Sandhill Street: The Loss of Gentleness

by Rob Summers

  Chapter 14 Calling Down Fire

  On the evening of December twentieth Dignity and Reason were summoned by Ambassador Grace to join him in the new cupola atop Grace House; so having put on heavy coats, they ascended the spiral stairway with curiosity. In the cupola they found the Ambassador dressed in his official uniform, all white, with gold braid and gold buttons, and wearing a communication headset. On a small table before him lay a pair of binoculars and a map of the Sandhill Street neighborhood, divided into grids and illumined by a small lamp. All around them below were the neighborhood houses, lit not only by the usual streetlights and area lights but also by thousands of Christmas lights.

  Grace thanked them for coming. “I suppose you know that Leasing House is to receive its City Seal tonight? As you can tell by all the lights and movement down the block, the ceremony has already begun in front of the house, and the Seal is due to be hung in its place in just a couple of minutes.”

  “We knew about it, sir,” said Dignity. “Did you want us to see the ceremony?”

  “Yes and no. I certainly couldn’t care less about the ceremony per se. However, I’ve summoned you because I received word this afternoon that the H.M.S. Gloria Dothan, though not yet arrived, is now within range of this City, and I’m in contact with her chief gunnery officer over these headphones.”

  “Good Lord!” said Reason. “There won’t be shelling?”

  “Don’t be alarmed. The Dothan’s artillery is capable of pinpoint accuracy, so Grace House is quite safe. All the Dothan requires is a spotter, a post I have volunteered to fill this evening.”

  Dignity’s eyes were wide. “Then war is about to begin.”

  “Not official war, my friend. The actual outbreak of war is yet some years away. We Heavenites bide our time, you see, and as for the City authorities, they would rather commit mass suicide than declare war on Heaven. Hmm, actually it adds up to the same thing. No, tonight you will see, and take part in, a battle in an undeclared war. We’re hitting them with a surprise attack.”

  “Yes, sir. But sir, will people die?” Dignity asked.

  “If some do die, will you be indignant? Perhaps angry? Calm yourself in the fear of our King. He has determined the matter, and it isn’t for you to second-guess Him. If it helps, you might keep in mind that everyone in the City has been scheduled to die sometime, and that you have known that fact since childhood. If you had any objection, you should have raised it before this. You still don’t like it? Then let me assure you that the shells that will hit Sandhill Street tonight are not lethal.”

  Dignity and Reason expressed their relief.

  “How little you understand,” Grace said, looking at them sternly. “Among Heaven’s weapons, those that kill the body are the least powerful, the least destructive. Do you think we could terrify demons with a threat of mere death? But some of the shells to be used tonight would prevail against the gates of Hell itself. Our weapons are spiritual.” He turned his attention back to the grid map. “But now it’s time to see them in use. Reason, did you fetch the abominometer as I asked? Good, thank you. Would you tell me what it’s reading?”

  She held the instrument under the lamp to read it. “Still 95, sir. No change in days.”

  “Keep an eye on it, for I think the Seal should be hung in place just about now.”

  All three waited silently but not for long.

  “Sir,” she said excitedly. “It jumped up. Now it reads 97.”

  He nodded to her as he spoke into his headset, naming coordinates for the gunners and requesting an incendiary.

  Rented spotlights illuminated the front of Leasing House right up to the peak (but angled so as not to emphasize the missing roof) where workmen on a hanging scaffold held ready the shield-like City Seal, painted with the representation of a golden fortress surrounded by six vipers. Below, where dozens of cameras and video cameras were in use, Guiles circulated among the guests, glowing with pride and constantly shaking hands and slapping backs. The outgoing mayor was present, as were Mr. and Mrs. Power, Mayor-elect Therion, the members of the city council, the Mammons, and many other dignitaries, most with their spouses and children. The crowd was so dense that some had found vantage points across the street on the front lawn of Dread House or in Sluggards’ Lot on the corner. The police had closed the block to traffic so that others could stand in the street.

  Using a public address system, Mayor Strawman was winding up a short speech. He was a balding man of medium height and about sixty-five years, an old campaigner who had been told by Power never to run for office again and would comply.

