Chapter Three
The good went to Heaven, the wicked to Hell, and the unquiet dead lingered in Purgatory.
That was the Church’s party line. They mostly avoided dealing with Purgatory, though, except in the vaguest of terms. Even in the rabbit holes that Hill had gone down over the last year, there hadn’t been a lot of detail to find.
Still, he’d formed a vague concept of what it was like.
Empty. Uneasy. Somewhere there was no rest. Misty and soft-edged.
Maybe he should have realized that the dead took up more space than the living.
The…Beyond, Davy had called it…was a slightly undersaturated magic-eye version of the Dudley that Hill knew.
The familiar streets and most of the buildings were there, but just with more folded into the geography to make them fit.
An alley would open up like origami to reveal trees long since uprooted and streets that had been renamed or buried years ago.
Every building extended beyond what he remembered, stacked up toward the sky with layers of mismatched architecture and clumsily proportioned windows.
It made his head hurt if he looked too hard at it, so he tried not to. The closer he stuck to Davy, the more “real” the living world seemed.
A tentacle wrapped around his waist, casually intimate in the way it hooked into the pocket of his jeans, and nudged him away from a pothole in the road he’d not noticed.
Hill touched it absently in thanks and then shook his head.
“Real” obviously needed a bit of a mental update, he supposed.
The tentacle uncurled from his waist and reached up to push a long hanging branch out of Davy’s way. Davy didn’t seem to notice, and Hill wondered idly if the tentacles were somehow sentient or just autonomous in the same way that blinking and breathing were.
He’d fallen a few steps behind Davy as he thought about that and almost missed it as a cafe door swung open. A lifetime of not paying enough attention to his surroundings made him hop back in time to avoid crashing into the man coming out.
Mostly avoid it.
His foot caught around the man’s ankle and made him stagger; hot coffee sloshed over gray slacks and very expensive shoes.
“Sorry, I didn’t…” Hill got that much out on autopilot, before his tongue caught up with his eyes and went numb and stupid.
The man made an annoyed noise as he brushed the liquid off his legs and shook it off the newspaper he had in one hand.
Gray speckled feathers bristled over human eyes and the start of a human nose—enough to support a pair of reading glasses—before it melted into a pointed yellow beak the length of a forearm.
“Watch where you’re going,” the man snapped, a blunt black tongue wriggling around the words. Then he shook his head and tossed his coffee-stained paper down in disgust. “If you weren’t still wet, I fucking swear.”
He stalked away.
Hill stared after him and then shook himself quickly. He started to jog after Davy, then stopped to grab the paper. The coffee—and how, the thought briefly distracted Hill, had the man planned to drink it?—stained the front page and smudged the ink. Hill could still make out a few words.
The masthead read The Dudley Pomp, and the date was today. Apparently the big news of the day was something to do with a road. The picture of a multi-level interchange took up most of the space above the fold, with a stern DISRUPTION just visible above the headline.
A tentacle snaked back and latched around Hill’s wrist. He didn’t resist as he hurried past the other…dead? ghosts?…on the sidewalk until he caught up with Davy. A few gave him a look on the way by, somewhere between pity and hunger.
“What did that mean?” Hill asked.
“Huh?”
“That guy had…” Hill trailed off and sketched the outline of a beak in front of his face with one hand.
Then he nodded over the street where the bird-faced man had stopped to look in a window.
Davy looked that way and then made an annoyed face at himself.
Hill ignored it as he pushed on. “Why? Is it like your…”
He trailed off again and wriggled his fingers in the air. The tentacles pounced on the movement and wove through his knuckles like they were playing.
Davy whapped at them, his fingers passing through them like they were smoke. They still retracted, pulled in close to his body and curled gently.
“No,” he said flatly. “That’s…look, you’re not actually dead. Does it matter?”
“I will be,” Hill said. “One day.”
“Yeah, well, do good deeds. Hope for the best.”
“I prefer to plan for the worst,” Hill said.
The words were out before he remembered why the answer came to mind so easily. It was what Fraser always said. From Davy’s sidelong look, he’d heard it a few times himself…back when he’d been alive, presumably.
“Muzzles are a sign of office,” Davy said after a brief pause. He kept walking as he talked. “Birds, dogs, maggots, hares. Anything to do with the dead. It confers status and conveys position. The tentacles are….”
