And all around him, under the ice, glowing wall to ceiling, ceiling to floor: more loops, more dots, more empty spaces. Sigil after sigil of angelic script, the Watchers’ own personal language . . . the same one they taught their outsized children (whose passions were so disproportionate they once threatened to disrupt the balance of Creation itself) to sing themselves lullabies in, before leaving them orphaned forever.
Joe stopped, stood still, squinting up at it. As he did, the “letters” blurred, ice peeling to slice away in semi-solid folds. Under it, the shaft walls—already washed clean—began to dry on contact with the steamy air; alien fossils came humping up beneath the signs as if to meet him, surfacing from under the rock’s grey skin like dragonflies backlit in amber. While something else, at the same time—from inside him—rose to meet them in return.
A final shimmer, wrenching the cave-writing straight from un- to intelligible. Those oblique whirls and curves suddenly easy to read as any given street-sign: As Above, so Below, for here, Zemyaza and Azazel Grigorim bequeath an archive to our children’s children, a treasurehouse of words made for war, deception, and pain. Here we speak of the assumption and uses of human flesh, of the unseating and pollution of the human soul, so that our seed may replace theirs, and thus subdue the world. Occupy them like an army, make them curse themselves, make them break themselves apart. Drive them out into the unclean places. . . .
(make them wander amongst the tombs, and)
. . . cut themselves. . . .
Joe doubled up and puked, long and loud, at the feel of it touching his brain. Behind him, he heard a bone-break scattering of stones on stone as someone else—Judy, he could only assume—regained their feet, hands braced against either wall. Yet it was Mr. Nobody’s voice, now more than ever, which said his name a slow second later; hesitant, like it was a bit impressed he’d actually survived the fall. Or possibly just amused.
“Joe Crow,” it said. “Looks like something in here doesn’t agree with you. Or maybe I should say: something in you agrees with here.”
Unable to speak, bracing himself over the steaming pool of his stomach contents, Joe only spat.
“Probably better not to tell any of your Native Supremacist friends up North,” the voice suggested, “but it looks like you might have a touch of the really Old Blood in you, after all.”
Joe pushed himself back to rest on his heels, head down, making himself breathe slow and deep. The sigils’ light rang in his ears; he could see the thrum of their radiance pulsing through the air like basso heatwaves. He lifted one arm, reaching for the light without conscious will; stopped, staring at his hand like a boy on his first hash-high, entranced solely by the workings of his fingers.
The light shone through his flesh, the way a flashlight inside a cupped hand highlights bones, but all throughout, in shifting waves. And the silhouettes inside his flesh were the shadow-sketch mirrors of the things in the wall: skeletal spirals of shell, leaf-thin fins and wings, limestone bone-spurs. They moved and turned like a magic lantern’s cutouts, and he could feel them inside him, spasming and knotting and—
Punching out through his skin, the fabric of his clothes, more shocking for the wrongness of it and the lack of pain than anything else. Juddering cramps racking him, a sudden wrenching constriction at waist, knees, shoulders, feet—as if everything he was wearing had suddenly become half a size too small for him—
(No. Not the clothes shrinking. You’re—)
His parka tore up the back, and he felt something, two somethings, spring out through the gap; on the floor below him, shadow fell black to either side, saw-edged triangles of membrane and bone (bone to bone, bone of my bones). His balance shifted, weight and muscle filling in beneath his shoulderblades. His fingernails lengthened before his eyes, werewolf B-movie style—sharpening, thickening.
And between his hands, Judy Kiss, kneeling to face him, her own hands cupping his face. Looking at him now with eyes gone brown once more, completely human and completely helpless. Mr. Nobody driven out, if only for a moment, by the thing Joe had so arrogantly assumed was his prerogative: pity.
Softly: “Oh, Joe. . . .”
The changes hadn’t stopped; he could feel them raking through him like barbed wire, threading veins, muscles, and organs at once. He forced out words, hearing the shift in his vocal cords: deeper already, timbre unnaturally resonant, a vibration he could feel in his sinuses.
