Beneath Ceaseless Skies #191

by Chaz Brenchley

  My shin burned. I stooped, drawing up the leg of my trousers. Blood dribbled from the laceration.

  I realized Magdalena was staring at me, her lips pursed. Trying not to look interested in my wound.

  I ground my teeth, refused to allow myself to shiver. “Salazar will be waiting.” I stood, took out the extra salt crystal vial—the empty one from my pocket and gave it to her. “Keep this. Don’t let him see you.”

  Magdalena gripped it and smiled her lovely, jagged smile. Her lantern sputtered out as she stepped backward, becoming invisible to me in the shadows.

  I stroked the second vial looped around my neck, the salt coarse against my fingers, then tucked it under my shirt. I thought of the woman wearing the red slipper, her body pressed against the bricks, moaning. I shivered with anticipation.

  I lowered Darwin’s dark lenses over my eyes and called out my rival’s name. “Salazar!” My voice echoed through the Underground, bouncing off the stone walls. “Salazar!” the passages called to themselves, whispering into the distant darkness. “Salazar!”

  Something luminous sparked in the distant tunnel. It shot toward me, flickering. The harsh light made the grout between the bricks look like a wall of pulsing veins. Rats squealed and scurried at the light’s edge. It pulled up inches from my face, the light momentarily blinding my eyes. I blinked rapidly.

  “You should be at home, Elijah,” the ghost said. “Beside your bed. Begging God to forgive you for your sins.”

  “Is that why you’re still stranded here? You forgot to ask forgiveness and weren’t allowed to move on?”

  Of course, I knew better. I’d read Chamberlain’s journal. In truth, Salazar had wanted to be one of the first to continue his explorations in spiritualist studies from the other side. The vain bastard had drank poison so his appearance wouldn’t be marred by half of his face missing from a gunshot wound or his neck forever tilted at an odd angle, a noose hanging around it. Aside from his too-wide, unblinking eyes, he looked remarkably handsome.

  “You were uncharacteristically silent about your discoveries after you died, Salazar,” I pressed. “Did you see God? Did you refuse Him your company?”

  He didn’t answer, only bobbed in the air on a cool current of air. His great bulging eyes, unblinking.

  “No, I thought not. Perhaps because there is nothing more than what we see—nothing more than this.”

  “And yet, you’re bleeding out the end of your life looking for a damned angel,” Salazar said.

  Something roared deep in the tunnel.

  “It’s coming,” I said. “There’s no reason for us to quarrel. All I want to do is study it. We could even work together.”

  “Is that what you told Fossick?”

  “Yes, poor Fossick,” I said. I forced myself not to clutch the grounder in my pocket. “What a pity. I suppose you’ll have to pay for your ghostgasm studies now?”

  Salazar snarled and dived inside me.

  * * *

  Inside my head, Salazar ravaged my memories, like the consumption tearing apart my lungs. I put up mental barriers of my own remembrances, trying to stall him. He hewed them apart, pinned them up in the walls of my mind for him to examine and prod.

  There I was—a child of eleven—lowering Saint Darwin’s goggles over my eyes for the first time. What I saw thrilled me. From my window, my friend Angelina—who had died three months earlier—darted along after her very-much alive parents. She saw my goggles and waved. I giggled, so happy to see her again, and she shot through me, into me, possessed me. Even as my body spasmed, excitement and wonder became tempered with curiosity.

  Another memory—another wall. Several years later, naked in the twisted sheets of my bed—my hips thrusting furiously, under the throes of a ghostgasm. When I’d finished—or, when the ghosts had finished with me—they left my body, their giggles turning to sighs as they wisped through each other, unable to connect any longer. On the bed, my body shivered, but I stared at them through my goggles, then pushed them off my forehead, reached out for the notepad on my bedside table, and began scribbling notes.

  Salazar swiped it aside, reached on.

  Now, just weeks ago. In my apartment with Dr. Stuart, his face as sterile and stiff as the cadavers he’d let me dissect and study under his tutelage. He suggested I had perhaps several months left. “Of course, you know better than most what lies beyond,” the doctor said. His breath reeked of whiskey. “Don’t think of it as an ending, so much as a transition.” They were, I suppose, intended as words of comfort.

  Salazar pushed past it. I couldn’t hold him off much longer.

  The following evening, with a golem, whose company I’d paid for. Sobbing as I came, spilling across its clay skin. The golem’s fire-lit eyes seemed dull and cool as I shuddered then rested against it.

  The barriers crumbled. “Here!” Salazar cried out in triumph.

  I saw again the scene he’d been searching for: me standing over Fossick’s bloodied body, folding up the map, when Salazar flitted through the walls and screamed, demanding what I’d done. I held up my grounder, warding him off. I didn’t want him to see the glowing salt crystal vial I’d just pocketed. “You’re dead, Salazar. Now, so is he. You should have no trouble finding him in a few hours.”

