The Love of the Dead Read online

  “What is he?”

  “Something that never should have been. He has to end tonight.”

  “How can I kill him?”

  “With that,” Miles said, and pointed to the blade on the floor. Peter saw it for the first time. It was black and sheer. It seemed sharp enough to cut light, cut dark. He saw the fat man’s foot, severed cleanly, bone and flesh neatly cut in two.

  He stooped and picked the dark blade up. He struggled, used both hands. It was far heavier than it should have been. It was little more than a long knife, and yet it weighed...

  “It doesn’t weigh anything,” said Miles. “No more than we do.”

  Peter remembered he was dead. This wasn’t a real knife, in the world he left behind. It was a dead blade, and he could lift it easily.

  He put a hand tenderly on his son’s cheek.

  Miles turned his head into his father’s hand, taking comfort in the touch he’d been missing for so long. The light within him blazed brighter, and Peter’s hand glowed where he had touched his son.

  “Will I see you again?”

  Miles smiled and nodded. “If the big spirit wills it.”

  “Can we win?” Peter asked.

  Miles shrugged. “It’s not the winning that matters,” he said.

  Peter turned away from his little boy. With the light at his back and darkness ahead, foreboding running through him even though he knew he was dead, he stepped down into the earth.

  Into the tower.

  Chapter Sixty-Nine

  Beth plummeted through the earth, her clothes plastered flat against her body by the wind, her hair whipped behind her. Her eyes stung from the wind and the heat and the stench.

  She felt no fear. What was there to be afraid of? She was dead already. She had denied him. Now to finish it.

  She put her arms out as she saw the bottom of the pit rising up toward her. Stopped herself with her will alone and landed on her feet, walking as soon as her soles touched the earth. Her steps were dignified, her gait strong and confident. All her doubts washed away.

  But she was facing the angel of death. He didn’t want her before him, head held high. He wanted her filthy and broken, her back bent in supplication. The walls closed in on her, the ceiling got lower, until she walked stooped. At first she passed through rock, the edges rough-hewn and jagged. They could not cut her, but then the tunnel changed.

  The walls started to drip, began to run with vile fluids that she could feel on her skin as though she were alive. Fat insects crawled along the walls, inches about her head, between her feet. Bloated sickly things that popped when she trod on them, ichor burning her bare feet and squelching obscenely between her toes.

  Her shoes were gone. She wasn’t wearing the clothes she’d died in. She wore a long sheer dress. It had probably been white when she fell. Now it was grimy with rock dust, dirt, and all the foulness that seeped from the walls and dripped down on her.

  She had been made afresh when she died, but this was his realm. The tower. The end of things, and he was its architect.

  The walls swirled as she walked, colors shifting, blood red, yellow bile, pale semen, other base colors. Perhaps he thought she would balk at his depravity, but she did not stop. She opened her eyes wide, taking it all in. Using it to strengthen her resolve.

  She passed deeper, and within the walls she saw grossly deformed creatures fucking and tearing at each other’s flesh in some nightmare orgy. She laughed.

  “Is that it? Is that your best shot?”

  His response was a tableau of children spitted on pikes, their bellies yawing open with wicked wounds. She didn’t laugh, but she did shake her head. He was nothing but an illusionist, a mesmerist, his nightmares projected on the walls. They didn’t touch her in the way he expected.

  The tunnel became so narrow, so low that she was reduced to crawling forward on her knees.

  Would he eventually close the tower to her, keep her in eternity bowed low beneath the rock?

  She didn’t think so. He was a creature of pride. He would want her begging. He could never believe that she could defeat him.

  And she knew it was true. In spirit, she knew strength of heart that she’d never had in life, but she was a mortal spirit. He was an immortal spirit, something bestial and angelic at the same time. Terrible to look upon, powerful beyond imagining.

  But she had taken a leap of faith. She had no choice but to keep falling.

  Coleridge was gone. Peter, Miles, all the people who had tried to help her. She was alone. She neither saw nor sensed any other spirit. They would not, perhaps could not, come to this place.

