Hell on Earth

by Mike Wild

  It was ironic, actually, but thanks to one last desperate radio transmission from the saucer brought down by Cecilia Bird, Nazi Intelligence - or more precisely Sonderkommando Thule - had been aware for years of what Department Q itself had gone to great lengths to make British Intelligence forget.

  And all that time Helen Earth had been helping the angel - its corrupted form - prepare for its poisonous jihad.

  He wondered if the sect leader had any idea of the amount of danger she was in.

  "No, I don't," Brand said, in answer to Ravne's query. "We're just going to have to knock really hard."

  He and Jenny Simmons began to wind their way up to the monastery, while Solomon Ravne decided to join the Brigadier, believing he could be of more help in containment and control than in an actual assault. Both parties' passage through the town passed relatively uneventfully, Operation Hamelin so far appearing to work. Apart from one or two townsfolk who staggered unexpectedly from houses, most whom the Voice was already affecting were brought down by the B3 neurotoxin in advance of doing themselves or anyone else harm. And unlike 1944, it did indeed seem that harm was what the angel had in mind.

  The thing that the neurotoxin couldn't control, however, was the soul-stripping. Those whom the Voice sent into SHC were immediately tended to by medical teams, but Brand could only stare down in helpless frustration at the ones who didn't burn, their orange soul-fire twisting and writhing from their incapacitated bodies like last breaths from dying men. His eyes followed the wispy tendrils to where, high over the monastery, Abaddon's soul shield was already beginning to form.

  Brand and Simmons reached the demolitions team at Leidenbrock's Ledge. Carefully placed charges had already cleared a considerable amount of the blocked entrance. Brand commandeered one of the men and said to the others, "Remember, don't blow the final section until you receive my signal. I need to complete the artefact first."

  "Make it snappy, doc," Ness said. He and Verse were waiting on nearby rocks with the rest of the Brigadier's subterranean assault team. "Itchin' to get in there."

  "Any news of Hannah?" Verse asked. The usually somewhat dour ex-priest looked gloomier than ever and Brand realised this was likely the first time he'd had chance to think about his partner. The academic shook his head, and Verse sighed. "Like the man said, itchin' to get in there," he intoned coldly.

  Brand did his best to facilitate the desires of the two men. Reaching the monastery entrance, he ordered the demolitions expert to plant strategic C5 charges and then dismissed him to detonate the explosives from back down the hill. The reason for this latter order was that, after Croydon, he thought it politic not to allow more soldiers to see Jenny transform. And that, he thought, might soon be necessary.

  He was right. As the C5 detonated, a number of figures in hooded robes flung themselves through the resultant hole in the door. Brand leapt back but needn't have worried - there was an infernal flash, a couple of homicidal slashes from Baarish-Shammon, and those of Helen Earth's acolyths who had been waiting for them rained down in slices.

  More worrying was that back down the hill, from Leidenbrock's Ledge, the sixth explosion he had counted sounded - the explosion that was meant to breach the final part of the blockage.

  What the hell, Brand thought?

  Jenny Simmons echoed his sentiment, shouting down the hill, "He only told you to blow the bloody doors off!"

  Too soon, Brand thought. It was too soo-

  And then it hit him. Hit them. The Voice.

  SHOW ME YOUR SINS.

  And they did.

  Jonathan Brand, back at Exham Priory, locked in sweaty, panting embrace with the woman he thought had been Jenny Simmons, but here knew wasn't, and yet still he revelled in her flesh. Mikey Ness, fresh from his escape from the institution, head of the man who'd put him there shattering beneath the butt of his gun as it descended over and over again with a bone-crunching SMAK! SMAKK! SMATCH! Lawrence Verse, the mission school, Martinique, slaughtering the Palo Mayombe - zombie children - with chainsaw and shotgun, wondering now whether he could have saved them, but continuing on as if they were nothing more than NPCs in his own sick version of Doom. And finally, Solomon Ravne, he who harboured the greatest secret of all, there, once more, on the London Underground on what had been their first case, cold-bloodedly hurling the innocent Jenny Simmons into the hell-bomb rift in an attempt to seal it, and releasing instead the thing that had turned Jonathan Brand's life into a nightmare.

