The Death of Me: A Tor.Com Original (3 page)

*   *   *

After he had been let into the storeroom to the rear of the hatter’s shop, Cabal dropped his bag heavily on an old worktable and leaned there, both palms upon the tabletop, while he marshalled himself.

“I have experienced a very bad day thus far, Mr Jones. I hope you are not going to add to my sorrows.”

When he received no reply, he turned his head to look at the nervous hatter. Jones hardly seemed to be listening. He was at his habitual place at the window, twitching the blinds. Cabal bit back his frustration with the man’s lack of focus. It had taken a long time to cultivate Jones, to make him trust Cabal enough to use his peculiar talents to supply Cabal’s needs. As it was, Cabal was coming to the conclusion that the whole line of investigation might be fundamentally flawed and that he would be bringing it to a halt soon enough anyway. Still, it was worth the extinction of a few dozen more fluttering woodland types to be sure. When Cabal had read
Peter Pan
as a boy, he had found himself thinking,
Yes, I do believe in fairies. But I still want you to die.

“Well, enough of the pleasantries,” said Cabal when he still had no reply. “Have you gathered my supplies, Herr Jones?”

Jones still did not reply. “What precisely are you looking at?” Cabal asked, joining him at the window. They gazed down into the dusty, uninteresting street. It looked uninteresting, but for the dustiness. Cabal felt unilluminated and strangely out of sorts. He’d felt unpleasantly detached from the full experience of reality ever since that nonsense in the carriage with…

He looked down at his life line. He hadn’t even noticed that it had gone. When he had—for the lack of a better term—died that time, the state of his palm print on returning from that
Dark Vale of
—ironically enough—
No Return
had not been of much concern. Now, he couldn’t stop sneaking faux-casual glances at his palm.

“I fear death, Mr Cabal,” said Jones quietly, his eyes still upon the empty street.

The words so closely matched Cabal’s own thoughts that he was hardly aware that they had been spoken at all. “I was dead once,” said Cabal distractedly, his attention upon his hand. He didn’t see Jones’s sudden, frightened glance at him. “Years ago. An experiment. I suspended my vital signs for nine minutes and forty-four seconds. I was looking for inspiration, an understanding.” The sight of his restored life line fascinated him. “I didn’t find one. The laboratory grew dark, and then I awoke. Only my instruments assured me that I hadn’t simply fallen asleep.”

“Did … did you see anything?” Jones was terrified to ask, terrified not to.

“No. Nothing at all. No afterlife. Although … There
is
a Hell.”

“Hell? How do…?”

“I’ve seen it. Visited. I was alive on that occasion. It wasn’t a pleasant day trip. It wasn’t a pleasant year.” He frowned. This was a conundrum. “I wonder how it was that I didn’t see anything? I would have certainly … Oh. Of course.” He smiled to himself, how had he forgotten that small detail. “I had no soul.”

It was a small omission. If he had continued the sentence a little further to include “but I have one now,” things might have turned out differently. Cabal realised that later when he analysed the day’s events, but—right then—it seemed an unimportant point. A tiny bit of happenstance that, for scientific reasons, he had seen fit to sell away his soul and that later, for scientific reasons, he had seen fit to recover it.

He certainly didn’t appreciate its significance at the time, when it might have done some good. The sight of Jones going quite mad with fear unduly distracted him from that conclusion.

“You!” said Jones, backing away. “It’s you!”

“Of course it’s me,” replied Cabal.

This, he was later to realise, was exactly the wrong thing to say at that juncture.

Jones spoke, but it was in such a paroxysm of dread and terror that the words fell over one another and became shrill, sobbing gibberish. Cabal watched him, utterly nonplussed. What had got into the man?

Perhaps, Cabal conjectured with a growing sense of threat, Jones’s paranoia had gone too far. Perhaps he, Cabal, had asked Jones to risk his neck once too often. Perhaps Jones had been keeping himself busy between excursions and the rare occasions when anybody actually wanted a hat by constructing an imaginary world of menace and conspiracy—a world that Cabal had accidentally tapped into with his apparently ill-omened comment.

