London Macabre

by Savile, Steve

  The homunculus’s smile twisted, baring row after row of razor-sharp teeth and a forked tongue slick with blood.

  ”I am what you made me, Father. It’s all your fault. Ah, is that it? Don’t you like your own image? Does it remind you of everything you are capable of?”

  The rain hit the ground all around it, sizzling and steaming as it did. The heavier the rain the thicker the clouds of steam that gathered around the daemon on the steps.

  As the curls of white coalesced around the pillars of the Ald Gate so the gate itself coalesced, drawn back into this plane from the oblique city where it was hidden.

  The homunculus gripped the iron bars and shook and shook the gate, forcing the stone the hinges were set into to squeal. And it didn’t stop shaking the gate until the stone wept and the hinges tore free.

  It cast the gate aside.

  The black iron clattered loudly as it fell, landing at the bottom of the white steps.

  The homunculus was making enough noise to raise the dead or the Devil himself.

  But that was the point.

  It stood beneath the keystone of the arch and threw its arms wide.

  Lightning raked the sky, and for that single heartbeat the homunculus had its wings back—wings of white-hot fire that split the night on either side of the ancient gateway. The lightning lit the church and everything for two hundred feet around it, the wet grass, the rain-slick cobbles, the windows of the public house and the gates of the tanner’s yard and the couch house and its stables, of course, the rooftops of the slums. This was London, all around it, but at the same time it wasn’t, it was somewhere else. The lightning offered a glimpse of the hidden city that brushed up against the here and now. And the Ald Gate was at the heart of it.

  The homunculus waited, shrieking its challenge again, knowing that the guardian would answer it. It had to.

  And all around it the bells of London began to toll, a single chime from each bell from Fleet Street to Temple Bar, Aldersgate to Holborn and Bishopsgate, from St Alphage down to the Tower, along the embankment west of Middle Temple, Blackfriar’s and London Bridge, up Chancery Lane to the Strand and St Martin’s in the Field and all the churches and bell towers in between. Every bell in the old city rang out. And as the final chime resonated through the bell of the Whitechapel itself, the Garden’s guardian stepped out of the Ald Gate to face the homunculus.

  ”I know you,” the angel intoned, its voice dry and thick with disuse. It hadn’t spoken for centuries, the daemon knew. Its vigil was a lonely one. Who would it talk to? Itself?

  The homunculus stood its ground as the angel revealed itself.

  This was no mere woman, no pretty young thing for God to admire and pretend to love. This was a malformed giant—a true angel in the image of the Chayot Ha Kadesh, Ophanim, Erelim, Hashmallim, Seraphim, Malakhim, and Bene Elohim. There was nothing cherubic about the thing blocking its way. Naked, black skin glistening with rain, the angel’s wings unfurled to fill the archway. The angel was utterly hairless and completely sexless. The muscular definition of its pectorals and abdominal wall flexed as the angel’s black wings beat the air.

  It was wrath incarnate.

  ”And I know you, Uriel, keeper of the gate. Or should that be Uriel, the last angel. How long have you stood your watch? How long have you waited for someone to come and relieve you?”

  ”I do not need to answer you, daemon.”

  ”No, you don’t. That is true. But you want to, don’t you? Tell me the truth. It hurts you to keep it in, doesn’t it? That’s because Father made you a good, obedient boy, didn’t he?”

  ”Have you come here looking for death? Is that why you taunt me thus?” Uriel asked, his rich baritone thundering out over the slum.

  ”No. I’ve come home.”

  ”You are not welcome in this place, daemon.”

  ”I don’t suppose I am,” the homunculus said, something approaching wryness entering its tone. ”But nevertheless, it is still my home and here I am. Now stand aside.”