“This . . . was always in me,” he husked. “Wasn’t it.”
Yes.
And new silhouettes stretched out across the floor, rearing up, backlit in the sigil-light; blurred outlines of ten-foot-tall shapes invisible to the eye, perhaps winged, perhaps armoured, their numbers uncountable.
Welcome, son. Grandson. Great-, great-, great-, great-, great- . . .
The words themselves enough to set off a glass-rim echo, droning ’round and ’round. Joe froze where he stood, shaking. While the cast-off fossil-storm swirled on, chipping and curling around him ’til it hooked underneath his skin like thrown seed, like dragon’s teeth, grooming him from within. These Holocaust-smoke-black new wings of his long enough now to cramp against either wall, to jut and fold and catch—hollow and extensible, spectre-thin, made half from his own bones, half from theirs. That tiny shard of the Nephilim inside him working its way out like a splinter, reducing the whole rest of his fallible human body to nothing but one big meat-waste byproduct.
Like one of those horror movies, Joe thought, thickly; the words took effort to form, his mind an anaesthetized tongue. The big-budget Hollywood ones, where the yuppie hero goes crazy when he finds out there’s a super- to go with the natural. Or the late-night creepshow classics, where ol’ Professor Knows-it-all dies with a look of pure amazement on his face ’cause it turns out those silly native superstitions really do work, even on well-intentioned white guys . . .
That was pretty much how he felt, right about now: not his God, not his demons, not even his basic cosmo-mythology—as ridiculous to him as his ancestors must have seemed to Knud Rasmussen and his ilk, squatting in their shaking tents and carving tupilak to keep “civilization” safely back over the ice. But all that didn’t seem too relevant right now, let alone ironic—not with his skeleton apparently trying to roll itself up, jump out of his throat, and crawl away, leaving him behind in a heap for the angels to pick out his soul.
How many times have I had to tell people it doesn’t matter if you believe in a thing or not, ’cause it’s damn sure still gonna kill you? he wondered, spitting teeth.
And Judy . . . just standing there, hand to mouth, watching. Utterly untouched. Because though she could read it too, which argued for more than a dip of the Nephilim paintbrush in her own genetic jar, this particular message just wasn’t meant for the likes of her. Not her, or anyone else unlucky enough to have already been so thoroughly—
(touched)
—by another, very different, sort of “angel.”
Peering through the baffling sensory array already starting to filter his input, which dimmed the visible world down to dust even as it turned the usually invisible world up to eleven, Joe could finally see how contact with Mr. Nobody had left Judy vacuum-sealed rather than cracking her even wider; she was lapped and slicked in some resinous, invisible coating that repelled glory, whether infernal or divine, the same way Teflon shed cooked egg. He remembered her gangrenous skin repinking itself, and wondered if even age could touch her—if she would wander forever from crime scene to accident site, trailing harm and discord like a fog . . . but never involved, never at the epicentre, never a bride (she who had been forced into marriage with Darkness, then forcibly divorced from Light).
Never, ever again.
“They used me,” Judy said, out loud, if to no one in specific. “To get to you. To get you down here and do . . . this to you.”
“Think that was more a sorta, ah—accident,” Joe managed, gulping, before puking a
fresh: no food this time, just hot bile, melting his words into unintelligible mush. Though it wasn’t like Judy seemed to be listening.
“A Judas goat. That’s all I am. That’s all I’ll ever be.”
The Watchers, behind their wall of ice and rock, nodded their strangely helmeted heads, agreeing: Burned girl, girl on fire; we smell our cousin’s scent on you, his breath on your breath. Look closely and see his marks rise everywhere, flaws on a blown coal.
Joe saw her bow under the assault, head dropping. Saw those steaming acid tears start to flow, her only weapon left.
Charred, carbonized, from the inside out—you know it to be true, do you not? Burned once, you now find you only wish to burn . . . this man, this place, everything you touch. . . .
