Jago

by Kim Newman

  Something with black butterfly wings swished against the rotor blades and was food-processed into a cloud of shreds. The helicopter dipped, the soldier with the gun tipped back into the body. Paul threw himself to the road, hands over his head. Teddy was fascinated by how slowly the disaster happened. The helicopter gently swayed as it turned wrong side up, drifting peacefully down. The seconds dripped by lazily. Two or three people fell out, arms and legs waving for a moment, and broke on the road. The rotors described a circle in the air, the helicopter creaking and complaining, sparks cascading out of its engine. A rotor scraped a wall, and the heavy machine was catapulted out of Teddy’s sight in a screeching cartwheel. It thumped over what was left of the pub and plopped into the dark beyond. An explosion behind the pub knocked Teddy backwards, almost off his feet, and a bright orange cloud expanded, burning his eyes.

  The pub was on fire, flames licking the rubble. The pub sign was broken on the pavement, and the corked bottles inside were exploding, flinging burning spirits out in splashes. Teddy looked around for Paul, and thought he’d been trampled under. A gang of leather girls with knives were prowling the area, two on motorbikes. They had angels tied up and dragging behind them. One of the girls had a bloody pair of torn-off wings stapled to her jacket. Not a girl, he realized; it was Mrs Keyte, his geography teacher.

  Fuck, things were out of hand!

  Behind him, close, he heard a familiar growl, beginning low and rumbling lower, spits of viciousness beneath the rasp.

  ‘Terry?’

  He turned around, and saw the large shape detach itself from the shadows. A long tongue touched the floor. On four padded feet, his brother jogged towards him, wet teeth catching red light.

  * * *

  They entered what Jago must think of as his throne room. It was precisely the fantasy Susan expected. A choir singing his praises, women prostrate at his feet, incense-stink of sanctity thick all around. Jenny, serene in Jago’s madness, and a dark, dangerous girl attended Beloved’s throne. The girl in his lap, mind flickering tinily like a fly in a web, was Hazel. Up at the top of the house, the curtain walls were fluffier, indistinguishable from clouds. A pool of light beside the throne afforded a God’s-eye-view of the strife down in the village, a black relief map dotted with flames, swarming with antlike doomed souls. Her head was close to critical mass.

  ‘Jago!’ James shouted, trying to get the Lord God’s attention.

  The congregation turned to look, with a craning of necks and a rustle of wings. Some of the more harpy-like angels squawked. James and Susan walked down the gold-carpeted aisle, like Dorothy and friends in the chamber of the great and powerful Oz. The aisle grew longer, as if they were strolling the wrong way on a moving pavement. James had his gun tucked into his jeans, at the back, under his jacket. He wanted to get near without being torn apart. Tendrils of fear linked their minds, stretched now to breaking.

  ‘…and I saw one of his heads as it were wounded to death,’ Sister Jenny said, ‘and his deadly wound was healed, and all the world wondered after the beast.’

  Susan looked beyond Jenny and the other handmaid, beyond Hazel in the Beloved’s lap, and tried to see into the Lord God. His mind was black, a blank obscured by his Talent. ‘You’re a very bad man,’ Dorothy had accused the exposed Oz. ‘No,’ he had proclaimed, ‘I’m a very good man…’ If there was something of Tony Jago left in the Lord God, Susan couldn’t find it. ‘…I’m just a very bad wizard.’ The man himself was another victim of his fantasies.

  James was between Jenny and the dark girl now, looking up at the Lord God, reaching for his gun.

  ‘This is a pile of shit,’ he told Jenny, drawing the pistol. ‘Snap out of it.’

  He didn’t immediately pull the trigger, and Susan knew they were lost. Jago touched his mind, stayed his hand.

  ‘And he opened his mouth in blasphemy against God,’ Jenny shouted, the Brethren rising angrily to their feet.

  Susan saw at once how James had been written into Revelation. An enormous surge of channelled detestation showered upon him from the Lord God and all his faithful. Jenny was still reciting St John. James staggered back, gunhand jerking as he tried to shoot upwards. He was unable to fire. Susan felt his need to shoot crying out in her mind, but also rising frustration as his wrist and fingers wouldn’t obey the commands of his brain. It was over, and they were dead.

  ‘He that leadeth into captivity shall go into captivity,’ Jenny said, in an even tone.

