Debris of Shadows_Book II_The Forgotten Cathedral

by Tony LaRocca

  The woman did not make a sound. Her doll–like lips remained sealed. She ran towards him in slow motion, her hands extended. Furrowed pores within her palms opened, and a score of thorns pushed their points through her skin.

  He aimed the rusted end of the saber at her heart. “Stop,” he said, though he knew that his time was faster than hers. She continued her advance. He leaned in, and drove the pitted blade deep into her chest.

  It slid in easily, as if he had stabbed a bell pepper instead of a person. She lunged forward, ignoring the steel within her flesh, her puckered hands still reaching for his shoulder. He whirled to the side, and twisted the hilt. Her body gave little resistance, and the sword’s edge sliced through her side, bones and all.

  There was no blood, just a thick sap that clung to the blade. He stabbed and slashed at her. It was like attacking a living vegetable. The cuts did not matter to her. Her stare never left his, her waxen lips never parted. The only thing she seemed to care about was driving her thorns into his shoulder. This all seemed familiar, but he did not understand why. Somehow, he knew this woman, and this place.

  He pushed his confusion aside. He could analyze his fractured memories later, he had to get away first. He threw the saber to the cobblestones, watching it spin away from him in slow motion. He spun on his heel. At the far end of the catacombs, he could just make out a decrepit, wooden door.

  He ran for it.

  Asher stood on the front steps of the church, his head pressed against its door.

  He was a coward, of that there was no question. He felt ashamed. The man had, despite everything, tried to help him, and he had left him to her.

  They’re both Abominations, a voice spoke inside of him. They’re probably in league with each other. She is the one who brought him here, don’t forget that.

  He looked alongside the pavement at the lawn. Its lush blades waved back and forth, despite the lack of wind. She was down there, amongst the roots. Was he supposed to avoid the grass forever, even within his own city?

  He took a deep breath, pushed the door open, and walked back inside.

  Fifteen minutes had passed since he had ran. He forced himself to walk through the chapel, and down the rickety stairs. He did not know if he could face what was in the catacombs again, but at least he could —

  There was no doorway in the corner.

  He walked to the wall with slow, measured steps. He brushed his fingers along the rough texture of its masonry. He had not done that, had he? Surely he would remember if he had released his wasps. He had panicked, he had to admit that to himself, but he had not been in any sort of fugue state.

  So how had the cinder block closed itself?

  He backed away from the solid wall. He could not risk opening it again. He had to perfect what he had built while he could, before she grew strong enough to try to take it away from him.

  “I’m sorry, Matthew,” he said to the empty cellar, “I really was going to help you, I really did mean it.”

  He turned, and ran up the stairs.

  Chapter 11

  Helen blinked.

  She looked around her living room with growing unease. Something seemed off, but she could not put her finger on what it was. Everything was neat and clean, and the air smelled fresh and sweet. Still, something was not quite right.

  She had woken that morning from a nightmare, but she could not remember it. Something about Tish screaming, and Roger flying into a rage. But when she tried to chase the details, they disappeared. She shrugged. Most dreams were like that. She began to scratch her arms, but stopped herself. Their olive–colored skin was flawless. Why should she do that to herself? She folded them instead.

  Roger opened the front door, and stepped inside. He was Roger, but at the same time, he was not. She felt a momentary queasiness, and decided it would be better not to think about it. And with him…

  She looked the monk over. He was barely more than a teenager, and damn, he needed to eat something. Don’t be stupid, she thought, he’s probably just fasting. Monks do that. At any rate, he definitely needed a shower. She pushed the last thought from her mind, touched her fingers to her lips, and kissed them. “Blessed be the Ophanim, Brother,” she said.

  He smiled. It seemed warm and genuine, but it also seemed like a smile of relief. “Blessed be the Ophanim, my friend,” he said. She tried not to stare at him. He was a brother of the Church, so why did she feel like screaming? Why did she want to run? Tish, she thought, I have to save —

  “Tish,” she said aloud. “Roger, where is Tish?”

