The black bakelite phone sits there. This is the sort of thing Mr D could advise me on. But I need to start making my own decisions. I'll talk to him this afternoon, once I work out exactly how I feel about this offer.
I type up a couple of emails, then text Lissa: Interesting morning, how about you?
No response. So I send another one, creaking backwards and forwards in my throne: Wish you were here. Naked.
No response. I play the crossword in the Courier-Mail – only cheat half the time.
Then I consider the paperwork on my desk. There's a whole bunch of stuff I sign off on.
A car accident on the Pacific Highway chills me with eight deaths. It's just a gentle chill, but their deaths come so suddenly – I worry that there is no one there to facilitate their way into the Underworld. That there is, and that it is done, brings a tight smile to my lips. A seventy-five-year-old woman in her garden in Hobart clutches at her chest and tumbles among her rhododendrons. Two children jump off a bridge in some northern New South Wales town: only one surfaces. Someone takes a hammer to their husband, claw end first. Death. Death. Death. And my people are close by at every one.
It sounds terrible. But there's life before those endings, and existence after. It's not the world ending, but lives. The world's ending, though… I need to find out more about that Stirrer god.
Still no response from Lissa, so while I work I follow her via my Avian Pomps.
A crow witnesses her stalling a Stirrer in the Valley – the corpse had somehow escaped the Royal Brisbane Hospital. She lays the body gently against a bench and makes a call. An ambulance will be along soon. They'll ship the body back to the morgue and it will be as though it never happened. She binds the wound in her palm quickly and efficiently.
A sparrow watches as she eats a kebab for lunch, sitting in a mall, just a few streets from where she lay the body down. I can almost smell the garlic. I want to reach out and touch her, and the sparrow, misinterpreting this desire, flies at the back of her head. I manage to convince it otherwise an instant or two before contact.
An ibis ostensibly digs in a bin as she attends an open-air funeral service and pomps a soul, that of an elderly gentleman, whom she charms utterly. I can see his posture shift from scared, to guarded, to a chuckling disregard as she reaches out to touch his arm. He is gone in a flash – I feel the echo of the pomp through me. And Lissa is standing there, on the very fringes of the funeral service, alone.
Lissa's the ultimate professional. She talks to the dead so easily. Knows how to bring them around from loss to acceptance. She is the best Pomp I've ever seen.
After a while, she walks up to the ibis. I stare at her through its dark eyes. 'Steven, I love you, but this is creepy. Don't you have work to do?'
I'm out of there in an instant, my face flushed.
I get out of my chair and, as I do every day about this time, pull open the blinds to the rear windows. These face the Underworld. My office is immediately lit with a reddish light. The One Tree isn't far away. Down below, the traffic of the Underworld moves slowly, in a stately reflection of the living world's traffic. The various bends of the river that I can see are busy with catamarans and ferries. Traffic, cars and buildings are almost identical to the living city, except everything is that little bit ornate. Mr D says that's his fault. I haven't bothered to change it, yet. I'm not sure how, but I'm certain it's a lot of work.
With the blind open, the sunlight and unlight battle it out over my desk. They're equally matched. Where they strike my desk there's a patch of gloom, neutralised only when I turn on my lamp. I've read that the living and the dead worlds occupy the same place, but I don't really understand how that's possible. I prefer to think of them as two skins of the same onion.
A shrill screech startles me. I flinch, then glance over at the window leading to Hell. Someone's hanging from a harness and cleaning the glass from the outside with one of those big plastic squeegees. He's slowly sinking into view. This is a first. He's a big fella, pale skin, long black hair pulled back into a ponytail, a strong jaw marked with stubble. The harness digs into his shoulders. What is a living person doing in Hell?
He waves, I wave back.
Then he pulls out a gun and fires. It's such a casual movement that I hardly notice it. Don't even react until it's done. My stomach flips, I throw my hands in the air, and stumble backwards, then catch my balance on the back of a chair.
The window stars, but doesn't implode. You have more than double-glazing when your office faces Hell.
Through the fragmentation of the glass, I see the 'cleaner' frown.
I look at the door; I'm much further from it than the window. If I run that way I'll probably get a shot or two in the back and, while I'm at it, lead him into the office. Enough people have died in here this year already. It seems clear that he's only after me – and if this is about me, I want to keep it that way. Besides, I've taken bullets before and survived them easily. I lift up a chair. Not the throne, that weighs a bloody tonne.
He fires again. The window shatters this time, glass going everywhere. The bullet thwacks against the wall behind me. Alarms sound throughout the building and the One Tree's creaking intensifies to a dull roar now there's no glass to block it out. Hell has entered the building.
My arm tingles, then burns. Wal extrudes from my flesh. He pulls the most impressive double-take I have ever seen, his wings fluttering madly.
'What the hell?'
'Gun!' I shout. 'Assassination attempt!'
'Right, then. Shouldn't you be running the other way?'
'Shut up and help!' I yell.
I charge towards the gunman, the chair gripped in my hands as though it's some sort of medieval weapon. Here's a guy with a pistol, and me with something that I bought from IKEA. My boots crunch over glass, a big chunk of which slides through the side of my shoe and into my foot. It should hurt more, and it will, I'm sure, but right now all it does is make me angry.
I jab the chair at his head. He leaps back with all the grace of a gymnast. Fires again.
Misses.
But not quite, my ear stings. I resist the urge to slap a hand over the wound. It hurts more than the last time I was shot.
Wal's already buzzing around the bastard's head, and the gunman slaps him away easily, but Wal is back just as fast.
The gunman arcs out on the end of the rope, a pendulum packing a pistol. As he hurtles back in, I hurl the chair at him. He struggles to weave out of the way and the backrest hits him in the head with a sickening crunch. He swings in, then out, and in again, hanging limp.
I hobble over to him and reach out, but suddenly he falls, a long tail of rope following him. I peer down into the Underworld and watch him tumble, his limbs twitching. It's a bit of a mess when he hits. The mess itself is gone a moment later, back to the living world. He wasn't from the Underworld, that's for sure. Someone's just received a very nasty, splattery surprise.
'Watch it!' Wal yells. 'There's someone on the roof!'
Who the hell is that? I swing my head up – stupid, stupid, that's the best way to lose your face, but I have to look – and someone ducks for cover. But I catch a glimpse of the stork-like beak of a plague mask.
I jerk back in from the window, and shake my head at Wal, who grimaces and then shoots up past me, hurtling towards the roof. He's gone a moment, before swooping back. He tears past me and hits the carpet hard, but is back in the air almost at once.
'Shit,' he hisses. 'That hurt. Not enough Hell here for me to fly properly.'
'Did you see who it was?'
'Oh, yeah, I'm all right. And no, I didn't, they were gone.'
Then the first bastard's soul arrives, lit with the bluish pallor of the dead. I'm the nearest entity capable of pomping him. I should have expected him.
He blinks – like the dead do, and his death was more sudden than most – surprised, perhaps, at who he's ended up with. He snarls at me, his every movement a blur, as though he can't find traction here. There's a terrible weight of anger in him. It's holding him here where his lack of flesh can't. I try to use it to my advantage.
'You're not going anywhere until you tell me who sent you.'