  The dark girl took James by the lapels and bent him backwards, pressing his shoulders to the floor. The gun slipped away.

  ‘He that killeth with the sword must be killed with the sword…’

  * * *

  ‘…here is the patience and the faith of saints.’

  Allison had her knee on the Anti-Christ’s chest. He was a poor specimen. Their game of hide-and-seek in the woods had given her a chance to gauge his skills. He was nothing. Prince of Lies, Trickster Duke, Pathetic Loser. Allison held the Anti-Christ’s chin and kept his head still. She rolled out of the way, to allow the force of Beloved’s gaze to fall upon him. She half expected him to shrivel to dust, or to explode in flames. He struggled, weakly.

  ‘Here is wisdom,’ Jenny said. ‘Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast, for it is the number of a man…’

  A circle began to burn on the Anti-Christ’s forehead, three commalike sixes twirled together.

  ‘…and his number is Six Hundred Three Score and Six.’

  * * *

  Paul was swept on a human tide, borne towards the Agapemone. As the fighting died down, a lemming rush started. Striding on branches among the crowds was the Maskell Family Tree, a file of followers trailing behind it like Hare Krishnas. Paul was surprised at how tall it had grown. It had four faces, not counting the eyes of a dog dotted near its roots. Its worshippers, led by Dolar, were starting to green. He worked his feet desperately, pumping the ground, knowing that if he stumbled he’d be crushed. Light was all around now, banishing the dreadful night, replacing the absent sun. The house pulled him like the moon pulling the tide.

  * * *

  Beloved stood, and looked upon His fallen enemy. Hazel didn’t understand, but guessed this was the end of a court struggle begun thousands of years ago. The man with 666 branded on his forehead was trying not to scream. He didn’t look especially evil, but he had dared to defy Him.

  After so long in His embrace, Hazel, set aside, was weak as an old woman. Jenny stepped in to comfort her and hold her up.

  At the end of the aisle stood Sister Susan. She had come before Beloved’s throne with the traitor, and was exposed as a Judas. The woman was looking about, nervous, expecting an attack.

  ‘Babylon is fallen,’ Jenny whispered, ‘that great city, because she made all nations drink of the wine of the wrath of her fornication.’

  Around Susan, the carpet fell apart and shrank from wooden floorboards. The woman was concentrating. She made fists and lifted them up. As she did so, Hazel saw nailheads protrude from the floor. Maybe a dozen of them. The nails popped out of the floor. Boards twanged as they bent up at the ends. The nails slowly rose as Susan’s fists were lifted. They clustered together like a flock of tiny metal birds.

  ‘I saw a woman sit upon a scarlet coloured beast, full of names of blasphemy, having seven heads and ten horns…’

  The clump of nails began to glow with heat. Susan’s fists were white knots, dotted with blood.

  ‘And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet, having a golden cup full of the filthiness of her fornication.’

  Susan opened her fists, and the nails flew towards Beloved.

  * * *

  It was a nice try, but futile. Susan whipped back as the nails fragmented in the air before Jago’s face, spanging harmlessly against the floor.

  If James got to be the Anti-Christ, she was left as the Whore of Babylon. Great. Jago’s gospel being Sexism Writ in Flame, she knew that let her in for disproportionat
e suffering.

  ‘Babylon the Great, the Mother of Harlots and Abominations of the Earth,’ Jenny screamed, a good little denouncer. Susan tried to remember her as a sweet, funny, confused child. That girl was dead.

  ‘…I saw the woman drunken with the blood of the saints, and with blood of the martyrs…’

  James was bucking, but the dark girl had him pinned down and the Brethren were gathering round. She might be able to make a run for the landing behind her. But Taine was blocking her path, wings outstretched. She shot a mental bolt at him, but he shrugged it off. With Jago around, her Talent was a clip full of spent bullets.

  ‘…Her sins had reached unto Heaven, and God hath remembered her iniquities,’ Jenny continued, meaning Susan.

  Taine grabbed her and forced her forwards, towards the throne of the Lord God. Jago stood over James, sorrow on his face, and glanced without concern at her.

  ‘How much she hath glorified herself, and lived deliciously, so much torment and sorrow give her,’ Jenny ranted. ‘Therefore shall her plagues come in one day, death and mourning and famine…’

  Susan felt Jago’s mentacles around her heart.

