As he tried to stand, a tiny, ridiculous splash of flesh rising to face a thing both wondrous and immense, his apprehension was fuelled by the knowledge that it had appeared moments after his failure to confess his sin to his Lord. Shadows flared and died in staccato patterns between the pews, and the light caught the figures in the stained glass windows in peculiar, disturbing ways, highlighting eyes that studied him with both pity and fury. Finding his feet, Calum acknowledged what he thought he had noticed when he first stared at the firestorm before him. At the centre, in the flames, was a molten, humanoid form.
Whether angel or demon, he did not know. Whether, given his crime, one would be preferable to the other, he could not say.
“Kneel.” There was mad fury in the voice, an inferno roar with drumfire beating through it like radio static, that drove Calum back to his knees. Addressed directly by that voice, Calum was no longer able to look at the shape in the flames, had no strength to lift his head at all. Instead, he fixed his wide eyes on the grimy floor as his heart hammered ice through his veins.
Everything was lost. When the being before him asked, he would hold nothing back.
“Sinner.” The voice sent tremors through the world that Calum could feel through the floor. Surely somebody would hear? The doors of the church would open any moment, and the noble public would... what? Save him? Die trying? Or would they stand, and gawp, and tell their grandchildren years later of the strangest thing they ever saw? Tears dripped to the floor, sizzling to nothing in the rising heat. “There are questions, sinner. There are truths we need hear. You have knowledge for us.” Calum nodded, unable to stop himself. “Seek not to lie to us, sinner.” With a huge effort Calum raised his head, as flames whooshed out from the pillar to engulf him. Crouching into a ball as fire washed over his flesh, Calum drew in a breath to scream, and then realised he was unharmed. Although he felt the heat, the fires did not burn. “Incentive, sinner. Speak truth, and be unharmed. Speak deceit, and feel the pain you have earned.”
Calum uncurled himself carefully as flames roared around him, a torrid, blazing cocoon of light and colour that only added to his compulsion to speak the truth. A clinical part of him observed that he was being controlled, though the knowledge gave him no power to prevent it happening. Confessions were already lining up to flee his lips, but he did not know how to release the words. Whatever compulsion bound him to tell the truth also prevented him from speaking without permission. The need to rid himself of the aching guilt, whatever the cost, made him feel as though the tide of secret knowledge he could tell would explode, bursting his mortal shell to leave pieces of him frying brutally in the unnatural flames.
“Sinner, do you know why I am here?”
Calum nodded, his head a vast weight on his straining neck. “I do,” he heard himself say, and the words were lost and tiny in the maelstrom around him.
“Sinner, do you know the demon Ambrose?”
Again, Calum nodded. “I do.”
“Sinner,” Calum knew this was going to be the question that damned them all. “Sinner, has he been here?”
“Yes.” Calum's throat was dry, and he hacked his response out. Except, suddenly there was an opportunity. With no new question yet asked, he could continue. Coughing, he fought to do so before the creature delved deeper. “Three weeks ago. I absolved him of sin.” Calum's instinct was to pray that the precision of his answer would brook no further interrogation on the matter. Given the circumstances, it was an instinct he gagged back. Instead, he stared fixedly at the floor, dappled insanely from the firestorm and the whiplash lightning, and said no more.
Long moments passed, and the pressure in Calum’s head spread down to his shoulders, his back, until he was a dead weight from the waist up, his face pressing hard on the hot wood of the dais. Splinters slid into the soft meat of his cheek, but the pain was welcome, a touch of the real world invading this surreal interrogation.
“You speak truth,” came the voice, and the fires retreated, sucked back into the torrent surrounding that molten figure. Strength flooded back into Calum's body, and he heaved himself off the floor with a gasp. If there was to be a reckoning, and punishment, he wanted to be standing when he received it.
Calum squared his shoulders, wiped a hand across his eyes, braced himself for fire and death.
Nothing happened.
