Thy Fearful Symmetry

by Richard Wright

  Hitting the door to the annexe at a sprint, smashing it open, he saw Bob lying unconscious on the bottom steps. Blood poured from his head, and the accompanying smear on the wall told Ambrose everything he needed to know about the intruder.

  Whoever it was, they were human. No angel would sink to brutality against a human.

  Pausing, ears straining as water dripped from his hair, he heard the conversations in the nave turn into panicked shouting, the running footsteps of the police officers approaching the door, and, very softly, footsteps in the corridor above. They were stealthy, those footfalls. Quieter by far than Ambrose would have guessed a human could be, and his so recent sense of relief vanished again. From a standing start, he took the stairs four at a time, using a hand on the banister to swing himself around the spiral, and then he was on the top floor, turning the corner, seeing the shape of a tall man step into Pandora's room.

  All thoughts of withholding from committing sin vanished as he prepared to rush upon the human, and tear him to pieces where he stood. While the man could be a curious innocent, or even an ill-advised thief, the fact that he had attacked Bob suggested he was here for a reason. Ambrose would not chance that reason being Pandora. He stepped forward.

  And stopped as the man flew backwards out of the doorway, slamming against the wall hard enough to crack plaster, Pandora gripping his arm hard.

  Ambrose froze, too stunned to react as his ears caught up with his eyes, and he heard the scream coming not from the man, but from the peeled, snarling lips of his naked angel.

  Pandora was awake.

  And she was completely insane.

  She shattered the man's arm with a cruel, casual flick of the wrist. The callous intention of that small movement, made by such delicate, beautiful hands, belied the madness in her cry.

  Pandora was torturing him, and his hoarse howl joined hers, a symphony to the destruction of the only thing Ambrose held dear. She lifted her other hand, two fingers pointed forward, and time paused. In that long moment, before she stabbed the man's eyes out, Ambrose felt a horror unlike anything he had ever experienced. Even during the long fall, when he was cast from his home and made the enemy of everything he once loved, he had not felt so appalled and terrified.

  Pandora bared her teeth and jabbed her fingers forward. Bloody jelly splashed back across her pure, white face and breasts. The man's cry, previously hoarse, went up the register until it was a shrill scream. When would his lungs empty, and that scream end?

  Ambrose realised then that the scream he was hearing did not come from the intruder at all. It came from his own throat.

  Pandora turned to face him, even as the two police officers mounted the bottom of the stairs. She paused, made eye contact with him, and broke his heart. Whatever animal her madness had created, there was nothing of his angel left.

  Unfurling her wings, she rushed down the hall, just as the female officer reached the landing below him, breathing hard. Ambrose wanted to give in, to let Pandora do what she wanted with him, but she wouldn't stop there. The church was full of innocents, who he had brought here as a shield against those hunting them. If he let Pandora hurt them, then he would have failed her one final time. While he barely cared what happened to those cowering below, he would not let Pandora further betray the memory of what she had been.

  So when she slammed into him, he resisted, grabbing one of her arms and taking her with him as they toppled over the banister. They fell into open air, one of Pandora's wings clipping the female officer in the face, knocking her down the stairs. Ambrose heard the Inspector call out a name as she toppled past him, and wished he had time to apologise.

  They landed awkwardly in the corridor on the ground floor, neither hurt by so small a drop, but it was Ambrose who broke their fall, and Pandora who found her feet first. Ambrose cursed. He had brought her closer to those he was trying to protect. Grief was fogging his mind.

  Rather than head for the church proper, with its din of human voices squabbling in terror, Pandora reached down for him again. Thinking she was attacking, he tried to roll back, but her hands instead went to his pocket.

  The box. She sensed the box.

  Ambrose tried to snatch it back, too late.

  She had it in her hands, and some part of her remembered what it was for. Ambrose sat up, as she said a word both hideous and wonderful. Upstairs, the Inspector cried out as that word, not meant for human ears, froze his soul.

