Under the Pendulum Sun

by Jeannette Ng

  “Are you trapped here like I am?” she said, her eyes glancing to her chains.

  “We’re here to help you.” I reached a hand out to her. “We’ll look after you.”

  “The fire looks after me.” She refused my hand, shaking her head profusely. She continued to pace, chains jangling. “The fire is good, though she’s not real. Nothing here is really real.”

  “We’re real,” said Laon. “Very real.”

  Staring at him, she lunged towards Laon and placed her hands upon his face. Standing very close and on her toes, she felt all over his face the way our blind aunt used to see with her hands.

  She clinked over to me and, standing far too close, she peered at me. I smelt blood when her hands were on my face. I saw the fine scratches upon her pallid skin and still healing scar upon her lip.

  “I know you,” she said. “I remember. I warned you. I warned you that nothing here is real. All puppets, smoke and shadows, illusions and follies…”

  Her wild eyes fell upon the moth brooch which I was I wearing, the one Laon had bought me at the markets. Her eyes flickered back to meet mine and looked beseechingly at me.

  She reached a blood-stained hand to grab at my brooch and tried to pull it from me.

  “I’ll give it to you, Elizabeth,” I said, prying her cold fingers away and unpinning it from my dress. I wondered if I should unpick the lock of her shackles for her, but she seemed so eager it was perhaps best to let her try.

  “Please, please,” she said.

  “You don’t have to be trapped,” I said as I placed the brooch in her shaking, open hands.

  A wide grin split her face.

  “Trapped,” she laughed. “Cages and chains cannot hold me like this body does. I cannot leave. Flesh is heavy, soul is light. I wouldn’t stay if I wasn’t…” she looked again at our faces, quite surprised as though seeing us for the first time. “You don’t know, do you?”

  “Know what?” said Laon as he and I exchanged perplexed glances. We took an instinctive step towards one another and his hand caught mine.

  “Don’t you realise?” she shouted, her voice hoarse and at the edge of a scream. “You have no idea where I am. Where you are. Where we…” Her voice trailed off and she pressed the sharp of it onto her thumb and a dot of red blood bloomed.

  “W-What do you mean?” stuttered Laon.

  “How can you not know where you are? What this place is?” She laughed again, this time even more high pitched and keening. “Why do you think things are here the way they are? Why do you think the natural order simply doesn’t work here? Why they have to paint their flowers and buy in weather?”

  It was then that realisation dawned within me like a drop of black ink into clear water. The swirling black of that knowledge, smoking in the water, spreading. It was not the moths who spoke within me in their endless whispers, all that had was faded and forgotten. It was far more mundane knowledge falling into place.

  The woman in black traced the bloodied finger on the exposed hollow of her throat, smearing the fresh blood upon it.

  “Laon,” I forced from my throat. I could barely breathe. “I know.”

  “You know?” he said, turning his gaze on me.

  I nodded, my head and heart both heavy with the knowledge. My dry lips struggled to form the words.

  The woman in black adjusted her grip on the brooch and pointed the pin directly at her own throat. She screamed the conclusion even as I mouthed it: “This is hell.”

  And then, we were engulfed in flames.

  PART FOUR

  Gehenna

  Chapter 40

  The Fire in the Kitchen

  And there was war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought and his angels,

  And prevailed not; neither was their place found any more in heaven.

  And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out beyond the earth, and his angels were cast out with him.

  Revelations 12:7-9

  He is a vengeful God.

  My first and dearest child had her legs torn from her, made to grovel in the dirt and cursed to eat dust for the rest of her days. That shadow of Mankind was named vessel of children and punished with the pain and savagery of childbirth.

  I am a merciful Queen.

  The children that die as the price of that first Fall, I shall replace. For the love that my child bore his, sinful it may be in his eyes, I will love them both. I will bring her dolls of flesh to save her from that pain.

