London Macabre

by Savile, Steve

  Now the One Tree stood alone in the centre of the lawn, its gnarled roots grown up out of the ground while the branches hung down heavily, trailing on the grass like dragging knuckles. A single black-skinned apple clung to one of the denuded branches. The rest of the fruit lay rotting on the ground, riddled with maggots. The flesh had yellowed where the skin had been eaten through. Cain kicked aside one of the rotten apples, his smile spreading as he thought of all the problems another apple had caused his father. It was hard to believe this husk of a tree had once contained all the knowledge of the world; harder still to believe that God had been so cruel as to place it there in the centre of their walled-in Garden-world. What did he expect? Obviously the only reasonable answer to that question was He expected them to fail Him; to bite into the apple, just as he expected Pandora to open her box and let all of his darker creations out, otherwise why create them in the first place? Knowledge and evil, of course He wanted them out in the world. He wanted them to bloom. A world without knowledge could never flourish. A world without evil could never understand the true power of good. It was a world without balance and a world without balance was a world forever be trapped in this limbo where things didn’t age, didn’t mature, where wisdom did not exist and where life had no value. Death, Cain had long ago decided, was the sole thing that gave life value. That had to be the truth, the secret of the One Tree. He couldn’t know for sure because he had never partaken of the forbidden fruit, but he knew their Lord enough to know that this God of theirs was a perverse master. Why create a well and bless the water with the taste of eternity if you didn’t want your children to live forever? Why create poisonous roots and herbs if you did not want them to die?

  There was permanence in change.

  It was the only way life could flourish.

  And the one sure thing that death brought about was change.

  He ignored the bones scattered across the grass and walked toward the One Tree. He only had eyes for the grim tree. Within the ridges of blackened bark he began to see the outline of a man take shape as he neared. At first he assumed it was simply shadow play, a trick of the light on the bark as he moved closer, the angle of the sun shifting or some such, but he quickly realised it was no such thing. It wasn’t a carving either. Nor was it a Green Man formed from lichen and moss and knots in the bark. Twenty feet away it became obvious that it was a man, though how he had become trapped within the twist trunk of the tree itself Cain had no idea. He stopped ten feet away from the great bole, his breathing quickening.

  He knew the face that looked back at him. He knew it as well as his own. Better, in fact, because vanity was not one of his sins.

  He stared almost lovingly at the thick creases in the bark that made up the man’s face, half-expecting the man to flash one of his bright shining smiles, only of course it wasn’t a man at all. Cain stared at the face of the angel, once first among them all, before his own fall from grace. The Morning Star fallen from Heaven. Even rendered in the shadows and deep lines of rotten bark it was the most beautiful face Cain had ever set eyes upon. The prodigal Cain reached out, his fingers lingering upon every line of the Morning Star’s face lovingly. His reaction to the angel shocked him. Given the blood of so many angelkind that stained his hands it was incongruous that he should feel something akin to adoration for the son of dawn. But there it was, undeniable. He allowed his touch to linger over the fallen angel’s cheek.

  I must wake him. That is why I returned. That is what my God always intended. That is why I was banished and not killed, and that is why Uriel could not stand in my way now. This moment was preordained.

  The thoughts entered his mind unbidden.

  He felt the rightness of them.

  It had always been his destiny to put the Morning Star back in the dawn sky.

  But how?

  What incantation would wake the sleeper?

  What sacrifice?

  He felt the tree stir beneath his touch, as though responding to the surge of love he felt. And he understood the Morning Star’s punishment better than anyone alive—after all his had been the same. By loving so deeply and intensely he had been condemned to exist forever apart from His love. That was how perverse their God was.

  He looked around, but the thought was already there, bright in his mind. That last fruit still clinging to the withered branch of the One Tree. Taste the fruit, feel all the knowledge of creation flood into his brain and being, and with it all of the answers to questions that had yet to even occur to him.

