The Prison of the Angels

by Janine Ashbless

  “Well, I am a bit worried how it will all end,” I said in a small voice, “but at least I’m spending it with the man I love.” And for a moment he smiled wonderingly and I smiled back, the weight of dread lifting.

  It hurt when we let each other go. We walked on, keeping close.

  “Are we going into the Square?” I asked. The agitated crowd was thickening, and I didn’t like that. Crowds of frightened people are dangerous.

  “No. Going to slip in around the side. Come on, let’s cross here.” He led me to the right, away from the beckoning white dome of St. Peter’s Basilica, pushing against the flow now. We walked through streets where every chapel door stood open, thronged to the pavement, and every television shop and bar had a crowd of agitated viewers staring at the screens. Squabbles were breaking out. Motorists, stranded in the gridlock, stood and shouted at each other. A small public drinking fountain, one of the many that dotted Rome’s streets, had attracted a cluster of appalled onlookers and someone who was waving a Bible and preaching in loud Italian, and I saw that the gush of water was bright crimson.

  This is it, I thought queasily. The End Times.

  The Vatican Museum was behind and to the side of St. Peter’s, but we didn’t approach the gates. Instead Egan stopped across the road, between two shop fronts. “Back door,” he said.

  It didn’t look like anything other than an ordinary blank door, wedged between two others in an eighteenth century facade. The sort of door that might lead to an upstairs office or set of apartments. It had an electronic keypad but no label or number.

  Egan pulled a canister of spray-paint out of his vest pocket. “This is where I hope they haven’t changed the passcode recently,” he said.

  “I’m pretty lucky with that sort of thing. They haven’t.”

  He raised an eyebrow, then punched the keys; a six-digit number. The door clicked, and he opened it just far enough to insert his arm and spray the aerosol can upward, with precision.

  We entered the hallway on a waft of volatiles and I cast the ruined security camera a single, unfriendly glance. Egan shut the door, sealing us off from the street. The sudden silence was unnerving.

  “Here’s hoping security are all watching the TV too.”

  The interior passage was short, barren, and ended in a set of narrow steel elevator doors. He led the way there, punched the button, and sprayed the camera lens inside the dingy metal interior the moment it opened. Then he dug the toilet roll from the bag and laid it carefully end-on in the door tracks to stop them closing.

  “If we take the lift it’ll definitely set off a warning in security,” he said. “We’re going to have to climb down.”

  “Down?”

  He didn’t answer; his actions spoke for him. Bending to a maintenance hatch set into the scuffed floor, he used a Leatherman-type folding tool to prize the little latch up and unlock it. A square of darkness yawned at our feet. The elevator doors thumped repeatedly at my back, trying to close but thwarted by the roll of tissue.

  Egan pulled out a flashlight and stuck his head into the hatch to have a brief look around. “Right so, there’s a ladder on the wall at the back there. You’ll have to feel with your feet. It’s not that far. Move to the side when you get to the bottom.”

  I didn’t like the thought of going first. “Can I have a light?”

  He shook his head. “Cameras in the bottom corridor.”

  Sliding into that open throat was uncomfortable, and even when I found the rungs with my feet I needed a hand down from Egan, supporting me as I scrabbled with blind fingers to the back wall. The ladder was grease-coated metal and bit into my skin. And despite his reassuring words it seemed to descend a long way into near-total darkness; I eventually worked out it was a good thirty feet, more than enough to cripple me if I fell. The shaft stank of oil and metal.

  The square of light overhead cut out and I felt the vibration of Egan’s feet on the rungs as he descended above me. We were in pitch darkness. I opened my unnatural eyes as wide as I could, but could see nothing. There was no option other than working my way down one step at a time, careful never to trust my grip on the oily rungs until I had arms wedged tight enough to take my weight. And I couldn’t help imagining what would happen if the elevator somehow started to come down on top on me.

  When my feet finally met solid floor I ducked gratefully aside and listened to Egan descending to join me. The stone felt uneven beneath my feet.

  “Okay?” he whispered, finding my arm and giving it a squeeze.