  “Many of you have a Seal on your houses,” he said, “as do I. For those who don’t, keep in mind that the opportunity is always open to you. No house in this City is too lowly for the honor, not if the inhabitants are truly pro-City. But tonight we honor Leasing House. Guiles? There you are, Guiles. Here is a man who has helped build the City, tirelessly, year after year. When I think of…”

  Wittily Dread and her family were in the crowd, and indeed, had little choice about it. If they wanted to have any hope of leniency concerning Conformity’s debts, they must not appear to be unenthusiastic about such an event as this. Of course, the smile on Wittily’s face was strictly for the occasion. She had spent the evening so far saying one clever and complimentary thing after another to all the right people, doing everything in her power to show that the Dreads were a pro-City family indeed.

  Now she looked up at the seal as the Mayor drew his listeners’ attention to it. The two workmen on the scaffold were each holding a side of it, prepared to lift it into place.

  “So now, in my official capacity as Mayor of the City, I congratulate the Leasings, I thank you all for coming, and I order that the City Seal, our highest honor, be affixed to Leasing House.” He paused for the applause as the workmen did so. “Forever attesting the high status of….”

  A screeching of something moving through the sky drowned out the Mayor’s words. Everyone looked up into the darkness above the houses, and a second later something hit the front of Leasing House’s second story with a tremendous crashing, rending sound. The workmen clung precariously to their scaffold, which now tilted at a steep angle and began to slowly descend. As for the house, it was instantly afire from attic to foundations, a roaring, roasting blaze too bright to look at. The crowd withdrew in panic from the heat, running into each other and crying out.

  Wittily tried to run with her family across the street into her own house, but they found their way blocked. An armed squad of soldiers dressed in combat uniforms had appeared on her front lawn, and they were not only preventing anyone from fleeing into Dread House but were actively forcing civilians out of the yard, shoving them out with gun butts. A woman so shoved fell to her knees beside Wittily, and the girl paused to help her up. In the meantime her father came up to the soldiers and demanded to know who they were and what they thought they were doing.

  “We have a voice match,” she heard one of the soldiers say to another. He pointed a thumb at his own broad chest. “Sergeant Clemency of the Heavenite marines, Mr. Dread. We have orders to allow only you and your family into Dread House tonight. You may proceed inside.”

  “But who are you? What are you doing here?”

  “We want you and your family inside Dread House on the double quick,” the Sergeant said sternly. “We’ve set up a perimeter; no one will get through to you.”

  Still standing with the woman she had helped to her feet, Wittily saw the other members of her family being half dragged into their home by burly, gun-toting marines, and she determined at once that she would not follow them. At that moment another shell could be heard whining overhead, and she turned and ran with others up the street in a blind panic.

  In the cupola above Grace House, Dignity handed the binoculars back to Grace.

  “Leasing House isn’t burning down! I haven’t seen anything like this since
Reason and I were in the Powers’ house on New Year’s Eve so many years ago. That house looked like this does except that it wasn’t blazing as fiercely.” He shook his head in wonder. “They burn but they aren’t consumed!”

  “And we do that? I mean our side?” Reason asked. “I thought the Hellites made that kind of fire happen.”

  “Perhaps Mr. Power thinks so too,” Grace replied. “At any rate the Hellites are in no hurry to set him straight. But listen, another shell’s coming in. Sounds like a Reluctance 8.”

  As they watched, the shell landed in the street just uphill from Leasing House, that is, nearer to Grace House and just where many of those who had fled the area close to the first blast had paused to look back. Pieces of some burning blue substance exploded like shrapnel from the point of impact, mowing down dozens of them.

  Reason gripped Grace’s arm. “Are you sure no one is hurt?”

  “I promise you, no wounds or loss of life. What I can’t promise you is that those hit will ever be the same again. This is our King’s show of power, after all. And don’t think of running out there to try to help them. This is a battle, and we’re under orders to stay at our post. Everyone downstairs has been told to stay inside the house till it’s over, and in fact Heavenite marines have surrounded our house with orders to allow no one in or out. We even have air cover they tell me, though that seems superfluous considering that the City has no air force. Meanwhile, what a show!”

