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“Sorry about the door,” he said.
Stephanie stared.
“I’ll pay to get it fixed.”
Stephanie stared.
“It’s still a good door, you know. Sturdy.”
When he realised that Stephanie was in no condition to do anything but stare, he shrugged again and took off his coat, folded it neatly and draped it over the back of a chair. He went to the broken window and started picking up the shards of glass.
Now that he didn’t have his coat on, Stephanie could truly appreciate how thin he really was. His suit, well-tailored though it was, hung off him, giving it a shapeless quality. She watched him collect the broken glass, and saw a flash of bone between his shirtsleeve and glove. He stood, looking back at her.
“Where should I put all this glass?”
“I don’t know,” Stephanie said in a quiet voice. “You’re a skeleton.”
“I am indeed,” he said. “Gordon used to keep a wheelie bin out at the back door. Shall I put it in that?”
Stephanie nodded. “Yes OK,” she said simply and watched Skulduggery carry the armful of glass shards out of the room. All her life she had longed for something else, for something to take her out of the humdrum world she knew – and now that it looked like it might actually happen, she didn’t have one clue what to do. Questions were tripping over themselves in her head, each one vying to be the one that was asked first. So many of them.
Skulduggery came back in and she asked the first question. “Did you find it all right?”
“I did, yes. It was where he always kept it.”
“OK then.” If questions were people she felt that they’d all be staring at her now in disbelief. She struggled to form coherent thoughts.
“Did you tell him your name?” Skulduggery was asking.
“What?”
“Your name. Did you tell him?”
“Uh, no…”
“Good. You know something’s true name, you have power over it. But even a given name, even Stephanie, that would have been enough to do it.”
“To do what?”
“To give him some influence over you, to get you to do what he asked. If he had your name and he knew what to do with it, sometimes that’s all it takes. That’s a scary thought now, isn’t it?”
“What’s going on?” Stephanie asked. “Who was he? What did he want? Just who are you?”
“I’m me,” Skulduggery said, picking up his hat and wig and placing them on a nearby table. “As for him, I don’t know who he is, never seen him before in my life.”
“You shot him.”
“That’s right.”
“And you threw fire at him.”
“Yes, I did.”
Stephanie’s legs felt weak and her head felt light.
“Mr Pleasant, you’re a skeleton.”
“Ah, yes, back to the crux of the matter. Yes. I am, as you say, a skeleton. I have been one for a few years now.”
“Am I going mad?”
“I hope not.”
“So you’re real? You actually exist?”
“Presumably.”
“You mean you’re not sure if you exist or not?”
“I’m fairly certain. I mean, I could be wrong. I could be some ghastly hallucination, a figment of my imagination.”
“You might be a figment of your own imagination?”
“Stranger things have happened. And do, with alarming regularity.”
“This is too weird.”
Skulduggery put his gloved hands in his pockets and cocked his head. He had no eyeballs so it was hard to tell if he was looking at her or not. “You know, I met your uncle under similar circumstances. Well, kind of similar. But he was drunk. And we were in a bar. And he had vomited on my shoes. So I suppose the actual circumstances aren’t overly similar, but both events include a meeting, so… My point is, he was having some trouble and I was there to lend a hand, and we became good friends after that. Good, good friends.” His head tilted. “You look like you might faint.”
Stephanie nodded slowly. “I’ve never fainted before, but I think you might be right.”
“Do you want me to catch you if you fall, or…?”
“If you wouldn’t mind.”
“No problem at all.”
“Thank you.”
Stephanie gave him a weak smile and then darkness clouded her vision and she felt herself falling and the last thing she saw was Skulduggery Pleasant darting across the room towards her.
Stephanie awoke on the couch with a blanket over her. The room was dark, lit only by two lamps in opposite corners. She looked over at the broken window, saw that it was now boarded up. She heard a hammering from the hall, and when she felt strong enough to stand, she slowly rose and walked out of the living room.
