Angel City

by Jon Steele

  “Right. Any rate, got a match?”

  “I did, in my backpack. And some spare candles. But I can’t find it, not in this dark.”

  Harper flashed Goose and Astruc cleaning out the cavern before they took off.

  “No, they took it. I saw them take it. Your backpack and all the candles.”

  “You did?”

  “Just before I went out.”

  “Oh. I was hoping, perhaps, it would still be here.”

  “No. It’s gone.”

  . . . it’s gone, it’s gone, it’s gone . . .

  Silence.

  “Tell me, Gilles, is anyone coming to get us?”

  “Non.”

  “Why not?”

  “No one knows we’re down here.”

  “Of course not. Look, you’d be doing me a huge favor if you ran a few things by me, just till I get a grip of the picture.”

  “Je compris. It took me time to remember things, too. What do you wish me to tell you, mon père?”

  “Whatever comes to your mind. And stop calling me mon père. It’s confusing the hell out of me.”

  “Oui, mon . . . sieur. What should I tell you?”

  “Freeform it, that’s the best way. Remind me who you are, for starters.”

  “I’m a file clerk in the mayor’s office of the fourteenth arrondissement. I guided you, all of you, to this place.”

  Harper flashed back again, saw himself with Gilles Lambert, Astruc, and the other one named Goose entering the cavern. Small headlamps strapped to their heads, four beams of lamplight reflecting off the black glasslike stone. Then Goose, setting candles about the floor, Gilles Lambert telling them to turn off their lamps. Harper saw the immense cavern with the rows of coves cut into the walls. He stopped, jumped further back in time. The big man with the blue lenses over his eyes, telling Harper that Gilles Lambert was the best cataphile in Paris, knew the tunnels like the back of his hand.

  “That’s right. You discovered the cavern a few weeks ago.”

  “You remember it now?”

  “Let’s just say it sounds familiar. We came here to see something, a crime scene of some kind, yeah? Mutilated bodies.”

  “Oui, they were here when I found this place weeks ago. Their heads were gone, and their skin had been sliced off. It was terrible to see.”

  “The bodies weren’t here, though,” Harper said. “They’d been taken away. The cavern was empty.”

  “C’est vrai ça.”

  “Right. Got it. So at the risk of sounding like a complete dolt, what are we doing here?”

  “Because . . . because of you.”

  “Me?”

  “There was a pillar in the center of the cavern . . .”

  Harper saw it. Looked like a supporting pillar, but it was only an illusion. The cavern was supported by the walls, and the pillar rose to a perfect point almost touching the center of the dome, as if pointing somewhere up there. Harper snapped back to nowtimes. Gilles Lambert’s voice still echoed through the dark, telling the tale.

  “The priest told you to put your hands on the pillar. That’s when you fought with them and took a gun from the little one, Goose. And that’s when the priest threatened to kill me, unless you surrendered and put your hands to the tablet drawn on the pillar. I’ve never seen such a thing, monsieur. You touched the tablet and you said ‘This is the watcher, it is the hour,’ but you said it in French. And a door opened in the base of the pillar. And there was a wooden chest inside, very old. The priest removed something from the chest.”

  The something flashed through Harper’s eyes . . . one or two frames . . . then it was gone.

  “What was it, can you remember?”

  “A sextant. That’s what you called it. And you said it was for finding your position at sea. It’s all so very strange.”

  Harper rubbed the back of his neck.

  “Listen, Gilles. Give me time to recover. We’ll figure something out, we’ll get out of here.”

  . . . out of here, out of here, out of here . . .

  Silence.

  “Monsieur?”

  “Yes?”

  “Who are you?”

  “Me?”

  “If you are not a priest, who are you?”

  Those bits on his timeline fell into place.

  “My name is Harper, Jay Harper. I do security work for Guardian Services Limited out of Switzerland. I was asked to check up on this Astruc character.”

  “You’re a detective?”

  “More or less.”

  “So you knew about all this before. You knew what would happen to me last night.”

  “No, I was flying blind on this job.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means . . . it means I knew fuck-all. It’s the way my agency works sometimes. It’s a sort of disguise.”

  “Oh, I see.”

  . . . I see, I see, I see . . .

  “Are you going to kill me, monsieur?”

  “Am I going to what?”

  “At first, after I woke up, I thought you were dead. You weren’t breathing, not at all. But suddenly you mumbled something about killing them, killing all of them. It sounded like you were talking in your sleep. Then it sounded like you were having a nightmare. I was afraid you might wake up and kill me.”

  Harper laughed a little, thinking, Our kind do not sleep, our kind don’t dream . . . But it seems we do babble whilst mightily drugged.

  “What did you say, monsieur?”

  “Sorry?”

  “You said something, just now.”

  “No, I didn’t say anything, I was thinking.”

  “Oh. I thought I heard something.”

  “No, I told you, it’s just the way our voices are echoing in this place.”

  . . . echoing in this place, in this place, this place . . .

