Thy Fearful Symmetry

  “If he knew it was me, he wouldn't mind,” Clive whispered. “I'm his best friend. I'm trying to save him.” Conflicting emotions flickered through his eyes. “If you tell me, I won't have to hurt the girl.” His face crumpled, and there was desperation there. “Please don't make me hurt the girl.”

  Calum saw the opportunity, and took it. “Like your wife?” Clive nodded, his face pleading. “I spoke to her, Clive. That's how I found you. She told me that she loved you.” The lie came fluidly, and Calum was shocked at the ease of it. “She wanted me to tell you that.”

  “She's... alive? Heather?”

  The second lie formed on Calum's lips, and stuck there. He saw the hope, pure and radiant, in Clive's eyes, and paused at the thought of feeding it further. Then he remembered Minna, and spat it out. “Yes.”

  Too late. Clive snarled. “Liar!” The lunatic twisted, and Calum flew the few feet to the end of the hall. He slammed into the mirror, the frame crashing to the floor alongside him and showering his face in glass.

  The slicing reminded him of the exploding pulpit in his church the day before, and the curse laid upon him. Yesterday, he had thought he might have years left before he faced his afterlife torment. Now, he thought he was moments from discovering what Metatron had laid out for him.

  Even that fear could not make him lift his head from the carpet. Two feet away, he saw the little girl sitting in a dark doorway, possibly her own bedroom, white and shaking. Further down the hall, a woman in a dressing gown lay face down, her dark mousey curls falling around her face. She was breathing, but unconscious.

  Clive stared at him. From somewhere he had produced a large kitchen knife. “Liars go to hell,” he said, as he raised the blade.

  I know, thought Calum, too tired to put the thought into words.

  Behind Clive, at the far end of the entrance hall, there was movement. A dark shape filled the hallway, advancing impossibly fast. Before Calum could blink in shock, the shape had slammed into the back of Clive, lifting him from his feet and shoving him face first into the wall. There was a crunch, as parts of Clive's face broke.

  The shape was one Calum recognised. “Ambrose,” he muttered, suddenly able to rouse himself.

  The demon looked down, a slender eyebrow raised and a strange, excited hope in his eyes. “I told you not to get distracted,” he said.

  Calum hauled himself to a sitting position, the demon's intentions the only thing on his mind. “Don't kill him.”

  Ambrose swung Clive around. The man was unrecognisable beneath the blood and fresh swelling, but his eyes lit up when he saw the demon. He tried to say something, but his nose and throat were full of blood and snot. Calum understood then that this madman really did know the demon.

  Ambrose did not look so pleased to see him, his lips pursing as he stared at the man. “Sorry Calum. I have to.”

  “He's not well.”

  “I know.”

  “You'll be committing a sin.”

  “By saving a little girl? I don't think so. I’m fixing a mistake. She would not be in danger were it not for me.”

  “Ambrose, they could be coming for you now! There's no time!”

  Ambrose looked down at him. Without looking back up, he swung Clive easily around and let him go, tossing him with breathtaking force down the hallway, over the fallen woman. Clive crashed into the closed door at the end, which shattered under the force, and kept going. The room at the end was dark, but Calum heard glass breaking, and the sounds of the crowd, and knew the man's flight had ended in a three-storey drop to the street.

  “I can always make time for mending my wicked ways,” Ambrose said. He dropped to one knee. “I know you have the box, Calum. Take it to me at the church. Make me listen to you telling me what happened here. Do you understand?”

  Calum didn't. “Take it now.”

  “I can't. I have to take it at the church. Don't ask questions, just get me the damn box. If you don't, everything's going to end.”

  With that, he ran down the corridor to the main door.

  Calum stared stupidly after him, wondering when he was going to wake from this strange, mad dream.

  Ambrose stood on the dais at the rear of the nave, amidst the splintered, blackened remains of the pulpit, and gazed out over his flock. A deviant satisfaction filled him at that phrasing, and then turned to irritation. The wolf might be playing shepherd, but only because it was defanged.

