Posh Boy and Dead Boy

XXII

Hugo’s observing mind did something very strange. It flipped from ‘seeing’ nothing to sensing blackness around him. He lost that momentary sense of vertigo, for sensation had returned. Cold stone was under his bare feet and rushing water was nearby. Then, with infinite comfort, he felt a warm hand take his and a very familiar voice said in his ear. ‘Yes Posh Boy, you’re dead. We’re both Dead Boys now.’

Humour bubbled up in Hugo’s soul, and dispelled fear and confusion. ‘Dead maybe, but still more stylish than you, Lucacz my love.’ He thought back to his previous experience of the passage of the soul, when he received the victims of the Brentheim massacre. ‘So where’s this particular place “where the barriers are thinnest”? Doesn’t seem to be the old castle at Terlenehem.’

It was still dark where they were and the darkness had a strange quality of solidity in that place, it was a dark of incalculable age. ‘Could do with some light here,’ Hugo observed.

‘A reasonable request,’ said a third voice, the voice of Karl Wollherz, and the darkness retreated. Hugo looked around, they were in a large, high cavern with a floor of slate and black sand through which rushed, foamed and tumbled a dark torrent.

‘Looks very symbolic,’ Hugo remarked. ‘Is this the Styx? If so where’s the boat’

‘You what?’ asked a puzzled Lucacz.

‘Somehow I expect you to know such things,’ sighed Hugo, ‘all experience to the contrary.’

‘Herr Winschel’s penny school at Tarlenheim didn’t teach that sort of thing 250 years ago,’ sniffed Lucacz. ‘And I only attended for one term. This is a cave deep under the Kaleczyke Horja. You’ve not come that far from where the NKVD man shot you in the guts.’

‘It’s a deeply sacred place, though as yet unknown to humans,’ said Karl. ‘But one day a revenant boy will consecrate it to a great purpose and it will play its part in the salvation of one of Heaven’s angelic orders.’

Hugo was distracted by the appearance around him of a small crowd of naked youths he recognised as the Brentheim boys. ‘Hugo!’ bellowed a tall youth of the apparent age of eighteen, the boy called Anton Waclawic whom he’d helped pass over at the castle of Tarlenheim. With him were his twin brothers, Jan and Mikhel, as well as Sanczu Jankovic, the first ghost he had met. He was warmly hugged by all of them.

‘So you’ve fulfilled your fate, Hugo,’ observed Anton.

‘Have I?’ Hugo asked Karl and Lucacz.

‘With triumph,’ Karl assured him.

Hugo was not convinced. ‘Really? The last act of my life was a tale of squalid rape, torture and pointless death in a doomed assault on a Nazi fortress. Please correct me if I’ve got that wrong.’

Karl looked over at the boy, Anton Waclawic. ‘You tell him, Lord Seer,’ he said.

Anton grinned. ‘With pleasure, Lord President of the Great Council. Hugo, in the brief time you were a captive you made friends with a Russian boy, Vasya, and the last thing you did in life was to throw yourself between Vasya and the bullet that would have killed him, but instead killed you.’

‘So … greater love hath no man, and all that. But how was that act, however selfless, so important as to bring the Dead back into the world of the living to make sure it happened?’

‘That would be because it saved the life of Vasily Alexandrovich Arkhipov.’

‘Vasya is that important? He was a kind, brave and cheerful boy, but nothing special other than that the KGB and NKVD wanted him dead, which I guess is a recommendation of sorts.’

Anton shrugged. ‘Vasya is more than he appeared to you. The seers amongst the Dead, of whose Council I am now numbered, long ago determined that there will be junctures of events so critical that they threaten humanity’s very existence. Vasya lies at the heart of one of the most dangerous of them. Eighteen years from now, he will be a senior naval officer in the Russian submarine fleet in the Atlantic Ocean. His damaged vessel will be isolated and cut off from his fleet command, and it will be being hunted by American surface ships. Vasya’s captain will decide that Russia and America are at war, and he will contemplate launching an attack on the American fleet with a weapon of dreadful power, the very use of which will trigger that very war and lead to a military exchange so cataclysmic that it will sterilise the world and all but destroy the human race. The submarine captain will need two of his command team to agree with his reading of the situation before he could use the weapon. One of the two will be Vasya, and he will refuse to go along with his commanding officer’s reading of the situation. And so, because of Vasya, the world will not end, and the Dead’s greater schemes will come to pass … and all because of you, Hugo.’