  “Yeah.” I wanted to grab him and touch his face, to reassure myself that there was more to him than just his voice and his hand and the smell of his skin.

  He crouched at my feet; I could hear him rummaging around in his bag. “Right so, there are cameras in this corridor but the lights don’t trigger from this end unless the lift comes down. When we get to the far end there’s another locked door, and the moment that opens the lights will come on in here, so we need to get through it quickly. I’m going to be wearing infra-red goggles so I’ll lead the way. Watch your footing; the floor’s old and very uneven. Okay?”

  “Uhuh.”

  “And can you keep your eyes closed, Milja? I can see the green. I don’t know if it’s enough to show up on camera, but let’s be careful.”

  I shivered. “Alright.”

  “The shaft exit here’s at about shoulder height. I’ll boost you up and follow.”

  With his help and a lot of fumbling, I crawled out onto what felt like flagstones and stood, relieved to be out of the lift shaft. My groping hand felt what seemed to be a wall of old, crumbly bricks—then a stone upright, and a gap beyond. A doorway? The smell up here wasn’t grease and machinery but damp cellar.

  I heard Egan scramble to my side, then he took my hand. “This way.”

  He didn’t lead off through the doorway, to my slight surprise, but past it. I tried to make sense of the echoes and the brush of my fingers, held out to the side. We were in a corridor of brick and stone, which seemed to take a dead straight line. There were many openings off it though, enough of them to make me think of a row of prison cells. But we walked and walked, and I could not imagine a prison corridor that long.

  “Where are we?” I whispered.

  “We’re actually down on the Imperial Roman level. This used to be a road outside the city walls, but the ground’s risen since those days. When they started building St. Peter’s they dealt with hillsides and stuff by slabbing over and backfilling to bring it up to level. So it all went underground.”

  “What are these doors?”

  “Tombs. The Romans buried their dead outside the walls, along the roadside. If you follow the passages far enough, this connects up to St. Peter’s tomb on the other side of the basilica.”

  I pictured the rows of gaping graves on either side of us as we passed. Those people, dead so long ago—ancestors, perhaps, of those we’d seen on the streets above. If I dared open my eyes would I see their ghosts looking out at me? Would they rise up and condemn me, if they knew, for the chaos and terror I’d brought on the world of their children? I knew my own forebears would. They’d dedicated their lives to keeping Azazel enchained. They’d carried that burden and that fear. They’d sacrificed everything, and I’d thrown it into the wind. The thought churned over in my belly, indigestible and threatening to rise up my throat. In this inky blackness there was no distraction and no escape. The silence seemed to hiss with the taunts from priest and archangel that I’d tried so hard to ignore.

  ‘That is why we watched over you, after all.’

  ‘Nearly as pretty as your mother. How exactly did she die?’

  “Egan,” I said in a small voice. “Do you remember what Father Giuseppe said about Vidimus watching my family for Nephilim?”

  His step slowed. “Yes.”

  Father Giuseppe hadn’t just meant the danger of me bearing Azazel’s children. “Did they think I might be one?”

  He sighed—not exasperati
on, but as if letting out a breath he’d been holding a long time. “To our right there—there’s a doorway. Duck your head. There’s a big stone at the threshold and then a step—two steps down.” He drew me off the path, under a stone lintel, into a space that made small, enclosed echoes, and then around into a corner. I heard a scuffling, and then suddenly there was light on my eyelids.

  I opened them, blinking, to see Egan holding a lit flashlight, his fingers across the glass to cut down the illumination. A huge pair of black, complex goggles dangled from a strap in his other hand. His face, very close to my own, looked pale and deathly serious.

  From the corners of my eyes I glimpsed ancient brick walls, plastered in parts. A near-featureless cell.

  “You’re not his daughter,” he said gently. “If you’d been one of the Nephilim it would have shown up a long time ago, believe me.”

  I nodded.

  I am not his daughter. But I easily could have been.

