The Scarlet Gospels

by Clive Barker

  Knotchee squared his shoulders. Harry bit his lip and took his finger off the trigger of his holstered gun. He pointed to the giant demons and said, “I just want you all to know, if she hadn’t said what she just said, you wouldn’t exist right now.”

  The demons stood their ground, motionless. Knotchee cracked his knuckles, the bones inside his massive hands popping so loudly the din bounced off the walls of the entryway.

  “Okay,” Harry said, looking back at his group. “Everyone, make sure Norma gets out of here safely.”

  “She goes nowhere,” Knotchee said.

  Harry turned toward the soldier, staring intently at him, while speaking to Norma. “I thought you said these guys were team players, Norma? We’re not leaving without you. So tell this fucking mountain to move, or else we will move the fucking mountain.”

  “Don’t threaten me,” the demon warned. “I have orders from my lord. A soldier never leaves his post.”

  Norma turned to Knotchee, laying a gentle hand on his bulbous, veiny forearm.

  “I have to go now. Thank you for keeping me safe. Thank you all. But your lord said for you to stay here. Not me.”

  The other soldiers attempted to protest, but that was as far as they ever got. Norma closed her eyes, and when she did they fell asleep dead away.

  “Holy shit, Norma!” said Caz. “I never knew you could do that.”

  “The old girl still has some tricks up her sleeve,” Norma said. “I just wish it would have worked on their lord. We could have ended this fiasco a long time ago. But, my God, he’s got power.”

  “Where is he, Norma?” Harry said.

  Norma turned, and with a graceful gesture of her hand indicated the Priest’s location inside the chamber.

  “Right,” Harry said. “Norma, you go with Caz, Lana, and Dale.”

  “Harry, don’t. Let’s leave together.”

  “I can’t,” Harry said.

  “Seriously, Harold?” Caz said. “Leave him. Let’s get the fuck out of here.” Harry gazed into Lucifer’s chamber.

  “I have to see,” he said.

  “No,” Dale said. “You have to watch.”

  “Just go,” Harry said. “I’ll be okay.”

  Norma kissed Harry on the cheek, then turned to the Harrowers who began ushering her up the stairs.

  “You better fucking come back,” Caz said.

  “If you do,” Lana said,” I want details!”

  “That makes one of us,” Dale said. “I already have enough terrors in my head to keep me rich in nightmares for two lifetimes. See you upstairs, Harry. Hopefully literally. Maybe metaphorically.”

  Harry silently watched them ascend the stairs and only when he was certain that Norma had been safely delivered into the hands of his friends did he turn to face the chamber. He took a deep breath, then stepped into the room where he would meet the Devil face-to-face.

  Harry walked through the maze of technology that was laid out in the vast chamber. His tattoos pulsed as he went, guiding their wearer through the warren of potentially lethal machinery. Slowly, he wove, the sweat beading on his forehead and dripping down the sides of his face. He wondered if he’d ever reach the end. As his tattoos led him through the industrial monstrosity that was this room, his thoughts began to wander. This whole damn thing had started with a puzzle—the simple invention of a humble toymaker—and ever since that moment, Harry’s life had been a series of puzzles, mazes, and labyrinths, some physical, some mental, but all challenging beyond belief.

  He hoped, after this incident—however it would end—that he at least would be spared from having to solve any more puzzles for a long time to come. And with that thought, Harry’s tattoos led him around the final bend. There the Hell Priest stood in front of him, and in front of the Hell Priest, seated on a marble throne, sat the Lord of Hell himself. His robes were white, his skin a mass of purple blotches and yellow stains. His eyes were open, but they saw nothing.

  “Dead,” the Hell Priest said. “The Lord of Hell is dead.”

  4

  Harry moved closer. As he studied the motionless body, it became apparent that the throne upon which the Devil sat was, for all its fine carving, nothing more than an elaborate death chair. Harry saw now that the machinery through which he had found his way all led ultimately to this fatal throne. The entire room had been set up to activate a fan of spear-length blades, arranged like the feathers of a peacock’s tail. These blades had entered the Devil from left, right, and directly below him and summarily exited him in perfect symmetry.

