Thy Fearful Symmetry

by Richard Wright

  He began, keeping his voice low, measured, and insistent. “What are those things?”

  Melissa considered for a moment, obviously deciding that the question was one she could answer without compromising herself. “Shadows. Essences. They're minor demons that have never left Hell before. Mindless, barely formed creatures. In Hell, they have substance, but not here. Not yet. They make do with shaping the darkness into something they can wear. They don't think much for themselves.”

  Malachi's eyes narrowed. None of his research had hinted at such things, which meant that Melissa was very well informed indeed. “The first was left to watch, then,” he ventured. “The others gave chase once we were identified. Why was it waiting? Is it guarding her trail, trying to pick us off before we reach her? Are they her bodyguards?”

  “I don't think so.” There was something in the way her breath caught that made him suspicious. That had been a part truth. There was more to learn, and he would come back to it.

  “Do they know about me?”

  “I don't know. I'm not with them, Mr Jones.” Malachi almost broke his rhythm to tell her to stop calling him that, to call him Malachi instead, but caught himself. Something about her made the tiny sliver that was left of his humanity want to embrace her presence. He found the flicker within him that responded to her, and crushed it.

  “How do you…” Malachi stopped. Melissa was no longer staring at the knife in his hand, or trying to meet his gaze. Instead, her eyes had snapped up to look over his shoulder, towards the window.

  Reflex took him to his feet and twirled him around, knife out as his coat flapped behind him.

  There was nothing there. Outside, it had begun to snow, heavy, fat flakes drifting to the balcony and lying there. When her attention was so suddenly caught, he had feared the worst, that one of the creatures had got in despite his preparations, and...

  His eyes went wide as a drop of fire, like a splash of burning petroleum, dropped from above and landed on the balcony. It doused instantly.

  Another followed, and another, until it was raining fire alongside snow, for as far as he could see.

  Glasgow was lit, in glittering orange. Standing there, watching the firedrops fall softly onto roofs and roads across the city, distantly aware of Melissa standing beside him, Malachi had his first moment of absolute acceptance that the world was ending.

  They watched, as the long night of fire and ice began.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Minna Gilroy sat up in bed and shook her head, giving herself an exaggerated rub of the eyes as though to tell herself that she really was tired, but really couldn't sleep, and that she had spent the last minute and a half trying really hard to drop off, and who could say fairer than that? The world had become much too interesting to sleep through.

  When her parents brought her to bed, scarcely hiding the fact that they were getting her out of the way so that they could devote more time to staring out of the window, they had closed her curtains so that she wouldn't be scared of what was happening outside.

  Minna wasn't scared.

  Minna was deeply, deeply curious.

  Hopping down from her mattress as quietly as she could, not knowing that her parents were halfway through a bottle of vodka and engrossed in the international spectacle unfolding on television, she shuffled across the bedroom floor, thick carpet tickling between her toes as she went, making her giggle.

  How Mummy and Daddy expected her to sleep when the glow of fire falling in drops past her window turned her Toy Story curtains into a kaleidoscope of orange and shadow, she didn't know.

  Beneath her window was a large wooden toy box, on which she often sat and played. By standing on top of it, she could see out to Byres Road. There were lots of shops down there, and pubs too. At night, people went drinking in the pubs, and she had watched them come out again many times. Daddy said they were drinking fighting juice, that made them dizzy and silly, and sometimes angry or upset. Minna didn't understand why they wanted to do this. Being dizzy was fun, and she enjoyed spinning round and round, but the rest of it? She didn't see the point. When she was grown up, she would do more exciting things, like watching television after eight o'clock, and having the world's biggest collection of dolls, and having a hundred ponies, so she could go riding with all of the people who would be her best friends.

  Minna Gilroy had a firm sense of what was important and what was not.

  Leaning over the toy box, a large, blue one that her Daddy had made so she could keep her room tidy, she hauled herself up. Then she sat, and pushed her head under the curtains.

  Pulling her curls back where they had fallen in front of her eyes, Minna looked out and up. She didn't think it was scary, like Daddy thought. It was the prettiest thing she had ever seen.

  Above her, going as high as the clouds, fire fell gently to the ground like tiny baubles. Mixed in with it, buffeted by the wind, were big, heavy flakes of snow. The scene looked like the best bits of Christmas, descending in tiny flakes. It was even better than when she had seen the angel.

  Minna clasped a tiny hand to her mouth, as though she could take the thought back. She wasn't supposed to talk about the angel, or even think about it. The first time she had told her parents about it, when she woke the next day, they had smiled, and asked her questions, and told her she was sweet. When she kept talking about it, they had first gone quiet, and then sat her down for a talk. They said that she should stop telling people about the angel now, and not think about it any more. It worried them.

  Minna didn't like to make them worried, so she tried her best not to think about the angel, but it was difficult, because she knew that not many people got to see one, and that made her special. Minna liked to be special.

  Standing there at the window, lit by falling fire, she felt very special indeed, and diligently ignored the noise from street level for long enough to enjoy it.

