by Clive Barker
But how? Her letter to him had been quite clear: she would contact him when it was safe to do so. He had no address for her; nor a telephone number.
In desperation, he turned to the only source of intelligence he had on the whereabouts of miracles.
He found Virgil Gluck’s card, and rang the number on it.
There was no reply.
IV
THE SHRINE OF THE MORTALITIES
1
he day after Apolline’s visit – with polar conditions moving down across the country, and the temperature dropping hourly – Suzanna went out to look at the sites on the list. The first of them proved a disappointment: the house she’d come to see, and those adjacent to it, were in the process of being demolished. As she studied her map, to be certain she’d come to the correct address, one of the workmen left a fire of roof-timbers he was tending and sauntered across to her.
‘There’s nothing to see,’ he said. There was a look of distaste on his face which she couldn’t fathom.
‘Is this where number seventy-two stood?’ she asked.
‘You don’t look the type,’ he replied.
‘I’m sorry, I don’t –’
‘To come looking.’
She shook her head. He seemed to see that he’d made an error of some kind, and his expression mellowed.
‘You didn’t come to see the murder house?’ he said.
‘Murder house?’
‘This is where that bastard did his three kiddies in. There’ve been people here all week, picking up bricks –’
‘I didn’t know.’
She vaguely remembered the grim headlines, however: an apparently sane man – and loving father – had murdered his children while they slept; then killed himself.
‘My mistake,’ said the fire-watcher. ‘Couldn’t believe some of these people, wanting souvenirs. It’s unnatural.’
He frowned at her, then turned away and headed back to his duties.
Unnatural. That was the way Violet Pumphrey had condemned Mimi’s house in Rue Street; Suzanna had never forgotten it. ‘Some houses,’ she’d said, ‘they’re not quite natural.’ She’d been right. Perhaps the children who’d died here had been victims of that same unfocused fear; their killer moved either to preserve them forever from the forces he felt at work in his little sphere, or else wash his own fear away in their blood. Whichever, unless she could read auguries in smoke or rubble, there was no sense in lingering.
2
The second site, which was in the centre of the city, was neither house nor rubble, but a church, its dedicatees Saints Philomena and Callixtus, two names she was not at all familiar with. Minor martyrs, presumably. It was a charmless building of red brick and stone dressing, hedged in on every side by new office developments, the small accompanying graveyard littered and forsaken. In its way it looked as unpromising as the ruins that had been the murderer’s house.
But before she even stepped over the threshold the menstruum told her that this was one of the charged places. Inside, that instinct was confirmed: she was delivered from a cold, bland street into a haven for mysteries. She didn’t need to be a believer to find the candlelight and smell of incense persuasive; nor to be touched by the image of Madonna and Christ-child. Whether their story was history or myth was academic; the Fugue had taught her that. All that mattered was how loudly the image spoke, and today she found in it a hope for birth and transcendence her heart needed.
There were half a dozen people sitting in the pews, either praying or simply letting their pulses slow a little. Out of respect for their meditations she walked as quietly as the stone underfoot would allow down one of the side-aisles to the altar. As she approached the chancel rail her sense that there was power here intensified. She felt self-conscious as though somebody had their eyes on her. She looked round. None of the worshippers was looking her way. But as she turned back towards the altar, the floor beneath her feet grew insubstantial, then vanished entirely, and she was left standing on the air, staring down into the labyrinthine bowels of St Philomena’s. There were catacombs laid out below; the power was sourced there.
The vision lasted two or three seconds only before it flickered out, leaving her hanging onto the rail until the vertigo it had brought with it passed. Then she looked about her for a door that would offer her access to the crypt.
There was only one likely option that she could see, off to the left of the altar. She climbed the steps, and was crossing to the door when it opened and a priest stepped through.
‘Can I help you?’ he wanted to know, offering up a wafer-thin smile.
‘I want to see the crypt,’ she said.
The smile snapped. ‘There isn’t one,’ he replied.
‘But I’ve seen it,’ she told him, pressed to bluntness by the fact that the menstruum had risen in her as she’d crossed beneath Christ’s gaze, unnerving her with its eagerness.
‘Well, you can’t go down. The crypt’s sealed.’
‘I have to,’ she told him.
The heat of her insistence brought a stare of something like recognition from him. When he spoke again his voice was an anxious whisper.
‘I’ve got no authority,’ he said.
‘I have,’ she answered, the response coming not from her head, but from her belly.
‘Couldn’t you wait?’ he murmured. The words were his last appeal, for when she chose not to reply he stood aside, and allowed her to walk past him into the room beyond.
‘You want me to show you?’ he said, his voice now barely audible.
‘Yes.’
He led her to a curtain, which he drew aside. The key was in the lock of the door. He turned it, and pushed the door open. The air that rose from below was dry and stale, the stairway before her steep; but she was not afraid. The call she felt from below coaxed her down, whispering its encouragement. This was no grave they were entering. Or if it was, the dead had more than rot on their minds.
3
Her glimpse of the maze beneath the church hadn’t prepared her for how far below ground level it actually lay. The light from the baptistery rapidly faded as the staircase wound its way down. After two dozen steps she could not see her guide at all.
