by Mike Ashley
“We’re going to Hell,” the New Doctor said.
“Probably,” Sigmund said, edging away.
She sighed. “No, really – we’re going into the underworld. Or, well, sort of a visiting room for the underworld.”
“I’ve heard rumors about that.” Hell’s anteroom was where Carlotta found her ghostly lovers. “One of the Table’s last remaining mystic secrets. I’m surprised they didn’t lose that, too, when they lost the key to the moon and the scryer’s glass and all those other wonders in the first war with the Templars.”
“Much has been lost.” The New Doctor pushed a shelf, which swung easily away from the wall on secret hinges, revealing an iron grate. “But that means much can be regained.” She pressed a red button. “Stop fidgeting, Sigmund. I’m not going to kill you. But I do want to know, how did you get into the Old Doctor’s office and see me kill him, when I know you were on assignment with Carlsbad in Belize at the time? And how did you disappear afterwards? Bodily bilocation? Ectoplasmic projection? What?”
“Time travel,” Sigmund said. “I don’t just see into the past. Sometimes I travel into the past physically.”
“Huh. I didn’t see anything about that in the Old Doctor’s notes.”
“Oh, no. He kept the most important notes in his head. So why aren’t you going to kill me?”
Something hummed and clattered beneath the floor.
“Because I can use you. Why haven’t you turned me in?”
Sigmund hesitated. He’d liked the Old Doctor, who was the closest thing he’d ever had to a father. He hated to disrespect the old man’s memory, though he knew the Old Doctor had seen him as a research tool, a sort of ambulatory microfiche machine, and nothing more. “Because I’m ready for things to change. I thought I wanted to be an operative, but I’m tired of the endless pointless round-and-round, not to mention being shot and stabbed and thrown from moving trains. Under your leadership, I think the Table might actually achieve something.”
“We will.” The grinding and humming underground intensified, and she raised her voice. “We’ll find the cup, and see God, and get answers. We’ll find out why he created the world, only to immediately abandon his creation, letting chaos fill his wake. But first, to Hell. Here.” She tossed something glittering toward him, a few old subway tokens. “To pay the attendant.”
The grinding stopped, the grate sliding open to reveal a tarnished brass elevator car operated by a man in a cloak the color of dust and spiderwebs. He held out his palm, and Sigmund and the New Doctor each dropped a token into his hand.
“Why are we going…down there?” Sigmund asked.
“To see the Old Doctor, and get some of that information he kept only in his head. I know where to find the cup – or where to find the map that leads to it, anyway – but I need to know what will happen once I have the cup in hand.”
“Why take me?”
“Because only insane people, like Carlotta, risk going to Hell’s anteroom alone. And if I took anyone else, they’d find out I was the one who killed the Old Doctor, and they might be less understanding about it than you are.”
She stepped into the elevator car, and Sigmund followed. He glanced into the attendant’s past, almost reflexively, and the things he saw were so horrible that he threw himself back into the far corner of the tiny car; if the elevator hadn’t already started moving, he would have pried open the doors and fled. The attendant turned his head to look at him, and Sigmund squeezed his eyes shut so that he didn’t have to risk seeing the attendant frown, or worse, smile.
“Interesting,” the New Doctor said.
After they returned from Hell, Sigmund and the New Doctor fucked furiously beneath the card table in the Old Doctor’s library, because sex is an antidote to death, or at least, an adequate placebo.
“That’s it, then,” the New Doctor said. “We’re going to the Himalayas.”
“Great,” Ray said. “I always wanted to eat a Yeti.”
“I think you’re hairy enough already,” Carlotta said.
Sigmund and the New Doctor sat beneath a ledge of rock, frigid wind howling across the face of the mountain. Carlsbad was out looking for Ray and Carlotta, who had stolen all the food and oxygen and gone looking for the temple of the cup alone. They wanted to kill God, not ask him questions, so their betrayal was troublesome but not surprising. Sigmund probably should have told someone about their planned betrayal, but he felt more and more like an actor outside time – a position which, he now realized, was likely to get him killed. He needed to take a more active role.