  Eventually though, she had to look down. All through the week, and especially at the weekends when she didn't have to go to school, the street was noisy at night because of the pubs. Daddy blamed the students, and though she didn't know what he meant, she always nodded thoughtfully when he said this. Tonight, it was worse. Far beneath her window, lots of people were running back and forth across the road, big crowds of them. Minna knew that you had to be careful on roads, because of cars, but from what she could see the few cars out tonight had to go very slowly because of all the people. At least nobody was on fire. Minna had worried that some people might be, but the firedrops didn't seem to be very hot. Some people swatted themselves when a drop hit them, but they didn't look hurt. Minna frowned. She had always been told that fire was very dangerous, and wondered now whether that was true.

  From her third floor vantage point, she watched a litter bin on the street start to smoke, the dry layers of rubbish perfect tinder for a blaze, and was reassured. She hadn't been lied to, and the world made sense again.

  Across the road, some men were fighting. Some of them wore blue T-shirts, and others wore green. She knew that this had something to do with football. The men didn't like each other at all, and were trying very hard to hurt each other.

  Further along the street, two women wandered though the crowd hand in hand, singing loudly about Jesus and Heaven. Minna knew that Jesus was something to do with angels, and Heaven was where they all lived. She thought that Heaven was probably like Edinburgh, but to the north instead of the east. She was good at directions, and liked maps, but she had never seen Heaven on one. She would be going there one day, she knew, because her Granny had gone there last year, and they always visited Granny in the summer.

  The crowd milled in bafflement, and anger, and happiness, and fear. Daddy was probably right. If she was down there on her own, she probably would find it a little bit frightening.

  Minna's attention was drawn to the pavement immediately below her window, three floors down. A man stood there, unworried by the commotion around him, an island of calm in the chaos. He wore a
t-shirt and jeans, and his hair was a mess because there was something sticky and dark in it, which dribbled down his face. It didn't seem to bother him though. From the look in his eyes as he beamed up at her, he was very happy indeed.

  Minna raised her arm and waved, and the man waved back.

  Then he stepped toward the street door to the flats where she lived, vanishing from her sight.

  Ambrose stood in the churchyard, shrouded by night. Arms outstretched, face upturned, he let the puffs of flame falling between the bare branches of the overhanging trees land on his cheeks, where they died instantly away. Containing little heat, they were a danger only to the driest, most flammable materials. Even humans would feel only a faint patter of warmth as they were rained upon.

  Nevertheless, the spectacle of it, thousands of guttering lights saturating the night for as far as he could see, filled him with a burning joy. During his long years on the mortal plane he had seen wonders by the hundred, but this was of a different scale, such as could only be devised by Heaven. In a strange, sad way, it reminded him of home.

  Ambrose turned his eyes to the curtained window on the first floor of the church annexe, behind which Pandora still lay motionless, and some of his exaltation eked away. What would it be like to have her in his arms right now, the two of them watching the skies together?

  His good mood vanishing fast, Ambrose turned for the back door of the church, through which he had slipped when the firefall first came to his attention. The desperate influx of Glaswegians with a newfound faith in God had ceased some time ago, which was a good thing. The nave of St Cottier's was reaching capacity. Fortunately, the occasional bout of hysteria or over zealous prayer aside, the freshly devout were being markedly quiet in their devotions. With so much time to make up, he supposed, they wanted to make the most of their brief conversion before the world ended.

  Which it was doing at a remarkable speed. The nature of events still made little sense to Ambrose. Everything had been laid out for the Apocalypse and Armageddon long ago. While the Bible might have fudged the detail in vague metaphor, the precise sequence of proposed events was long established among the key players. Not only was this the wrong time, but it was too fast, and nothing was as arranged. This was a movie Armageddon, big and flashy, designed to fit into a two hour attention span. Ambrose was deeply worried. The timing of this distorted, rushed affair was unlikely to be a coincidence. An angel had never allied with one of the Fallen. Ever. It was an act written as crime into the fabric of reality. To not only break that rule, but do it in love and lust, fractured everything.

  Three weeks after they had escaped capture, God was improvising the end of the world with all the care and finesse of a dying comedian trying to reach the end of his slot. Was what they had done really so bad that it warranted the immediate cessation of the Great Experiment?

  Ambrose sighed, the better to suppress the shudder of frustration that was crawling up his spine. They only wanted to be left alone. Humans, those weak, fleshy mammals full of petty sin and failings, were allowed to fall in love. Why not Ambrose and Pandora?

  Trapped on holy ground, with his only allies mortals more clueless than he, there was no way to find out.

  Splashing desolately through the slush building on the ground, Ambrose made for the back door. What was keeping Calum? He was supposed to have picked up the box that afternoon. Were the streets so busy that he couldn't get to the church? Ambrose was feeling increasingly uneasy about the delay. What if Metatron had spotted something in Calum's mind that hadn't made sense until later? Ambrose didn't think it likely. Metatron didn't have much imagination.

