by Pavel Kornev
"Gotcha, piggy!" he grinned.
The inspector turned out not to have been prepared for this turn of events and froze in confusion. I, though, did not hesitate.
I stepped out from the corridor and shouted:
"Police!" And, to enhance the effect, fired a shot up into the ceiling.
In response, a pair of shots clapped out; Robert White sank down into a pile of rubble, his chest shot through. Detective Constable Orso dropped his smoking pistol and fell to the floor like a sack of potatoes. There was a black hole gaping in his forehead. He died instantly. The inspector, though, was scraping his feet on the stones, not having any desire to kick the bucket himself. Blood was bubbling up between his lips. The stubborn man was still trying to gather his strength and reach his pistol.
Before he could, though, I shot him through the head. I simply raised my Roth-Steyr, aimed it, and pulled the trigger. Just like at the firing range.
"Shit," gasped Inspector White.
"Shit," I agreed, pulling a tin of sugar-drops from my pocket and sending the first candy I happened upon down my throat with a trembling hand.
Robert shined his light at the robber on the pile of rubbish. He had returned to his true appearance after death. Robert then shined his torch on the man’s partner. Death had returned him to his original body as well.
"How the hell?! How'd you do that?" The inspector demanded an answer, mechanically patting his chest and finding it utterly unharmed. "How did you force them to kill each other?"
I shrugged my shoulders, faking ambivalence.
"They were afraid. They were afraid of a police raid, afraid of a cave-in, and afraid of being shot in the back by an untrustworthy partner. I simply took advantage of their fears, and got them to see something that was not there. That is my talent, as you know."
"But I saw it, too!" Robert White bellowed, the volume of his breathing drawing attention to its unevenness. "Curses! I saw you shoot me! You! Me!"
"Fear is inside all of us," I stated calmly. "You can't be telling me you never considered the possibility that you could be wounded, or even die, right? I'm sure you're afraid of that, just like everyone else. It's one of the hazards of the profession."
"Do you mean to tell me that you are capable of changing reality itself with the power of your thoughts?"
"More like the power of my imagination. I have an extremely active imagination." I looked at the shot-through robber and shook my head. "And no, I do not have the power to change reality. I only gave it a slightly different face, that's all."
I said nothing about how exactly my talent was fed by others' fears. If I had, the conversation may have gone too far; being accused of black magic was serious, even for an illustrious gentleman such as myself.
The inspector just shook his head and placed his pistol in the holster. I followed his example and asked:
"What now?"
"I don't know," Robert White answered, shining his torch all around the underground room. "I don't see a hole leading into the bank."
"Maybe they hadn't dug it out yet?"
"Or maybe it's in a different room," the inspector decided, calling me after him: "Let's go! We can send all this dog’s meat to the morgue in the morning."
Leaving the stiffs on the bloodied floor, we turned back toward the fork in the path and walked off down the second corridor. Soon, Robert White slowed his pace and raised his torch, aiming its bright beam into the black maw of an empty door-frame. The darkness immediately dashed off into the corners of the small room with a high cupola-ed roof, revealing rows of dusty, sculpted-stone benches.
"Check them!" the inspector ordered.
After the recent incident, the desire to crawl headfirst into a new mystery had diminished a good amount.
Before stepping inside, I took my Roth-Steyr from its holster just in case, but I didn’t need it: in the small room there was neither any person, nor any exit.
A dead-end.
A dead-end, sure, but what kind of room was it?
"Strange..." I muttered, returning my pistol to its holster.
"What's up there?" The inspector elbowed his way past me and scanned from side to side with his torch. "It looks like an abandoned chapel," he declared, deeming it, "old news."
"That could very well be," I nodded and agreed. "Would you be so kind as to point your torch over there, though?!" I asked my boss, indicating the place at the end of the room where, according to my suppositions, there had once been an altar.
Robert White swept the beam of his torch along the far wall and turned back around to leave.
"Let's go!" He called, but I couldn't even get a single word out. It felt like I was having an epileptic seizure.