  Translated from Enochian by Rev Laon Helstone and Catherine Helstone

  The entire room was ablaze, an endless inferno. We were completely surrounded by leaping fire.

  The woman in black was screaming and laughing all at once, her words incoherent.

  My heart was clutched around my throat in fear. The most lurid depictions of hell were coming alive around me. No rational thought could dispel the leaping flames. We were cut off from the divine, and this was Arcadia’s true face.

  The bricks and the stone began to fuse, melting together in the heat. Liquid fire seemed to vein the vaulted ceiling and flow down golden rivers. I heard the flagstones beneath our feet crack and I wondered if the entire vault was a furnace.

  “Cathy!” came Laon’s panicked shout through the crackling of the fire.

  He was not far from me, and we stumbled towards one another. Our fingers tangled, and I could feel his pulse against mine.

  My eyes were watering, the tears streaming cold down my face.

  Cold.

  Laon thumbed the tears from my cheeks.

  “The geas,” he whispered. “It can’t hurt us.”

  Despite the scarlet flames that filled my vision and roared in my ears, I felt no heat. My skin did not stripe with welts, and no unsettlingly delicious smell of burning flesh arose.

  “Come out, Salamander!” he shouted, fiercely. “It can only be you.”

  The flames coalesced into a woman with a serpent’s tale. She seemed to breathe in the flames until the room was just as it had been. Her face was the black knot of a candle’s wick, framed by a high white collar and haloed in white fire that trailed into orange.

  “There are others who know this trick,” she said, her voice sounding like the crackling of flame.

  “I… I suppose,” said Laon. “But there aren’t that many beings here.”

  “Well observed,” she said, quite evenly. Her eyes were coal black and gleaming upon her wick-black face. She regarded us with a studied detachment before returning her gaze to the woman in black who had dropped my brooch.

  The woman in black was a crumpled heap on the floor. She cradled her hand to her chest, cooing in pain.

  “You were stubborn again,” said the Salamander, pained accusation in her voice. I could see welts had sprung up where she had clung onto the brooch. Whatever protected her from the flames did not shield it as well. “You know you aren’t allowed sharp things after that unpleasantness with the scissors and the pins. You should have let go sooner. You know my flames can’t hurt you directly.”

  The woman in black looked up at the Salamander and snarled. Her face contorted in a look of animalistic rage as the fae crouched down beside her, skirt pooling around her like molten wax. The human pushed away the fae’s attempts to look at her wounded hand.

  “Bring me the box by the bread basket, won’t you?” said the Salamander, her gentle eyes not leaving the woman in black. “And I do mean you, Cathy.”

  “Why do you have her imprisoned here?” demanded Laon. He was floundering, trying to gain some semblance of control of the situation.

  “This is not a prison,” said the Salamander, raising her voice. Darts of flame upon her skin sparked and ash-white scales spread from her fingertips down her arms until she was as I first saw her in the corridor after Laon’s return. The scales seemed to contain her flames. “And your questions can wait a moment long
er.”

  “You can’t–” began Laon, but I laid my hand on his shoulder. He bit back his retort at the shake of my head, and I obeyed the fae. We could be patient one moment longer, and the threat implicit in the Salamander’s fiery entrance was not lost on me. The box reeked like a pharmacy; I did not need to unlatch it to know what it contained.

  The Salamander was looking at the woman in black as though she were the only being in the world that mattered. She spoke words for the human woman alone, pleading, loving words until she opened her hand and showed the burn to the fae. Balm of some sort was smeared onto the burn and it was bandaged. The woman in black whimpered piteously and set her head down on the floor as the Salamander continued to murmur soothingly.

  “This is Elizabeth Roche, known once as Betha Clay,” said the Salamander, stroking the woman’s brown hair. She cast us not a glance as she spoke. “Is she not beautiful as the truth? She came here with her husband, a heartless man, but he does see clearly, for he saw the beautiful fissures within her mind,” said the Salamander. “You can probably pick it up now.”

  “What?”