  Silence.

  “So, you’re not going to kill me?”

  Harper laughed again, this time thinking how his laughter must sound to a frightened man sitting somewhere in the absolute dark. Right up there with ghoulies and ghosties and other long-legged wackos that kill in the night.

  “Be a stupid thing for me to do, wouldn’t it? So far, you’re the only one who really knows what’s happened down here.”

  “But I don’t,” Gilles Lambert said. “I don’t know anything. I’m terribly confused. I was betrayed by my confessor, the man I trusted with my soul. I believed you were a priest, sent to protect me. I was tricked. And then, I saw such strange things . . .”

  “Gilles.”

  “. . . and I saw you open the pillar by touching it, as if your hands were keys. And that thing, that sextant thing . . . what was it doing down here? I’ve been sitting here thinking none of this could have happened, but I saw it with my own eyes. Please, tell me, what is happening?”

  Harper thought about it. In the absolute dark, the man was losing his grasp on reality. Didn’t mean Harper could help him. Not yet. Maybe it would come to that, but not yet.

  “It’s a complicated case. I don’t really understand some of it myself. Even if I did, I couldn’t tell you what I know.”

  “But . . . but why not?”

  “Because that’s the way it is in my job.”

  “But you must tell me!”

  “Mate, you need to stay calm.”

  “Calm? I’ve been left to die in this evil place. Why this torture? Why didn’t they just kill me?”

  . . . why didn’t they just kill me, kill me, kill me . . .

  Harper listened to the man’s voice, the way it echoed in the dark. And he asked himself the same damn thing. Couldn’t come up with an answer that made sense. Then again, since when did murdering wackos make sense? Maybe these murdering wackos thought their victims would find this mise-en
-scène a more entertaining way to die. Wake up in the absolute dark, think you’re dead, find out you’re still alive. Now the pain begins. Harper had to admit, it was as creative a method of murder as it was twisted. But he kept the thought to himself and sat quietly. After five minutes—could’ve been fifty—Harper heard the sound of human tears.

  “Gilles?”

  “Please, monsieur, I don’t want to die like this.”

  Harper listened to the man’s voice again, counting the cycles of slow, dense, reverberating sound. He’d heard the same fearful sound a billion times through the ages, in thousands of languages—I don’t want to die like this—and through the ages, Harper watched them die.

  He listened to the voice again.

  It wasn’t echoing off the walls. It was drifting like some disembodied thing. Then, like a ton of bricks . . . wham, Harper knew. He lowered his head and whispered: “Cum tacent clamant.”

  The words passed his lips and rose through the cavern, chasing after Gilles Lambert’s voice.

  . . . cum tacent clamant, cum tacent clamant . . .

  “Who’s there?”

  “It’s just me, Gilles.”

  “What . . . what were those words? It sounds like Latin.”

  “That’s right.”

  “What does it mean?”

  “It means: ‘When they are silent, they cry out.’”

  “Such strange words.”

  Harper concentrated, trying to find the man’s voice. There—no—over there.

  “Gilles?”

  “Oui?”

  “Where are you just now?”

  “The other side of the cavern.”

  “How did you get there?”

  “Quoi?”

  “You were next to me when they . . . when they drugged us. How did you get to the other side of the cavern?”

  “Oh, that.”

  Harper could tell the man didn’t want to say it.

  “Tell me, Gilles.”

  “When you started talking to yourself about killing people, I thought you might wake up and kill me. I was so terrified, I soiled myself. So I just crawled away.”

  “Why didn’t you just keep going?”

  “How?”

  “You’re the best cataphile in Paris, aren’t you? You know these tunnels like the back of your hand, remember? You could’ve tried to find your way using your hands.”

  “Oui, I remember. And I remember wanting to try. But I thought it best to sit here and wait.”

  “For what?”

  “I don’t know. But that’s what I thought. And then I felt I would never leave this place. It was an odd feeling. I’ve spent so much time down here, and now I would be here forever. Then I thought about my Laguiole pocket knife. It was a gift from my father; I always carry it. I thought I might carve my name into the wall with the knife, in case someone found me.”

  . . . someone found me, found me, found me . . .

  Silence.

  “What were we talking about, monsieur?”

  “We were talking about how you got to the other side of the cavern. Which reminds me, which way did you go?”

  “Pardon?”

  “Clockwise, counterclockwise?”

  “Clockwise. Non, the other way. Why?”

  Harper struggled to his feet, touched the black stone wall with the fingers of his right hand. “Because I’m coming over to you.”

  “Pourqoui?”

  . . . pourquoi, pourquoi, pourquoi . . .

  Harper stepped through the absolute dark, following the echoing sound, slowly, as if expecting to step into a bottomless pit any second.

  “For one, it’ll take less effort to talk to each other if we’re closer.”

  “But it isn’t an effort, monsieur, really it’s not. I’m fine where I am. Please don’t come near me.”