‘Oh …’ Hugo was lost for any further words in the face of that revelation. Instead there were pressing questions. ‘Where is Vasya now, Karl? What will happen to him?’

‘The attack on Kaleczyk will fail … has failed. The POWs, poor fellows, are being dispatched en masse by SS death squads. But that will not be Vasya’s fate. He escaped out of the tunnel and fled into the valley of Andreshalch, where a team from General Tarlenheim’s resistance brigades was waiting for him, led by Colonel Sachert.’

‘Waiting?’

‘I arranged it by means of your sister Euphemia. We talk to her. She knows you have died, and she will inform your family. Your body unfortunately will not be recovered, but will be burned by the SS along with those of the executed Russians. I had hoped that it would be honourably laid in a slot in the Tarlenheim Grüft amongst your ancestors, but sadly not. Vasya will be looked after by the resistance till he’s recovered and means will be found to return him to a frontline unit of the Red Army, one without an NKVD Komissar.’

Hugo thought for a while in silence and then asked, ‘And what of the mad seraph, Tobias?’

Karl shrugged. ‘His plotting amongst men has ended for now, we think. He underestimated the deviousness and treachery of humankind, which was more than his match. Ironically in the end he was overthrown by his own naïvety in the face of human rivals. He was easy for Korngeibel to overthrow, once he was aware of the danger and Prince Leo had given him the necessary material. Tobias was not so foolish as to obey the summons to Berlin, where arrest and summary execution awaited him. He could not have actually been harmed by human weapons, but his unmasking as something other than human would not have served his cause. He is not that mad as yet.’

‘So where is he? Has he returned to the World Beyond?’

‘We do not know. He still has his seraphic power, and the likelihood is that he has fled into the current of time, which is a possibility open to him. His appearance in the Reich in this time confounded our seers, we think now it was because he had time-travelled here from an unfixed future for an unknown purpose. His safest option would be to return to that future and pick up his allotted space in that time. What he will do there we do not know, but I fear we will find out sooner or later. His aim is still to frustrate the Elphberg restoration and eventually to destroy humanity, but he will look for other instruments and other means no doubt.’

Lucacz took Hugo’s arm. ‘Ready to go onwards, Posh Boy?’

‘Is it time?’

‘You know you’re dead, baby. Your after-image has settled; you’ve got your hair back thank God. It was your best feature. So yes, you and I are ready to pass on into Eden and head for the Isles, and this time there’s no coming back for me. I’m ready to settle down with the man of my dreams in a place beyond dreams.’

Hugo contemplated his cheeky, honest, loyal and loving companion, and with a pang of great affection took Lucacz in his arms, kissing him thoroughly. ‘I love you Dead Boy. You and I have been destined for each other, and at last I know why. But there is one last thing I need to do in this world, and you can help.’

Lucacz looked puzzled. ‘Is this going to get us into trouble?’

‘I want to haunt someone.’

‘Who … what? Oh I get it. Good old Feemy.’

‘How do you read my mind, Dead Boy? Yes, I need some words with my sister. Can we do it?’

‘You’re a hero, Posh Boy. No one will refuse you a thing now. Hold my hand. I’ll show you how we travel in this world. By the way, we’ll appear naked, and I for one don’t intend to accommodate your sister’s probable squeamishness about male genitalia on display.’

***

Euphemia von Tarlenheim was not a happy woman. Her idiot youngest brother had got himself killed, which made her deeply sad and also deeply annoyed. Sad, because she loved her little brother, which might have come as a surprise to Hugo considering the amount of scolding and disapproval that had come from her direction since he had been a toddler. But the manner of his death annoyed her intensely. The World Beyond had seized on her brother for its arcane purposes, and seduced him into a relationship with a very dubious spirit, and that shade had then lured him to his death at Kaleczyk. So her glare at Lucacz when he appeared in her Medeln workshop was fully as poisonous as she intended it to be.