“Ray and Carlotta don’t know the prophecy,” Sigmund said. “Only the Old Doctor knew, and he only told us. They have no idea what they’re going to cause, if they reach the Temple first.”
“If they reach the Temple first, we’ll die along with the rest of the world.” The New Doctor was weak from oxygen deficiency. “If Carlsbad doesn’t find them, we’re doomed.” She looked older, having left the safety of the library and the archives, and the past two years had been hard. They’d travelled to the edges and underside of the Earth, gathering fragments of the map to the temple of the cup, chasing down the obscure references the New Doctor had uncovered in the archives.
First they’d gone deep into the African desert, into crumbling palaces carved from sentient rock; then they’d trekked through the Antarctic, looking for the secret entrance to the Earth’s war-torn core, and finding it; they’d projected themselves, astrally and otherwise, into the mind of a sleeping demigod from the jungles of another world; and two months ago they’d descended to crush-depth in the Pacific Ocean to find the last fragment of the map in a coral temple guarded by spined, bioluminescent beings of infinite sadness. Ray had eaten one of those guardians, and ever since he’d been sweating purple ink and taking long, contemplative baths in salt water.
The New Doctor had ransacked the Table’s coffers to pay for this last trip to the Himalayas, selling off long-hoarded art objects and dismissing even the poorly-paid hereditary janitorial staff to cover the expenses. And now they were on the edge of total failure, unless Sigmund did something.
Sigmund opened his pack and removed his last vial of the Old Doctor’s most potent exotic upper. “Wish me bon voyage,” he said, and snorted it all.
Time unspooled, and Sigmund found himself beneath the same ledge, but earlier, the ice unmarked by human passage, the weather more mild. Moving manically, driven by drugs and the need to stay warm, he piled up rocks above the trail and waited, pacing in an endless circle, until he heard Carlotta and Ray approaching, grunting under the weight of stolen supplies.
He pushed rocks down on them, and the witch and the phage were knocked down. Sigmund made his way to them, hoping they would be crushed – that the rocks would have done his work for him. Carlotta was mostly buried, but her long fingernails scraped furrows in the ice, and Sigmund gritted his teeth, cleared away enough rocks to expose her head, and finished her off with the ice axe.
She did not speak, but Sigmund almost thought he saw respect in her expression before he obliterated it. Ray was only half-buried, but unmoving, his neck twisted unnaturally. Sigmund sank the point of the axe into Ray’s thigh to make sure he was truly dead, and the phage did not react. Sigmund left the axe in Ray’s leg. He turned his back on the dead and crouched, waiting for time to sweep him up again in its flow.
Carlsbad found Ray and Carlotta dead, and brought back the supplies. By then Sigmund was back from the past, and while the New Doctor ate and rested, he took Carlsbad aside to tell him the truth: “There’s a good chance we might destroy the world.”
“Hmm,” Carlsbad said.
“There’s a prophecy, in the deep archives of the Table, that God will only return when the world is destroyed by fire. But it’s an article of faith – the basis of our faith – that when the contents of the cup are swallowed by an acolyte of the Table, God will return. So by approaching the cup – by intending to drink from it – we might collapse the pro
bability wave in such a way that the end of the world begins, fire and all, in the moments before we even touch the cup.”
“And you and the New Doctor are okay with that?”
“The New Doctor thinks she can convince God to spare the world from destruction, retroactively, if necessary.”
“Huh,” Carlsbad said.
“She can be very persuasive,” Sigmund said.
“I’m sure,” Carlsbad replied.
The fire began to fall just as they reached the temple, a structure so old it seemed part of the mountain itself. The sky went red, and great gobbets of flame cascaded down, the meteor shower to end all others. Snow flashed instantly to steam on all the surrounding mountains, though the temple peak was untouched, for now.