Skulduggery Pleasant was trying to hang the door back on its hinges. He had his shirtsleeve rolled up on his left forearm. Ulna, Stephanie corrected herself, proving that her first year of Biology class had not gone to waste. Or was it radius? Or both? She heard him mutter, then he noticed her and nodded brightly.
“Ah, you’re up.”
“You fixed the window.”
“Well, covered it up. Gordon had a few pieces of timber out back, so I did what I could. Not having the same luck with the door though. I find it much easier to blast them off then put them back. How are you feeling?”
“I’m OK,” Stephanie said.
“A cup of hot tea, that’s what you need. Lots of sugar.”
He abandoned the door and guided her to the kitchen. She sat at the table while he boiled the water.
“Hungry?” he asked when it had boiled, but she shook her head. “Milk?” She nodded. He added milk and spoonfuls of sugar, gave the tea a quick stir and put the cup on the table in front of her. She took a sip – it was hot, but nice.
“Thank you,” Stephanie said, and he gave a little shrug. It was hard discerning some of his gestures without a face to go by, but she took the shrug to mean “think nothing of it”.
“Was that magic? With the fire, and blasting the door?”
“Yes, it was.”
She peered closer. “How can you talk?”
“Sorry?”
“How can you talk? You move your mouth when you speak, but you’ve got no tongue, you’ve got no lips, you’ve got no vocal cords. I mean, I know what skeletons look like, I’ve seen diagrams and models and stuff, and the only things that hold them together are flesh and skin and ligaments, so why don’t you just fall apart?”
He gave another shrug, both shoulders this time. “Well, that’s magic too.”
She looked at him. “Magic’s pretty handy.”
“Yes, magic is.”
“And what about, you know, nerve endings? Can you feel pain?”
“I can, but that’s not a bad thing. Pain lets you know when you’re alive, after all.”
“And are you alive?”
“Well, technically, no, but…”
She peered into his empty eye sockets. “Do you have a brain?”
He laughed. “I don’t have a brain, I don’t have any organs, but I have a consciousness.” He started clearing away the sugar and the milk. “To be honest with you, it’s not even my head.”
“What?”
“It’s not. They ran away with my skull. I won this one in a poker game.”
“That’s not even yours? How does it feel?”
“It’ll do. It’ll do until I finally get around to getting my own head back. You look faintly disgusted.”
“I just… Doesn’t it feel weird? It’d be like wearing someone else’s socks.”
“You get used to it.”
“What happened to you?” she asked. “Were you born like this?”
“No, I was born perfectly normal. Skin, organs, the whole shebang. Even had a face that wasn’t too bad to look at, if I do say so myself.”
“So what happened?”
Skulduggery leaned against the worktop, arms folded across his chest. “I got into magic. Back then – back when I was, for want of a better term, alive – there were some pretty nasty people around. The world was seeing a darkness it might never have recovered from. It was war, you see. A secret war, but war nonetheless. There was a sorcerer, Mevolent, worse than any of the others, and he had himself an army, and those of us who refused to fall in behind him found ourselves standing up against him.
“And we were winning. Eventually, after years of fighting this little war of ours, we were actually winning. His support was crumbling, his influence was fading, and he was staring defeat in the face. So he ordered one last, desperate strike against all the leaders on our side.”
Stephanie stared at him, lost in his voice.
“I went up against his right-hand man who had laid out a wickedly exquisite trap. I didn’t suspect a thing until it was too late.
“So I died. He killed me. The twenty-third of October it was, when my heart stopped beating. Once I was dead, they stuck my body up on a pike and burned it for all to see. They used me as a warning – they used the bodies of all the leaders they had killed as warnings – and, to my utter horror, it worked.”
“What do you mean?”
“The tide turned. Our side starting losing ground. Mevolent got stronger. It was more than I could stand, so I came back.”
“You just… came back?”
“It’s… complicated. When I died, I never moved on. Something was holding me here, making me watch. I’ve never heard of it happening before that and I haven’t heard of it happening since, but it happened to me. So when it got too much, I woke up, a bag of bones. Literally. They had gathered up my bones and put them in a bag and thrown the bag into a river. So that was a marvellous new experience right there.”