‘Hey Feemy!’ Lucacz hallooed cheerily. ‘Don’t say you’re surprised to see us. I’m your brother-in-law now, Feemy sis. Me and Hugo are married.’

‘We are?’ Hugo responded. ‘I don’t recall saying “I do”.’

‘It was part of the deal when I took this job. You’re my dream lover, baby.’

‘I think I still have a choice,’ Hugo declared.

‘So … wanna?’

Hugo caught the longing and pleading edge in Lucacz’s gaze, and his heart took him aback with the wash of love it had for this eccentric spirit who had guarded, guided and comforted him loyally. ‘Course I do, nutcase,’ he confirmed. They embraced and kissed. Hugo realised that in his present form his astral body partially melted into Lucacz’s and when it did he experienced a powerful erotic charge far more intense than any human copulation he had ever experienced.

Don’t mind me, please.’ Euphemia grumbled.

‘Ooops, sorry,’ Hugo said, noting that his penis had swelled to an enormous facsimile of human lust, and sternly refused to let his hands clasp over his groin as he turned to his sister.

‘Time to say goodbye, Feemy,’ he said. ‘I died my death, and whatever you may assume, it was for a good and sufficient purpose.’

Euphemia favoured her brother with a sour look, a look which focused anywhere but on his midriff. ‘Nice of you to say goodbye, Hugo. We’ll miss you. I’m trying to mastermind a memorial, though it is difficult. It’ll get around that you died working for the Rothenian resistance, but we can’t say you were involved in the Kaleczyk fiasco. We need to pin that on Horvath and his Soviet sponsors. We keep a register of all out people who fell in the line of battle, and I see your name one day inscribed in gold on a prominent tablet recording heroes of the Resistance which will be erected in a free Strelzen; free of Nazis and free of Communists too.’

Hugo smiled and nodded, ‘That’ll do. The Dead were sorry I won’t get my slot in the Grüft, but it was never part of the deal.’

‘Time to go, lover,’ said Lucacz.

‘It is? Okay.’

‘Take my hand, Hugo. Next stop Eden.’

***

‘Who are all these people?’ a bemused Hugo asked, scanning a huge crowd gathered under the eaves of the Unlikely Forest to greet him. ‘And a lot of them are not even people,’ he added.

‘It’s a tradition in the World Beyond to greet souls,’ Lucacz replied. ‘The pegasuses are a recent addition, but they’re party people and they’ll turn up for anything. It’s sweet.’

‘Am I that famous on this side of the bourn?’ Hugo mused. ‘I only got myself shot. Millions of young people did no more over the past five years, and I’ll bet they didn’t get this reception.’

‘True enough, Hugo. You accepted death willingly for the greater good, as they did, but the eyes of the World Beyond have been on you for years and each episode of your adventures has gripped the whole community of the Dead, especially when Jonas Niemand got involved. He has billions of fans across the Final Sea, that boy.’

‘So what happens next, Lucacz?’

‘We walk down the river to the Isles of the Blessed.’

‘In a big mob, like this?’

‘Nope, just me and you, but we won’t be alone. Your supporters here will be watching over us as we go.’

‘Watching over us? And why do we need watching?’

‘Let’s go. Follow your Lucacz, baby.’

The two boys set off along the banks of the River of Life heading downstream. The party behind them sent them off with back-slapping and cheers, which followed them for miles. Hugo was curious as to what dangers they faced.

Lucacz snickered. ‘You? Not much. You are now one of the greater spirits of this place. But elementals are a danger for some of the deceased in Eden.’

‘What? Beings like that evil bastard Mammon? They prey on the newly Dead?’

Lucacz shrugged. ‘No, not Mammon now, not after he got on the wrong side of Jonas Niemand. But there are many others of them in Eden, and they cluster around the River, much though they may dislike it. They sniff out souls that interest them, and if they find them sometimes they …’ The boy paused, looking stumped, for some reason.

