Free The 13th Horseman by Barry Hutchison Page B

back.
    “We’ve arrived,” the giant said.
    “About time too,” Pestilence complained. “I’ve got blisters on my blisters, and this sand is doing my dermatitis no favours, let me tell you.”
    “Sorry, where have we arrived?” Drake asked. He leaned round War, expecting to see more nothing. Instead, he saw a door.
    The door was a glossy white with a brass handle situated almost exactly in the centre. There was a wooden frame round the door, painted to match, on to which the door’s hinges had been screwed. The door and frame stood upright on the sand, with no walls above or around them.
    There was a sign on the door. It was small and rectangular, black in colour, with a gold-painted border. There were two words printed on the sign, also in gold. Drake read them out loud.
    “Staff only,” he said.
    “Right then, sunshine,” War said. His powerful hand wrapped round the door knob. “Walk this way and do not – I repeat, do not – touch anything.”

I T WAS DARK on the other side of the door, and the air smelled faintly of damp. War felt along the rough brick wall until he found the light switch. He flicked it on and the darkness was swept away by a sterile white glow.
    Row after row of lights came on with a clunk . As they did, more and more of the room was revealed.
    At first, Drake thought they were in a garage. Then he thought they were in 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