What happened next happened quickly and Cabal was hardly aware of the chain of events even as they occurred. He simply responded to stimuli, reasoned rapidly and without reflection, and acted upon that reasoning.

Jones continued to move away from him until he reached the end of the table. His eyes flickered down and he reached for the handle of one of the table’s drawers. Cabal watched him with cautious curiosity, but no real sense of danger.

Then the pain began.

It was the living echo of the agony he had felt earlier that same day, burning across his hand as if the flesh was being laid open with a blade of frozen vitriol. He gasped with its suddenness and gripped the stricken hand with the other as he looked down at the open palm. What he saw first confused, then horrified him. His life line was shortening before his eyes, burning like a fast fuse across the skin. He could see the crease vanishing in a bead of boiling blood, leaving nothing but smooth skin behind it.

He looked up: Jones had the drawer open, looking furtively at Cabal as he searched in it.

Cabal reached for his bag, undid its strap and buckle in two fast twitches, shook it open.

Jones had found what he was looking for, closed his hand around it.

Cabal reached into the bag with his right hand, ignoring the pain. When his hand closed around the butt of his Webley, the cool wood and metal seemed to ease the burning. He let the bag fall, lifting the gun and thumb cocking its hammer at the same time.

Jones had a knife, an ugly, large thing made of some crudely refined metal and placed in a lightly coloured wooden handle. The expression of panicked hope in his face dissolved as he saw the gun. He whimpered and Cabal shot him.

The shot was placed to kill instantly and it could hardly miss at that range. Jones was dead before he even started to fall. By the time his head cracked against the floor, Cabal was already preparing his departure.

He gathered up the particular materials he had come to buy, wrapped them in a large square of butcher’s paper, and packed them into his bag, placing the revolver upon the top of it in case it was needed in a hurry again. He strapped the bag shut and made as if to leave. Instead, he paused and looked back at Jones. Poor, paranoid, very dead Jones.

At least, he assumed Jones was dead. He’d never heard of anybody surviving a Boxer .577 round delivered at close range to the interorbital space, but that wasn’t to say he should take it as a given. He stood over Jones and looked at the damage. On examination, it appeared very much like one
could
take death by Boxer .577 round delivered at close range to the interorbital space as a given. Cabal sighed. He disliked killing, doubly so when it represented a nuisance to him quite apart from the judicial ramifications. He was quite adept at running away from the police and bribing the few that lasted the course. The loss of Jones, however, made gathering the specialist materials Jones had been supplying quite difficult. Speaking of which.

Cabal knelt and picked up the unwieldy knife Jones had made to attack him with. The blade was of some form of barely refined metal, certainly not steel.
Iron?
he wondered.
But why?
It wouldn’t hold an edge for long, it would rust easily, and it simply didn’t make much sense for anybody to…

Suddenly reaching a conclusion can bring a bolt of pleasure or a stab of dismay. This was definitely the latter. Cabal reached into his pocket and found the small piece of meteoric iron he kept with him and held it alongside the blade. While not the most thorough of metallurgical tests, there was still an undeniable similarity.

With a sinking heart, Cabal looked at his right palm. There was his life line, just as it had always been there. Of course it was.

Cabal stood, placed the metal in his pocket, put the knife into his bag to lie alongside his revolver, and left Jones’s hat shop for the last time. He had killed once today in self-defence. He strongly suspected that he would kill again before the day was out, but this time it would be in revenge.

*   *   *

As anticipated, the train trip passed without incident. Also as anticipated, the walk home didn’t. As he walked past a small hillock topped by an old elm, he suddenly found himself in shadow. He turned expecting to find the black landau, the black horses, the black-clad coachman sitting and waiting. Thus, Cabal was not disappointed in most of his expectations. The coachman, however, was far more proactive than at their last meeting. As Cabal turned, the coachman grabbed his wrist, tore his Gladstone bag from his hand, and tossed it to the verge of the road as if it were dripping pus. Before Cabal could protest, the coachman had opened the landau’s door, picked Cabal up by the scruff of his jacket, and thrown him in. The adjective
unceremonious
occurred to him as he landed face-first on the carriage’s floor. Disconcerting as his first entrance to the carriage had been, it seemed greatly preferable to the second. He heard the door slam shut.

