Thy Fearful Symmetry (20 page)

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 froze 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.

The wall of force did not impede their progress, and they vanished inside the church, so many of them that she half expected the building to burst at the seams. Desperate, screaming in the wind, she hurled herself after them, into the invisible barricade, which only slapped her brutally back.

Melissa’s senses quested for some clue to what was happening within. She had her answer in moments. As she watched, the roof and spire melted away like butter in a hot oven. The walls of the first floor followed, and Melissa saw the cause.

Inside, floating above the floor, were two blazing balls of energy. The first was white hot, blinding, a nova which could not be looked at directly. Its partner was the deepest black Melissa had ever seen, a hole in colour. Despite its sucking, dead appearance, it threw off energy every bit as powerful as its starlight cousin, and between them they were burning the world away, unmaking it, and Melissa knew that if she had a body it would have been blasted to oblivion the moment the walls came down. As nothing more than an observing essence, she survived, feeling the heat and the pain despite having no flesh or nerves to convey these things to her mind.

The balls melted away the vapour around the church, as the building itself bubbled down the outcrop in molten trickles. The force they gave out was more powerful than the energies of Creation. It was anti-creation, and it was all consuming.

As the pinnacle itself began to melt, demons bursting into flames and dropping into the void as it did so, Melissa felt a tug behind her eyes. She shook herself, needing to watch the end of everything, to know the worst before being pulled away.

The tug came a second time, yanking her a few feet backwards. The pinnacle of stone, crowned by the two blazing orbs, was entirely molten at the tip, a volcano in reverse, but she saw no more, because there was a third yank, and everything vanished.

Melissa woke with a shriek, and tried to curl into a ball. Still handcuffed to the bedpost, it proved impossible, and she made herself relax.

Malachi was already at her bedside, leaning over her, and she wondered if he had dozed while she slumbered. Frustration thinned his lips. “Water?” The way he said it was less like a question, and more like a command. Melissa nodded miserably.

Watching him open his bag and pull free a bottle of mineral water, she struggled to keep the dream in her head. Light, and something that was the very opposite of light, and angels, and demons. She took the mineral water that Malachi handed her, gazing absently at the label before taking a gulp. Apparently, it was filtered through volcanic rocks before being bottled, and that had been in the dream too. She had the pieces of the jigsaw. Now she needed to interpret them.

“Did you dream?” Malachi asked, and Melissa was suddenly relieved that she had. When she had told Malachi that she saw the future in dreams, and had done so since the day that Pandora attacked his wife Stacey, he had slapped her twice to make sure she was telling the truth, as though he could beat deception from her flesh. Part of his reaction had been simple disbelief. The other part had been frustration, that this was another thing beyond his control.

Two years ago, Melissa had begun having dreams that proved prophetic. Only later, when Stacey entered St Dymphna's, did she realise that the visions had started around the time of the attack. Through interpretation, over many varied dreams, Melissa had pieced together the story of the world ending. She knew what Malachi needed to do. She knew how it would end, if she didn't help him.

That was why God had given her the dreams, she had realised, not long after falling quietly in love with Malachi. She was supposed to help him destroy Pandora, and save the world from ending.

Except, she had seen in her dreams that Pandora was no demon. She had seen that much of the truth, and she couldn't say anything, for fear that this fact alone would sway Malachi's fierce resolve.

With tears in her eyes, she looked at the figure of hate she had come to love, and nodded. “I saw. They're in a church, near where she lived. I don't know what it's called, but I'd recognise it. She’s going to destroy the world. By morning, it will be too late. Please stop them, Malachi.” A tear rolled down her cheek, and he never knew that she was crying for him, not the world.

Eyes grim, jaw clenched, he nodded. “I believe you,” he said. “Let's go.”

For a few blissful moments, as he emerged from a dark place like sleep, Clive didn't know anything was wrong. He was cold, all the way through, but he knew he would open his eyes and find out that this was because it was winter, and the heating was off, and the duvet had slipped from him, and Heather had already climbed out of bed to brew the coffee. In that dozing, semi-conscious state, Clive had a last moment of being truly himself, the man he had been before gods and monsters made him a pawn.

A moment before he opened his eyes, the truth washed over him, but because the truth was impossible he denied it to himself, even though he felt hard tarmac beneath him, heard the shouts of people along the street and the horrified mutterings of those nearby. He smelled burning and tasted ash on his tongue.