The Dying of the Light

Ups: people listened to him a lot more. When he had been a man, Vaurien Scapegrace had found it somewhat difficult to be taken seriously. But once his brain had been transferred into the red-haired woman’s statuesque body, everyone seemed to find a lot more time for him. This was good for pub business.

Downs: sometimes he felt as though people weren’t really listening to him. Sometimes he felt as though they’d laugh at any feeble joke he made, just so long as the joke emerged from his new, plump, incredibly soft lips. He also didn’t like the way all those eyes would follow him as he went to fetch a patron’s drinks. It was unnerving.

Walking down the street was unnerving, too. He felt far too self-conscious to be comfortable. He’d left Roarhaven and gone into Dublin the previous week, and that was even worse. All that time spent living apart from the mortal world had made him forget what mortals were like. They didn’t even try to hide their staring. A few of them – random people he passed on the street – had even made comments about his appearance.

And this was acceptable?

He’d seen a lot, had Scapegrace. In his time as the self-deluded Killer Supreme, he’d surrounded himself with murderers and low lifes and religious psychopaths. In his time as the self-deluded Zombie King, he’d surrounded himself with rot and evil and decay and corruption. He had seen a lot of bad things happen. He had encountered a lot of bad people. But these were, in a way, professionally bad people. They were insane or twisted or downright evil, but they carried that air of professionalism with them wherever they went. And they certainly didn’t make catcalls or wolf whistles whenever they saw a passing female whose form they appreciated.

When he’d got back to Roarhaven, he vowed to never again leave unless it was an absolute necessity, because at least in Roarhaven he had a sanctuary. And it wasn’t the huge palace in the middle of the city, either. It wasn’t the one surrounded by Cleavers and ruled by China Sorrows. Scapegrace’s sanctuary was a small house, tucked away in the corner of the south district, and it was here he returned to at the end of another long night in the pub.

He walked through his front door, hung his coat on a hook and went through to the kitchen. He sagged. It had been Clarabelle’s turn to clean, but Clarabelle had a unique way of doing things that made sense only to her. Her way of cleaning, for example, entailed taking everything that was messy and moving it to another side of the room. It took as much time as cleaning would actually take, but the end result was far less useful.

Light footsteps came down the stairs. Clad in a fluffy pink bathrobe and wearing fluffy pink slippers, on which swayed twin ping-pong balls painted like eyes, Clarabelle’s hair was a furious shade of green. “Hello,” she said.

She didn’t launch into a full-blown babble, which was unusual. Very unusual.

“What did you do?” Scapegrace asked.

A series of expressions flitted across Clarabelle’s face. First, there was indignation, then there was resignation, followed by hope, chased by confusion, and finally knocked down and sat upon by innocence. “Nothing.”

“Did you set fire to something again?”

She shook her head.

“Are you sure?”

She frowned, then nodded.

“Where were you just now?”

“Up in my room,” she said. “I was sorting through my favourite socks. I have seven. Snow White had seven dwarves, did you know that? I have seven socks. In a way, I’m kind of like Snow White.”

“Snow White cleaned the kitchen every once in a while.”

“She had little birds and squirrels to help her. All I could find was a hedgehog, but he was useless. I had to do everything myself.”

“Moving things is not cleaning them.”

“Do you want to know what I did wrong?”

He sighed. “Yes.”

Clarabelle scrunched up her mouth, like she did when she was figuring out the best way to say something. Before she could confess, the front door opened and Thrasher walked in.

“I’m home!” he called, even though he could see them both standing in the kitchen.

“Gerald!” Clarabelle said, bounding over to him. Thrasher hugged Clarabelle, wrapping her in his massive, muscular arms. “Did you have a good day? Did anything fun happen?”

“Every day is a fun day when you’re doing what you love,” Thrasher said, and flashed an eager smile at Scapegrace. Scapegrace ignored him, walked to the fridge and left them to their chit-chat. He poured himself a glass of milk, leaned his hip against the cooker and drank.

