King of the Hollow Dark, page 3
Walk slower. Make it seem like you're gradually slowing down, and it's totally random and has nothing to do with the guy sauntering along behind you.
His feet slap against the concrete paving, a solid, slow thwack. It's the only sound but for the slight breeze shifting the top branches of the jacarandas so they whish together. I can't even hear traffic or birds or barking dogs or the occasional rattle of a falling twig or anything.
The breeze picks up, cooling the sweat prickling the nape of my neck, and ruffling the new paper bunting put up in readiness for Praeter Day. No more flowers. Just wards. Chills slide down my spine, like the air around me just dropped a couple of degrees.
Ghost wards and the sounds of footsteps. I'm freaking myself out now. Just a little.
My messenger bag is slung over one shoulder, and I shift my grip a little higher. I have just finished picking up some pantry basics, so if my creeper makes a wrong move, he is going to get a face full of extremely heavy tins of beans and sausages. Best use for them really.
He's slowing down.
Shit.
Okay, new tactic. I stop with a muttered, “Oh damn,” in what I hope is a convincing tone, and turn around.
The guy is just about to walk straight into me. He veers, and without changing his pace, takes a wide berth around me as if I'm some kind of Untouchable. He makes such a point of avoiding me that he actually steps off the edge of the pavement and into the road. For some reason, I feel oddly offended by that. Which is ridiculous because he's the stalker, not me.
Instead of hurrying off like I should, I watch him leave. It's the same guy from Umma. My back crawls. The world isn't falling to silence, and I'm not hallucinating rivers of paper flowers. It looks like him. He's dark-haired, but the nape of his neck is sickly pale. Maybe he's from another country, one where the sun never comes out. That or he lives under a log in a swamp. And there's something else. I frown. The branches that arch over the walkway are dropping crinkled brown petals, just along the line of where he's been walking. I look up. The jacarandas are in full summer lilac, except for a line of dead branches that stretches back down the avenue.
A gust of wind scuttles the crisp petals and leaves away. I'm imagining it. Or it's the weirdest, spookiest coincidence ever. I shake my head. Coincidence. Has to be. I'm still staring at him when he reaches the corner, stops and looks back at me. I feel like someone just dunked me in boiling water.
He frowns and starts walking back. “Wait,” he says. “You can see me?”
My arms prickle with goose-flesh. I am getting the hell out of here. Thalema's house is closer than mine, and she did firmly suggest I come over and help her study this afternoon. Right. Study, whatever. I turn and run, the soles of my trainers skidding on fallen drifts of lilac petals.
By the time I reach Thalema's house I'm completely winded. She opens the door to find me bent over, clutching at a stitch in my side and panting.
“Eager, were we?” Thalema says. “That's a first.”
But I can't answer her. Maybe it's my over-active brain turning on me, or perhaps the run triggered something, but things are going all wrong inside my head again. This is bad. I need to be somewhere safe when it hits. Fear rises in me, a panicky shiver that it's happening again and this time I'm not half-asleep and I can't write it off as the tail end of a dream.
“Need to lie down,” I mumble as I stagger into her house. Air-conditioning cools my sweat-soaked tee-shirt. It's a blissful split-second of relief.
“Empress, you’re insane, running in this heat. Go up to my room, I'll get you some ice water.”
Insane. Damn, if only Thalema knew just how close to the bone that was. It's better if she stays in the dark. Let's pretend we're sane and we can cope with life. I pull myself up the white-painted staircase, hanging to the railings like a sailor clinging to a ship in a storm. Thalema's room seems too far away; the beige carpet in the passage leading to her bedroom an endless desert. I scrabble with the handle of her door. “Come on, damn you,” I whisper, jiggling the handle until it clicks. My hands against the brass look wrong—they don't belong to me. The metal of the handle drags against my skin, sucking at my palms.
Finally, the door swings in. The bed is neatly made up, an inviting expanse of dove-grey cotton like a restful cloud floating in the endless wool blue of the carpet. I collapse, and the springs chide me in soft squeaks. For a few panting seconds I lie curled on my side. It makes me feel small and weak. I force my muscles to move, to stretch out, and roll over onto my back. Slow your breathing, slow your heart, slow your mind.