  The blades were close to one another and immaculately positioned so that seventeen blades alone emerged from his head, their bright array forming a gruesome halo that stood seven or eight inches off of the Devil’s skull. Blood ran down over his face from the seventeen wounds, dried into a purple stain in the curls of his pale blond hair. God, but he had been beautiful, his brow unlined, with almost Slavic features, his cheekbones high, his nose aquiline, and his mouth serene and sensual in equal measure. It was slightly open, as though he might have loosed one last sigh when the suicide machine drove its armory of weapons into him.

  There were mirrored arrangements of blades all around his body as well, entering through slits in the marble throne. They pierced his corpse on one side and emerged on the opposite, the glinting, narrow spearheads seeming to surround his form with signs of glorification, even in death. There was blood from each of these many wounds too, of course, which had soaked into his once-pristine robes, the stains a bright purple in the whiteness of the weave.

  “How long…” Harry said.

  “There is no knowing,” the Hell Priest replied. “A thousand days. A thousand years. The flesh of an angel never decays.”

  “Did you know?”

  “No.”

  “I expected—”

  “A mind turned inward for centuries, wholly in search of divinity. In a word: greatness.”

  “Yes.”

  “He had seen It, and known It, and been Its most beloved.”

  “But losing that—”

  “Was more than he could bear. I thought he’d seek the Maker’s mark inside himself, and take comfort in its presence. But instead … this.”

  “Why the elaborate suicide?” Harry asked, gesturing to their surroundings.

  “The Lord God is a vengeful God. Lucifer’s death sentence was life everlasting. He was beyond death. He found a means to trick his way past immortality.”

  As he spoke, the Hell Priest stepped onto the dais and around the side of the throne, where he reached out and seized hold of the end of one of the spears that transfixed Lucifer’s corpse. There was a short, sudden sound of numinous voices, and Harry looked back at the Cenobite to see him defiantly holding on to the end of the spear, which was attached, by means of a cable two inches thick, to a defense mechanism that had come into play due to the Hell Priest’s proximity to the body. Even in death, Lucifer clearly desired his solitude.

  There was a release of energies through the Priest’s body that threw him violently about. The Priest stood his ground and so a second shout of voices was released, ten times more violent than the first, the force of the energies passing through the spear commensurately larger. This time, the Hell Priest could not hold on. He was thrown backward, off the dais and through the entrails of the machine.

  He had not left the throne without a keepsake, however. He’d held on to the spear long enough to have it slide all the way out of the corpse. As he was pitched across the floor, however, he lost his grip, and the spear ended up no more than a couple of yards from where Harry was standing. The detective stepped a little nearer to it and went down on his aching haunches to look at it more closely. He could not tell what type of metal it was made from. There was a railing iridescence in its substance, which when it had caught Harry’s gaze drew him into a place that seemed limitless, as though somehow the angel had caught and sealed a length of infinitude within the spear.

  In that moment, the v
ast engines that filled the chamber beneath the cathedral in all directions made some sense to Harry. He’d seen evidence of almost every kind of magical working with which he was familiar (and many with which he was not) in the labyrinth’s devices: ancient icons of primal magic inscribed on devices made of white gold, all shaped to suggest the sexual anatomies of men and women; diagrams that had been etched into polished silver, which were designed—if his memory served—to open doors where there were none. There were more, of course, countless numbers, most of which he’d barely glimpsed. He saw that Lucifer had empowered his final grand act of defiance by drawing together pieces of every magical system that humanity in its hunger for revelation had created, and he had made himself his own executioner, thus successfully bypassing the Will of the Maker.

  All this filled Harry’s head in a matter of seconds, during which time the Hell Priest had risen from where the blow had pitched him and was coming back at the dais, moving with glacial ease, his hands raised in front of him, motes of glistening darkness pouring from his palms, from the open wounds in his chest, and from his eyes. Harry watched and saw that only at the very last, when the Priest stepped up onto the dais in one stride, did his face betray the fury that was fuelling this counterassault.

