Stephen Leather - Nightfall

‘Which is pretty depressing.’

‘You think hell is a better alternative?’

‘Oh, Jenny, I don’t know. I don’t know what to think any more.’

‘You think it might be true? You’re starting to believe that Ainsley Gosling sold your soul to the devil.’

‘To a devil. Proserpine. I’m sure he did, yes. Or, at least, I’m sure he believed he did. The big question is, do I have a soul to sell? Is the soul something tangible that can be traded? It’s nonsense, right? There’s no such thing as a soul.’

‘Are you asking me or telling me, Jack?’

‘That’s the thing, isn’t it? We can talk about it until the cows come home but we’ll never know for sure.’

‘That’s what makes us human,’ said Jenny. ‘We’re the only animal that knows it will die one day. No other creature thinks about death.’

‘But most of us do everything we can not to think about it,’ said Nightingale, ‘because it’s the scariest thing imaginable.’

‘Life is what you should be thinking about,’ said Jenny. ‘Enjoy it while you have it. Relish every moment. Every second.’

‘But one day it’ll be over.’

‘Maybe.’

‘Maybe?’ echoed Nightingale.

Jenny shrugged. ‘I don’t know, Jack – I don’t know any better than you. But I have a gut feeling there’s more. That’s all it is, a gut feeling. Jack, what’s brought this on? Has something happened?’

‘You’re not religious, are you?’

Jenny smiled. ‘No, but religion has nothing to do with life after death, has it? You can believe in that without believing in God. Maybe we just move on to something else.’

‘Like what?’

Jenny sighed. ‘I have no idea, Jack. Nobody does.’

‘That’s the point, though, isn’t it? If there was something else, wouldn’t those who have passed on come back and tell us what lies ahead? Why didn’t my mum and dad? The last time I saw them they were on the doorstep, waving me off to university. Then, bang, they’re killed in a car crash. If there was life after death, wouldn’t they have come back to say goodbye? Just to let me know that everything was okay?’

‘Sometimes people do get messages from beyond, don’t they? And lots of people say they’ve seen ghosts.’

‘Have you?’

‘No,’ admitted Jenny.

‘And neither have I. And my parents died suddenly and violently, and so did my aunt and uncle, and if you believe what you read, those are the most likely circumstances to produce a ghost. I got nothing from them, Jenny. Not from my mother and father and not from my aunt and uncle. They died and that was the end of it.’ He sighed. ‘You know, when I buried my mum and dad, I expected to feel their presence at the funeral but there was nothing. Just the coffins.’ He reached for the whisky but didn’t make it.

‘Maybe they couldn’t come back. Maybe that’s not how it works,’ said Jenny, picking up the bottle. ‘I’ll make you a coffee.’

‘And what about my so-called genetic father? He died violently but I haven’t seen him floating around. He left me a DVD apologising for what he’d done, and you’d think he might have come back and apologised in person. Or in spirit. And if there is life after death, don’t you think he’d get in contact and tell me what to do? And what about Robbie? Remember the message he left on my phone? He had something to tell me, something important.’

Maybe it’s a one-way journey with no coming back. Like caterpillars.’

‘Caterpillars?’

‘Caterpillars spend their lives crawling over leaves until one day they turn into a chrysalis and then the chrysalis bursts open and there’s a butterfly. Now, does the caterpillar know that one day it’ll be a butterfly? I doubt it. So far as the caterpillar is concerned, the chrysalis is death. The end of the caterpillar. And does the butterfly remember being a caterpillar?’

‘Who knows?’ said Nightingale.

‘Exactly,’ said Jenny. ‘Who knows. But do you ever see butterflies hanging out with caterpillars? No, you don’t. They’ve nothing in common. Maybe that’s what happens when we die. Part of us moves on and there’s no looking back.’

‘Our spirit, is that what you mean?’

‘They say that when you die, you lose twenty-one grams. It just goes. You weigh a person before they die and you weigh them afterwards and twenty-one grams have disappeared.’

‘Says who?’ asked Nightingale.

‘I did a philosophy course in my final year,’ said Jenny. ‘It was an American doctor who did the experiment, back in the nineteen hundreds. Duncan MacDougall, his name was. He designed a special bed that was built on a set of scales and he had six dying patients who agreed to help him. By weighing the entire bed he was able to take into account sweat and urine loss, everything physical. With all six patients there was an immediate weight loss of twenty-one grams at the moment of death.’

Nightingale narrowed his eyes. ‘And that’s the weight of a human soul, is it? Twenty-one grams?’

‘The weight of a humming-bird, give or take,’ said Jenny. ‘That was MacDougall’s theory. He repeated the experiment with fifteen dogs. Tied them to the bed and put them to sleep. With the dogs, there was no change in weight as they died. His theory was that people had souls and dogs didn’t.’

‘And why has no one done the experiment since?’

‘Weigh dying people? I’m not sure you’d get away with it these days.’ Jenny put a hand on his shoulder and squeezed. ‘What’s wrong, Jack? What’s brought all this on?’

‘Give me the whisky and I’ll tell you.’

‘Jack…’

Nightingale held out his hand. Jenny gave him the bottle.

‘You know there’s supposed to be a pentagram mark?’

‘If your soul is sold to the devil, yes. But you haven’t got a mark, remember?’

‘There was an optician next to the bank in Brighton. I went there to deposit the money and the optician was offering free eye tests.’

‘You don’t need glasses,’ she said. ‘Eyes like a hawk’s.’

‘I went to get my retinas scanned,’ he said quietly. ‘I figured it was one of the parts of the body you never get to see.’

‘And?’

Nightingale slid a manila envelope across the desk. She opened it with trembling hands and slid out the photograph inside. There were two images on it, retinal scans of his right and left eyes. On the left eye, down at the four o’clock position, there was a small black pentagram.

‘That’s impossible,’ said Jenny, staring at the scan in horror.

‘Yeah, that’s what the optician said.’

‘It’s a pentagram.’

‘Isn’t it just.’

‘On the back of your eye?’

‘Apparently. He did the scans twice, thought there might be a problem with the machine.’

‘Jack…’

‘I know.’

‘Oh, my God.’

‘My thoughts exactly.’ He raised the bottle in salute. ‘Now you understand why I’m drinking. It’s Wednesday morning. Tomorrow night at midnight… blah, blah, blah.’

‘That’s your plan?’ said Jenny in disgust. ‘You’re going to drink yourself to death?’

‘My plan is to talk to Proserpine. I just can’t work out how to do it. I’ve been trawling the Internet but there isn’t much about her.’

‘Please tell me you’re joking,’ said Jenny. ‘I’m making you a coffee whether you want it or not.’ She went over to the machine. ‘Is that what you’re doing, looking for an email address for Proserpine?’ She forced a smile. ‘Hotmail, probably.’

‘Ha ha,’ said Nightingale. ‘The guy I saw at the airport yesterday said it’s all true, that you can sell souls and there are devils out there who’ll buy them.’