And I might as well have been. Because a fallen one had cast its gaze on me.
Right then and there, he looked at me, and his bottomless eyes sucked into themselves all the darkness, rage and injustice of this world; all that and a bit more.
And there’s quite a lot of that around, mind you.
My reality started blurring...
MY CONSCIOUSNESS RETURNED from a punch straight to the shoulder.
"Detective constable!" The inspector's roar burst into my oblivion. "Eyes open, now!"
I greedily sucked down some air and crawled away to the nearest bench. I sat on the floor next to it and leaned on it back first. I started massaging my temples with my palms in a pitiful attempt to stop my much-suffering head from exploding.
"What's going on with you, Leo?" Robert White got down on his haunches and touched my shoulder with his fingers. "What happened?!"
"A fallen one," I exhaled. "There..."
The inspector turned to the far wall, then stared at me with unhidden annoyance.
"Are you stark raving mad, Leo?" He wondered acridly. "That's nothing but a statue!"
"Not at all! That is a fallen one! I'm telling you!"
Robert White gave a quizzical snort and shined his torch on the wall again.
"That is a statue," he declared after a short break, not quite as certain this time. "A strange statue..."
The quality of the sculpture did, in fact, reflect how wrong he was. It was sculpted down to the smallest detail, as if every fiber, hair and wrinkle were carved into its marble skin, but only above the belt. Its legs were hidden in the wall. Beyond that, it didn’t look like it was being held in the wall, it simply made a smooth transition into the unified whole of the wall, as if the fallen one had been bursting out toward freedom, and only something minor had stopped it from escaping its stony prison.
"Do you not feel that, inspector?" I asked, overcoming my weakness and leaning more upright against the bench. I got up from the floor and repeated my question: "Do you not feel that?"
I was trying not to look at the fallen one another time if I didn't have to. To be perfectly honest, I tried not looking at all. The fallen one, even in this stony form, weighed on me with a sensation of limitless power and a pronounced otherworldliness. Every feature of its stony face reflected its perfection but, all together, it formed something so ideal that nothing human remained in its frozen mask whatsoever.
Ideal without the slightest flaw.
A dead ideal.
And that ideal weighed down on me.
"Do I not feel what?" Robert White seethed with anger. "You are stark raving mad, Leo!"
"You're illustrious, though! You cannot tell me you don't feel that!"
The inspector burned a hole in me with his hateful gaze, approached the statue and placed his palm decisively on its stone chest. I unintentionally followed him with my eyes, not noticing how my attention had once again been seized by the marble sculpture; it held me completely. The fallen one increased in dimension, filling the whole space. Its stone wings, spread in different directions, and began glowing from the inside with an amber light, which only made it seem darker in the chapel. And the eyes... Its black eyes were no longer dead; they were now filled with a boundless darkness. Darkness and something e
lse, like scornful incomprehension.
Its supernatural willpower was again pressing me down into the floor like an unseen hand. It reached my head. With a gust of transparent wind, it upended my memories. I tried to reach the exit, but my hands and feet were numb. I really don't know how it all would have ended if the torch hadn't burnt out. Its wire started smoking, and the room began filling with the smell of burning rubber. The caustic stench helped me master the ghastly apparition, throw off my consternation and flee back into the corridor.
Robert White jumped out behind me, pulled back on my legs, and pressed me to the wall with his elbow.
"What the devil was that?!" growled the inspector, spittle flying from his lips.
"That was a fallen one!" I shouted, tearing my boss's arm from me and carefully, following the wall, continuing away from the ghastly chapel. "I don't know how it was turned into stone, but that is a genuine fallen one! We must tell the authorities. We must plug up this tunnel system before he makes it out to freedom!"
"Come off it!" The inspector gave me a jerk. "Even if that is so, how many decades has he been down here collecting dust? How many centuries? He can't escape, Leo! There's no way."
"I could have returned him to life. And if I could have, that means others can as well!"
