We Will All Go Down Together (23 page)

(That’s why you’re here.)

That current again, leaching from the air down into the snow and rock beneath them, then spilling back up through their boot-soles—that irregular beat, a thousand skipping, inhumanly ventricled hearts. Judy didn’t even seem to hear it anymore, gaze turned inwards; she was listening to another voice entirely. As she kept on speaking, Joe could already catch its too-familiar no-tone seeping through her own: Infinitely recognizable, considering it belonged to something he’d only ever “talked” to the once, in somebody else’s dream.

“I don’t know how much you know about the Apocrypha, the stuff they left out of the Bible, but . . . Once upon a time, before the beginning, God assigned angels to watch over humanity: called them Watchers, predictably. Never let it be said that the Almighty isn’t literal-minded. . . .”

(A pure Mr. Nobody line, if ever there was one.)

“Well, these angels betrayed their trust—they looked down, liked what they saw, acted accordingly. This is where a lot of the people who seem, um,
larger than life
in some indefinable way come from—the Gilgameshes, the Alexanders, the Rhanis of Jhansi. Giants in the earth, in those days. All those mighty men and women of renown, those people with a little something extra. People like. . . .”

. . . you and me, Joe.

He shook his head against the intrusion, pain flaring first behind one eye, then the other. Man, that telepathy of hers—or whatever the hell (ha, ha) it was—was really beginning to wear.

“Naturally,” Judy continued, “the angels had to be punished—that sort of supernatural fuckery is always at least quasi-non-consensual, considering the basic age and power disparity issues involved. So the Watchers were disembodied, cast down, cast out. Only those of their blood remained behind: the Nephilim, whose very flesh is anathema, antithetical even to the humanity they sprang from. Who fought amongst themselves and were worshipped as false gods, whose followers laid the foundations of Babel and Chaldaean Ur, of Sodom and Gomorrah. . . .”

“Uh huh. And where’d
they
end up?”

Another smile, extra-creepy. “Well . . . God took a gander down, got pissed, made it rain for forty days, forty nights, consecutively. And after that—”

—after
that
, the deluge. The one myth every culture worldwide seemed to come up with. The great and terrible Flood.

Meltwater sloshed up over his toes as he took a shaky step back, away from her and her thinning crooked pupils. Joe felt the thrum abruptly turn rumble, small puffs of dust detaching from above, cracks marbling the walls around. Said, with what he thought was quite admirable restraint: “This place doesn’t seem too stable all of a sudden, girlie. Might be time to—”

Which is when the ground opened up below them both, pulling them in; a short fall but a deep one, through empty space, onto rubble. Then silence, darkness, sleep.

Joe opened his eyes at last and saw sky, a thin strip of it crushed between two jagged shelves of rock, full of stars. Night had obviously fallen while he lay unconscious, which didn’t bode too well in terms of temperature—but when he wiggled his toes and patted himself down, he didn’t feel any unforeseen wetness. No bones broken, either, though the lamp must have escaped the pitfall; only the starlight provided any illumination. Just a ringing in his ears, a rough throat, and the slow realization that Judy Kiss was nowhere within reach or sight.

He looked back up along the raw broken rock slope, automatically marking handholds and boot-rests as jagged black edges against the stars. Relief grew as he realized the climb back up looked far from impossible; this was followed by a connect-the-dots flash of understanding that, he was almost embarrassed to admit, registered far less as “normal” shock or loss than unlooked-for good fortune. Because
he
might be able to make the climb unaided, but—

Could just get up and leave her,
he thought, before he could muster quite enough willpower to kick the traitorous idea away.
I mean, she’d be okay, right? Like she said. And maybe all this crap really
is
happening because of her, at which point go me, for savin’ her ass just long enough to make sure she got buried alive down here in the first place. . . .

But no. He didn’t even need the immediate shock from his back pocket—where his Grandmother’s bag, and the tusk inside it, had ended up—to tell him how wrong that was. Or her voice, for that matter, back-masked into his head through a momentary crease between Worlds:
This place is a sink, Joe, a rotten wound—won’t get any better for covering it up.

(Her, either.)

Naw, ’course not. ’Cause that’d make things
way
too easy.