Frustration made him bold and he stepped toward the storm, raising his arm against the heat. “Come on then,” he screamed into the storm. “Do it! Punish me! I've sinned against God - you know I have!” Unable to forgive himself, pictures of bodies in a nightclub piling high in his mind, he wanted his punishment taken out of his hands, delivered direct from his God. Calum wanted biblical torments. He wanted to pay a personal price.
Within the flames, behind the rushing, crackling spiral of air, Calum heard faint laughter. “Sinner, you merit no mere humbling, no flash of pain or glimpse of power. There is no rush for your punishment.”
Calum quailed. “What do you mean?”
“Your transgression is beyond mortal agony. No human has so swiftly plunged from piety to depravity as have you. No crime against God has matched yours since the War in Heaven and the Falling of the Stars. Your punishment will come when you pass from this plane. Your castigation will be eternal, your agony unlike any Hell has delivered upon a single soul in the history of man. Know, during what pitiful existence passes for the rest of your life, that what awaits you has not yet been imagined by those who will inflict it. Live in fear, sinner.”
The flames whooshed in on themselves, until they were a vivid thread of light running from floor to ceiling. Then they were gone.
Calum blinked as the natural gloom of the Church crashed over him, shivers rippling him at the abrupt absence of heat. The change was a slap to his sense of balance, and he staggered to keep his feet.
Finally, he gave up, letting his legs go from under him and collapsing to his backside. The only signs of his visitation were the shattered, charred remains of the pulpit scattered around him, and the blood on his face and hands from splinters and flying debris.
I can convince myself it was a dream, Calum thought. I can pretend nothing happened, and I have nothing to fear beyond death. I am a good man, and serve my Lord faithfully.
No longer caring whether anybody came in to see him, he wrapped his arms tight around his chest and began to cry.
An hour passed by, and Calum might have said it felt like eternity if that wasn't too close to what the future held for him. The young priest wasted no time questioning the veracity of his experience, not after all he had seen and done. That left him only cold, sharp acceptance, and bleak misery. In one terrifying encounter, he had moved from being God's tool on this earth, to becoming the worst of His enemies, and his understanding of that was crushing him.
All that stopped him from taking his own life was knowing that the act would draw his fate closer. Calum wiped his eyes and stood. Only a little unsteady, he made for the door to the left side of the dais. It led through to a small joining corridor linking the main church to the annexe that jutted at right angles to the main building and functioned as a community hall. In the middle of the corridor a set of iron stairs led to the first floor, and it was these that Calum slowly climbed.
There was much that he did not understand. Who was the being who had appeared before him, and did it come from Heaven or Hell? From the look of it, he would have said Hell in an instant. Yet Ambrose had taken only a few steps inside the building before suffering agonies from being on sanctified ground. Could that thing really have been an emissary of Heaven? If so, how had Calum been able to mislead it so easily? Why had it not raped his mind, spilling his secrets on the floor like trinkets and selecting what it wanted?
At the top of the stairs was a long corridor running the length of the annexe below, with facing doors halfway down. One side contained his office, where he performed the daily tasks that came with administering a city parish in the modern age. It was t
he door opposite that Calum made for, standing outside and examining the dirt-filled grain of the wood in minute detail.
Raising a hand, which he was proud to see shake only a little, he knocked on the door. There followed the gentle pad of footsteps, and the scrape of a metal bolt sliding back.
Inside were the answers he needed, if he was going to survive his involvement in a world full of demons and angels. Survival was suddenly very important to him, a long and happy life, the better to take into whatever hell was being invented for him. The avatar that interrogated him downstairs had been powerful beyond his imagining, able to appear and disappear at will, in command of the flames and storms that whirled around it. Ambrose had once told him that most angels and demons could sense when others of their kind were near.
The door opened a fraction, and Ambrose glanced cautiously through the gap. The demon looked him up and down. “Ah,” he said, one elegant eyebrow arching upwards. “We've had a visitor.”