Judy flinched, as though from a slap; Joe gave a bark of protest, slapping the wet rock with both crippled hands as Mr. Nobody’s yellow glint peeked out from beneath her lids yet one more time, nonchalantly unexpected, to grin at her pain like it was the very best show in town. Following up the Watchers’ iron-voiced assertion in his sly, oddly ordinary voice: “You’re my match, Judy-girl; a match for me, like I’m a match for thee. My flint and steel, fit to burn the world, always ready to hand whenever I feel the need to pick you up—”
“NO!”
The force of the roar from Joe’s throat shocked him, shook the cave walls; stone pattered down from the ceiling, rattling like static. Judy looked up, the yellow in her eyes flickering sharply back to brown, as if likewise spooked.
Joe got his feet under him, stood, fighting the nausea the skewed perspective of his new height and balance brought. “You’re . . . not him,” he coughed out. “Not his. You’re you.” He could feel his boots splitting along the seams, laces snapping. “He can’t do shit . . . unless you let him. Just gets to watch. And who did that, huh? Who got you . . . free?”
Judy had turned away, not looking at either the Watchers or at him, staring into what little darkness was left. But Joe didn’t need to see her face anymore—he felt her mind in a psychic spotlight, pain and memory tangling inside her skull like acid-green lightning around raw-stripped power cables. And hovering over it all, Mr. Nobody’s amused malice, a mustard-gas cloud of hate mixed with—
(wariness?)
“Father Frye,” Judy husked. “Father Wale. God. . . .”
“And you, Judy. You’re the one did that.” Joe felt his tongue changing further even as he spoke, muscle becoming fluid, ready and eager to shape sounds no human could; he fought it back under control, like wrestling a six-inch python. “Without you, the blackrobes—even the Spirit itself—none of ’em could’ve done a damn thing. So now you know: you saved yourself. And that means you can do just about anything you want from now on, can’t you?”
A wave of something not quite pain swayed him where he stood. The world blurred. He felt a terrible, slow cracking beneath his feet: something giving way, no longer able to support the weight of what he was becoming. Judy had turned back to watch, wide-eyed, white-faced.
“Anything I want,” she whispered. “But that’s just one more lie, isn’t it, Joe? Your life was a lie, and I can’t retell it—I can’t undo this. Can’t make you . . . human again.”
No tears, this time, only breathlessness, as if the scope of how wrong they’d both been had finally sunk in.
Can’t make me what I never really was, Joe agreed, slipping onto the frequency of Watcher-speak with despairing ease. The beings limned upon the wall inclined their silhouetted heads once, in silent agreement. And then froze, as Joe went on, deceptively calmly: But you can make me something else, send me where I’m supposed to end up. Where those things can’t ever go.
Wordless denial rang in a shockwave from the wall-shapes, a bell’s note so immense it bled into subsonics; Judy stumbled under it, and even Joe reeled. He felt the Watchers swarm him like dogs on a toddler, goodwill or malice irrelevant for sheer fright of weight and numbers; he sank to his knees, their need and longing burdening him in layers of stone, geologically ancient.
He could not leave them, they begged. Not after so long. He was their last hand left to play, the first chance they’d had to touch Time from inside in thousands of years, the first opportunity to be no longer Watchers, but actors. To stand embodied once more as beings of angel-stuff and human flesh admixed, able to hear the Eternal the way humans never could, but possessing the free will angels never would: Nephilim.
Our child, the Watchers sang, born to make the world his own, born to give us back the world. . . .
Joe’s specific memories were almost gone, thinned to invisibility under the onslaught, the way ink washes to transparency when a tide comes in.
But: “Zemyaza,” Judy said, carefully. “Az-aym-ez.”
. . . and somewhere on the wall, near the top left corner, the light of one of the sigils blinked out.
For a moment the mark beneath remained; then it puffed off the wall like rust, like rain. Dust corkscrewed into the air, then whirled out of existence.
The Watchers, as a chorus: No no no no no no no—
(Yes.)
Joe pulled himself up on one elbow, grimacing as it bent the wrong way. “What’d you do?” he asked her.
