Highway To Hell (33 page)

“Of course, whenever you need it,” Becky whispered in his ear, enjoying the fluttering sensation the flitted in the pit of her stomach, like nerves before an exam. Although in Becky’s case the most recent memory that had caused her to be nervous was the night of her first ever trick.

“What’s that?” Helen asked, pointing at a cluster of orange veins, which they now saw ran beneath everything.

Before any of the angels could offer their explanations, Graham popped up with a simple one.

“It’s Hell, my dear. Or so they want us to think.” The last sentence was spoken with the tone of a true conspiracy theorist.

“Oh, it’s more than Hell, old man.” Sariel stepped forward to speak. His voice was hoarse, like that of a man with a sixty a day habit. “The Hell you think of, even in your wildest variations thereof, cannot be compared to the kingdom Lucifer has established. Your world would be swallowed whole, absorbed without even upsetting the balance down there, which, given how fragile it is, should be regarded as nothing more than embarrassing.”

Graham said nothing. There was no need for him to speak; the three angels already knew what he would say. He could feel them rooting around in his head, plucking at his thoughts the instant they formed, sometimes before he had even heard them.

Keep your doubts, old man. It doesn’t matter. I’ll send you back down there myself the moment you stop being of any use,
a voice said – well, it didn’t speak, but rather came from inside Graham’s head. He didn’t know who it was; possibly a combination of all three of them. Either way, Graham knew a threat when he heard one, and decided it was best to play simple.

… Although…

…He didn’t think it. He was careful not to do that.

“Okay, so it is Hell, I’m not going to disagree either way. I mean, I know what I saw and went through down there,” Becky said. Now it was her turn to hold onto Sammy for support. “What you’re trying to say is the end of the world is coming; Armageddon and all that shit. Only you say it has always been like this and now the walls have gotten a little thin, like an aneurysm waiting to happen, and you have no idea how big it’s gonna be?” She let the words flow, aware that it didn’t exactly make sense, but they were stuck inside her and she needed to get them said. They just happened to come out in a flood.

The angels looked from one to another, as if conferring. Once again it was Nemamiah who spoke. “You think of it in such simple terms. The world you think of as being the centre of your universe will not be destroyed, nor will the people in it – not all of them, at least. They will simply be overrun. When the barriers to your world begin to break, beings will emerge. First it will be the lower level sentient beings, like those you encountered. They will overrun your world and fill it with terror, getting ready for the cracks to open wider and allow the Kingdom of the Damned to take control. To answer your question, if that is even what it was, then no, this isn’t new. Cracks appear all the time and beings escape, as do souls – those brave enough to fight through their way through the torture racks and pain thresholds. We do our best to keep it to a minimum, although there are always a few who manage to evade us. It is just that this time… this time something big is brewing, and...” Nemamiah looked across at the other two as he spoke. Once again they seemed to smile at him, a wry smile that none of them noticed, not even Nemamiah, who had returned his stare to the group.

”You don’t know what it is, do you?” Graham piped up, seeming to take quite some degree of pleasure in the statement.

“Lucifer was thrown from Heaven after a great war within our family. He questioned our Father’s decision’s. We tried to reason with him, we tried to help him find his faith, but his anger made him powerful, more powerful than many of us realized. So there was a war, civil war. The angels fought amongst themselves, our purity was ruined, and our Utopia was ripped apart like the Garden of Eden had been after the touch of mankind. With our brother Michael leading our army, we banished Lucifer and his followers from Heaven. As punishment his soul was tainted, meaning he couldn’t find a vessel on earth, and so he fell deeper, into the very bowels of the universe itself,” Nemamiah said with the soothing tones of a storyteller. All five of them stood captivated by his words.

‘You mean the like the core of the earth?” Helen asked clumsily.

