Dancing On the Head of a Pin rc-2

by Thomas E. Sniegoski

  “I’m not even going to ask if you’re feeling that,” Remy said.

  The strange sensation, an aura of undiluted menace, pulsated in the air, creating an invisible barrier that caused the people walking the streets, or driving in the vicinity, to have no desire to go any farther, making everything come to a complete stop.

  He had an idea as to the cause but hoped he was wrong.

  Turning around in his seat to check the rear window, Remy put the car in reverse. He beeped his horn to get the traffic piling up behind him to move so that he could back the Toyota toward Commonwealth Avenue, where he took a left, heading away from the chaos.

  “Thank you,” Madach said though chattering teeth.

  “Don’t,” Remy stated flatly, his eyes scanning the street for the first sign of an open space. He found one that would require an amazing feat of parallel parking, but he wasn’t deterred.

  “What are you doing?” the fallen angel asked, panic growing in his voice.

  “What does it look like?”

  “You can’t,” Madach stated. “You can feel it in the air as much as I can, and you know what it is.” He hugged himself as his body became wracked with painful-looking spasms. “It isn’t right,” Madach yelled through clenched teeth. “You’re not supposed to be able to feel it here.”

  Remy shut the engine off, pulling the keys from the ignition. As he opened the door, preparing to get out of the car, Madach’s hand shot out, grabbing hold of Remy’s shoulder.

  “We’re not supposed to feel Hell here.”

  “You’re right,” Remy said, shrugging the hand away and climbing out of the car. “We’re not.

  “And that’s what makes me so goddamn nervous.”

  * * *

  As much as it frightened him to admit it, the essence of Hell had indeed come to Newbury Street.

  Steeling himself against the feelings of utter despair, fear, and hopelessness wafting down the street at him like a bad stink riding on a gentle summer wind, Remy forced himself forward, fighting his way toward Francis’ brownstone.

  The sidewalks and street were filled with people, lying where they had fallen—first affected by the waves of misery leaking out from the nether regions, some trembling and crying, others so sickened, so traumatized by what they were experiencing, that they had fallen into a kind of coma, puddles of vomit pooling at their heads.

  The closer Remy got to the brownstone, the harder it became for even him to continue. His mind became crowded with thoughts of failure—of the crimes he’d committed against his own kind in the name of God. He saw the death of his enemies—his brothers—his sword cutting them down. With each strike of his sword—each death—the journey down Newbury Street became more difficult.

  Remy stopped, pummeled by the memories, the guilt, of his ancient past. Violently shaking his head, trying to force away the overpowering thoughts, he glanced at Madach there beside him.

  The fallen angel hugged himself, tears streaming down his face as he gazed fearfully ahead.

  “I can’t go back there,” he said shaking his head. “I’ve done my penance and I won’t go back—I can’t go back.”

  The miasma of anguish that enveloped them was nearly suffocating; Remy felt his legs begin to grow limp, and he was tempted—oh, so tempted—to lie down on the street, curling up into the tightest ball that he could imagine, to escape the sensations he was experiencing.

  Anything of importance had left his mind; all he could think about, all that he could dwell upon, was the failure to his own, to his Lord God Almighty.

  To Madeline.

  It was as if he’d a received a shot of pure adrenaline directly to his heart, the image of his wife’s smiling face, like the rays of the sun, burning away an oppressive fog. Thoughts of her loss, and of how he had failed her on so many levels, niggled at the edges of his memory, but they had not the strength to dampen the joy and love he felt for her still.

  Remy straightened, focusing on his surroundings. They were less than two blocks away.

  Madach had dropped to the street. He sat there rocking back and forth, head buried in his hands.

  “Get up,” Remy said, reaching down to haul the fallen angel up by the arm.

  “I can’t…,” he complained.

  “You can and you will,” Remy stated firmly, using this moment of clarity to propel himself and his companion forward. “If it wasn’t for you, this wouldn’t be happening. You’re coming with me just in case I need a hand.”