Unless I can get a grip on myself, in a few moments I am going to stop being me.
“Here's your water. Are you sure you're okay?” Thalema clunks the glass down on the bedside table.
I manage to pull my thoughts together long enough to say, “I'll be fine, just give me a moment,” but my voice already sounds wrong. A young voice, a sulky girl’s, when it should be deeper and darker and slow like honey pouring from a wooden spoon.
I'M MY MOTHER. ONLY I'M not, so it's not a memory. And I'm awake so it's not a dream. Hallucination. Maybe the stress of not working and being in the apartment all day with nothing but my memories has finally caught up with me and driven me completely bat-shit.
And I'm talking to myself, so it must be true. You know what they say—whoever they are. Then again, maybe talking to yourself so that you go less mad is okay, by whatever standards people judge this sort of thing. At least I've managed to keep all my conversations zipped up in my head. If I start speaking out loud, I guess I'll have crossed some borderline into oh dear maybe we really should put Georgina in a place where they can help her. Those damn They again. I wonder if They have names, real shapes, or if They are just a sub-species of human, grey and faceless as ghosts.
It's coming up on me now, and my head feels all different inside; sticky, oily, like fresh red paint over a familiar old bench. Her thoughts seep into mine, staining the inside of my skull. So I talk to myself and I try to keep all the memories separated, to hang onto the pieces that are me. Lie very still, keep your eyes open. Don't blink. If you blink you'll fall further into this.
The bed is soft below, the ceiling white and bright above. Keep your eyes open and see what's really there. If you close them.
If you close them.
Shit. My eyes are burning.
And I'm her again and because we're so close to the day they killed her, I fall headlong into that thirteen-year-old memory.
STANDING ALONE IN THE MORNING dark, listening to the ibises and the starlings and the far-off nothingness of a city in despair. My hands are bound.
I'm not really alone. The ones who will execute me make tiny shifting sounds as they wait. One ties the blindfold about my eyes, wrapping them in a white darkness. Contradictions make me smile. My mouth tastes bitter, like cigarette smoke. What a cliché. But when they asked me what I wanted before I died, I couldn't think of anything except a cigarette. no one smoked, so I got an extra few minutes while one of the guards went off to round up a cig and a lighter.
They lit it for me, let me stand there in the cold morning, my skirt slapping at my knees, my shoes wet with dew, and I drew in each dark and acrid breath as if it were my last. Ha. Ha. I hung onto those lungfuls. What a stupid way to die. What a stupid way to spend your last moments, but I couldn't think of anything better to do.
When I used to work in the lab, I would always get annoyed with smokers. They squeezed more breaks into the day, all those stolen extra minutes spent puffing guiltily on the outside balconies. And now it seemed far too quick, this little smoke break. The red coal ate away at the paper too fast, the ash grew longer, bending like an old bridge, only to fall and shower the tops of my shoes with a dull grey constellation. That only made me think of my little Georgina, of how she watches the stars. I bought her that fat reflecting telescope for the festival of Rising Mikesh. What kind of six-year-old gets excited about a telescope?
Mine, I supposed. My strange little changeling thing.
I reached the filter—never thought I'd wish for a cigarette that never ended. Never thought there'd come a day when I even wanted a bloody cigarette. I knelt down to stub the thing out, even though it was already dead. Maybe I just wanted to grind something down—anything to make me feel like I still had a little bit of control in my own life.
So, you won. You won, you stupid bitch. But you'll still never have what you want.
I made sure of that.
The guard took the dead cigarette and now those same careful hands are tightening the knot on my blindfold. I wonder if I will hear the clicking of the rifles, or if I will only hear the shots.
Will it hurt?
Oh, gods, don't let it hurt. Don't let them hurt my baby.
I made sure she was safe, didn't I?
Didn't I?
I can't remember.