  ”How could we ever imagine we should bend the knee to the likes of you?” Uriel’s distaste smouldered in his black eyes. ”You forfeited Eden when you were cast out, Cain, son of Adam,” the homunculus shuddered at the abandoned name. It had not been called that for an age. No one outside of this place even knew it. It had been called so many other things over the centuries. Names were unimportant to it. Or so it had thought until it had heard its true name again on the angel’s lips. Perhaps names were not so unimportant after all. Perhaps, as the lesser daemons believed, they did hold some small power over this flesh.

  The homunculus looked down at its carcass.

  It had worn other flesh the day the angel had seen it banished into the Land of Nod. Meat was temporary. The soul was eternal. It was eternal. The essence the angel branded ”Cain” was eternal. This second skin it wore, this was fleeting. Still, just hearing the name again took him back to that time, his brother’s blood on his hands. He looked down at them. There was blood there still. Different blood but blood all the same. Though it never did abide within the gates, it was still his home, as it was his parents’ before him and it remembered the fear of being cast out beyond the gates of Eden. It remembered the disorientation of being alone, left to die as it stumbled through Nod. Nod, the backwards land where everything it had been taught to believe was proved false, where vice and greed and corruption and all of the flaws it had exhibited in the murder of its own brother were evidenced in everyone it met.

  And how that place had changed as the city of iniquities built up around the hidden Ald Gate. It had been nothing, an emptiness outside the gates. A nol, in the old tongue. Naming it had been a joke, nodnol, a soulless place outside the safety of Eden. London.

  The convulsions gripped homunculus from the root of its engorged cock and burned all the way up to its face. ”There is no place for a murderer in the Garden. There never was and there never will be,” Uriel’s eyes had glazed over. ”Your place is out there amid the filth, wallowing in the detritus of humanity. His mistake was forcing us to love you. You are nothing. You are a stain on this world, Cain. Your exile is eternal.”

  It took the daemonic Cain a moment to understand what the emptiness of the angel facing it truly meant. Uriel bared his cracked and yellowed teeth. The angel hadn’t merely rebelled, or fallen, it had broken. There was no sanity there. Millennia alone had driven the angel into despair and despair into solitary madness.

  ”Eternity is a long time, Uriel, especially when He preaches forgiveness now,” the homunculus rasped. ”Our Father is not the wrathful patriarch He was. And with all of his other children dead, I suspect He will welcome me with open arms.”

  ”There is no welcome for you, Cain. He could never love a murderer. Besides, He is gone from this place.”

  ”Gone? How can He be gone? He is in all things. He is creation. He is life.”

  ”And He is gone. There is nothing here for you, Cain. Go now.”

  ”No. And believe me, Uriel, I will kill you if you continue to stand in my way.” He looked down at the silver blade as though seeing it for the first time.

  ”The wolf and the lamb,” the angel said, looking at the silver head carved into the hilt of the blade.

  ”There are no lambs here,” the homunculus told him, his face utterly implacable. ”Now stand aside.”

  ”You shall not pass, daemon.”

  The homunculus turned the blade in its hand, over and over and over in a lightning-fast figure of eight that cut the air with the sharp whicker of restrained violence. When the blade stopped, two shallow cuts marked each of Uriel’s biceps while a deeper one ran the length of his torso with surgical precision. ”Nothing about flesh is immortal, Uriel. It doesn’t matter whether it is angelic, daemonic or human. Flesh dies. Flesh rots. It is meat. It has its season. Yours reeks. It isn’t just the blood I can smell on you,” and even as it said it, Cain realised it was true, he could smell blood, and not just the archangel’s, the whole
Garden reeked of it. ”You should have shed your skin centuries ago, Uriel. Corruption has eaten away at it. Breathe in your own stink, Uriel. Wallow in it and tell me you can’t smell the insanity ingrained in your skin. It’s like a sickness that has sunk down into your bones. Madness and blood. You’re broken, Uriel. You’re …” it stopped, seeing the dead calf lying on the lush green of the Garden’s grass. The blood had long since congealed into a dark stain and the calf’s hide had rotted through, becoming a feasting ground for flies. It wasn’t the only victim in the Garden. What had been Eden had become a murderer’s playground. All of those creatures … all of those creations that Uriel had been charged to protect … It saw broken-winged birds scattered across the dirt beds where the flowers were rotting, and sticking out of the dirt, bleached white against the loam, the bones of some long-dead animal.