“That’s it, then,” Carlsbad said. “Only the evil in you two is keeping me alive.”
“No turning back now,” the New Doctor said, and started up the ancient steps to the temple.
Ray, bloodied and battered, left arm hanging broken, stepped from the shadows beside the temple. He held Sigmund’s ice axe in his good hand, and he swung it at the New Doctors head with phenomenal force, caving in her skull. She fell, and he fell upon her, bringing the axe down again and again, laying her body open. He looked up, face bruised and swollen, fur sprouting from his jaw, veins pulsing in his forehead, poison and ink and pus and hallucinogens oozing from his pores. “You can’t kill me, junkie. I’ve eaten wolverines. I’ve eaten giants. I’ve eaten angels.” As he said this last, he began to glow with a strange, blue-shifted light.
“Saving your life again,” Carlsbad said, almost tenderly, and then he did what the Table always counted on him to do. He swelled, he stormed, he smashed, he tore Ray to pieces, and then tore up the pieces.
After that he began to melt. “Ah, shit, Sigmund,” he said. “You just aren’t evil enough.” Before Sigmund could say thank you, or goodbye, all that remained of Carlsbad was a dark pool, like a slick of old axle grease on the snow.
There was nothing for Sigmund to do but go on.
“The cup holds the blood of God,” the Old Doctor said. “Drink it, and God will return, and as you are made briefly divine by swallowing the substance of his body, he will treat you as an equal, and answer questions, and grant requests. For that moment, God will do whatever you ask.” The Old Doctor placed his hand on Sigmund’s own. “The Table exists to make sure the cup’s power is not used for evil or trivial purposes. The question asked, the wish desired, has to be worth the cost, which is the world.”
“What would you ask?” Sigmund said.
“I would ask why God created the world and walked away, leaving only a cupful of blood and a world of wonders behind. But that is only curiosity, and not a worthy question.”
“So anyway,” Sigmund said, sniffing and wiping at his nose. “When can I start doing field work?” He wished he could see the future instead of the past. He thought this was going to be a lot of fun.
The cup in Sigmund’s hands held blood, liquid at the center, but dried and crusted on the cup’s rim. Sigmund scraped the residue of dried blood up with his long pinky fingernail. He took a breath. Let it out. And snorted God’s blood.
Time snapped.
Sigmund looked around the temple. It was white, bright, clean, and no longer on a mountaintop. The windows looked out on a placid sea. He was not alone.
God looked nothing like Sigmund had imagined, but at the same time, it was impossible to mistake him for anyone else. It was clear that God was on his way out, but he paused, and looked at Sigmund expectantly.
Sigmund had gone from the end of the world to the beginning. He was so high from snorting God’s blood that he could see individual atoms in the air, vibrating. He knew he could be jerked back to the top of the ruined world at any moment.
Sigmund tried to think. He’d expected the New Doctor to ask the questions, to make the requests, so he didn’t know what to say. God was clearly growing impatient, ready to leave his creation forever behind. If Sigmund spoke quickly, he could have anything he wanted. Anything at all.
“Hey,” Sigmund said. “Don’t go.”
I, HARUSPEX
Christopher Priest
Yes, I had to look the word “haruspex” up in a dictionary as, in my ignorance and before reading the story, I thought it might be someone’s name. In fact it was a diviner amongst the ancient Romans who sought to interpret omens from a study of the entrails of sacrificed animals. Its relevance in the following powerful story will soon become apparent. Christopher Priest (b. 1943) is one of Britain’s most accomplished writers of science fiction and fantasy. He is perhaps best known for his novel The Prestige (1995), which was filmed to much critical success in 2006, but he had been writing short fiction for over thirty years.