  The thing was, Solomon Ravne really didn't care, and neither did Mikey Ness. Lawrence Verse, on the other hand, did care, and it was because he cared and because of his faith that the Voice could not affect him.

  Jonathan Brand was simply resistant.

  "There's something wrong," he shouted into his mobile. "The Voice is-"

  "We'd noticed, doctor," Ness responded. He was busy firing B3 darts into the men who'd blown the last of the charges. They were coming at him and Lawrence Verse with an intelligence in their eyes that was no longer their own. "Would one o' yous like to tell me wha' the hell hap-"

  "No interference," Verse said suddenly. "No-"

  The ex-priest began to run down the hillside, a sudden thought striking him. What was it that Jonathan Hemlock had said? That beside the shaft under the monastery there was rumoured to be one more entrance. If so, then what would have been a more appropriate way for the original monks, once their vows had apparently disintegrated, to gain clandestine access to the town than through the-

  Oh Lord, Verse thought. The place where Brand had thought the mumblers would be safest was in reality the most dangerous of all.

  Verse barrelled through Boswell, shocked to see in the absence of interference how quickly the place had become a warzone. Pitched battles were being fought between those of the Brigadier's men who were so far resisting the Voice, and those who had already relinquished their souls and been puppeteered to its will. Though the former still used the neurotoxin darts, the latter had swapped them for live ammunition clips. Either way, the bodies were falling everywhere, and in the midst of it all those for whom the demands of the Voice had proven too much burned away untended on the ground.

  But the worst horror awaited him in the church itself. Passing through doors abandoned by their guards, Verse was greeted by the aftermath of a massacre. The dead bodies of the mumblers lay where they had been mercilessly mown down, their wrinkled flesh redly peppered by so many machine gun bullets they were hardly recognisable at all. Knitting and puzzles and cards lay bloodstained beside them on the floor. I'm so sorry, Lawrence Verse thought.

  His eyes were drawn to the rear of the church, to the secret panel he had known would be there. He caught a glimpse of white-skinned, emaciated figures dressed in rags before they disappeared into the darkness from where they'd come. Then the ex-priest's jaw pulsed and set hard as he placed his mobile to it and called Brand and Ness.

  "The mumblers are dead," he said.

  There was a second's delay before the other two answered, during which Verse stared out from the church door. Over Boswell, the sky had darkened, a storm begun, and yet the soul shield above the tor was glowing more brightly than ever. As yet, it remained featureless, but he knew it would not be so for long. He nodded as Brand and Ness came back, their sentiments echoing his own.

  "We need to finish this. Now."

  SEVENTEEN

  Lawrence Verse was the first to enter hell.

  The ex-priest's discovery of the secret passage led him deep inside the tor, overtaking Ness and the Brigadier's strike team, working their way in through the collapsed passage from '44. Perhaps because of some residual effect from the mumbling most of the men were so far managing to fight the Voice, but they still needed to watch each other's backs and Verse heard the odd barked warning then dartshot or worse, resounding hollowly inside the labyrinthine rock. It was difficult to pinpoint where the noises originated precisely, though, as the tor was a natural honeycomb that twisted and distorted sounds within,
sucking them in here and disgorging them there, muted or boosted depending on the vagaries of the rock. A whisper could be a scream in this aural funhouse, and - for all he knew - the last scream could have been above him, below him, to the left, the right, or even by his side. It made passage through the gloom a little discomforting.

  But Verse made good progress, and surprisingly, without incident. He had wondered why, if this passage had existed all these years, the things that lurked down here had not made greater use of it, and why they were not doing so now. But the answer was actually quite obvious. This passage exited through the church, and if Brand's theory that the angel was protecting - hiding - itself with a soul shield was correct, it probably dared not risk dispatching its minions directly through a house of God.

