Pandaemonium

by Christopher Brookmyre

  Tullian insisted that only his people were permitted to be in direct contact with the specimens, and was anxious to restrict circumstances that would bring non-Vatican personnel into close proximity. This was to prevent what he described as ‘spiritual contamination’. Merrick had encountered some unusual, uncommon and improbable Health and Safety stipulations in his time, but this was the first time he had seen the threat of possession cited as an occupational hazard.

  The fact that it actually seemed a credible threat nonetheless proved no deterrent to Merrick’s burning experimental quest. After much patience, greater delicacy and a degree of deference closer to grovelling than diplomacy, as well as the submissions, each in triplicate, of four different drafts of a formal experimental protocol, he eventually procured permission to carry out his live-subject study.

  When he stepped through the door of what Steinmeyer was always bitterly reminding everyone used to be the Alpha Labs, he was left under no doubt that he was now on Vatican property. The fixtures and fittings were largely the same as in the Beta Labs across the corridor - even the initial layout was symmetrical - but from the logos on the keycards for the electro-locked doors to even the screen savers on their computers, the iconography served to stress that this was all under a very different - and some might say higher - jurisdiction. Tullian and his staff were using this part of their allocated area as office space, confirming what a priest once told Merrick at a friend’s wedding: that in day-to-day operation, the Catholic Church was more bureaucracy than theocracy. However, it wasn’t only the former Alpha Labs that the Vatican staff controlled; it was what lay beyond them, above them and beneath them that represented the true extent of the Cardinal’s delegated power.

  Merrick was welcomed into the LV offices by two priests who were to be his escorts throughout the test, as agreed on the final draft of his experimental protocol. Monsignor Kharkov and Father Tanner, as their photo-IDs announced them, furnished him with one of their yellow suits and left him to put it on while they verified the agreed contents of his inventory. He declined the garb, a certain scientific chauvinism compelling him to point out that all Geiger readings taken around the creatures had been negative and the radiation suit was therefore unnecessary. That was when they reminded him that radiation was not what the suit was intended to shield him from.

  They did not suit up themselves, he noted.

  ‘We will be remaining outside of the contamination radius,’ they explained.

  It occurred to him to ask how they measured such things: a possession compass? He held his tongue, though. He didn’t want them taking the huff and cancelling the experiment; and frankly he had little right to be irreverent, when so far these guys had demonstrated a far deeper understanding of the phenomena they were all dealing with than anybody across the hall in the Beta Labs had managed.

  They led him beyond the office complex, through a mag-locked door, into a wide, steel-walled corridor. He was inside the secure section, taking the same journey as the specimens, and would enter the chamber precisely as they had: from the Alpha side, accompanied by his own Vatican escort. At this point he was glad they weren’t wearing their yellow suits to complete the effect, not to mention the steel tethering shafts.

  He passed a code-locked security door on his right, the top of its formidable outer frame bearing the legend: ‘Containment Pods - Extreme Caution’. Stealing a glimpse through the bullet-proof glass observation panel, he saw a wide aisle flanked on either side by a row of steel grids, each one securing the front of a small cell.

  It was a long walk to that second mag-locked door, longer still as he understood that its distance corresponded to the length of the chamber housing the pods. It used to be a testing range for experimental weapons.

  The original containment area had been the brig, on the opposite side of the corridor, consisting of a mere four cells. Merrick couldn’t get hard data on how many live specimens were currently in containment, or how many had come through the Dodgson anomaly in total. Steinmeyer estimated the latter figure to be upwards of a hundred.

  On one wall of the corridor there was a small arsenal of Decoherence Rifles visible inside an electronically locked, keypad-operated cabinet. Kind of like ‘in case of emergency break glass’, except the glass was unbreakable and you needed code-clearance to get hold of the hardware. Merrick wondered whether the priests had it; he sure as shit knew the scientists didn’t.

