Seth sidesteps another hovering light and moves toward the glass. Suspended within is a rose with petals closed and drooping. Its stalk flows serpentine to the base, where a treelike root, thicker than the flower, stretches like a fist striking at the bottom of the vat.
She grimaces. “What is it?”
“I don’t know.” They speak quietly, pitching their voices so the machine, which lumbers close, might not hear. Seth glances at it cautiously. “Take care.”
She nods and squeezes his fingers. The air holds its breath, and its pulse is like an underwater timpani. It waits for them to speak, to determine the direction of the Music, but they force it into stasis, too frightened to pluck the wrong note.
They move to the next vat and observe another plant that seems but a simple vine with leaves sprouting in symmetric patterns. Upon closer inspection, tiny bone-like projections, reminiscent of teeth, sprout from the edges of the leaves.
The air grows thick and warm.
Ayla whispers, “These plants aren’t like anything I’ve ever seen.”
“They look altered in peculiar ways.”
“They do evil things here. I feel it as if it touches me this very moment.” She hugs herself and rubs her arms.
“The Watchers,” he says as if remembering an ancient secret.
“I do not think we belong here. It is wrong for us to be here, to open these doors at all.” She presses her fingertips against the chilled glass, and the plant seems to move in response.
Something about the crossbred organisms draws him, and he cannot turn away. In subsequent vats are a bush with flowers sprouting from its roots, a flower with a pink object resembling a tongue, and another vine with bone-spines and malignant growths like bloody contusions.
Ayla turns. “I don’t want to see any more.”
But Seth is compelled to see more. The Music turns, descending from innocence toward skin-tingling darkness, raising the hairs on his neck and his desire to see more, to give in, to become one with the Music as a dancer’s body becomes the manifestation of musical emotion.
They edge toward the door and Seth’s throat dries despite being filled with saliva. He says, “The machine says we are here for a reason. I wonder what led us from the beach to the Shrine and pushed us down the stairwell.”
“I think it was nothing but our own curiosity,” she says.
“We cannot turn back now.”
“Yes, we can.”
“And go where?”
“Somewhere, anywhere.”
“We are meant to see this.”
“But I hate it. I hate how it makes me feel.”
I should take her far from this place. He forces a smile and feels a quivering in his abdomen. “It’s the Music. It is leading us. It knows who we are and what we want, and it is offering what we need.”
“But what if we’re here by accident, and the darkness I feel is a warning in my heart?”
“I don’t believe in accidents.”
Her eyes search his, and he can see her resolve crumble. She does not speak. She simply grabs his hand and follows him down the corridor.
Desire blooms into itchy satisfaction as they make their way through the endless rows of vats stretching on until they become too small for the eye to register. They return to the Eastern Nexus, find the door of the lion with the tail of a serpent, and enter together, hungry for what might be seen.
The lights flicker on, but the vats that greet them are hideous. Floating in the pinkish liquid are hardly recognizable cadavers, malformed hunks of meat suspended in torturous positions.
Why are they here?
Seth swallows and touches the glass with a shaking finger. The creature’s eyes roll and lock on his. Its lungs pulse in quick, sharp movements. Its mouth is twisted open, locked in place by deformed joints, and the image becomes a blur in his pained eyes.
Ayla’s fingernails dig into his hand, and he shakes his head and wipes his face. Her gaze burns his cheek, and he tries ignoring the same thoughts he knows trouble her.
What torture is this creature enduring? An eternity spent drinking in the pain of such an embryonic existence—what hell could be more terrible?
But the Music! It is beautiful and terrible and growing.
“The Master says it is one of the most beautiful sights.” The machine walks to the vat and inserts its arm into the apparatus. The beast’s eyes bulge as it rushes from the glass and stares at the hand in the apparatus. The water fills with gray smoke like Fog.
“What are you doing?” Seth says.
The murk disappears, as if a current is sucking it away, and the fluid is clean.
Blue water. The vat is empty.
“What is happening?”
“A morsel of Time is stolen from the Waters and suspended in the vat, and inside is woven the fabric of life. It is the Master’s supreme art, performed in true Time-suspension.”
Suspension, Seth thinks. I feel suspended above black water. Such terrible darkness, such brutal addiction. I am burning with fear, and yet cannot plug my desire. I am thirsty, so thirsty … And Ayla?
“Where do the creatures go?” she asks in a trembling voice.
“To the Master.”
“To do what?”
“To serve.”
Seth cannot look away. He cannot stop, and it seems neither can she. It is as if he only watches decisions made by another.
“Let me show you the Master’s greatest creation.”
Seth remembers the picture on the door, the serpent’s tail, barbed and poisonous. He can feel it lurking in the Music, a whipcord striking every measure, subtle yet relentless.
“The Master calls it Nephilim,” the machine says.
It seems at first like a man, but the eyes are silver, the skin is gray, and curling out of its skull are two dirty gray projections, like the horns of a ram.
“What is it?” Ayla asks.
“It is one of you taken and transformed. A soulless half-breed. Before Adam dies, the physical world will see it walk among its cousins. It is the next evolution of what your people call the Jinn, only as applied to humanity instead of animals.”