‘They what, Lucacz?’ pressed Hugo.

‘Er … I wanted to say “they eat them” but it’s not necessarily accurate.’

‘Eat them? Elementals cannibalise departed souls?’

‘Umm no, more like absorb them. But it’s rare they can do that, the soul has to be really deranged and tainted before it’s weak enough to be absorbed. And no one is quite sure what happens to a consciousness that has been absorbed by an elemental.’

***

Lucacz took Hugo’s hand and drew him to a halt. They were far down the river and could just glimpse the ridge of hills beyond which was the dark lake of Avalon.

‘What’s up, Lucacz?’ he asked.

‘Can you feel it, Posh Boy?’ came the reply.

‘The cold grip on your soul. Something horrible is happening here.’

Hugo focussed, then indeed saw something strange just inland of where they were standing. At first it just seemed like a ripple in reality, but as he concentrated he appeared to catch a pleading voice.

‘No. don’t go any nearer, Posh Boy,’ said Lucacz.

‘Should we not help?’

‘It’s an elemental. Lust I think. It’s got a soul in its grip.’

Hugo concentrated and the ripple in reality settled. A naked human figure was restrained by a crouching ogre. It was impaled on its enormous phallus and struggling.

‘Fuck!’ exclaimed Lucacz. ‘You recognise the guy? It’s that shit, Sergeant Major Brückner. Lust is consuming him. Amazing someone that morally crippled could have got so far down the river. Well, his victims have the ultimate revenge. Now I wonder if Lust stalked him till it could take Brückner in a place you might see it all happen.’

‘Do elementals act in any such a way? As agents of vengeance?’

‘In your case they might. You have very powerful friends in the World Beyond, and the elementals respect the powers that rule here. The fate of Mammon shook them all up I think.’

***

The two dead boys sat on the short grass on the green bluffs that overlooked the Isles of the Blessed. Lucacz pointed out the island capped by a white tower. ‘That’s the Isle of Meeting, where the Council of the Dead sometimes talk to living humans. And that one to the left is the Isle of Dwelling, where the Dead brought the pegasuses when they left Earth. Karl Wollherz and Prince Willem Stanislas of Glottenberg ran a school there teaching the pegasuses to speak Rothenian.’

‘Solemn sort of place,’ Hugo observed.

‘The pegasuses tell me they were glad to move to the Unlikely Forest in the end. They’re not a solemn people.’

‘So what now, Lucacz?’

‘I’m not entirely sure. Back when I died, I got this far and that’s when He appeared.’

‘Er … He?’

‘The Nameless Seraph. The Angel of Death.’

‘Oh … that sounds scary.’

‘Well. You’d think so. But he was really a pleasant person, like a friendly uncle type. Quite unlike the other erelim, way more human, but then he meets a lot of people. Anyway we had a cheerful chat and he ushered me towards the passage across the Final Sea, beyond which is our destination, the Kingdom of the Dead. And he gave me my assignment.’

‘Your assignment?’

‘Before we go to the World Beyond some of us are given an indication of how our talents will be used. Now, I never knew I had any talents other than grooming horses, but we had a long talk and he told me I was to be one of the Walking Ghosts. It’s a melodramatic name of a department which assists the Council of Seers. We’re sent on random assignments to gather intelligence in the Living World.’

‘Hmm? You’ve been a spy for the Dead in the Real World! How come you didn’t know what date you died when I first talked to you? You must have had chances to catch up with the time line.’

‘Typical Posh Boy. We don’t all have your passion for knowledge and events. That’s not my strength. The Nameless One said what attracted his attention to me was my “verbal facility and alertness to character”. He said that’s what an agent in the Living World needed. And he’s right. I’ll talk to anyone, and I usually make sense to them.’

Hugo pondered those remarks, and had to admit their justice. ‘Don’t get used to it, baby, but I’m going to agree with you. Time and again your connections with people who were born over two centuries after you died took me by surprise. No wonder you got on with Count Oskar Maxim. Is he a Walking Ghost too?’

Lucacz giggled. ‘Nah! Way too grand. He’s on the Council.’

‘What’s that?’

