by KW Jeter
“Elohim? Is that how they style themselves? Seems very Biblical of them. My religious education was spotty, so I cannot say with certainty, but I seem to recall that the word means something in Hebrew – gods, or angels, or such like.”
“How would I know?” Scape’s irritation audibly increased. “Look, they can call themselves whatever they want – doesn’t matter to me. Maybe all the good conspiracy names were already taken. But what I’m trying to tell you is that they’re nothing to mess with.”
“If you say so; your knowledge exceeds mine on this point. And with that being the case, I would appreciate some further information about them. Who are they? Other than their assumed name, I mean. What do they want? Specifically, what do they want with my son, that they have secured him in their no-doubt nefarious clutches?”
“It’s not just your son, Dower – they’ve got a thing for orphans in general. That’s why it was so hard to track down the kid. This Elohim bunch has been raiding orphanages up in Northern England and Scotland for years now – all on the hush-hush, of course – and rounding up children and sending ‘em down to someplace near London.”
“This seems highly unlikely – I would have thought there would be some public outcry, if such were actually happening.”
“Well, that’s sweet of you, but you’re dead wrong. When it comes to orphans, nobody’s ever really cared very much about what happens to them – and that was before all these big changes in the world we live in. Do you think that machines care about each other? So the more like machines that people become, the less they give a rat’s ass about anyone else. That’s just the way it goes.”
“But what purpose does this Elohim group have in acquiring these wretched children? I shudder to contemplate what sordid interest they might have – as a general rule, an untoward avidity of this nature never results in anything but the most scandalous fates for the children involved.”
“Wish I could tell you,” said Scape, “but I can’t – though I’m pretty sure it’s nothing like what you’re talking about. They’re up to something else. That’s why the Elohim are so dead set against the More Loving Embrace group – they’ve both got their agendas, and somehow these orphans that the Elohim have scooped up are involved. And you, too – somehow the More Loving Embrace have got it in their heads that if you’re able to track down your son, and make contact with him wherever the Elohim have got him and the other orphans stashed away, then they’re screwed. So they sent their agents out to kill you, to make absolutely sure that doesn’t happen.”
“I see – or rather, I do not.” Wearied by what passed as his explanation, I gave another shake of my head. “Why is it that whenever I press anyone, yourself included, to make clear the mysteries that continually enfold me, they respond with yet more mysteries? I would have been better off by never having sought enlightenment at all.”
“Suit yourself – but you asked. And frankly…” Scape tossed the pebble into the unnaturally still waters; it struck the surface with a minimal plunk. “We’ve wasted enough time talking. We need to get going.”
“And to where would that be?”
“Just about anywhere would be better – especially for you, pal. You got out of Blightley and Haze’s hands all right, but that doesn’t mean your ass is safe. I told you already: the More Loving Embrace wants you dead, and their guys are probably tracking you down here already. You got away from them twice – that doesn’t mean you’ll be lucky a third time. And–” Scape directed his disfigured visage straight toward me. “We’ve got other stuff to take care of.”
“Indeed? To what exactly do you refer?”
“What the hell have we been talking about all this time?” Scape’s gaze widened in astonishment. “Your son, moron! We don’t have him – right?” He spoke with elabourate slowness, as though to a child. “But we know where he is – right? Or at least I do. So we go… get… him. Right?”
“No… we… do not.” I answered him in the same plodding fashion. “You entirely mistake my interest in the matter, to the degree that I have any at all. My primary concern – and my only one – is with preserving my own skin intact. As for rescuing this child from whatever dire situation in which he has been placed–” I held up a forestalling hand, palm outward. “He certainly has my sympathies; I am not entirely hard-hearted about his welfare. But finding him, and rescuing him – that was a promise you made to Miss McThane; I gave no such avowal to her. How could I have? She was dead long before I even learned of the child’s existence.”
