Drinking Midnight Wine

  “Keep that psycho away from me!” Toby glared around him, his hands balled into fists. “I am leaving, right now. Just point me down the right tunnel, and I am out of here.”

  “Toby,” said Gayle, and something in her voice chilled him. “Toby, you can’t leave.”

  “Want to bet? Just watch how fast I can move when I’m properly motivated.”

  “I need you to do this for me. For both of us. You said you’d do anything for me.”

  “This isn’t what I had in mind, and you know it! You’re taking advantage of my feelings for you.”

  “You said you’d do anything. You said you’d die for me. I need this, Toby. You’re the one who said he loved me.”

  “I can’t believe you’re asking me to do this,” said Toby. “This is emotional blackmail.”

  “I can’t force you to do anything, Toby. It’s up to you, and how much I mean to you.”

  “Come and see our volunteer,” suggested Jensen. “When you see how easy she is about it, I’m sure you’ll feel a lot better.”

  “Don’t put money on it,” muttered Toby, but he allowed Jensen to lead them all to the back of the great chamber, where a tall, busty young woman was lying on her back on a cot, listlessly smoking a cigarette. She sat up as they approached and smiled sardonically at them. Her skin was so pale it was almost luminous, especially when set against the basic black she was wearing. She also had long black hair and wore heavy black eye make-up. The only touch of colour was in her blue lips. She had a dozen piercings on her face and ears. She was every Goth girl Toby had ever seen, cranked up to the max. She didn’t look healthy. Her bone structure was far too prominent in her face—there were deep hollows under her eyes that the make-up couldn’t conceal, and there was a disturbing languor to her movements. As far as Toby was concerned, she looked half dead already. She offered him a limp, cold hand and he shook it gingerly in case it might come off in his grasp.

  “This is Betty Bones,” said Jensen, smiling approvingly at her. “One of our most enthusiastic death-walkers. She holds the current record for the most deaths and successful returns.”

  “Yeah,” muttered Toby. “She looks it.”

  “Oh, we’re all very proud of dear Betty. Game for anything, aren’t you, dear?”

  “Damn right,” said Betty, in a breathy whisper. “Nothing is too extreme, that’s my motto. I did heroin chic for a while, but this is much sexier. Dying’s better than any orgasm.”

  “Sometimes,” said Trash, to no one in particular, “I think I’m the only normal person down here. Which, given my background, is a truly disturbing thought. Lie down, Betty, and I’ll send you on your way in a minute. If you meet Elvis again, ask him where he’s really buried. Toby, you can have the cot next to hers. One size fits all.”

  Betty lay back on her cot immediately, smiling as though waiting for a lover. Toby sat reluctantly on the empty cot next to hers, and glared at Gayle as she stared impassively down at him.

  “I can’t believe you’re asking me to do this.”

  “You only think you know me, Toby. I’ve done harsher things than this, in my time, when I’ve had to. And this means a lot to me. You will do it for me, won’t you?”

  Toby’s anger ran slowly out of him and was replaced by a tired, bitter acceptance. “Of course I’ll do it. You knew I would before I came here. Women like you have always been able to get what they want from men like me.”

  “You attached yourself to me,” Gayle said steadily. “I told you not to. There are good reasons why mortal must not love immortal. But … I will be here, all the time you’re gone, and I’ll be waiting for you when you come back.”

  “Well, that’s a comfort, I suppose.” Toby took a deep breath, that didn’t calm him nearly as much as he’d hoped it would, and lay back on his cot. The stretched canvas barely gave under his weight and there was no pillow. He was careful not to look at the cot immediately to his left, already occupied by an especially bloody corpse. Toby’s heart was all but leaping out of his chest and despite his hurried breathing, he couldn’t seem to get enough air. He wanted just to get up and run, but he didn’t, couldn’t. Even if Gayle didn’t love him, to be needed was something. She sat on the edge of the cot beside him, and held his right hand in both of hers.

  “I’m scared, Gayle.”

  “Of course you are. I’m here, Toby. I won’t let go. I’d do this myself, if I could … but there are some things even I’m not permitted.”