‘The Council of the Dead decides policy and monitors events in the Living World. Karl Wollherz is its President at the moment. Before him it was the Lady Fenice, your many times great grandmama. It’s different from the Great Council of Heaven, which is run by the erelim mostly, and I suspect Tobias might still have influence there.’

Two strong hands took the boys’ shoulders, and drew them to the figure who had appeared between them. ‘Hello lads,’ he said.

Hugo looked around. The newcomer was a powerful figure of a man, though he knew he was no more a man than was Tobias the seraph in human form. The form he had adopted was of a strongly built mature male, with a square but sympathetic face. He was dressed in a German army tunic, and carried a stout walking stave, which he lay down at his side.

‘Well done to you both,’ he continued. ‘Though I’m not supposed to have anything to do with the factions of the World Beyond, you played a good, brave game and won it triumphantly. So I applaud you both. Because of your sacrifice, Hugo, the world will live to witness the coming of the One and will experience the salvation he will bring to humanity. And now I am come to bear you onwards to your long reward, where you will each live in honour and in the love of a boy who is your equal in many ways.’

‘You are the Nameless Seraph, sir?’

‘I am, so excuse me from introducing myself.’

‘Er …’ Hugo stuttered, ‘how do conversations with you usually go?’

The seraph chuckled, ‘The newly departed have many questions. So let me pre-empt the common ones. There is a heaven but no hell. Hells are what the human race create on Earth. You will meet your loved ones where you are about to go beyond the Final Sea. But I would warn you that though they will still love you, they will not be exactly as you remember. Neither of you has been married even once, so you needn’t worry about the complications it creates, especially if you married more than once. One of the things that takes the longest for the Dead to learn is that the morality of the living does not apply beyond the Final Sea. There are theologians of the middle ages there who are now happily married to other men, living in the ‘unnatural vice’ they spent their lives condemning. In your particular case you two boys from different ages are already as married as any two boys ever have been, and your life together in the Afterlife will be a blessing to you and all who know you. There now, is that everything?’

Lucacz sniggered. ‘You gave me the same pep talk on this spot 250 Earth years ago, sir. But I do have a question you may be able to answer.’

‘Ask away, young hero.’

‘Thank you sir. It’s about Tobias, your … colleague. What’s happened to him?’

The seraph frowned. ‘I had a chance to confront the rogue seraph at a deathbed where he came upon me unexpectedly. There he discovered that the Great Council was aware of his treason, a revelation which I had hoped would have been enough to shake his complacency and bring him back to his duty. I am not sure it was, though he has at least returned to his proper place in the stream of time, which has been taken by the court of Heaven as his acquiescence to my rebuke. There he has resumed his place in the fight against the future Antichrist in a time three human generations in the future when an Elphberg king sits on the throne of Rothenia, and the One is about to appear.’

‘You don’t seem convinced he has truly submitted to Heaven’s mandate, sir,’ said Hugo.

The seraph smiled. ‘Hugo, dear boy. You read people well. The order of erelim do not fully understand how corrupted their prince is by his experience of sensuality. They do not appreciate how his incarnation and initiation into sexuality has broken his mind. Had I a voice on the Great Council I would have urged that he be rendered human and sent back into the world to learn about these things properly and establish his personhood.’

‘You seem very wise to the ways of the world, sir.’ Hugo smiled. ‘You remind me of Jonas Niemand.’

The great seraph guffawed. ‘The Satan and I have a lot in common. We both have studied the human condition with more sympathy than most of the powers in the Court of Heaven. It will be his crown of glory one day, when he comes to this place after his real death, to pass across this lake to the World Beyond, where you now go, my children.’

Lucacz asked. ‘Do I carry on as a Walking Ghost, sir?’

The seraph nodded. ‘You do, my boy, and your success in this tortuous affair will bring you promotion to head of that department, and with you will work your Hugo. What a team you will make!’

With those words, there was a deadening in the air around them, and a jolt in the region of their stomach. They took each other’s hand as the sky wheeled and a sense of terrifying motion seized them. A vast water was beneath them and a great and mountainous land lay open before them.

THE END