“Wait a minute.” Comprehension dawned behind the other’s eyes. “You sonuvabitch… she was your wife. She told me… that was how you thought of her. And now…”
“Do you think I care about your opinion?” I could hear my own voice turning colder and harder. “If I do, it is certainly to a lesser degree than I care about my own safety. I had little need of your telling me how greatly the More Loving Embrace desires – I had evidence enough of that already; I still do not know why they wish it, but then, apparently neither do you. With these Elohim people, I have had no experience, but if they are as deadly enemies of the More Loving Embrace as you indicate, then I can only assume that they are of an equally grim nature. I doubt if they would welcome me with open arms, if I were to turn up on their doorstep, enquiring about my son; more likely, their reaction would be of a similarly lethal type. If you wish to attempt the rescue of my son, then by all means, proceed. But as my ability to assist you would be negligibly slight, and the cost to me would almost certainly be my life, then I must beg off any participation in such an endeavour.”
“Too late for that, Dower.” His fierce glare focused more tightly upon me. “You’ve already been part of it. How do you think you wound up there at Highgate Cemetery? How did that come about?”
“That fellow Rollingwood – him and the Gravitas Maximus Funerary Society. I accepted their invitation to travel to London, along with my wife’s casket, so that she be interred there.”
“And who arranged with them for all of that?”
“I have no idea; they told me that had all been done at the behest of some anonymous benefactor, who paid for everything.”
“Well, he’s not anonymous anymore, is he?” Scape slapped one of his dark-gloved hands against his chest. “You’re looking at him.”
“You? Very well; in some ways, I am not surprised at all. My dealings with you have always revolved around your scheming and plotting, all designed to snare me into your various enterprises; it now appears that you have returned from the other side of the grave, to which I had believed you to have been dispatched, to continue on that course. The problem for you is that I have the sharpest memory of your machinations against me, and thus I refuse to become tangled up in them again, no matter how nobly you state your motivations.”
“Dower… it’s different this time.”
“As always,” I said. “You must pardon my skepticism.”
“No, seriously – you gotta listen to me.” A note of pleading sounded in his voice, that I had never heard before. “You can’t walk out on this one. I need you – I can’t rescue the kid without you.”
“I confess I grow weary with this constant indispensability, which I am inevitably assured I possess. How I became so valuable to so many rogues and schemers – it is a mystery to me. But always I am told by low, disreputable persons such as yourself, that their plans cannot advance without me. I would be less exhausted with the world, if this were not so frequently the case.”
“OK, fine; I’ll tell you – I was planning to, anyway. But here’s the deal–”
Whatever revelations Scape intended to make, they remained unvoiced. For at that exact moment, a great deal of chaos ensued, that had no doubt been long impending.
Scape’s words were drowned out by a startling eruptive noise, that might have been volcanic in nature except for the fact that it sounded, not from beneath our feet, but out of the sky above our heads. The essential falsity of that expanse wa
s further confirmed by the jagged chasms branching through it like black lightning strokes. Startled by the noise, I had immediately craned my neck back and looked up toward it – a fortunate thing, for it enabled me to raise my arm across my face, shielding me from the rain of broken tiles and other debris that came tumbling down.
“Crap!” The shout from Scape was loud enough to be heard through the tumult, as bits of the crumbling sky struck the sands and the equally artificial rocks about us. “They’re here!”
One section of the sky, like a piece of an enormous eggshell, fell end over end, at last striking the surface of the water. Its impact was sufficient to send a low wave sloshing across the shore and washing up against our boots. Neither Scape nor I paid this slight inundation any mind; our attention was fastened upon the sharp-edged opening that had been produced at the limit of our upturned gaze.
Of what lay beyond, little could be seen but the bright pinpoints of the stars in the open night sky – but that was the least of our concerns. While smaller bits and pieces were still plunking into the agitated false ocean, a number of coarse, knotted ropes were flung out, their weighted ends drawing their serpentine lengths close by us. No sooner had the process been completed, than I saw the agents of the More Loving Embrace – recognizable even at this distance, from my previous encounters with them – as they swarmed down the ropes, their rifles slung across their backs. Obviously, they were taking no chances with their lethal intent toward me, preferring to strike at close quarters rather than take aim from above.
