Page 75 of The Death Wish

Silas slipped his hand deeper, to the wrist now. The tonnage of the past brushed at his fingertips, and made him shudder. His grave lay beneath him. Dark and cold and, it had seemed, endless. That was what had frightened him most. The eternity of solitude. The inevitability of being catapulted between life and death, over and over, until he was lost to both worlds. There had been nothing–no one–to anchor him before.

‘Silas, please. Sit back, will you?’ The daemon’s concern was precious. And unnecessary.

‘It’s all right.’ The voice that left Silas bore traces of all the men he had been; dead, and alive. And he had needed each and every one of them to form the creature who now trailed his hand through these deathly waters, daring the depths to reach for him one more time.

He was ready. To repel them. To make them wait.

The lives he’d lost trickled through his fingers, slipped around his palm like seaweed. They sat on the bottom like submerged tree trunks grown thick and unrecognisable with detritus. Bones were there too. Many more than Silas’s own. This was an old loch, and death an ancient part of it.

To Silas, it did not seem at all strange now to find himself here: returned to where it had began, as the end approached.

The ferryman guided them deeper out over the loch, heading towards a tiny island which sat nearer to the middle of the loch than the rest of the greater islands beyond it.

A speck of land, defying the unfathomably deep waters

Waters Silas knew intimately.

With his hand still submerged, his fingertips numb with the cold, he raised his head.

Found a shoreline carved into his awakening memory.

There, the jetty that had seen him fall.

There, the lawns where the woman in lavender and the young man had run to him.

The echoes of the estate and its gardens had clung to his dissolved memories; and refused to be lost with all the others.

He’d walked those halls therein; tending to the potted plants that held their fronds towards light that filtered through expansive windows. He’d eaten at the table where working folk gathered, and tended many a fireplace in those wood-panelled rooms.

The details weren’t sharp, time had dulled them, polished them down to worn stones with no facets, no pin-points he could prick his finger upon.

But he knew.

Silas knew this the place, the way he knew certain things in his life. A short list: he had died in this loch, he was Izanami’s servant, he was a man of the outdoors, he had an affinity for all the beauties of the garden, a taste for brandy, an appetite for womenandmen. He had the rhythm of a rabid badger when it came to dancing, but above all else, he knew he’d not held a desire for any other, like that he harboured for the daemon by his side.

The one waiting with uncommon patience for him to speak. Pitch rested his head upon Silas’s side, burrowing into him.

‘This is the lake in my nightmares, in my dreams,’ Silas said, while the water swept through his fingers. ‘This is where my brother drowned me, while the Flood waters fell.’

Pitch’s heat strengthened, and Silas’s fingertips defied the freezing water. ‘My dear man, I don’t…I don’t know what tosay…’ That he was seeking to say the right thing at all bore witness to how a wild prince had softened.

‘How is this possible?’ Charlie very rarely sounded as small as his stature. The lad suddenly laughed, high and hard. ‘What a stupid question, really. After all I’ve seen. And it doesn’t even bear asking how we travelled so far so fast. But do you know this place as well, Silas?’

He was still on his feet, still gazing back towards the shore which grew ever more distant.

‘Do sit down, dearest,’ Edward insisted. ‘Give yourself a moment to breathe.’

‘You too, Silas. Breathe.’ Pitch’s whisper was like a caress. ‘You are rather more blue around the lips than I would like. Take a breath, perhaps another after that.’

‘Silas?’ Charlie’s voice seemed to drift down a tunnel. ‘Have you visited my family estate?’

Oh Christ, how he had visited. ‘I have. It was my…’ Home? That was not quite right. ‘I worked there, for a time.’

‘What a remarkable coincidence. But surely before I was born, for I feel certain I would remember one such as you coming to call.’ Charlie’s words echoed with confusion. ‘I feel like…well, this sounds foolish, but it is as though I have nevernotknown you, Silas. I’m not making any sense, am I? Bloody hell, what a time this is.’ He imitated Pitch, in slumping against Edward’s side, and found equal welcome there. The lieutenant, drained as he was, wrapped his arm about the lad. And Silas felt a surge of gratefulness, of contentment, that such closeness had been found. ‘Do you think you might visit, Edward? Once life is not so peculiar?’

Charlie’s wistfulness suited the strange hues of the day.

‘I would like that, very much,’ Edward said, thickly. ‘Once life is not so peculiar.’