  Paradise was supposed to be abloom with every genus of flower, filled with every scent ever created by God, painted with every colour and shade, but Eden had been reduced to a single all-pervading reek, and washed in a violent colour that, given time, would turn everything to black.

  ”What have you done?” It asked, disbelieving. It tried to see past the angel’s great bulk, to see more of the slaughter. Suddenly all it could smell was death. Eden was full of it.

  The homunculus’s heart beat faster.

  This was beyond its wildest dreams. This went beyond vengeance. Here it was back at the gate, a few steps from home, the infernos of Hell behind it, the ceaseless agonies gone. It had escaped, and right at the last, as it dared to think it would be safe, that it could return home and things could be the way they were before, a brand new hell was in front of it.

  The black angel’s face twisted, anything that might have approached beauty in its visage gone, replaced by a deep-seated hatred of the creature standing before it. ”There is no God,” Uriel said. The angel’s voice was filled with despair.

  ”I know,” the homunculus Cain said. ”I killed him, and now I am going to kill you.”

  Chapter Forty-Four

  McCreedy watched the fight on the steps of the old church.

  The two combatants moved with such brutal grace it quickly became impossible to separate them—even with his wolf-sight he couldn’t distinguish angel from daemon as they went to war, tooth and claw. Blood and spittle flew. Blows glanced and thundered. Fists landed with bone-crunching force. Each sledgehammer punch would have driven the life out of a mortal man, of that the wolf was in no doubt. Their bodies moved to a primitive dance, each duck and lunge primal in their simplicity. It was all about death. Only one of them would be left standing, the mad angel or the damned exile. The wolf had no way of knowing which.

  The negro angel only had his hands, but given that they seemed to be made from the very stone of the earth, he didn’t need more. A black fist crashed into the side of the homunculus’s face. The daemon staggered down a step, spitting blood and razor-sharp teeth. It responded by lunging up the steps, the tip of the silver blade burying itself in the angel’s gut.

  There was no blood.

  The angel bellowed, its rage fierce enough to shake the foundations of every house along the terrace. A single sharp crack was followed by the cascade of broken glass as every window cracked in its frame and then shattered.

  The wolf bolted out into the middle of the street as the shards of glass fell like jagged rain. It cut the pads of its paws walking over broken glass as it loped toward the church steps.

  The wolf McCreedy only had eyes for the fight.

  The pair taunted each other, but not in any words that the wolf could recognise. The sounds were more primitive. More guttural. Syllables. Sounds. Grunts and gasps that together replaced the complexity of actual language. And yet the wolf could understand them. McCreedy didn’t know how, what with there being no words to understand, but each grunt and gasp had its own unique resonance.

  Was this the language of creation?

  Was this how the voice of God sounded?

  McCreedy slunk forward another step, ignoring the rain. He felt drawn. Compelled.

  It wasn’t the only language on the street that night. To the wolf it sounded as though the silver blade spoke as it sliced through the air. Runnels had been engraved into the length of the blade, opening out into the engraved wolf’s roaring mouth. As the sword whipped through slash after savage slash the displaced air moaned through those bared metal fangs. Part of McCreedy, on the level of animal instincts, believed those mournful cries came from the dead—each moan torn from the ghostly mouth of one of the sword’s victims.

  The cries sent shivers deep into his soul.

  Up on the steps, the angel clapped its meaty hands on either side of the blade and wrenched it out of its gut, tossing it aside with casual malice.

  There was no blood.

  The wolf’s nostrils flared wide.

  McCreedy couldn’t help himself; his muscled bunched, tension steeling his entire body, then he bolted, racing away blindly into the streets of the slum quarter as though the Devil himself were snapping at his heels.

  He was no coward, but this was beyond him.

