The Death of Me: A Tor.Com Original Read Online Free

when he still had no reply. “Have you gathered my supplies, Herr Jones?”
    Jones still did not reply. “What precisely are you looking at?” Cabal asked, joining him at the window. They gazed down into the dusty, uninteresting street. It looked uninteresting, but for the dustiness. Cabal felt unilluminated and strangely out of sorts. He’d felt unpleasantly detached from the full experience of reality ever since that nonsense in the carriage with…
    He looked down at his life line. He hadn’t even noticed that it had gone. When he had—for the lack of a better term—died that time, the state of his palm print on returning from that Dark Vale of —ironically enough— No Return had not been of much concern. Now, he couldn’t stop sneaking faux-casual glances at his palm.
    “I fear death, Mr Cabal,” said Jones quietly, his eyes still upon the empty street.
    The words so closely matched Cabal’s own thoughts that he was hardly aware that they had been spoken at all. “I was dead once,” said Cabal distractedly, his attention upon his hand. He didn’t see Jones’s sudden, frightened glance at him. “Years ago. An experiment. I suspended my vital signs for nine minutes and forty-four seconds. I was looking for inspiration, an understanding.” The sight of his restored life line fascinated him. “I didn’t find one. The laboratory grew dark, and then I awoke. Only my instruments assured me that I hadn’t simply fallen asleep.”
    “Did … did you see anything?” Jones was terrified to ask, terrified not to.
    “No. Nothing at all. No afterlife. Although … There is a Hell.”
    “Hell? How do…?”
    “I’ve seen it. Visited. I was alive on that occasion. It wasn’t a pleasant day trip. It wasn’t a pleasant year.” He frowned. This was a conundrum. “I wonder how it was that I didn’t see anything? I would have certainly … Oh. Of course.” He smiled to himself, how had he forgotten that small detail. “I had no soul.”
    It was a small omission. If he had continued the sentence a little further to include “but I have one now,” things might have turned out differently. Cabal realised that later when he analysed the day’s events, but—right then—it seemed an unimportant point. A tiny bit of happenstance that, for scientific reasons, he had seen fit to sell away his soul and that later, for scientific reasons, he had seen fit to recover it.
    He certainly didn’t appreciate its significance at the time, when it might have done some good. The sight of Jones going quite mad with fear unduly distracted him from that conclusion.
    “You!” said Jones, backing away. “It’s you!”
    “Of course it’s me,” replied Cabal.
    This, he was later to realise, was exactly the wrong thing to say at that juncture.
    Jones spoke, but it was in such a paroxysm of dread and terror that the words fell over one another and became shrill, sobbing gibberish. Cabal watched him, utterly nonplussed. What had got into the man?
    Perhaps, Cabal conjectured with a growing sense of threat, Jones’s paranoia had gone too far. Perhaps he, Cabal, had asked Jones to risk his neck once too often. Perhaps Jones had been keeping himself busy between excursions and the rare occasions when anybody actually wanted a hat by constructing an imaginary world of menace and conspiracy—a world that Cabal had accidentally tapped into with his apparently ill-omened comment.
    What happened next happened quickly and Cabal was hardly aware of the chain of events even as they occurred. He simply responded to stimuli, reasoned rapidly and without reflection, and acted upon that reasoning.
    Jones continued to move away from him until he reached the end of the table. His eyes flickered down and he reached for the handle of one of the table’s drawers. Cabal watched him with cautious curiosity, but no real sense of danger.
    Then the pain began.
    It was the living echo of the agony he had felt earlier that same day, burning across