by Alex Bell
‘Gabriel!’ Mephisto said with sudden sharpness.
But I had already scrambled up onto it and jumped over the edge . . . almost seeming to hang there for a moment, like a bird in the night sky suspended high above the cathedral, frozen stars sparkling coldly in space above me, and frozen air blowing past me to grace the bell tower in so many thick ribbons of twisted ice, like candy canes . . .
I began to fall and pure joy cut through me like blades - I’ve never known anything like it. This was it; soon it would all be over. At last I had taken steps to finish it. Cold air would dance around me, all the way to the last. The ground, the divinely hard, unyielding ground was waiting far below, and stone at least would fulfil its promise. To cease upon the midnight with no pain . . . But the air went rushing past without me as a hand gripped hard around my arm and my body slammed against the cold wall of the cathedral, knocking the breath out of me, the tips of my boots scraping against the stone.
For a moment I just gazed out over the light-speckled city beneath me, wondering why I wasn’t moving, thinking that I must have discovered some new superpower I hadn’t known about before. Then I looked up and saw Mephisto, balancing on a ledge below the wall, clinging to the edge of the tower with one hand, the other gripped about my arm.
‘What are you doing?’ I demanded, irritated that he was interfering.
Mephisto grinned down at me. ‘What are you doing?’
‘Just let me fall,’ I pleaded, even as he inched his way back up the wall of the tower and swung himself up onto the low wall. ‘I deserve it. I’ve earned it! You’ve got no right to interfere.’
Mephistopheles paused, gazing down at me from his perch as I hung from the side of the tower, as if considering what I’d said for a moment before he spoke. ‘The baby too, then, Gabriel?’
I glanced down. Casey’s second daughter was still clasped in my left arm, warmly tucked into the folds of my jacket. How strange that I should have forgotten she was there.
‘Well?’ Mephisto asked pleasantly, gazing down at me with traces of that all too familiar amusement on his face. The shreds of his ripped black clothing were flapping about him in the glacial wind; leathery wings spread slightly to keep his balance on the low wall. I had truly liked Zadkiel Stephomi. If only he had been an angel instead of a devil. The ground below called to me still. Death himself was singing to me in the sweet, golden voice of a nightingale, and I longed for it like I’d never longed for anything.
‘Let him go,’ I heard Michael order from above. ‘It is his wish. You must not interfere.’
‘Isn’t it rather unseasonable for nightingales?’ Mephisto remarked conversationally, turning his head slightly to look at the angel.
The bird song stopped suddenly, leaving loud, melancholy echoes in its wake.
‘Dear, dear, Michael. How very hypocritical of you,’ I heard Mephistopheles say with a laugh.
I shook my head; confused, disoriented, feeling the mists of some strange trance evaporate from my mind. Then I made the mistake of looking down. ‘Jesus fucking Christ!’ I screamed, unable to stop myself from thrashing about instinctively as the city below me swung alarmingly. ‘Oh, fuck!’
‘Hold still, Gabriel, hold still!’ Mephisto snapped, gritting his teeth as my weight pulled on the wounds he’d received from Michael that evening.
I felt his grip slip slightly and that panicked me enough to force myself to go limp, although it took all the willpower I had. I looked down at the baby. What had I been thinking to jump over the wall like that while holding her? She was so fragile, for all I knew my stupidity had already broken her neck. But, no she was blinking up at me. Lower lip trembling, she started to cry - which probably had more to do with the cold than anything else, for she couldn’t understand that a demon’s tenuous grip was currently the only thing keeping her alive.
‘Pull us up!’ I pleaded, looking up at Mephisto and, to my dismay, seeing him hesitate. ‘For God’s sake, Stephomi, pull us up now!’
Instinctively, I wanted to reach up with my other hand to grab onto his arm, and use him to drag myself bodily over the wall, but I couldn’t do that without dropping Casey’s daughter.
‘This will go on, you know,’ Mephisto said softly in a strange tone, gazing at the baby girl tucked into my coat. ‘If you don’t drop her now, while you can, it’ll never end. It’ll just . . . we’ll all just keep going round and round in these circles . . . You can save us all from that. Do you really want this for yourself, Gabriel? Is it really something anyone would ever actually choose?’
I couldn’t help but look down again as I felt his grip slip a little further. Fear of death. Here it was. I wouldn’t have minded so much if I’d been atheist. If I could’ve believed that I would cease to exist once I fell. But I knew there was an afterlife, and I knew which Circle I would be going to, and I knew who was waiting to meet me there. It would happen eventually whatever I did. But not yet! Oh, Christ, not like this!
Without even realising it, I had started to mutter the Lord’s Prayer under my breath. ‘Our father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name—’
‘Now, now, none of that,’ Mephistopheles said angrily, shaking me - actually shaking me so that the city below swung madly as the horizons on either side of my vision went up and down. ‘Now isn’t the best time to offend me, Gabriel. Use your brain for once.’
I swore again, unable to stop myself from looking down, and feeling sick at the sight of Budapest so far below. The pressure of Mephistopheles’ hand on my arm was excruciatingly painful by now, and I couldn’t even feel my frozen hands any more.
‘You were always going to drop me, weren’t you?’ I asked, loathing burning inside of me. ‘You just wanted me to die unwillingly. You just wanted it to be as awful as possible, didn’t you, you bastard?’
‘Tut, tut, what a thing to say to the demon holding on to you for dear life,’ Mephisto said with a leer. ‘No, I really am saving your life, Gabriel. But I want to teach you something about the nature of prayer first.’
‘What . . . what do you mean?’ I asked, my teeth chattering together from the cold.
‘Prayers to God have no effect on me,’ Mephistopheles said coldly. ‘So before I save your life . . . I want to hear you pray to Lucifer.’
I stared at him. Surely he couldn’t be serious?
‘I’m quite serious, I assure you,’ Mephisto said with a grin. ‘I serve Lucifer. So if you swallow your pride and pray to him, then you will see how much more effective prayer to the devil can be.’
I started to tremble, hating Mephistopheles with all my soul for this. I could feel the cold, heavy weight of the onyx crucifix Casey had given me just last week pressing into my skin. I couldn’t hesitate for long - I was so cold by now that I was afraid Casey’s daughter might slip right out of my numb arm, falling the whole height of the terrible Basilica on her own. The image was too awful - I would just have to pray to the Devil and hate myself for it later.
‘Lucifer,’ I said between gritted teeth, ‘please . . . please . . . help me—’ I bit my tongue to keep from crying out as a particularly savage gust of wind made me sway, the tips of my boots scraping against the old stone of the basilica, my coat flapping back from my body, tugging at my back. The baby wailed louder and I could feel her tears soaking through my shirt. ‘Oh, shit!’ I whimpered, trying in vain to tighten my numb fingers around Mephistopheles’ arm. ‘Lucifer, please, please don’t let me fall! I don’t want to die yet! Have mercy on us, I’m begging you!’
‘That was very nice, Gabriel,’ Mephisto said kindly. ‘But there’s no need to beg. You see what the Devil can do for you if you just ask him nicely. Trust me, he’s much more reliable than God.’ And with that, he hauled me up over the edge.
He tried to steady me as I landed shakily on the stone, but I pushed him away and stumbled over to the middle of the tower, desperately trying to erase that dreadful image of the city swinging crazily beneath my feet. Yet another memory to come back to hau
nt me in the middle of the night. I sank to my knees, closed my eyes and bent my head over Casey’s daughter, who was still crying into my shirt. I wanted to cry myself but my eyes were painfully dry. This - all this - must be a dream. It was the only sensible explanation.
But when I looked up, Michael and Mephistopheles remained stood at the edge of the tower, watching me. I realised with a sudden jolt of fear that the baby had stopped crying. But when I looked down at her, she didn’t seem to be hurt, except for a small scratch on her cheek where her face had grazed the Basilica wall. It wasn’t a bad cut but the sight of it shrivelled my insides with guilt, and I knew I had to get her out of this freezing cold quickly. Still covered in her mother’s blood, she was staring up at me with wide, brown eyes - as if she knew me, as if she trusted me, as if she really did love me already. Making up my mind in that moment, I looked up at the two angels and tightened my grip on the baby slightly. ‘I’m not giving her to either of you,’ I spat, glad to relieve some of the anger that was building up inside.
‘Then what, precisely, do you propose?’ Michael asked coldly.
I wrapped my arms more securely around my daughter and said nothing. Suddenly, Mephistopheles laughed, ‘You plan to keep her for yourself! Well, well. You are a glutton for punishment, aren’t you? But be very careful of little Adolf there, for she might come to haunt you in the years to come. At least the demons got one of them. A small victory for our side, Michael,’ he said, with a mocking smile at the glowering angel. ‘I’ll never be too far away,’ he said, nodding his head at me. ‘I believe it was William Congreve who said, “The Devil watches all opportunities.” And so he does, my friend. So he does, indeed.’
Mephisto inclined his head at Michael and myself, and then turned and leaped from the dome as Lilith had done, spreading his great batlike wings behind him and fading back into his own realm. Michael was, of course, disgusted with me. He raged at me, shouted and cursed at me so furiously it made me tremble, but still I refused to give him Casey’s daughter and eventually he left.
Once the angels and the demons had gone, the Basilica slowly returned to normal, the frozen half unfreezing and the fire on the other half smoking away into nothingness as the last of the frozen lightning crackled and melted away. And then it was just me, Casey and the baby. I stood there, wondering what to do, struggling against the great fatigue that was tugging at me. I felt I just wanted to crawl back inside the dome and curl up, to sleep there by the top of the stairs . . . wait until morning for the police to arrive. But that was no good at all - there would be investigations and questions, and how could I give the police answers they’d be able to understand? So I had to leave Casey there. We said goodbye to her first, the baby and I, although I could hardly bear to look at her glassy eyes or the sweat that had frozen to her cold skin. At last I turned away from her, head down, shoulders slumped, and crept away into the night with her daughter.
Now I am back in my apartment, with my baby lying sleeping on the couch beside me, delicate eyelashes resting on her cheeks as she dreams. At the moment she is wrapped up in one of my jumpers, but later I will have to break into Casey’s apartment and retrieve some clothes and other supplies for her. She’ll be hungry - I’ll have to feed her soon. Oh, God, I don’t know anything at all about looking after her; I don’t know how the hell I’m going to do this . . .
I don’t know what will happen about Casey. I suppose police will be called tomorrow morning when it’s discovered that the Basilica was broken into. They’ll find Casey’s body, which will probably have frozen completely by then. It will be obvious that she died from natural causes. The mystery will lie in how she got there and what happened to her child. But that is a mystery for the police to deal with, and I do not think there is anything to link the scene to me.
I feel wrong - the world feels wrong. Everything looks different now, even my familiar apartment. I will grieve for Casey. But I can’t do it yet and I’m grateful for the numbness. First I have to make plans. Where should I go now? Italy, perhaps? Or Holland? Oh, I know that what I flee from can’t be escaped by moving to a different country. But I can’t stay in Budapest now, after all that has happened, although I will always think fondly of the city that gave me the briefest taste of what life is like for normal people. I love Budapest like I’ll never love anywhere else. But I can’t stay here.
I have decided on a name for Casey’s daughter. I thought of naming her for an angel, but my experiences with Michael turned me from the idea. He is not at all what an angel should be. He refused to forgive me my sins and, worse, he had wanted me to kill a newborn baby - had even tried to trick me into doing so when I refused. That nightingale’s song - he deliberately put it in my head while I was holding Casey’s daughter. He wanted the two of us dead and it was only the actions of a devil that saved us both. If I owe Lucifer my sanity, I now owe Mephistopheles my life and, to be frank, the speed with which I am clocking up debts to demons appals me.
I considered naming Casey’s daughter for a saint or a leader or a hero. But finally, I decided to name her for a virtue: Grace. A man like me shouldn’t be anywhere near this baby, or any baby. But I have to stay with her to protect her from the angels and the devils who might wish her harm. I have no choice. I must do all in my power to protect her, to save her, as I was not able to save her mother or her sister.
And so the question comes back to haunt me . . . If you could go back in time to Adolf Hitler’s birth, would you kill him if you had the chance? Would you kill him there and then - an utterly defenceless child? Would you have a duty to the world to do it if you could? Would you really be able to do such a thing to a baby who has yet to commit even the most inoffensive wrong? We all say ‘yes’ but trust me, it doesn’t seem quite such an easy question once it ceases to be purely theoretical.
As I sit here watching Grace sleep, I can’t believe that anything bad could ever possibly come from her. In my dreams, Casey gave birth to both an angel and a demon. The angels themselves had believed that there was one baby, who would either be the Antichrist or the Second Coming of Jesus. But now the thought occurs to me that perhaps one of Casey’s daughters will be a saviour and the other will be a destroyer. And if that is true, then which one did the demoness Lilith steal away with her back to her own demonic realms and which one is lying, content and peaceful in an innocent sleep, here on the couch before me? When I look at Grace, I know in my soul that those dark prophetic words Nostradamus wrote hundreds of years ago couldn’t possibly apply to her.
I didn’t kill Grace, or hand her over to the demons or the angels, because I wanted her for myself. It was pure selfishness. I weakened - the temptation was too great . . . to have a baby who would grow up to love me automatically; to have some unbreakable bond between us because of my role in her life. A kind of bond that I would never otherwise know. I want to know how it feels . . . to be loved like that, even if I will spend the rest of eternity paying for it in the Ninth Circle itself. To be loved in spite of what I’ve done . . . I mean, that’s what family’s supposed to be, isn’t it? I want to keep Grace as I have never wanted anything in my life. I want her. She belongs to me now.
My name is Gabriel Antaeus. My daughter’s name is Grace Antaeus. I know she will not hurt anyone. I know she will bring me happiness such as I have never known. And I know I am not making a mistake.
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to the following people who either contributed to the book or to the preservation of my sanity at some stage:
My agent, Carolyn Whitaker, for the first professional positive feedback I ever received and thus the first letter that I didn’t tear up or viciously deface in some way after reading it. Thank you so much for all your hard work.
Simon Spanton and Gillian Redfearn - for taking on this book and for improving it immensely with all their comments and advice. And to Kustaa Saksi for the really beautiful cover artwork.
Christine Moffat and Qi Bao - for believing in the Ninth Circle be
fore they even knew what it was about. The same goes for my grandparents - John and Joan Willrich, and Ali (1930-2007) and Joy Bell - who have all been so encouraging over the years.
Very special thanks to Shirley and Trevor Bell - the most supportive parents in the world - for bringing Mephistopheles home to live with us when I was six years old (even though it meant taking out a loan) and for graciously funding all on-site research in Budapest, including the essential visit to Faust’s wine cellar!
Dad - thanks also for being the first to read this one and for the encouraging feedback at a discouraging time. And for letting me have Mephistopheles for the duration of the writing - he helped immensely with the difficult parts!
Lastly, thank you both for being such keen and avid travellers, providing me with a lifetime’s worth of visits to different countries and cultures around the world before I was even out of school.
And finally, I duly acknowledge Cindy, Chloe and Suki because behind every writer there should always be three beautiful, rather perfect, if occasionally grumpy cats who dutifully keep the author sane.