  A seam of pure light blazed around the edge of the box, dazzling Ambrose as the container fell apart. The seam expanded, until it was a nova without heat, whiting out the corridor until everything faded together. Ambrose couldn't see Pandora anymore, except as the vaguest of shadows.

  She stepped forward, into the light, and was gone.

  Ambrose scrabbled to his feet as the light began to dim. The Inspector looked silently down over the banister, eyes wide with terror.

  “Sorry,” said Ambrose, and then dived into the portal, as he had so many times before.

  When the light downstairs went out, Gemmell thought he had gone blind, and his hands flew to his eyes. In the sudden stillness, his mind played back what he had seen and heard.

  A word that he was thankful his own tongue would never be able to replicate.

  Wings. White, angel wings, streaked with blood, on a beautiful naked woman. They were vast, those wings. They had knocked Summer…

  “Jackie,” he called out, the rasp of his own voice making him jump. Lowering his hands, he realised he had not gone blind after all. Slowly, his eyes adjusted to the natural gloom of the stairwell and corridor. Summer was lying halfway down the stairs, face down, moaning something, and he went to check on her. Feeling shaky, not entirely trusting his own limbs, he took the steps slowly, keeping firm hold of the banister. Certain that Ambrose and the woman, surely Pandora, were taken by the light, he still fought the last threads of logic that told him that they must be downstairs despite the hush, waiting for him.

  By the time he reached Summer, he could see this wasn't the case. She was stirring already, trying to swing her legs round to right herself. “Easy.” Gemmell supported her as she pushed herself round, sat next to her in the gloom.

  “Sir?” She sounded weak.

  “Yes?”

  Instead of answering, she leaned forward, putting her head between her knees. Watery vomit splattered the grey step below, and the acrid smell turned Gemmell's own stomach. Swallowing the urge to follow suit, he put an arm around her. “Say one bloody word about sexual harassment, and you're on your own.”

  Summer laughed, surprising him, then spat. “I hate being sick,” she said.

  “I hate you being sick too.”

  The furrow of her brow told him she was looking for something from him. “She had wings.”

  “Yes, Summer. She had wings.”

  At that, his sergeant burst into tears, and he let her bury her face in his shoulder as she sobbed, holding her tight. He stared at the wall as Jackie Summer emptied her tears onto him.

  Eventually, she stopped, and raised her head. “What do we do now, sir? Are they gone?”

  Not sure how to tell her what had happened while she was out, he decided on simplicity. “Yes, they're gone. There's a body upstairs. I haven't checked it yet.”

  Summer gave a nod, wiping her eyes on her sleeve and visibly composed herself. Gemmell let his arm fall away, feeling the sudden loss of ordinary human contact more than he would ever let on. “I'll have a look, sir.”

  As she walked up the stairs, Gemmell roused himself and went down. The ground floor was empty. Nothing was scorched, which was impossible given the light he had seen. Could anything so blinding be without heat?

  Nobody in the nave had responded to the screams, but the natural soundproofing in a building like this would be excellent. The man at the foot of the stairs, who he had been careful to step over, was still unconscious. Gemmell was the only witness to Ambrose and Pandora's vanishing trick.

  “Ins
pector?” Summer's voice made him glance up without thinking, and he grunted at the pain from his whiplash. “He's alive, sir!”

  If he was alive, then they had something to go on. There was an evidence trail. They hadn't come here only to witness miracles they could never hope to understand.

  They could do something.

  Gemmell again ascended into the darkness, buoyed by a new sense of purpose. Summer was crouched over the body he had seen earlier, a large man with long hair, wearing a leather trench coat. She was trying to move him into a sitting position.

  Kneeling next to her, Gemmell tried to assess the man's condition. Even in the dim light the mess of his face was appalling. The nose had been broken, but the way the blood had stopped pouring down his chin made Gemmell think that this might have happened before they had rushed into the church. What made his gorge rise again were the man's eyes, or lack of them. Black gelatinous fluids dribbled down his cheeks, and his left eye would not close properly for the sad, deflated mess of one eyeball hanging out. The right eye was closed over, and Gemmell assumed that the eyeball, destroyed as it must be, was still in the socket. Aside from that, the man's arm was broken. He was muttering, vowels and consonants that almost strung together as words, but not quite.