Priest has never followed fashion and has defiantly produced material of striking originality and high quality. Other books include A Dream of Wessex (1977), The Glamour (1984) and The Separation (2002), though perhaps his strangest book remains Inverted Island (1974), which won the British Science Fiction Award as that year’s best novel. Priest’s website is at www.christopher-priest.co.uk
The morning of that January day was icy cold with bright but slanting sunlight, the blue sky lending an electric radiance to the hoar frost that lay sharply on the grass and shrubs of the Abbey grounds. Earlier I had taken a brief walk across the Long Lawn, but the pre-dawn chill had driven me indoors again after a few minutes. Now I waited in the draughty main entrance hall of the Abbey, behind the closed double doors, listening for the sound of tyres on the gravel drive outside.
The car sent by the solicitor arrived punctually, only a few seconds after the clock in the stairwell had finished chiming nine o’clock. I snatched the doors open as soon as I heard the car come to a halt. The frozen air swirled in and around me.
The simple formality began.
The chauffeur climbed out of the driver’s seat, lowering his head to one side to avoid dislodging his cap, then straightened his full-buttoned jacket with a jerking motion at the hem. He stood erect. Without looking in my direction he walked smartly to the rear compartment of the car, and held the door open. He stared into the distance. Miss Wilkins stepped down: a brief vision of silken stockings, a tight black skirt, glossy shoes, mousquetaire gloves, a discreet hat with a wide brim and a veil. She was clutching the small, box-shaped parcel I was expecting.
As she climbed the double flight of steps towards the main door the chauffeur followed. He stood protectively behind her as she confronted me. As usual she did not look directly at me but held out the package for me to take. She was looking down at the steps, a parody of demureness. Intoxicating waves of her civet-based perfume drifted across to me, and I could not suppress a relishing sniff.
I took the package from her, and also the release form that required my signature, but now I had the parcel in my hands I was no longer in any hurry. I shook the package beside my ear, listening to the satisfying, provocative sound of the hard little pellets rattling around inside. All that potential locked within! I stared directly at Miss Wilkins, challenging her to look back at me, but her expression remained frightened and evasive. She could not leave without my signature on the release, so naturally I made her wait.
I like to see fear in another person’s face, and in spite of her seeming composure, and her deliberate avoidance of my gaze, Miss Wilkins could hide her apprehension no better than she could conceal her youthful allure. She was trembling, a hint of convulsive movement that induced a terrible bodily craving in me. As usual, she had gone to manifest efforts to make herself unattractive to me. The jacket and skirt of her suit, made of heavy, businesslike serge, and of forbidding stiffness, for me only served to emphasize the hint of feminine ripeness that lay beneath. The delay I was causing interested me, the fear in the young woman stimulated me, and her scents were all but irresistible.
I said softly, “Will you enter my house, Miss Wilkins?”
Beneath the veil, her steadfas
t gaze at the ground was briefly interrupted; I saw her long lashes flicker.
“I dare not,” she said, in a whisper.
“Then…”
The moment was interrupted by the chauffeur, who shifted his weight in an impatient, threatening manner.
“Please just sign the receipt, Mr Owsley,” he said.
I did not mind him intervening, although I resented the sense of intimidation. He had his job to do; I expected only that he should do it civilly. I gave the young woman an appreciative smile for bringing me my pellets, hoping to excite another response, perhaps even a glimpse of her eyes, but during the many brief visits she had made in the last few months she had never once looked straight at me. I fussed with my pen, making it seem that it was unexpectedly dry of ink, but I must have tried this once before in the past. Miss Wilkins had another pen at the ready, concealed in her gloved hand, and she moved deftly to provide me with it.
I took it from her, contriving to brush my fingers against the soft fabric covering the palm of her hand, but once I had the thing in my hand there were no more excuses for delay. I signed the receipt for the package, and Miss Wilkins seized it from me with a fearful sweep of her hand.
There was a momentary unavoidable collision of her fingers with mine, but she turned back to the steps and at once hurried down them to the car. The chauffeur strode beside her. Her last scents briefly swirled around me, and I darted my face through them, sniffing them up: not everything of the flesh she exuded was concealed by the bottled perfume.