  He pulled the struggling Madach along, maneuvering him through the body-strewn street until they finally reached the steps of the brownstone.

  Wave after wave of sensations, the likes of which Remy had never felt before, washed over him. Hell had indeed come to Earth and it was leaking from the brownstone.

  Madach was a quivering wreck, trying to sit down on the building steps, to hide from the destitute feelings that threatened to cripple him.

  “I… I just can’t,” the fallen said, his voice a pathetic squeak. But Remy would not allow him to sit down, holding on to his arm and dragging him up the stairs toward the door.

  The fallen angel’s complaints fell on deaf ears, Remy’s only concerns being that he get inside before he himself was reduced to a quivering pile of jelly. He had to know what was going on. He had to know the fate of his friend.

  Remy opened the heavy wooden door and pushed Madach in ahead of him. The inside foyer door was open and Remy dragged Madach through the lobby to the door to the basement and Francis’ apartment.

  Reaching for the doorknob, he felt the pulsations of the infernal place radiate from the crystal knob, a warning of what he was likely to find on the other side.

  Again he steeled himself with the memory of Madeline, and like a suit of armor, it protected him against the relentless onslaught of the dispiriting atmosphere.

  He took the knob and turned it, pulling the door open and letting it bang off the wall as he stood in the entryway looking down the stairs. Voices drifted up from the room below, voices that sounded familiar.

  Madach shuffled closer. “We’re going… we’re going down there?” he asked, gulping noisily as he stared down the steep set of steps that led to the living area below.

  The voices continued, followed by some menacing music that strangely enough seemed to fit the situation. Eerie pulses of light caused bizarre shadows to dance around what little they could see of the room waiting at the bottom.

  “Looks like it,” Remy said, already beginning his descent.

  He stopped momentarily to give Madach a look, making sure that he wasn’t going down alone.

  The fallen angel pulled his act together, using the banister as he leaned against the wall, taking each of the descending steps slowly.

  They were closer to the source. It was all Remy could do to keep from blacking out with the intensity of malevolence that hung in the air like smoke.

  “We’ve got to keep it together,” he told Madach, who didn’t appear to want to leave the next-to-the-last step. He stood there, body rigid, petrified.

  “You’re doing fine,” Remy told him, walking into the living space. “Don’t make me haul you off those steps.”

  His words having their desired effect, Remy listened as Madach descended the remaining stairs and followed at his back.

  Nothing appeared abnormal. The strange, shifting light and the sound of voices were caused by the television set. Remy took note that Francis had been watching Jaws. There was a half-eaten sandwich and cup of coffee sitting on the table, next to Francis’ chair.

  “Where is he?” Madach asked through trembling lips.

  Remy didn’t answer, approaching the television and turning the volume down to nothing. He hated to do it. His favorite scene was on: Quint’s speech about being on the Indianapolis.

  But it didn’t become completely quiet.

  He saw that Madach was carefully looking around the space, zeroing in on the source of the additional sound.

  �
��It’s coming from over there,” he said, pointing with a nearly lifeless hand at the narrow corridor that ended with the worn door to Hell.

  Remy moved down the hallway, the noise growing louder the closer he got to the door.

  “I don’t think… I don’t think you want to go down there,” Madach said at his back, and Remy had to agree.

  He didn’t want to go there, but there really wasn’t much choice.

  Madach stopped at the edge of the darkened corridor as Remy continued.

  The door was closed, but a radiance of palpable hopelessness emanated off the paint-blistered surface of the wood, and the sounds coming from the other side—he hadn’t a clue how to describe them. They were like the raging of a powerful storm, the sounds of nature’s fury muffled only by the fragile barrier that kept the storm at bay.

  Something was wrong on the other side of that door.

  Horribly, horribly wrong.