  “Don’t I get a local anaesthetic?” Toby tried to smile, but his lips were already trembling too much to cooperate. The presence of death was thick in the room, like another person. “Even the dentist will give you a local.”

  “Are you scared of the dentist?”

  “Terrified. What if this goes wrong?”

  “It won’t.”

  “But what if it does?”

  “Then I will kill Jensen and Trash slowly and horribly, and send them after you to explain.”

  “Oh ye of little faith,” said Jensen breezily, as he joined them. “We do this every day and things rarely go wrong any more.” He stood at the base of the cot and smiled cheerfully down at Toby. “So; how do you want it? We usually recommend poison for first-timers, but that can take time, and our Lady here is looking impatient. Or you could cut your wrists; that’s very popular right now among the Goth community.”

  “Razors are cool,” said Betty dreamily from her cot. “You can feel your life just slipping away from you along with the blood.”

  “Sorry,” said Toby. “I’m not the suicidal type.”

  “Fair enough,” said Jensen. “Murder it is.”

  He drew the gun from the shoulder-holster under his lab coat and shot Betty Bones in the chest. The bullet took her right between the breasts and she spasmed on the cot, her legs jerking. Her head lolled to one side and Toby saw the light go out of her staring eyes. He started to say something, but even as he turned back to yell at Jensen, the scientist was already aiming the gun at him. There was a sound louder than thunder, and something punched him hard in the chest. The impact drove him back into the cot, the canvas absorbing the pressure. The bullet knocked the air right out of him and when Toby tried to breathe more in, he couldn’t. There was blood all over his chest, he couldn’t breathe and his head was still full of the sound like thunder.

  But he didn’t die. His body fought stubbornly to cling onto life. His lungs sucked and fluttered in his chest, already filling with blood. He tried to lift his arms and couldn’t. There was no pain yet, only a terrible, terrifying numbness. He tried to scream and blood came up his throat and filled his mouth. He jerked on the cot like a fish caught on a hook, going nowhere. He tried to speak to Gayle and thick blood spilled down his chin. She held his hand in both of hers, pressing so hard her knuckles went white, but he couldn’t feel it. There was only the new, growing pain in his chest, worse than he could ever have anticipated, and the slow awful fragmenting of his thoughts as the thunder filled his head.

  Everything seemed very far away. Darkness was creeping in from all sides. He wanted to tell Gayle he’d changed his mind, that he didn’t want to die, that it had all been a terrible mistake, but there was just the blood bubbling in his mouth and Gayle holding his hand, looking down at him with a calm, horribly implacable face. And that was the last thing he saw as the darkness finally, mercifully, swallowed him up.

  And then he died.

  There was no great tunnel rushing past him. No wondrous light, calling him home. No choir of angels and St Peter at the gate. No downward-bound train to a lake of fire. No old familiar faces to welcome him in; not even his whole life flashing past one last time.

  It was dark and then it was light, and then Toby was sitting in a waiting room so typical it was practically generic. The bare walls were painted in institutional pale green, and there was a vaguely uncomfortable chair and a coffee table almost buried under old issues of the kind of magazines no one really reads anyway. At least there wasn’t a
ny muzak. Toby looked slowly, unhurriedly about him. There was no one else waiting with him. The room felt calm and very peaceful and it seemed to Toby that he knew this place, that he’d been here before.

  Perhaps while he was waiting to be born.

  A door opened on the opposite side of the room and a young woman in a stylised nurse’s outfit entered and smiled prettily at him.

  “Mister Toby Dexter? Death will see you now.”

  Toby nodded to her, rose to his feet and walked over to the door she was holding open for him. It never occurred to him not to. The door closed behind him with a solid-sounding thud and he found himself in a bare white room, just big enough to hold a standard office desk with a chair on both sides. Sitting behind the desk, which held two wire trays overflowing with official-looking papers, was a beautiful woman. Her smile was warm and welcoming. Toby trusted her immediately. He knew he’d never seen her before, but her face was immediately familiar, as though he’d always known her. He sat down in the empty chair, while Death studied the thick file in her hands.