  But she could, because she was damned beyond redemption.

  He had built this tower, inverted beneath the earth. But she belonged here as surely as he did. She belonged in the earth, among the fires and the screams. An eternity of pain awaited her. There was no redemption for the thing she’d done.

  Hell welcomed her.

  Suddenly the walls around her were gone. She stood, stretching out of habit. A line of skulls floated in the air at each side of the path before her. Flames tore the flesh from the heads every second, only for it to regenerate and burn over and over again. She didn’t even notice the smell. The whole place smelled so awful she couldn’t make out individual smells, like she could make no sense of the noises. Screams ruled, gibbering, insane ranting in unknown languages. People grunting in agony while they performed acts on each other that, from a distance, might have been seen as love, but closer was nothing more than torture. Women hammered flaming nails into men’s asses, men chewed and ate women’s breasts while the women writhed in pain or an ecstasy of pain. An orgy of death unfolded below her, to either side of the path. Flames spewed down and dripped smoldering lava on her dress. Her dead flesh charred under the heat, though she knew no pain.

  This was hell?

  It was a fucking joke.

  Sawyer sat upon a throne made of headless corpses, held together with bones driven through the still living flesh. His weight bowed backs and broke arms. He was heavy now, a thing of stone and feathers.

  He was lord here. This was his home. He looked so pleased with himself, but Beth just laughed at him.

  Rage flicked across his face.

  She stopped before him. “King of Hell?”

  “I am at home.”

  “You need a new housekeeper,” she said. “Looks like someone took a shit in your living room.”

  “You think you come to beat me, Elizabeth?”

  “You can’t do anything to me I haven’t done myself. I deserved to die. But not by your hand. That must smart.”

  But he was smiling, and she was worried.

  “I didn’t just want you dead, Elizabeth, you sweet, beautiful fool. Your power. That’s what I wanted. You’re the capstone in my tower. And you came calling. I wanted you dead, but more, I wanted your soul. And here it is, dressed up like a virgin but covered in shit and dead men’s come, soiled and worn and oh so fucking beautiful.”

  He reached out and grabbed her hair with his sharp claws and pulled her down on her knees before him.

  It wasn’t done. Hell wasn’t funny anymore.

  He squeezed, and his nails drove through her skull and into her brain. Then she understood.

  She screamed and bucked under his grip, but this was his house, his rules, and suddenly Beth knew she didn’t understand a Goddamned thing but pain, and pain she knew better than she liked.

  Chapter Seventy

  A deep sigh issued from Coleridge’s chest. His framed heaved once as he tried to push himself up. He landed back down with a thump as his hands slid in the slick blood coating the floor. He reassessed his capability.

  Turning his head to one side he puked hard enough to hurt his guts, but he didn’t mind so much. It didn’t hurt anywhere near as much as his missing foot. The foot rested on over to the side. He was at the perfect angle to see down into his own flesh. It fascinated him, looking at the clean bone, seeing shapes wit
hin the bone itself. Like he’d seen on Freeman’s butcher’s table enough times. He didn’t usually see the living’s bones like that.

  For a moment he panicked. What if he wasn’t living? Beth said the dead bore their wounds as spirits. What if he was doomed to hobble through the afterlife on crutches?

  “Fuck that,” he said. If he could think such morbid thoughts he couldn’t be dead.

  Plus, there was the pain. It hurt like all of fucking hell was having a party in his leg. It hurt right the way up through his thigh, into his balls and his guts. His head was pounding and he was struggling to get enough breath to move. His arms couldn’t even hold his weight.

  He was in a sorry state.

  Then he remembered Beth, Sawyer, the sword, the bottle, the blood.

  “Oh, no. No. No.”

  From somewhere deep within he found the strength to pull himself across the floor to Beth’s side.