  Remy wanted to quit, to drop down to the floor, allowing the sins and failures of his very long life to wash over him, to drag his body out into an ocean of anguish but Madeline helped him to fight, her memory urging him on.

  The doorknob was both excruciatingly hot and numbingly cold in his grasp. As he was about to turn it, he looked to the end of the hall to see Madach standing there. The fallen looked as though he had aged twenty years, his body stooped from the Hellish emissions that pummeled them.

  “Don’t,” he begged, a plaintive hand reaching out trying to convince him not to do what Remy knew had to be done.

  He had to find out what was going on, and what fate had befallen his friend.

  He had to know about Francis.

  Remy turned the knob, throwing open the door to a blast of intense, lung-shriveling heat, followed by suffocating cold.

  Through watering eyes Remy gazed in horror at the sight before him. Francis stood upon the bridge of writhing, fallen-angels in the midst of battle, a bloodstained sword in one hand, a gun in the other. From out of the icy prison streamed a steady flow of prisoners, their mouths open in ululating screams of madness and rage as they attempted to put him down, fighting to get past the only thing preventing them from making their way toward the exit and the earthly plane beyond.

  Remy stared, frozen in place by the sight of the former Guardian angel as he dispatched wave after wave of his attackers. He was relentless in his defense, as were the fallen in their attempts to remove him from their path. For every fallen angel that fell beneath the boom of gunfire, or was cut in two by the bite of his sword blade, there seemed to be four more scrambling over the decimated corpses to take their places.

  “What’s going on? What do you see?” Madach cried, temporarily distracting Remy from the disturbing scene playing out before him.

  Remy glanced to the end of the hall and then back through the doorway. He had to do something; the number of fallen angels spilling out from the prison onto the bridge was growing unmanageable, many of the pale-skinned attackers tumbling over the side of the bridge of angel flesh to the Hellish landscape waiting for them below.

  He started onto the bridge, the bodies of the fallen that comprised the structure quivering beneath the heel of his shoes.

  “Francis,” Remy yelled.

  The Guardian turned and his face twisted at the sight of Remy.

  “Get back!” he screamed, quickly returning his attention to the marauding fallen, cutting down five more before looking back. “Get back into the fucking apartment!”

  Remy hesitated, not sure what he should do. It wouldn’t be long before his friend succumbed to the ever-increasing number trying to escape.

  He started forward again, feeling the stirring of the Seraphim within. He would have to let it out if he was going to be of any significant help to Francis in holding back the ravening hordes emerging from Tartarus.

  Francis turned back again, his favorite suit tattered, spattered with blood, his horn-rimmed glasses missing.

  “Don’t you fucking listen?” he bellowed, shoving the hand-gun into the waistband of his pants and reaching inside his jacket pocket to remove something that chilled Remy more than the frigid air radiating from the frozen prison at the bridge’s end.

  Francis held a grenade, something that he’d likely picked up wholesale from one of the many weapons suppliers that he did business with.

  “I said go back.” And with those words he pulled the pin on the round, olive green explosive device, rolling it across the uneven surface of the flesh bridge, where it became trapped within one of the open mouths of the angel-damned.

  Remy knew what was about to happen and turned quickly, running back toward the open door.

  The force of the blast propelled him through the doorway, face-first into the corridor wall, the deafening roar of the explosion and agonized screams of the fallen angels that made up the bridge suddenly cut off by the slamming of the door behind him.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Remy rolled awkwardly onto his back, the metallic taste of fresh blood filling his mouth. He leaned his head back against the wall of the narrow corridor, and gazed at the dilapidated door, listening to the sudden silence.

  Slowly Madach moved down the hallway toward him. “What happened?” he asked, cautiously eyeing the closed door.

  Remy scrambled to his feet, his human form aching in more places than he could count. He ran a hand across his mouth and nose, wiping away the blood there.

  “He closed it.”

  Remy took hold of the doorknob again, experiencing none of the extreme sensations he had before. The emanations from Hell had stopped completely. Throwing the door wide, he gazed upon a utility closet, the most menacing things inside an ancient mop and a plastic bucket.

  “He closed it,” Remy said again, looking fitfully to Madach. His mind was on fire. Something terrible was happening in Tartarus, and he was almost certain that the Nomads were responsible, and that it all revolved around the Pitiless weaponry.

  A spasm of cold went up his back, so powerful that it nearly broke his spine, Suroth’s words again echoing in his ear.

  This time the true victor will reign supreme…

  He liked the sounds of them even less now.

  Pushing past the fallen, Remy went out to the living area, his brain humming as he tried to piece together every piece of information he’d gathered and form it into something he could act upon.

  But there were still too many gaps.

  “So what now?” Madach asked, much calmer now since the radiation from Hell had stopped.

  Remy dropped down heavily upon the couch. “Good question,” he said, throwing up his hands in frustration. “I’m stumped.” He strained his fevered brain even more, staring at a particular section of pattern on the carpet beneath the coffee table until it blurred.

  “The Nomads took the Pitiless for some kind of purpose,” he said aloud. “And from what I just saw, it has something to do with Tartarus and the prisoners there.”

  Madach leaned against the doorframe. “They’re going to break them out,” he said suddenly.

  Remy looked up, urging him on with his eyes.

  “They’re going to use the power of the weapons to free all the fallen angels still being punished in Tartarus.”

  A sick sensation began to grow in the pit of Remy’s belly, something horrible and malignant expanding in size as he realized how close Madach likely was to being right.

  “They’re going to free all the prisoners,” Remy muttered, again hearing the Nomad leader’s chilling words.

  This time the true victor will reign supreme…

  Tiny pinprick explosions of realization erupted all across the surface of Remy’s brain and suddenly he knew the horrible, deadly truth.

  He bolted up from the sofa, going to the closet in the corner of the room adorned with the original poster from The Wild Bunch. He grabbed the latch and gave it a pull. As expected, it was locked, but he couldn’t—wouldn’t—allow that to stop him. He gave the handle a forceful twist foll
owed by a tug and listened as the lock broke, pieces of the mechanism clattering around somewhere inside the closet door.

  Remy pulled open the door, exposing Francis’ treasure trove of violence: everything from bladed weapons to guns of almost every caliber, shape, and size. It was a closet filled to the brim with instruments of death.

  “Was your friend expecting to fight a war?” Madach asked, coming to stand beside him.

  “He liked to be prepared,” Remy said, reaching for one of the handguns—a Glock—hanging from a peg. He hoped that Francis had a hefty supply of the special ammunition he would need to deal with the kind of threat he believed he was going up against.

  Madach reached for one of the handguns too.

  “You don’t have to do this,” Remy said, finding the ammunition in a small wooden box and loading a full clip. Even touching these special bullets, created from materials mined in Hell, made him feel sicker than he already did.

  “Yeah, I think I do,” Madach answered. He took a gun, staring at it in his hand. “You said it yourself. If it wasn’t for me, none of this would have happened.”

  Remy slipped the loaded clip into his gun.

  Madach helped himself to some of the special bullets, doing as he’d watched Remy do. “Who knows,” he said with the hint of a sad smile, “if I do some good maybe I’ll get time off for good behavior, and I’ll be able to go back home all the sooner.”

  Remy scowled, not even wanting to think of Heaven. If what he suspected was going on, he was disturbed to see its lack of involvement. It just proved to him again how dramatically things had changed, and not for the better.

  “So what now?” the fallen asked, carefully loading his weapon.

  “I had some dealings with the Nomads a few days ago,” Remy said. “Only thing I can think of right now is to check out where I found them last and hope they’ve left clues as to where we go next.”

  Madach stared at him blankly.

  “I know, the plan sucks, but it’s all I’ve got right now.”

  His phone started to ring and he reached inside his coat pocket to retrieve it.