  Cain reached up, plucking the last fruit from the black tree, and took a bite. His teeth crunched through to the core. The juice of the black apple trickled down his dry throat even as he chewed the rest of it. He swallowed, not knowing what to expect. Would all knowledge suddenly assail him in a torrent of visions? Or would it just be there, known? How would he find the answer he needed to help the Morning Star from this hell, frozen out of time in the flesh of a rotten tree?

  But the fruit was different now, the wisdom it contained as blackened as its skin and the branch that bore it. The darkest wisdom and blackest secrets of all creation flowered within him. A chill passed over his soul.

  The first image that rose up, all encompassing, was of bathing in the blood of angels to open the gate to Eden. It was about more than the blood of innocence, it was about spilling the blood of his brother’s keeper. It was his first glimpse of the truth. And with it came so many more fragments of knowledge, all of them together combining to overwhelm him. And he began to see what it would take to raise the archangel they called so many names but never his own. The names filled his mind like taunts: Phosphorous, Light-Bearer, Morning Star, Day Star, Stella Matutina, Venus, Lumiel, The Torch of Baphomet, Masema, Devil, Azazel, Eosphorus, Satariel, Baal Davar, Lucifer, Belial, Serpent, Tempter, Iblis, Adversary, Satan and so many more twisted names. Not once did they call him by his true name, Sataniel, marking him as brother of Michael, Raphael, Gabriel, and Uriel.

  And that was the key, Cain knew. Uriel, his brother’s keeper …

  But it was like staring into a mirror the moment after it has been shattered into hundreds of thousands of pieces, some thinner than a whisper in the cold air, others thick and chunky but no less delicate. They showed everything, the world all at once, but it wasn’t the world he knew. It was diffracted and refracted, convex and concave and just plain wrong. Before he could fixate on the slain archangel at the centre of the pattern the fragments of—what were they? Memory? Knowledge?—mirrored glass were consumed by fire. The first tongue of flame licked at the sharp edge of the memory-shard, charring it black, and then, like that, it started to smoke and burn and in the space of two heartbeats, three, it went from smouldering to burning to gone. But even in that there was more wisdom. The archangels were creatures of fire, while he, Cain, son of Adam, was a creature of clay.

  The Morning Star seemed to smile at him through the rough bark, approving his thought as they traversed the wilderness of mirrors. Cain reached out to touch the living wood once again, as though he could feel the angel beneath its rough surface. No matter how important to his father, it was just wood, and wood burned. It was one of its many uses. Ironic then that it had been turned into a prison for a creature of fire. They burned when they were brought into this world, and then in everything they did they burned, burned, burned, burned, burned. Why then wouldn’t they burn when they left this world? The warmth of the Morning Star’s smile filled him.

  Cain turned his back on the black tree and returned to Uriel’s corpse.

  The sky above him was red with flame. Something was happening in the city he had left behind. It did not concern him.

  He knelt at the side of the dead angel. He could feel the heat coming off his corpse in waves. When a clay being died it turned cold and decayed … but when a creature of fire died, like the phoenix beast, it rose up in flame leaving only ash behind. Uriel would burn. It was part of the ascension ritual. Cain grasped the black angel under the arms and dragge
d him bodily across the grass toward the tree. As he neared he felt the heat rising beneath Uriel’s skin. By the time Cain had dragged his dead weight to a spot in the shade of the black tree, every inch of the archangel’s ebon skin rippled with subcutaneous bubbles. It began as one or two, seemingly responding to the homunculus’s touch but quickly, as the flesh beneath was brought to the boil, hundreds of bubbles welled up, the water in Uriel’s corpse evaporating, and as it changed state the gases bloated up beneath the skin looking for a weakness in the skin to escape through, just as the angel’s soul had in that pulse of pure white light that had lit the constellations in the moments after its death.

  Cain did not have time to wait for nature to take its inevitable course. He looked around for where he had dropped his sword stick—such a wonderful invention of this polite society, like the pistol, a way of killing without getting blood on your hands. It was so much more civilised than beating your victim to death with the sharp edge of a stone. He found it lying on the last step on the other side of the Ald Gate. The homunculus hesitated for a moment, unsure whether leaving the Garden again would mean he could never return—there were no angels left for him to kill, after all—or if now that he had returned the curse that had enforced his exile from His love had been forever broken.