  Her husband took her hands in his. They were warm and strong, but why shouldn’t they be?

  The dam of her mind broke, flooding her with memories: Roger gasping for breath and needing oxygen all the time, his life reduced to a bitter, filthy shell that made her home reek of sickness and death. But that had all just been a bad dream, hadn’t it? She tried to yank her hands away, but he held them fast.

  “No,” she said. “No, no, no.”

  “Helen, listen to me.” He pulled her close. “It’s okay, it’s all okay. Brother Asher has explained it all to me.” He pushed a length of dirty–blond hair away from his forehead. “You have to listen to me, please.”

  “I’m scared, Roger, I’m so scared. Where’s Tish? Ophanim, where is she?”

  “Tish is fine,” the scrawny monk said. “Or rather, she will be.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Helen. “I don’t understand what any of this means. Where is our daughter?”

  Asher stepped towards her. His face seemed kind, though the muscles in his cheek and jaw twitched. She had seen twitching like that before. She looked down at her flawless arms. Had they once… Had she…?

  “Helen,” he said, “do you remember your scripture?”

  She took a step back. “Of course I remember,” she said. She stopped her retreat. This was her home, and she would be damned if she would be intimidated here, especially by a child who looked as if he would fall over if she blew on him.

  “Tell me,” he said. “Tell me what you remember of Revelations.”

  She licked her lips. “The Shadows will fall upon the land,” she said. She did not know why her mind went right to that verse. “And all will be dust and sand in their wake.” Her eyes grew wide.

  “Please,” said Asher, “there’s more. You can remember.”

  She reached out, and touched the filthy skin of his cloak as if it were made of gold. “And the brothers and sisters of the Ophanim shall walk amongst the just. And they will cry out, ‘Are there any…’” Her voice trailed off.

  “‘Are there any who deserve love and life, after living so long in pain and sorrow?’” he finished for her, smiling.

  “And their children came forth,” Helen continued, her fingertips brushing the rents on his neck. Thousands of tiny insects beneath seethed at her touch, and she jerked her hand back. “And they… they…”

  “They wove life back into the just.”

  “No,” said Helen. She turned to Roger, and wrapped her arms around him. “No, I wasn’t just.”

  “Neither was I,” said her husband as he stroked her soft, blond hair. “I was cruel, vain and stupid. I hurt you, and terrorized our daughter.”

  Realization dawned on her. She broke their embrace. “Wait,” she said, “are you trying to tell me that Tish isn’t here, that she wasn’t good enough?”

  Roger shook his head. “Just hold on a minute, hon.”

  “Holy Ophanim.” She backed away. “How can you just stand there? We can’t be in Heaven without our little girl. Take me back, I don’t want to be in Heaven without her.”

  “Please, Helen,” said Asher. “This isn’t Heaven, and Tish will be with you shortly.”

  She looked back and forth between the two men. Then she looked at her arms. She felt the urge to scratch them, to dig her nails in deep, but she forced her hands to her sides. They were her arms, weren’t they? Even though they did not have needle tracks, and
the skin was… She blinked. Her memories were obscured by smoke and confusion. Every time she tried to chase one, it danced away.

  Roger took her hands again. “You have to listen to me,” he said. “Tish is fine. He says that she’s fine, and I believe him.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “Because I’ve been with him for two days now.” He rubbed her fingers. “We walked through the city, and talked. You need to see it. You need to see what he’s done. It’s paradise, compared to what it was.” He swallowed. “He said that there was an imbalance in my head, and that it made me afraid all the time. It made me scared, hurt and angry. There was something wrong in my brain that blocked the signals from the right chemicals.”

  He took a deep breath, exhaled, and grinned. “You have no idea how good it feels to be able to breathe like this. Every second was hell for me, before. Now, I have another chance.” He wiped his green eyes, and sniffed. “And he says that he’s given you another chance too, that now, you’ve kicked Tangerine for good. Remember how badly you always wished that you could do that?”

  Helen blinked. A memory flashed through the fog. Roger yelling, Roger shaking Tish. She recoiled as she snapped back to the present.