Calum nodded, and the question burned brightly in him. How had the creature not known that Ambrose and Pandora, the two beings it sought, were hiding in the very building where it had manifested?
CHAPTER FIVE
Winter deadened the grounds of the St Dymphna Residential Care Home, but this matched Malachi's mood so well that he didn't mind. In a couple of months, the plants would put on a blossoming show of colour and scent, erupting into life as spring thrust the winter back. Malachi's shoulders bowed at the thought, the weight of his own endless personal winter moving from his mind to his muscles.
Trooping up the long driveway, which wound carefully around the skeletal bushes and trees, he tried his best to fluff up his small bouquet of flowers. It wasn't much, just a posy to splash pink life into Stacey's room, but even that was lacking in lustre. It didn't really matter that it was limp and dying. She probably wouldn't know it was there. Malachi hoped so, even while he loathed himself for that hope. Stacey could be difficult when she was lucid, and he wanted what could be his last memory of her to be peaceful. Reaching the top of the driveway, Malachi climbed the shallow stone steps up to the front of the old Georgian manor house.
A long, high-ceilinged corridor greeted him inside, dotted with heavy oaken doors, opulently carpeted in warm rust colours. Rich teak handrails ran the length of the corridor, complementing the doors, while the carefully spaced chandeliers were delicately ornate. Stacey's care was not cheap, but he had determined that she would have the best. It had cost him his house, his savings, his cars, his investments. Nothing at all, really. Stacey's care was paid up for the next fifteen years. Malachi had been assured, in the strongest possible terms, that her mind was not going to heal, that his future had died in one savage, crazed assault. These days he spent his nights in a rented bed-sit in the Wallsend area of the city. He had few needs, and did not miss his money. Some nights, lying on a filthy mattress, staring fixedly at the ceiling, he wondered whether he would soon lose the need to eat, so sustaining was his search for vengeance.
“Mr Jones, how are you?” The nurse at reception, Melissa, knew him well, though when they first met two years ago he had been very different. The Malachi Jones she had greeted then had been a skinny, emotional wreck, a walking wound with tears constantly threatening to overflow from eyes that refused to meet her gaze. As the months passed, she had watched his hair become steadily longer, his mass slowly increase, and his emotional wounds... withdraw. Whether she could still sense them, lurking beneath his armour, he didn't know. It was a surprise to find that he cared. She was the only member of staff he saw regularly, and the only person who had met the old Malachi who had not since been excised from his life. His parents and brother had not heard from him in eighteen months, and he had not contacted Stacey's family since the accident. On the rare occasions when one of them was visiting when he arrived, he left without disturbing them and came back again later. He bore none of them ill will, but did not wish them to see how he had changed. Lying had never suited Malachi's character - they used to joke that he was Newcastle's only honest estate agent - and there were no truths he could tell about what he was doing that would be believed.
“Melissa,” he nodded, and a smile ghosted over his lips. “How is she?”
Melissa smiled, but her fractional hesitation forewarned him of the answer. Pushing back a bang of black curly hair that had escaped from her ponytail, she sighed. “She had a bad night, Mr Jones. The night staff had to strap her down. Right now she's sleeping off the extra sedatives.” The first time he had heard that, Malachi had been incensed, punching walls and ready to find a lawyer. Before he made too big a fool of himself, he had actually witnessed one of her episodes. Screaming, thrashing, scratching, swearing, lashing out at anybody nearby - Malachi himself had taken home a black eye and a busted lip from that visit. She was a danger to herself and those around her. Over the last two years the episodes had proven a regular occurrence, as much a part of her weekly routine as sleeping and eating.
At least Malachi would get his wish. Doped up on sedatives, Stacey was hardly going to be much trouble today. Guilt at his own relief flushed his eyes. Melissa misinterpreted it. “I'm sorry Mr Jones. There's nothing else we can do when she gets like that.”
Malachi nodded again. “I know. And Melissa,” he was suddenly tired of being Mr Jones. “Call me Malachi, okay?”