  He tried not to let his misery show on his face. The pews were crammed with worshippers, lit by the dozens of candles on stands along either side of the room. There was a certain peace in their contemplation, even though he knew that many of them were desperate and lost. Three quarters of those before him had very likely never been to church in their lives, and while they knew how to pray, unfamiliarity with the act made them feel foolish and self-conscious.

  Ambrose had known he was going to miss toying with the lives and souls of mortals, but he hadn't realised how deeply hardwired his base urges had become. There had been a commotion as soon as he entered the nave. Cries went up across the room that he should lead them all in prayer, and he had bounded onto the dais before the mob could trap him against a wall, waving his arms for silence.

  “It is not for me to bargain with the Saviour in your place,” he had boomed, liking how his voice bounced back from the cold, stone walls. “Your souls are not mine to broker!” An ironic touch that he couldn't resist. Trapped in the church since the nightclub incident, he needed to have some fun. “Let each man, woman, and child here seat themselves. Bend your heads in prayer and speak to Christ yourselves. He saved you once, and soon he will judge how you have used the salvation bought by his sacrifice. Use this time, as blood flows in the river and fire falls from the sky, to make your peace with God!”

  It was a fine performance, and had sent the crowd scurrying to the pews. For the last hour, they had prayed, desperate murmurs reaching him through the gloom, and Ambrose had paced the stage.

  In part, he was pacing through boredom. While he was shut away from the action, the world appeared to be ending. He also had cause to fear. If the world ended before he could execute his escape plan (where are you Calum?), then he would have nowhere to hide.

  The second reason he was pacing, trying to take a different path with each crossing, was that the blurring of the world around him continued. The floorboards on the dais were a smudged brown, devoid of detail. There were only patches left where he could still see the hard lines between the boards, and he didn't want to stand still for too long for fear of having the floor beneath him vanish entirely. Ambrose was glad that the faithful and faithless alike associated prayer with looking at their own feet. If anybody examined his too closely, he was going to have to come up with an incredibly plausible dismissal of the problem.

  Because most people had seated themselves in the pews, a movement at the far end of the nave caught his eye. Somebody was standing next to the doorway, hands held up to his face.

  There was a dazzling white flash, and Ambrose spent two stupid seconds blinking, before realising that he had been photographed.

  Some in the impromptu congregation tutted, or looked back in irritation, and then returned to their makeshift devotions. They were far more startled to see the priest leap down from the dais, and bolt along the central aisle. Heads turned to follow his run, eyes wide at the speed he managed, but Ambrose ignored them.

  Even at the best of times, he tried to avoid having his photograph taken. Most of the angels and demons on earth did. Their work, for good or evil, was easier when they remained undocumented. Now though, it was more serious still. As he shot along the stone floor, hair flying and jaw set, he tried to think of a harmless reason why somebody would want to take his picture. His imagination provided many, none of them terribly credible. What photographer decided to eschew capturing images of an actual apocalypse in favour of church interiors?

  That picture would be going to agents of one of the two Great Powers. The ph
otographer was unquestionably human - an angel or demon would not have bothered with a photo, but instead simply opened their minds for their superiors to judge the images within. Ambrose had to stop him. While he had been blinking stupidly, the photographer had turned, pushed the door open into the night, and darted out.

  Ambrose hit the door with his shoulder, and it flew back. He was on the path before he had seen it, eyes scanning the surrounding graveyard and street, prepared to leave the sanctuary of holy ground so that he could haul the photographer back inside. It would be a small risk, but worth taking to destroy the photographic evidence.

  Yet as he reached the gate, he skidded to a halt, his momentum such that he had to catch himself on the gate to stop from toppling over it. The graveyard was quiet and still. The street was empty.

  The photographer was gone.

  Ambrose strained his preternatural vision, searching every shadow for a cowering figure, leaning over the fence to check the man was not crouched behind the wall, straining his ears for the scrape of a shoe or the rustle of a coat.