  Harper stopped. His soul knows; his mind can’t accept it.

  “Be not afraid, Gilles.”

  There was that delay in response that always came when human beings heard those words from one of Harper’s kind. The words echoed and drifted till they found Lambert.

  “I don’t understand what that means, monsieur. I hear the words, but I don’t know what they mean.”

  The man’s voice had settled. Harper stepped softly, not wanting to chase it away. He squeezed his eyes closed, reaching for shreds of radiance. He saw the tablet—just for a microsecond, but it was enough.

  “Just listen to my voice. This isn’t a place of evil, Gilles, it never was. The bodies you found here were those of warriors, slain in battle.”

  Silence.

  “What battle? When?”

  “Good guys, bad guys. A hundred and thirty thousand years ago. The battle took place directly above us, wherever the pillar of the cavern is pointing. The good guys lost, and the ones that were captured were slaughtered. The good guys that survived returned at night and collected the bodies. They covered them in oils to preserve them and laid them in these coves.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “It was written on the tablet, the one on the pillar. The whole story.”

  “You remember it?”

  “I can see it now.”

  “So . . . so this place is a burial chamber?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And the thing they found? The sextant? The priest called it a sacred treasure, he said you brought it here. But it was ancient, it looked—”

  “Thousands of years old.”

  “Oui. How could you have brought it here? How could you have known about this place already?”

  “I think Astruc’s got the wrong . . . the wrong guy. I think he only needed one of my kind to pull it off.”

  “One of your kind?”

  “That’s right.”

  Silence.

  “Monsieur?”

  “Yes?”

  “What you are telling me, none of it is possible.”

  “Trust me, mate, spend enough time watching the world go by and you learn just because something isn’t possible, doesn’t mean it can’t happen.”

  “But there were no people here a hundred thirty thousand years ago, monsieur. The first human settlements didn’t appear in France until 5000 BC. No one lived in the region of Paris until 15 BC.”

  “You know your history.”

  “I was very good in history, monsieur.”

  “Well, all I can tell you is these warriors weren’t from here. They were from another place.”

  “Another country?”

  “Bit farther. A lot farther, actually.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You don’t need to understand, Gilles. You only need to listen to my voice and trust me. There’s nothing to fear about this place.”

  Harper was next to Gilles Lambert now. He pressed his back into the wall and eased down next to the man. The man didn’t move.

  “I’m very sorry for the smell, monsieur.”

  “Don’t be. I’ve been in a few trenches. It happens. I’m sure it’s happened to me more than once.”

  “You were a soldier? You have been in war?”

  “Many times.”

  “Have you . . . Have you killed in war, monsieur?”

  “Yes.”

  “Many times?”

  “Yes.”

  Silence.

  “You’re one of them, aren’t you, monsieur?”

  “Sorry?”

  “Those warriors from another place. You are one of them, and that’s how you know about this place. It was the battle between good and evil as told in the Holy Bible. I understand now. You were one of the survivors, you helped bury the dead. They were the angels of God.”

  “Gilles . . .”

  “That’s why the prie
st called you the angel who saved Paris. He knew. And . . . and that’s why the pillar opened when you placed the palms of your hands to the clay tablet. It was . . . it was a miracle, because . . . because you are an angel of God.”

  Harper whispered, “Gilles, it wasn’t a miracle.”

  “Non? Then what was it?”

  “Manipulations of frequencies based on mathematical equations that affect the behavior of observed matter.”

  “Quoi?”

  “Quantum mechanics, Gilles. That’s all it was. That’s all miracles have ever been.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Miracles, gods, angels. Those are just names, Gilles. You need to let go of them. They’re not important anymore.”

  “Pourquoi il-faut pas d’importance?”

  “Because names are things of the living.”

  . . . of the living, the living, the living . . .

  Silence.

  “Am I dead?”

  “You’re hanging on, but yeah, this is the time of your death.”

  “The priest, he killed me?”

  “Yes.”

  “But he couldn’t kill you, because of what you are.”

  Good point, Harper thought. What the hell am I still doing here? Then he recalled his undefined metaphysical condition. You die in your form, boyo, but your form keeps coming back. Sounds swell, except for the fact there wasn’t enough radiance in paradise to keep him going. Soon enough, the very form keeping him alive would crush and extinguish the last trace of light trapped inside. A wave of nausea washed over Harper, and he fought for breath . . . Christ, the weight.

  “No, Gilles, I’m dying, too. It’s just different for me.”

  “How can you be dying? No one can kill an angel.”

  “Trust me.”

  Silence.

  “But I cannot be dead, monsieur. I’m talking to you.”

  “You are, and you aren’t,” Harper said.

  “I really don’t understand.”

  “You don’t need to. You just need to know you’re not alone. I’m here just now, and I’m going to help you.”

  “How?”

  “All you have to do is look into my eyes.”

  “But I can’t. There isn’t any light.”

  Harper scraped at the last of the radiance in his blood, drew it to his eyes.