It seemed very sad, the little room. Somebody’s little hutch. But…where was it, exactly?
Experimentally, he pushed his hand in the doorway. There was a faint pop, nothing more. Immediately, though, his hand felt warm. It felt damp. Slowly, he moved it back and forth, and observed what was without question one of the most bizarre things he had ever seen. His hand moved more slowly than his wrist, meaning that, when his moving arm reached the center of the doorway, his hand was a good two feet behind it. There was no pain and there was no sense of detachment, but the hand simply did not appear to keep up with the arm.
He snatched his hand back.
Was he, perhaps, looking into a room in Abaddon?
If so, then this might be a major opportunity. There were controls in Abaddon that kept the fourteen huge lenses that were the main gateways open into the other human world. Tonight, the seraph would pour through them in their billions.
Disrupt those controls, and you would set the seraph back. The gateways, which would be wide open tonight, would begin to close. By the twenty-fifth they would be closed entirely, not to re-open again for all those thousands of years.
The secret of Christmas was that the birth of goodness came on the day that the door to evil was closed.
This was a gateway and that little room was in Abaddon. He knew where, of course. It was General Samson’s apartment.
The “earthquake” had been local. It had involved the opening of this gateway.
Should he go through? Dare he?
It must be a trap. A temptation.
Then he noticed that the glow was less. This very unusual gateway was closing.
It could be an opportunity.
It was here that the seraph had originally attacked him.
Except, no, there was something wrong with that picture. As soon as his memories flitted back to that night, he saw Brooke and Nick and Kelsey coming up from the draw with him. And everybody was happy. They were thrilled. He was thrilled.
What?
He’d been raped by seraph marauders in this draw, trying to claw their way into a human universe that had rejected them.
The glow was dropping fast.
He stepped up to the gateway. The room on the other side looked now more like a photograph than an actual opening.
He stepped forward—and found that the surface was now thick, that it felt like stepping into a molten wall. He pushed against it, pushed harder. It was like squeezing through a mass of rubber.
And then he was stumbling forward. He tried to check himself, but windmilled across and hit the far wall hard. He sank down, feeling as if all his blood had been drained right out of him.
Then the noise hit him. Coming from outside was the most ungodly screeching and roaring he had ever heard in his life. Machinery howled, voices squalled and screamed, high and rasping and utterly alien—but not the voices of animals, no. They were shouting back and forth in a complex language, oddly peppered with any number of human words, English included. Worse, they were close by. This was a ground floor apartment.
A greasy stink of sewage and boiled meat came from the bloodred soup. The fact that it was still steaming worried him, of course, because whoever’s dinner it was would be back for it at any moment. It must be Samson’s food, meaning that he was here.
Recalling the story of the Three Bears, and the little girl who had entered their woodland cabin and found their meal ready to eat, he thought that others had passed through gateways like this before. In fact, if you read it right, you could reconstruct the entire fairy-faith of northern Europe as a chronicle of contacts with Abaddon.
He could either leave here now and try to make his way to Government House, or he could lie in wait for that monster.
Maybe he should try to steal Samson’s car. But it had a soul, didn’t it, so maybe it wouldn’t be so willing to let itself be stolen.
The safest thing would be to lie in wait.
There weren’t many places to hide in the room—just a curtain that concealed a still toilet full of puke-yellow goop that was being swarmed by flies as fat as ticks and as red as a baboon’s ass. Or no, look at the things, they weren’t flies at all, they were tiny damn bats.
He could not hide in there. He could not be near that toilet, which had, among other things, part of a rotting seraph hand in it. He knew that they were cannibals, of course, he’d seen this place before, had heard Samson think to himself that the execution fiesta he’d witnessed from the bus would mean lots of soup.
So this was some of that soup. But where was Samson? It had to be getting cold, even in the jungle heat they had here. Maybe he’d been arrested. Could’ve happened in a heartbeat. Maybe he was being tortured to death right now by that sociopathic kid of Echidna’s.
The shrieking rose, and with it came thudding from above. There were crunching noises, more cries, then a sound outside the door of somebody running downstairs. The sobs were unmistakable. A short silence followed. Then, more slowly, a heavier tread. It moved past the door.
This was not good. If somebody came in here, they’d raise the alarm and—well, he dared not allow his imagination to go there.
He decided this had been a fool’s errand. The soup was a trick. Samson was actually on the other side, and he was going to be menacing Brooke and Nick and Kelsey.
It was obvious, and what a damn fool he’d been.
He turned to go back through the gateway.
Except there was no gateway. For a moment, he simply stared at the blank wall.
The door clicked. He watched the crude wooden handle rise slowly. There was a flicker and a sputter, and he realized that the sharp light wasn’t even electric. It was carbide, a type of gas that had been used at home a hundred and fifty years ago.
They didn’t even have electricity.
The door swung open.
A gleaming creature stood there, shimmering purple-black. The vertical pupils in its eyes were bright red, the irises gold. It had in its hand a small disk with two barrels on the business end. Wylie knew what that was, and he decided not to show the magnum just now.
