Part 52 (1/2)

Actually, yes, she was expecting something like that.

”Why would I want to?” he says. ”I'm not afraid of you, if that's what you're thinking. There's nothing you can do to stop me.”

Mouse isn't so sure about that -- she seems to recall doing a pretty good job of stopping Gideon the last time he was out -- but her look of skepticism gets him laughing again.

”What?” he challenges her. ”What do you think you can do? Report me to the police for stealing Andrew's body? I'd love to see you try to explain that one to Jimmy Cahill. Or Chief Bradley -- try telling him he can't have the cottage after all, because he's dealing with the wrong Andy Gage now. Even if you could get him to believe that, do you think he'd care?”

Mouse closes her hand around the keys. ”You still need a ride to Chief Bradley's house tonight.”

”Not really. I could walk there if I had to -- I used to go for long hikes around here all the time.

But I won't have to walk. You'll take me.”

”No, I won't.”

”I think you will. You don't believe me when I tell you Andrew isn't coming back. You think he is, and until you think otherwise, you're going to want to stay close to me. And that means when it's time to go to Chief Bradley's, you're either going to have to drive me there, or follow me in your car at four miles an hour -- if I'm nice enough to hike along the roadside.” He shrugs. ”I think you'll give me the lift.”

Mouse would like to walk away now, to prove him wrong. Unfortunately he's not wrong.

”Still here?” Gideon says smugly, scanning the ground for another skipping stone.

Mouse decides to change the subject: ”Tell me about Xavier,” she says.

Gideon smiles, like he's been expecting this, too. ”What about him?”

”The first time I asked you about Xavier you said he was a tool. But you never said what for.”

”You want to know if I called him out to kill the stepfather?” He laughs. ” 'Xavier the Exterminator': is that what he seems like to you?”

”No,” says Mouse. ”But he doesn't seem like much of a lawyer, either.”

”He isn't much of one. Real lawyers cost money, and I didn't have any to waste. That was the whole point.”

”You wanted money from the stepfather.”

”I wanted money,” Gideon says. ”The stepfather seemed like an easy person to get it from.”

”So you made a lawyer, to sue him. To blackmail him.”

”Xavier was going to give him a choice. Paying me was one of the choices.”

”Only Xavier came too late. Chief Bradley was already there.”

”That wasn't my fault,” Gideon says, irked. ”If Mr. Useless hadn't gotten lost in the woods, we'd have been there first.”

”So it's true, then. It was that same night. What Xavier said about the blood on the living-room floor -- that was the accident. He saw it.”

”It was the night the stepfather died, yeah. Talk about the world's worst timing. I don't know about any accident, though.”

”What do you mean?”

Gideon plunks another stone in the lake, not even trying to skip it this time. ”You understand,” he says, ”I wasn't exactly there. Xavier's the one who went up to the cottage; I wasn't looking when he looked in the window. But I did overhear some things, before he panicked and ran off. What's the official story? The stepfather tripped over a coffee table?”

”. . . and cut himself.” Mouse blinks. ”That's not what happened?”

”Well I don't know,” says Gideon, enjoying her reaction. ”Could be he was just delirious from all that blood loss. But it seems kind of strange to beg a coffee table for mercy, don't you think?”

I was dead.

That in itself didn't concern me much. I'd never been afraid of death. Of dying, yes; of a painful end, or a premature one -- important things left undone -- definitely. But the thought of actually being dead held no particular terror for me. I remembered the moment of my birth, and having come out of the dark, it seemed only right that I should eventually return there. The scary parts were all in-between.

So being dead didn't bother me. What bothered me was the way it didn't bother me. In the no-place of oblivion, there aren't supposed to be emotions; the time to be comfortable with your death is before it happens, not after. How was it I still had feelings on the subject?

And as long as I was asking questions: how come I could still see? In the dark there is, by definition, nothing to look at. But here -- wherever here was -- there was something: though what the something was, exactly, was hard to say.

A labyrinth, maybe: a symmetrical maze of raised and tightly winding pathways, divided down the middle by an especially deep trench. It was gray, which made me think of Coventry, but the layout seemed far too convoluted, unless Gideon was once again trying to discourage visitors.

I was suspended above it, looking down, unable to move. That last part at least seemed appropriate: when you're dead, you shouldn't be able to move. As for the rest, though. . .

I thought back over my death, trying to work out where and how the process might have gone wrong. Gideon had dropped me into the lake from a great height, and I'd struck the surface with tremendous force -- I could only hope the house hadn't been swept away by the tsunami that surely resulted. The impact alone had nearly killed me; I was already deep underwater by the time I came to my senses, and then there was nothing I could do but drown, my soul twirling like a bent propeller in the cold currents, spiraling downwards.

It wasn't physical, or metaphysical, damage that kept me from saving myself (though I thought I had a good idea now what it would feel like to break my back jumping off a bridge). It was despair: the certain knowledge that I had failed. Not just this latest failure, this sneak attack that I should have seen coming. All my failures: every inadequacy, misstep, and f.u.c.kup of my short life, all concentrated into a single self-revelation, like a weighted chain that bound me. You'll learn, my father was always saying, and I had, one last lesson: I was useless. Useless.

And so I drowned. It was a relief to finally reach the lake bottom, to slide down past the weeds and sink into the muck that is not muck, last light going out as my soul was sucked back into the void to be unmade. All over now, all finished. Nothing left to do but disappear.

Wait. Wait.

Yes, that was it: that was where the death scene had started to unravel: right at the point where I did. For my soul didn't just dissolve uniformly into nothing; it came apart in stages, layers of ident.i.ty peeling away, paring me down towards nonexistence. Only it never got that far, because the part of Andrew that was feeling sorry for himself, that welcomed dissolution, was among the first bits to be discarded. Once that distraction had been sloughed off, the Andrew that remained -- the core Andrew who was thinking these thoughts even now -- was no longer willing to give up so easily. Couldn't give up: because his job wasn't finished yet. That Andrew clung stubbornly to his Purpose, and held what was left of his soul together even as it continued to sink, down into. . .

Oh.

Oh, of course.

The gray labyrinth: I wasn't above it, looking down; I was below it, looking up. It was a geography, the geography, only seen from the other side. I hadn't drowned in the lake bottom; I'd just pa.s.sed through, and come out underneath, in -- ”The antipodes,” a voice said.

Antipodes, right, of course that's what you'd call it; although, like the strata in the Badlands hill faces, I'd never actually seen an antipodes before. Not what I would have expected from the name. I wondered about the plural: what portion of what I was looking at const.i.tuted a single antipode?

”I really shouldn't be wasting time on word games.”

Who was that speaking? I tried to turn towards the voice but still couldn't move, which was frustrating now that I knew I wasn't dead. Thinking that a little more substance might help, I gathered back some of the layers I'd shed on the way down here, and sure enough, as my soul recoalesced, I started to regain my mobility. But then the sense of failure came back too, threatening to paralyze me all over again.

Fortunately, there was a solution for that: I reached up to the geography and smoothed out a rough spot on one of the gray ridges. As though an emotional volume control had been turned way down, the bad feeling diminished to a level where I could handle it.

It was still there, though. I really had made some bad mistakes, and some very bad decisions, and I knew it. It would be a lot nicer not to know it. What if I were to grab hold of that gray ridge and pull it clean off?

”I'd better not,” the voice said. ”That's exactly the sort of thing that got me into this mess in the first place.”

I could turn around now, so I did. But there was n.o.body else there.

Talking to myself. Typical.