The Scarlet Gospels

by Clive Barker

  “Maybe,” she said, smiling.

  Harry turned his chair around and stood up, reaching with uncertain fingers for the cords of the antiquated venetian blinds, which were knotted and truculent and near impossible to open even when he’d had eyes to help him separate them. Today was no exception. Harry gave up tugging on the cords and reached down to lift the blinds with his hand. When he did so, he looked down at the street as Norma had requested, and he knew that nothing would ever be the same again. It felt like the bottom dropped out beneath his feet and he’d fallen ten stories in the blink of an eye.

  “They’re everywhere,” he said.

  EPILOGUE

  Prima Facie

  Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore.

  —André Gide, The Counterfeiters

  1

  Lucifer came up into the world with an unerring sense of how the lines of power were laid and which was best to follow if he wanted to get into the heart of the human story the same way he had so often in the early days. The lines converged in the city of Welcome, Arizona, where he’d lingered for two days to sit in on the trial of a man who’d murdered several children in the region and partaken of their flesh.

  There was nothing new about the spectacle: the parents of the dead children sat in the court, pouring out wordless venom toward the murderer; the madman sought refuge in his madness; and outside the courthouse demonstrators threw makeshift nooses over the branches of the sycamores that grew amid the square. When Lucifer was certain that there was nothing for him here, he skipped unnoticed through the crowd, pausing to look up at the churning trees, their boughs creaking in the gusting wind that snatched away fall’s early deaths.

  Then he was on his way again, following the flow of energies that seeped up out of the ground. He knew already what city awaited him at the end of his journey. He’d seen its name many times in the newspapers he plucked out of trash cans or out from under the arm of some human being. New York, it was called, and all that he’d read about it made it seem the greatest city in the known world, somewhere he could linger awhile and taste the times. For long distances he walked, because the line did not lie beside a highway. But when it did he never waited long for a ride. A woman driving alone picked him up when he was still three hundred miles from his destination. She said her name was Alice Morrow. They talked a little, of nothing significant, then lapsed into silence. Ten minutes passed. Then Alice said, “I had a night-light when I was little, which I kept beside my bed to make sure the bogeyman didn’t get me. Your eyes have the same light in them. I swear.”

  They stopped at a motel for one night, Alice paying for his room and for food. He ate pizza. Thereafter, it would be all he ever ate. In the night, he lay naked on his bed and waited for her. She did not come immediately, but after two hours she knocked at his door and said something about wanting to see his eyes in the dark. Alice and he had sexual congress six times before dawn, and by the fifth she was in love with him. In the middle of the next day she asked him if he had a place to stay in New York and when he told her no she seemed happy, as if this confirmed the rightness of what she felt.

  They arrived in New York at one in the morning, the city an astonishment to Lucifer. Alice checked them into a hotel, promising that tomorrow she would take him out and buy him some good clothes. The long drive had exhausted her, but sleep would not come. She went to his room, where he was waiting, twin night-lights flickering in his head.

  “Who are you?” she asked him.

  “Nobody yet,” he whispered.

  2

  The Cenobite was climbing the steps to the fortresses, which were littered with pieces of stone but still climbable, when a shock wave passed through the air and ground. He turned to see bright bursts of gold and scarlet flame spouting from the fissures in the stone that had demolished the city, the force of the eruptions sufficient to make the fissures gape, which unleashed still-greater torrents of fire. He watched for a little time and returned to his climb, his long, thin shadow, thrown by fires, preceding him to the top step. He was two steps shy of reaching the top himself when a second shock wave, much more violent than the first, erupted. The tremors didn’t die away this time. They steadily became more powerful. Very cautiously the Cenobite took a backward step while keeping his eyes on the flame. The vista of stone, smoke, and tremors was changing in nature, the shocks giving way to tidal motions that had the scale of tsunami surf.

