Read Drinking Midnight Wine Online
Authors: Simon R. Green
Drinking Midnight Wine (27 page)
“Give me one good reason why I should go down there, into God knows what?” Toby said hotly. “Hell, give me one bad reason.”
Gayle looked at him directly for the first time. “You said you’d follow me anywhere.”
“This is very definitely not what I had in mind.” Toby frowned unhappily under Gayle’s unwavering gaze, and then shrugged angrily. “All right! You lead, and I’ll follow. But this had better be worth the strain this is putting on my nerves.”
“Trust me,” said Gayle, starting down the wooden steps. “If nothing else, I guarantee you won’t be bored.”
“Isn’t that what General Custer said to the Seventh Cavalry?”
Gayle’s dry chuckle floated back up from the gloom she was fast disappearing into, and Toby reluctantly went after her. He had to believe she knew what she was doing. She was all he had.
There were no railings, nothing to hold on to, just the bare wooden steps falling away before him. Gayle was just a dark figure some distance below. The stairway had been cut directly into the earth, with nothing shoring it up, and Toby couldn’t help wondering how safe it was. And whether, if he put out one hand to steady himself against the wall, he’d feel worms wriggling in the damp soil. He kept his arms firmly at his sides and his eyes straight ahead, and eventually he reached the end of the steps and the beginning of a tunnel.
There was a bare lightbulb hanging from the low ceiling, giving the scene an eerie blue cast Toby could very definitely have done without. It was utterly quiet, and very cold. Gayle fumbled at the earth wall and found a hidden switch. There were faint grinding sounds from up the stairs, and Toby realized it was the false grave sliding back into place. They were sealed in down here now, with whatever they’d come to find. Toby glared about him, ready to jump right out of his skin at the first hint of an excuse. The narrow tunnel leading off before him was barely seven feet high, and not much wider, and it didn’t go far before it branched off into several new tunnels. There were signs on the various walls, but they were all in Latin. Toby decided he wouldn’t ask Gayle if she could translate them, just in case one of them said ABANDON HOPE, ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE. Gayle set off confidently down a side tunnel, and Toby hurried after her, not wanting to be left on his own.
The tunnel branched again and again, until Toby was quickly lost and totally disoriented. He visualized a subterranean maze of tunnels, crisscrossing endlessly under the unsuspecting visitors to the cemetery. He tried hard not to think about the coffins and bodies that were presumably interred somewhere above the tunnel’s earth roof, making himself concentrate on what was before him. Everywhere he looked there were long trails of wiring, stapled into place along the earth walls in a bewildering rainbow of color codings, enough to run all kinds of technology. Presumably there was a generator down here somewhere, but Toby couldn’t hear it running. In fact, the whole place was eerily quiet. Adding to the deserted feel of the tunnels were the piles of rubbish strewn across the tunnel floor. It was pretty recent stuff, too; pizza boxes, fast-food wrappings, and all kinds of crumpled paper. There were also a large number of primed, oversize mousetraps, which Toby preferred not to think about. Gayle sniffed loudly as she kicked something out of her way.
“This whole place could use a woman’s touch. I suppose when you’re preoccupied with solving the mysteries of existence and eternity, you can’t be bothered with cleaning up after yourself.”
The tunnel suddenly opened out into a wide cavern that was again cut directly from the earth, easily thirty feet across but with the same uncomfortably low ceiling. All around the walls stood banks of very much state-of-the-art computer systems, with monitors and terminals piled up and pushed together on rows of wooden tables. There were three different coffee percolators going, and any number of abandoned plastic cups on every available surface. There was a pervading smell of ozone and cheap air freshener. The whole room had an improvised feel to it, as though the many and varied items of equipment had been compiled piece by piece over the years, as required, to no particular plan or order. Gayle stopped, so suddenly Toby almost crashed into her from behind. He looked quickly past her and found that a man was standing directly before them, even though Toby hadn’t seen or heard anyone enter the chamber.
Given the setting, and Toby’s growing fears of what the death-walkers might turn out to be, the newcomer was something of a disappointment. He was of average height, average-looking, and wore the scientist’s traditional white lab coat, complete with pens and pocket protector, over slacks and a shirt that had clearly gone too long between washes. His face was wide and open, his manner calm and pleasant. He was just the kind of person Toby always imagined working on nuclear bombs and germ warfare.