  He was a creature who held his dignity very high, and the blow from the throne, in casually swatting him away, had violated that dignity. Now he reached deliberately for the throne, despite the power it had just demonstrated, and without hesitation repeated his crime by pulling out a second spear. There was another discharge of energy as he did so, but this time he was ready for it. The black motes that continued to grow in number around and behind him broke like a wave about his head and their dark surf met the force that had emptied from the throne with its own hunger, moving through it like a fervent revolutionary, transforming it as it went.

  The Hell Priest was already moving onto the third spear, and the fourth, his face lit from below by the arcs of power leaping from the throne and bursting against his body. If he felt them, he made no sign of the fact; he just went on his business of undoing the death chair’s lethal mechanism, one transfixing spear after another. On occasion he separated the serpentine pipe from the handle of the spear into which it fed, releasing a rush of acidic gases. On others he simply pulled the blades directly out of the Devil’s corpse, and cast them aside, one upon another, until the dais upon which Lucifer sat had become a nest of metallic snakes forged of alloys unknown to humanity.

  The Hell Priest glanced back over his left shoulder and whispered to the assembled darkness, which drew itself closer to him, an anxious ally determined to catch every order that he gave it. Harry watched everything that transpired—his head awash with questions. Was this strange figure—steadily slumping lower in his suicide seat as the blades that had held him were removed—truly the Adversary, Evil Incarnate, the Fallen One, the Satan? He looked too pitifully human sitting there on his death throne. The notion that this thing might have once been God’s Most Beloved seemed ludicrous, an urban legend spread by drunken angels. And yet Harry had witnessed enough evidence as to Lucifer’s preternatural grasp of occult systems—their code, their sigils, their consequences—to be certain that the creature on the throne was something more than he presently appeared.

  Meanwhile the subject of the Hell Priest’s whispered conversation with the assembled darkness became apparent as streams of it ran underneath the throne and began the process of removing the spears that had entered the corpse from below. As they went about their labors the Cenobite was pulling blades from the other side of the body, effortlessly transforming the surges of power that flowed from the throne into dark droplets that swelled the thunderhead behind him. Finally, he stood back from the throne, staring down at the Fallen One with hate-filled eyes.

  “You expecting him to thank you?” Harry asked.

  “There is naught to learn from this pitiful display,” the Hell Priest said.

  The Cenobite then whispered again to his attendant darkness, and motes of it flew from him like bullets, striking Lucifer’s body. For such tiny forms, they possessed uncanny amounts of power. They caught hold of the corpse and raised it up off the throne, its arms outstretched. The allusion to the scene at Golgotha was not lost on Harry; even the way the Devil’s head fell forward put in his mind the Man of Sorrows.

  While the Fallen One hung there, a hundred or more of the motes swarmed over his body, eating away at the stitches that fashioned the whole of the vestment’s many pieces. They came apart effortlessly, revealing behind their sumptuous folds evidence of Lucifer’s true nature. Beneath his robes, his entire body was encased in armor wrought from dark metal through which many colors ran like the surface of gasoline on water. Each portion of the armor was immaculately decorated with designs.

  For all its exquisite appearance, of course, it had failed in the duty for which it had been forged and hammered: protecting its wearer. That fact, however, meant little to the Hell Priest: it was clear that he meant to have it. And this time the Priest had no need to instruct his creatures. They understood his will perfectly. While Lucifer’s body hung before the killing seat, the armor was removed piece by piece from his pale, lithe body.

  Harry continued to watch, transfixed, as the Cenobite brought a knife out of a long pocket in front of his left thigh. It was nothing like the other instruments of torture he’d worn on his belt. For one thing it was a much bigger blade, and for another it wasn’t caked in blood and chunks of decaying flesh. This weapon glinted in the light. It was obvious to Harry that the knife had never been used. The Priest, it would seem, had been saving it for a special occasion. That occasion now found, the Cenobite slashed at what was left of his black vestments so that they fell away in a foul heap of bloodstained fabric and leather.