He stopped on the curb to wait for a truck to pass, and then glanced back at the obedient cloud of tentacles.
“Well,” Davy said. “Think of them as like…more like a rap sheet.”
He stepped into the road. A passing silver Bentley clipped him as it growled by, hip and knee getting the brunt. It made Hill flinch in an immediate atavistic response to the thought of how much that would hurt.
Davy didn’t even notice. The car exploded around him, streamers of dust and smoke unspooled in the air, and he just kept walking. As the car passed him, it knit itself back together. There didn’t seem to be a driver that Hill could see.
He tried to blow out a relieved breath and realized he hadn’t anything in his lungs. It felt a bit stupid to breathe in just to sigh, but he did it anyhow. It made him feel better.
“Did you—” he started to ask. Except he knew Davy hadn’t.
OK. Hill wiped his hands on his jeans, the ones that his body wasn’t wearing any longer, and stretched his legs to fall back in next to Davy again.
He gave one of the tentacles a leery look as it draped casually over his shoulder, the weight of it a surprise. “What does that mean, a rap sheet?”
Davy made an exasperated sound and pulled his hand down over his jaw.
“It’s…when you die, your sins come with you,” he said. “What they look like when they get here depends on…fuck knows, to be honest. Some people get chains, some get a rache-a hound or cat or beast- that sticks to their heels, some get—”
“Tentacles?” Hill said dubiously.
Davy shrugged and idly reached up to poke his ear, as if he had an earpiece in. Of course, Hill realized uneasily, even this early there would be people on the streets. Living people. It was just that Hill couldn’t see them.
That gave him a strange, “turning up naked to English class,” dream feeling.
“You know my mom didn’t name me Davy Jones, right?” Davy said.
Hill had…not. The only information he’d had about the dead man had been that name and his dad’s guilt. Even the address had been something he’d had to dig through shell companies and bank transfers and old calendar entries to narrow down. So that explained that, he supposed.
“Why—”
“I made problems go away,” Davy said. “They never came back, just like they’d been sent to Davy Jones’s locker. Since I was already called ‘Jones,’ it stuck, and then I died and my sins…I guess they thought it fit too.”
“What was your real name?” Hill asked.
Davy glanced at him. He quirked the corner of his mouth in a smirk. The lazy confidence of the expression made Hill struggle to find the lines of his own face under the handsome blond overlay of Davy.
Not gonna ask how many bodies I sent down there?” he asked.
That would, Hill supposed, have been a good question. Logically, it was the important one, but what Hill wanted to know with sudden, unexpected need was the name.
When he didn’t edit the question, Davy shrugged.
“It was…”
He trailed off. Surprise flickered over his face, chased quickly by consternation. He reached up to rub his forehead, frown lines indented under his fingers.
“It was… umm…” Davy tried again, face pinched as he tried to shake down the answer from his brain, and then laughed instead. He shrugged it off dismissively. “It wasn’t important then, and it doesn’t matter now. Come on. We’re here.”
The afterlife as a concrete experience was new to Hill. He would be willing, however, to put money on Davy being wrong about that. It probably wasn’t the time to push, though.
He stopped on the pavement and looked up.
Unlike some of the buildings, Fraser’s offices didn’t look much different in the afterlife.
The tinted glass was nicotine brown instead of black, and the long white concrete pillars were chipped and gray.
CIRATTA HOLDINGS was written in a discreet gold font on the main doors.
Shadows moved against the windows, just visible enough that you could see some of them looked inhuman.
Hill took a shallow breath and rubbed the back of his neck with one hand.
“I still don’t know what good you think this is going to be,” he said. “If there was any useful information at Ciratta, I would have used it before summoning the dead.”
Davy took the ID badge out of his pocket and clipped it to his shirt.
“You’re not me,” he said as he straightened the badge and headed up the low flight of well-worn steps.
He changed how he walked as he climbed. The lazy, cocky confidence of Davy Jones, not currently dead and enjoying it, changed to something hesitant and careful. Hill didn’t know what he was doing at first.
Then he realized it was him. He walked like that.
“I really doubt that was necessary,” he muttered under his breath as he squared his shoulders and headed up the steps.