  “My mother died when I was nine,” I said, the words furred like dust on my tongue. “I remember her crying for weeks; she wouldn’t talk to us, she wouldn’t let us near her. Then one day she walked out into the snow in a blizzard; my father searched for her and brought her back before she froze, but she developed pneumonia and it killed her.”

  Egan waited.

  “She was four months pregnant, and she was terrified. Scared enough, guilty enough, to try to murder herself and the baby.”

  He sucked his lips in and said nothing.

  “Everything he tried on me…he’ll have done it to her, won’t he? The dreams and… He’d have tried it on with every woman in my family, all the way back to the beginning. Desperately looking for someone who’d fall in love with him and set him free.”

  He nodded. “I’m sorry, Milja.”

  “You never said anything.”

  “To be honest, I assumed you knew.” He looked pained. “It’s sort of obvious, when you think about it.”

  Yes. And maybe I did know.

  I looked at the floor. “I didn’t think about it. I didn’t want to think. I don’t ever think about my mother. I hardly remember her. Papa put all the photos away. We never talked about her after she died.” And now I know why.

  We sent her memory into the wilderness to be forgotten. Both of us. What must Papa have felt? Did he blame her, or Azazel?

  How could he have made himself carry on looking after the demon who’d seduced and killed his wife? It must have torn him up inside, like eating glass. I never knew. He never let me see.

  It must have nearly killed him, realizing that the same thing was about to happen to me too.

  I hurt him more than I ever knew. Oh Papa.

  The fruit of knowledge tasted rotten on my lips.

  And Mama… I threw her out of my Eden and set an angel with a burning sword to make sure she never came back in.

  If Samyaza hadn’t been wrapped around my fear like a snake guarding an egg, I probably wouldn’t have brought myself to recall it, even now.

  Egan tipped to brush my hair with his lips. “If it helps, in all the years that Vidimus has been monitoring your family, there’s been no sign that he ever fathered a child with any of them.”

  “Maybe she was weaker than the others. She was an outsider, from Belgrade.” Maybe that’s why I was weak.

  “I’m afraid I can’t vouch for the unborn child, one way or the other.”

  I rubbed at my dry, itchy eyes.

  “Milja, what do you want to do?” He sounded calm. “I’m going to let you take the lead on this. D’you still want to help him?”

  Are you still on Azazel’s side? I asked myself. Can you still love him?

  I took a deep breath. “It doesn’t matter.” I forced myself to look him in the eye. “We should hurry. We’ve got an Apocalypse to stop.”

  Ten minutes and three ruined cameras later we escaped out of the corridor into the bottom of a service stairwell, where Egan shed his goggles, vest and other equipment, packing them swiftly away into the little sports bag, and donned instead a black clerical cassock and dog-collar. He hung the bag over his left shoulder and tucked the pistol inside the open zip, easily to hand.

  “Come on.”

  Our way through the Vatican Museum seemed familiar from my previous visit; corridors, staircases, courtyards, too many ostentatious artworks I didn’t understand. The crowds were missing from the public galleries though. We passed only a few people, almost all of whom seemed in a hurry and weren’t interested in us. A single middle-aged museum security man hailed us at one doorway, but even with him speaking Italian it was obvious that he was asking anxiously for news, not challenging our passage, and Egan shook his head grimly as he answered.

  We reached the windowed gallery outside Father Giuseppe’s office, the one with all the Classical statues. A reddish gloom washed the still air. There was a lone figure in residence; the wizened old priest we’d met before. He was staring out of the high window at the sky and fingering the cross about his neck.

  Egan strode ahead of me, his footfalls firm but not hurried enough to cause alarm. He had the gun out from under his arm and pointed at the old priest before even I realized what he was doing.

  “Don Giuseppe?” he asked, once recognition and realization had surfaced in the cleric’s eyes. “Dov’è?”

  There was a lot of denial in Italian. I could follow the body language: He’s not here, I don’t know where he is, I can’t do anything to help you.

  I looked out of the window and saw what he’d been staring at; the sky was an inflamed pink, like a sunset arrived hours early, and clotted all over with tiny, dark red clouds. I’d never seen weather like it.