Melissa smiled, genuinely this time, energy flooding beneath her skin. Malachi realised how attractive this slender, vibrant girl was. At the same time as he felt a stirring of arousal, for perhaps the first time since losing Stacey, self-disgust crushed it beneath spiked soles. How could he have such thoughts in the same building where Stacey suffered daily?
Melissa had turned before the shadow fell over his face. With a slight bounce in her step, she led him along the corridor. “I really shouldn't, Mr... I mean, Malachi. Supposed to keep things as professional as possible, you know?”
The two of them walked in silence, hers companionable, his awkward and introspective. Though he had been here many times, and had little need for a chaperone, it was a standard courtesy that visitors were escorted at all times. It would be nice to think that this was simple courtesy, but Malachi suspected it was more to do with protecting the patients. Long-term care at such an establishment was expensive, and after several months or years even the most loving family member might feel the need to take matters into their own hands. None of the patients here were going to recover, and even if the financial burden could be shouldered, the emotional one was crushing. In his darkest moments, when despair and sorrow were overwhelming, Malachi had found himself thinking the unconscionable: why won't she just die?
Halfway down the corridor a stairwell presented itself on the right, with an elevator on the left. Melissa took the stairs, as Stacey's room was only on the first floor. Halfway up, they met Mrs Ryland coming down, her wispy white hair floating around her wizened face like fine-spun candy floss.
“Mr Jones.” She spoke clearly, as always, with the air of somebody used to deference.
“Mrs Ryland.”
“Did you get them yet?”
“Not yet.”
“Well, keep trying dear. They can be tricksy, but you'll get them. I know you can do it.” With that, she continued, taking the steps carefully, her skinny seventy-year old frame fragile but poised.
Melissa smiled at him, saying nothing. The conversation was the same as ever. Who "they" were had never been made clear, and he knew that the nurse thought she was broadcasting from deep inside her own dementia-ridden world. Malachi wondered whether that was the case. Sometimes he thought he knew who she meant. The ones who had struck down his wife in body and soul. One day soon, he would be able to tell her that, yes, he had got them. What would her response be then?
For Malachi, of late, an even greater concern was what, after he found a way to inflict pain and ultimately death on a being who was immortal, came after? The fact that he couldn't picture life without his quest to sustain him left deep, disturbe
d pools of doubt within him.
What would there be to live for, when his vengeance was complete?
Stacey was sleeping when Malachi entered her small room, and did not wake when he brushed his lips against her cheek. She was lying on her side, facing the window that looked over the gardens and the driveway, and it was almost possible to pretend that nothing had happened to her.
Melissa walked quietly around the bed, grabbing the empty water jug on the bedside table and the accompanying plastic beaker. The only glass in this room was the television screen inset in the wall, and that had a tough, shatterproof plastic cover. Even the furniture, comfortable though it was, had been securely attached to the floor. Stacey wore no restraints now, as she would be too groggy to cause any trouble when the sedatives wore off. Usually, after an episode like the previous night's, she woke content and happy. Often, she would spend the day staring out of the window, saying nothing, hardly moving. Though it was impossible to be sure, Malachi sensed that these moments were among her happiest, when her mind was empty of everything but the view.
Having collected the jug, Melissa made for the door, taking the flowers from him in passing. “I'll be back when I've found a vase.” Malachi grunted as he moved past the bed, to the window. That she should not be leaving him alone at all went unmentioned.
The view was good, and he wondered why he had never appreciated that before. These days he noticed much that he had missed during his two years of training and searching. Perhaps it meant the end was near, and the quest would claim his life. Could that be why these moments of beauty kept leaping out at him?
Should he be frightened that he didn't care?
Closing his eyes, he imagined that Stacey was simply asleep in bed behind him, that this room was theirs, that he would leave for work any moment now, kissing her softly on the way out so as not to wake her. In this moment of fantasy, Stacey's face was soft, untouched.
Thy Fearful Symmetry Page 4