  “Toby Dexter. You really shouldn’t be here, you know. It isn’t your time yet.”

  “I couldn’t agree more,” said Toby. “I’m supposed to be piggybacking one of the death-walkers.”

  “Oh them,” said Death, pulling a face. “Bloody nuisances. They’ve been shooting back and forth so often just lately I’ve been seriously considering installing a revolving door. It won’t do them any good. Their spirits can’t travel far enough to learn anything really interesting without leaving their bodies permanently behind. You’d have thought they’d have figured that out after all these years. Still, hope springs eternal in the minds of the seriously deluded.”

  “You don’t mind?” said Toby dubiously.

  Death shrugged easily. “Let them play. Everyone has to come to terms with dying, and this is their way.”

  “Do they all get to meet you?”

  “No. They’ve never seen me. You only got this short interview because you’re special.”

  Toby groaned loudly. “You have no idea how tired I’m getting of hearing that. All right, I’m a focal point. But can you at least tell me why?”

  Death smiled. “It was decided where all the things that matter are decided. You have been given the power to decide the fates of peoples and of worlds.”

  “But I don’t want that kind of responsibility!”

  “Then you’re the very best kind to have it.”

  “Why me?” said Toby, almost plaintively.

  “Don’t ask me. I don’t move in those kinds of circles. For what it’s worth, I think the Creator occasionally likes to test his creations, to see what they’ll do. To see how far they’ve come.”

  “But … what am I supposed to do? No one will tell me!”

  “You’ll know, when the time comes. Every martyr has to choose their own cross. Be strong, be brave … and be yourself. Follow your heart, Toby. And if it does all go wrong, I promise I’ll be here, waiting for you.”

  “Where is this place?” said Toby.

  “Don’t ask me. It’s your mind we’re talking in. See you again, Toby. See you again.”

  Toby sat up suddenly on his cot, his lungs sucking in air. There was blood in his mouth and he spat it out, but there wasn’t much. He clutched at his chest, but the wound was already healed. Gayle was still holding his hand in both of hers. Toby looked wildly about him. Everything looked very sharp, very bright. At the next cot, the necromancer Trash was leaning over Betty Bones, who was lying very still. Toby breathed harshly; his body felt like a small and fragile thing, and very precious. He also felt cold, terribly cold. He was shuddering violently now, full of the chill of death. He started to cry, and Gayle took him in her arms, holding him close, warming his body with the heat of her own. Toby would have liked to push her away, but he didn’t have the strength. And besides, right then he needed to be held. Gayle rocked him slowly back and forth, containing his shivers in the resilience of her own body, until gradually they died away.

  “Hush,” she said. “Hush, hush, it’s all right now. It’s all over.”

  “You don’t know what you did to me,” said Toby, forcing the words past his tears. “You don’t know what you made me do.”

  “I’m sorry I hurt you, Toby. I always hurt the ones who get closest to me. I’m not allowed to have favourites. Goes with the job.”

  After a while he stopped crying and stopped shaking, but Gayle still held him, and Toby let her hold him. He needed to believe, if only for a while, that she cared for him on some level. But eventually pride made him push her away, and she let go of him immediately. They sat there on the cot for a long moment, just looking into each other’s faces.

  “I’m back,” Toby said finally. “Surprised?”

  “Not at all,” said Gayle. “I always knew you were too stubborn to be beaten this easily. I never doubted your strength of will to return for a moment. Welcome back, my hero.”

  “More like your fool,” said Toby.

  “Where did you go?” said Gayle. “What did you see?”

  Toby frowned. “It’s like a dream, the details already fading. But … I wasn’t with Betty. Where …?”

  He looked past Gayle to see Trash working fiercely on Betty’s unresponsive form. He leaned over to breathe air into her slack mouth, and then hit her hard on the chest, again and again, all the time chanting angrily in a language Toby didn’t recognise. Jensen hovered nearby, capturing it all on video. And then, finally, Betty Bones convulsed on her cot and sat bolt upright, almost hitting Trash in the face. She made a sound like being born, opened her eyes, snatched his cigar from his mouth and stuck it in hers. Trash stopped chanting, patted her fondly on the head and took a long drink from his bottle. Betty ran her hand slowly through her hair and blinked a few times.

  “That was intense,” she said dreamily. “I went a lot further than I’ve ever been before. But I lost the new guy. Something just … ripped him away from me.”

  Jensen quickly turned his camera on Toby. “So where did you go, Toby Dexter? What did you see?”

  “She was very beautiful,” Toby said slowly. “But I can’t remember … what she said. ”

  Jensen lowered his camera, looking disappointed but not surprised. “Don’t worry, Toby. Few people bring back much from their first trip.”

  “So it was all for nothing,” said Toby, looking at Gayle. “Everything you put me through; everything I did for you. All for nothing.”

  “I learned something,” said Gayle. “I learned what you’re made of, Toby. And how much you love me.”

  She reached out to touch his face and he flinched back. Gayle looked at him sadly. Jensen coughed politely.

  “Yes, well; let’s see how our little Betty did. She’s a much more experienced traveller.”

  He turned the camcorder on Betty, who smiled into the lens with practised ease. “I found Hob’s victims, or some of them, anyway. They never knew what Hob was really up to; only that his plans, or rather his father’s plans, were a threat to the whole of Mysterie—a threat to its very nature. That’s why they thought they’d be safer in Veritie.”

  “But the nature of Mysterie never changes,” said Gayle, frowning. “That’s the point. What could the Serpent possibly be planning that could threaten the very essence of Mysterie?”

  And that was when all the dead people on the cots came back to life simultaneously. One moment they were just so many bloodied corpses, and the next they were all sitting up at once, thrust back into life. A lot of them were screaming. Trash and Jensen and even Betty Bones ran back and froth, holding and comforting the returnees and asking what had happened. It quickly emerged that the death-walkers had been thrown out of the afterworlds, though they couldn’t or wouldn’t say by what or by whom. All they knew for sure was that Something Bad was coming, heading right for Mysterie and Veritie, and that they were banned from the realms beyond life until it was all over, one way or another. A lot of them mentioned Toby
Dexter’s name. And on learning that he was right there with them, these men and women who were so unafraid of death that they did it every day, just for kicks, looked at him with spooked and wondering eyes.

  “I think it’s time we were leaving,” said Gayle.

  “You took the words right out of my mouth,” said Toby.

  They waited till they were well out of the death-walkers’ lair, and were walking back through the Sacred Heart cemetery, before they had their row. Toby’s anger had plenty of time to build, and by the time he finally spoke to Gayle, who seemed as cool and calm as ever, it was all he could do to keep from shouting at her.

  “You used me.”

  “Yes. We didn’t get nearly as much out of it as I’d hoped, but then, I always knew it was a long shot.”

  “You used me! You knew I couldn’t say no to you. And all for what? What do we have now, that was worth what I went through?”

  “I did what I had to,” said Gayle. “You don’t know what it cost me, to ask favours from them.”

  “Since it didn’t involve getting shot through the chest, I don’t think I care! So what if it hurt your pride? I can still taste blood in my mouth!”

  “Keep your voice down,” said Gayle. “You never know who might be listening. Especially here.”

  “I thought you knew what you were doing. But you’re just as lost and confused as the rest of us, only you won’t admit it. I don’t know who or what you really are, or used to be, but it’s clear you’ve been human too long. You’re out of touch. I don’t know why I’ve followed you this far.”

  “Because you love me.”

  “Do I? Do you care for me at all, Gayle? Does my pain mean anything to you?”

  “I care about it. But I can’t let it matter to me. I have to see the bigger picture.”

  “You can’t see anything any more! You’re as divorced from what’s really going on as your crazy sister. She said I ought to ask Jimmy Thunder for help, and I’m beginning to think she might be right. He has good contacts, in Veritie and in Mysterie, and I don’t think he’d lower himself to betray me the way you did.”