“Don’t worry!” Scape seized my arm, preventing me from executing any attempt to flee. In his voice sparked a trace of the excited glee that I recalled from long ago. “I’ve got this!”
I thought him mad, though not for the first time. My instinct to run was tempered by the knowledge that there would be no hiding places in the limited confines of this manufactured cove; I would shortly be tracked down and slaughtered wherever lay its bounding walls. If there had been hope of escape, I might have shaken him off, and taken to my heels–
But his seemingly demented assurance to me proved true, or at least sufficiently so as to throw my assailants’ plans into disarray. The noise of the artificial sky cracking open had ebbed, the last of the shattered pieces landing near, even as the More Loving Embrace’s dread agents swiftly came within a few feet of releasing their grip upon the ropes, and springing onto the ground. That partial diminishment of the enveloping tumult was ended by a more deafening noise, that drew my vision away from my rapidly approaching pursuers, and back up to the sky.
Or rather, what remained of it. Around its circumference, even larger segments toppled from their moorings at the horizon, and plunged into the water. The illumination from the flaring gas jets was extinguished with a steaming hiss, leaving only revealed stars and a sickle moon to provide any light. All was turmoil; Scape drove his shoulder into my chest, driving me backward and saving us both from being crushed by an immense concave section that imbedded itself into the ground where we had been standing.
The complete destruction of the constructed sky had the salutary effect of forestalling the More Loving Embrace’s agents from completing their attempt upon my life – the ropes by which they descended had been secured to some point on the outer surface of the now disintegrating dome; as it crumbled to pieces, the result was to send these assassins falling, and then tumbling upon the sands, the ropes coiling and snaring about their torsos and heads.
My observation of their predicament was suddenly obscured, the landscape about us lapsing into more thorough shadows. Glancing upward, I saw that the stars and moon had been eclipsed by some awesome shape, extending farther than my eye could see. I was struck by the sudden recall of a similar event, when I had stood beside my wife’s freshly excavated grave in the cemetery at Highgate, and that great hovering graveyard had loomed into view above our heads. But this time, rather than the casket being drawn up from below and toward that immensity, something else could be perceived falling from it.
The darkness hindered Scape from calculating the object’s vertical trajectory as he had done before, so he was unable to make a similar motion to evade it. We were both struck by the object, sending us sprawling backward.
“I was borned in the district of Sauchiehall Street, to loving and hard-wairking parents…”
That I was hallucinating the voice that spoke, in a creaky and sepulchral tone, seemed the most likely explanation, as I lay flat on my back, somewhat stunned. Pushing myself up on my elbows, I received further confirmation that I had been knocked from my proper senses: a cadaverous form, skin grey in pallor mortis over protruding bones, stood propped against a nearby stone outcropping. The wind admitted from the opened sky set the ragged shroud fluttering about the cage-like ribs, ribbons of the tattered cloth winding about the bare ankles of the feet that had embedded themselves into the sand.
“Me muther were a wee sma’ wummin, but me faither were a gi’nt of a man, nigh six feet tall.” The corpse’s jaws clacked open and shut, roughly in time to the words scratchily emitted from a mechanism very like a spring-driven music-box, partially visible through the parchment skin covering the throat. “A wheelwright he were, and a secessionist in the Free Church, so he thrashed a great deal o’ Biblical larning into me hide when I were young…”
The grisly figure continued mechanically relating its biography, as I gaped at it in astonishment. To my further surprise and horror, I heard a rising murmur of similar voices all about me; gaining my feet, I scanned across the ill-lit landscape. My eyes had adjusted well enough to the darkness occasioned by the vast shape looming above, that I could make out a seeming regiment of other shrouded corpses littering the cove, most sprawled flat on the sand, a few tilted at whatever angle their plummeting descent had left them at; one had landed headfirst, burying its tight-fleshed skull so that only its torso and limbs were visible, skeletal legs waggling in a slow semaphore, its voice muted by the encasing sand. The others, not so encumbered, were free to continue their own narrations, the clockwork devices sutured above their breastbones clattering away the details of birth and baptism, marriage and labour, and whatever mundanities had been deemed fit to record. A faint aroma of formaldehyde and other funereal preservatives hung in the air, to render the scene even more ghastly.