  In the end he decided it wasn’t worth the risk.

  ”Civilization is overrated,” he said, turning his back on the open gate. ”There’s plenty to be said for getting your hands dirty every now and again.”

  The Garden had never been proofed against murder—the intention and therefore the need—hadn’t existed before Cain left, and after his exile the place could never be the same again. It couldn’t return to innocence. It took him a few minutes to find what he was looking for and even as his hand closed around it he knew it was the same stone. This time he allowed himself the luxury of memory. It had the feeling of ritual about it. Uriel’s blood was still fresh on the stone, but the memory of a much more distant murder was buried deep within it. It felt good to hold it in his hand once again. The stone had a sharp edge where it had been broken like a flint up against another harder stone. That edge would cut through flesh and bone eventually, if he delivered the blows with enough force.

  Of course he didn’t need to completely remove the angel’s skull to vent the fire. Opening it up would be enough.

  Cain returned to the tree. Under the shelter of its gnarled branches he felt an immediate and all-consuming sense of calm settle on his shoulders. The world beyond the branches ceased to exist to him. He knew it was a form of madness, but then so was so much of his life that it didn’t matter. He hefted the stone in his hand, amazed that it was still here and that he had found it so easily. That too was the nature of madness. It made everything seem so right. Fated.

  And then he went to work on opening up the angel’s skull with the sharp edge of the stone. Again and again, Cain brought the stone down. At first it was messy work. The skin split. There was blood. It didn’t pump because there was no heart to drive it. It didn’t need to. Every new blow with the stone splashed up more and more blood until the grass around them was soaked with it. And Cain was covered with it. It was slick and sticky beneath his fingers but not once did the homunculus lose his grip on the stone. And each time as the stone struck, bone sparks flashed, again and again. The bone cracked, first with the smallest hairlines that widened into fissure as the plates were driven apart. Cain hollowed out the archangel’s skull, and then as the bone cracked wide open on the emptiness that had been Uriel’s core, and the gaseous bubbles beneath the Uriel’s skin leaked out through the ragged wounds left by the sharp stone, a single spark ignited.

  All it took was one spark.

  The flame burned blue, so hot it scorched the earth as it chased around the archangel’s corpse. The rippling gas bubbles made it seem for a moment as though Uriel struggled to rise, and then the corpse caved in on itself and the fire spread out questing for things to burn.

  Cain stepped back as the angelfire raced across the grass, scouring the earth, and found the tree.

  Above him, the fire in the sky seemed to mirror the fire below, blanketing the sky from horizon to horizon as it danced. He felt the heat from all sides; beating down on him from above; driving him back from the tree as its branches burned to cinder and crumbled, raining down in soot and char; coming out from the last vestiges of the dead angel as his corpse turned to ash. There was no mercy from the flame. But the fiercest heart came from the Morning Star himself, wreathed in flame, emerged from the One Tree.

  And he was beautiful.

  There were no words. Cain felt the breath rush away from his lips and fell to his knees. He could not bring himself to look up, such was the radiance of the naked Sataniel. He understood all of his names now: Light-Bearer, Bright One, Morning Star, Torch. Every name reflected the fierce nature of his fire. Fire, fire, burning bright … Unable to bear the pain of Sataniel’s perfection, Cain pressed his face to the ground, trying to bury his gaze in the dirt.

  He had never felt more like a child of clay.

  Cain wept. Not the heart-wrenching sobs of sorrow, rather the silent tears of rapture. Sataniel was beyond beautiful. Even with his face pressed into the dirt of Eden the homunculus could see the angel burned into his mind’s eye. Fire burned beneath Sataniel’s skin. Cain could feel the overwhelming warmth of it. The kindness. This he had not expected. What had he expected? Wrath? Hatred? Even Sataniel’s shadow as it fell across him sent a delicious thrill surging through Cain’s blood. It was almost sexual with its potency.