  ‘Hazel,’ she said, ‘don’t believe this.’

  Hazel broadcast fear and loathing with the rest of them. Another loss.

  ‘…and she shall be utterly burned with fire…’

  All over her body, flames clung like a garment.

  ‘…for strong is the Lord God who judgeth her.’

  Susan saw and hated Jago’s look of pity and lament. A thousand agonies of fire and insect jaws dragged her deep into limitless night.

  * * *

  Allison picked him up by his head and hauled him upright. Lytton’s feet paddled in the floor, numbed and useless. The Brethren jeered him, and things were thrown at his face. Allison led him away from the throne, away from the pool in which Susan lay, through the gauntlet of the faithful. He was punched, kicked and scratched. Hands tore his clothes, ripping his shirt apart, even parting the strong denim of his jeans. They reviled him as an outcast.

  Jenny recited, ‘And he laid hold upon the dragon, that old serpent which is the Devil and Satan, and bound him a thousand years, and cast him into the Bottomless Pit and shut him up, and set a seal upon him that he should deceive the nations no more…’

  He knew pleading for life would only encourage the Chosen to abuse him more, but he tried. He called those he had known, and they didn’t even turn their heads in shame, instead fixing their gaze on him, pouring out righteous anger at his betrayal. Allison held him up, arm around his waist, and his lower body dragged, legs below his knees trailing through the cloudy floor. If she let him go, he’d plunge through the insubstantial house to be broken on the concrete of the cellar floors.

  Janet Speke, magnificently winged, opened her mouth and trilled hate at him. She had just settled into the ranks of the Chosen, bringing someone with her.

  ‘Pam,’ he called out, his voice creaking in his throat.

  She recognized him, but was afraid to show anything. Earlier, she’d clung to him for protection; now she huddled against the Angel Janet, hiding in her wings. Susan was gone, the presence inside his head shut off. If Pam was here, Paul and Teddy, were probably out of it too. He was the last heretic, lunatic in his defiance, unable to accept the One True God, doomed to a despised martyrdom. If he’d shot Jago as soon as he pulled out the gun, he might have had a chance. The reality of a bullet might have pierced the curtains of his Talent.

  The Faithful were all around, Jenny encouraging them with her recital. ‘…and fire came down from God out of Heaven. And the Devil that deceived was cast into the lake of fire and brimstone…’

  He burned inside, a fire kindled in his stomach, flaring in his eyes.

  ‘…and shall be tormented day and night for ever and ever.’

  Behind him was a solid wall, the Brethren pinning him to face against it. He was hoisted. Something held his ankles and lifted them high, turning him like a clock hand. He dangled, nose pressed to the wall. His feet were tied together, the rope over a hook.

  Tormented day and night for ever and ever.

  He turned his head, neck muscles complaining, and saw Allison upside down. The girl had long nails in her mouth and an iron-headed mallet in her hand. He recognized a tool from his own kit.

  ‘Allison,’ he said, ‘make him do it himself.’

  ‘Don’t tempt me, Satan,’ she said, through the comically fanglike nails.

  The Chosen had him against a wooden board. It had been a door, but it was inset into the Light now.

  Allison, chaired on Angels’ shoulders, was level with him. She held his right wrist and pressed it to a door panel.

  ‘Hold it there,’ she told Taine, who was in midair, hovering with occasional flaps. The brother took Lytton’s hand and kept it where it was.

  He made a fist against the pain to come, and Allison stabbed with a nail between the bones and tendons of his wrist. It was a good eight inches long, and spear-sharp. The point broke the skin, and the nail hung like a heavy tick from his flesh. He didn’t even feel it. Then she angled it properly, digging in. A slight tickle turned to grating agony.

  ‘Apollyon serves God, too,’ she said, going past him entirely. Whatever the rules were, they’d stay obscure to him.

  Awkward on the shoulders of still-human supports, Allison’s first hammer blow was clumsy. The nail scraped against a bone, and the hammer slid, thumping against the wood. Lytton screamed, pain blotting everything else. The Light became, for a wavering moment, a peeling and dirty wall. Then, the Light seeped back.

  Allison repositioned the nail and gouged deeper with it. It pricked through the underside of his wrist, and scraped varnish.