  Her neck was a ragged mess. Pieces of glass were still stuck in the wound, too slick for him to get a grip on. He tried, anyway, cutting his fingers and adding to the blood, though he didn’t notice. He gave up and tried to hold the wound together with his slashed fingers, but blood still seeped out. If there was blood seeping, she must still be alive.

  He refused to give up on her. With one hand he tried to stem the bleeding, with the other he felt for a pulse. He couldn’t find it. Didn’t mean it wasn’t there, though. Didn’t mean that.

  He pulled himself atop her, probably crushing her and breaking a few ribs, then he managed to push himself up high enough so that he could straddle her, take his weight on his knees.

  His fists pumped up and down as he tried to massage her heart back to life. He cried while he did it. Sobbed, his massive chest heaving and snot dripping down onto Beth’s face. She didn’t move, didn’t stir.

  He checked for a pulse, for breath, pumped hard enough to hear her ribs crack. He knew it was useless. He knew she was dead before he’d even begun.

  But what else could he do? He’d let her die. He hadn’t been able to do a fucking thing. She’d died, and he’d just laid on the floor, passed out like a fucking pansy just because he’d had his foot cut off.

  “Come on!” he roared into her face, spittle flecking her cheeks, hitting her wide, staring eyes. But she didn’t move, just bucked under his fist. It felt obscene, in a way, him pumping up and down on her, her jaw opening in a parody of ecstasy, but no moans escaped. It was just a dead thing being played with, like a puppet.

  “Fucking bastard cunt fuck fuck fuck!”

  He brought his fist down toward her face, suddenly furious, and turned it aside at the last second, breaking his middle knuckle on the hard floor.

  Miles watched from beside the hole down into the earth. Looked at Coleridge, then to the hole, then back again. Torn.

  Coleridge’s eyes rolled. He gave a great sigh and fell across Beth’s body.

  Chapter Seventy-One

  Sawyer laughed as he drove fingers like talons deep into Beth’s skull.

  The pain was terrible. There was no blood, but she could feel the damage he was doing. His fingers sought out the core of her, her self, her memories and her feelings, her hurts and successes, the loves she had, her regrets, her shame and her fear. He tore at the things that made her Beth, the things that remained after death, her immortal soul.

  Most of all he tore at that one thing that set her apart, a kernel deep inside her that was always and forever connected to the afterlife.

  He would pull it from her and devour it like the beating hearts of his victims. She would serve in hell for all time, beyond time, for an eternity as nothing but a mindless slave, and he would be more powerful than anyone could ever imagine.

  The pain was unbearable, but the terror was worse. She screamed and scratched at his skin, but he was made more of stone than flesh. She left no mark and his laughter bore into her like needles.

  She was a fool. She thought she’d deserved this. Maybe she did but, God, was this the price?

  Then the pain lessened. The sharp digging within her ceased, but the laughter continued. No humor in that laugh, it was just a hole to his rotten lungs, fetid air escaping from a creature born of death.

  But the pain was gone and maybe she had a chance.

  His eyes were fixed beyond her, dark mirth twinkling.

  She turned and saw as he saw.

  “Oh. No.”

  Peter stood on the pathway above the bodies of the damned. He shook with terror, his dead face pale. But he’d never been a coward.

  “Peter, no! Go back!”

  “No, no. You’re all welcome down here,” said Sawyer, grinning through black teeth. He grabbed Beth by the hair and yanked her head back, hard. She yelped. Peter started forward.

  “No! Run!”

  “No,” he said. “Let her go.”

  Sawyer shook Beth’s head back and forth.

  “Beth says she wants to stay. Oh, Peter, she’s so wet for me.”

  “Let her go.”

  “Fuck off, Nancy,” Sawyer spat.

  “No, fuck you,” said Peter, and drew the black sword from behind his back. He strode forward, his hand shaking, even though he was just a shade in this place of death. He didn’t need to shake, but the spirit remembered the body long after death.

  Beth shook, too. She felt her neck bones grating together as her head was pulled back, even though she had no neck anymore than she could feel physical pain.