It was sad how quickly he’d got used to normal things again. Life as the Zombie King, as self-deluded as he’d been, meant that magic had sustained him and his steadily-rotting body. But after Doctor Nye had placed his brain into its new home, he’d had to deal with the gradual reawakening of natural bodily functions. Normal things like eating and drinking had become astonishing adventures in sensation. A glass of milk was a delight. But now? Now it was a glass of milk again. How quickly it had lost its thrill.

Thrasher and Clarabelle came into the kitchen, still talking. He ignored them. He did that a lot lately. He just couldn’t summon the anger he used to direct Thrasher’s way. It was … gone. It had slowly evaporated these past few weeks. Thrasher had noticed, of course. Thrasher always noticed things like that. But where he had assumed that it was as a result of living a normal life, maybe even of a softening of attitudes and a growing fondness, Scapegrace knew better. The anger was gone because the anger was beaten. There was no point to it any more. It had lost.

Scapegrace was living in the suburbs of a city full of sorcerers. He was no longer deluded enough to call himself the Killer Supreme. No longer dead enough to call himself the Zombie King. He was just another citizen, just a regular guy who’d had his brain transplanted into the body of a beautiful woman. He was normal. He was average. And this was his life.

“Master?” Thrasher said.

Scapegrace brushed his luxurious hair from his face and looked up. “Hmm? What?”

Thrasher and Clarabelle looked at him with real concern in their eyes. The old Scapegrace would have heaped scorn upon them. The new Scapegrace didn’t see the point.

“I was saying that I washed the floor in the pub, just like you asked,” Thrasher continued.

“And I was saying you shouldn’t get Gerald to do that every time,” said Clarabelle. “He’s not your slave.”

“I don’t mind, really,” Thrasher said, blushing.

“You should mind,” said Clarabelle. “Scapey, it’s just not nice, the way you treat Gerald. He’s your best friend in the whole entire world and you two are my best friends in the whole entire world and best friends shouldn’t treat each other like that.”

It had been a long day. All Scapegrace wanted to do was have a shower and go to bed. “You’re right,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

They stood there and blinked at him.

“You’re sorry?” Thrasher asked.

Irritation flared in the back of Scapegrace’s mind, then sputtered out. “Yes. I’m sorry.”

“You … you’ve never said that to me before,” Thrasher said, tears in his eyes. Dear lord, he was going to cry.

“Then I’m not sorry,” Scapegrace said hastily, in an effort to hold off an embarrassing display of emotion. “Does that make you feel better?”

Thrasher’s hands went to his mouth as tears spilled down his perfect cheekbones. “You’ve never cared about how I feel before.”

Scapegrace went to roll his eyes, but lost his enthusiasm halfway through and ended up looking at the ceiling.

“Are you feeling OK?” Clarabelle asked.

For the second time in the last few minutes, Scapegrace sighed. “I’m fine.”

“But are you really?”

“Of course. The pub is doing good business. We have a loyal customer base. Most of them are in every night. What’s to complain about?”

“I don’t know,” said Clarabelle. With natural grace, she sprang on to the kitchen table and sat there, cross-legged, while the dishes she’d knocked off crashed to the floor around her. “You tell me.”

Scapegrace hesitated. He’d always viewed himself as an old-fashioned type of guy, not the kind to talk about whatever was troubling him. But circumstances, he supposed, had changed. One glance at his reflection in the window proved that.

“I always wanted to do something important,” he said. “I wanted to be someone important. I wanted to make a difference.”

“You make a difference to me,” said Thrasher.

The old Scapegrace would have thrown something at him for that. The new Scapegrace didn’t bother.

“I never wanted to be normal,” he continued. “But here, normal is all I am. In Roarhaven, I’m … unexceptional.”

Clarabelle frowned. “Do you want to leave?”

“No. Nothing like that …”

“But if you do leave,” Clarabelle said, “do you promise to take me with you?”

“I’m not leaving.”

“OK,” Clarabelle said happily. “Just don’t decide to leave one morning before I get up. Then I’ll get up and you’ll be gone and Gerald will be gone and I’ll be all alone in this house and I’ll have no friends.”