Slowly, carefully, he raised his hands.
The creature smiled a little, a tired smile. “I’ve been waiting for you,” it said in a rasping voice. Its English was good enough, but spoken with a curious singsong lilt that made Wylie think of the voice of a car.
Wylie had been outmaneuvered.
“Where’s Samson?”
“He is with your loved ones, Mr. Dale.”
Wylie knew what the phrase to die a thousand deaths really meant. In a situation like this, it was no cliché, but a dark expression of truth.
The creature made a very curious sound, a sort of smacking. It watched him with ghastly eagerness. He thought that they might be allergic to human dander, but they could eat human flesh, and this thing was hungry.
“At this time, come with me.”
What else was there to do? Wylie followed the creature down a steep, narrow staircase that reeked of something that had rotted dry. The walls were covered with graffiti—squiggles and lines that looked at first meaningless…and then didn’t.
They were drawings, all at child level, but done with the light and dark backward, like photographic negatives. For the most part, they were scenes of torture and murder and orgy. Some drawings showed male seraph with sticklike penises, others females with bared teeth guarding black eggs.
And as they came to the street, he saw some of them. One that looked up was the same color as Jennifer Mazle, creamy and pale, her scales glittering. Her eyes were the same as those of his captor. She gave Wylie a long, melting look as she slowly ran her tongue out and touched it with her fingers.
“A whore,” his guard said. Then some boys appeared, wearing hugely oversized T-shirts painted with images of crocodile-like creatures so perfectly rendered that they seemed about to leap off the cloth and into his face. Some of them. One had a New Sex Pistols T-shirt obviously from home, another a shirt with a big
green fruit on it in the shape of a bitten apple, and in the bite, an image of a squeezed human face. This one carried a brutal weapon, an Aztec sword made of steel with obsidian blades jutting out of it. The squeezed face was instantly familiar. It was Adolf Hitler.
They watched him with their brilliant, dead eyes, their heads moving with the clipped jerks of lizards. As he walked, he saw that the street was made of wood—in fact, of cut tree trunks fitted together with an Inca’s skill. Before them was a vehicle looking something like a horse-drawn hearse, but with a tiny barred window in the back instead of glass to reveal the coffin.
Standing in its equipage was a brown animal with fearsome, glaring eyes and purple drool dripping from its long, complex jaw. The jaw itself was metal, and appeared to be partially sprung, the way it dangled. The animal was smaller than a horse by half, but seemed made entirely of brown, wiry muscle, with the narrow, ever-twisting neck of a snake. When it saw them, it began to burp and stomp pointed, spikelike feet, which made it look as if it was dancing. Others just like it, pulling various wagons and carriages, moved up and down the street.
The door at the back of the wagon was open, and his captor made a brisk little gesture toward it and bowed. A twisted smile played on his almost lipless mouth, and his spiked teeth glittered in the brown light.
There was a hissing sound overhead, and he saw soaring past, a gorgeous green machine shaped like a horizontal teardrop with a gleaming windshield at the front of its perfectly streamlined shape. It was so different from the miserable mess in the street that it was hard to believe that it even belonged to the same world.
Then he got a terrific push, which caused him to bark his shins painfully against the edge of the wagon’s floor. He tried to turn toward his assailant, but a powerful blow brought whizzing confusion.
The door shut behind him with a dry clunk. For a moment, he could see nothing. As his eyes got used to the dimness, he examined the space he was in. It was like nothing so much as the interior of an old, zinc-lined ice chest. It was at most three feet high and five long. There were claw marks gouged in the roof and walls, and in the wooden floor, places—many of them—that had been gnawed.
He drew out the magnum, cradling it in his hand as he would the rarest diamond. This was hope.
He twisted himself around until he could see out one of the tiny, barred windows. They were not going up the great esplanade he had seen through Samson’s eyes, but along the city’s back streets. There were neon hieroglyphics everywhere, and flags overhead with more unreadable slogans on them. The place was ancient Egypt on steroids. Martin would have loved it, but he wasn’t the sucker on the spot, was he?
No, indeed, and the fear had a funny quality to it. The fear had to do with more of the knowledge he had gained. He had a soul. These people could take out your soul and put it in a damn glass tube. They could remove your memories and graft them into their own souls—eat them, as it were. They could use you for crap like running a car, and God only knew what else. In this place, the phrase the soul in the machine had a ghastly new meaning.
They went around the corner—the animal was not fast—and began to pass what appeared to be a restaurant. Behind the lighted windows, he could see gleaming red walls and a gold ceiling. Balls of light floating in midair provided illumination. Sitting in large chairs were seraphs in beautiful, shimmering suits, tight against their bodies.
Then he got what could probably and with accuracy be called the surprise of his life: there were human beings in there, too. As they trundled slowly past, he strained to see more. There was a man in a fur jacket and a white ermine fedora, not recognizable to him but obviously some kind of entertainer, maybe a rapper or rock star, there were women in silks and furs. Other men wore tuxedos, some business suits, others caftans and gallabias. Then he saw a cardinal, distinguished by the red zuchetto on his head and the red-trimmed black cassock.