“No, female, that is not what we mean. We mean the bottom of the universe, the basement of all existence. It is here that he came to rest, and even that was too good for him, the traitor,” Sariel began, but he was cut short

“Sariel, bite your tongue or offer penance,” Nemamiah bellowed. The power of the voice was enough to make the group of mortals jump, and had it been directed at them they were all certain that it would have been too much and turned them into liquefied jelly puddles. Thankfully, however, it was directed at Sariel, who shrank visibly, and took several steps backwards. Even Nakir seemed to shrink away. Then, as if nothing had happened, Nemamiah continued talking.

“Lucifer fell. By your own way of calculating the passage of time, he fell for millennia, before landing on a desolate piece of rock at the bottom of the universe, the edge of all existence. So fierce was the wrath that God unfurled on him after his defeat. It was there, on a small rock fighting for its survival in the truest possible sense, that Lucifer began to create his realm. Four of his followers survived the descent and impact. Their bodies were broken and disfigured, twisted into hideous beings with a thirst for revenge that consumed them completely. Lucifer saw his chance and so fuelled their rage with crazy promises and desires, the same way Gollum was consumed by the ring. Lucifer spoke to them so as to keep himself whole. His anger was channeled through them, and as time passed they grew stronger. They remained there, balanced on the brink of everything, when more rocks began to pass them by; used up, dead chunks of everything, crushed down into rocks and floating debris islands by the pressures that the end of all existence exerts. There were gathered together and fused to each other, and thus his empire began to grow. The denser it became the more it began to rise. Not ascending, no, the path home was closed to him, but they pulled away from the edge. It was here, as they rose, that Lucifer found the portals, and so too he found their weaknesses.” Nemamiah stopped, pausing to let everything sink in. To give them time for a question and answer session. None of them knew what to say; his voice held them captive, while his anger kept them tamed.

Marcus wanted to speak but found himself frozen, his lungs filled with air, but when it came out it brought no sound. It was like he had been hypnotized, yet all of them were aware of what occurred around them. After a while Nemamiah resumed his tale and they all stood, their minds filled by the words yet hungry for more, as if they had been offered fruit plucked from the tree of knowledge itself.

“Once Lucifer found the portals and learnt how to use them it was merely a matter of time before he became strong enough to travel through them. Your world is not the only one, as I am sure you now understand.” Nemamiah swept his arm out before him showing them once again the barren, oven baked land upon which they stood. “Yet it was man that he was truly seeking, it was man that he blamed most for his fall, and man who, sadly to say, was the easiest to corrupt. He filled your world with hate, murder and deception. Envy and lust became mainstays of your existence and the more you sinned, the more his power grew. Yet despite it all, he could never take you whole, unlike the spirits and beings that dwell in the outer worlds. He had to wait for your death before he could claim your spirits, a small parting gift from us to him when he fell.” The voice had changed now, or maybe they had become accustomed to it. Maybe all angel stories were told in such mesmeric tones and it you just had to build up a tolerance.

“If he could move around all this time, why hasn’t he broken out already?” Marcus said. He had many a great many questions stored up, but he feared at least half of them would not be answered – but this question was one that he wanted to get out in the open. He treated it as a test to make sure they weren’t just playing a trick on them. It was a question that he hoped would give him enough information to be able to use it at a later date in a number of different capacities and help them on their way.

“Travelling the portal pathways is not easy; it drains you, and if you get lost along the way the energy of the paths will consume you,” Nakir said to them, but Marcus noticed – he could not speak for the others as he had forgotten that they were there, with the exception of Helen – that neither Nakir nor Sariel dared stepped forward now to speak, nor did they look so bold and brash. Apparently an angelic ticking off had a lasting effect.

“Then what is so different now?” Graham asked, his tone of voice still one of deep cynicism. He sounded quite annoyed, as if they had woken him from a good nap or pulled him away from a good football game to talk at him nonsensically.

“A great many things have changed. Lucifer’s domain has grown, and broken through the portals. He has fused masses together across the pathways, breaking them down and setting the balance of everything off center. Each new piece of land, every extra world he adds to it, causes the balance to topple further,” Sariel answered. His tone was much like that of Graham. One of deep annoyance, and Marcus couldn’t quite work out whether it was a good imitation or if they were genuinely annoyed at being made to talk to humans.

