by Tim Lees
I said, “Where is everyone? We need to stick together. Where’s Willis? Is he here?”
“Higher! Higher!”
I put my hands up higher.
“Now. Walk toward me. Real slow.”
He wanted to sound tough, and in charge, but he wasn’t. I could hear it in his voice. I could see him now; a faint, dark shape peeping from behind the trolleys. A little boy, all alone, and frightened of the dark.
I had a theory if I just kept talking, kept him occupied, then we’d be safe.
So I did. I sweet-talked him. Explained again who we were, dropped names I thought he’d recognize, spoke about cooperation, all of us, pulling together . . . And about twenty feet along, we reached a junction, a corridor that opened on the left. And Anna threw herself at me. She almost knocked me off my feet. I tumbled sideways, arms out, smacked against the wall. Then she was dragging me away. “Run!” she shouted. “Run!” She pulled my arm, and I stumbled after her. And every other sound just vanished in a roar of gunfire.
We ran. And ran. It was a maze down here. I passed the place I’d fixed the flask, all neat, a schoolroom set up for a lesson nobody would ever get the chance to learn. Or so it seemed.
Shots echoed; an intermittent burst of firing would be answered by another, and another, till I realized there had only been a single shot, rebounding through the corridors, repeated, on and on.
Then Anna stopped and pulled me back.
“Here. This door.”
I looked around. “What?”
She put her finger to her lips and pointed to the big sign overhead, red lettering on white.
Stairs, it said.
“He was bedded down. He would not chase. Also, he was scared.”
“Thanks for the explanation.”
“It is you took stupid risk. I will tell you—I was in his place, I would shoot you. Shoot you dead. For safety.”
“Yeah. His boss promised me that, as well.”
“Lucky that his boss is not here. Perhaps he is dead. Better for us, maybe, if so.”
The stairs were narrow. Concrete stairs in a concrete shaft. We went in single file. Seven tight turns and we were at the foot, facing another door.
She put her ear against the wood and listened for a long time. Then she shrugged and pushed it open.
CHAPTER 55
HARBINGER
There was a plastic-covered sign screwed to the wall:
NO DRUGS
NO ALCOHOL
NO CAFFEINE
To the left, some kind of maintenance had been in progress; a trapdoor lay open in the floor, fenced by a guardrail.
To the right, the corridor ran straight and empty. Grays and yellows, dim electric light . . . Someone was waiting for us at the far end.
“It is him?”
“I don’t know. I can’t tell anymore.” I motioned Anna back. “Stay here. He hasn’t hurt me yet. I’ll go . . .”
“He will not hurt me, either, Chris. Now I have gun.”
“Gun? Since when?”
“Since dead man, upstairs. He does not use it anymore, I think.” She pulled it from her pocket, showed me. “You do not observe this, Chris? You flunk detective school, I think . . .”
“Shit! Be careful with it, will you?”
“Ha. Man hunts gods, is scared of gun.”
“Good reason, too.”
“So.” She nodded down the corridor. “Let us go. Let us meet him. Finish this.”
A set of doors closed off the hallway. The figure seemed to lounge against them, slouching in a lab coat and blue jeans. Behind him was another sign:
Have you scrubbed? Have you slept? Are you wearing ear defenders? Are you sober and free from all intoxicants?
Underneath, in a shaky hand, someone had added:
Are you pure in heart and soul?
The man was Thoms. Facility Director Thoms. His little gnome-like face looked gray and tired almost beyond imagining; his hands were in his pockets, and the lab coat, once so crisp and white, was rumpled, stained, and pulled up awkwardly around his neck. The pose that from a distance seemed so casual, close up proved a necessity; he propped himself against the door, too weak to stand alone. His lips strained in a smile. His head tipped back. His mouth began to move, though with a terrible rigidity, as if he were a wooden doll, a ventriloquist’s dummy.
Anna caught my sleeve and pulled me back.
His mouth twitched. The skin upon his face seemed shrunk down to the bone.
It took a while before the words came.