On the tables before them were golden dishes beautifully decorated with garlands of greenery and white flowers. Heaped on them were roasted body parts, both seraph and human. The diners were eating busily.
Then it was gone, replaced by more of the endless gray city and its hurrying, oblivious hordes of seraph.
A stunned Wylie Dale sank down to the floor. For a time he lay there listening to the creak of the axles, feeling the steady swaying of the wagon. His blank mind held an image of that cardinal. Of the men in tuxedos, the women in evening gowns.
Who in the name of all that was holy WERE THEY?
Rich, to be sure, compared to the starved horde that crowded these streets. Human beings, movers and shakers all, living large in hell.
Or was that the whole answer? The seraph were chameleons. So maybe these weren’t human beings at all, but seraph spending time at home. Two-moon earth must have been plagued by them. It had totally ignored air pollution, and global warming was running wild there, even worse than at home.
Shape-shifted seraph had probably been running the place for centuries. They were the cardinals, the big personalities, the ministers and the kings. Like Samson. He’d ended up in control of the United States itself, and he was a shape-shifted repitilian seraph maintaining himself on drugs.
He wondered, Who in his own world might be a seraph in disguise? Who sought the ruin of souls? Who encouraged greed? Who lived by the lie that pollution didn’t matter?
Who, indeed?
He realized that he was not far from insanity, here. His mind just wanted to go inside itself. Walk in the green fields of dream, smell the flowers, above all shut this horrible world out, scrub his brain free of all knowledge of it and memory of it.
Every trembling cell of his body, every instinct that he had, every drop of his blood said the same thing: You are not supposed to know this, you are not supposed to be here, and you cannot get away, and to keep their secret, they are going to kill not just your body but your immortal soul.
But now that he had fallen into the trap, he must not freeze, he had to do everything possible to turn their trick back on them. He had to try.
Oh God, he prayed, what is the universe? How does it really work? Above all, how can I save this situation? A memory came to him of Martin and his ceaseless prayer, and he began to pray that way, also. He prayed to the healing hand that had raised Osiris after his brother had cut him to pieces, and Jesus after his passion had ended. The unseen one who bound the good by the cords of love.
They were arriving somewhere, the wagon turning, stopping. He looked out first one window and then the other, but saw only skeletal trees, huge once, no doubt rich with leaves and life, now gray and dead, clawing at the brown sky. “Mr. Dale, if you don’t mind?”
As Wylie came down, the creature added, “I was wondering if you’d autograph Alien Days for me?”
For the love of Pete, it had a paperback of the damn book and a pen in its clawed hand. Too stunned to do anything else, he took the book. Opened it to the title page. “Do you want me to personalize it?”
“Oh, hey, yeah. Make that out to me.”
Confused, he looked up, to find himself staring into a very human, and very familiar face—Senator Louis Bowles, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, senior senator from Utah.
Senator Bowles smiled, then shuddered and shifted back into a long-faced vampiric horror, its scales glistening, its eyes glaring with evil energy.
He finished the inscription—to Senator Bowles…and as he did so, saw the hand that was doing the writing, and then also the hand that was holding the book. He saw long, thin fingers of the palest tan, ending in black claws, neatly manicured.
He saw the wrists where they were visible outside the sleeves of his jacket. Narrow, scaled, shimmering with the gemstone sheen of snake-skin. He looked at the hand that held his Mont Blanc, turned it over, watching the light play on the scales. Then he raised his fingers to his cheek, and felt beneath their tips the delicate shudder of more scales.
He hadn’t come to an alien earth at all.
; He was a shape-shifter himself.
He had come home.
PART FOUR
THE BLUE LIGHT
He found the blue light, and made her a signal to draw him up again. She did draw him up, but when he came near the edge, she stretched down her hand and wanted to take the blue light away from him. “No,” said he, perceiving her evil intention, “I will not give you the light until I am standing with both feet upon the ground.” The witch fell into a passion, let him fall again into the well, and went away.
—THE BROTHERS GRIMM, “The Blue Light”
How long, Yahweh?
Will you forget me forever?
How long will you hide your face from me? How long shall I take counsel in my soul, Having sorrow in my heart every day? How long shall my enemy triumph over me?
—Psalm 13: 1–2
TWENTY-TWO
DECEMBER 21, EVENING THE CHAPEL PERILOUS
OUTSIDE THE TENT, THE NIGHT bellowed. Earthquakes had started right after they had come back from Wylie’s universe and were continuous now, a low shuddering that never stopped. On other parts of the planet, Martin and Trevor knew from reading Wylie’s book, this meant that hell was unfolding. The seraph were racing to sink the great human cities and most of the human lands, and raise the ocean floors that would be their new continents. They had only hours left until the fourteen artificial gateways they had constructed around the world opened wide and a billion hungry seraph came swarming through.
Three times now, the little band had heard the unearthly scream of tornadoes in the sky, then the bone-shaking thudding that followed when they hit and went marching off across the prairie.
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