Another tremor shook the ground, this one lasting about thirty seconds, and even the angels seemed to look startled. In the distance, lost somewhere in the reaches of the wastelands, a pillar of orange fire spurted into the sky, glinting in the sun like a tower of jewels. The power of it was felt even in town: they could all hear the foundations of the skeletal buildings creak and groan. Fibers snapped even further as the wave of heat washed over them, pushing a cloud of dead, dusty earth before it like a shield, preserving its heat for as long as possible.

“The underworld is a powerful place, and Lucifer was the most powerful angel in paradise, but even he is not exempt from the effects of the portals. The large beings, like Lucifer and what remains of our other fallen brothers, are easy enough to find and contain, but his army grows at such a rate even we cannot keep track of them all the time. It has always been so; beings escape through the portals and come out in other worlds. Their sole purpose is to recruit, to gather new souls, new bodies for Lucifer to bend to meet his will. ”

“You mean on earth?” Sammy raised his voice. He looked blindly towards the angels.

“To coin a popular phrase, there are other worlds than this. Have you not understood that yet? There are beings, energy forces everywhere that can be taken. The lost souls of mankind are but a small piece of the population. You are merely Lucifer’s own personal fascination, to be honest, in the grand scheme of things; you are but cannon fodder for his soldiers.” As he spoke Nemamiah cast a nervous glance at the floor beneath their feet, where thin snail-like traces of a warm orange glow could be seen shining through the crust. “We must be quick,” he added in a tone much more somber than anybody would have liked.

“Why us?” Marcus asked, another one of the questions he felt must be asked.

“The answer is simpler than you realize. You are God’s favorites. He had us, and then he created you, and commissioned us to ensure your safety. Lucifer will do anything to control mankind simply to anger our father.” It was Sariel who spoke, his gravelly voice resonating deeply in the air.

“I mean
us
,” Marcus said again, only this time he swept his arm out and drew an imaginary circle around the five of them. They had moved closer together again.

“In good time you will know,” Sariel said, before he stood back and turned the floor back to Nemamiah.

XV

All around them the strange humming sound began to work its way into their heads, not forcing its way but rather worming inside them, sneaking in through the back door while they were occupied with other more important matters.

“Every world that Lucifer conquered or emptied was welded to his own, but nothing is able to satiate his quest: his hunger for control over humanity has transformed him. There have been battles for as long as your time has existed. You hear them but cannot interpret them for what they are. Besides these worlds there are parallel existences, where humans live in the same place as you, the same time, but you never meet. Time runs adjacent in each parallel, but the portals access them all.” Nemamiah had once again resumed control of the story telling. He stood more relaxed now, as if he had grown slightly more acclimatized to his guests. If there had been a sofa and a few beanbag chairs, Becky was fairly sure he would have sat down in one and resumed his tale, possibly smoking a pipe as did. With this image in her head she could not help but give a smile.

“You mean like a parallel universe; a world existing within our own, people living in the same house as us, shitting in the same pot,” Graham scoffed.

“Yes.” Nakir’s curt response came out even before Graham had finished speaking. “More than one. Yyou may catch glimpses of them from time to time; reflections and shadows from for the most. You call them ghosts.” At this both Graham and Becky gave a stifled laugh. One in disbelief, the other a distorted form of understanding. “Believe me or not, for I have no time to deal with the simple gradient of your thoughts,” Nakir snapped before being thrown another, if not even more furious glance from Nemamiah. So heavy was his face that even Nakir’s black eyes seemed to pale compared to the thunder red rage that appeared on Nemamiah’s face. Without saying another word, Nakir spread his wings; wings so bright and pure that none saw, apart from Sammy; they shone in his mind’s eye as beams of pure brilliance, with a detail that the human eye could never even hope to comprehend. Then with the speed of a flying bullet he was gone, and Sammy felt a wave of depression sweep through him as his world was once again restored to darkness. Even the light of the remaining two angels seemed dark in comparison to what he had just witnessed. He let out a slow, quiet sigh.