  Another shock wave threw him off his feet, and he fell. The cracked slab of the threshold dropped away beneath him into the throw of the wave, making his fall all the longer. When he landed, the bones of his face cracked in a dozen places, and the sudden rush of pain, which had been such a reliable source of pleasure in years long lost, was now only agony. His system rebelled. His body was marked by its own tsunamis, driving deep into the cankerous pit of its stomach and deeper still, into its gut, where rot turned to shards of stone. It was as if his body were attempting to turn itself inside out. He loosed a sound that was part belch, part sob, and then vomited, a rush of blood that was nearly black and as thick as phlegm. Through the noise of its splattering he heard a far deeper sound, and some fraction of him that was able, even in the midst of this violent decay, to assess circumstances with detached thought.

  That’s the end beginning.

  The violence of his vomiting left him powerless to control his body, his battered face so distrusted by his scream that his lips tore like wet paper. There was nothing left in him now except his last poor hope of willing his eyes to open, so he might look and see whatever final vision Hell had for him.

  He drew every last mote of will from the furrows of his collapsing body and gathered them, turning them to a single purpose.

  “I will open my eyes,” he ordered himself.

  Reluctantly, his body obeyed him. He unstuck his lids, sealed with the gray glue of his dissolving flesh, and focused his eyes on whatever was in front of them. He had the whole panorama in view: the flames emptying to a higher point than ever, as the motion in the ground put new stresses on the stone.

  He had been watching for just a few seconds when the tidal shifts in the ground abruptly ceased, the thundering that accompanied them ceasing at the same instant.

  The Hell Priest’s pulse quickened in anticipation of whatever lay on the far side of this silence. It came soon enough. A simple sound, as of some immense blow, struck in the tormented ground. It caused the pieces of the stone that had crushed the city to be lifted off their bed of rubble, their vast weight effortlessly thrown up by the power unleashed in that single blow. At the top of their ascent they seemed to pause for a beat. Then they dropped—their magnitude so great that the ground upon which the city had been raised simply cracked as the stones bearing the city’s remains started their descent. The fires found the mother lode of whatever fuel had fed them and the geysers of flame leaped so high they would have licked the sky if it had still been there.

  The burst of light illuminated the cataclysm below with brutal clarity. But there was nothing down there left to witness. Just the stones falling away with the abyss. The Cenobite looked at the fire instead, and in that instant the fire looked back at him.

  He was watching, he knew, the unmaking of Hell. The place was being wiped away by some great, invisible hand. Perhaps it would be rebuilt. Perhaps a new system would be put in place. It was not for him to know. The thoughts contented him. He had challenged a higher power, and he had lost. It was the natural order of things. In that challenge, he had wreaked havoc, and now he was dying, along with everyone else in this contemptible place. Content in the knowledge that his legacy would forever be one of agony and loss, he opened himself to oblivion.

  His eyelids closed—buckled, really—the bones in his face so fragile they shattered under the weight of his very lids as he dropped to the threshold of existence. His last breath had already left him. And as he fell, life did the same.

  3

  Be
sides Norma’s impressive television collection, the only other physical items Harry had inherited from Norma’s apartment were the many talismans and charms that she accrued doing during her years as New York’s Queen of the Dead, almost all of them sent to her by the relatives of spectral clients, thanking her for the help that she had given to a spouse, or a sibling, or, most distressing of all, a child.

  As it had been Harry who had read the letters these items came with to Norma, he was profoundly respectful of how much love and gratitude had been poured into the gifts. Each item had been charged with all the power of those feelings, making up a vast collection of potent protectors. Not a single one was discarded.

  With so much to be moved from Harry’s apartment and office, Caz knew the task would take several weeks if it was to be left to Dale and himself. He talked it over with Harry and asked if he could bring some extra muscle to get the job done quickly, so that Caz could open up his shop again and start earning some money. Harry had no problem with this; he only asked that Caz be the one to box up and carry the contents of the two deep-bottomed drawers to the right and left of his chair.

  “What have you got in there that’s so special?”

