Geek Fantasy Novel (22 page)

“I’m not dead yet,” Ralph observed.

“Quite right,” the skeleton said, slowing its speech to make sure this obvious numbskull understood. “But that’s not to say you won’t be dead shortly.”

“Will being dead mean I can go back home?” Ralph asked.

“How many dead people go back home?” the skeleton asked.

Ralph wondered how to answer.

“No,” the skeleton said dryly. “You won’t go back home. Because you’ll be dead.”

“I think I’ll stay alive, then.”

The skeleton looked hard at the featureless sea, then politely returned its eye sockets to Ralph. “Forgive me, but I don’t really see how you’ll manage that.”

“Look, I know this must have something to do with Beatrice. Let me meet her and get on with it.”

Yes!

The skeleton looked confused. “Beatrice?”

“Yes. This is bound to be her wish.”

“And you expect me to immediately recognize that name among the millions of dead?”

“I guess not.”

“There are probably a thousand dead Beatrices in the various purgatories.”

“I’m very sorry.”

The skeleton sighed. “Let’s give it a shot. This Beatrice is a male or a female?”

“Female.”

“Known by you?”

“Yes.”

“Likely cause of death?”

Ralph shrugged.

“Is she of a sunny or rainy disposition?”

“Rainy. Definitely rainy.”

“Young or old?”

“Young. Ish. A teenager.”

The skeleton nodded. “Gloomy teenage females are automatically assigned to Purgatory Main Isle. Very crowded these days.”

“Is it hard to get to?”

“If you’re alive, impossible. Flatly impossible. Even when you’re dead, it’s difficult. Before the Flood, PMI served as the exclusive entry terminal for the dead, but now we’ve had to farm our client load out to dozens of auxiliary purgatories. PMI’s almost at capacity, so even if you died right now, you’d still be too late to have much chance of being assigned there.”

“And it would be impossible to see her if I was in a different purgatory?”

The skeleton laughed, which caused its ribs to grate harshly against one another. “They’re
different purgatories.
Yes. It would be strictly impossible.”

“What’s to be done, then?”

The skeleton shrugged, another unpleasant sight when no flesh covers the bones. “There are zoning exceptions, of course. If you die within a mile of any given purgatory, you can get a local waiver. But that’s simply not going to happen for Purgatory Main Isle.”

“Why?”

“PMI was formerly in the middle of the Acrid Plains, which were hard to reach, though not impossibly so. But after the Snow Queen’s Flood, the Acrid Plains are …” The skeleton trailed off and gestured at the fathoms of dark water. “To make sure you were within a mile of PMI, you’d have to die two miles below the surface of this ocean.”

“Maybe I could swim two miles down and then die,” Ralph suggested.

“Swim two miles down? Good luck. On top of the physical feat, which you seem to be of too geeky a stature to accomplish, you’d also have to guess where Main Isle is. The currents could carry you far away in the Iron Sea before you died.”

“Do you know where Purgatory Main Isle is?”

“Not precisely. I do know that we’ve received hundreds of PMI local waivers for whales and kraken, so PMI must be near their battlezone.”

“Can you introduce me to them?”

“They
live under the water,
Ralph.” The skeleton tapped its finger against the void where its lips would have been. “Though the whales must come up to breathe, I suppose. That’s what whales do, no?”

Ralph nodded.

“I’ll see what I can do. Give me two days. That’s about when you’ll be dead from lack of water, anyway. Just sit tight.”

“Come back soon,” Ralph said encouragingly. But the skeleton was already gone.

The sun was setting and Ralph, doing his best to beat back dueling pangs of thirst and hunger, huddled in his web cocoon to wait for the skeleton’s return. Once the night arrived, it was cool and pleasant, but he knew that, come morning, daylight would again beat into his skin.
What would it feel like,
he wondered,
to die of sunburn?

But he only had to wonder for one night, since with dawn came the sound of something large slapping the water outside his vessel.

