a warehouse. By the time the last row of lights had come on, he could only imagine they were in an aircraft hanger, and a large aircraft hanger, at that.
He was wrong every time. There were no aircraft hangers in Limbo, and no garages, either. There was a warehouse, if you knew where to look, but this wasn’t it.
“Where did this come from?” Drake asked. He turned and pressed his hands against the wall. “Bricks,” he mumbled. “These are... are... bricks. How is that possible? There weren’t any bricks a minute ago.”
“Oh, don’t ask us how it works,” Pest said. He took a neatly folded plastic bag from his pocket and opened it. Then he removed his hat, carefully folded it flat, and slipped it into the bag for safekeeping. “Just accept that it does. Trust me, you’ll save yourself all kinds of headaches. Nod and smile, that’s what I say. Nod and smile.”
Drake nodded, but he didn’t smile. He turned back, keeping one hand on the wall to make sure it didn’t go anywhere, and tried to take in the enormity of the room before him.
He estimated it to be about twenty football pitches long, and the same across. Then again, he had no real idea how big one football pitch was, so this was a wild guess at best.
It was difficult to judge the size of the room with any accuracy, because of its contents. Vast mountains of boxes and bags reached from the floor to somewhere near the ceiling. They stretched out, forming canyons and valleys between the peaks.
There were cardboard boxes, wooden crates, plastic storage tubs and slatted pallets laden with yet more containers. There were black bags, green bags, string bags and hessian sacks, all bulging close to bursting point.
In among it all Drake spotted fourteen rolled-up lengths of carpet, eleven broken picture frames, two vacuum cleaners and a snooker table with a leg missing; all within fifteen metres of where he was standing.
“The Junk Room,” Pestilence announced. He saw the wonder etched on Drake’s face. “Over the years it’s sort of become a storage space for the afterlife. It’s where Heaven, Hell and all the others put the stuff they never use, but can’t bring themselves to throw away,” he explained.
Drake thought about this. There had been a cupboard in his old house, under the stairs. For as long as he could remember it had been full of taped-up boxes, bulging bin bags and a cardboard owl he’d made when he was eight. The entire contents of the cupboard had been packed into the removal van when they’d left the old house, then placed in their entirety in another cupboard in the new house, whereupon the door to that cupboard had been closed.
This, he guessed, was a bit like that, only on a much larger scale.
“Ready for your first challenge?” War asked, turning to face him.
The big man’s voice roused Drake from his daze. “Yeah, sorry, what?”
“Your first challenge,” War said again. “Are you ready?”
Drake shook his head. “What? ‘First challenge’? What do you mean?”
“In order to become the fourth horseman, you must overcome a series of ancient challenges,” War explained impatiently.
“Whoa, what? No one told me about ancient challenges.”
“Must’ve slipped my mind,” War replied.
“Yeah, that seems to happen a lot,” Drake said. “What if I say ‘no’?”
“Then you will be cast for ever into the fiery pits of—”
“OK, OK, I get it,” Drake sighed. “Fine. What do I have to do?”
War gestured at the landscape of junk strewn ahead of them. “Somewhere within this room is the Robe of Sorrows, a flowing robe woven from darkness itself, which will be worn by the fourth horseman upon the Day of Judgement.”
Drake could guess what was coming next. “And you want me to find it.”
“And we want... Oh. Aye,” said War, looking slightly deflated. “That’s the first challenge. Find the Robe of Sorrows.”
“Is that it?” Drake asked. He pointed to a hook on the back of the door. A black robe hung from it, dangling all the way down to the stone floor.
War’s eyes went from the robe to Drake, then back again. He quietly cleared his throat. “Right. Well. Aye. The second challenge,” he said, moving along quickly. “Hidden in this room is the Deathblade, the long-handled scythe that will be wielded by the fourth horseman upon the Day—”
“All right, all right,” Drake muttered. He cast his eyes across the mountainous territory before him. “Any clues?”
“No,” said War firmly. He was clearly still annoyed