After I die they are going to Dispell me, and everything I have worked toward will be over. Briefly I wonder if there’s a way I can seed my last thoughts in my baby’s mind, if there’s a moment between death and Dispellment where I am free to go to her.
It’s possible.
I can do it. I can do anything.
STOP IT. I MAKE MY eyes wider, until they feel dry and itchy. I'm not standing in front of a firing squad. I am, in fact, lying down on my best friend's puffy bed. I'm not waiting to die, although it might be an improvement over my current existence.
I am not my mother.
Not today.
I am me, and I am not dead. I am in my best friend’s bedroom, breathing, and being very much alive. I say it over and over silently, a mantra that will keep me safe in my own head and won't hook on any memories that belong to
someone else.
Stop. I breathe deep. Concentrate on the texture of the thin cotton under my back, the faint incense and lentil smell of Thalema's house. The scent of dye and dried flowers. This is not a place from my mother's memories. Thalema's bed is very different from mine; queen-sized and marshmallow fluffy. Her ceiling has just been repainted off-white and it glows against my face like the skin of the moon. I bounce a little, lying on my back and letting the springiness jog me around for a while. The slip, that weird moment where I was my mother, it's passed. I'm safely myself again. I wonder if I should tell Thalema. If I trust her enough. I can just imagine how it will sound.
Hi, Thalema. I think I might be going mad. Just a little bit. I keep thinking I'm my dead mother. You know the one I said was killed in a head-on collision, well, yeah, I might have lied a little about that. Oh, and one more thing; there's this uh...let's call him a stalker—
Stalker. Yeah, right.
“You can see me.”
Who says something like that?
“It's a bed, George, not a trampoline.”
I stop bouncing and lift my head to squint at Thalema. At least she's back to herself and not sewn into that weird costume for Umma. She's just my friend again, and not the representation of some mythical goddess who is probably only the twisted legend of some ancient real-life princess who killed a few people and then made a peace treaty with some other random ancient person.
There is no Umma-Lukaya, Empress of Life, and there is no King of Death.
Thalema sits in front of her mirror, dragging a comb through her hair and scowling. The mirror is edged with comps from punk gigs and little black and white pictures cut from music magazines. Faded remnants of our teen years. Not that long ago and yet it feels like half a lifetime. There are also a few brand-new ghost-wards on bright green paper, ready for the Praeter Day celebrations. Now that Umma is over we move from the paper flowers of life to the symbols of our fear.
The spidery black eyes glare at me from the wards. I stare back. Come on, wards, bring it, I can take anything you care to throw at me. But they're just bits of paper. They don't mean anything. Not really. People put them up to keep away ghosts, but I've never really understood why. It's not like we would even know if they work.
A necromancer could; but they're tuned into all that paranormal shit. For the rest of us common-or-garden humans, the most we'd get is a cold shiver, or that feeling that someone just walked over your grave. It's not like we see them.
“You can see me?” he said. Like I shouldn't have been able to. In his weird clothes. Old-fashioned black, decades out of date. His mushroom-white skin.
Before she died, my mother told me that wards do work, and I suppose she would know, being the head necromancer under the Empress (the previous version, not our current swan-necked, wilting maiden). The ghost-ward is all that's left of the necromancers and their arts. The rest of their knowledge was destroyed after the Uprising.
We don't want to call up any damn ghosts, we want them to stay far away.
“You could tell me what it is that's bugging you?” Thalema says, but she's facing her reflection instead of actually turning around to look at me. She's annoyed. I’m supposed to be testing her on some idiotic revision. I don't even know why: it’s not like any of this stuff about the invention of the press and how advertising has shaped our culture has anything to do with my life. Or hers. “Or we could, I don't know, study?” Thalema raises an eyebrow, and I see it in the mirror.
“Ugh.” Instead, I pull one of Thalema's pillows over my face and try to smother myself, breathing in the smell of bergamot and vanilla hair oil, shampoo, and baby-safe washing powder. “I'd rather be torn to pieces by wild dogs, and my remnants scattered over Umma-Lukaya in a rain of blood. I have been out of school for nearly three years, why must I keep suffering?”