It was a whale breaching, smacking the surface in a tremendous spray. It threw itself into the air and came crashing back into the sea a few times before gliding over to Ralph’s perilously tilting craft. Its head emerged from the water; even that head was already twice the size of his cocoon, and fitted with a sleek steel helmet that had been hammered on with scab-crusted tacks.

“Hello,” Ralph said.

He expected a manly baritone, but the whale’s voice was so high-pitched as to be almost inaudible. “You’re Ralph?” it asked.

“Yes,” Ralph said.

“I’m to take you four hundred fathoms below. As a favor to the narrator, to get you moving along. Are you ready?”

“Who’s the narrator?”

“Come on, get on.”

“I, what, hold on to your flipper?”

“Dorsal fin, please. Otherwise I can’t steer.”

The whale curled so more of its body was exposed. Ralph gingerly stepped from the cocoon to its back. He gripped the fin at the center and admired the whale’s fine helmet, and the massive steel plates bolted to its flukes. “Are you a soldier?” Ralph asked.

The whale nodded, a spectacular shimmy that almost pitched Ralph into the sea. “Just got called up. Shipping back out to duty. You’re ready?”

Ralph said yes, and the whale dove. Not unforeseeably, Ralph was thrown and left bobbing at the surface of the iron sea. The whale re-surfaced minutes later. “What happened?” it asked.

“I couldn’t hold on. No chance.”

“Oh,” the whale said. “I should have thought of that.” Its flippers sagged in discouragement.

“You’ve never had anyone ride you before?”

“Calves, sure. But no humans.”

“Could you go slower?”

“Not if we want to get you four hundred fathoms deep. I’d never get up enough momentum. I have an idea, though. Get off for a second, would you?”

Ralph heaved himself back into his rocking cocoon and watched as the whale performed an elaborate dance, its armored head and tail glinting below the surface as it twirled and sang.

When it returned to the surface, it had two water sprites in tow. (To those who are unacquainted with water sprites: They are lovely and almost shapeless, like the mist from a hose spigot on a sunny day.)

They carried between them a length of shimmering cord, which the whale had them bind around Ralph’s wrists and ankles. They giggled and slapped him as they did, their vaporous touches making Ralph shiver pleasantly. Then the whale opened its mouth, exposing long strips of baleen. Words were exchanged in some sea-language, then the sprites lifted Ralph out of the cocoon and positioned him against the baleen, right where the front teeth would have been. The whale’s mouth was covered with grimy plankton, and smelled like a wharf on a hot day.

The whale asked if Ralph was ready and he nodded, though he wondered what it was, precisely, that he had declared himself ready for.

The whale dove. Ordinary flukes are powered by the strongest muscles in the animal kingdom — and magical flukes, well! Ralph found himself instantly pressed upon by thousands of gallons of water. It rolled his eyelids, shoved its way down his throat and filled his stomach and lungs. He was blasted by plankton, the more resourceful of which clutched his clothing as their peers were sucked into the whale’s gullet.

They dove farther and farther, until all was black and cold. The rapid increase in pressure caused Ralph’s eardrums to burst, which would have hurt terribly if he hadn’t been distracted by the more pressing sensation of zooming to the bottom of the ocean.

By the time he was fifty leagues beneath the surface, Ralph had passed out. Which was good, since by two hundred leagues he was dead, and the one hundred fifty leagues in between would have been extremely disagreeable.

Ralph first noticed that there was no color. But Purgatory wasn’t black-and-white, either — it was full of luminous grays, grays like tweed, grays that hinted at thousands of colors latent somewhere within, grays flecked in colors like goldenrod and periwinkle, grays with dried flowers inside.

It was also, though thousands of leagues under the sea, blessedly dry.

