Rafe screamed this at me in front of Zenda. He punched me in the face and stomach and I fell down. I gave no defence. I had none. I had nothing. He kicked me twice, and then he went away.
I took Zenda back to The City. We continued to see each other every now and then, but something had died in me. I thought at least I'd known my world, the one I'd grown up in. But I hadn't. I hadn't known it at all. I'd thought that lies had a different sound, that you could tell what the truth was by listening.
I was wrong. More than Jeamland, more than The City, Rachel's baby proved something to me. You don't know anything about the world, not the real world, not the one that matters. I couldn't understand how they'd been able to do it. I don't even mean emotionally; I mean practically. I couldn't understand how they'd been able to work it, to find the time without my knowing. You think you see the world as it really is, think the gaps you see, the time you understand, is the way it is. But there are other gaps, ones you don't know about, and in those gaps the devils are playing. You don't know anything about the world. You just don't fucking know.
So I withdrew from it. I didn't kill myself, though I stood shaking with a broken bottle in my hand more than once. I just closed down for a while, and when I reopened for business I wasn't the same. I found someone else to be. You met him.
A year passed before I went back into Jeamland, and when I went, it was for a reason. A friend of a friend had starting having very bad nightmares, nightmares which were slowly killing her. In her nightmares she kept seeing a man who sounded very much like Rafe.
That's how it started. I spent another year trying to patch up what Rafe was doing to Jeamland, but I couldn't keep up. He was insane by then, stirring up the Somethings and making them stronger, pissing in people's streams and finally actually killing them. For the hell of it. For something to do.
He was as lost as I was, but he was full of Jeamland and it had killed my friend just as surely as Rachel's baby had killed his. The Rafe I knew would never have come to specialise in smashing his fist up through people's skulls from the inside. The more time I spent in Jeamland, trying to fight him, the worse I got, the more I hated him, and when he decided to try to bring the whole thing crashing down, to break down the wall between Jeamland and The City, I got on my steed and rode.
Ji and I found him, and we killed him. The difference between worlds, the conclusion of twenty shared years, the end of it all came down to a filthy room in the future and the sordid hatred of two men who hurt too much to live. Ji pulled the trigger, but that was a technicality. I pulled it really, and I felt a savage rip of joy.
And after years of wandering around The City, rounding up Somethings who were still running wild eight years after Rafe was dead, I'd come down a path in a forest to find that they were not the only ones for whom he'd never died.
The twist of Jeamland that had pushed Alkland, the Something that had killed Bellrip in Rafe's distinctive way, the shadowy figure that asked questions in Red and shot at me in Royle, the whole nightmare: that was me. I did it.
When I was a few yards away from the figure I stopped for a moment, and then took one more cautious step forward. The coat was exactly as I remembered it, the hair, the stance, everything. It was Rafe.
Slowly he turned. A lock of dark hair fell over his tanned forehead, and his face looked tired. His eyes looked tired too, tired but alive, just as they always had, and this time I had no way of stopping the tears that pushed up from inside. I ran my sleeve across my eyes, not wanting my vision to be blurred, wanting to be able to see my friend properly. That face.
I tried to smile, and he smiled back, and his smile was the same. It was the smile he'd always had, since we were two small boys on a bench outside a headmaster's office four hundred years ago. It was exactly as I remembered it.
It was bound to be. Because that was all it was: how I remembered it. In the end I'd dreamed stronger than anyone, strongly enough to bring my monster to life again so I could finally face him.
Still grinning softly Rafe jerked his head towards the wall and I stepped tentatively forward to stand beside him. Side by side we stood, and watched through that dear membrane, looked out at a September day in 1994, at a house in a leafy street. The door opened and we came out together, looking so young but so much more like ourselves. We stood on the path and Mum and Dad stepped out to wave us goodbye, not knowing that they would never see me again.
I could see their faces so clearly as they stood arm in arm on the doorstep, hands waving in time, and as my chest hitched I raised my hand and waved back. Rafe waved to them too, and as we did I whispered to myself all the things I never had the chance to tell them. It wasn't the same, but it was the best I could do.
They stopped waving, and Dad turned to Mum and said something which made her laugh before they went back inside. And that's the memory I always have of them now, that picture. It's a good picture, a glimpse of the last day I had with them, and I'm glad that on that day they were happy.
When the door was shut I turned to Rafe, and we took a long look at each other, seizing a last ever chance.
Because Rafe was dead, dead everywhere except inside me. I'd kept him alive these years, condemning him, hating him until the columns of my memory were so diseased that all they could support was a nothing. The light of life shines up from your birth, and I'd left so much in the way that I had stood for years in twilight, isolated and alone while the person I'd once been still stamped and raved, blocking the light and poisoning the sun. The world could no longer reach me, and my past had become all I had, a past I could do nothing about, could never go back and change.
Everything you've done, everything you've seen, everything you've become, remains. You never can go back, only forward, and if you don't bring the whole of yourself with you, you'll never see the sun again.
I reached clumsily forward and put my arms round him, and I felt his come up to hold me too. One time was going to have to pay for all, and we knew it, and we hugged each other by the wall, our heads on each other's shoulders, soaking each other's coats. We hugged each other for the friends we had been, for the friends we should have remained, for time spent and time lost. We leant back for a moment and laughed shakily, just happy to see each other's faces once more, and then we hugged one last time. And when I opened my eyes, he was gone.
* * *
After a while I walked slowly back along the path between the trees. I was never going to come here again, and so I took my time, reminding myself who this person was. There was still nothing between the trees, but it felt different now. It wasn't emptiness any more, but a space, and spaces can be filled.
Eventually I was back in Jeamland. I didn't bother to look for Ji's body. I knew I would never find it, and I wondered how long it would have to walk before it found the block of flats I lived in as a child, and what happened to it after he'd spoken to me. I came back into the old square and again I stood a moment, remembering, and for the first time it felt good to think about those days.
I sensed that I would not be back in Jeamland very often, that as the years went by I would come back less and less frequently, that maybe one day I would leave and never return. That felt okay.
Then I closed my eyes and woke up.
'Christ, Stark, are you all right?'
'Yes' I said.
The End
They filled me in on what happened.
ACIA had turned up eventually. Spangle let them through, but cats filled the suite to bursting point in case there was any trouble. There wasn't. ACIA had nothing against me any more.
C really had thought Alkland had been kidnapped, first by somebody else, and then by me. The guy who'd planted the bomb had been acting on his own, trying to climb up the ACIA ladder in true over-achiever style. He was now a grade 43 mono attendant, which served him right. C was just trying to protect Alkland. He wasn't a bad guy after all.
It turns out that Dilligenz is a plant extract. Nobody uses it any more, apparently: it doesn't do anything.
I told Snedd about Ji, and he nodded. He'd known before I got back, I think. I tried to say something, but he stopped me. He understood.
We walked back out of Cat, the ACIA men carrying Alkland's body. He was buried in the Centre, next to his sister. Snedd went back to Red. He controls just about all of it now, and keeps sending me hideously detailed press releases.
Shelby got her heliporter back to Brandfield, and I fixed it up for her during the week we spent going to Maxim's every night. I'm still paying the bill.
And Zenda? She still works in the Centre, is still a zappy, can-do kind of girl. But she got a dispensation from C, and she lives in Colour with me. It's been a year now, and it's working out very well. I think it will stay that way. I hope so. Everyone deserves a happy ending.
Even me.