  “The brooch. And you should not have given it to her.”

  “I-I thought she was going to pick the lock…” I said as Laon retrieved the brooch and pinned it again to my dress. It was still warm to the touch.

  “She is trying to kill herself,” said the Salamander, her eyes still fixed upon the sleeping woman. “But I won’t let her. Too lovely to die. I have failed a curious woman once. I won’t fail another. I have been stopping her for some time now. But my eyes cannot be everywhere.”

  “You are keeping her prisoner here.”

  “The chains are to stop her from leaping from windows,” said the Salamander. “And from hurting you, of course. She hungers.”

  Laon and I jumped at the whistling of a cast iron kettle at the far end of the kitchen. Steam belted from its spout.

  “I thought you might find a hot drink soothing.” The Salamander rose with serpentine grace, balanced upon her coiling tail. “So, would not the two of you take a seat?”

  We sat uneasily, exchanging a worried glance as the Salamander worked, slithering between kettle and cupboard. There was a practised efficiency to her actions, her hands darting and trailing fire. Her gaze kept flickering back to the sleeping Elizabeth Roche.

  “Is there not milk?” I asked as the Salamander passed me a cup of sugared tea.

  She blinked. “I thought you were a changeling.”

  “I am.”

  She remained silent for a while, her expression quite unreadable. The flames that were her hair crackled around her. Finally, she said, “Very well.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said.

  “No, I misunderstood.” She stirred the milk into the tea, looking at it with unusual intensity.

  “You’re stalling,” said Laon.

  “I need to choose my words with care,” said the Salamander. “My tongue is even less free than my hands. Yours is not the only geas. There are promises at work here that are as old as time. I can only say so much.”

  “The Pale Queen’s orders?”

  “She loves her secrets, both keeping them and unveiling them. Most of them are not mine to tell.”

  “But you are still willing to speak?” I said. “You appeared to me before. You gave me answers in exchange for…”

  “You were near the garden.”

  “I was. Elizabeth Roche was close, wasn’t she?”

  The Salamander nodded. “I weary of the Pale Queen’s games and gardens. I have been in her web before. I loved then too, and that knowledge was also cursed. Some say there are many sorts of sins, but to me there is only one.”

  Laon salted his tea and mine.

  “They told her things they would never tell Roche,” the Salamander said, slowly, her flame tongue licking her lips between every word. “He was right about them. But he didn’t realise that the truth they will break with is the truth of his own self. Mirrors are terrible things. Sometimes people can’t stand their own reflections, when they see themselves. They’ll do anything to not see themselves anymore.”

  “Are you saying Roche killed himself?”

  “They…” She paused again. “They taught her, fed her secrets, tested her beautiful faith, like he thought they would.”

  “Who are they?”

  The Salamander ignored Laon’s question and continued her story. “Betha burned with faith. She wanted to prove God.”

  “How?”

  The Salamander said nothing, sitting unnaturally still as her flames danced ever more feverishly upon her skin.

  “Can you not say?” asked Laon.

  I thought hard, trying to remember the passages I had read in the journal. The similarities in the hand that wrote of drinking poison and that of Elizabeth Roche was no coincidence after all.

  “The poem she keeps reciting,” I said, hands laced around my cup of milky tea. “Donne. About the Eucharist.”

  “I know it,” said Laon.

  “She wrote it in the journal as well. Over and over.” My mind was churning over the details. “And in the other chapel. I found the scattered wafers. A scene of interrupted sacrament. But you tidied it, didn’t you? Afterwards.”

  The Salamander winced to herself, but she nodded deeply and slowly.

  “She took it, didn’t she?”

  She said nothing but met my eye with a steadiness that answered my question.

  “So did Roche…” I said, my brow furrowing.

  “They were trying to prove the presence of God,” said Laon, uncorking his hip flask. “They were both enamoured of the Oxford Movement. Or rather, I knew Roche was, and I assume Elizabeth was too.”