“Hi,” said the newcomer easily. “I’m Glen Jensen. I run things here, as much as anyone does. We’re more of a cooperative really, these days, working together on whatever interests us. We had word from the afterworlds that you’d be coming. Been a long time since you last honored us with a visit, Lady. I’m sure you’ll be impressed by the improvements we’ve made.”
“Don’t put money on it,” said Gayle. “This is all still just a step up from rooting around inside a sheep’s guts and making guesses according to which way the liver’s pointing.”
Toby was rather surprised at her tone. There was a genuine edge of anger in her voice that he hadn’t heard before. If Jensen was at all intimidated, he hid it well. He just nodded to Gayle, then beamed happily as he stepped forward to shake Toby firmly by the hand.
“Not often we get visitors down here. Usually it’s all need-to-know, and all that security nonsense. Still, any friend of the Lady . . . And we’re always glad of a chance to show off our latest toys.”
“Really?” said Toby, his voice a little uncertain; he’d just noticed that Jensen was carrying a gun in a shoulder-holster under his lab coat. “Gayle’s told me so little about you. What exactly do you people do down here?”
“We are death-walkers,” Jensen said proudly. “Explorers of the unknown, scientists dedicated to uncovering the secrets of the last great frontier. Going where no living man has dared to go before, and doing our very best to come back to talk about it afterwards. It’s a dangerous business, venturing out into the afterworlds. There are all kinds of hazards. Some of us don’t come back. Quite a lot, actually. Membership drives are a real problem, and you wouldn’t believe the difficulties we have collecting dues. But the rewards can be . . . exhilarating.”
“Yes,” said Toby. “But what do you
do,
precisely?”
do,
precisely?”
“We die,” said Jensen. “We let our spirits leave our bodies, allow them to explore, for a designated time, and then our resident necromancer draws the spirit back into the body, before it can move on, and he then revives the body. A whole new Near-Death Experience, scientifically evaluated. It’s such fun, and terribly exciting. We’re learning all kinds of things, all the time.”
Toby felt seriously out of his depth. He looked plaintively at Gayle, who shrugged.
“Don’t get too impressed. These people are just the philosophical equivalent of bungee jumpers and sky-divers. A Really Dangerous Sports Club for complete headbangers. They say they’re doing it for Science and Knowledge, but mostly it’s just for the kicks.”
“Facing our fears is what makes us strong,” Jensen said easily. “And fear of death is the greatest fear of all. We have moved far beyond that, here.”
“You’ve moved far beyond sanity,” said Gayle.
“And yet still here you are, coming to us for what you can’t find anywhere else.” Jensen turned pointedly to Toby. “Come with me, and let me show you how we overcome that old devil, Death, every day. Just for the hell of it. We are taking Science into areas where even Einstein and Hawking never dared to go.”
He led Toby around the chamber, ignoring Gayle, naming and explaining the various pieces of high-tech equipment, while Toby smiled and nodded and did his best to look as though he understood more than one word in ten. He could work a word processor and find his way around the Internet, but after that he was pretty much lost. One thing was increasingly clear, though: this was all major-league equipment. Nothing off-the-shelf here. It had the look of cutting-edge technology, where you couldn’t even explain what it was for without speaking fluent maths. Still, Toby felt he ought to say something, since Gayle was manifestly so uninterested and unimpressed by any of it.
“Who pays for all this stuff, Glen? You didn’t get any of this equipment through mail order.”
“Various corporations,” Jensen said smoothly. “You’d be surprised how many top-rank firms are ready to ship us anything we might want, under the counter, in return for access to whatever information the equipment might produce. None of them wants to be left behind, in case we come up with anything interesting, or useful. Corporations are technically immortal entities, these days, so they’re more prepared to take the long view. But, even with all this help, the nature of our business still remains . . . highly experimental.”
“Translation,” said Gayle, “they don’t know what they’re doing.”