  “Apri la porta.” Egan made an economical gesture with the muzzle at the office door. His demeanor was calm, almost reassuring, but he had the gun. The older man backed away, groping for the key-chain attached to his sash.

  “Pezzo di merda,” he muttered under his breath.

  “Bless you too, father,” said Egan.

  The moment the office door was unlocked and ajar, Egan shoved the old man inside. I held my breath, listening for any noise from within, but there was nothing, and Egan signaled me to follow him.

  The room was as I remembered it; large and almost empty. The big desk where I’d sat for Egan's interrogation had been cleared of even the laptop.

  “Shut the door all but a crack,” Egan told me. “Listen out for anyone coming.”

  We were in a dead-end here, I realized uncomfortably.

  I watched Egan put a hand on one shoulder and propel the old priest to the back wall. He seemed to know exactly where he was going. Twitching one of the huge grey tapestries aside, he bunched it onto a large hook, exposing a painted wooden wall into which was set what looked like the dial of an old-fashioned safe. Egan gave one handle a cursory try. “Aprirlo,” he commanded.

  The priest waved his hands. He couldn’t do it. He didn’t know the combination.

  “Sei sicuro?” asked Egan, stepping back to point the gun at his knee.

  “No!” I yelped, making them both look at me, startled. “You don’t have to do that!”

  Egan’s face was hard and unreadable, but he waited as I hurried over.

  “How many numbers?” I asked. “I can do it, I think.”

  “Four and then a turn to the stop. I’ve watched him.”

  A while back—weeks, months, but it felt like a lifetime—Roshana had asked me if I’d bothered playing the lottery, and warned me off making my preternatural luck too obvious. A four-number safe combination was not much more difficult than the Mega Millions or the Powerball, surely, even if they did have to come in the right order? No, strike that—With some effort, I squashed the urge to calculate the odds.

  “Does it start to the right or the left?”

  He hesitated. “Right. I think.”

  “Okay.” I squatted down in front of the dial and twin brass handles. I was an engineer by training; of course I’d been interested in how
combination safes worked. Who wouldn’t be?

  Egan motioned the old priest to stand in the corner out of the way.

  Four numbers, anywhere between 0 and 130. So chances are, five turns right to the first integer, four left to the second, three right, two left…and one right to the stop.

  I just have to guess which numbers.

  Great.

  Forty-seven. I spun the dial to the right, around and around.

  One.

  Twenty-five.

  Thirteen.

  The dial accepted a final turn right, and stopped. I twisted both handles and they gave, opening the double leaves of what was revealed to be a glass display cabinet. Sloped shelves lined in scarlet velvet met our eyes. LEDs flicked on.

  I caught my breath, the thump of my heart loud now that I was paying it attention.

  “Well done,” Egan breathed.

  “What is this lot?” I asked, frowning at the shelves as Egan slid the glass door aside. Most of them were empty, though labeled in Latin as if exhibits had once been stored there.

  “Relics.” He reached in and grabbed a pair of linked metallic keys from their velvet nest. “Vidimus has been collecting anything that might be a viable weapon for centuries now.”

  I frowned at one of the few items visible; a fragile-looking arrow with a bronze head, whose card read PARIS SAGITTA. “There aren’t very many of them.”

  “Yeah… I’m thinking they’ve been passed out for emergency use.” He sounded grim. “Let’s get out of here.”

  He kept his gun pointed at the old priest as he led the way back across the room. But he never reached the door I should have been guarding. There was a thump, it jumped open, and something flew into the room. There came a vivid flash, and a report so loud that it felt like my head had exploded—for a moment I was blinded, deafened and reeling. Then I blinked, contracted my pupils, and shook the silence from my ears. A great green rage swelled up inside me.

  Egan, who’d been a lot closer to the point of detonation and knocked back by the blast, lay against the desk, one arm over his face, groaning. My natural instinct should have been to rush over and see if he was injured, but that’s not what I did. Samyaza squirmed inside me like a dragon threatening to hatch, and I felt his fire roaring to the tips of my fingers. I stalked to the door, yanked it open and stepped out into the gallery.