“You are such a drama queen,” Thalema says. “Stop with the suicide and ask me some questions from these.” She holds out a sheaf of papers, which I decline to take.
“Thalema,” I say after a few minutes, the pillow muffling my voice, keeping my words small and easily missed. “I need to get out of here.”
“Drink your water. Out where?”
“Anywhere—some place that doesn't remind me of...” I wave one hand, unable to explain all the things inside my head.
Thalema winces in sympathy. “I know this is a shitty day for you, but maybe we can do something, go somewhere?”
“Ugh,” I say. “I can't go home.”
It’s the anniversary of the day they took my mother away. A whole thirteen years since I watched the men in the white uniforms of the Empress march my mother off at gunpoint and into the back of a brand new UNU van.
I tell people she died in a car crash.
Tomorrow is the anniversary of the day they stood her in front of a pitted wall somewhere in the middle of nowhere and blew
my brains out.
Her. Her brains out. Most people are not celebrating that, of course. They're celebrating the end of their fear.
Tomorrow is also my birthday. Mine, I almost say out loud in a growl, like a dog with a bone it doesn't want so much as it doesn't want other dogs to have it. Twenty. And what do I have to show for it? Thalema is nearly done with her design course, by twenty my own mother was already pretty famous, with her face on the cover of magazines, her own entry in the encyclopedias. Of course, she was also dead at thirty-two, so here’s hoping I don't have the same life progress.
Thalema pulls the pillow away from my face. “How bad is he going to be?” She knows my dad gets moody around this time. I've spent enough birthdays with her.
I grimace. “Bad.” It's awful, I know, but I hate being around my father while he sits there crying silently and looking at old videos of her. Doesn't he know I'm sad too?
There's a place inside me so black and deep and empty where she used to be. I miss her. But not in the way he does, and I've learned the trick of misdirecting my own mind. If I don't like to think about something, I make it small and smooth as an egg, and that way I can never really think about it. My mind just slides away to something else it can latch on to. Well, it used to, anyway.
Before the small memory problem.
I'm not insane, I tell myself. I'm over-tired, I'm stressed, and the Praeter Day celebrations aren't helping. It'll pass.
Thalema hugs the pillow and stares down at me, a small frown pinching her brow. “So, stay here.”
And I really want to, but guilt gets the better of me. I never should have tried to get all serious. Deep stuff, emotional stuff, that's dangerous. It could lead to truth and that's something I don't need anyone, not even my best friend, knowing about. I shift the topic, and end up on the only slightly less dangerous ground of my stalker. I try to be all coy about it, but I fail. “Have you seen a weird homeless guy hanging around town recently?”
“Huh, no. Not that I pay attention to every weirdo on the streets.” Thalema goes to the art college in the middle of town, she’s basically surrounded by weirdos. Hardly surprising that she wouldn’t notice one more.I get the old drunks and the miserable housewives. “Why?”
I shake my head. My inner voice is yelling at me to shut up, that this is not what I want to be talking about, but my mouth apparently decides to carry on, flipping some mental override switch. “I swear that some creeper is stalking me, then.”
“Drama queen.” Thalema prods my forehead with her index finger. “Come on, I'll make you lunch and if you go through my notes with me, then I’ll treat you. We can go to The Portly Pig and grab a few drinks. Anyway, there’s something I want to talk to you about.”
I make a mental note to flatly ignore that last comment, and almost sigh in open relief. If she'd actually got me talking about the guy, it might have become apparent that I think he's
dead
with the ANU and then she'll want to know why I think ANU people are stalking me and that will lead back to truth and goddess knows I would rather go stack shelves for all eternity than deal with the truth.
“The Portly. Kill me now.” I make a grab for the pillow in her hands. I've heard that you can't actually smother yourself, but it can't hurt to try, I reason. Well, it probably can, but I'll take that over hanging out at Thalema’s local, which is apparently where all the pretentious arseholes in the world go to grab a drink. All those suits and sunglasses.
