Skypoint by Phil Ford Page B

didn’t need to ask what Alison had told her mother. He knew what lay on the other side of death – real death, the kind that reduced your body to dust. And there was nothing but darkness. There were no long tunnels lit by distant lights, there were no endlessly sunlit gardens where birds sang and loved ones from the past waited, there wasn’t even a cloud.
    There was just cold darkness. And fear.
    Alison had told her mother and she had no option but to believe her. And the lie that kept the human race sane had been exposed.
    She didn’t refuse to talk about Alison’s accident because she was traumatised by the past. She was terrified of the future.
    ‘So now you know,’ she said. She flashed him a harsh, humourless smile.
    Hope was what kept the world going. Hope that one day you would find somebody you could love and trust, hope that you would never lose them; hope that your team won the cup this year; hope that you found that dream job; hope that you would find the money to pay the mortgage. But most of all, hope that one day – whatever you have told yourself over the years – you will find that life really does go on beyond the deathbed.
    ‘There is no salvation,’ she told him. ‘This is all there is. I don’t mind that so much. You know, I’ve actually learned to value life more. Every day counts, you don’t get it again.’
    ‘There’s nothing wrong with seeing life like that,’ Owen told her. ‘The trouble with God is people think they get a second chance. They don’t.’
    Wendy drank from her glass. ‘If this is all there is, we should make the most of it? Absolutely. Where’s your glass?’
    ‘Oh, I’ve put it down somewhere.’
    ‘Have another. While you can,’ and she started to pour wine into another glass.
    Owen hoped that she wouldn’t want to toast living life for today, or something.
    She didn’t. As she poured the wine her eyes misted over again.
    ‘What pisses me off is that my daughter has seen what’s waiting for her.’
    ‘She seems to handle it all right. She’s happy.’
    ‘Yeah.’
    Wendy said it as if that itself scared her a little bit.
    ‘But it’s not going to get her again,’ she told him with quiet defiance. ‘Not for a long, long time.’
    She put the wineglass into Owen’s hand and moved off across the room. He looked at the drink in his hand and felt the urge to knock it back. Wendy Lloyd was right, her daughter had seen what was waiting for her, and was waiting for all of them in that room – even him, perhaps, one day.
    Owen shivered. He hadn’t felt cold, or warm, in weeks. Temperature, like pain, meant nothing to him now. He had almost forgotten how it felt. The last time he could remember feeling cold was in the darkness of death, just before Jack had wrenched him out of it with the resurrection glove. That had been a terrible cold, and he felt it again now. Just for a moment.
    And Owen remembered that there were worse things than being undead.
    His eyes found Toshiko across the room. She was talking to another couple that Owen hadn’t been introduced to. They were both in their thirties, he guessed, and short and fat and dressed as if their invite had read Hawaiian Theme ; they looked like beachballs on legs. Toshiko was laughing with them. And he wondered if he had ever heard her laugh like that before. He didn’t think so. It wasn’t that people didn’t laugh down in the Hub – Jack was often good for a giggle and Ianto had that dry wit of his, and Gwen knew more dirty jokes than the Blues’ locker room had ever heard – but Toshiko usually only smiled and got on with her work. Something was different about her now. Maybe her spritzers were a little heavier on the wine than she normally took them. Maybe she was just more relaxed.
    Owen took in the rest of the room. More people had arrived while he’d been talking to Wendy, there were more than twenty people in the apartment now. None of them looked like good candidates for the