  “There’s a lot that I can’t remember.” She turned to Asher. “You don’t fool me. I don’t fool as easily as he does. You did something to our memories, I know you did.”

  Asher pursed his lips, and shook his head. “I can’t, Helen. I can heal your bodies, but I can’t do anything to your memories or your thoughts. They’re all still yours.”

  “Bullshit, what’s all this talk about imbalances, then? You changed his thoughts, he just said so.”

  “What I did is no different than what anti–depressants do, just better, and without side effects.”

  Her nostrils flared. “You swear? You swear on the Holy Ophanim that you haven’t changed our memories?”

  Asher kissed his fingers. “I swear by the Holy Ophanim,” he said. “Roger was the first, you’re the second. But like him, I wanted to give you time to understand.”

  “My memories were a mess too,” said Roger. “He says that it takes time.”

  “Tish’s recovery is going to be the same way,” Asher said. “She was on the verge of diabetes, before. I can heal that. I can make her thin and healthy. I can even fix the imbalances in her brain that caused her depression and extreme obesity — but I can’t change her memories or thoughts. So no matter what I do, she’s going to have to learn how to earn her own self–esteem. She’s going to have to learn how to treat herself with love, so that she’ll love herself enough to take care of her health. She’ll need you two to help teach her that.”

  Tish screamed, her jaw wide open like a beached fish, as a swarm of tiny wasps engulfed her —

  The image disappeared. That had never really happened, had it? Was that when the Shadows had fallen? Helen rubbed her temples. It felt as if reality had become a whirlpool of changes beyond her control.

  “And what if she can’t?” she asked. “What are you going to do? Will you erase her?” Her mind latched onto the thought. “Will you just rub her out like a bad drawing, and start over again?” She looked around her. “Oh Ophanim,” she said, “it’s all happened before, hasn’t it?”

  Roger rolled his eyes. “Damn it, do you have to be like this?”

  “How many times have you done this to us?”

  Asher sighed. “I can’t,” he said. “I can’t ever resurrect you more than once. Otherwise, your Sands would become poisoned. I promise you, this is the first and only time.” He turned away, and looked out the window. The diffused sunlight formed a violet halo around his skull–like head. “I’m giving you an incredible gift, Helen. I’m giving you what people have paid fortunes for a taste of since the dawn of man. I’m giving you health, I’m giving you a new chance, and I’m balancing all your scales. What more do you want?”

  “You didn’t answer me,” Helen said. “See, Roger? See how his tone is changing?”

  “Stop it, Helen.” Roger took a step towards her.

  “Or what? Or you’ll slap me, both of you?” She smirked, and put her hands on her hips. “Or maybe you’ll just take my tongue away with your little ‘children.’”

  Asher turned back towards them. He looked at Helen for a few seconds, his face expressionless. “Roger, leave us for a few minutes,” he said, his voice low. Roger nodded, and walked to the bathroom. The door clicked shut behind him.

  “I know the truth,” said Asher. “I know your mind, I know what you think and feel. I know your entire life. It was all in the scrolls. The problem isn’t the gift, it’s that you’re convinced that you don’t deserve it.”

  “Shut up. You don’t know anything.”

  “Every thought, every memory, and every pang of guilt. It’s all still there. Go ahead, remember them. Wallow in them. I won’t stop you.”

  She tightened her hands into fists. “Stop it.”

  “Tangerine. That was your favorite, especially when you mainlined. It made you feel like nothing.”

  “Maybe I liked feeling like nothing.”

  “Oh, I know you did,” he said, “because I know your secret, the one that tears and rips at you every time you look at her.”

  “Shut up.”

  Asher just stood, staring at her, his arms folded. Over her shoulder, the bathroom door silently cracked open.

  Helen looked at the floor. The carpet was a deep shade of navy blue. Had it always been that way? She rubbed it with her toe. It felt soft and plush, the way she imagined the carpets were in the White House. “When I got pregnant, Roger and I weren’t married. I was still living with my mother. Then he started to drink and smoke all the time, and I knew, deep down, that he didn’t want a baby. He said that he loved me, and that he’d never leave me, but I knew that he didn’t really want a baby.”