  Nothing.

  Somebody had a photograph of him in the church, and there was nothing he could do about it. Ambrose squeezed his eyes closed, knowing his arrogance had put a time limit on his sanctuary. Why had he wanted to stand in full view of the nave, when he could have hidden upstairs with Pandora?

  Despite the wonders of the fire in the sky, the rivers of blood, and the strangeness of the blurring, only two questions were relevant to Ambrose. Would that photo end up with the Lords of Heaven or of Hell, and would he be able to make his escape before they came?

  “Calum Baskille,” he whispered to the fire lit night. “Where the hell are you?”

  Clive stared upwards at the falling flecks of flame, unable to avert his eyes, unable even to blink to prevent them landing on his eyeballs. Every time one did, there was a flare of heat and brightness, and then everything blurred behind the tear rising up to wash it away. Too broken to summon his own tears, he let the world help. It seemed right. The world owed him something, after the many ways it had betrayed him.

  Ambrose had saved the other man, and cast Clive aside like the sinner everybody else thought him to be. There had been no time for him to explain, for him to warn his friend of the horrors that were seeking him out. Had the angel recognised him beneath the stubble, blood, and bruising?

  Clive was glad that the sky was conspiring to make him cry. It forced his eyes to obey his heart.

  He did not know how fast he had been travelling when Ambrose flung him from the flat. The impact from splintering that interior door like a cannonball had shattered his ribs, sending shards of bone into his lungs and organs. Still reeling from the breathless shock, he did not remember hitting the window, although he did remember the slap of cold air as he span into the night sky. There was a jumble of snapshot images in his head from the brief flight. Stars, and people below, and buildings on fire, and then he had hit the wall of the bank opposite. That was the last breath he could remember taking, a vast expulsion that emptied his lungs. Even when he had fallen the three storeys to the road, he did not remember taking another breath in. All he remembered of landing was whiteness.

  Now he lay there, not moving. People had leaned over him when he first crashed down, eyes wide, but they lost interest as the violence and exhilaration of the crowd swept them along. Clive was just another casualty of this strange night, a statistic for the morning newspapers to collate.

  Clive wondered if he was already dead. His legs splayed at strange angles. His face was inclined backwards, as though his head was resting in a hole, but there was no hole there. The warm wetness at his ears and neck came from the pulped remains of the back of his skull.

  Clive remembered the angel at the police station, and knew that he was not allowed to die yet.

  It took tremendous effort to move his arm. At first he could not remember where it was, how it connected to his body. When he found it, pain found him in return. Agonies jigged through him, from shattered bone, twisted muscle, and crushed flesh. He couldn't even grit his teeth against the tsunami that washed over him, or release it as a scream. All his strength, so much focus that he forgot why he was torturing himself so, went into contracting the muscles of his arm.

  It worked. Slowly, he felt his fingers dragging across the tarmac, through slush and broken glass, until they rested against his pelvis.

  Somebody stepped on his hand, crushing his little finger, but compared to the other torments in his flesh, it amounted to nothing.

  It was like lifting a concrete block, but he dragged his hand up his jeans until it was resting at his pocket, and this time he did grit his teeth, for fear that if he failed to express the effort somehow, parts of him might burst on the spot.

  The shouts of those on the street, the music pouring out of pubs, the sirens and alarms underlying everything, were very far away. Clive realised he couldn't see any colours, that the world was black and white, and panic forced his numbed fingers to move, sliding into his pocket, seeking a single piece of paper.

  He found it, as the sounds the world was making grew more distant, and slid it out using a fingertip that felt like it was tracing slowly over a bed of razors.

  His final effort, perhaps the most extraordinary and heroic thing he had ever done, was to grip the dollar bill between two fingers, and pull his hand up his body, across his expressionless face, to his forehead. He hoped the pyramid and the eye were in the right place.

  Clive tried to banish the pains in his body, and think of the angel. He didn't have much time left. Already, a great cold was sweeping his body, chilling him to the bone, making him wish he had air in his lungs so that he could gasp at the sudden onset of it.