  He had circled me, prodding for an opening past the grounder. “Dead, yes, but more human than you’ll ever be.”

  “Perhaps. But still just a spirit.”

  I smiled as I listened to my own words, echoing in my head. How right I’d been.

  Salazar—the Salazar sifting my soul—hissed. His grotesquely handsome face contorted with rage as he prodded my memories, pushing. “What did you do to him?”

  He pushed back a little further, the night’s events swirling in reverse. He stopped as Fossick gargled blood, with me straddling him, the vial hidden in my hand. Fossick stopped moving.

  The scene vanished. Salazar’s face crowded everything else out, swelling in my head.

  “My God.” It sounded as if he was actually praying. “You monster! What did you do?”

  “You’re dead,” I repeated. “And you’re a fool.”

  Salazar screamed and shot up, tried to exit my body. He was much, much too late.

  * * *

  I blinked my eyes open and squeezed the grounder in my pocket hard enough that blood dripped from the broken skin of my fingers, slicking the talisman. But I continued to grip it, binding Salazar to me. He twisted inside me, shrieking.

  Magdalena stood over me, the empty salt crystal vial in her hand.

  I lifted the grounder and tore Salazar’s flickering spirit out of my body, and bottled him up.

  * * *

  After I stoppered the vial, it glowed sky-blue like its twin, and I allowed myself to gag and cough up blood onto the tunnel’s floor. My body convulsed so violently I thought the whole Underground was shaking. I caught my breath, my fingers clawing into the mud beneath me. The Underground continued rattling. The phlegm and blood and tissue I’d spat up writhed like a worm sliced into segments.

  Magdalena said something to me I didn’t understand. She said it two more times, and I recognized my name.

  The tunnel howled and seemed to constrict around us. An emerald beam washed through the darkness, drenching everything in a light that made it look as if we were all underwater. Warm air whipped my face and clothes, pushing against me like a wave from sea, threatening to smash us.

  Then a train twisted into the station—a locomotive and carriages blacker than obsidian. The darkness shuddered and pained my eyes as it glided toward us. Flames licked from the undercarriage, illuminating scales as it floated above the tracks. I couldn’t help thinking of my namesake, taken up into heaven in a chariot of fire.

  Magdalena pulled me to my feet. “Come, Elijah. Time to make our names immortal.”

  She threw open a scale-like door, and we climbed aboard.

  * * *

  The violet ribbed walls expanded and contracted as we made ou
r way through the carriage. Luminescent fungus bubbled from the folds in the accordion-like paneling. The segmented floor was uneven, a mosaic of colors and shapes. Chairs and benches made from cable and wire were strung like inner membranes throughout the cabin.

  Strange windows punctuated the carriage walls, displaying impossible views. I let go of Magdalena and stepped toward them.

  The Underground tunnel walls weren’t visible. Instead, I saw pictures that moved like magic lanterns with a God-like imagination.

  The first looked like an image based in reality: a golem constable stepping through an open door from the post-rain fog. The golem knelt beside an unmoving man whose body cast a growing shadow of blood.

  Fearful that the corpse would have Fossick’s face, I moved onto the next: the woman in the red slipper, shivering against bricks. She smoothed her dress. The spirits had abandoned her.

  But the third window was more fantastical: rust-colored sands battering a feathered cathedral. A flock of great birds swarmed out from the bell tower. I squinted. Beneath the wings, the shape of the bodies appeared human.

  “Magdalena,” I breathed.

  She moved to my window and laughed. It was a drunken, uncertain sound.

  The door at the end of the carriage folded open with a wet rasp, like an orifice parting.

  The angel towered before us, his skin the color of unpolished jade. His six wings were dirty and shriveled—possibly atrophied, I noted—but still magnificent to behold. He was naked, save for trousers fitted with patches.

  “You are not the one Fossick promised.” His great unblinking oval eyes didn’t waver from me as he addressed both of us. “Not the ghost spiritualist.”

  “No,” I admitted. “We’re here in his stead.”

  “Why?”

  “His fears got the better of him.” I stepped forward, unable to keep from smiling. “Do you have a name?”

  The angel cooed, pigeon-like. “It has been unpronounceable in your languages since Babel fell.” He stepped forward, lifted a webbed hand before my face. Three fingers and a thumb. “You are dying, Elijah.”

  Magdalena moaned, or maybe growled, but I only said, “You know why I have come?”

  “You believe death can be avoided.”

  “Yes,” I breathed. “I believe you have avoided it for quite some time now.”

  “For quite some time, yes. You wish to be healed. That is why you have searched me out. Yes, I know why you have come.”

  “You can do it, then? You can save me?”

  “It is in my power.”