“But if it is soulless, how then does it live?” Seth says.
“An empty body may be filled. Indeed, the intention of the Master is that the Sons of God might walk about as kings of men. Here, as well as there, I prepare the way for them.”
The machine manipulates the console, but the reaction of the Nephilim is wholly different from the other creature’s. Its lips slide into a skeletal smile, and it grabs its arms and digs. Wisps of red float to the top. The gray Fog comes, now disappears.
“Can you show us the rest of the Shrine?”
“You wish to move on from the Chambers of Science?”
In shaky unison, they say, “We do.”
“Very well, follow me. There are many rooms left before us, and they are greater than these, though none quite so distinct.”
They move on, but the hum of the Chambers continues—adding complexity upon complexity and growing in both beauty and ferocity.
39
The Shrine expands. Seth finds it strange that a building can be alive, let alone move and change, but steps continue to materialize as the machine methodically pushes the stone walls ever deeper.
Where are this puppet’s strings? By what will does it move? Is the Music its life? The Song is strange—strange and powerful.
And yet, in the absence of Time, he recognizes there is something greater still, as if glimpsing a star through the cracks in a moon. What is seen is only a shell hiding the true glory, though for the present it is all they know.
The deeper they walk, the farther through the octaves the Music cascades. The staircase ends and an archway appears, gilded in silver and shining like pearls. Beyond the arch the way widens to a dome, and the machine’s eyes dull reactively. In the great basin revels a pool lapping against the sides of its domain, like a crooked smile undulating in ecstasy.
“This is the bathhouse of the Watchers,” the machine says.
“They bathe?” Ayla asks.
“Not such as humans do.”
Somehow, Seth senses the purpose of the room is not to wash filth, but to rinse cleanliness with unbridled pleasure. The machine wades across the pool. There is no ground on which they can escape, but neither does Seth desire to. He steps toward it with veiled excitement, and as his toes touch the water, existence itself becomes indulgence. Prudence flees and he falls headfirst, gluttonizing the water through his nose, mouth, and skin. He vibrates with the hum of the pool and senses his being ravaged by the rhythms.
The meaning, which sounds at first like a muffled groan, crashes into him.
He kicks in the pool and breaches the surface, grasping for substance with hungry lungs. He feels like a drum, hollowed inside and filled with violent air thrusting against his shell.
Ayla crawls from the pool next to him, and they lie dripping in the archway next to the machine. Her eyes are ringed with darkness, sunken into tired sockets, and he wonders if his look the same. They stand and shake the remnants of the pool away, though, oddly, it seems to remain.
With terrible clarity, he realizes the Song is not what it pretends. It monotonously propounds excitement. It screams to fill the pit with sound. It kills to claim life.
Contradiction. That is its lifeblood.
What if our purpose in coming is not to experience the Song, but to stop it? What if we are appointed to sing a different Song?
She whispers for him to hold her and rub the perversity from her skin, but he feels incapable, and she reaches an arm around his waist instead. The machine turns down a new hallway as the Shrine begins expanding once more, revealing new rooms, hallways, and staircases. They follow it with a different spirit, attempting to shrug the weight planted on their shoulders by the pool.
The Music—or is it so many hammers striking anvils?—dims in the Light of a new awareness.
“It is the heart of the Shrine.” The machine sweeps its arm toward the monstrosity filling their ears with measured noise. “It is the pump of the lifeblood, the percussion in the Music. It is the Metronome.”
“But Time does not exist here,” Seth says.
“The Metronome is a multiplicity, an anomaly lodged between the layers. It is one of the Master’s many masterpieces, and through it we can glimpse the workings of the Song in other Places. Come.”
It ascends a staircase leading over the Metronome. They follow and see from their vantage what can only be described as a bubble set into the Metronome like a great eye, the surface of which is akin to a membrane of oil with iridescent markings shifting constantly.
Seth asks, “What is that bubble?”
“That is the Metronome’s telescope. It reveals the glory of the Song, and though some notes may be only vague images, others are vivid phantasms.”
Seth bends over the rail and peers inside. The telescope seems to expand, and he wonders if he is leaning backward or forward, for it engulfs his vision. In the ever-shifting shadows, he senses arms reaching toward him, fingers straining and sliding around him and pulling until he feels himself removed and fastened to the Metronome’s belts. The movement does not frighten him. It feels natural, as if his soul were meant for such an action.
Visions appear, and some remind him of dreams he might have had while under the influence of Time, which he feels closer to, like part of him has crossed through the Metronome’s eye. But he is incapable of setting both feet in any one Place, and he remains suspended as he views a piece of Time here, a scrap of life there.
He watches people with gray skin heap piles into a foundation. The foundation spreads until there is no escaping its totality, and on it, cruel empires build towers and warriors beat their chests. They march with footsteps in line with the Music, and flames rise and lick the lens.
Now comes Water—a singular element from outside the Music. It fills the foundation until it overflows like a great basin and washes the world clean. As it recedes, there comes more gray-skins who build another foundation, and from it rises a Tower whose peak pricks the stars.