  Oh God, oh Jesus, oh fucking hell, oh…

  The girl hammered better, and the nail slid through his wrist, embedding itself in the wood. She continued her blows until the nailhead was set into his skin. Blood leaked around it, but she’d been careful not to tear an artery. That would have been too quick.

  Tormented day and night for ever and ever.

  The bonds of his ankles shifted and, for an eternal moment, Lytton’s full weight was on his punctured wrist. As he screamed, he saw the ruin made of reality. A group of mad people in the dingy top-floor hall of the Manor House, surrounded by wreckage, clothes ragged, eyes unhealthy.

  Then they were holding him up again, working on his left hand. Allison was better at it now, and sank the nail through wrist and door with only four precise taps. Her face was changed for an instant like a flash superimposition, every time she struck. The eaten-away skull mask of Badmouth Ben grinned over her determined look. She was businesslike about the crucifixion, but he delighted in it.

  Pinned, Lytton was left to hang. His face and chest thumped wood, and he felt sweat and blood pouring down his body, clogging in his hair. Allison was lifted higher, and he felt her fussing with his feet, tearing away the rope and crossing his ankles so she could drive the long nail clean through both of them. This would have to take all his weight.

  Tormented day and night for ever and ever.

  As the Chosen backed away, his body dropped and his wounds tore. He thought he might fall free, and heard the nails straining. His shoulders popped, and he felt air between his chest and the wood, gravity fighting the nails. He tried to make fists, but as the tendons in his wrists and arms grew tight, so the pain increased.

  Reality was almost constant now, but no comfort. Jago sat on a chair, not a throne. The Chosen were bedraggled, ignoring their own wounds, hearing a different tune and seeing a different picture. The girl with Jago was a bruised waif, gown hanging open. Jenny was a child in a play, smugly remembering her words. Allison was a scary nut, carried away.

  The Light of Heaven couldn’t be completely dispelled, even as he was pulled away from it by the slow trickle from his wrists and ankles and the increasing pain in his lungs. Crucified victims, he remembered, mainly died from suffocation as they became u
nable to breathe. His ribs were sagging, making a funnel too narrow for his lungs.

  Tormented day and night for ever and ever.

  Each air intake was boiling lead sucked up his throat. Inside his chest, two furnaces stoked. He felt membranes tearing inside him.

  He thought he heard Susan calling him, and wondered what came next.

  Blood roared in his ears. He couldn’t focus his eyes. His heart beat, loud as a drum. It stopped. The torment ended.

  INTERLUDE ONE

  Wright, the piano player, was running through the latest Dixieland tunes, some borrowed, some invented. ‘The Okeefenokee Swamp Stomp’, ‘It’s the Thing to Sing and Swing on the Susquehanna Sands’, ‘If the Man in the Moon Were a Coon’. Catriona hadn’t yet got used to the tinkling and clunking of the new music, but Gussie and G-G claimed that Wright, who had been Edwin’s sergeant in the war, was an authentic genius of the art.

  At the other end of the table, Madame Irena was a spectacle in her black Paris gown, black feathers around lovely throat, jade pendant hanging between pigeon breasts. The medium claimed to be a Serbian refugee, but Edwin had privately established that ‘Irena Dubrovna’ was born in Holloway as plain Irene Dobson. Parting her veil, Irena sipped iced water. Nothing alcoholic, for she was teetotal. Alcohol would disturb her spirit guide, she had explained in her stage Mittel-European accent.

  Catriona wondered if any of the men in the company—if Edwin—would like Irena for a mistress. Then she mentally rapped her own knuckles for even thinking the word. She never thought of herself as Edwin’s mistress. Theirs was an equal partnership, unsanctioned by the hypocrisies of a ceremony neither regarded with anything more than an anthropological interest. He wasn’t her proprietor in the way he would be, whether he liked it or no, as her husband.

  Edwin was by her side, at the head of his table, lampooning the absurdities of ritual magic to Robert Querdilion. The war poet was attracted to the dressing-up aspects of the occult, which sometimes led him into lunatic company, while Edwin was as committed a debunker as a believer. Convinced there was a plane beyond the physical, he’d devoted years to the assessment of psychic phenomena but was thoroughly scornful of the hocus-pocus of the dilettante seance-hounds and the mumbo-jumbo of the secret-society sorcerers.