Archive of Our Own

Harriet followed the corridor. She had the impression that she had been doing so for quite some time, though no number that came to mind – five seconds? three minutes? an hour? – seemed at all plausible. She did not know the place, but there was at least no possibility of missing her way, for there were no turnings. The walls were lined with arches, all of some greyish material that was clearly meant to suggest stonework; a candle flickered in each arch. Her footsteps made no sound on the tiled floor.

Her hands were empty, but the sensation of something being missing was as palpable as the bag she might have been carrying. There was a broad wooden, or wood-ish, counter running the width of the end wall; but when she reached it she saw that in fact the corridor turned a sharp left. Here she stopped. She hesitated for a while at the desk, but nobody came to greet her. There was no bell, and that felt, somewhat obscurely, something of a relief. After an interval that seemed like a decent time to wait (there was no clock; surely there should have been a clock) she followed the left-hand turn.

This led her back on herself, and the corridor widened into something more like a room, if not a hall. The increased size made it correspondingly dimmer.

‘I don’t like the look of this one bit,’ she said aloud.

‘My thoughts exactly.’ The voice came from the far end of the room. She turned towards it.

The boy – he must have been ten years her junior – raised his glass to her with a world-weary grimace. He was lolling on some kind of angular dark bench, his feet on a box that seemed to be serving as a table.

The long rectangular mass down the side of the room resolved itself into a bar. As soon as the thought had crystallised in her mind, there was a glass in her hand. For want of anything better to do, she carried it over to the bench where the boy sat.

He made a nonchalant gesture that conveyed the idea that she was welcome to join him or not, as she chose. She sat, and, faintly aware of some ill-omened precedent, but not really caring if things got any worse, sipped at her drink.

He nodded at it. ‘Any good?’

‘I’ve had worse.’ The worst one could say of this beverage, whatever it was, was that it didn’t taste of much.

He took a pull of his own drink. ‘I know I’ve had better. The infuriating thing is that I can’t remember them any more.’

Harriet was not sure whether she found this encouraging or not. She settled for a non-committal ‘Hmm.’

‘And why are you here?’

‘I don’t know where I am, never mind why.’

‘Nobody at the desk? They are slack these days. This, madam, is the antechamber to Acheron; the hallway to Hades; I’d like to say, the prelude to Purgatory, but that seems presumptuous. I’ve been here some time, and I’ve yet to find out what lies beyond.’

‘I’m dead, then?’ She couldn’t remember anything about it at all: a relief somewhat to be grudged, after the long nights where the gallows had danced between her eyelids and her mind.

He patted his left side. ‘I most certainly am. And, since you don’t seem to be in the least surprised, I assume you were anticipating it. May one ask how?’

‘I was under sentence of death. It seems to have been executed.’

For the first time, a spark of interest broke through his languid demeanour. ‘Indeed? For what?’

‘Murder.’

He sat up straighter. ‘That can’t be all there is to it, or you wouldn’t be here.’

‘I didn’t kill the man. Sometimes I wished him dead.’

‘That might explain why you’re here, but not why you’re dead yourself.’

‘Circumstantial evidence. I bought poison.’

His eyes narrowed. ‘To be served to whom?’

‘Nobody. I needed to see if it was possible.’

His scepticism was obvious; he said, ‘Well, they’d have hanged you for buying it where I come from, regardless of what you were going to do with it. That gives me a chance, I suppose. Was it hanging?’

‘I can only assume so.’ She put a hand up to feel her neck. Nothing out of the ordinary. It seemed indelicate to ask, but the boy had not let such scruples trouble him, so she enquired in return: ‘And you?’

A rueful smile. ‘Fair fight, and to you I think I might admit it was my own fault: no foul play, but a little fool play.’

‘From yourself?’

‘From my friend – who I’ve yet to see here.’ He gazed down the length of the room, past the empty niches formed by rough columns, arching and interlacing like tree branches, and looked, suddenly, very lost. ‘I’ve seen none of my fellows here. I can only think they have gone straight to – wherever their place is.’

‘While you wait?’

He grimaced. ‘If you can call this waiting. It’s possible that my fate is to remain here forever, minding my own business for eternity as I failed to in life. If so, nobody’s ever seen fit to tell me.’

‘Who would tell you?’

‘Someone’s in charge of this place. God knows who. And I’m not sure that it is God. One feels that the Divine ought to have set things up more logically.’

‘It may be that they just don’t know what to do with you,’ she suggested. She shifted in her seat; she was not exactly uncomfortable, but once again had the impression that she ought to have been. ‘Is that how it goes, then? We wait?’

‘Not necessarily. You see there’s nobody else here. There’s a small ritual. A test, if you like.’ He had returned to his original flippant tone. ‘It may well go your way. There does seem to be some sort of sense to the result, and by your account you were a fool, but perhaps I was a damned fool. We shall find out.’

‘And if I refuse?’

‘Well, I suppose in that case I shall enjoy your company until you become bored enough to investigate.’

Once again curiosity won out. ‘Go ahead, then.’

He smiled wryly and reached into a small pouch that hung at his belt. ‘It’s nothing fancy. Heads or tails?’

‘Oh. Tails.’

If that told him anything, she couldn’t see what. He tossed the coin; she followed it with her eyes: it spun high in the air, catching the candlelight, winking as it turned and fell, dazzling her with an unexpected glare.

She blinked, once, twice, and the brightness resolved itself: not a roundel now, but a square, striped with dark lines. And she was alone, sitting up in her narrow bed, and the silence had thinned, melted; and it broke to the sound of a rattle and a clank in the passage outside, and the patter of rain on the barred window of her cell.

She blinked again, and nothing changed. Well. In spite of everything, she had been granted another day, then. And one never knew…