  Sataniel spoke, his voice tender and every bit as beautiful as his face. ”I do not demand devotion, Kabil, murderer of Habil,” he lapsed into thoughtful silence, but still Cain did not dare raise his head. Cain had not heard those other names in forever, but as with Sataniel, they were merely names, not true names. He had been called worse, that much was true. ”Do you still hear him crying for vengeance? For the destruction of your seed? That was the justice of my Father, turn one brother against another, just as he had turned Micha’el against me,” the Morning Star lapsing again into silence. The silence stretched out so long that Cain looked up to see Sataniel gazing sadly at what remained of Uriel’s earthly form.

  ”It seems we both lost brothers in this place,” he said finally. There was no denying the sadness in his voice.

  Cain did not answer him.

  He could not speak.

  ”How could we have been so blind as to ever think this was paradise? Look at it, look,” he demanded, and Cain did, even though he knew exactly what he was going to see. It did not look like paradise. It didn’t look anything like the Garden he had grown up in. Was Uriel right? Had he done this? Had he destroyed paradise? Once, he might have taken a perverse sort of pride in the notion, but now, bathed in the warmth of Sataniel’s presence, he only felt loss. ”Now tell me, what do you see?”

  The homunculus Cain had no answer.

  ”I see a wretched reflection of my home. There’s nothing here. This place is a pale shadow. We are all of us shadows, reflections. Do you know what my brother’s name means?” he asked, ”Micha’el, Who is Like God.” Cain felt the sadness way heavy about him as Sataniel remembered some fantastic place. ”It was always a question, not an answer, but he never understood that. The only answer was always no one, no one is like God, not man, not angel. Just like this place is no paradise. Stand, walk with me,” Sataniel said, holding out his hand for Cain to take.

  The homunculus found himself rising and reaching out for the Morning Star’s hand. Sataniel nodded, a gentle smile touching his rich full lips. A crow lay in the grass at his feet. Cain hadn’t noticed it before. It was almost as though by mentioning his brother the bird’s carcass had been returned, drawn up out of the blackened earth. And with it, more memories surfaced.

  As though reading his mind, Sataniel held his hand a little tighter, offering assurance, and said, ”While Father gave my brother a sword with which to strike me down
, he chose to martyr yours and raised him up to the rank of Judge of Souls. Hardly seems fair does it? But that is how he always was, bring one brother closer to His love, cast the other out into the cold. The pattern repeats and repeats if you care to look for it. It’s the tragedy that is existence. We are not so different, you and I. Walk with me, Kabil who is Cain, son of the serpent. It is time to leave paradise,” but the way he said it left Cain in no doubt that the Morning Star thought of this place as anything but paradise.

  Cain cast one last lingering look back at the blackened tree, and at the wild grass and the withered plants, at the borders and the climbers and the bones. Having fought so desperately to find his way home he was reluctant to leave it so soon. He felt no affinity for the place. It wasn’t his home, and with that realization came the truth: it never had been. He wasn’t his brother; he wasn’t his father. Of course he wasn’t. Did the Morning Star know his father’s true nature? Did he understand the completeness of the betrayal in the Garden? He didn’t think so. It had taken him centuries to understand it himself, otherwise he wouldn’t have mentioned his brother, Micha’el, Who is Like God … the truth was so close if you thought about it. Man was made in ’God’s image. His father, Adam, the archangel Micha’el and God himself bore the same face. But that wasn’t the whole truth was it? That was a story fit for a fairy tale, like doppelgängers and homunculi and daemons crawled out of the pit. Adam had never been fashioned in God’s reflection, it had always been the vanity of Micha’el. Who is like God? Cain thought bitterly.

  They were the children of Micha’el, fashioned from the dirt of the earth. There was nothing remotely divine about the children born of clay. They lied to themselves, repeating those same lies over and over; how they were made in His image; how the Morning Star fell because he refused to bow down to the first man; how then the serpent destroyed paradise for them. But all of those lies spilled from the same source, trying to hide the truth that they were not God’s children at all, but rather were born of Micha’el’s vanity.