“Mom,” he said. That feltfuckingweird. “What are you doing here?”
Chapter Nine
Dec 23, 11am
The living world fadedthe further that Hill got from Davy.
Or more accurately, he supposed, the more distance he put between himself and his living body.
It was still there, but as background noise and shadows. The Beyond was where he had to step sideways to dodge around commuters who managed to be sour-faced over dog muzzles or twitching hare-whiskers and split noses, or jump back out of the way to avoid being run down by a cab with a skull-faced driver.
Company men.
And women, Hill supposed. Davy made no such corrections, but he’d been dead thirty years, and most of Beyond had probably been dead longer. It was probably a safe assumption that being politically correct was a few years behind the living world.
Man or woman, though, most of the spirits on the street wore masks of some kind.
Muzzles, the correction nudged at his brain in that pointed voice that Davy used when hewasn’tgoing to say anything. Hill tried to pretend he’d not heard it. There was too much implied in that word for him to unpack right now. The less-weighted “masks” moved on more easily in his head.
That left him room to wonder why the only person he saw with stigmata like Davy’s was a ragged beggar, his disorientingly lumpy body hidden under rags and cut-up blankets.
Instincts of a city kid told Hill to avoid eye contact and keep moving. He hesitated, but stopped instead.
“Do you know—” he started to ask.
The man raised his head, and Hill inwardly recoiled. Runnels of loose flesh covered the man’s face like lumps of melted plastic, sealing his eyes shut and twisting his mouth into a tooth-baring grimace.
“Change?” the man slurred, his voice rough and clumsy. The blankets slid back from his body as he stuck his hand out, a jar of thin tin coins clutched in fingers that looked like warmed wax. “Have some pity, man.”
Hill patted himself down out of habit. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t…”
The beggar reached up and dug his fingers into the skin over his eyes to claw it back. A sharp blue eye peered out at Hill for a second before the skin dripped back over it.
“Fuck sake,” the man said. His voice was still thick, but it was harder now. “The wet dead walking the streets. Get the fuck away from me. Go on. Piss off.”
He kicked at Hill with a booted foot and then spat at him when Hill didn’t move on fast enough.
“I don’t…what?” Hill spluttered as he backed up. “Sorry?”
A hand caught his arm and tugged him away.
“Pay no attention to him,” the woman said as she tossed a distasteful look toward the beggar. “The Hounds will move him on soon enough.”
Hill looked back over his shoulder. “Why?”
“Nobody wants to come out of work and see that,” the woman said. She gave a delicate, mannered shudder as she glanced back over her shoulder. “We’re all dead. Some of us just still want to better ourselves.”
The question “for what”was on the tip of Hill’s tongue. He took a proper look at the woman before he asked and completely forgot what he’d been about to say.
“I…Aunt Hen?” he asked, his voice stuck halfway between surprise and uncertainty.
The tall brunette chuckled and squeezed his elbow with something like affection.
“And there I thought you’d forgotten me,” she said through the short, pointed beak of her pre-death namesake. The fleshy lobes of bright red wattles swung against her neck as she looked up at him. She still wore glasses, Hill noticed with distant interest, and her eyes crinkled around a smile her beak couldn’t form. “Lasttime I saw you, you were only six or seven? Now look at you, all grown-up and dead already.”
“Do you want a coffee?” Hen asked as she pulled her purse around to the front of her body and stepped into the queue for the small kiosk.
Hill glanced at the menu. A Depresso Espresso was four scrip. An In Love Latte was six.