‘How much further?’ she said.
At that moment, he struck a match and set it to a candle-wick. The flame was reluctant in the feeble air, but by its uncertain light she saw the priest’s fretful face turned towards her. Beyond him were the corridors she’d first viewed from above, lined with niches.
‘There’s nothing here,’ he said, with some sadness. ‘Not any longer.’
‘Show me anyway.’
He nodded weakly, as though he’d lost entirely the strength to resist her, and led her down one of the passageways, carrying the candle before him. The niches, she now saw, were all occupied: caskets piled from floor to ceiling. It was a pleasant enough way to decay, she supposed, cheek by jowl with your peers. The very civility of the sight lent greater force to the scene that awaited her when, at the end of the passageway, he opened a door, and – ushering her before him – said:
‘This is what you came to see, isn’t it?’
She stepped inside; he followed. Such was the size of the room they’d entered that the meagre candle-flame was not equal to illuminating it. But there were no caskets here, that much was apparent. There were only bones – and those there were in their thousands, covering every inch of the walls and ceiling.
The priest crossed the room and put the candle to a dozen wicks set in candelabra of femur and skull pan. As the flames brightened the full ambition of the bone-arranger’s skills became apparent. The mortal remains of hundreds of human beings had been used to create vast symmetrical designs: baroque configurations of shin and rib, with clusters of skulls as their centre pieces; exquisite mosaics of foot and finger bones, set off with teeth and nails. It was all the more ghastly because it was so meticulously rendered, the work of some morbid genius.
‘What is this place?�
� she asked.
He frowned at her, perplexed.
‘You know what it is. The Shrine.’
‘… shrine?’
He moved towards her.
‘You didn’t know?’
‘No.’
Rage and fear suddenly ignited his face. ‘You lied to me!’ he said, his voice setting the candles fluttering. ‘You said you knew –’ He snatched hold of her arm. ‘Get out of here,’ he demanded, dragging her back towards the door. ‘You’re trespassing –’
His grip hurt her. It was all she could do to stop the menstruum retaliating. As it was, there was no need, for the priest’s gaze suddenly left her, and strayed to the candles. The flames had grown brighter, their jittering manic. His hand dropped from her arm, and he began to back away towards the door of the Shrine, as the flickering fires became incandescent. His short-cropped hair was literally standing on end; his tongue lolled in his open mouth, robbed of exclamation.
She didn’t share his terror. Whatever was happening in the chamber, it felt good to her; she bathed in the energies that were loose in the air around her head. The priest had reached the door, and now fled down the passageway towards the stairs. As he did so the caskets began to rattle in their brick niches, as if their contents wanted to be up to meet the day that was dawning in the Shrine. Their drumming lent fervour to the spectacle before her. In the centre of the chamber a form was beginning to appear, drawing its substance from the dust-filled air, and the bone-shards that lay on the floor. Suzanna could feel it plucking flecks from her face and arms, to add to its sum. It was not one shape, she now saw, but three; the central figure towering over her. Common sense might have counselled retreat, but unlikely as it seemed, given that death surrounded her on all sides, she’d seldom felt safer.
That sense of ease didn’t falter. The dust moved in front of her in a slow dance, more soothing than distressing, the two flanking shapes forsaking their creation before they became coherent and running into the central figure to lend it new solidity. Even then it was only a dust-ghost, barely able to hold itself together. But in the features that were taking shape before her Suzanna could see traces of Immacolata.
What more perfect place for the Incantatrix to keep her Shrine? Death had always been her passion.
The priest was scrabbling for a prayer in the passageway outside, but the grey, glittering smudge that hung in the air in front of Suzanna was unmoved. Its features had elements of not one but all three sisters. The Hag’s senility; the Magdalene’s sensuality; the exquisite symmetry of Immacolata. Unlikely as it seemed, the synthesis worked; the marriage of contradictions rendered both more tenuous and more pliant by the delicacy of its construction. It seemed to Suzanna that if she breathed too hard she’d undo it.
And then the voice. That, at least, was recognizably Immacolata’s, but there was a softness in it now that it had previously lacked. Perhaps, even, a delicate humour?
‘We’re glad you came,’ she said. ‘Will you request the Adamatical to leave? We have business to do, you and I.’
‘What sort of business?’
‘It’s not for his ears,’ the mote ghost said. ‘Please. Help him to his feet, will you? And tell him there’s no harm done. They’re so superstitious, these men …’
She did as Immacolata asked: went down the drumming corridor to where the man was cowering, and drew him to his feet.
‘I think maybe you should leave,’ she said. ‘The Lady wants it.’
The priest gave her a sickened look.
‘All this time –’ he said. ‘–I never really believed.’
‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘There’s no damage done.’
‘Are you coming too?’
‘No.’
‘I can’t come back for you,’ he warned her, tears spilling down his cheeks.
‘I understand,’ she said. ‘You go on. I’m safe.’
He needed no further urging, but was off up the stairs like a jack rabbit. She returned down the passageway – the caskets still rattling – to face the woman.
‘I thought you were dead,’ she said.
