The 13th Horseman - By Barry Hutchison Page 0,21

confirmation. “Right,” Drake scoffed. “And I suppose there’s an Easter Bunny too?”

Pestilence shot Famine an accusatory look. “Well... there was.”

“What? Not this again,” the fat man protested. “He was made out of chocolate!”

“He was carrying chocolate,” War said. “There’s a big difference.”

“Not from where I was standing,” Famine mumbled. He rubbed his blubbery stomach and stared wistfully into space, lost in a fond memory.

“Anyway, all these afterlives and mythological kingdoms,” Pestilence continued, “they’re all separate, but they’re all connected. Certain beings – of which you are now officially one, yay! – can travel between them.”

“I don’t believe that,” Drake said. He crossed his arms across his chest.

“Which bit?” Pestilence asked.

“Any of it. All of it, whatever,” Drake told him. He shrugged. “I don’t believe any of what you just said.”

War’s chair scraped across the floor. He stood up, but had to duck his head to avoid bumping it against the roof. “Right, then, in that case we’ll just have to prove it.” He looked down at Drake. The small patch of face Drake could see behind the big man’s beard seemed to darken.

“Tell me,” War growled. “What do you know about Limbo?”

THE HARSH WINDS of nothingness whistle around him as he streaks through realms undreamed of by the minds of men. He sees the birth of planets and of suns and of vast, sprawling galaxies, and he pays them no heed.

He is there for the other end of creation too. He alone bears witness to the deaths of other worlds, other stars, other universes. For these he does pause, just briefly, to admire the end of all things.

He crosses each dimension between the beats of his black heart. Each one he travels through brings him closer to his goal. Every realm he passes across, from the ancient to the new, brings him one step nearer to his destiny.

And one step nearer to the shed.

IT HAD BEEN nine years since Drake had been to Sunday School, and even then he’d only gone twice.

The first time he’d gone because he’d heard there was going to be a puppet show, and Drake liked puppets. He particularly liked Bert and Ernie, from Sesame Street. Or, at least, he liked Ernie, the fun-loving one with the rubber duck. He wasn’t all that fussed about the po-faced Bert, if he were completely honest, but even back then he’d instinctively known the two came as a package.

The Sunday School show didn’t feature Bert or Ernie, though. It didn’t even feature a rubber duck. Instead, the puppet show was about some guy called Jesus healing something called ‘the leper’.

Drake hadn’t really known what a leper was, but he’d been disappointed by the build quality of the puppet. Every time it moved, bits kept falling off. By the time Jesus got round to healing it, it was little more than a torso with a head.

The second time Drake went to Sunday School was to pick up his coat, which he’d forgotten to take home the previous week. It was during this second session, that he had heard about Limbo. And the bit about moving mountains.

Limbo, he had been told, was a place of absolute emptiness, somewhere between Heaven and Hell. It was sort of a neutral territory – a place for souls who hadn’t done anything bad enough to earn themselves a ticket to eternal damnation, but who equally hadn’t impressed the man upstairs enough to be allowed into Paradise.

At least, that was how Drake remembered the lesson. There was other stuff too, but he’d been busy looking for his jacket by that point, and hadn’t really paid all that much attention.

Which was probably just as well, since more or less everything the Sunday School teacher had tried to tell him was wrong.

Drake stood in the doorway of the shed, looking out on to a vast expanse of sand. Overhead, the sky was a wishy-washy sort of blue – nice, but with a chance of scattered showers later.

He turned away from the door and looked to the three men standing behind him. “How did you do that?” he asked, his voice shaking. “Where’s my house?”

“The house is where we left it,” War assured him. “It’s the shed that’s moved. We’re no longer on Earth. We are in Limbo.”

Drake looked out at the copper-coloured sand. Despite everything, he felt surprisingly calm. “It’s like... Mars or somewhere.”

War and Pestilence stifled a laugh. “‘Mars’,” War smirked. “Now who’s living in la-la land?”

“I could just go a Mars,” Famine panted, salivating slightly. “Don’t