The visions move on relentlessly, but all is the same. There are empires, buildings, technologies, symbols, fires, disasters, wars, and plagues, but Death is all that reveals itself. There is a simplicity, a repetition in the Music, like a measure replayed. The Music is a circle, Seth thinks. It is the circumference of the telescope, a great engine sustained through the whole of Time.
They build to tear down to build to tear down. Contradiction. An opposing statement.
Rebellion.
This is all the telescope shows. The Music rolls on and the Metronome releases him, though it sets its rhythm in his chest, and he is moved to synchronize with it.
“Now you know the beauty ordained—the inevitable thrust of the universe.”
The machine’s voice jars him awake. He blinks and sees his surroundings, including the Shrine, for what it is.
The Music is a mindless machine, an instrument itself.
But played by what? Or by whom?
He thinks of the people. The gray-skins. They choose the paths they walk, but seem to forfeit their will in the end. Do they then become lifeless machines? Hollow Instruments?
“Come now,” the machine says. “There is another chamber I desire to show you, and it is the greatest of all.”
The machine leads them to a vast room that is made up of seemingly endless angles set against each other and that is filled with a singular object—a massive headless body. Instruments of every kind weave in and out of the four limbs and torso, and they play as if the fingers of many masters attend them. Seth and Ayla’s mouths gape at the sight, and the machine motions them closer. More than in the bathhouse, Seth feels the sensual pull of the Music. It is more forceful, more violent, and more beautiful, and they quake in the Song’s enormity.
“This is the Master’s body,” the machine says.
“This? This is the Master? Where is his head?”
“The Master is the head. The violence of the Enemy’s Music separates the head from the body, but the Master’s body plays on.” The machine opens its chest as if peeling back flesh, and the metal separates to reveal gears, belts, and glowing parts reminiscent of organs. “And I, the machine, remain self-existent through the brilliance of the Master. I am the first of his children, my purpose to tend the great Music of the Master and prepare the way for the Sons of God to come in the skin of men.”
It leaves itself exposed and stares at them. It is terrible, but they stare because the glory of the machine, and the pulse of the Music, hypnotizes them.
“The Music exists to defy the Enemy,” the machine continues. “Every note is an expression of this base intention, and every chord, every melody line woven through the Music, is sung by one of the Enemy’s creation.”
“His creation?”
“The Sons of God and of man. Do you not wish to sing the Song? Do you not wish to become an Instrument as magnificent as I?”
Seth cannot deny that he desires it. It is truly great, truly beautiful, though it is terrible to behold, and his desires strain against each other.
But there is something missing, he thinks. Some ruinous ghost in the hollow between notes.
“Why should we sing this Song? Why should we become the Master’s Instruments?” Ayla says.
“Because the Master longs to adopt you, to free you from the Enemy. The Song shall break the Enemy’s chains, if you allow it, and if you become an Instrument of the Music, you may add to it whatever your heart desires.”
“We may sing anything we want?”
“It matters not whether your Song be Power, Pleasure, or Pride. All are one with the Music of the Master.”
Seth teeters on the edge of the Music’s embrace. As he looks, the machine gazes as if seeing his nakedness revealed. The Music hums, and his eyelids lull as he feels himself drawn invariably toward it. He remembers the control of the Cham
bers, the pleasure of the Pool, and the magnificence of the Metronome, and he wants it.
He wants it all.
But in all the sensual beauty moving in seemingly perfect fluidity, a note squawks his mind awake, and he sees the Music and the machine with disgust. The allure redoubles until the room shakes so violently he can hardly see, and he feels himself once more slip under the Song’s command.
Ayla’s fingers slip into his, and he looks at her and sees her mouth moving. Though all sound is drowned in the violence of the Music, he hears the words in his mind.
I love you.
The Music screams, and the silver temptress is revealed for what it is—an Abomination. The smile yellows, the eyes bleed and stink, and all pleasure falls away like rotten fruit.
Seth meets Ayla’s eyes, and they sprint forward, grab the machine by the arms, lift it into the air, and carry it toward the body of the Master. A metal arm swings down into Seth’s abdomen, and he grunts. His knees buckle as they drop the machine and it falls into the swirling machinations of the Instrument. The Music grinds the machine to a twisted, sparking heap, and there is an ear-bursting screech like scraping strings, and a rumble of stones like falling towers.
A hush descends. The machine is in a ruinous heap, but its eyes …
Its eyes remain aimed at Seth.
Seth cradles his abdomen. Ayla’s voice is shrill in his ear. “You’re bleeding?” But the sound is nearly lost in the groaning approach of the Music as it begins anew.
“Merciful Almighty, there’s so much blood. Get up. You have to get up.”
He looks up and his eyes sting with the dust of falling stone. His fingers feel thick, cold, and sticky. Something strains against his arm, and he stands to relieve the pressure. It twists him around and he stumbles, sensing crumbling violence filtered through the darkness overtaking his vision.
Cain: The Story of the First Murder and the Birth of an Unstoppable Evil Page 18