  When the countdown ended and Merrick stepped inside the chamber, he found that the experiment was already set up in accordance with the agreed protocol. Tullian was waiting a few yards from the subject, which was clasped and bolted to the cross-braced table. It was a smaller specimen, attended correspondingly by only two yellow-suited priests and a detail of a mere four soldiers. The subject was shorter and less muscular than Merrick had seen previously. Its horns were only budding, though there was the same snarling defiance and crackling aggression about its visage.

  Merrick placed his materials on top of an aluminium trolley while Kharkov and Tanner set up the recording equipment. Just the two cameras this time: one standard digital video and one infrared, both stationed a few feet in front of the trolley and trained carefully on the subject.

  Merrick then approached the table slowly and connected the first of his sensors. The subject scrutinised him intently, trying to twist its neck to keep an eye trained on him wherever he stepped. Up close, the creature looked rather scrawny, its skin taut against wiry sinews in a manner that reminded him uncomfortably of concentration-camp inmates.

  Merrick glanced towards his escort, catching Father Tanner’s attention.

  ‘You’re giving them water to drink?’

  Tanner nodded solemnly.

  ‘And that’s causing no burning effects, right?’

  Another nod.

  ‘Okay. So what are you giving them to eat?’

  Tanner immediately broke his gaze from Merrick and directed it towards Tullian. Merrick didn’t catch what Tanner saw in response from the Cardinal, but deduced that it wasn’t permission to speak. Instead he clasped his hands and bowed his head, almost as though he had been switched off.

  After a silence long enough for Merrick to accept that he would receive no answer, Tullian spoke, calmly but gravely, in that odd accent of his, one indicative of many years spent speaking in foreign tongues and talking of higher things.

  ‘They feed on souls, Dr Merrick. Thus there is no nourishment we could or would wish to offer them.’

  ‘So they’re not fed?’ he responded, trying to ensure that his tone conveyed only incredulity and enquiry rather than outrage or accusation. ‘It’s been months for some of them.’

  Tullian closed his eyes solemnly for a moment, and when he opened them, he wore the burdened expression of one charged with conveying news of bereavement.

  ‘They also feed on each other,’ he said.

  ‘I see.’

  ‘No, you don’t, and you ought to give thanks for that. Dr Merrick, I have little doubt you have already seen sights enough in this place to haunt your dreams forever. I appreciate that the jurisdictional inequities necessary to my involvement here must have chafed harshly with your fraternity, but trust me, your end of the deal is not without its privileges, and not having witnessed that particular sight ought to be prized among them.’

  Merrick glanced back at the creature, suddenly paying closer attention to the rows of pointed teeth bared across its snarling mouth.

  ‘I’ll take your word for it,’ he said.

  Merrick approached the creature bearing the first test phial, which contained plain water. The liquid rippled inside the small vessel, agitated by the tremors of his hand. He was unsteady with trepidation, shivering in the chamber’s humid, blasting heat, more apprehensive on this occasion than the first time he encountered one of these things. Was this because he knew what he was doing was wrong? He couldn’t afford to think about that. He had to proceed. There would be no second chances at this, and he had to
know.

  The first splash upon the demon’s skin was of a liquid not listed in the protocol: his own sweat. It was running in rivulets from his forehead into his eyes, and as he wiped them with his free hand, a few droplets whiplashed clear of his fingers and landed on the creature’s abdomen.

  There were no observable effects.

  Taking a breath and steeling himself, he then extended his arm over the table and poured a small volume of water on to the demon’s thigh. Observing no dermatological reaction, he quickly looked at the creature’s face for a response. He saw only anxious curiosity amid that constant simmering aggression.

  As part of the agreed protocol, he then handed the phial to Tullian, who would bless it right there under the rite of exorcism, so that they could be sure it was the same sample of water. Even a difference in mineral properties from a phial bottled in Rome, for instance, would have to be accounted for as a possible explanation, and that wasn’t what they were testing here.