  “Just a few keepsakes. Souvenirs from various scrapes I got into. I don’t want anybody but you to deal with all the stuff in those drawers, okay? Do you know who will be helping with the move yet?”

  “Yeah. Some friends of mine. They can be trusted.”

  “Are they…?”

  “Ex–fuck buddies, Harold. I’m a new man, remember?”

  “That’s right. I keep forgetting that Dale has made an honest man of you.”

  “It doesn’t hurt that he’s hung like a giraffe.”

  “I was a detective for a long time, Caz. I already assumed as much.”

  Caz’s friends Armando and Ryan arrived the next day. Lana was there too, invited by Caz, unbeknownst to Harry, who forcibly made nothing of it and put them all to work in the storeroom, with the duty of packing up in boxes everything on the cluttered shelves and in the cabinets. The room was L-shaped, with the portion that wasn’t visible from the office abandoned to chaos by Harry several years before. Most of it, Harry had admitted to Caz, was boxes of old office supplies, which he’d intended for his secretary back in the day when he’d still believed his life was going to be a painless, lucrative round of divorce cases and insurance investigations.

  Lana, Armando, and Ryan were working up a sweat in the L-shaped room, the door between the two rooms open a crack, but there was very little conversation. They shifted many boxes that were indeed packed with office supplies that told their own melancholy story. Only one item was slipped through to Caz.

  “Take a look at this. There’s a whole box of them,” Lana said, passing Caz a Christmas card. If there was any sadder proof of Harry’s high hopes for his business it was this slickly painted card with an innocuous painting of pine trees and snow by moonlight with a printed message inside wishing the recipient:”The Best Christmas till Next Christmas! Season’s Greetings from the D’Amour Detective Agency.”

  Caz laughed. “I’d bet he never sent a single one of these out.”

  “What’s the joke?” Caz turned. Harry was pushing the door open wider.

  “Just talking about Christmas,” Caz replied a little lamely. He put the card down on Harry’s desk. “It wasn’t important.”

  “Everybody okay?”

  “We’re sweaty and dusty and ready for something to eat,” said Lana, “but we’re getting through it.”

  “Shall I order Chinese? Or there’s a good Thai place a few blocks over that delivers? Or pizza?”

  “I vote Thai!” Armando yelled through from the storage room.

  “Thai’s fine with me,” Lana said. “Will you get some Thai beer? I’ve worked up a powerful thirst.”

  “Not a problem,” Harry said. “Is the phone still in the same place?”

  “You want me to do it?” Caz asked.

  “No, Caz. I’m blind, not crippled.”

  Harry made a confident move toward the desk, avoiding with uncanny ease the heaped-up files that littered his path. He got to his chair and sank down in it.

  “You know this is a damn comfortable chair. Will you put it by the window for me, Caz?”

  “You mean in the Big Room? In place of Norma’s chair?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Done.”

  Harry slid the chair toward his desk and picked up the phone, dialing the number from memory.

  “I’m just going to order a bunch of things they do really well. Is that okay?”

  “Ryan doesn’t like stuff too spicy,” Armando said. “Right, Ryan?”

  There was a grunt from Ryan.

  “Are you okay back there?”

  “Yeah. Just … concentrating.”

  “On what?”

  “Nothing. Just make sure it isn’t too spicy.”

  “Already noted,” Harry said. “Damn.” He put the phone down. “Dialed the wrong number.”

  He pulled the phone over so it was right in front of him and ran his fingers over the buttons. “Why the hell did I do that? My head feels—”

  He stopped.

  “You need me to check the number?” Caz said.

  “Listen,” Harry murmured. “You hear that?”

  “What?”

  “That tinkling music.” Harry stood up, dropping the receiver on the desk beside the phone. “You don’t hear it, Caz? Lana?” He was moving around the other side of the desk toward the stockroom door, kicking over several piles of paperwork in his haste. Lana opened the door as wide as she could, squashing the garbage behind it against the wall.

