The Levelling

by William Mitchell

  Nonetheless the sensation was strange, and almost invasive, as Ardent scanned the thing over Howard. It never once touched him, but he could feel his flesh being pulled and pushed like iron filings under a magnet as Ardent moved it over him, staring into a lens fixed to the back of the thing.

  Then, Ardent put it down, before backing away to a chair in the corner. He looked pale, almost traumatised, and collapsed onto the chair rather than sitting in it.

  “What did you almost do?” he said to Howard. “What did I almost let you do?”

  Howard lifted his head, trying to process yet another inexplicable development.

  “Er ist giftig?” the sentry asked Ardent.

  Ardent nodded. “Giftig. Poisonous.”

  “Sollten wir ihn töten?” the sentry said.

  Ardent looked at Howard, recovering his composure. “Nein, noch nicht.” Then to Howard himself: “My colleague was just asking if we should kill you. What do you think, Howard Shale?”

  Howard didn’t reply, but tensed himself ready to run; the leash was off, and if the talk had turned to killing then it was time to act. At the same time he reached down the side of the bed next to the wall of the tent, trying to feel for the stretcher pole without them noticing.

  “I think we’ll let you live,” Ardent said. “For now anyway. After all, we have so much more to talk about. Amy—that was her name, wasn’t it?”

  Howard felt his eyes widen in surprise.

  “I saw everything,” Ardent said. “I know everything about you. I know that you’re an innocent in all this, but I finally know why Simon chose you. It was her you see, it was Amhazrel. She was there when Coventry burned, and she was the one who took your wife, and still has her now. Did you know the Germans created a new word after that attack, because no existing word was enough to describe what they’d done? They called it Coventrieren, or to ‘Coventrate’, to utterly annihilate with fire. But although they set the flames, Amhazrel guided them, and took everyone touched by them. Simon knew that, and he chose you right from the start knowing that Amhazrel would want to take you too. That was why you survived, how you found your way here. But Simon hid something on you, in your Aura. He must have irradiated you within an inch of your life to get it that strong. If I let you walk from here right now you’d be dead within a week from radiation poisoning. You were never meant to survive this mission—Simon signed your death warrant. If she had taken you though, it would have undone everything. And that can only mean that Simon is talking to them, negotiating with them. Somewhere in England, a space has been opened up, and Simon and his people are talking, to them. They want Amhazrel eliminated, before we can torture her into relinquishing her powers. They know we are close, so close, and agreeing to destroy her is Simon’s way of placating them in the face of my supposed transgression. And if he does, he will push us even further into the dark age we’ve inhabited for the last six thousand years. You thought you were here to kill a turncoat, Howard Shale. Well you were—but it wasn’t me.”

  Then Ardent turned to the sentry. “Jetzt kannst du ihn töten.” Now you can kill him.

  Howard moved before the last word was out of Ardent’s mouth. His fingers had reached the stretcher pole and it was now in his hand. He jumped up, pivoting with his feet to face Ardent and the man who was with him, swinging the pole round and into them as he did so.

  The pole hit Ardent in the face, knocking him backwards. The other man had been quick enough to jump back though. Howard grabbed the pole with both hands and pushed it broadside into the pair of them; Ardent was doubled over clutching at his face, while the other man was pulling his fist back ready for a punch. Howard had his feet braced though, and was able to push him back. Then Howard jabbed the end of the pole at the man’s throat, planting it in his wind pipe. The man collapsed, choking. Ardent was now standing again, with blood running from his nose and rage in his eyes. Ardent shouted something, some kind of order, and Howard knew he had less than a minute before more of Ardent’s followers arrived.

  He hit Ardent with the pole, square in the face, then across the back of his head as he doubled up. Ardent was on the floor in seconds, and Howard didn’t wait to see if he would get up. He ran from the room, back through the store rooms, the map room, and Ardent’s bizarre harem with the three concubines still drugged and listless. The two men who had been working in one of the further rooms were already on their way down, but Howard took them by surprise; they weren’t fighters, and the weight and reach of the pole soon put them on the floor as well.

  Howard emerged into the twilight near where the bonfire was still burning. He could hear shouts from the end of the quarry where the trailers were lined up, and could see men running toward him, attracted by Ardent’s calls. Sounds of rage were coming from further back in the tent as well; it sounded like Ardent was conscious again, and the more noise he made the more followers would come. Howard had no idea how many people were in this cult he’d created, but so far he’d seen around a dozen, eight of whom were running toward him right now.

  The stairway which had brought him into this place was near the trailer store, right where those men were coming from. If he went back into the tent though, he’d be trapped. That left only one place to run—the far end of the quarry, the part he hadn’t been able to see into, with every chance he’d be trapped there as well if there wasn’t a way up the cliff. He didn’t have time to stop and think though, so instead he ran, away from the tent and the trailers, past the fire, past the long tables, and round the corner into the furthest part of the quarry. And what he saw there stopped him in his tracks.