Thrasher wrapped his gigantic arm round her shoulders. “We’re not going anywhere.”

She nodded. “Because I have trouble making friends. People think I’m weird, just because sometimes I see things that aren’t really there, and just because I say things they don’t understand. They don’t want to be my friends. But you guys don’t care about things like that. You two are really nice.”

“I’m not leaving,” Scapegrace said. “I’m just feeling sorry for myself, that’s all.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know, I … I suppose I can just see myself living out the rest of my life as an ordinary person.”

“You’re not ordinary,” Clarabelle said. “None of us are.”

“I get sad, too,” Thrasher said. “I don’t like to bother anyone with it, but … I mean, my new body is very nice. It really is. But every time I look in the mirror, I see someone that isn’t me. I don’t think that feeling is ever going to go away.”

Scapegrace nodded. “You’re always looking into the face of a stranger.”

“That gets to you,” said Thrasher. “After a while, the novelty wears off and you just want to see your own face again.”

“You forget where you came from,” Scapegrace said softly. “You forget who you are.”

Clarabelle leaned forward. “Would it make you feel better to remember?”

“It would.”

She smiled. “Then the news I have is good news. I went exploring today. I’ve never been to the left side of the Medical Wing before because, when I walk in the door, I always turn to the right.”

Scapegrace frowned. “Why?”

“I don’t know. I’ve always wanted to turn left, but I never do. I think I turned left once in a previous life and I was beheaded or something, so I’ve never even wanted to walk down that side. But today was different. I was playing with a Cleaver and we were both taking it in turns to spin around really fast. I was winning, because he kept forgetting to spin, and he just stood there and I spun and spun and spun, and by the end of the game I was really dizzy and I think I threw up on him a little bit. Just on to his coat, though. I don’t think he minded much. He just stayed standing there. He probably thought we were playing musical statues.”

She hesitated. “Maybe we were. Oh, I think we were. If we were, then he won, because statues aren’t supposed to spin around. Anyway, I was dizzy, and when I walked into the Medical Wing I started to fall. It took me ages to fall, and I knocked over a few people along the way, but when the dizziness went away I was in the left corner of the Medical Wing. It was amazing! The sights that were on show … You know the way tables seem really different if you look at them from a different angle?”

“Clarabelle,” said Scapegrace, “it’s been a long day. Could you get to the point?”

“Right, sorry. Anyway, there are all these rooms in the Medical Wing, so I went into a few of them. And in one of them there was a big glass tank full of green water, and there were two people floating in that tank. It was you. It was the two of you.”

Scapegrace frowned. “What?”

“Your old bodies,” she said. “They still have your old bodies.”

They got to Axle’s house. Stephanie went round the back while Skulduggery knocked on the door. Sometimes people with dodgy pasts liked to sneak out of windows. She cupped her hands, blew on them. It was chilly out. Roarhaven was as dark and as quiet as ever. She heard the low murmur of Skulduggery’s voice. No alarm raised, no windows opening, no one trying to run.

She heard the front door close, and walked back to the Bentley. Skulduggery was already behind the wheel. They didn’t speak as they pulled away from the kerb. They drove for a few minutes, stopped outside a dingy little pub called The Cauldron.

Skulduggery led the way into the chatter and the laughter. Stephanie didn’t have his skills. She couldn’t glance at a room and notice every single thing, catalogue every single face, in one go. It took her a few seconds to notice the man sitting at the bar with an empty stool beside him. His work boots were dirty, his clothes not much better. He sat with his head down, shoulders slumped unevenly, staring into his drink. They walked up to him and for a few moments he didn’t notice them. He had a small cut on his jawline, another on his neck. There was a larger abrasion on his right hand and across his thick knuckles, and a plaster was wrapped clumsily round the thumb of his left.

“Mr Axle,” Skulduggery said, and Axle looked up sharply. He paled when he saw them, and when he finally spoke he could only manage one word.