“Ephraim Speck and the Necromire within him are slain,” she said more calmly. “Forgive me, Steward. I go too far.”
“You let the human Host control you too much, Lilith,” said the Steward. “She is no more than a means to an end. And you care too much about this failing World and its backward inhabitants. What does the Change mean to the likes of us after so long a time anyway?”
“It will mean suffering, Steward. Humans are such fragile creatures, we are such fragile creatures. The Necromire within me will find a way to survive, as will you. I will perhaps not be so lucky. But there is hope, hope that I intend not to abandon so easily.”
“Hope?” There was no tone to the voice of the Steward. None of the rises and falls of speech that define us, none of the texture of real communication. Empty, hollow words, devoid of all emotion. “Ah, yes, Pandora’s last gift to the World.”
“The Harbinger may have found a way to travel both to and from the Inter-World. Time is against us.”
“Ah, yes. The secret of bilateral travel. But to what end I wonder.”
“It remains Sin’s desire to enter the Ether to bring about the Change and bring about the destruction of the humans that dwell here.”
“There you go again, Lilith, with your talk about humans. Why should we care for them? Even the Creator has abandoned them. They do nothing but fight and squabble among themselves. They have no comprehension of the magnitude or significance of the Creation. They are petty, ignorant, self-centred and vengeful. I see no reason to mourn their passing.”
Harker snorted loudly, shuffled her feet uncomfortably, made sure some of the dirt on the soles of her four hundred pound shoes rubbed off on the rug beneath them.
“You test me, Steward. You feel compassion for all creatures, ignorant or not, as do I. We just feel it necessary to exert that compassion in different ways but you have no desire to watch the suffering of billions of lives, watch children slaughtered in their mother’s arms, watch men turn to fire, women ravished and torn apart. That is what Sin will bring with Him; an evil hitherto unknown even in this violent world. Those that are left will be enslaved. Am I to understand that you will abandon your obligations?”
The clink preceded the glass falling from the table, the dark liquid spilling out and soaking into the carpet, bubbling and hissing as it did, but whether it was an accident or something the Steward had intended, she was not sure. But she backed away in any event as the hand withdrew quickly into the chair.
“Do not question me, Lilith,” said the Steward and there was a sensation rising itself up through Harker’s neck and into her head as she regretted her outburst. “There are bigger issues at stake than the fate of humans.”
“But we are here to protect them,” Harker countered.
“We are here to ensure that their suffering is minimal. We are not here to prevent the Change. The Creator has deemed that this world must perish. It is not for us to frustrate his wishes.”
“But with respect, Steward, how can you be so sure of the Creator’s intentions?” And with this Harker knew she walked a tightrope. Rumours that the Steward no longer possessed the power to communicate with the Creator’s agents had been in circulation for considerable time now. She knew that what she had said was a direct challenge to his power. And her heart was wedged well and truly in her mouth.
“I need no validation to impress you, Lilith. You cannot stop what is happening but you can stop trying. And we must prepare ourselves, Lilith.”
“Prepare ourselves for what, Steward?” she said as she continued to slowly back away into the shadows.
“For our departure, Lilith. Our exodus.”
“I have a choice, Steward. Don’t I?”
“Yes, Lilith. You have a choice. Now, choose wisely.”
C
hapter 48
The buildings were alive.
Their foundations didn’t sink into the ground as they should do; they merged into a floor of blood and tissue that spread out into the distance on either side of her. The giant structures resembled modern skyscrapers but instead of shining glass fronts and concrete walls their sides were moist and slippery, deep reds and purples over a complex web of tubes and pulses, arteries and cartilage. The whole thing pulsated rhythmically and all around her was the purring noise of blood pumping through veins the size of sewers, gargling and burbling as muscle contracted around it to squeeze it through.
Beneath her feet - what should have been roadway, tarmac and base-course - was an uneven, moving surface of leathery skin stretched over a network of bone and pulp. Where she took tentative steps, her feet occasionally sank deep into the ground where the skeletal structure was less dense. When this happened, she could feel smaller bones and gristle strain and snap with her weight. The noise and the jerks that followed as nerves were stimulated made her stop moving.
Higher up, the bloody mass of organisms that surrounded her reached into a shadowy sky of pinks and greys at some indeterminable point making it appear as though she was encased in an airless, living dome. A womb, perhaps. There were other smaller structures sprouting up from the flesh around her. Purple veins twisted their way round parking meters and street lights, giant car shaped boils, oozing with puss and bile, were lined up down one side of the road, trees made from bone had torn through the skin surface and jutted out from the ground.
Was this Hell? Alix wondered.
Was she dead?
There was a square in front of her, the focus of which was a circular fountain from which grew a large tulip shaped organ that throbbed metrically, like a beating heart. The peak of this abomination was an inflamed, rubbery orifice that spat and choked as the fat, stinking body that supported it shuddered with every convulsion. Black, gelatinous blood trickled down its sides and accumulated at its base forming a pool of thick, bubbling liquid. It was sight that only Dante himself could possibly have conceived.