“Yeah,
Nukum
,” he sighed, out loud. Then turned over, painfully, and shifted enough of the crap around him away to make standing up an option. He had no immediate idea of which way to turn after that; just keep on shuffling, he guessed, hands out, ’til he caught hold of something that felt like it might be Judy.

But the further he went, oddly enough, the less he had to fumble—a new light was growing everywhere at once, sickly-golden. It lit the walls a fissure at a time, making their flaws sing like veins filled with radioactive isotope. Space spread out before him, the floor seeming to unfold into visibility like a fist opening, palm-up.

And all around him, under the ice, glowing wall to ceiling, ceiling to floor: more loops, more dots, more empty spaces. Sigil after sigil of angelic script, the Watchers’ own personal language . . . the same one they taught their outsized children (whose passions were so disproportionate they once threatened to disrupt the balance of Creation itself) to sing themselves lullabies in, before leaving them orphaned forever.

Joe stopped, stood still, squinting up at it. As he did, the “letters” blurred, ice peeling to slice away in semi-solid folds. Under it, the shaft walls—already washed clean—began to dry on contact with the steamy air; alien fossils came humping up beneath the signs as if to meet him, surfacing from under the rock’s grey skin like dragonflies backlit in amber. While something else, at the same time—from inside
him
—rose to meet them in return.

A final shimmer, wrenching the cave-writing straight from un- to intelligible. Those oblique whirls and curves suddenly easy to read as any given street-sign:
As Above, so Below, for here, Zemyaza and Azazel Grigorim bequeath an archive to our children’s children, a treasurehouse of words made for war, deception, and pain. Here we speak of the assumption and uses of human flesh, of the unseating and pollution of the human soul, so that our seed may replace theirs, and thus subdue the world. Occupy them like an army, make them curse themselves, make them break themselves apart. Drive them out into the unclean places. . . .

(make them wander amongst the tombs, and)

. . . cut themselves. . . .

Joe doubled up and puked, long and loud, at the feel of it touching his brain. Behind him, he heard a bone-break scattering of stones on stone as someone else—Judy, he could only assume—regained their feet, hands braced against either wall. Yet it was Mr. Nobody’s voice, now more than ever, which said his name a slow second later; hesitant, like it was a bit impressed he’d actually survived the fall. Or possibly just amused.

“Joe Crow,” it said. “Looks like something in here doesn’t agree with you. Or maybe I should say: something in
you
agrees with
here
.”

Unable to speak, bracing himself over the steaming pool of his stomach contents, Joe only spat.

“Probably better not to tell any of your Native Supremacist friends up North,” the voice suggested, “but it looks like you might have a touch of the
really
Old Blood in you, after all.”

Joe pushed himself back to rest on his heels, head down, making himself breathe slow and deep. The sigils’ light rang in his ears; he could see the thrum of their radiance pulsing through the air like basso heatwaves. He lifted one arm, reaching for the light without conscious will; stopped, staring at his hand like a boy on his first hash-high, entranced solely by the workings of his fingers.

The light shone
through
his flesh, the way a flashlight inside a cupped hand highlights bones, but all throughout, in shifting waves. And the silhouettes inside his flesh were the shadow-sketch mirrors of the things in the wall: skeletal spirals of shell, leaf-thin fins and wings, limestone bone-spurs. They moved and turned like a magic lantern’s cutouts, and he could
feel
them inside him, spasming and knotting and—

Punching out through his skin, the fabric of his clothes, more shocking for the wrongness of it and the lack of pain than anything else. Juddering cramps racking him, a sudden wrenching constriction at waist, knees, shoulders, feet—as if everything he was wearing had suddenly become half a size too small for him—

(No. Not the clothes shrinking.
You’re—
)

His parka tore up the back, and he felt something,
two
somethings, spring out through the gap; on the floor below him, shadow fell black to either side, saw-edged triangles of membrane and bone (bone to bone, bone of my bones). His balance shifted, weight and muscle filling in beneath his shoulderblades. His fingernails lengthened before his eyes, werewolf B-movie style—sharpening, thickening.