  A greater fear was that his own masters, Leviathan in particular, might have waylaid Calum. If that was the case, it was all over. Demons of the higher orders had a variety of provocative methods for extracting information. To his surprise, he realised he was worried about the man, not solely because he carried salvation with him, but because he didn't want any harm to come to him.

  Ambrose stepped inside, pulling the heavy door closed behind him and shooting the bolts home. The cold brickwork of the passage greeted him. So sterile. Why did God so often demand that worship be a freezing, thankless thing? Was it any wonder that those with questing minds, mortal and celestial, wondered what else there might be?

  Such was sin. By its nature, those committing it were the least likely to understand why it was so, and the most forgiving of their own errors.

  Ambrose smiled ruefully as he made his way to the nave. It was time to put in an appearance, and allay suspicion. If he could not reassure himself, perhaps he could offer false hope to others.

  Calum pushed between two drunken students spitting science versus theology at each other, taking an elbow in the ribs as he did so.

  “What's the fucking hurry, man?” He didn't pause long enough to get into his first fight since University. Already he was shoving past a drunken group of scarcely dressed women, who had decided to face the end of the world with midriffs and legs on full display, standing in the middle of the street as lukewarm fire spattered their fake-tanned flesh.

  Calum's mind was back in the flat with the dying woman, the light fleeing her eyes as he watched. One moment she was staring up at him, a plea on her lips, and the very next, she was dead. Behind those fixed orbs there had been humanity, and warmth, and a living soul. Then it had gone somewhere, as though sucked out of a hole at the back of her head.

  While he had tried to give her comfort, not even knowing her name, Calum had found himself at a loss. What could he tell her? When he had been unable to get through to the emergency services, pacing next to the coffee table in fear and frustration, it had been all he could do to refrain from giving her the Last Rites, to stop himself asking if she would have him hear her confession.

  Calum knelt beside her for half an hour, stroking her hair and murmuring, wondering if she was destined for Heaven or Hell and frightened for her either way. Even though he could not take the role of priest, he still felt responsible. Nobody should die alone.

  At the end, finally, as he had seen before in hospitals across Glasgow, sense flooded through her again. The terror and shame that filled her face broke his heart.

  “I told him,” she gasped, cold blood spraying from her lips to dot his face. “I told him where she lived!”

  “Please,” he said as he tried to stop her from jerking off the couch. “Calm down. Tell me what you told him.” Years in the priesthood, talking to the dying and distraught, had honed the gentle command in his voice, and she relaxed beneath his hands.

  “I told him where the girl lived... the picture...”

  Calum saw where she was pointing, and picked the discarded picture off the floor. It was in a child's hand, and he recognised the subject immediately. “It's okay,” he told the woman, though goose bumps raised across the back of his neck. “I've stopped him. He won't be hurting anybody now.” While he kept his eyes fixed on hers, his smile kind, his mind raced. The man next door had wanted Ambrose. Somehow, the girl who drew the picture had seen something, might even know where Ambrose was. The man had intended to acquire that information, and Calum knew that there were few limits to how he was prepared to get it. The thought was sickening.

  “Check... please, check...”

  Calum backed out of the room calmly, keeping his eyes on her, not wanting her to pass away without a friend beside her. Beneath all the blood, the cuts and slashes, she was pretty. He had noticed the pile of pictures, drawn by different children, sitting on the table. A teacher?

  How much pain had she taken before she had given the girl's address? How could she be ashamed, when the carving in her flesh so vividly told the story of what she had suffered?

  Calum's hatred of God had never been so strong. Ultimately, all blame lay at His door.

  Once at the corridor, he ran into the flat next door. That was where fear took the strength from his limbs.

  The man who had attacked him, last seen face down on Ambrose's be
droom floor, was gone.

  Feeling the tremble in his limbs, Calum darted back to the other flat, dropping to his knees beside the woman, too aware of how shallow his breathing was.

  “Where? Where did he go?”

  The trembling woman told him an address, and the name of a little girl. Then she died. Were it not for the fact that she was drenched in her own blood, her passing might almost have been peaceful.

  Calum ignored the honking of the cars, the spontaneous street parties and brawls that were erupting all around him, and pushed on. Despite the fire that filled the air around him, the accompanying snow affected him the most. Deep inside him, there was a matching sheet of frozen failure that refused to thaw. He had failed as a priest, he had failed as a shepherd, and now, by not swinging a marble ashtray hard enough, he was horribly scared that he had failed a little girl who he had never met.

  Most of the street level buildings were shop fronts and pubs. Secure doorways to flats above divided them, shuttered tight against the world. Tonight, those not abandoning themselves to drink and madness had locked themselves away, watching news coverage and false reassurances. Calum, struggling for breath and strength, wished his life were so simple. Everything in his body hurt, from the cuts on his face, through the wet, throbbing lump on his temple where the golf club had caught him, to the searing agony in his hand. He didn't know how much more he had to give.

  All he knew was that however much it was, it came from within, and he owed it to no power but his own.

  When he found the street entrance to Minna Gilroy's flat, it had been jimmied open, and he burst through without pausing. Terrified, he hit the stairs running.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN