Richard Kadrey - Dead Set

Zoe gently put a hand on Mr. Prosper’s leg, and that seemed to get his attention. He jerked away from her, his eyes wild with fear. “You!” he said in wonder.

“Me,” said Zoe. She glanced up at Valentine. “I told my brother how you kidnapped me and how you said you were going to slit my throat. Know what he wants to do to you?” She leaned in closer and spoke in hushed tones. “With that bad leg of yours, he wants to drag you down to one of those dark streets and leave you for the dying dead. How does that sound?”

Mr. Prosper put his hands over his face. For a second she felt bad for the man, blubbering and terrified, stripped of his dignity and everything he valued by Hecate and now by her. But he did threaten to kill me and steal my body and we really won’t give him to the dying. Maybe scaring him a little is payback .

“No! Go away, please! I’m sorry,” Mr. Prosper said.

“If you’re really sorry, tell me how Emmett gets back to the world. What’s the way out for someone who’s alive?”

He looked at her in horror. “No. I can’t.”

“Tell me how to get out of Iphigene,” Zoe insisted.

“She’ll know it was me. She’ll feed me to her dogs.”

“She will if I go and tell her what you did.”

“What?”

As Zoe and Mr. Prosper talked, Valentine went around the man’s room taking small things and stuffing them in his pockets. He slipped the empty flask off the bed, took a silver bottle opener off a table and a faceted glass paperweight off the top of Mr. Prosper’s dresser.

“I’ve been thinking about it,” Zoe said to Mr. Prosper. “I bet I can make a deal with Queen Hecate. My brother and father would like living in this building. Would you like this room, Valentine?”

Valentine looked over at her and Mr. Prosper as he was slipping a cigarette lighter into his pocket. “Very much.”

“I can do more,” said Zoe to Mr. Prosper. “If you worked for Hecate, I bet Emmett has one of those records with your soul on it. I’ll get her to tell Emmett to break it. What will happen to you if your record breaks?”

The man’s wide, wet eyes swiveled in their sockets, looking first at Valentine and then at Zoe. “Please. You can’t.”

“What will happen to you?”

“I’ll fall apart,” he said in a tone that was more of a plea than a statement. “It’s horrible. I’ll burn up from the inside out and disappear. Forever.”

“It doesn’t have to happen. Just tell me how to go home. But first tell me this. If Emmett can get to the real world, why doesn’t Hecate take his body?”

Mr. Prosper seemed horrified by the question. “He’s her child. She’d never hurt him.”

“Why can he go back and forth to the real world when no one else can?”

“For the same reason that he holds the records. He’s Ammut, the eater of the dead. The keeper and destroyer of lost souls. Some spirits are ushered into this world and others-”

Zoe nodded. She didn’t want to hear the rest of the sentence.

“I understand. Now, how do I get out?”

Mr. Prosper held up a hand in Valentine’s direction, palm out, defensively.

“I’ll tell you what I know,” he said miserably. He pulled one of the pillows from the bed and clutched it to his chest. His face contorted. “Please, my leg,” he whispered.

Zoe took one of the laudanum bottles from his bedside table and handed it to him. Mr. Prosper tore out the cork with trembling hands and downed half the bottle before coming up for air. “Thank you,” he said, gasping. He pointed out the window. “On the beach, near the far end of the boardwalk, is a rocky outcropping. At low tide there’s a drainage pipe. You can’t miss it. It’s big enough for a man to stand up in. Follow the pipe for perhaps a quarter of a mile and take the left fork.” He took another drink from the bottle. A smaller one this time. “Soon you’ll come to an underground entrance to the palace. Only Emmett ever uses it, so no one will bother you. When you see the door, you’ll know you’re on the right path. Keep going until you see light. When you reach the end, you’ll be back in the world of the living.”

Valentine came over and leaned on the wall at the top of the bed. “Are there any tricks or traps along the way?” He weighed Mr. Prosper’s knife in his hand.

“Why would there be?” Mr. Prosper clutched the pillow tighter as Valentine loomed over him. “No one knows about the tunnel but Hecate’s most trusted advisers.”

“I hope you’re not lying,” Valentine said. “If anything happens to my sister. . well, those unlit streets are already calling your name.”

“Thank you, Mr. Prosper,” said Zoe. She started to turn away, but stopped. “I’m sorry about what Hecate did to you.”

“Go away now, please,” Mr. Prosper said. He lay down and curled up on the bed, clutching his bottle and pillow.

Outside, it was starting to rain again. Clouds of silver and midnight blue roiled over the rooftops as a few fat raindrops fell onto their faces. It’s going to be a downpour, Zoe thought. She was struck again by how beautiful Iphigene could be in the right light. There was something wrong with that. It didn’t seem fair for there to be any beauty in a place like this. She was about to say something to Valentine when he shoved her back against the building. She tried to move, but his hand swept back and held her in place. She was getting annoyed when she saw something across the street coming toward them.

She could make out three of Hecate’s wolf men in the rain, which was coming down hard and steady. As the wolf men advanced, Valentine shifted, keeping Zoe behind him. He reached under his coat and pulled out Mr. Prosper’s knife. The wolf men hesitated. Moving away from the apartment building, Valentine pulled her along, shifting his stance with each step, keeping himself between Zoe and the wolves. She looked around for a way out, a place to run. She couldn’t see anything. This wasn’t fair, not after they’d learned how she could get home. She held on to Valentine’s coat sleeves.

“Zoe?” whispered Valentine.

“Yeah.”

“When I tell you, I want you to run. Find Father. He’ll take care of you.”

Zoe held on to him harder. “What are you going to do?” She felt his body tense.

“Now!” he said, pushing her away and leaping at the wolf men, slashing the closest one. The knife flashing streaks of silver streetlight as the air filled with Valentine’s shouts, the wolf men’s howls, and the hissing of the rain.

As the wolves closed on Valentine, Zoe looked around for something to hit them with. A branch or pipe, anything.

“Go!” yelled Valentine.

Still, her mind screamed for her to stay, to help him, but she knew what this was. It was Valentine’s sacrifice for her. To stay now when she couldn’t help and would only get in the way would turn him from a hero into a fool. So she turned away from the fight and ran as hard as she could. The pain in her ankle grew steadily worse, but this time she was grateful. It was something to focus on, something to enable her to shut out the voices telling her to turn around and go back. In her mind, she drew a circle, then she eased the white-hot pain in her leg into its center, letting the hurt propel her through the storm all the way to the sea.

She walked out onto the beach and her feet sank into the wet sand. Each step hurt her ankle and the usefulness of pain had passed a couple of blocks back. Now pain was just pain and each time she had to drag her injured leg out of the heavy sand, the pain made her breath catch in her throat. But she didn’t stop walking until she made it to the abandoned carousel.

She stepped up to the crooked platform and dropped immediately to the floor, breathing hard. Rain seeped through the cracks in the carousel’s wooden roof, dripping onto the faces of some of the nearby animals. The horses looked like they were crying. Zoe lay down and pressed her ear flat to the floor. Overhead, the rain was a high-pitched patter, while the sound coming into her ear on the floor was deep bass mixed with the pounding of the waves. There were no monsters here. No mad queen. Just the rushing of the water. There was no reason for her to ever get up, she thought. I might stay just like this forever.