  Company or not, he negotiated the passage with a good deal of caution, torchbeam panning slowly in front of him, his finger tensed on the trigger of his shotgun, business end aimed into the halo of yellow light. His ears had shut out the sound of Ness and the soldiers and were attuned now to the sounds of those he pursued - a series of low exhalations, grunts and hisses that seemed almost neanderthal in this environment. Occasionally he heard the scraping of what sounded like claws on rock, but from the brief glimpse he'd seen of the mumblers' attackers, Verse guessed they were more likely seriously overgrown human nails. What was more, he thought he knew to whom those nails were attached. The scraps of cloth he'd seen on those white bodies at the church were, he realised now, actually scraps of uniform - Sonderkommando Thule uniforms, to be exact, circa 1944. So maybe when Cecilia Bird had brought down the saucer, the men inside hadn't perished as assumed. Maybe they'd been sucked into Hemlock's submarine caves where, in turn, they had met an entirely different fate.

  Verse started suddenly, a flash of a shape bang in the middle of his torch beam. Only extensive combat experience prevented him discharging the shotgun unnecessarily. It was just as well. Not only would he have alerted every one of the half-humans he followed, he would have obliterated the detail of something absolutely irreplaceable.

  My God.

  He realised he was no longer in man-made tunnel but original cave - a small chamber, in fact - he reckoned must have been used as a habitat in some ancient times. And mesmerised, he stared at the paintings on its rocky walls... cave paintings. Verse fingered them in a state of some awe, and not just because he was probably the first person to see them literally in ages. From the relative fading of the primitive artworks, they looked to have been made over time, possibly by a number of different hands, and yet the subject depicted was always the same.

  Only it wasn't. Not quite.

  It doesn't know which angel it is, Magister had told Jonathan Brand, his words echoing in Verse's mind. It may no longer truly be an angel at all, but a corrupted version of the thing it once was. Verse heard Jonathan Hemlock's voice, then. How can one monster be all of these things, the caver had asked. It's either one or it's none at all.

  Well, maybe not. Here was the evidence.

  Because in all of these representations of the creature these tribesmen had encountered in these caverns, the angel had changed.

  More gunfire from above - or was it below or by his side? - broke Verse from his reverie, and the priest moved on. It was beginning to sound as if things were getting more heated; he should hurry. Heading further along the passage, he began to wonder whether he was ever going to see daylight again, and his mood wasn't lightened by the fact that the further into the tor he progressed, the colder and damper the surrounding rock became. A quick feel of the passage walls brought his palm away glistening, and he frowned. He must be near to sea level; any deeper and he could very easily become prey to the random tide flow in the lower chambers that Hemlock had warned him about.

  Unexpectedly, not only did the passage begin to level out, it began to rise, shallowly at first, and then more steeply. Verse levered himself up the rock walls and found the soles of his boots sliding out from under him. There was a fine sand on the floor here, no doubt caused by erosion from other sliding feet, and he shone the torch down. Footprints. Human. Most likely the monks, and whichever scrabbling captive the bastards were returning with to the monastery, from long ago.

  He scrambled further, and then dropped quickly to his haunches. Two things had alerted him to the fact that the passage had finally come to an end - the beam from his torch shooting off into space abruptly like an emergency beacon, and the sudden corrupt and overwhelming stench that made him spin away, lose his footing, and very nearly heave.

  It was the same stench that had assailed him in Saknusem's Swallow on the beach, only magnified a thousand times. It reminded him of the stench of some of the foulest places on Earth. The Charnal Pits of Sarajevo, Tepes' Dungeons or the Ultimate Solution Facility he and Chapter had shut down in Greece. But reminded him only. For all of those places paled in comparison to the absolute, utter corruption he smelled here.

  Bodies there may be in this place, but this was more than a decay of the simply physical. It was a decay of the spiritual.

  Verse snapped off his torch instantly, hoping - probably in vain, considering how light-sensitive anything living down here had to be - that it had not been spotted. He threw himself against the rock wall and waited a moment or two, tensed and ready to defend himself, using the time to allow his eyes to grow accustomed to the dark.