Robert White even took a step back.
"You've gone mad!" he announced.
"No!" I assured my boss. "That's all my talent, my cursed imagination! It's enough for me to simply imagine him free! Do you understand? If I simply imagine it, he will burst out of his stone prison! Freeing him would be easy. Too easy. We need to plug the chapel up!"
"What are you on about?!" The inspector walked up to me again and shook me sharply by the shoulders. "You've always spoken of fear! Of the fact that others' fears could feed your talent and give it power!
The fallen are that very power! A pure, totally unclouded power!
Infernal creatures are simply energy incarnated into the material world. They generously shared their power with the mortals who swore allegiance to them and began to act as generators for even more power, but they didn't create electricity, they created death, sorrow and destruction.
In the end, the malefics were forced to settle accounts with these hell-spawn at the cost of their own souls and many others' lives. My talent, though, allows me to use the power of these otherworldly creatures directly, because fear and deadly horror walk hand-in-hand with them.
But that fallen one was too strong. It weighed down on me with an unearthly grandeur and rage. It forced all images from my head except its own. I was merely a tool to it, and I was capable of breaking the curse and turning its stone firmament into living flesh; to it, I was a mindless 'skeleton key' and nothing more.
Giving impetus to such an unnatural metamorphosis would be certain to fry my consciousness, but why should the fallen mind that? Tools do tend to break, right?"
All my admonishments did not seem to be convincing to Robert White.
"That's enough!" he ordered.
"No, it’s not enough, inspector!" Having forgotten my place, I walked up to the man. "Do the fallen not hold sway over forces that go beyond the limits of human understanding? Curses! Just remember what they did to the Arabian Peninsula! They simply ripped a fair chunk of it off and chucked it half a world away into the Atlantic Ocean! They needed only a single day to create Atlantis, just one day!"
"That's all hogwash!" Robert White cut me off, pushing my back against the wall. "I'm the final say in all matters, got it? Not a word to anyone. Not Jimmy, not Billy and not Ramon. Not a living soul, do you understand, Leo? That is an order!"
"Yes sir," I grudgingly agreed to keep my silence.
"Then let's go."
Robert White headed for the exit, and I shuffled off in his wake, asking:
"Was its heart beating? Inspector, did you feel its heart beating? You did, didn't you?"
The inspector stopped with a fateful sigh and looked at the palm he had placed on its stone heart.
"It was beating!" He suddenly confirmed. "It was beating, Leo. But be nice and hold your tongue. Alright?"
"Alright," I relented, not wanting to get into a senseless squabble with my boss. I guess I’d just have to deal with this.
"Feel free to check, I can handle it," Robert White promised.
And I believed him. He could handle it. The inspector knew where his interests lie. He wasn’t that kind of person.
WHEN WE GOT OUT of the tunnel into the barber shop's basement, Ramon Miro was standing against the opposite wall with his weapon drawn, simultaneously watching over the hole and our captive.
"What happened to you two?!" He asked in agitation, lowering his lupara. "I heard gun shots!"
"Nothing happened to us," the inspector answered calmly and took the pistol lying on the table. "Nothing at all," he repeated, shooting our kneeling captive in the back of the head.
Uri fell awkwardly on his side. A very thin trickle of blood ran down his cheek onto the dirty floor. Then Robert threw the pistol back and let out another gasp:
"Nothing!"
"What devilry was that?!" Ramon marveled. "Inspector, what's going on?!"
White grabbed the constable under the arm and dragged him to the stairs.
"Ramon!" He spoke didactically. "Do you have hearing problems? Can you not hear me? Nothing happened and nothing is happening! Nothing! You weren't here at all, Ramon. Leave it to me."
"How do you mean...?" What the constable tried to do was turn to look at the executed man, but the inspector held him in place and pushed him back toward the exit.
"Leave this all to me," White declared. "Get out! And send Jimmy!"