  “Be careful,” she said to Harry. “The floor’s covered—”

  Too late. Harry’s foot caught on one of the boxes and he stumbled forward, dropping onto his hands and knees in the litter of envelopes and rubber bands that had spilled from the box he’d kicked.

  “Oh God, Harry,” Lana said. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine!”

  He reached out to his right, memory guiding his fingers to the handle of the top drawer of the much-dented filing cabinet. The drawer was unlocked, however, and empty. It slid out, and Harry would have hit the floor a second time if Lana hadn’t thrown her weight against the drawer and slammed it closed. There was still a moment while Harry regained his equilibrium. The music continued its tintinnabulation: the sticky-sweet little cycle of melody quickening like a madhouse waltz.

  “Where’s Ryan?” Harry said.

  “He’s back there,” Armando told him. Armando was talking from the corner of the room, Harry guessed, a vantage point from which he could have both Harry and Ryan in view. The far end of the room was the most chaotic. Four black plastic garbage bags, disgorged notes without files, and files without notes, discarded cameras that had been thrown in a box along with hundreds of rolls of exposed but undeveloped film. And buried behind all this chaos, a few items that Harry had felt obliged to hang on to but hadn’t wanted to think about every day because they had unpleasant associations; toxic souvenirs of his journeys to the end of the world and his wits.

  He quietly cursed himself for failing to remember the danger that was buried amid the trash here: a scalpel he’d confiscated from a demon who’d caused mischief by passing itself off as a cut-rate plastic surgeon; some keepsakes from a demonic casino he had closed. He’d held on to all of these, but—

  “No,” Harry whispered. “That’s not possible. I left it in Louisiana.”

  Harry had cautiously found his way around the corner now. It was unmistakable. It was the chime of the box, Lemarchand’s infernal masterpiece.

  The music it was producing was to enrapture the man who was in the midst of opening it.

  “Ryan?” Harry said. “What have you got?”

  Ryan grunted by way of reply. He was obviously in the throes of the box’s hypnotic working.

  “Harold, what is it?” Caz shouted. “You’re freaking me out
, man!”

  “Ryan! I know what you’ve found is fun to play with, but you need to put it down.”

  Ryan actually spoke up now, in defense of his ownership.

  “I found it in the trash!”

  “I know,” Harry said as calmly as he could. “But it needs to go back there.”

  “You heard Harry,” Caz said. He’d come to the spot just behind Harry’s left shoulder where he’d reliably been throughout the march through Hell. “Harry doesn’t fuck around,” Caz went on. “Just hand over the fucking box. I don’t know what you’re fucking with, but neither do you.”

  “The hieroglyphics are beautiful.…”

  “It’s Teufelssprache,” Harry said. “It’s German. The guy who decided it all was a man in Hamburg. He’s dead now. But he named the code before he died.”

  “Teufelssprache,” Lana said. “Fuck. That’s—”

  “Devilspeak, yeah. And I’ve had my fill.”

  “And what does it say?” Ryan asked.

  “Give me the box back and I’ll tell you.”

  “No,” Ryan said.

  “Ryan, listen to yourself,” Caz said. He squeezed Harry’s shoulder for a moment as he spoke, signaling that he was about to make a move.

  “All I hear is the pretty music.”

  “Bullshit.” Caz moved suddenly and Harry heard a scuffle, then a pained shot from Ryan, and the source of the lunatic melody dropped to the floor and rolled away from the struggle, ending up close to Harry’s feet.

  Harry dropped down onto his haunches, his clammy-palmed hands locating the box instantly. As he picked it up, Ryan yelled:

  “That’s mine, you fuck!”

  “Get back, Harry!” Caz yelled.

  Harry turned, but Ryan reached out and grabbed his arm, his fingernails digging deep enough through shirt and skin to make Harry bleed. Harry pulled away, Ryan’s nails gouging him in the process, and stumbled in what he hoped was the right direction. Lana caught him and took his arm.