  Nothing came at him out of the space ahead. It appeared he'd been lucky. Lucky, or whatever was in here was only biding its time, waiting for him to step inside and join the party.

  Unfortunately, there wouldn't have been much of a point in his coming if he didn't do so. Apart from anything else, his thinking about Hannah had boosted his determination to find Abaddon and, he prayed, Hannah herself. Especially the latter.

  The fact that it was quiet, too quiet, didn't deter him from this goal in the slightest.

  The ex-priest eased himself over the lip of the passage mouth, emerging from it about a third of the way up the wall of the huge cavern his torch-beam had illuminated. His boots crunched down on a massive slide of scree, and a mini-landslide of small stones bounced and clattered away down into the dark. Again, he crouched. But again, there was no discernable reaction to his presence. But he remained where he was for a few moments, using the vantage point to assess his surroundings with a professional eye.

  It was brighter here than should be expected in some subterranean chamber, and Verse realised the place was being dimly lit from not one but three sources. The first, spots of some bioluminescent alga, the second, what could only be soul-shield residue hanging like a mist near the cavern roof, and the third a softly bubbling lake exuding foul gases that filled the centre of the cavern floor.

  And at its heart, like an island, was the angel.

  What had once been an angel.

  It was almost a topographical addition to this cavern, this creature, a tor within a tor, rising there in the postulant sea that surrounded it. Details were barely visible at his distance, but Verse could make out a glistening black mass that was as high and as broad as three men, then as long as six. The glistening was caused by an outer skin of scales identical to the ones he had seen in the Breaking Point and at Jardine's farm, and as he watched they rose and fell in a slow but regular cycle, the angel breathing just as it had on Kostabi's geophysical scan. It appeared, in fact, to be in a kind of half-sleep, but that did little to lessen the vileness of the rest of it. At one end seemed to be a wedge-like head, like an anvil, and at the other misshapen, clawed limbs that could have once been legs but were now something more... reptilian. The angel's arms, if the creature possessed arms, couldn't be seen because of two thick and sweeping ribbed black wings that lay at rest down its length, but Verse was certain they concealed yet more mutation.

  Fallen or not, it was hard for Verse to imagine how this monstrosity could ever have sat by God's side. Excommunicated or not, he had to get close to it, feel if there was anything of God left.

  But therein lay
a problem. Getting to it. For the floor of the chamber was busy with the things who had slaughtered the mumblers, Sonderkommando Thule's dead.

  Oh, they were dead, no doubting it, these white-skinned puppets in their tattered uniforms, for sixty years or more, yet somehow preserved by the angel. Worse, milling amongst them employed in tasks at which he could only guess, were a number of Boswell's townsfolk, dressed in the remains of the clothes they had been wearing in 1944. Grey, cataract-covered eyes stared from their soulless faces.

  Verse had to take a chance moving by the townsfolk but dared not do the same with the soldiers, armed as they were with their modern machine guns, provided, no doubt, by Helen Earth. No, here he had to take a different chance. He fired a B3 dart into each of them and watched them collapse. There was no reaction from the angel. As he had hoped, at the moment its mind seemed occupied by other things.

  Show me your sins.

  Potential threat eliminated, Verse moved warily through the rocks edging the cavern and reached the lake, holding a handkerchief over his nose to mask the stench. He almost gagged anyway, but it was more from what he saw than what he smelled as the death-pit bobbed before him.

  Oh dearest God, he thought, so many people... so many poor, poor people.

  He felt a soft impact on his head. Raising his hand, it came away red. Verse looked up. There was a body far above him, a young woman, skewered by a blade projecting from the wall of some kind of rocky flue in the roof of the cavern. He was looking at Hemlock's much sought-after monastery entrance, he realised - except for those who used it, it was not an entrance but an exit - the last they would ever make.

  Hannah, he thought suddenly. Did Helen-?

  But it wasn't even her fault, was it? The sect leader, the Sonderkommando Thule commander, may have thought she was orchestrating the horrors of this place but she had become as much a puppet as the rest of them, the only difference being that the angel had left her with her soul.