  The explosion of the second shell knocked Prevarica Leasing to the ground, and for some moments she could see nothing but vivid blue lights pulsing above her. When her vision cleared she found herself lying on her back among others who had been knocked down. She sat up screaming, or rather trying to scream, but what came out was rather reedy and intermittent. She soon stopped trying.

  She thought of getting up and trying to find her mother but wondered if her legs would hold her up. When she looked down at her legs, she caught her breath. The coat she was wearing left off just at the knee, as did the skirt that she wore under it on this formal occasion. The tops of her knee socks left off just below the knee, and in the light from the corner street lamp she could see nothing between the socks and her skirt, nothing but the pavement beneath her. Her vision blurred again and her mouth was suddenly dry. Her legs had been blown off! Worse yet, she couldn’t feel anything, so she must be paralyzed. She would probably die! But where was the blood? And why did her foot move when she willed it to?

  She reached down with both hands to where her knees ought to be and could feel them, as knobby and real as ever. She waggled both her feet. Still she couldn’t see her knees. She began to sob as she peeled down one of her knee socks, feeling her leg but seeing nothing, nothing! All around her the other victims of the shell blast were getting themselves up, some shakily standing, others on hands and knees or just sitting up as she was. The terrible thought came: what if someone came to help her and saw her condition? She must cover up and get away. She got to her feet and then hunched over and tugged her skirt down enough to cover the gap above her socks, and in this odd posture began to scurry toward home as fast as she could.

  “Prevarica! Where are you going? Are you hurt?”

  Alexandra Disdain, a girl about her own age, was coming toward her. She shot the girl a look of terrified warning and ran even faster, doubled over as she was.

  “Don’t come near me! Don’t anyone come near me!”

  Her fear of being discovered was even greater than her fear of the fire that enveloped her house. That fire, at any rate, was already far less fierce than it had been, had lowered in intensity until it was a ghostly flame running along every surface of the old place, inside and outside. As she opened the door and fled inside, she smelled brimstone.

  She fell on a couch in the foyer and lay moaning and crying. The Hadean flames that seemed to feed on the couch did not burn her, and she knew why. She was a part of those flames now, and fire can’t burn fire. She was a little spout of Hellfire herself. She held up a hand before her eyes and saw the same flames licking along her fingers. She closed her eyes, knowing that in the morning day would come but not for her or for her family. This was a night that would just go on.

  Grace double checked another set of coordinates on his grid map and read them to the gunnery officer on the Gloria Dothan. “Drop a Gravedigger this time,” he added.

  Dignity and Reason saw the old man nod as if receiving an affirmative over his headphones. He looked up to them. “Dignity, you might want to keep the binoculars focused on Sluggard’s Lot.”

  Wittily was on the doorstep of the Mopers’ house, just across Flood Avenue from Sluggards’ Lot, when she heard the third shell coming. She had been knocking and knocking, but no one came to let her in, and had almost decided to try the next house, when a glowing, dark-orange cloud exploded into existence on her left. Sluggard’s Lot was lost in this cloud as pieces of dirt rained down everywhere. She pressed herself against the Mopers’ front door under a little metal canopy and waited with her eyes closed against the dust. After a long minute, she found that she could see again.

  Much light now came from the lot, very much, shining up as if from underground and all of it of the same burning dark orange that she had seen at first in the cloud. Smoke poured upward from a great hole in the ground. Soon the flaming light was brighter and more defined, lighting up the side of her own house just beyond, even lighting the undersides of the scattered clouds above. This did not look like something created by the shell but revealed by it, as if an inferno had been uncovered. Everyone else was running away or already had run, but Wittily stood still under the canopy and watched. If this was some threat to her home, and her family in it, then she had to know about it, no matter the cost to herself. Or perhaps, more than that, she had to know what was the reality that had been revealed. If some great, eternal fire had always been burning beneath her neighborhood, then she should have known about it long before this. Why had this been kept a secret? Who had the right to keep it from her?