So we went. We came up from the basement in silence, striding wordlessly through the empty rooms. Only when we’d reached the dead darkness of the back courtyard did the constable decide to express the doubts that had beset him.
"Has the inspector decided to clear out the bank himself?" he asked directly.
"No," I refuted his theory. My colleague was clearly expecting something more concrete, though, so I shared a partial truth: "Ramon, you should know that complications of a certain nature have arisen, and our boss has taken them... let's say, a bit too close to heart."
"Is that right?" my hulking partner stared at me with unhidden suspicion, beginning to suspect that he was being tricked.
"That's exactly right" I affirmed. "The robbers didn't even make it to the vault. Don't worry."
"Ah, then what is it to me? The inspector knows best," Ramon shrugged his shoulders and headed off to find Jimmy.
I nodded and went after him.
To you, it's nothing, and to me it's nothing.
We don't have so many responsibilities. Let the higher-ups deal with the headache.
How could I have been so naïve?
4
RAMON AND I SET OFF back toward our respective homes. The constable left his lupara in his work locker and was now empty-handed, but he walked with such gloomy focus that it seemed he had a heavy pack on his back. I had no doubt that he was now tormented by doubts on the reason for the inspector's order. We couldn't discuss it though, as questioning orders from the higher-ups was something this hulk was not planning to do.
And neither was I.
Now perhaps Ramon, ignorant of the real facts, was filled with lingering doubts. I though, on the other hand, knew too much. And the fact that lots of knowledge can bring lots of sorrow is something that smart people noticed a long time ago.
I wasn’t feeling any less sick either, so we walked in silence.
Right after the Dürer-Platz, the constable took a left and trod down the hill to Little Catalonia; I was going in the opposite direction. Up the winding slope of the hill, the street began rising to Calvary. The dense urban development was soon behind me. Mountainous fences now extended along the road, hiding the estates of retired army officers, diplomats and ministerial civil servants from the immodest gazes of passers-by.
The city had long surrounded Calvary on all sides but, for some reason, Calvary had never expanded vertically, with the exception of the two-hundred-and-two-meter-high open-work iron tower erected on the very peak of the hill a few years before the overthrow of the fallen. At night, its signal light was turned on, and lighting often struck it, not only during thunderstorms, but also in clear skies.
When Gustav Eiffel saw this rusted monstrosity, he became obsessed with the idea of outdoing it and, by some unfathomable miracle, not only received his monarch's approval, but also sold the design to the Paris city council. Admittedly, he must be given his dues for his talent as an architect – the new three-hundred-meter tower, based on post cards I’d seen, looked somewhat more elegant than its predecessor.
Roads had only started being built up the hill a quarter century ago, which is when one of the plots ended up in my grandfather's possession. Not Count Kósice, who never even had enough to rub two sticks together his whole life, but retired Imperial Army Colonel Peter Orso, my grandfather on my father's side.
Our property was located on the outskirts. It was truncated on two sides by steep slopes, and the third was lined with the rustling leaves of a small thicket. I can't say for sure if my grandfather chose such a secluded place on purpose or not, but we weren't often pestered by our neighbors. No one came around at all, to be honest; even tax inspectors just looked the other way.
They had for the last sixteen years in any case...
WHEN I BEGAN TO HEAR the gurgling of a fast stream in front of me, I turned toward the curb to face a small pile of stones, taking the one on top. After that, I walked up the steep bridge and sent a heavy stone flying at full speed into an eye that was shining back at me from beneath it with a fell light.
The beast roared up, and quieted down, then the pair of eyes retreated.
I have no idea what kind of creature lived down there, but it wasn't fond of this kind of treatment.
It would have been wise to solve the problem once and for all, but the retirees who lived around here had long since lost their former influence, and all their complaints usually slipped past the ears of the city government unnoticed. None of the clerks were too eager to be the one to pursue an unknown creature at night, and even those local inhabitants who loved boasting of their African safaris did nothing but give mere promises to dig their old weapons out of their closets. And they were right: it wasn't yet clear who would be hunting whom.