  The air filled with a single fetid stench: Death.

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Uriel lashed out with the full force of his fists, driving blow after blow into the face of Cain.

  The liar buckled beneath his fury.

  Each blow shattered another piece of his ugly face. How this abomination could ever have looked like his Father? The very notion was revolting. The angel drove another clubbing fist into the side of Cain’s head, driving the murderer down to his knees. ”You should not have come back, Cain.”

  ”This is my home.”

  ”No. This was your home. Now it is where you will rot out eternity.”

  ”What happened to you, Uriel? What happened to the Garden? You were supposed to protect it,” the accusation stung.

  ”And protect it I did,” the angel spat. ”I cherished each and every dweller, I nursed them through sickness and grief after you left, but what you did, what you did could never be undone. Once death entered the Garden it could never be cast out. I couldn’t save them. I had to watch them die again and again,” the angel drove a meaty black fist into Cain’s jaw. The homunculus spat blood and bone. ”No matter how much I tried, I failed them. I could not keep them safe. What was I to do? Watch them suffer and age and end, again and again? Their lives were too short, their suffering too great. I could not bear it. I could not live with my own failures, being reminded again and again that I was not Our Father, that I could not save them,” his face twisted bitterly. The angel could not keep the ache of failure out of its voice.

  Uriel sank his thick black fingers into the soft stuff of Cain’s chest, hooking them around the bloody bone and hauling the homunculus back to its feet. The angel forced Cain to look it in the eye, willing the daemon to see inside it, to see and understand. The homunculus screamed.

  It saw.

  ”I saved them the only way I could,” Uriel said, and the poor wretched creature actually believed that. Actually believed that by murdering each and every last inhabitant of Eden it had saved them from the horrors of aging, of cancers and sicknesses eating away at their flesh, at the effects of time addling their brains and stealing thoughts and words from their lips even as their bodies became weak and feeble. It had saved them from all the things that made them mortal. And it had done it by murdering them with the same stone that Cain had used to beat his brother’s brains out. The irony was delicious. Cain had let death into Eden, but Uriel had taken it so much further, taking up that first ever murder weapon and turning it to his own deluded purpose.

  ”Father forgive him, he knows not what he has done,” the daemon Cain mocked, and threw back his head, laughing.

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Killing the angel was as close to mercy as the homunculus had ever come.

  It knelt, head thrown back, raucous laughter frothing from its lips. Every evil it had dreamed
up was nothing compared to the ”mercy” of Uriel. The black angel unleashed another flurry of clubbing blows but the daemon had long since ceased to feel them. It stretched out long fingers for the sword but couldn’t reach it. It mattered little. It didn’t need a blade to defeat the angel.

  The fighting had taken them through the Ald Gate.

  They were inside the Garden.

  Its fingers found the familiar shape of a sharp-edged stone. It felt right in Cain’s hand. Familiar. The homunculus didn’t think about it. It clenched its fist around the stone, imagining it could still feel its brother’s blood dripping through its fingers, and brought it round with the same ferocity that caved in Abel’s skull. For a moment he saw his brother’s face in the angel’s place. He drove the sharp edge of the rock into that face over and over and over again until the skin split and the bone beneath cracked and opened up, and kept driving it into the wound until a blistering white light speared through Uriel’s ruined face. The light, the angel’s essence, ripped through the heavens, turning night into day as it bathed the entire Garden in its glory.

  And for a moment the daemon mourned everything that it had lost.

  The light of Uriel stretched from star to star, joining the constellations.

  It was pure.

  And then it lapsed into a darkness that mirrored the mad angel’s soul.

  The homunculus didn’t care.

  It was home.

  Cain breathed in deeply of Eden’s air. It had never imagined it would find a way back—that any man would.

  The homunculus laughed then. It hadn’t thought of itself as a man in forever. It wasn’t a man. It was anything but.

  ”I am home,” the daemon called out.

  Nothing answered.

  The Garden was dead.