  Straightening up, Gemmell stepped into the room behind him, through the smooth-edged hole in the wall where a door had been knocked out, and saw the bed against the wall. He rubbed his eyes to make sure he was seeing properly, convinced that the blinding light must have damaged them more than he thought.

  No. He could see his own hands fine. Somehow though, he couldn't quite focus on the bed, as though all its edges had vanished. Looking back at the hole he had stepped through, he saw the same thing. The hole wasn't smooth at all. He just couldn't focus on its edges.

  Gemmell didn't like that one bit.

  “Can he be moved,” he asked Summer, wondering at the same time where he was going to go with the streets full of fire and walking dead.

  “I don't know sir. This is a bit beyond mandatory first aid training.”

  Gemmell gave her a quick smile, glad that she was in control of herself again, and stepped over to the window. The curtains, which he had thought were ragged and moth-eaten at the edges, showed the same melt as the rest of the room. A small trickle of panic crept through him.

  Opening the curtains, hoping to see whether the streets had cleared, Gemmell instead stood back, glad that his bladder was empty.

  In the ten minutes since they had run into the church, a thick, icy fog had surrounded the building. Mad, twisted, shadows milled within the vapour, in vast, silent ranks.

  “Oh hell,” he said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Madness greeted Ambrose as he stepped through the portal. The fight to keep his body and thoughts together, in a place where only force of will allowed him to survive, was almost enough to make him lose the trail. Pandora could be tracked, if he focussed and was quick.

  Around him, essences bubbled and rolled over one another, those souls judged fit for neither Heaven nor Hell, but consigned to the nothingwhere of Limbo. It wasn't a place. It was the very opposite, a shard of unreality left over from before time and space had been spoken into being. All things merged in Limbo. The souls were one soul, at the same time as they didn't exist at all, remembering a million lives as one, never having truly lived them.

  The result was insanity given presence, and Ambrose's physical form wanted to merge with it, become a blended fragment of the whole. It required a single-minded focus to prevent that from happening. The howling madness infected his skin, bled into his mind. Thrusting the distractions away, he tried to concentrate.

  Standing outside time, Limbo was the highway between dimensions most often used for casual travel between the planes of Heaven, Hell, and the mortal coil. There were no colours, but there was an impression of a thousand colours, an insane, shifting mosaic that pulled at the stomach and encouraged the mind to frolic in madness. There were no sounds, but afterwards there would be memories of voices, of screaming hysteria, and sobbing. The void contained nothing physical to hurt him, but on emerging, Ambrose would feel as if beaten to within an inch of his life.

  Some angels, demons, and archangels managed to emerge from Limbo looking graceful and powerful. Ambrose usually ended up curled into a little, sobbing ball.

  Ambrose had been given the box when he first entered the mortal plane, and it was his ticket back to Hell. Only the most powerful creatures could create a portal without a key. The box had been his last one. Once in Limbo, all of Time could be witnessed, or entered. Ambrose had wanted to take Pandora into the past, to a distant age, where they might have whole human lifetimes together before reaching the now, and their penalty.

  He crushed the sob in his chest. That wasn't going to happen any more. Circumstance demanded that he follow his angel, and from the shape of her eddy he wasn't going far. A couple of years, not too geographically distant from Glasgow. He tried to imagine the affect on Pandora of entering Limbo with her mind already damaged, and stamped down on despair. Despair would let the insanity seize and absorb him. He would be diluted by a million, million parts, until he was so small a fragment of this place that he might as well not exist at all.

  Biting his tongue, he followed Pandora's fading ripples, propelling himself with the fierce energy of his determination, floating in her wake until he came to the point when she had re-entered Time. The box was a one-way ticket, gone now. Wherever they landed, they would be stuck.