“Are you all right down there?” she asked.

“Oh, good,” he replied as he climbed into the seat facing her. “Insult to injury. Why no legerdemain this time? Run out of pixie dust or just couldn’t be bothered? After all, you’ve won your little game, haven’t you?”

She looked at him, silent and serious, for several seconds. “Not a game, Mr Cabal. No game at all.”

“No game,” said Cabal in a low, dangerous voice. “No game? You have … manipulated me right from the moment I first saw you. Induced me to draw false inferences. I should have thought something was wrong. The black landau, the black horses, the silent coachman, the widow’s weeds—it was all so much more … banal than I would have expected.”

“Then why did you believe?”

“Because … because supernatural entities insist on melodrama. I’ve met Satan. Did you know that? He is such a drama … What is the phrase?”

“Queen?” She seemed amused.

“Yes, just so. Brimstone, devils, fiery depths, cribbage. It is all so theatrical.” He considered. “Well, perhaps not the cribbage. I think that’s more of a hobby. But the point is that when a mysterious funereal black carriage materialises out of thin air, abducts me, alters the passage of time, and its occupant lectures me on fate and life expectations, I apply Occam’s Razor and arrive at the obvious solution.”

“Which was…?”

“Which was that you are Death.”

“I never said it,” she said, serious again.

“You didn’t. You just implied it with sledgehammer subtlety and I accepted it, based on the evidence. There was only one other alternative, and that I proved was not the case. At least”—he took the piece of cold iron from his pocket and held it up—“I
thought
I’d proved it.” He watched her. She seemed calm, but her eyes never wavered from the small bit of metal. “You
are
of the Fay, aren’t you? I admit, you still have me at a loss to explain the lack of reaction. The metal should have burned you.”

“You have a reputation for great deductive powers, Mr Cabal. I shan’t insult you by offering a solution.”

He hardly heard her. The threads were finally coming together. “Unless, of course, you are not of pure blood. Your mortal heritage would prevent the worst physical effects.”

She nodded. “Your reputation is well-earned.”

“I would thank you not to patronise me, fräulein. I have killed on your behalf. I am not happy about it.”

“Jones was a murderer, and you were his employer, Cabal. You should be thankful that you are not sharing his fate.”

“I should kill you.”

“You should not. You would surely die in the attempt, especially without Jones’s filthy knife.” She saw Cabal’s expression. “Oh, with Jones dead, the defences he’d placed upon his shop collapsed. It was searched as soon as you had skulked out of the door.” Cabal began to protest that he did
not
skulk, but she talked over him. “I would have been far more surprised if you had not taken the knife with you.”

Cabal weighed the piece of metal in his hand. It seemed altogether too feeble an ace to do him any good at this juncture. He slid it back into his pocket. “This all seems very calculated.”

“It has been planned for a long time. You should be flattered, Cabal. Both the Seelie and the Unseelie Courts cooperated in this. It takes a great deal to make them sit down together.”

“But you … you planned this for them. I have had dealings with the Fay before. They lack the detachment shown here. It would have all been hellhounds and ogres if left to them. The piece of theatre with the life line”—he paused to look at his palm— “very cunning. You made me aware of my own mortality and the mechanism to make me fear for it all at the same time. How did you prime Jones? His paranoia was quite evident. What did you use? A few anonymous letters? Some carefully ambiguous evidence that I was planning to betray him to the Fay? No wonder he was so fascinated about what comes after life. No wonder he startled so violently when I mentioned that, once, I had no soul. Proof positive to his terrified little mind that I am as you. I might have been able to calm him except, thanks to this
verdammten
line you placed on my palm starting to disappear, I was convinced that I was going to die within seconds, apparently at Jones’s hand. And while we were both…”

“Panicking?”

“Distracted from rational thought, we attacked each other. How could you be sure Jones would be dead at the end of it all, though.”

“You had a gun, he had a knife. It was the probability.”

“But, if I’d not been able to reach my gun in time…?”

“He would have killed his only client. He would have had no reason to carry on harvesting us. Either way, we win. There were plenty who hoped that you would kill each other.”