“I understand,” he said. Air whistled through his teeth. “I understand . . .”
“Dr. Thoms . . . ?”
We stopped a few yards off. He looked weak and sickly, but I was wary of him, even so.
He had a voice like paper rustling.
“I met him. He could have told me, he could have just—explained it to me, but he didn’t. No. He showed me. So there’d be no mistake.” He nodded, or perhaps his head just wobbled, too weak to hold up. “All my life, I waited for that . . . revelation. Not the theory, not the word . . . the actual, empirical . . . And now it’s done. It’s over. All my work, every project, every paper I presented . . . It’s all led here. To this. This . . . moment.” He was still trying to smile, weak lips pushing at the flesh that failed to respond. “It’s the whole secret. The great theory of everything. It’s the union of the base and the divine. It’s all linked up, you see? I know that now. We rise, we fall. Our little lives, plowed under like the wheat. But they go on. Our footprints on the shore, you might say. But them—they are the shore. Always there. Forever and forever more . . .”
“Chris,” she whispered. “It is him. It is him, in Thoms’s shape.”
“I don’t think so.”
“See—look. His cheek . . .”
The movements of his mouth, small though they were, had torn the skin at the corner of his lips. It broke away, flaking off, as delicate as rice paper.
There was no blood, no pink of living flesh.
“In Christ.” That dry, cracked voice again. “In Christ, I am a new creation. Borne on the wings of angels, God and man made one. The rebus. The union. Homo divinus. He left me here. ‘Behold, I will send my messenger, to make the way for me.’ Upon the podiums, in the journals and the lecture halls. Behold . . .”
Thoms’s face had shifted. It was as if he’d had a stroke; quite suddenly, the whole left side seemed to have sheared and slipped. His lips kept moving. Cracks appeared in the skin, running down his chin like drool.
“The thing is . . . the dreadful thing . . . I thought I was St Paul. Logician, theorist, interpreter of the divine. And all the time—ha. All the time, I was just John the Baptist. Barefoot in the wilderness. A harbinger, a messenger. Not . . .”
He made a little, crumpled sound; then all at once, his hips gave way, he folded up, and sat down on the floor.
“Oh God. Oh God. It’s here . . .” His eyes moved in their sockets, gazing up at me in hopeless, terrified appeal. “It was the great moment—great, great. The triumph of my whole career. I understood. In that one act, he made me understand. I have the references, the bibliography. He put it in my head. A thing that can encompass all things, alpha and omega. All things, and one thing more, which is itself . . .”
“Shit, Chris.”
“I can’t write. Can’t get it down. No one will . . . ever see . . .”
He was crumbling. Literally falling apart, like a plaster statue, breaking into powder. His clothes sagged. The great dome of his skull began to wither and wrinkle like an old balloon. The dead eyes swiveled up, fell back into the dark. The jaw came loose. Only when he ceased to look like anything human, when I could think of him as just a thing, an object, only then I stepped across him and put my shoulder to the door. It felt as heavy a
s a bank vault.
Thoms was long dead. Or I hoped so, anyway. Dead, still speaking. The white coat and the jeans sagged. A ballpoint pen dropped from his pocket and rolled across the floor.
I glanced up at the sign.
“Pure in heart?” I said.
“Sober,” she said. “Will have to do.”
CHAPTER 56
THE AIR WAS FULL OF SOUNDS
Another corridor. A whirr of engines, a hiss and chatter in the pipes; somewhere a sluice gate clanking and the sudden weight of water rumbling overhead.
Somebody whispered in my ear.
I spun around, saw no one.
“Hear that?” I said.
“Hear what?”
And yet I had heard it—the tiny smack of lips, an indrawn breath, a word—I struggled to remember. I’d heard it clearly, perfectly, and yet already it was fading from my mind. I tried to think—
A second voice, off to the left, a single syllable, lower in pitch, though sharp, precise . . .
“Listen!”