From the square sprouted nine paths, their sides lined with bony trees and throbbing buildings. Then more movement, from one of the paths. The outline of a dark figure emerged from behind one of the buildings. But it was out of proportion, towering high above the bone trees. A human torso and a tiny head on giant, spindly legs, like a circus performer on stilts. The creature’s movement was irregular. It looked unbalanced, its top half seemingly too bulky for its brittle legs to carry it. But it made quick progress across the square and was soon creeping its way around the fountain less than ten metres from her. Alix froze. She could do nothing but watch as the creature bent low from its elevated position and regarded her with bright red eyes.
She could see now that its spider-like frame led to a woman’s torso, grey skin wrapped tightly around red, swollen breasts. Arms twice as long as hers stuck out at odd angles, biceps flexed, pushing veins to the surface of the skin. Its midriff disappeared beneath a mass of black hair from where the legs protruded. Its head was small and round, with piercing eyes and gaunt cheekbones leading to a set of shark-like top teeth. A wet tongue flicked from side to side around purple gums. It took Alix a while to realise that it had no lower jaw, so that the top of its mouth overhung its face exposing the inside of its throat, a tangle of red and blue conduits disappearing into its chest. She felt like her heart would shatter with fear.
The devil’s head was slanted to one side, as if it were appraising her inquisitively. Alix saw its cheekbones tighten and the muscles that lined its neck pulse. It emitted a low gargling noise and she realised, to her horror, that perhaps it was trying to speak to her. Its tongue lashed furiously producing more dreadful, unnatural noises. Wisps of thin, silver hair fell down around its face as it slowly lifted its arm, bones cracking and creaking, and extended a bony finger outwards. It was pointing, she thought. Mesmerised, Alix followed where the creature was indicating, turning her head cautiously, dreading what she might see, until she stopped, realising that she was now looking at what the creature had wanted her see, what sight it had wanted to burn into her soul.
Chapter 49
It was always the same dream.
As far back as her memory stretched, Alix had dreamt of the same thing: a strange place, usually a centre of sorts, around which nine channels or paths were connected. The places were always different, constantly shifting form and content; a dream kaleidoscope. Sometimes the places were peaceful: a park, a forest, a school. Sometimes they were haunting: an abandoned warehouse, a deserted hotel, a scrap-yard. And sometimes they were off the weirdness scales.
The living world was just part of the same chronicle of dreams, she thought. It wasn’t real.
Which meant she wasn’t dead.
She was freezing, although her clothes were saturated in sweat. Her head throbbed with that groggy feeling one associates with having too much to drink the night before. Her legs were heavy. She was lying on the floor. She didn’t want to move yet; she wasn’t ready. When she opened her eyes, all she saw was brightness. It felt good: the coldness, the damp, the light. It all meant that the devil wasn’t real. That the walls were just walls and the floor wasn’t alive.
Then she remembered the fire. She remembered the pain in her lungs and the burns on her face and arms. Her skin must have melted off. She daren’t move. Was she horribly disfigured? How had she survived? Had she in fact survived? Her mind was scrambled, like every thought was obscured by a thick fog.
She vaguely noticed that the orange tunic she was wearing was made of thick, itchy material. Her heart lurched. It meant that someone had undressed her. No pants or bra. What the Hell had happened to her?
Welcome back¸ said a voice inside her head. The voice wasn’t hers. She ignored it.
Slowly, things came into focus. She was lying on the floor. Why wasn’t she in a hospital bed? Ahead of her, a door. Something was tight around her waist. The walls were white. Everything was white. She touched her face, felt the coldness of her fingers rub across her neck, felt every contour, every little blemish, every soft hair. Then her arms, smooth and pain free. The burning sensation was in her head and with every second she embraced herself it ebbed away and relief – glorious, restorative relief – flushed through her like a river bursting through a dam, crashing through the dry channel beyond and escaping out into the endless ocean. She wasn’t hurt. Battered and bruised and with a headache that would knock a rhino out, yes, but really hurt and burnt to a crisp? Apparently not.
It didn’t make sense. Had she dreamt the fire? No. The living city was a dream because it had nine paths. Anwick’s cell only had one door. That was real. No doubting it. The fire was real.
I appreciate that it’s been a stressful couple of hours, Alix, but you really need to get up now. The voice again. In her head. How odd. It was soft, melodic, but she couldn’t tell whether the speaker was male or female. It was both comforting and disturbing at the same time.
“That’s a massive understatement,” she mumbled, rubbing her head and starting to pick herself up from the floor. The blood rushed to her head so she propped herself up against the back wall of the cell.
The back wall of the cell.
Where the hell was she?
Half way is good. I can deal with half way, provided that it precedes the whole nine yards and you get your ass up Alix Franchot because time is not something that we are blessed with.
“Okay, okay,” she said, blinking in the light. “Just give me a minute.”
Jesus, she was talking to herself. And hearing voices in her head. It made her laugh. Laugh because she was relieved to be alive and because she was apparently now mad. She remembered an anecdote from her psychology degree. In the seventies, a group of students from the US carried out a study into the way that madness was diagnosed. They split up and attended different psychiatric institutions and attempted to get themselves admitted. They pretended to be suffering from a delusional psychosis with no symptoms other than they claimed to hear voices in their heads. The point was to show how easy it was to get sectioned. They succeeded. It took some of them over a year to be discharged and certified sane despite coming clean after the first week.
