One Word Kill

Elton and Mia arrived about ten minutes later and shook me out of my strange state of mind. Of course, with Mother there they couldn’t say too much, but Mia looked happier. She’d put on her war paint and cast herself in beautiful monochrome, all dark eyes and small smiles full of . . . something good.

We talked about nothing important. Somehow, I never questioned my assumption that this should stay between us and not be shared with Mother. I think I was protecting her from additional fear for her child, and less selflessly I was protecting my ownership of all this craziness that had dropped into my lap. I wanted to be the one making decisions about it . . . to the extent that decisions could be made.

Mia said something about putting her money in a sack, and I knew that the debt was settled. The details didn’t worry me. I was just happy she was there. Pathetically happy, truth be told. Elton saw it, even if Mother and Mia mercifully didn’t, and on their way out he shot me a grin that said so.

‘Is that your girlfriend?’ Eva dragged her stand over after her parents had left. She sounded in awe.

‘Nah.’ I leaned back on my pillows, unable to suppress a smile. ‘But she is pretty cool, though.’



CHAPTER 12

I didn’t make it to school again that week, but I made it to D&D at Simon’s house that weekend. I took a bowl with me to be sick in, in case I couldn’t reach the bathroom. Truth may often be the first casualty of war, but dignity is definitely the first casualty of disease. I was shiny headed beneath my black woollen hat now, and I looked as if I had stayed up all night for a week. I felt like crap, too. Demus must remember what it felt like to be this way; he’d lived through it and given me something to aim at. Still, I found it hard to forgive him for coming back from the future to make headbands that looked like props for a low budget sci-fi film, rather than to brew up some super cure; if not for the leukaemia, then at least for the nausea.

‘That wasn’t a trick.’ Simon opened the door as I reached for the bell. ‘The thing with the dice, it wasn’t a trick.’

‘How do you know?’ I followed him up the stairs, taking my time.

‘I thought about it. Hard.’ When Simon said that, he meant he hadn’t thought about anything else. ‘I cut my dice open with a hacksaw. There’s no way. Not unless you knew. And how could you know? You have some way of predicting the future? Then why aren’t you a billionaire?’

I sat at the table and got my notes out, not answering.

‘Well?’

‘They’re all going to ask the same question. Let me give my answer once.’ I set down a rulebook with a thump that I hoped Simon would take for finality.

‘OK.’

We sat in silence. John arrived and took his seat, joining our vigil, quietly getting ready. Elton and Mia arrived only five minutes later, though any five minutes that stretches a silence close to breaking point will feel like an hour.

Mia took her seat beside me, with a three-part smile: one third uncertainty, one third mistrust. And a last third that made me smile back and ran a warmth through me that seemed to drive back both sickness and pain.

‘Spill it,’ she said. ‘They all want to know how you did the dice thing.’

‘Right.’ I looked around the table. ‘First up, this is ridiculously hard to believe. I’m not asking you to believe it. I’m telling you what I believe. If you have a better theory, then I’ll sign up to it because what I’m about to say really sounds as if the game has jumped off the table and taken over.’ I shrugged. ‘It is what it is.’

‘And what is it?’ John asked, serious, focused.

‘The man who gave me the paper with the numbers on it. It’s not just dice rolls he knows. He knows the winners of horse races. He knows things about me I never told anyone. He knows things about Mia she never told anyone.’ I took a deep breath. ‘Either he reads minds and predicts the future. Or he’s from the future. He says it’s the last one. He’s a time traveller.’

‘No way!’ Elton leaned back, shaking his head, grinning. ‘It was some dice trick. Dude’s not from the year 2000. I’m telling you that. No how.’

‘The future?’ John kept staring at me. ‘You know that’s nonsense. Right?’

‘Why does he know things about you and Mia?’ Simon asked, frowning hard.

‘You don’t believe this crap, Si?’ Elton’s chair rocked back down onto four legs.

