one,’ Okkervil says. ‘They were hinting at something, skirting around it as much as they wanted to tell me – well, as much as James wanted to tell me. But I was tired. You know what I mean? I kept nodding off, and all I was looking for was a way out. A way back to her.’

We all were, even now. And look where that had got us.

‘So a recruitment agency, and they were looking to hire us.’

‘Yeah, said our knowledge was specialised.’

Hard to believe. ‘They wanted to hire us, even after cutbacks?’

Clash laughs. ‘Must have thought we’d be going cheap. What do you reckon, L7?’

It really is annoying to be called after your T-shirt.

‘I don’t know, Clash. Either of you attacked by birds?’

Clash nods. ‘A magpie, some noisy miners and, it’s not a bird but a possum had a go at me.’

‘How’d you deal with that?’

He taps his Docs, well, my Docs – how come he is wearing my favourite Doc Martens? ‘Kicked it in the head.’

‘They’re a protected species, you know,’ Okkervil says.

‘Protected? I’m an endangered one.’

‘Well, there’re three of us here; not that bloody endangered.’

‘That’s just it, there aren’t.’ Clash looks like he’s going to say more, but instead he must hear something and turns towards the door.

It swings open, and two men come in, holding guns. Pomp Goons. Did we have goons when I was running the show? Actually, I kind of think we did, but they were
nice
goons. They point over-muscled fingers at me, the sort of fingers you’d be alarmed to see coming at you for a prostate examination.

‘You're coming with us,’ one says.

Perhaps we should have all changed T-shirts. Seems pretty obvious now. But none of us really has the others’ back.

They gesture at the other two. ‘Both of you, in that corner.’

We’re remarkably malleable as a group. We all do what he says. Okkervil rubs his hand gently, clenches it into a fist and releases, as though he was merely stretching it out. Clash shakes his head. But there’s no rebellion in them or me.

‘Where are you taking me?’ I ask.

‘To see the Ankou.’

What does my cousin want now?

*

‘How’s Sally and the kids?’ My hands are behind my head; I don’t feel too bruised, not that the Pomp Goons were that gentle.

‘You don’t get to ask the questions,’ Tim says. He can't even begin to hide the look of disgust on his face. I've pissed Tim off plenty of times, but never seen anything like this.

I sit on a hard chair at a table across from my cousin. Flashes of the dream I had coming to mind. No chessboard though.

There’re pictures of me on the walls. Not me, of course. I don’t remember doing any of these things. Several feature little more than a shadowy, Steve-ish form – new filter on the camera, perhaps?

Tim pushes a cup of coffee across the table towards me; his free hand is resting on a pad of paper. I can just make out Tim’s usual scrawl, and the nicotine stains on his fingers. He’s fooling himself if he thinks he’s fooling Sally.

‘Coffee! How did you know?’ I say, taking a long sip. Not the best coffee I’ve ever had, but it’s
coffee
.

Tim frowns. ‘I never thought I would be so unhappy to see you. And yet, here we are.’ Why is he so pissed off with me? What have I done?

‘Hey, I’m back from the dead.’

Tim ignores me. ‘One of you, yes, but … what's happening here … Come on, what do you think we are? Stupid? This has to stop. You have to stop.’

‘Lissa –’

‘Don’t bring her into this; she’s hurting enough.’

‘I want to talk to her.’

‘You’ve had your chance.’ He sighs again. ‘But you can talk to me. What happened?’

‘I woke up in the waves on a beach in Ballina. There was a guy –’

‘Which beach?’

‘Does it matter?’

He taps his notepad with his pen. ‘The first one says he came from the Sunshine Coast; the second says he came from Brunswick Heads. Where did you come from?’

‘Shelly Beach.’

‘Ballina?’

‘Yeah.’

Tim scratches something down on the pad. ‘And before that?’

I shake my head. ‘Just the water and before that … Well, we won. There was the wave, that wave that went on forever. I remember saying goodbye.’ Her eyes, green and wild, and flecked with grey. I remember …

Tim’s face is expressionless. ‘Yes. They’ve all said that.’

But I’m not them, I’m me!

‘Tim,’ I say. ‘When did this start happening?’

He puts down his pen. ‘I know what you think you are, or what you say you think you are. But you’re not. And because of that you don’t get to ask questions.’

‘But I am.’

Tim looks almost bored. ‘No, you are not. The moment you walked through those doors, all sorts of silent alarms went off.’ Tim smiled. ‘We’ve got remarkably sophisticated since you … since
he
went away. Steven left the world a human, you’re not.’

‘What the hell am I? A Stirrer? Christ, don’t tell me I’m a Stirrer.’

Tim scrawls something else on his clipboard. ‘No, you are not a Stirrer. You’re … you’re trouble. You’re something worse, something we can’t just stall, and banish back to the Underworld.’

‘Look, there has to be some sort of test. Something more accurate.’

Tim winces. ‘Yeah, there is. It’s traumatic. I don’t know what you are, but we’re not monsters here: except for the monsters.’

I raise an eyebrow; monsters on the payroll? Sure, I’d been something close, but … Tim grimaces. ‘It’s complicated. Look, I’m sorry, mate.’ I can tell he wants to say Steve, but he doesn’t. I can read him like a book and he knows it, and I can see that he knows it. He looks away from me.

‘Ask me any question,’ I say in a voice that has far too much pleading in it. ‘Anything that only you and I could possibly know.’

Tim shakes his head. ‘We tried that first, it didn’t work. You all know that shit. Even the first one.’

‘The first one?’

‘Yeah, the one we really thought was you. It attacked Lissa.’

‘What?’

‘Went at her with a knife. Like that was going to hurt her.’

‘A knife – he should have known better. Where is he? Which one is he?’

‘That one got away. It could be you. It could be one of the others, or it could still be out there.’

‘You’ve got to believe me.’

Tim slaps a hand down on the table hard, makes me jump; the dude’s definitely been working out. ‘You, whatever the fuck you are, have to stop doing this. It’s cruel, this joke, this madness. Haven’t we been through enough?’ By the end he’s shouting, jabbing a finger in my chest. I don’t like seeing him hurting. I sit there and take it.

He wipes at his face. ‘Enough,’ he says, to himself, I can see him reining the anger in. If there is one thing Tim can’t stand it’s being unprofessional. ‘Enough.’

Tim drops back in the chair and gestures at a camera in the ceiling. The men who brought me to his offices walk in. They grab me; one of them holds my right hand to the table.

‘Sorry about this,’ Tim says. ‘And I’m really sorry if this proves me wrong.’

I try to wrench my way out of their grip, but there’s no give in them. I might as well be encased in concrete.

‘Need to test if you possess a soul.’

‘Of course I do.’

Tim gives me a hard look. Pulls out his knife. Every Pomp has one; you need blood to stall a Stirrer. You run the knife across your hand, and touch a Stirrer (or, to be more precise, the body it’s inhabiting) with your bloody palm, and it belts its soul straight back to hell. It’s elegant, painfully simple, and it works. I had my first knife when I was ten. Took it to school, got in an awful lot of trouble for it – like nearly expelled trouble. That was the first time I realised just how different my family’s business was to everyone else’s. This knife could be exactly the same one – in truth they’re all made in a factory in Spain. Silver, sharp, the blade seven centimetres long. A brace symbol – a triangle bisected by a slightly off-centre line – etched into the point.

Tim looks at the knife for a moment, and then drives it into my hand.