  He was a patchwork of scars and abrasions, his body resembling—absurd as it seemed—the wall of a cell where countless crazed, raging souls had been incarcerated and all left marks of their presence there: scratches, designs, numbers, faces, there wasn’t an inch of the Cenobite’s nakedness that did not reveal some piece of testament. He glanced at Harry in this brief moment.

  “Angels have a perfect anatomy,” the Priest offered. “Few of us are blessed with such a gift.”

  The Priest then raised the virgin knife and shaved away an inch, perhaps an inch and a half, of the already-skinned muscle of his chest. It curled before his blade, offering itself without protest, the layer of pulpy fat dark yellow, the muscle beneath gray thanks to his bloodletting. Realizing halfway through that the cut was not going to be deep enough to expose the bone, he left off and went for a second slice, which exposed his sternum and a portion of his ribs.

  Harry saw that the Cenobite’s bones too had been subjected to the questionable horror of being scratched and inscribed in the same fashion as his skin. How that had been achieved was something Harry was neither equipped nor instructed to answer. All he could do was that which the Hell Priest had asked of him: watch.

  And watch he did. The Hell Priest continued to saw through the flesh of his chest and on down to his abdomen, opening areas of bleeding muscle with every fresh descent of the blade. At his navel he finally cut the lengthy flank of skin free, and it dropped to the ground in front of him. The Hell Priest feigned indifference, but beads of sweat stood out on his face, gathering in the grooves of his scars.

  He took the knife to the fold of excess flesh at his hip and cut off a large piece, which was entirely fat. It had barely hit the ground and he was cutting at the place again, digging deep into the flesh behind the wound he’d already made and using both hands on the knife to make certain the blade kept its course. He came back to the precious cut a full two inches deeper and was rewarded with the sight of blood spurting forth in tiny geysers, then running down the side of his shin. Once he’d turned the corner of his hip he stopped, his breathing hard and raw, sweat running freely from the places where his scars carried it to his jawline.

  The Cenobite then t
urned away, casting his gaze instead on the now naked Lucifer. Each piece of the Devil’s armor hung in the air an arm’s length from that portion of anatomy where it had been removed. To Harry’s eye there was a formal beauty in this, the corpse and its armor entirely static.

  As Harry marveled, the Cenobite continued his brutal effort of making new adjustments to his own flesh so as to fit the Devil’s suit: first a slice off his other hip, down to the red meat; then up to his arms, slicing away the flesh at the back of his triceps; and passing the knife from left hand to right and back again, cutting effortlessly with either. The area around his feet looked like the floor of a butcher’s store. Cobs and slices of fatty meat were scattered everywhere.

  Finally, it seemed, the Priest was satisfied. He let the knife drop among the scraps and hackings and then opened his arms, mirroring the position of the Lord of Hell.

  “The King is dead,” said the Cenobite. “Long live the King.”

  “Oh shit,” Harry said.

  Watching the insanity before him unfold, Harry suddenly heard Dale’s words echoing in his ears: Watching isn’t the same as seeing. Harry had spent a lifetime looking. He had watched as Scummy had been burned alive. He had watched a crazed cult leader slaughter his entire congregation. And he had watched a demon drag his friend to Hell. Now Harry realized with terrifying clarity that he no longer wished to be the witness of such sights. This was not the world in which he belonged. Though Hell had come calling on more than one occasion, Harry had always dodged its grip and lived to fight another day. Today, he determined, should be no different. The gripping curiosity to see what came next left Harry in an instant and he decided then that it might be a good time to start running.

  5

  Harry, running as fast as he could, drew closer to the room’s exit when an unsettling din began to fill the room. It was a sound that was difficult to make sense of, drumming that had no real rhythm but came and went from first one side of the cathedral vaults and then the other.