  It was a dead end, a final section of the quarry with no way up and no way out. But the space occupied by that last excavation was not empty. There was a structure there, like a neolithic henge, but formed of quartz blocks and pillars, a concentric arrangement of translucent slabs and other more elaborate shapes, precisely carved and positioned. There was a ring of Wehrmacht trailers inside that, with the crystalline structures they contained unpacked and unfolded to form intricate geometric shapes that extended upward and inward like tree branches leaning toward the light. Beyond those was a set of vertical structures from which ropes hung, glittering with embedded crystals like the ones he’d seen laid out behind him. All of these structures were illuminated, but the light was coming from within them, and no source of power was visible.

  Then in the spaces between the rings Howard noticed the remains of fires, like burned blackened shapes littering the floor of the quarry. It was only as he looked more closely that he saw they were human forms, over a hundred of them of all ages including children and babies with charred wire round their wrists and ankles. The sight sickened him; he’d seen evidence of similar savagery in this country before, carried out at the hands of the Germans themselves, and he’d seen the aftermath of Japanese atrocities that had given him nightmares for a year afterward. But Ardent was as British as Howard was—and yet he’d seen fit to oversee this.

  Then, finally, in the middle of this bizarre arrangement of quartz slabs and human sacrifices there was a set of huge prisms, completely encircling the central space, distorting what was beyond them so that nothing, not even the far side of the quarry, could be discerned. Yet Howard could tell that somewhere at the centre, held within that distortion of light and space, there was something looking back at him.

  The shape of the thing shifted as Howard moved, visible only in glances like shapes seen in a kaleidoscope. Howard felt himself gripped by fear, somehow knowing that if he was to see this thing in its entirety then it would destroy him, and suddenly he knew that this was what Teddy had seen, and the sight of it had ruined him.

  Then the space seemed to fold in on itself, shifting like a page being turned, but more like a three-dimensional space turning in some direction at right angles to every other axis. And on the other side of the page was a sunlit riverside, with grassy banks and a forest beyond. The forest was like a tropical jungle, but beautiful, with magnifice
nt towering trees filled with birds of every colour imaginable, and in amongst the branches was a series of wooden huts, strung together with rope bridges and aerial walkways like an entire village nestled in the canopy of the trees. Howard could see warm yellow lights in the windows and doorways of the huts, and each one seemed to be welcoming him in. There were people by the river too, either basking in the sun or walking along the waterside, picking fruit from the trees as a herd of elephants drank nearby, while the clear water ran slowly round and out of sight in the distance. It looked like somewhere Howard could just step into and spend the rest of his life there. And standing on the riverbank, smiling back at him, was Amy.

  “Howard, you’re here at last,” she said, suddenly closer to him despite having not moved. “I’ve been waiting for you for so long.”

  Howard took a step toward the scene, then another. “Amy? Is that really you?”

  “Of course it’s me. Why do you think I’ve been waiting here so long? Howard, I’ve wanted so much for you to come here too. This is like home. You remember the times we spent in my father’s orchard as children? Where we could play all day and help ourselves to anything? This is better. Come in, Howard. I want to see you, I want you to meet everyone here.”

  Howard took another step forward. He could feel the warmth of the sun, a pleasant warmth compared to the oppressive humidity of the jungle he’d crossed to get here, and he could hear the birdsong, and the laughter of the people lounging by the banks. And he could see Amy, just as he remembered her, not a day older than when he’d last seen her more than ten years before. He’d spent his whole life fighting, first to protect her and then to avenge her, but in here he could finally forget all of that and enjoy the peace he’d always wanted.

  “Come on Howard, it’s time,” she said, and she held out her hand to welcome him in. “It’s like paradise here. This is where we belong.”

  All he had to do was walk forward, one step after another, and he would be with her. He didn’t care how impossible it was, he didn’t care about anything rational, he just wanted to see her again. And so, he took his first step, and then the next, and then the next.

  He could see himself reflected in one of the crystal pillars as he walked, though bizarrely, even though he was walking forward toward Amy, it looked in the reflection as if he was stepping backwards instead. Yet the riverside forest was just ahead of him; he could even see and feel the bushes at his feet as he stepped through them. He leaned over at one point to shift a low branch out of the way—and saw his reflection bending over as well, except it looked like it was picking something up off the ground. He had to reach up after that, parting some overhanging vines so that he could step through—and he saw his reflection reach up too, except for some reason in the image he was holding the thing he’d picked up over his head, tipping it as he did so. He was closer to Amy now though; he could even feel the cool breeze coming off the river—but in the reflection it was like a liquid, running down over him, soaking into his clothes and his skin, volatile and fuming. He only had one more step to go though, one more step forward—yet his reflection was still walking backward, and was now just feet away from the bonfire.

  Then he felt the warmth of the sun, intensifying as he stepped out of the shade and onto the sunlit riverbank. The sun was fierce—the feel of it had gone from warm to hot, and was even becoming uncomfortable, but it was worth it to be here, so he stepped forward into its full heat.

  He reached out, touched Amy’s skin for the first time in over ten years, and took her hand in his.

  And then she was screaming at him.