“Then what happened?”
“I put myself back together, which was rather painful, then climbed out of the river and rejoined the fight, and in the end, we won. We finally won. So, with Mevolent defeated, I quit that whole scene and struck out on my own for the first time in a few hundred years.”
Stephanie blinked. “Few hundred?”
“It was a long war.”
“That man, he called you detective.”
“He obviously knows me by reputation,” Skulduggery said, standing a little straighter. “I solve mysteries now.”
“Really?”
“Quite good at it too.”
“So, what, you’re tracking down your head?”
Skulduggery looked at her. If he’d had eyelids, he might well be blinking. “It’d be nice to have it back, sure, but…”
“So you don’t need it, like, so you can rest in peace?”
“No. No, not really.”
“Why did they take it? Was that another warning?”
“Oh, no,” Skulduggery said with a little laugh. “No, they didn’t take it. I was sleeping, about ten or fifteen years ago, and these little goblin things ran up and nicked it right off my spinal column. Didn’t notice it was gone till the next morning.”
Stephanie frowned. “And you didn’t feel that?”
“Well, like I said, I was asleep. Meditating, I suppose you’d call it. I can’t see, hear or feel anything when I’m meditating. Have you tried it?”
“No.”
“It’s very relaxing. I think you’d like it.”
“I’m sorry, I’m still stuck on you losing your head.”
“I didn’t lose it,” he said defensively. “It was stolen.”
Stephanie was feeling stronger now. She couldn’t believe that she’d fainted. Fainted. It was such an old woman thing to do. She glanced up at Skulduggery. “You’ve had a very unusual life, haven’t you?”
“I suppose I have. Not over yet though. Well, technically it is, but…”
“Isn’t there anything you miss?”
“About what?”
“About living.”
“Compared to how long I’ve been like this, I was only technically alive for a blink of an eye. I can’t really remember enough about having a beating heart in my chest to miss it.”
“So there’s nothing you miss?”
“I… I suppose I miss hair. I miss how it… was. And how it was there, on top of my head. I suppose I miss my hair.” He took out his pocket watch and his head jerked back. “Wow, look at the time. I’ve got to go, Stephanie.”
“Go? Go where?”
“Things to do, I’m afraid. Number one is finding out why that nice gentleman was sent here, and number two is finding out who sent him.”
“You can’t leave me alone,” she said, following him into the living room.
“Yes,” he corrected, “I can. You’ll be perfectly safe.”
“The front door’s off!”
“Well, yes. You’ll be perfectly safe as long as they don’t come through the front door.”
He pulled on his coat but she snatched his hat away.
“Are you taking my hat hostage?” he asked doubtfully.
“You’re either staying here to make sure no one else attacks me or you’re taking me with you.”
Skulduggery froze. “That,” he said eventually, “wouldn’t be too safe for you.”
“Neither would being left here on my own.”
“But you can hide,” he said, gesturing around the room. “There’s so many places to hide. I’m sure there are plenty of good solid wardrobes your size. Even under a bed. You’d be surprised how many people don’t check under beds these days.”
“Mr Pleasant—”
“Skulduggery, please.”
“Skulduggery, you saved my life tonight. Are you going to undo all that effort by leaving me here so someone else can come along and just kill me?”
“That’s a very defeatist attitude you’ve got there. I once knew a fellow, a little older than you. He wanted to join me in my adventures, wanted to solve mysteries that beggared belief. He kept asking, kept on at me about it. He finally proved himself, after a long time, and we became partners.”
“And did you go on to have lots of exciting adventures?”
“I did. He didn’t. He died on our very first case together. Horrible death. Messy too. Lots of flailing around.”
“Well, I don’t plan on dying any time soon and I’ve got something he didn’t.”
“And that is…?”
“Your hat. Take me with you or I’ll stand on it.”