  Up from the pit came a great moaning and shrieking as of thousands of people in misery, and upward ascended the sound of the clanking of chains, and a terrible stench. The neighborhood was filled with sounds too awful to be heard and a smell too awful to endure. Wittily suddenly knew that Quake had been telling the truth, when he had said that he had seen real lizard demons. Hell was real: a door to it had been opened before her eyes. But she had to see, to actually see. She crossed the avenue, crept to the edge of the pit, and shielding her eyes, looked down.

  The floor of it was revealed as heart-stoppingly close, perhaps fifty feet down, maybe less. And burning on the uneven, boulder-strewn floor were the fires, and between the fires were the demons, and chained and tormented by the demons were the damned. Hundreds of these lost ones were within her sight, and the screams of many more could be heard from beyond the edges of the opening, coming from caverns not unroofed. The lizard-demons were dragging away those visible, yanking them by their chains. She was reminded of insects seeking to get back under a rock.

  She could clearly see the pale faces of the hopeless ones. None of them wanted to meet her gaze except one. This one, a young woman, looked back. It was Slothie. Gasping, choking on the smoke, nearly passing out, Wittily ran away into the night. As she got farther away from the pit, she picked up strength and speed. She crossed through an unfenced yard to the first street east and there paused while a helicopter flew over, its side lit up to show the insignia of the City Police. She could also hear sirens of squad cars. Since the government was aroused, she could not stay on the streets for long. She might be picked up and interrogated, and she now knew far too much. As quickly as she could she made her way northward and then around to her own house, again cutting between houses, and approaching her front door from the side away from Sluggard’s Lot.

  As she expected, a Heavenite marine challenged her, but in the few minutes
that had just passed her ideas about these soldiers had changed drastically. She welcomed his grim voice with a feeling very like gratitude. These leathernecks were human! or at least they looked so. She answered him, telling him who she was, and he hustled her inside.

  “The sergeant was about to send out a patrol to look for you, miss,” he said, while cradling in his arms an assault weapon that looked adequate to blow up a tank. “We’re expecting company any minute—you can hear their sirens—and we need to know that every member of your family is protected.”

  “Why are you doing this for us?” she asked.

  “Orders, miss,” was all that he said.

  In the cupola Grace continued to call down artillery support as the City Police cars arrived. At least a dozen came, sirens on and lights flashing, and every one of them took a direct hit, the shells tearing through their roofs and exploding. (Grace mentioned that these shells were called ‘Dozers.’) Out of each shattered car staggered one or two patrolmen who proceeded to wonder around in slow motion as if stupefied. Several of the Heavenite marines were kept busy easily disarming them and then shoving them down the street and back toward the center of town. Grace explained to Reason and Dignity that the policemen would arrive at their headquarters unharmed, but that they would have no fight in them for days to come.

  Finally the street became quiet. Everyone who had come to the City Seal ceremony had gotten away long ago. Leasing House still had a ghostly glow to it. The light from the pit was weaker as, apparently, the fires just below the opening were being smothered or covered somehow by the demons so as not to call such attention to themselves. The howling from below could no longer be heard, but the stench was still strong.

  “Is it over?” Reason asked.

  “No, the battle isn’t over,” Grace said, “but is entering a new phase. In fact, what you have seen so far might be termed a mere skirmish, having the effect of leading Power to react rashly. Yes, very rashly. He has never learned to back away from the path of our King’s curse. Don’t they always fill up the measure of their sins?” He laid his hands on their shoulders. “Now it’s time for you two to take part. I recall that you both offered your help? My chauffeur Fate is waiting on the street to take you into town, you and Miss Fret. She’s made such progress lately as to be of real help to you. The three of you have a key mission to carry out, and you must act with haste.”

  Dignity and Reason both spoke at once, asking what in the world their mission might be.

  Grace’s voice was slightly unsteady as he answered. “Therion and Power will be furious about this Heavenite attack and will insist on having vengeance in some form. So they’ll get it in the only way they can. A captive must die tonight. Your mission? You’re going to bring back Gentleness.”