  “Why?”

  She shrugged. “Why don’t men usually want babies? Responsibility? Getting tied down? Having to get a job and keep it, or else? I was certain that he didn’t want it, but he couldn’t say so.” She looked up at Asher, and her fingers instinctively scratched her arms.

  “I was convinced that he was just chicken–shit. I was sure that he just couldn’t bring himself to say, ‘Hey, sorry that I knocked you up, but I don’t want a kid and I won’t want you if you have one. So here’s a few hundred bucks, go down and get yourself a scraping.’” She dug her fingers into her arms for a few seconds, then stopped. “I thought about buying something at the store, or using a coat–hanger, like everyone says they used to do. But that was just too scary to even think about.” She focused on Asher’s sunken eyes, but his face was impassive. He nodded.

  “So, I started sniffing Tangerine. That’s the one thing the doctor told me not to do, said that it was the leading cause of miscarriages, but I was too scared to try anything else.” Her eyes burned, and she wiped them with the heel of her hand. “I didn’t have a job, and I was scared of my mother throwing me out. So I snorted petals once a day while I hid in my closet, until I started to show. Then the game was over. We got married. We lived with my mother for a few years while Roger went back to school. Then he got a job working for the city. Mom retired and moved away, and we bought her place. But the point is, he didn’t leave. He didn’t hate me. Every shitty thing I accused him of never came true.”

  Asher held her gaze. “And when Tish was born…”

  Helen snorted and laughed at the same time. “That poor girl,” she said. “Muscle problems, eye problems, whatever problems they could come up with a name for. She had to wear these big, goofy glasses, even as a baby. But worst of all, she was a little slow. Not retarded, not even stupid, just slow. But it wasn’t only her mind, it was her body, too. Her thyroid was all messed up, and her baby fat just kept piling on.” Her voice broke.

  “What?” she asked, wiping the snot that dribbled from her nose. “Do you know what it’s like to have to look at your baby every day, to know that she lo
ves and trusts you more than anything in the world, and that you ruined her whole life? Do you have any idea how much you start resenting everyone, especially yourself? And now you stand there, with your filthy skin wrapped around your naked body, and you judge me for shooting up Tangerine every now and then? Well, fuck you. Fuck you, and fuck the Ophanim for letting it happen.”

  She tried to slap him, but he grabbed hold of her arms with his skeletal hands. She struggled for a few seconds before collapsing against him, her body shaking with sobs.

  Roger’s footfalls were silent on the padded carpet. He wrapped his arms around her from behind, and pulled her away. She clutched at him, apologizing, whispering his name and the name of their daughter.

  “Take your time,” Asher said. “Take all the time you need. When you are ready, come find me, and I’ll bring Tish back to you.”

  Helen reached out from Roger’s embrace, and grabbed his hand. “I didn’t mean it, what I said. Ophanim forgive me, I didn’t mean it. I’m so, so sorry. Please, help her.”

  “Of course I will,” said Asher, his voice soft and even. “But there is something you need to know.”

  “Listen carefully,” said Roger, “this is important.”

  Asher held out his hands. “The Blessed Ophanim, She is the way, the truth, and the light. But wherever there is light, there is also darkness.”

  Helen sniffed. “But I thought the Shadows were supposed to be the final darkness before Heaven.”

  “This isn’t Heaven,” said the monk. “This is the world of men, and as long as we are on Earth, there will always be evil.”

  “I don’t understand. Roger said it’s paradise.”

  Asher sighed. “The evil is mine, I’m afraid. The sin of sloth, the sin of pride. Even though this is just the beginning, I might have failed you.”

  “How?”

  “The truth is, you two aren’t the first I’ve resurrected. There were two others, a man and a woman, but something went wrong.”

  Helen’s eyes narrowed. “I thought you could fix anyone, like you did with Roger and me.”