And between his hands, Judy Kiss, kneeling to face him, her own hands cupping his face. Looking at him now with eyes gone brown once more, completely human and completely helpless. Mr. Nobody driven out, if only for a moment, by the thing Joe had so arrogantly assumed was
his
prerogative: pity.

Softly: “Oh, Joe. . . .”

The changes hadn’t stopped; he could feel them raking through him like barbed wire, threading veins, muscles, and organs at once. He forced out words, hearing the shift in his vocal cords: deeper already, timbre unnaturally resonant, a vibration he could feel in his sinuses.

“This . . . was always in me,” he husked. “Wasn’t it.”

Yes.

And new silhouettes stretched out across the floor, rearing up, backlit in the sigil-light; blurred outlines of ten-foot-tall shapes invisible to the eye, perhaps winged, perhaps armoured, their numbers uncountable.

Welcome, son. Grandson. Great-, great-, great-, great-, great- . . . 

The words themselves enough to set off a glass-rim echo, droning ’round and ’round. Joe froze where he stood, shaking. While the cast-off fossil-storm swirled on, chipping and curling around him ’til it hooked underneath his skin like thrown seed, like dragon’s teeth, grooming him from within. These Holocaust-smoke-black new wings of his long enough now to cramp against either wall, to jut and fold and catch—hollow and extensible, spectre-thin, made half from his own bones, half from theirs. That tiny shard of the Nephilim inside him working its way out like a splinter, reducing the whole rest of his fallible human body to nothing but one big meat-waste byproduct.

Like one of those horror movies,
Joe thought, thickly; the words took effort to form, his mind an anaesthetized tongue.
The big-budget Hollywood ones, where the yuppie hero goes crazy when he finds out there’s a super- to go with the natural. Or the late-night creepshow classics, where ol’ Professor Knows-it-all dies with a look of pure
amazement on his face ’cause it turns out those silly native superstitions really do work, even on well-intentioned white guys . . . 

That was pretty much how he felt, right about now: not his God, not his demons, not even his basic cosmo-mythology—as ridiculous to him as his ancestors must have seemed to Knud Rasmussen and his ilk, squatting in their shaking tents and carving
tupilak
to keep “civilization” safely back over the ice. But all that didn’t seem too relevant right now, let alone ironic—not with his skeleton apparently trying to roll itself up, jump out of his throat, and crawl away, leaving him behind in a heap for the angels to pick out his soul.

How many times have I had to tell people it doesn’t
matter
if you believe in a thing or not, ’cause it’s damn sure still gonna kill you?
he wondered, spitting teeth.

And Judy . . . just standing there, hand to mouth, watching. Utterly untouched. Because though she could read it too, which argued for more than a dip of the Nephilim paintbrush in her own genetic jar, this particular message just wasn’t
meant
for the likes of her. Not her, or anyone else unlucky enough to have already been so thoroughly—

(
touched
)

—by another, very different, sort of “angel.”

Peering through the baffling sensory array already starting to filter his input, which dimmed the visible world down to dust even as it turned the usually invisible world up to eleven, Joe could finally see how contact with Mr. Nobody had left Judy vacuum-sealed rather than cracking her even wider; she was lapped and slicked in some resinous, invisible coating that repelled glory, whether infernal or divine, the same way Teflon shed cooked egg. He remembered her gangrenous skin repinking itself, and wondered if even age could touch her—if she would wander forever from crime scene to accident site, trailing harm and discord like a fog . . . but never
involved
, never at the epicentre, never a bride (she who had been forced into marriage with Darkness, then forcibly divorced from Light).

Never, ever again.

“They
used
me,” Judy said, out loud, if to no one in specific. “To get to you. To get you down here and do . . . 
this
to you.”

“Think that was more a sorta, ah—accident,” Joe managed, gulping, before puking afresh: no food this time, just hot bile, melting his words into unintelligible mush. Though it wasn’t like Judy seemed to be listening.

“A Judas goat. That’s all I am. That’s all I’ll ever be.”

The Watchers, behind their wall of ice and rock, nodded their strangely helmeted heads, agreeing:
Burned girl, girl on fire; we smell our cousin’s scent on you, his breath on your breath. Look closely and see his marks rise everywhere, flaws on a blown coal.