Skulduggery looked at her with his big hollow eye sockets, then held out his hand for his hat. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
5
MEETING CHINA SORROWS
They left Gordon’s land via a back road at the rear of the estate to avoid the flooding, a road that Stephanie hadn’t even noticed until they were on it. Skulduggery told her he was a regular visitor here, and knew all the little nooks and crannies. They passed a sign for Haggard and she thought about asking him to drop her home, but quickly banished that idea from her head. If she went home now she’d be turning her back on everything she’d just seen. She needed to know more. She needed to see more.
“Where are we going?” she asked as they drove on.
“Into the city. I’ve got a meeting with an old friend. She might be able to shed some light on recent events.”
“Why were you at the house?”
“Sorry?”
“Tonight. Not that I’m not grateful, but how come you happened to be nearby?”
“Ah,” he said, nodding. “Yes, I can see how that question would arise.”
“So are you going to answer it?”
“That’s unlikely.”
“Well, why not?”
He glanced at her, or at least he turned his head a fraction. “The less you know about all this, the better. You’re a perfectly normal young lady, and after tonight, you’re going to return to your perfectly normal life. It wouldn’t do for you to get too involved in this.”
“But I am involved.”
“But we can limit that involvement.”
“But I don’t want to limit that involvement.”
“But it’s what’s best for you.”
“But I don’t want that!”
“But it might—”
“Don’t start another sentence with ‘but’.”
“Right. Sorry.”
“You can’t expect me to forget about all of this. I’ve seen magic and fire and you, and I’ve learned about wars they don’t tell us about in school. I’ve seen a world I never even knew existed.”
“Don’t you want to get back to that world? It’s safer there.”
“That’s not where I belong.”
Skulduggery turned his whole head to her and cocked it at an angle. “Funny. When I first met your uncle, that’s what he said too.”
“The things he wrote about,” Stephanie said, the idea just dawning on her, “are they true?”
“His books? No, not a one.”
“Oh.”
“They’re more inspired by true stories, really. He just changed them enough so he wouldn’t insult anyone and get hunted down and killed. Your uncle was a good man, he really was. We solved many mysteries together.”
“Really?”
“Oh, yes, you should be proud to have had an uncle like him. Of course, he got me into a hundred fights because I’d bring him somewhere, and he wouldn’t stop pestering people, but… Fun times. Fun times.”
They drove on until they saw the lights of the city looming ahead. Soon the darkness that surrounded the car was replaced with an orange haze that reflected off the wet roads. The city was quiet and still, the streets almost empty. They pulled into a small outdoor car park and Skulduggery switched off the engine and looked at Stephanie.
“OK then, you wait here.”
“Right.”
He got out. Two seconds passed, but Stephanie hadn’t tagged along just to wait on the sidelines – she needed to see what other surprises the world had in store for her. She got out and Skulduggery looked at her.
“Stephanie, I’m not altogether sure you’re respecting my authority.”
“No, I’m not.”
“I see. OK then.” He put on his hat and wrapped his scarf around his jaw, but did without the wig and the sunglasses. He clicked his keyring and the car beeped and the doors locked.
“That’s it?”
He looked up. “Sorry?”
“Aren’t you afraid it might get stolen? We’re not exactly in a good part of town.”
“It’s got a car alarm.”
“Don’t you, like, cast a spell or something? To keep it safe?”
“No. It’s a pretty good car alarm.”
He started walking. She hurried to keep up.
“Do you cast spells then?”
“Sometimes. I try not to depend on magic these days, I try to get by on what’s up here.” He tapped his head.
“There’s empty space up there.”
“Well, yes,” Skulduggery said irritably, “but you know what I mean.”
“What else can you do?”
“Sorry?”
“With magic. Show me something.”
If Skulduggery had had eyebrows, they would most likely be arched. “What, a living skeleton isn’t enough for you? You want more?”
“Yes,” Stephanie said. “Give me a tutorial.”