‘It’s the simplest explanation that makes sense,’ Simon said. ‘Even if all of you are in on it. Even if every one of you is lying to me . . . I did not let go of those dice after I rolled them. I took them apart. They were just solid blocks of plastic. There’s no way I was made to roll those numbers.’ He laid a new dice set on the table before him. ‘The question is: how does he know these things about you two? Just being from the future doesn’t do that.’

I nodded. ‘I think you know the answer already, Si.’

‘Because at some point between now and when he comes from, you must have both told him. Which means you probably trusted him.’

‘Probably?’ Mia asked.

‘Well, he could have tortured the information out of you.’ Simon rolled one of his new dice.

‘I don’t think he did that,’ I said hurriedly.

‘The question is, why would he come here, now, to us?’ Elton said. He seemed to have reversed his opinion over the course of rocking on his chair. ‘Because of your leukaemia, Nick? He brought you the cure?’

‘Not that.’ I tried not to sound pissed off about it. ‘I think he is here to help, though. Because he knows us . . . Will know us . . . It’s something to do with Mia. He wants her memories.’

‘Well, that doesn’t sound creepy. I think he’s some sort of conman. Has to be. These guys are good at what they do.’ John looked at Mia. ‘What do you think about this?’

‘And why,’ Simon asked before Mia could reply, ‘would he want me, John and Elton to know about him? There has to be a reason for the stunt with the dice. He didn’t have to do that to convince you two.’

We kicked the idea and the question around the table until it all started to get repetitious. Slowly, we drew back from the notion that this was real and not a trick. Slowly, common sense began to stamp our collection of inconvenient facts into the ground.

‘Time to play?’ Elton asked at last, opening a coke.

‘Hell yes,’ John said. ‘I’ve had enough of make-believe. Let’s kill us some orcs!’

We started the game, and before long it had swallowed us as it usually did. The dice, the paper, and the figures relegated to the peripheries of a shared vision, the raw clay provided by Elton and shaped by collective effort.

We delved into caves beneath the ruined fortress that we had spent so long exploring and discovered a labyrinth that dwarfed the man-made one above. And in the deepest parts of those caverns, where black waters lapped on sunless shores, we found an abomination. Elton outdid himself setting the scene. He closed the curtains and read out his description of the thing haunting the depths into which we had unwisely ventured. The sickness made flesh, which had brought the fortress to despair and twisted the lives of those within it. A creature made of failures, of old cruelties, of stillborn children, missed chances, soured wounds. It spoke a language of pain, sewn from torture chamber screams and widows’ weeping for lost lovers. And by the time John had skewered it through with his burning sword, the thing had struck down both my mage, Nicodemus, and Mia’s priest. The creature’s essence fled like a shriek echoing away in all directions, and even Simon’s thief, Fineous, didn’t ask after any tainted treasure it may have left behind.

‘What’s wrong with them?’ John’s warrior and Simon’s thief had, with a hell of a lot of effort, got my mage and Mia’s priest back to the surface.

‘They’re starting to fade from the world. Going grey, seeming faint. It spread from where the abomination touched them, but all of their body is affected now. The fingers and toes were the last to go.’

‘I used my spell to cure the disease.’ Mia pointed to her list.

‘It can only slow it. This isn’t a regular disease. There’s magic at work.’

‘I have a . . . divination spell . . . that means I can call on my god for guidance, right?’

Elton nodded. ‘You call on The Man Jesus for his wisdom and cast your runes.’ Elton wrote something and tore the paper into three pieces before handing them over. ‘Three words: Two. Sicker. Fort. And a direction. Somewhere out there.’ He indicated the great wilderness stretching out beyond the mountains in which the fort nestled. ‘Out there among the dry stones.’

‘And how big is this wilderness?’ John asked.

‘You’ve only got rumours to go on, but it’s big.’ Elton spread his hands. ‘Biblical, brother. Forty days and forty nights shit.’

‘Locusts and honey,’ I said.