  Merrick returned to his trolley and retrieved the next phial: a strong alkaline solution. It was as he picked it up that he realised he had not brought the protective gloves he used when preparing it. The thought vividly magnified the reality of what he was about to do.

  Behind him, Tullian began his declamations, chanting the rite. As Merrick approached the demon once more, the loud calls for a purge of evil sounded like an admonition towards himself.

  His hand was still trembling even as his wrist remained locked, awaiting the will to rotate it and pour the solution. In the end it was the danger that his shaking would spill it on to his own fingers that prompted him to act.

  ‘That Satan may be crushed under our feet, that every evil counsel directed against us may be brought to naught.’

  The alkali hit the demon’s skin with a blistering hiss that was immediately drowned by the creature’s screams. Not roars this time. Screams. High, keening, an electrical jolt through the calcium of your bones.

  ‘Free us from every attack . . .’

  He couldn’t do this again, couldn’t visit this harm.

  ‘And every temptation of the enemy . . .’

  But he couldn’t give up, couldn’t not do it. He needed to know.

  He reached for the phial of acid . . .

  Now, these weeks later, the screams still echo, still scrape his bones and gnaw at his soul. But the data they heralded reverberated even more disturbingly. Tullian had handed him back the phial at the end of the procedure, allowing him to retest the same holy water sample on dead skin. It still had no effect. The acid and the alkali had the same corrosive impact whether the subject was dead or alive: the only difference was that the effects on the dead sample weren’t accompanied by screams of pain and an anguished wail from somewhere deep within Merrick’s conscience.

  Holy water on living tissue, however, had proven more damaging than any hazardous chemical.

  The questions were only beginning. Did holy water burn other creatures, or only these ones? If so, why? He had checked the sample before and after the blessing, and at a molecular level it was unchanged. Did the incantation alter the properties of simple water at some level we could neither measure nor detect? Would the rite work if performed by anyone? Did it have to be a priest? Did it have to be a Catholic priest?

  It was exciting, but in the most nightmarish way. Either his observations denoted the threshold of a whole new frontier of science, or they marked the barrier where the scientific paradigm reached its limit. What was truly disquieting about this was that if science couldn’t offer explanations, then nor could it offer solutions; while what did offer solutions was more worrying still. Our world was in danger of being overrun by these marauding demons, and it was only things he had shunned and scorned that might offer hope: that might offer, to use the now frighteningly appropriate word, salvation.

  With this thought returns the recurring fear, the one that stalks him every second he remains in this dark and damned place: Here beneath the world, held fast by adamantine rock, impenetrable. Here impaled with circling fire, yet unconsumed.

  All his life, he shunned, he scorned.

  He rejected, even ridiculed, the word of God, the very idea of religion. Now he’s confronted with damnation, torment and demons in a sweltering furnace beneath the earth. Wasn’t that what the Bible said would happen? How’s that for cause and effect?

  A world overrun by demons. His world. Perhaps only his. For what if this truly is Hell, his Hell? What if he had died but didn’t know it? Wouldn’t this be the journey that took him there: his unique, personal journey? He recalls some of his many possible deaths: a near-drowning at fifteen; on board a 757 tossed like a toy by an electrical storm above the Rockies. Then one more vivid than the rest: almost falling asleep at the wheel on a rain-lashed night nine months ago, on the drive north, on the road to here. He can still see the view from the windscreen. Lights everywhere, flickering and indistinct: white shapes stretched and pulled by random refractions in the rain and spray before being temporarily shrunk to points and discs by the wiper blades . . .

  What if he hadn’t snapped awake before that bend?

  Perhaps you didn’t go from your world to Hell: perhaps you brought it to yourself, made your own world become Hell. No moment of death, no judgment at the gate, no banishment with your fellow damned; but instead watching, close-up, helpless, as the decisions you had made, the things you had embraced not only proved powerless against, but in fact precipitated the advent of Hell on Earth.

  Mass Effect

  IV

  ‘God our Father, renew the living spring of your life within us and protect us in spirit and body, that we may be free from sin and come into your presence to receive your gift of salvation. We ask this through Christ our Lord.’

