I never sleep well in strange places, and that's all I've had these past few nights. At least the hotel is better than a highway underpass or a stormwater drain. My sleep is light and dream-fractured. There's a lot of running. I keep seeing the faces of my family and they're yelling at me, but I can't hear what they're saying. All I get is the urgency. And then there are a couple of nightmares on high rotation. I'm dreaming of:
Bicycles. They're tumbling from the sky.
Wheels spinning, gears shifting, and when they strike the ground they make skullish craters, the orbits of which cage vivid green eyes. Every death's head skull stares at me with Lissa's eyes.
It's not that far away, a voice whispers.
A bicycle strikes me hard. Gears grind down my arm. I drop to a crouch, cover my head with my hands. Warm blood trails from my wrist.
Duck and cover doesn't work anymore. It never really did.
I recognize the voice, it's-
I remember the first time I saw Mr. D. I was about ten and Dad had taken me to work. Even then I had a clear idea of what my parents did. Death was never such a big deal in my family. Cruelty, unfairness, rugby league-these were often spoken of-but not death, other than in the same way one spoke about the weather.
So I guess I was in something of a privileged position. Most kids my age were just starting to realize that such a thing as their own demise was possible, where I already considered it a natural part of existence.
Dad had told me it was time, but I hadn't really understood until he took me into Number Four. There was Morrigan, who scruffed up my hair. Number Four tingled around me with all the odd pressures of multiple worlds pulling and pushing at my skin like ghostly fingers. It was a peculiar sensation, and unsettling.
Then I saw Mr. D and he terrified me.
"Is this your boy, Michael?"
Dad nodded. "This is Steven."
"My, he's grown."
I realized that he must have seen me before. Well, I knew that I hadn't seen him-how could I forget? His face, it shifted, a hundred different expressions in a second, and yet it was the same face. He crouched down to my height, and smiled warmly.
"You were just a baby when I saw you last. Have you had a good life so far? Do you want to be a Pomp like your father?"
I nodded my head, confused. "Yes, sir," I said.
"Oh, none of that. Mr. D will do fine. The age of formalities is deader than I am." He looked up at Dad. "He's certainly your boy," he said. "Very brave."
I didn't feel brave at all.
He looked back at me, and I saw something in his eyes, and it horrified me. There, reflected back at me, was a man on his haunches, face covered in blood, howling. And a knife: a stone knife.
I let out a gasp.
Death held my hand, his fingers as cold and hard as porcelain in the middle of winter, and he squeezed. "What's wrong?"
"N-nothing."
"Not yet, anyway," Mr. D said, and he smiled such a dreadful and terrible smile that I have never forgotten it.
And I dream of it still, even when I don't realize that's what I'm dreaming of. Shit, that grin creeps up on me when I'm least expecting it. There was a bit of the madness of Brueghel's "Triumph of Death" in it, though I didn't know that at the time, and something else. Something cruel and mocking and unlike anything I'd ever seen.
I have spoken to Mr. D since, and nothing like that has happened again. Of course, it doesn't matter anymore, but it did then, and it haunted me for over a decade. It's true, isn't it? You drag your childhood with you wherever you go. You drag it, and it sometimes chases you.
I wake, and then realize that I'm not awake. The sheets cover me, and then they don't. I'm naked, standing in the doorway, and they're out there, a shuffling presence, a crowd of wrongness rapidly extending through the country.
You need to hurry, Steven. I can feel every single one of them. They shouldn't be here. But of course they are, there's no one to stop them.
You wait out here, and it will be too late.
You have to call me.
I turn to see who is talking, and I know, and am not surprised.
Mr. D is a broken doll on the floor. He's a drip in the ceiling. A patch on the floor. He's smiling.
And then Lissa's there and she's gripping an axe. The smile on her face is no less threatening than Mr. D's, and it's saying the same thing. Death. Death. Death. In one neat movement the axe is swinging toward my head. I hear it crunch into my face and- I wake to dawn, feeling less than rested. My face aches and I know I've come from some place terrible.
"Not a good sleep?" Lissa's looking down at me.
The image of an axe flashes in my mind. It takes a lot not to flinch.
"What do you think?" I rub my eyes and yawn one of those endless yawns that threatens to drag you back into sleep. It's early, no later than 5:30, but I don't want to return to my sleeping. I don't want to slip back into those dreams.
"You talk a lot in your sleep, you know," Lissa says.
"I have a lot on my mind."
"And you drool all over your pillow."
I wave feebly in her direction, then drag myself out of bed and stumble to the bathroom. There's a hell of a lot of blood in there, more blood than any portent has given me before.
I don't know where the blood comes from, even now. I've never found a satisfactory answer, which is fine, when most of the time it's only a splatter here or there. But this bathroom has more in common with an abattoir. I almost throw up.
"Come and have a look at this," I say.
She's by my side in an instant. "Oh, that's not good."
"What the hell is going on?"
"I don't think Morrigan has everything under as much control as he would like."
That's an understatement. I grab the showerhead and start hosing the blood away. I feel like some mafia hitman cleaning up after a brutal kill, only there's no body, thank Christ. It's gone fairly quickly but the stench remains and, with it, the feeling of things coming. A dark wave on the verge of breaking.
I shower, soap myself down, rinse and do it all again. Maybe fleeing the city wasn't such a good idea after all. But if that portent is correct there is a stir happening somewhere near, a big one.
"I have to do something about it," I say.
"He may be able to track you, if you do."
"My job is to facilitate death," my voice sounds high and unfamiliar in my ears, "not to allow murder, and if I don't stop this stir, I'm a party to it."
"How many stirs do you think are happening now, right around the country?"
I glare at her. "I know, but I'm near this one."