“I hear nothing, Chris. What are you saying? I—” But she stopped, suddenly alert. “Oh! Oh yes. Over here—is—no. Is no one. No one here. I thought, it was like, like—” She shook her head.
“Like what?”
“Like I hear my mother call. She calls, ‘Anikü! Anikü!’ but from far away . . . I am no longer sure. I think I . . . I mishear . . .”
There were openings in the walls, narrow alleys, barely wide enough for maintenance. Here was another, automated world, busily in motion. Long, sliding ladders fixed on rails rose floor after floor into these cramped, half-hidden spaces. Huge machines stood, tangled in a scaffolding of pipes and tubes. Lights flickered, red and green. Monitors pinged back and forth. The very air seemed vibrant, humming; I ran a hand across my forearm, watched the hairs lift, prickling in the charged-up atmosphere.
And we had come to it at last.
No temple gates, no sleek Egyptian pillars; just a frame of girders, ten feet tall, stark and industrial, striped in black and yellow. This was the portal, the entranceway. A trolley stood nearby, piled with plastic tubing. A box of tools lay on its side upon the floor.
Beyond, the shadows opened out in all directions.
You could feel the size of it. The air was different here. The sound was different. I tasted metal, cold and harsh against my tongue. The pressure in my head increased. I stepped back, and it eased; forwards, and it pushed into my ears, my nose, my sinuses, like walking underwater, as if the very medium through which we moved had changed.
There, in the presence of the gods, my teeth began to ache.
Small, brownish lamps hung from a ceiling lost in darkness, and they seemed to cast more shadow than illumination. Under them, the floor lay flat and empty as a football field.
To either side, a row of huge enclosures had been built, bolstered by steel and concrete, snaked through with pipes and gleaming circuitry. I stared, aware that I should see something extraordinary here, though for a long time, I did not. The gods were present—I could feel them—but I couldn’t separate them from the bonds that held them, the great machines that kept them in their place. It was as if they’d fused with their surroundings once again, just as centuries before, they’d fused with churches, shrines, and sacred ground.
I counted—what? A dozen? It was hard to pin them down, hard to focus or to work out which I’d seen and which I hadn’t. Hard to know where one stopped and the next began; hard even to look at them. It hurt the eyes—or no: much more, it hurt the brain.
“You see them at an angle,” Klein had told me years ago, his slit-eyes peering from a puffy, bloated face. I was the new boy, and I’d sat with him, wondering what everybody saw in this disheveled, grandstanding old drunk. I’d soon found out—though not quite then. “Like slicing through an apple. All you see’s the slice. Never the thing itself.” He’d made vague, chopping motions on the tabletop. “See—they’re the thing itself. Anything they’ve been, or will be, it’s all there, inside them, everything at once . . .” He’d fumbled for his cigarettes, surprised to find the packet empty. “Live long enough,” he’d said, “maybe you’ll see it. If you’re lucky . . .”
Yet I saw and didn’t see now, both at once. They towered over me: giants, monsters, possibly, or creatures of unheard-of beauty; I couldn’t tell. I saw them, but my mind failed to interpret. I couldn’t read them; instead, I tried to twist them into something I could understand, something familiar, like seeing faces in the clouds. It was maddening. Perhaps the gods didn’t much change, but my awareness of them flickered in a constant variation. It was easier, I found, not to look at them head-on, to focus on peripheries, their influence upon the world around—the way they pushed against the bulwarks and the thick steel plating, the way they spilled out, threatening to break from their allotted space. They had grown huge here, bigger than I’d ever seen out in the field. Huge, and powerful; you only had to look to know the system holding them was barely adequate—a mousetrap set to hold a lion.
And the air. The air was full of sounds.
Anna shook her head. She squeezed her hands against her ears.
I said, “I hear it, too.”
“Is real?”
“It’s the voices of the gods. They’re talking about us . . .”
I felt them through the floor, through my fingers, through the bones in my skull; that thin, high resonance, the shiver of a violin string, a sudden tremor that would race across the air, making me wince, as if they touched my nerves, not from outside, but directly, on the raw tissue itself. Anna pummeled at her head, turning this way and that. Then she drew the gun.