“We learn by doing,” said Jensen. “Our limitations arise out of the limits of the human mind. Our explorers into the infinite can only retain and bring back the merest scraps and fragments of information. What we see when we die is apparently so big, so overwhelming, so conceptually
alien,
that it’s hard for the human mind to comprehend it, once it has returned to the material word. What we get mostly are impressions, guesses, and dreamlike memories. Through extensive correlation and cross-checking, we have been able to obtain a few nuggets of hard information . . . Unfortunately, they often tend to contradict one another.
alien,
that it’s hard for the human mind to comprehend it, once it has returned to the material word. What we get mostly are impressions, guesses, and dreamlike memories. Through extensive correlation and cross-checking, we have been able to obtain a few nuggets of hard information . . . Unfortunately, they often tend to contradict one another.
“It’s possible that the nature of the afterworlds is, at least at first, determined by the thoughts and beliefs of the observer; the human mind translating unfamiliar information into acceptable metaphors. It’s all very quantum, really. As below, so above. And of course so much of what we get is meaningless without a context or useful frame of reference. But we persevere! Every scrap of information our volunteers drag back with them is fed into our computers, there to be sorted like with like, in order to build up a clearer, larger picture.
“The death-walkers have been compiling information for centuries, but recent advances in computer technology have made our lives a lot easier. We’re currently comparing and contrasting our compiled data with all existing religious texts, searching for useful correlations and insights. The living human mind may be too small and limited to encompass the afterlife experience, but computer models are theoretically infinite in application. We fully expect to have detailed maps of all the afterworlds, within our lifetime.”
“How long have you people been down here, doing this?” said Toby.
“We have written records going all the way back to the Roman Conquest. Of course, methods then were much cruder. We really peaked during the reign of Elizabeth I, after we’d finally broken away from the Catholic Church and its inflexible doctrines. Of course, we did tend to lose a lot more people in those days. They relied mostly on the terminally ill as subjects, in return for a promise to look after their families. Nowadays, we use volunteers.”
“And what exactly have you learned for sure, after all these centuries,” asked Gayle, “even with your precious computers? What can you tell us for a fact, about where people go when they die?”
“Not a lot that makes sense,” Jensen admitted reluctantly. “Some of our people have reported quite lengthy encounters with the recently deceased and departed, but either the newly dead lie a lot, or they’ve got a really weird sense of humor.”
“The more I hear, the less I like this,” Toby said frankly. “You’re trying to know things we’re not meant to know. Aren’t you afraid someone’s going to turn up and shut you down?”
“No one’s turned up yet,” said Jensen. “Actually, we’d rather like it if
Someone
did. There are all sorts of questions we’d just love to put to Him. Or Her. Or Them. We try to be open-minded around here. Though of course we have to be careful. Keep your mind too open, and you never know what might walk in.”
Someone
did. There are all sorts of questions we’d just love to put to Him. Or Her. Or Them. We try to be open-minded around here. Though of course we have to be careful. Keep your mind too open, and you never know what might walk in.”
“Show me a door,” said Toby. “Right now.”
“We were all terribly excited to hear of Angel’s arrival in town,” said Jensen. “An actual one-time occupant of Heaven or Hell! The things she could tell us . . . Unfortunately, she didn’t take too kindly to the emissary we sent, asking for her cooperation.”
“What happened?” said Gayle.
“She sent back his lungs,” said Jensen unhappily.
“Gift-wrapped. We think she ate the rest. We did try to make contact with the poor man’s soul, but we couldn’t find a trace of it anywhere. Presumably he was too traumatized to hang around, or just possibly she ate that, too. There’s a lot we don’t understand about the nature of the soul. Still, that’s why we’re here! Learning something new every day.”
“I’m here for information,” said Gayle. “Much as it pains me to admit it. I need to talk to the recently deceased. Do you think we could make a start, please?”
“Of course, dear Lady,” said Jensen magnanimously. “I quite understand your embarrassment, having to come to us for what you can’t do yourself, for all your power. But try not to be too uncomfortable. We’re happy to help anyone who comes to us in need, even those who have insulted and belittled our efforts in times past. Come with me, and we’ll get things moving. I’m sure we can help you out with whatever little problem is currently troubling you.”
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