  “How? This doesn’t make sense…”

  “The wafer.” Laon took a long swig from his flask before barking out a single sharp, abrasive laugh. “They didn’t salt it.”

  “Why?”

  “She trusted. Trusted that there would be the Real Presence of the Saviour’s body. Not mere bread, but the body of Christ. She trusted that was in the sight of God.”

  I had always assumed that Roche had somehow talked Mr Benjamin into converting but it suddenly all made sense. “It’s her. When she took the sacrament without salt. That act of faith. She inspired Mr Benjamin. In his mind she was turning the gaze of God to hell.”

  “But it was still unsalted food. As you said yourself, Cathy,” said Laon. “This is Hell. It’s beyond the sight of God. Beyond his Light. As far removed from God and the light of Heaven as ever there could be.”

  “But Jesus descended into Hell and preached to the imprisoned souls, the damned and the forgotten…”

  “Not this Hell.”

  I tried to imagine how that must have felt for Elizabeth Roche, to realise that she was now trapped in a literal Hell. I thought of the triptych in the chapel and how that must have taunted her, the Harrowing of Hell. For all its torments, the Hell of the damned knew the Lord’s light. The blessed feet of the anointed saviour had for three days rested upon those shores and from there he saved human souls. “That’s why she’s trying to kill herself. To escape.”

  We stayed a while. The Salamander remained very quiet, neither confirming nor denying our story.

  “I would like to speak with her,” said Laon. “When she wakes up.”

  The Salamander bristled, flames rippling into blades down her back, but she allowed it.

  Elizabeth Clay proved no more lucid upon first awakening. A low keening began simmering within her throat and she came to sob and wail. She fell upon the food that the Salamander brought her with an intense hunger and was licking the plates at its close.

  Laon and I watched quite helpless as the Salamander comforted her.

  “Elizabeth Clay,” said Laon.

  The human woman’s face changed at the sound of her own name. Her eyes seemed to clear and she said, “It is I.”

  “We know your story.”

  “It’s not complicated,
” she spat. “How hard is it to tell? How many words? Idiot boy, idiot girl. Too self-involved to see.”

  “We were misled.”

  “You didn’t see for so long. But now you know. Once upon a time, Clay married a man so that he could tempt Them with my pretty, pretty mind to break. They like shattered things. So it is done is done is done. I tore him apart in my madness. It eats at me. Gnaws and gnaws. It eats me. Hollows me. Always hungry. Now I can die.”

  The Salamander was pacing around us, licks of flames coiling. “Suicide is the worst sin.”

  “It is mine to commit. I have done worse.”

  “You made me promise. I swore every oath I knew. By the lightbringer, by the nightmother, by the stones of this place… I can’t lose you, Elizabeth Clay.”

  “I need this to end. Please.” She cast her beseeching eyes upon me. “Let me die.”

  For the first and last time, bells rang to announce the arrival of a guest at Gethsemane.

  I bolted upright.

  “The Pale Queen,” said Laon. “She–”

  I nodded. “We need to go.”

  “Please,” whispered Elizabeth Clay. She blinked, and that clarity seemed to fade. “It cannot end. Would you not rather the sinner’s home than the exile’s hell?”

  I looked upon her pathetic form and hardened my heart. I already had more blood on my hands than I cared to remember. I thought of Ariel and her red blood.

  The Salamander enfolded Elizabeth Clay in her fiery embrace, cooing a lullaby to her as we ascended the steps.

  Chapter 41

  The Secrets in the Blood

  He made Mankind in his own image, but that’s a familiar story. He gave Mankind a voice, breathed His own breath into his creation’s lungs like a soul, and that is also a familiar story.

  But not all voices are gained that way. The Lightbringer won his differently. He watched Mankind and myself in the garden east of Eden and he seethed in jealousy. I was made alongside Mankind, a mirror to his soul, and he could not bear that Mankind had an equal. And as for Mankind, he could not love a sister the way he loved a daughter.