  But this was the tower. Rules were different here. This was his realm, a realm of the dead, but where flesh still ruled. The people fucking and rolling below like worms were real enough to feel pain and hatred and to inflict terrible wounds. The place healed dead flesh so it could be severed again.

  She didn’t understand the rules. Peter shook, she shook.

  Sawyer just laughed all the harder.

  Peter roared and charged at the beast. He slashed down at Sawyer’s neck with all his might, but when the sword hit it wasn’t a sword any longer. It was just a feather.

  Chapter Seventy-Two

  Tears streamed down Miles’ face, and each drop glittered in the strange light that surrounded him. His expression was too old for such a young face. No eight year old boy should know such sorrow.

  But he knew it well. He knew what was to come.

  He’d been dead a long time. He’d seen the other side. He’d seen lifetimes played out, deaths untold, enough pain and sorrow to break the soul of the living.

  A long time dead, though, and stronger for it.

  He knelt by the hole and watched as Coleridge’s eyes rolled up into his head, only the whites showing. The big man had heart and he made Miles happy. The boy sensed in Coleridge a simple soul. One much like his own. He wouldn’t let him die if he could do anything about it.

  He knew his role. It wasn’t to give, but to take. He couldn’t break the rules. But maybe in this one thing he could slide them.

  Coleridge slumped across Beth’s body, blood still flowing freely from his wound. Miles looked down into the pit again.

  He could hear his mother’s screams rising from the well. His father’s terrified cries joined hers.

  Coleridge was dying. Time was short.

  But the dead were unbound by time. His mother thought she knew this, but she hadn’t experienced it. She couldn’t. She hadn’t seen the other side.

  Miles had.

  He stepped away from the hole, closed his mind to the agony coming from behind him.

  He reached the stove. Concentrated and turned the knob. Flames flicked high.

  He took out a heavy metal skillet. It was no more difficult for him to carry than a plate or a sofa or a car. It wasn’t his physical strength that moved the skillet over the flame.

  When he judged it hot enough, he lifted it from the flame and pulled Coleridge’s leg between his arm and his chest. Held it firm, in a grip like iron. The big man was liable to wake and fight.

  Coleridge would never get his foot back, but he wo
uldn’t die.

  Miles held the skillet against the stump of Coleridge’s leg. His flesh seared and stank. Miles could smell it well enough. Smells, sounds, sights, so much touched him, made his soul sing with wonder and horror.

  Coleridge woke and fought and screamed, but then he passed out again.

  The skillet cooled.

  Miles hefted it. A thoughtful look passed his face. He nodded, listening to a voice only he could hear.

  “OK,” he said. Took one step over the hole and in the next step he stood before the man who’d stolen Death’s throne.

  Chapter Seventy-Three

  Sawyer’s fist lashed out, and Peter flew backward, rolling and coming to rest at the edge of the chasm. The dead strained to reach him, but the throne was too high.

  Beth threw herself at Sawyer, knowing it was pointless. Still bound by the rules of the living, she fought nail, fist, foot against stone. Her knuckles cracked and her nails tore. Her foot broke and she felt the pain, and even though she knew it wasn’t real it took the fight from her. She couldn’t hurt him.

  He laughed at her while she struggled against him. Then, bored, he took her bottom lip between his talons and pulled her face toward his.

  “Give yourself to me. I’ll let him go.”

  The pain was immense. She couldn’t concentrate. She fought to hold onto herself. He twisted her lip so hard the only thing she could do was turn her head away, try to turn out of his grip, but he pulled, and she could only go where he wanted. He drew her head down to his lap. He was naked and every part of him was like stone.

  Repulsed, she spat at him.

  Her spit seeped through his flesh, like he was thirsty. He thrust himself at her, and she bit down, breaking a tooth. It hurt him though. It must have, because he roared and tore her bottom lip from her face.

  He put his palm in her face and pushed her down to the floor.

  No blood, she saw, kneeling and looking down. No blood.