  “Howard! Get out! Get back! Don’t come in!”

  At that moment he saw her as she really was—burned, twisted and disfigured, her skin charred and blackened, as she had been when her soul had been taken from the fire that had claimed her. The paradise jungle was gone too, or at least it had changed, and was now a nightmare landscape of tortured, deformed trees from which human forms hung, tangled in the branches, all burned as Amy was, and what was more there were thousands of them and every one of them was screaming. And that was when Howard realised, that everything Ardent had told him was true, the malicious entity he’d trapped here was real, and Howard was looking into its reality, at the hell occupied by every soul it had ever taken.

  The bodies in the quarry were the sacrifice, captives that Ardent had burned to death in an orgy of mass murder in order to lure this thing into the real world before ensnaring it with whatever ungodly mechanisms the Nazis had been toying with. And since then it had been trapped here, with only the memory of its jungle home, a home whose image it had tried to recreate around it here in the backwaters of Germany. And then, for a split second, Howard saw it, the entity who inhabited this place, and ruled it. It lasted only an instant, but the effect on him went beyond anything that the mere sense of vision could produce. It was as if the disparate senses within his mind had become suddenly linked, so that a mere shape, a three-dimensional form, could bypass the sense of vision altogether and invade the regions of his brain that produced pure unadulterated terror.

  For a second his body wasn’t his. He lost all strength, and could only produce one strangled, inchoate scream before falling to the ground. And at that point, with no further need for deception or trickery, the illusion was removed in its entirety and he saw where he really was. The hell-space of this creature was still before him, but right now he was lying in a fire on a quarry floor in Germany, doused in petrol, burning from head to toe with Ardent’s men standing round watching. It was too late even for the pain; the nerves in his skin had been burned away so completely he didn’t even have the capacity to feel the agony he knew he should have been suffering. Instead, all he could do was lie there as that demonic entity looked down on its newest prize, and reached out to take him. The pain might have eluded him, but he screamed nonetheless.

  Then the world around him convulsed. The ground heaved once, then twice, and the hell-space shook too, and this time it was the creature towering over him that was screaming. Something was wrong, something that was scaring it or hurting it for the first time in its existence, and it had happened when it had tried to take Howard. The walls of its reality were disintegrating, and even the entity itself was evaporating before Howard’s eyes.

  “Make this stop.”

  The voice didn’t reach Howard through his ears, but appeared in his mind as a fully-formed thought, without having to cross the intervening space as sound. Howard had no idea who had spoken though, or what was expected of him.

  “Make this stop,” the voice repeated, and only then did Howard realise that the entity before him was addressing him directly. And what was more, it was terrified.

  “Giftig,” Ardent’s man had said. Poisonous. Whatever Simon had done to him back in that antenna room, it had turned Howard into something toxic. This thing, this creature that harvested the souls of the dying, was not some unstoppable demonic force after all. It was a living thing, one that owed its existence to physical laws, which may have been different from those of the real world but were still laws nonetheless. And that meant it wasn’t a god, and things existed that could hurt it, and kill it. And right now, thanks to whatever Simon had done to him, that thing was Howard.

  “Make this stop,” it said yet again, and again Howard felt not only the words, but the despair behind them. “I spared you twice before. I have someone precious to you. You can make this stop.” It was an act of desperation on the part of the creature, communicating directly with an inferior being, an insect fit only to be hunted and tortured, but which now held the key to its survival. Yet Howard knew that whatever had caused this thing to spare him those times, it wasn’t for Howard’s benefit.

  He rolled out of the fire and onto the ground. He was still burning though, and his body was rapidly going into shock. His eyes were useless now, and his other senses were too; all he had was the link between this creature’s mind and his own, and even his own faculties were shutting
down. His mind had time for just one more coherent thought, and the realisation that came with it offered a chance of salvation. For Simon wasn’t the only one who had sought to manipulate this creature; Ardent had been working to a plan as well. If this thing could be hurt, it could also be coerced.

  “Give me power,” Howard thought, knowing that the creature would hear him. “Give me the power that people used to have.”

  “Never,” said the voice in his head. But the thing that was producing that voice was diminishing fast. It was almost gone, and as its life evaporated, its power did too.

  “I can save you,” Howard lied. “I can make this stop, and make you safe. Just give me the power.”

  “It is not yours,” the voice said.

  “Then make it mine. You are almost dead, I can see that you know that. Give me the power!”

  Then Howard sensed a change in it, a desperate need to survive no matter what it had to give up. Suddenly Howard could see, and hear, and move, and all damage had disappeared from his body.

  “Save me,” the voice said.

  Howard stood up. The flames that had engulfed him had disappeared as well, but had been replaced by an aura that shone almost as brightly. He could sense the control he had over the reality around him. He could shape it and manipulate it as easily as he could move his limbs. The thing before him was no longer terrifying, no longer demonic; it was just an animal, weakened and close to death. He moved into its hell-space, deliberately this time, invading this creature’s domain so that he could stand before it, except this time he was the one looking down.