  I laughed aloud, blinked back tears of joy. “A miracle,” I breathed. “Such a discovery. We’ll lift you up, out of this darkness. The articles we’ll publish, Magdalena!”

  The creature cooed again. “You would make a display of me? Show me to the world?” He laughed. Rough, and full of disdain. “No. I am not a trophy to be won and paraded.”

  “No,” I replied, as I realized my error. I was dealing with a prideful creature. “Of course not. I apologize. I misspoke.” My palms went slick with sweat. The inside of my fingers burned where the skin had been broken. “No, you misunderstand. Not my trophy. Not anyone’s trophy. I want the world to observe your glory. There’s so much we can learn from you. We would be your disciples.”

  Magdalena said, “These windows—you can take us to these other places? These other worlds?”

  The angel smiled at her. “Would you follow me? Would you leave your home?”

  “I would study these places,” Magdalena said. “Yes.”

  “Leave?” I echoed. Something hollow ballooned inside me. How could I leave? My studies, my research, my legacy. If I disappeared, I would be forgotten. My work lost. But if I refused, if I stayed, then he would refuse me. I couldn’t die. I wasn’t ready to die, and I couldn’t let him go. He had to save me.

  “No.” I wheezed. Tried to stifle another cough as the bile rose in my throat.

  “What?” Magdalena asked.

  “You were banished, weren’t you?” I demanded of the angel. “You’re an exile, or refugee. There’s no holiness to you, is there? Only blasphemy.”

  The angel’s wings bristled. I thought of the way a cat’s back arches, hackles raised. It cooed again. “The only devil here is you. You who have seen such wonders, who have written and recorded and hypothesized about them—you who did only believe because you saw them. What does your scripture say? ‘Blessed are those who have not seen, and believe.’“

  “Yes,” I said, shaking my head. I knew what I had to do then. That I would have to save myself. “But the scripture is wrong. ‘Blessed are those who have seen, and do not believe.’“

  The pistol shot barked, an unexpected thunderclap at sea. The angel staggered backward, as the echo rang through the carriage. Blood as bright as sunlight splattered the floor and wall, glistening. I pulled the trigger two more times, and the wooden bullets slammed into him.

  The holy wood that had once been saturated with the blood of Christ.

  Magdalena shouted. Her cane snapped against the back of my legs, and I toppled. She grabbed my arm, swung against one of the windows.

  “This is it, Magdalena,” I gasped. “Immortality. Not just for our names. For us.”

  She hissed at me, baring her sharp, splintered fangs. “Is that meant to tempt me, Elijah? My own immortality is already well-established.”

  “Perhaps. But securing and studying this specimen will make you one of the foremost spiritualists—recording something Darwin himself failed to capture. This is unlike anything we’ll ever again see. We must study it. Document it.”

  She relented. Of course, she relented. I had spent years studying with her, studying her.

  “My children-” the angel sputtered. “My children will avenge me.”

  “Children?” I repeated. “The Nephilim? Splendid.” Even to my own ears, my voice sounded ragged. “I hope to study them as well. Now, Magdalena, a vial, if you would please?”

  She stepped back, rooted through her satchel. Glass clinked against glass. She withdrew one of the vials, held it. For a moment, I doubted her.

  Then she nodded and tossed the vial to me.

  I placed it beneath the crippled thing, collecting a sample of its blood. The vial filled remarkably quickly.

  She passed me another, but before I positioned it, I ran a finger across the creature’s wound. The blood glowed and tingled against my skin. I put it in my mouth, sucked it clean. The taste—I’d never tasted anything so pure.

  It tasted like life, a second chance, redemption. My legacy.

  I licked my lips, and tasted it again.

  I have never considered myself to be a holy man.

  Copyright © 2016 D.K. Thompson

  Read Comments on this Story on the BCS Website

  D.K. Thompson (also known as the Easter Werewolf) has written stories featured or forthcoming in Apex, Bull Spec, Drabblecast, Pseudopod, and Escape Pod and has lost NaNoWriMo twice. His collection of stories And Welcome Back was funded via Kickstarter last year and will be out in 2016. He lives in Southern California with his wife and three children.

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  COVER ART

  “Huashan Temple,” by Xiao Ran

  Xiao Ran (a.k.a. Dawn Pu) is a concept artist from Shanghai, China. He received his art education at Shanghai University from 2004-2008, where he majored in oil painting. He is skilled at environment concept design and illustration and has worked as a Concept Designer for various game and movie companies, including Virtuos Game, Jiuyu Game Company, Tencent Company, and Talkweb Mobile Game Studio. To see more of his work, visit dawnpu.deviantart.com.

  Beneath Ceaseless Skies

  ISSN: 1946-1076

  Published by Firkin Press,

  a 501(c)3 Non-Profit Literary Organization

  Compilation Copyright © 2016 Firkin Press

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