The third thing Ralph noticed was a distinct lack of ghosts and zombies. The people who passed him looked like normal peasant folk, if understandably more preoccupied. He had materialized high in the branches of a deadwood tree, and as he worked to gain his bearings he watched the commoners pass in and out of their slate city. He was eager to get on with his search for Beatrice. First, though, he had to determine whether the people down here would try to kill him.

Wait — he was dead. Could he still be killed?

The idea of being dead made him anxious, and to divert himself he guessed what the hair color of the passing peasants would be, were it not gray. Identifying blonds was easy; distinguishing reds from browns was significantly more difficult.

He eavesdropped on their conversations, listening for Beatrice’s name. They talked mainly of peasanty things, bread loaves and taxes and hounds.
Eventually Ralph started to hear one word repeated over and over — “clutch.” It was a term that he had only ever known to be applied to secondhand cars, and he couldn’t imagine how it could relate to a fantastic land. He rolled to hear better.

The conversationalists in question were a pair of washerwomen (both with hair that would probably be gray in any context, Ralph noted), lugging basketfuls of wet clothing toward the gate and resting every few paces. Their names, he very soon surmised, were Ada and Alda. “I heard,” Ada said, “that Antonia has felt the Clutch.”

“No! When?”

“This morning. She was passing programs out for services, and suddenly she went even whiter than she usually is. She tried to cover it up — you know Antonia — but we all knew what had happened.”

Alda tsked. “I don’t understand how people think they can hide it. You’d think, given all that’s happened, that people wouldn’t still try to keep secrets.”

Ada grunted and gave her laundry basket a tug.

“Ada? You haven’t felt it, have you?”

“No,” Ada snapped. “Of course not.”

They pulled their baskets in silence. They were drawing out of range — Ralph had to crawl to the edge of a branch to hear them. “How long has Antonia been with us?” Ada asked.

“No one remembers exactly. Aurelio tried to calculate it, after I told him she’d felt the Clutch. He thinks it was forty-one days or so.”

Ada sighed mechanically, in the manner of people reading of morbid but far-off things. “Poor Antonia. Now a filthy undead.”

Alda shook her head. “So sad.”

“Let us lay our trust in Gid.”

“Yes, let us lay our trust in Him.”

They crested a hill and were gone.

Ralph descended from the tree. The sun seemed to be setting (it was tough to tell without color), and he imagined it would be prudent to be behind walls after nightfall.

The city reminded him of Durbanshire and Chessie’s castle, in that the townsfolk would stare studiously at the ground, involve themselves in the stitching of their garments, anything to avoid meeting Ralph’s outsider eyes. As he passed along the cobblestone streets he began to feel very much alone, to an extent he hadn’t felt since that terrible year when he couldn’t attend birthday parties and had been mercilessly teased about his paladin.

He began sneaking glances at himself to see what could be so off-putting about his appearance. There wasn’t anything so odd about him, was there? Pants and a T-shirt, its red stained in rings with the dried salt of the sea. Hair greasy but fairly tamed, shoes soggy but with nice — then he realized it: He was in color.

He passed through the town as if he were a ship’s prow, crowds of locals wordlessly falling to either side. He beat back his sudden sense of loneliness by focusing on memorizing the lay of the town, noting that he passed nothing but residences — no bars, no inns. And no Beatrice. As nightfall drew nearer, Ralph climbed a set of stone steps and wandered the city battlements, eventually perching on the edge and watching the gray sun draw back its light to reveal the moon.

During the earliest part of man’s existence, he was in constant contact with the dead. Ceremonies, phantom voices, tombs, all provided a means to access those who were no longer alive. Those who were yet living —

Ralph was startled to hear the book’s narration broadcast in his head. — would speak to those who were already gone, and so knew what to expect upon their own deaths, learning that the stage between life and death
was not short. Purgatory Main Isle was divided into two cities, that of the Recently-Living and that of the Soon-to-be-Dead. Half a being’s time would be spent in the first city, and then he would feel the Clutch and pass to the second, only to drop into farther, even more gruesome, realms once that second period had passed.