  Ambrose knew what his own future held, at least in part. Calum had told him, and there was no way to change it, because it had already happened. Yet until the day came when he rescued a little girl in a Glasgow flat, Pandora and he could be together.

  Squaring up, Ambrose prepared to enter the time stream. As he did, he let his mind expand, and snatched the briefest glimpse of the future, what it held, and why it was happening at all.

  The implications made him misjudge his step, ever so fractionally, but he was screaming so hard that he didn't notice.

  “What are you going to tell them, Summer? What, exactly, is going to make this situation all right for them?” Gemmell's temper was showing. He was amazed that it had taken so long.

  Summer pointed out of the window, as though he needed reminding of what was out there. “How can we keep that from them?” Gemmell looked out, distracted for a moment by shadows in the icy fog that could not belong to anything of this earth. His stomach turned over, and he wiped fresh sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand. She's scared, Jim, he reminded himself. She's fucking terrified. Don't make things worse.

  “Stop,” he raised his hands. “Think. What are the people downstairs – the frightened people – going to do when we tell them we're surrounded by a fog that won't cross on to holy ground, and it's full of things that growl, and slurp, and make a variety of other less than reassuring noises?” Summer stared at him, and then the fight slumped out of her. “That's right. They're not going to take it well. They're probably not going to listen to us telling them to stay inside, even when we flash our shiny badges. They're going to go and look. I don't think it's safe to leave the building Jackie, and if they panic I won't be able to stop them.”

  “So you'll lie to them.”

  “Yes I bloody will. Their safety is our first responsibility. Clear?”

  Summer was quiet a moment, and then returned to the broken man in the corridor. Outside, a shadow so large that it was on the same level as their first floor window pushed towards the edge of the fog. For a moment, Gemmell thought it was going to emerge, and he held his breath, locking his legs to stop himself turning away in fright. The shape had twisted horns, but withdrew before he could see more.

  Gemmell turned back to Summer, who was wiping gently at the wounded man's cheeks with a damp cloth retrieved from the office across the room. Everything in that office was blurring away. There was no other word for it. Like the hole in the wall, solid objects ex
isted in soft focus through there. Gemmell had no idea what was causing it.

  “How many do you think are downstairs?”

  “Maybe eighty or ninety people.”

  “That's what I thought. I'm going to go and introduce myself. I want you to help me move him,” he gestured to the blinded man.

  “We're taking him into the nave?”

  “No. I'm damned if I can think of how to explain the state he's in. We'll move him to the top of the stairs. I want you away from this blurring. It doesn't seem to be as bad along there.”

  “Thank you sir.”

  Gemmell nodded, wincing as his neck muscles gave sharp reminder of his whiplash. Taking the man beneath the arms, he eased him away from the wall. When Summer grabbed his ankles they lifted, ignoring his moans. The flaps of his long coat fell heavily to the ground, dragging along as they shuffled down the dark corridor. “While I'm gone, go through his pockets. I want to know who he is, and what he wanted here.” They laid him carefully down at the top of the stairs. Summer shifted him into the recovery position, rolling him as carefully as she could onto his unbroken arm. “There are far too many questions floating around. Maybe this one, at least, we can answer.”

  Malachi's head was on fire, the blaze fed through the twin points of his eyes. Since Pandora had stabbed her fingers forward, opening his head up to agony, he had drifted in and out of consciousness, not knowing whether he preferred reality, or the delirious nightmares waiting for him when he zoned out.

  Malachi wished he were dead. Better that, than know this failure.

  Pandora had flown at him, wings unfurled. White, angel wings. His studies said that was impossible. Demons could play many tricks, but they could not take on the true form of an angel. The sight had paralysed him, flying in the face of everything he knew.

  Pandora was supposed to be a demon, a thing of evil.

  Could he have been so wrong?

  Stacey's half-face, all scar tissue and sorrow, floated in front of him, and he knew he was dreaming again. Malachi had always loved her face, even after an angel had found cause to rip it away. What had she done, to merit retribution from one of God's foot soldiers? Her floating face stayed silent, and he wondered at the quiet disapproval in her crooked lips.