‘What’s dead?’ Immacolata replied. ‘A word the Cuckoos use when the flesh fails. It’s nothing, Suzanna; you know that.’
‘Why are you here, then?’
‘I’ve come to pay a debt to you. In the Temple, you kept me from falling, or have you forgotten?’
‘No.’
‘Nor I. Such kindnesses are not negligible. I understand that now. I understand many things. You see how I’m reunited with my sisters? Together we’re as we could never be apart. A single mind, three-in-one. I am we; and we see our malice, and regret it.’
Suzanna might well have doubted this unlikely confession but that the menstruum, brimming at her eyes and throat, confirmed the truth of it. The wraith before her – and the power behind it – had no hatred on its mind. What did it have? There was the question. She didn’t need to ask; it knew her question.
‘I’m here with a warning,’ it said.
‘About what? Shadwell?’
‘He’s only a part of what you now face, sister. A fragment.’
‘Is it the Scourge?’
The phantom shuddered at the name, though surely its state put it beyond the reach of such dangers. Suzanna didn’t wait for confirmation. There was no use disbelieving the worst now.
‘Is Shadwell something to do with the Scourge?’ she asked.
‘He raised it.’
‘Why?’
‘He thinks magic has tainted him,’ the dust said. ‘Corrupted his innocent salesman’s soul. Now he won’t be content until every rapture-maker’s dead.’
‘And the Scourge is his weapon?’
‘So he believes. The truth may be more … complex.’
Suzanna ran her hand down over her face, her mind seeking the best route of enquiry. One simple question occurred:
‘What kind of creature is this Scourge?’
‘The answer’s perhaps just another question,’ said the sisters, ‘It thinks that it’s called Uriel.’
‘Uriel?’
‘An Angel.’
Suzanna almost laughed at the absurdity of this.
‘That’s what it believes, having read the Bible.’
‘I don’t follow.’
‘Most of this is beyond even our comprehension, but we offer you what we know. It’s a spirit. And it once stood guard over a place where magic was. A garden, some have said, though that may be simply another fiction.’
‘Why should it want to wipe the Seerkind out?’
‘They were made there, in that garden, kept from the eyes of Humankind, because they had raptures. But they fled from it.’
‘And Uriel –’
‘ – was left alone, guarding an empty place. For centuries.’
Suzanna was by no means certain she believed any of this, but she wanted to hear the story completed.
‘What happened?’
‘It went mad, as any prisoner of duty must, left without fresh instructions. It forgot itself, and its purpose. All it knew was sand and stars and emptiness.’
‘You should understand …’ said Suzanna. ‘I find all this difficult to believe, not being a Christian.’
‘Neither are we,’ said the three-in-one.
‘But you still think the story’s true?’
‘We believe there’s truth inside it, yes.’
The reply made her think again of Mimi’s book, and all it contained. Until she’d entered its pages the realm of Faery had seemed child’s play. But facing Hobart in the forest of their shared dreams, she’d learned differently. There’d been truth inside that story: why not this too? The difference was that the Scourge occupied the same physical world as she did. Not metaphor, not dream-stuff; real.
‘So it forgot itself,’ she said to the phantom. ‘How then did it remember?’
‘Perhaps it never has,’ said Immacolata. ‘But its home was found, a hundred years back, by men who’d gone
looking for Eden. In their heads it read the story of the paradise garden and took it for its own, whether it was or not. It found a name too. Uriel, flame of God. The spirit who stood at the gates of lost Eden –’
‘And was it Eden? The place it guarded?’
‘You don’t believe that any more than I do. But Uriel does. Whatever its true name is – if it even has one – that name’s forgotten. It believes itself an Angel. So, for better or worse, it is.’
The notion made sense to Suzanna, in its way. If, in the dream of the book, she’d believed herself a dragon, why shouldn’t something lost in madness take an Angel’s name?
‘It murdered its discoverers, of course –’ Immacolata was saying, ‘– then went looking for those who’d escaped it.’
‘The Families.’
‘Or their descendants. And it almost wiped them out. But they were clever. Though they didn’t understand the power that pursued them, they knew how to hide. The rest you’re familiar with.’
‘And Uriel? What did it do when the Seerkind disappeared?’
‘It returned to its fortress.’
‘Until Shadwell.’
‘Until Shadwell.’
Suzanna mused on this for a little time, then asked the one question this whole account begged.
‘What about God?’ she said.
The three-in-one laughed, her motes somersaulting.
‘We don’t need God to make sense of this,’ she said. Suzanna wasn’t certain if she spoke only for themselves or for her too. ‘If there was a First Cause, a force of which this Uriel is a fragment, it’s forsaken its sentinel.’
‘So what do we do?’ said Suzanna. ‘There’s been talk of mustering the Old Science.’
‘Yes, I heard …’
‘Would that defeat it?’
‘I don’t know. Certainly I made some miracles in my time that might have wounded it.’
‘Then help us now.’
‘That’s beyond us, Suzanna. You can see our condition for yourself. All that’s left is dust and will-power, haunting the Shrine we were worshipped at, until the Scourge comes to destroy it.’