“Put that away.”
“He is here, I know. I cannot see him—”
“Put it away.”
“No. You, he likes,” she said. “Me, I think not so much.”
“Anna—”
She had fallen back on habit, I suppose, as if she’d walked into an active crime scene, cautious, watchful, ready to fight back.
I said, “Do you know where you are?”
“Of course I know.”
“Really know?”
“Chris. We do not have time. Come—”
“Look around. Look up. Just stop, and look. Can you see them?”
“My ears hurt. My head is hurting. Let us do this job. Do and go, yes?”
“Anna. Can you see them?”
She made a quick, irritable gesture.
“Stand still. Tell me what you see. This place.”
“Huh—it is—I don’t know. Factory. Cathedral. It smells of chemicals and electricity. I do not know. I am not—”
And in that moment, some detail caught her eye, somewhere high up, and she frowned, straining to make sense of what she saw. She took a step back, mumbled in Hungarian. Saw something else . . .
Her mouth went slack. Her eyes grew wide. The gun hung from her fingers, half-forgotten now.
“How long . . . ?”
“Since we arrived. It just takes time to get in tune with them . . .”
They had come clear within my sight. Some aspect of them, anyway; no longer vague, half-hidden shapes but solid, concrete, and alive.
Perhaps she saw what I saw. Or her own slice of the apple, her own angle on divinity. I don’t know. But from the look upon her face, I knew that what she saw was something vast, unthinkable, something she’d never wished to see, nor, having seen, would ever want to see again.
The first god had no human form. The air had thickened at its base, so that it rose up from a fug of mist and shadow, pallid tubers thrusting one out of another and thick, segmented branches curling in a twisted tangle. There was something not quite right about it, something in the angles or perspectives, some fractured logic. Nonetheless, it was impossible to pick out what was wr
ong; only a sense of something out of joint, as if each movement of the eye revealed a whole new vista, somehow incompatible with what I’d seen before; nothing I could point to and say, There!—except the creature seemed too large for the space it occupied, filling it the way a plant fills up a bell jar, pushing at its confines, straining the dimensions of its cage. From time to time it flexed, trembled, and the air around me quivered in response. I watched a bead of ichor, pale and glistening, roll along a limb and drop without a sound into the shadows far below. Steel bonds wove through its mass. On the nearer side, a concrete bolster had been split apart by coiling stems, a scree of debris spread across the House floor.
Was it aware? Did it sense me down there, watching? I thought so, at least enough to make me hush my voice and walk on tiptoe, too conscious of my own fragility to risk catching its attention.
The second god was certainly aware. Was all awareness, so it seemed to me. Felt, rather than seen, it slipped into my head even before I noticed it—a sly, persistent, gnawing little voice, wanting me to open up, to share with it, to let it know my fears, my dreams: my darkest and most shameful secrets. Promising me, too. Promising to take away the burden: memory, volition, everything, till there was nothing left. No pain, no misery. No ache of existence. Take it all, leave nothing, nothing . . . And I wanted that. In some part of my psyche, deep, deep down . . . I did. I felt the thing, just snuffling at the edges of my thoughts, a dog looking for crumbs. And then I blocked it. Shut it out. Hooked my arm in Anna’s, held her close, and hurried her away.
We moved now through a sea of sounds, of insect chirrups, voices at the wrong speed; data streams, zipping through the air.
“They know we’re here,” I said.
“From whom nothing is hid . . .”
The third god slumped back in a corner, head at an unlikely angle, long tongue lolling; small eyes shifting over us. A coarse red hair, like pig bristles, covered its body, and it stank of animals, of sweat and dung and uncured hide. It was thirty feet at least from head to foot. Its great face lifted, the twitching snout and bulging brow, and I could see the pores that opened in its cheeks—and yet already it was twisting out of shape, folding like a picture crumpled from a magazine, melting, draining into its surrounds . . .