He shrugged. “Well, I suppose it couldn’t hurt. There are two types of mages, or sorcerers – Adepts practise one branch of magic, Elementals practise another. Adepts are more aggressive; their techniques are more immediately powerful. In contrast, an Elemental, such as myself, chooses the quieter course and works on mastering their command of the elements.”
“Command of the elements?”
“Maybe that’s a bit of an exaggeration. We don’t command them as such, we manipulate them. We influence them.”
“Like what? Like earth, wind—”
“Water and fire, yes.”
“So show me.”
Skulduggery tilted his head a little to the right and she could hear the good humour in his voice. “Very well,” he said and held up his open hand in front of her. She frowned, feeling a little chilly, and then she became aware of a droplet of water running down her face. In an instant her hair was drenched, like she had just surfaced from a dive.
“How did you do that?” she asked, shaking her head, flinging drops of water away from her.
“You tell me,” Skulduggery answered.
“I don’t know. You did something to the moisture in the air?”
He looked down at her. “Very good,” he said, impressed. “The first element, water. We can’t part the Red Sea or anything, but we have a little influence with it.”
“Show me fire again,” Stephanie said eagerly.
Skulduggery snapped his gloved fingers and sparks flew, and he curled his hand and the sparks grew to flame, and he held that ball of flame in his palm as they walked. The flame intensified and Stephanie could feel her hair drying.
“Wow,” she said.
“Wow indeed,” Skulduggery responded and thrust his hand out, sending the ball of fire shooting through the air. It burned out as it arced in the night sky and faded to nothing.
“What about earth?” Stephanie asked, but Skulduggery shook his head.
“You don’t want to see that, and hopefully you’ll never have to. The earth power is purely defensive and purely for use as a last resort.”
“So what’s the most powerful? Is it fire?”
“That’s the flashiest, that gets all the ‘wows’, but you’d be surprised what a little air can do if you displace it properly. Displaced air doesn’t just disappear – it needs somewhere to be displaced to.”
“Can I see?”
They reached the edge of the car park and passed the low wall that encircled it. Skulduggery flexed his fingers and suddenly splayed his hand, snapping his palm towards the wall. The air rippled and the bricks exploded outwards. Stephanie stared at the brand-new hole in the wall.
“That,” she said, “is so cool.”
They walked on, Stephanie glancing back at the wall every so often. “What about the Adepts then? What can they do?”
“I knew a fellow, a few years ago, who could read minds. I met this woman once who could change her shape, become anyone, right in front of your eyes.”
“So who’s stronger?” Stephanie asked. “An Elemental or an Adept?”
“Depends on the mage. An Adept could have so many tricks up his sleeve, so many different abilities, that he could prove himself stronger than even the most powerful Elemental. That’s been known to happen.”
“The sorcerer, the worst one of all, was he an Adept?”
“Actually, no. Mevolent was an Elemental. It’s rare that you get an Elemental straying so far down the dark paths, but it happens.”
There was a question Stephanie had been dying to ask, but she didn’t want to appear too eager. As casually as she could, thumbs hooked into the belt loops of her jeans, she said, as if she had just plucked this thought out of thin air, “So how do you know if you can do magic? Can anyone do it?”
“Not anyone. Relatively few actually. Those who can usually congregate in the same areas, so there are small pockets of communities, all over the world. In Ireland and the United Kingdom alone, there are eighteen different neighbourhoods populated solely by sorcerers.”
“Can you be a sorcerer without realising it?”
“Oh, yes. Some people walk around every day, bored with their lives, having no idea that there’s a world of wonder at their fingertips. And they’ll live out their days, completely oblivious, and they’ll die without knowing how great they could have been.”
“That’s really sad.”
“Actually it’s quite amusing.”
“No, it’s not, it’s sad. How would you like it if you never discovered what you could do?”
“I wouldn’t know any better,” Skulduggery answered, stopping beside her. “We’re here.”
Stephanie looked up. They had arrived outside a crumbling old tenement building, its wall defaced with graffiti and its windows cracked and dirty. She followed him up the concrete steps and into the foyer, and together they ascended the sagging staircase.