  A figure leaned into his field of vision, frigid blue light emanating from its skin. Clive's angel.

  The creature looked solemn, and sorrowful. It tutted as it gazed down at him, and Clive wanted to say that it was all right, that he didn't blame the angel for his dying, that he just wanted to be free of the pain now.

  “Oh, my sweet,” the angel said, not caring that the crowd around it had stilled, had turned to witness its presence with something close to terror. Don't worry, Clive wanted to tell them. This is something beautiful. They couldn't hear him, and clutched each other. Clive thought of trapped animals, too scared to turn their backs on a predator, edging away in the hope that careful movements would not rouse it. Calum hated them all for their ignorance, even while he froze beneath the angel's presence.

  “I did not want this for you, Clive Huntley,” the angel said. “This was not my plan. Do you believe me?” Clive did, but could say nothing. The angel understood anyway. “I see you found our errant Ambrose. Poor, confused soul did not recognise you, I expect. Don't worry, he has been found and reported to us. We will retrieve him shortly.”

  Clive was confused, but glad. That he had failed in his task, and Ambrose had been found anyway, made him ever more sorrowful that he was dying. It felt so pointless.

  “Do not fear, Clive. You tried to do us a great service. You are loyal, and strong. We value that. It is wrong, to leave you with nothing after such devotion.”

  Can you fix me? Can you make me whole?

  “I have a gift for you, which you must pass on to all you meet. It is Judgement Day, a grand occasion, and many shall receive life everlasting. I want you to deliver that gift. I shall give it you, and you shall pass it on. Do you agree to this?”

  The tears on Clive's motionless face were real now. He wanted what the angel described so much. He wanted to be able to give to people, not simply take away, to compensate for all he had done in the last twenty-four hours.

  The angel smiled, and for a moment Clive thought those lips looked cruel. He dismissed the notion immediately, casting it to the pit of his subconscious as blasphemy.

  Then the angel raised his hand, and crunched it into Clive's chest.

  Despite everything, Clive arched his back and screamed as the cold f
roze his blood to ice, and his last semi-rational thoughts fragmented like fog in a gale.

  The crowd went berserk, their cautious retreat becoming a horrified stampede as the naked, glowing man pulled Clive's heart from his chest, and hurled it into the air with a sneer.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  The church sat on a smooth edged pinnacle of rock. Ice vapour poured upwards from the abyss, wrapping around the building like a cotton wool noose. There was nothing else to see except the void, which extended infinitely in all directions. The vast stalagmite, thrusting from an impossible depth, was the centre of the universe.

  Shadows made the vapour surrounding the church dance. Shapes that Melissa knew would drive her mad to see clearly clung to the rock face beneath the building, constantly shifting position, waiting for the signal to strike. Melissa glimpsed tentacles, and blades, and fingers made of bone digging deep into the cliff face, and teeth, and tongues, and dripping, beating hearts hanging from the outsides of feathery chests. Each creature was a menagerie in itself, full of malice and untouched by the cold. Others clambered from the depths to join them, a vast, depraved strike force called to arms.

  Melissa ignored them, knowing that the two-storey building was what she had journeyed to see, and swooped bodiless over the ranks of Hell. Some irrevocable force prevented her from crossing the lines of the building's walls, forbidding her even from passing directly above the building, and she circled it in frustration.

  She couldn't remember what she was looking for, exactly, only that she couldn't go back without witnessing it. Death had sent her on this quest, and he would not tolerate failure lightly. Time was against her.

  As she scanned the stones for some clue that might tell her how to force entry, air buffeted her from above, disturbing her flight, and she realised she was not alone. Glancing up, she saw light, and vast white wings, and grim determination – a celestial warrior clutching a spear of fire. The vision had company, many dozens of comrades flying in tight formation, a whole flock intent on their destination. They glided past her, the perfect hum of their existence making Melissa feel dirty and worthless.