“Come on, Dower–” A gloved hand caught hold of my arm. “We need to move.”
Scape appeared to have had some foreknowledge of this grisly barrage from above; he at least did not seem surprised by it, and he had managed to draw the two of us far enough away that we had not suffered the brunt of its impact. The assassins of the More Loving Embrace had not been so fortunate; a number of them had been knocked unconscious from having been struck by one of these dully yammering corpses, with their rifles still strapped upon their backs or cast from their outflung hands. One of these weapons had been snatched up by Scape; one-handed, he aimed and fired. The bullet struck into the chest of one of my pursuers, who had managed to stagger to his feet and swing his rifle in our direction; he flew backward and landed lifeless in the shallow waters behind him.
Urged on by my companion, I ran toward the centre of the cove, dodging as best I could the forms arrayed on all sides, of the silent living and the loquacious dead. Our passage was imperilled by yet more corpses falling from the sky, as though a veritable avalanche of the deceased had been unleashed upon our heads, but Scape managed to steer us both through the onslaught with no more than a glancing blow from one of the enshrouded figures striking the ground beside us.
“Here–” Coming to a halt, Scape cast away the rifle, so that both his hands were free. In the darkness, I saw that a pair of ropes dangled before us; these were not the ones by which the More Loving Embrace’s agents had descended, which had been precipitously loosened from whatever mooring had secured them to the outside of the cove’s artificial sky. These were fastened somehow to that great bulk floating above, which blotted the moon and stars from view; swiftly, Scape kn
otted one under my arms and across my chest, then did the same for himself with the other. “Hold on–”
“This is madness–” My protest could barely be heard above the hubbub of the corpses still recounting the incidents of their lives, mixed with the shouts of those of my pursuers who had managed to regain their capabilities and assess the situation surrounding them. “This can’t–”
“You got a better plan?”
I had neither that nor time for a reply, as the ropes jerked tight at our chests. With the monumental grace possessed by immense objects, the shape hovering above had shifted its position, sufficiently that both Scape and I were snatched off the ground and elevated to the open air.
Rifle shots barked from below, as the recovered assailants directed the fire of their upraised rifles at us. That the rain of corpses still continued, their shrouds fluttering as they arced to earth, proved fortuitous; their shrivelled forms were enough to shield Scape and myself from the bullets that might otherwise have struck us as our dangling ascent accelerated.
I knew it was unwise to look down, but I could not do otherwise; we were now so far in our course that I could see the little constructed cove entire, its sands and manufactured stones, and its bottled-up ocean, encircled by the remnants of the dome that had formed its masquerading sky. A few bright sparks of rifle-fire from my persistent assassins, then all was faded into the dark and distance below our trailing feet.
My companion dangled close enough by, both of us at a trailing angle as our speed increased, that I could reach out and touch his arm. Scape faced away from me, toward whatever might be presumed as our destination; I wished to inquire of him – of course I would have to shout over the rush of the wind streaming about us – as to where exactly that was.
In the event, I was spared any need to raise my voice; the prod of my fingers was enough to turn Scape around that he might converse with me – but he could not. Even in the shadow of the great bulk above us, enough light remained that I could see no animation in his dulled eyes, rolled back in the gravely scarred flesh about them. The cause of this transformation was quickly evident to me; the front of his dark leather garb was slick and shining wet from the blood draining from the bullet hole in the centre of his chest. Not merely had the falling corpses shielded me from harm; as cruel luck would have it, Scape himself had been interposed between myself and the assassins’ fire, the final one having struck home in this way. I pulled my hand away; whatever questions I might have, there would be no more answers forthcoming from him.