Claiming to hear voices gets you into a whole heap of trouble. That’s why most people keep it to themselves.
“Okay,” she said. “I’m up.” And she was, although her legs felt like jelly. Was this Anwick’s cell? She crossed the room to the door but her progress was suddenly halted and she felt a sharp tug around her waist. The leather strap that had bound Anwick to the wall. She looked back. The cord was fed into a small hole in the wall. She pulled it. Nothing.
“Fuck,” she said.
I’m pleased you’ve seen our predicament. Don’t waste your energy trying to pull the cord out of the wall. The voice inside Alix’s head didn’t sound as comforting now that her senses had returned. It was crystal clear; not the far away whispers that people who heard voices often described. It was like her own voice sounded in her head: pure, uncontaminated. She shouted out, “Hey! Hello! Hello!” She stopped and listened. There it was. “Hey! Mary had a little lamb!” And again.
Her feet were as white as snow, the voice replied. She stopped and fell to the floor again, slumped up against the wall, defeated.
I guess you were listening for the echo, the voice said.
“Yes,” she replied. When she had shouted, the acoustics of Anwick’s cell had fired the noise around a few times before it evaporated. But the voice inside her head only resonated in her ears.
Would you like me to shout, Alix? The voice offered. That way you can tell for sure that I’m in your head.
“No, no. It’s fine. Really. Things couldn’t really get any weirder anyway so, what the Hell, bring on the talking voices in my head.”
I appreciate this is difficult for you. The voice sounded genuine enough.
“No, to be fair, I don’t think you have any fucking idea how difficult this is for me.” Aix hunched herself up in the corner, arms folded over crossed legs. It reminded her of her secondary school rebel days when she spent the whole of one Saturday in detention for putting salt in Mr Johnstone’s coffee curled up in the corner of her classroom singing the theme from the Breakfast Club. She had spent the whole of next Saturday in detention doing what she was supposed to do. Those were the only two detentions she had had. The rebel days were... short.
I can help, the voice said. If you want to understand, I can help.
Alix laughed weakly. “Can you? I doubt that.”
I can explain why you didn’t die in the fire.
Alix thought about that. The fire. Trauma. She had been through a traumatic event. The nightmare she had had when she was out cold. Sleep paralysis perhaps. Her unconscious mind had created a latent personality as a coping method, to help her overcome her ordeal. It would probably also construct a seemingly logical explanation for the fire which would calm her, bring down her anxiety level and allow her to survive. If it’s one thing the human mind did well it was survival. There: a psychological explanation for the voice. She felt better already.
“Okay, shoot.”
My name is Azrael.
“Of course it is.” Of course it is. The alternative personality that Anwick had constructed. Eugene Anwick: the man who was so mad, he couldn’t remember whether he’d killed his wife and an innocent nine year old girl. This day was getting better by the minute.
Chapter
50
The disturbing thing was: Alix didn’t feel mad. That was disturbing because, of course, mad people don’t feel mad. Mad people feel normal. Generally, Alix felt normal, which is why the conversation she was apparently having with herself was even more disconcerting.
She sat in the corner of the cell. The smell of smoke hung in the air. That meant it was Anwick’s cell, but his charred remains weren’t there. She shuddered at the thought of his burning body, how silently he seemed to accept his fate. How unnaturally he had held out his arms, surrendered to the flames. He hadn’t jumped around, or sprawled on the floor like she imagined someone seriously on fire would. He had
just stood there and died.
And then at the back of her mind, the sound of his viscera... sizzling.
She tried to push aside the voice in her head by concentrating on the questions she had to answer: how and why did Anwick suddenly catch fire? Where was he now? How had she escaped choking to death? Why wasn’t her face burnt? Who had tied her to the wall of Anwick’s cell and why? Where was Omotoso?
She blinked a few times and things became a little clearer. The walls were scorched, blackened by the heat and the smoke. She felt short of breath. Her head throbbed. There was the low hum of the blood rushing past her ears.
Alix?
The voice again; the soft, earnest voice.
Have you had your moment? I know there’s a lot to take in but we really need to be working our way out of here.
“Oh really?” she laughed, “and how do you propose we achieve that?”
Well - was that a sigh? Did the voice just sigh? – perhaps if you start by getting up. It really is in your best interest to listen to me now but, if you do, I promise I will explain everything.
The unanswerable questions spun around in her head - Ash, Anwick, Innsmouth, Zara, the fire – until she could no longer distinguish between them; in the same way that a storm is a mixture of wind, rain, thunder and lightning, the demarcation between the individual elements no longer seems important. It’s just a storm.
She hadn’t expected the tears to come but they rolled down her face like the rain on autumn leaves. She tasted the salt as they passed her lips, following the contours of her cheeks and culminating at the bottom of her chin before finally falling off onto her knees, glinting in the artificial light as they fell. She broke down, put her head between her legs, bent her neck as far over as she could and clenched her teeth, willing back the tears, summoning up something from somewhere to help her.
Church of Sin (The Ether Book 1) Page 21