news from nowhere

“Oh, hello, Arthur. You’re dead,” Steven says.

The flat smells like smoke — not greasy cooking or a wood fire in a grate someplace but the smell of cigarettes and strong antiseptic soap and something else like the discharge of a gun. Why couldn’t bizarre things ever be heralded by something nice? Being woken up in the night expecting to have left the stove on, and it’s a shade fresh from the underworld.

Harrow spreads his arms. “So were you. I don’t see any reason to carry on with such a limiting understanding of human existence.”

The last time Steven’d died, Harrow had been there too, hadn’t he? Not the real man but the funny little version of him that their brain cooked up to supervise a sterile afterlife with no chance of peace in it, nothing recognizable as release from suffering. The not-real version of Harrow had been rather nice, all things considered, and if he hadn’t been much help it wasn’t that surprising — not like Marc has a degree in medicine, or Steven, for that matter.

But what matters is that right now, he’s alive, and he’s awake, and he’s standing about in his pajamas with a dead man, right in the middle of his apartment. Arthur Harrow looks like himself, only sharper somehow, clearer at the edges; in the afterlife he must have shed his customary cult leader leisurewear for a pair of institutional scrubs. When Steven glances downward to determine if he’s hovering or fading away past the knees or something, he sees behind him a trail of red footprints — crossing through the scattered sand, circling the furniture. Bare feet. Steven tries not to stare at his bare feet.

“No, I mean — you’re dead, and I’m seeing things. I’d rather not be seeing things.”

“You’re not hallucinating, Steven Grant. I think I’d know. After Khonshu left me, I had a kind of break. My mind wasn’t the most reliable. Nothing particularly cinematic, but I’d just lost the foundational relationship of my life. With things as they are now, I might have been able to find an understanding psychologist, but not then. Khonshu took the best years of my life, and then he left me.”

“He’s not very nice to me either, sometimes.” Steven laughs a little, humorlessly, nervously. All of a sudden he’s acutely aware of how alone he is, without another voice in his head to interject, and it occurs to him that that might be the point of this little meeting. “And Ammit? If you’re here, what’s become of her?”

No hard feelings, he can only hope. Unless that’s why he’s being haunted. Good grief.

“He’ll use you too. And you’ve got nothing else to anchor you, no family, no friends, no partner—“ Harrow puts a little teasing emphasis on that word, like he knows about Layla, and Steven doesn’t like it. “Not the best position.”

“Have you — come back to threaten me, like? Get your revenge? Ask me to avenge your murder? Give you a proper burial, fix up the old tomb?”

Things could get a bit — mutable, in the old cosmology, when it came to the ancient Egyptians and ghosts. And no one said how Harrow died, only that he had. A man like that must have enemies, and with a piece of work like that locked up inside him — well, it had seemed believable enough that it had broken him outright.

Harrow laughs at that, really laughs, eyes creasing. “I’m only here to warn you, Steven..”

The man’s ghost — spirit, shade, whatever — reaches out to him, and Steven tenses, but the touch of his hand is firm and pleasant — he’s not intangible, he’s not going to possess him, he’s not going to slip inside their skin and wear Steven like a suit during the precious few moments he has behind the wheel of their shared body. Maybe not the best metaphor when the first and last time Steven drove anything was in the Alps. But Harrow is touching him, one hand on his elbow and the other resting against Steven’s neck — there’s nothing cold about him, and the sensation of skin against skin is enough to make Steven stammer.

“Khonshu is a jealous god. He won’t be content with just the two of you. He already isn’t.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“You’re a better man than Marc. In another life I think I would have enjoyed your company.”

It’s flattering, almost. If the man weren’t perfectly happy to sign off on mass murder in the name of communal living and plant-based diet and commitment to societal equity. In another life, maybe. One where Steven didn’t have to worry about being manipulated and bundled off to the Alps and probably sacrificed to something ancient and nasty. Christ, he’s going to have to tell Marc about this, isn’t he? Some divide-and-conquer thing.

Steven frowns. “Well, we’re a package deal, Marc and I, now.”

“And yet you’re alone. The mercenary has his ex-wife, and you have nothing. There’s no one to touch you.”

Harrow’s thumb brushes against the underside of Steven’s jaw, light as a kiss. Steven wants to touch him, not to struggle as much as to understand what he’s seeing, but he can’t bring himself to go further than raising his hand. It isn’t as if he’s conjured this man up out of pure imagination just to give him a nice squeeze, but he does want to be touched. To be held. Maybe a bit more than that, even.

If it’s not a dream or a hallucination or an imminent threat, then the smell of hot iron has moved up several spots on Steven Grant’s list of active concerns. Harrow’s bare feet must be proper mince at this point. Maybe that’s a clue, maybe that was how they found the body. It hadn’t occurred to him to ask.

Steven points a finger past him, down at the floorboards. “Oi, is all that real? I mean, the blood—“

Harrow cocks his head, like the question almost amuses him. “You know, it’s hard to say.”

Christ, he really is good-looking when he’s not putting on the whole Dr. Moreau act. No longer serene, just haunted-eyed, and all the colors of him are muted like they’ve been put through a photo filter. His hand lingers over Steven’s heart — like he’s taking pleasure in the sensation of his heartbeat. Steven covers that impossible hand with his own, though he can’t say why; it should feel colder, it should go see-through or let his fingers pass right through it, but by all appearances Harrow’s as real as life, just — wrong. Faded, and fading fast.

“You’re saying Khonshu did this. I don’t suppose you’re going to tell me how, are you?”

Harrow chuckles. “Where’s the opportunity for personal growth in that?”

“Are you going to come back and haunt me, then?” Steven asks. He doesn’t know what answer he wants to hear. Maybe he ought to be asking, can he come back? Does Harrow know who killed him? Is this going to be a thing between them now, having a dead world-ending cult leader just drop in and visit? There’s got to be strings attached. He’s got to want more than to touch him.

Harrow smiles at him and his eyes are like chips of ice, without color. “We’ll be seeing more of each other. I’ll let you know what you can do for me very soon.”