  ‘Amen,’ they all respond.

  The room is warming up by the second, condensation beginning to form on the inside of the glass and disappointingly clouding out Adnan’s view through the windows, where he had previously been able to make out Orion.

  A makeshift altar has been constructed at one end of the room, just a low-standing coffee table draped with ceremonial cloths and adorned with standard-issue holyware: a crucifix, a chalice, a bell, a bowl of corpse-substitute wafers and a copy of the Christianity User’s Manual. Father Blake is got up in white vestments, arms outstretched and chest proud, like he’s waiting to hug a really fat relative who he secretly doesn’t like. Making his posture more bizarre is the fact that he’s kneeling, so that he’s not towering four feet above the top of his Playmobil Happy Priest Altar Set.

  Everyone else is sitting roughly in a circle with one flattened end around the focus of the proceedings. Some are on chairs and sofas, but most are cross-legged on the floor, leaning back into the spaces between the paired legs of the ones who have bagged seats. For once, it’s not the hard men and the cool kids who have secured the prime spots, as none of them wanted to turn up too early to this gig. It’s mostly the God squad and the staff who have those privileges, though there is no sign of Mr Kane, which Adnan finds ideologically satisfying but at the same time slightly annoying. If he had to turn up for this shit, why should Kane get a free pass?

  ‘May almighty God cleanse us of our sins, and through the Eucharist we celebrate make us worthy to sit at his table in his heavenly kingdom.’

  Maybe it’s the growing warmth, maybe it’s his fatigue, maybe it’s the fact that where he’s leaning back, his shoulder is in contact with Caitlin Black’s leg and she hasn’t recoiled it in a deliberately conspicuous show of disgust, and maybe it’s a combination of all of the above, but Adnan would have to admit he’s actually finding the mass quite pleasant. There is a very mellow vibe around the room: no tension, no aggro, nobody being a pain in the hoop, everybody quietly contemplative. There is something cosy and genuinely communal to it, like how he’d always been told religion was supposed to be. However, there is also something inescapably ridiculous about it, kind of the elephant in the room that’s being steadfa
stly ignored by the faithful. Really. There’s Blake in his superhero costume, striking crazy poses and talking in this elevated semi-singing register that so isn’t the guy’s normal voice; like he’s channelling or something. Meanwhile everyone else is nodding here, bowing there, all in unison, all on Pavlovian cue, and chanting like they’re entranced, their own voices altered, their delivery uniform and unsettlingly identical.

  ‘I confess to almighty God,’ they all chant, ‘and to you, my brothers and sisters, that I have sinned through my own fault, in my thoughts and in my words, in what I have done, and in what I have failed to do . . .’

  Shit, that doesn’t leave much space for plea-bargaining, does it? Sins of thought, sins of speech, sins of deed, sins of omission. Forgot sins of respiration and sins of spatial occupation, but otherwise we’re all owning up to being a shower of spherical bastards: bastards any way you look at us. However, our damnation is not a done deal, there is hope:

  ‘And I ask blessed Mary, ever virgin, all the angels and saints, and you, my brothers and sisters, to pray for me to the Lord, our God.’

  Yeah. The blessed virgin, the angels and the saints got our backs.

  It was at his dad’s insistence that he and his two younger sisters went to Catholic school. Like many devout Muslims in Scotland, faced with the absence of their own faith schools, he decided he’d rather entrust the education of his kids to Crusader infidel Christian hardliners than to the scorched-earth godlessness of the non-denominational system. Besides, the Muslims and the Catholics might disagree on the divinity of Jesus and the veracity of Mohammed’s secretarial skills in transcribing the word of God, but they had as much in common as divided them, mostly concerning who and what they disapproved of. This, according to Adnan’s most recent calculations, was pretty much everything, especially if it could be described by the words ‘enlightened’, ‘forward-looking’ or ‘fun’.