Judy shook her head, intent on where the last of the dust still spiralled. “I don’t know.” Then: “Azazael, lea-za-za. . . .”
No no, you cannot, you must NOT—
Still Judy read on, ignoring them: Words reversed, the archive rewritten, unwritten, backwards. The walls began to clear themselves a syllable/character at a time, flaking, falling. And there arose a field of wailing, thin and pained, a choir of dying bees.
Girl, what do you do? You’ll kill us.
“Shouldn’t’ve made your evil plan quite so easy to fuck up, then,” she told them, tonelessly. “If it meant that much to you.”
(Oh, good, little Judy)
Joe “heard” it, somewhere in the back of his skull: Mr. Nobody’s attention, walking around in there on tiny scuttling fly-legs, trailing carrion.
(Yes, hit them where it hurts, and keep on hitting. Watchers, Grigori, God-“chosen,” pathetic, arrogant human-fuckers)
But: “Yeah? Well, you can shut the Hell up too, while you’re at it,” Judy snapped back, out loud. “Joe’s right; I don’t need you, never did. Not like you need me.”
(Oh ho. Brave words, meat-bag. . . .)
But enough to do the trick, apparently. Joe’s nostrils cleared, slowly—Mr. Nobody’s matchbook-stink faded into the background, soon replaced with clean snow on the one hand, hot rock on the other. Unfortunately, though perhaps not unpredictably, he seemed to have taken Judy’s immunity to the Watchers’ signal-spell along with him; she folded and charred under its fatal current, bared bloody teeth over bruising tongue, spat clots from a swelling throat. . . .
. . . and kept on reading, just the same.
Words fell from the walls in every direction, spraying out into empty air, gone within seconds. Leaving nothing behind them but clean space and dead lichen.
We know his name, your persecutor—we will give it to you as pledge of victory. Say it backwards instead, and destroy him forever.
A bitter, liquid laugh. “Sure, right. But why should I believe you? You’re angels, just like him. You’ll say any fucking thing.”
You cannot, must not, do not, please, burning burning burning. . . .
“So stop me. If you can.”
Obviously, they couldn’t.
When Joe came to, one final time, he and Judy were lying together under a light-woven lace blanket of new snow, with more falling down through the sundered roof above—a cobweb curtain, torn and trailing in the wind. It was already far colder than he remembered; the once-warm meltwater had halfway turned back to ice, sticking his broken wings to the tunnel floor. In other news, his mouth also felt like it was full of somebody else’s teeth, and he couldn’t feel his arms or legs.
“Guess they’re . . . gone,” he managed, through abraded lips, not quite able to avoid lisping on the sibilants.
“Guess so,” she said, not moving.
Joe coughed, rackingly, then tried again. “Looks like the . . . storm’s comin’ back. You better get goin’, you wanna . . . make it to the truck before . . . it gets real bad.”
A listless horizontal headshake, like making a snow angel’s hat. “Wouldn’t do me much good if I did.”
“Why . . . not?”
“Couldn’t figure it out from my clothes, huh? That’d be ’cause I’m strictly a downtown-Toronto girl, Joe Crow. Never learned how to drive.”
And that, even with the pain mounting up, the horrid disconnect between flesh, spirit, and the world around both . . . that ridiculous pitch-black joke of a joke alone was almost enough to make Joe laugh—even here, even now. Even bad though he knew it would probably hurt to do so.
“Seriously, though. . . .” he managed, a minute or two later. “’S like the song . . . ‘You don’t have to go home, but yuh . . . you . . . ’”
“. . . ‘can’t . . . stay . . . here.’”
“Thass the one.”
Judy sighed, grimaced, and made it to her knees in a single spasming, cockroach wriggle; from this vantage point, she glanced down at him sidelong, hair hung back over her face from forehead to blood-smeared upper lip, like she’d planned it that way, or something. Like she really thought it’d be enough to hide the fact she was crying again.
“I’m pretty strong,” she admitted, “but I don’t think I can carry you.”
“’m not . . . assking yuh. . . .”
“Yeah, yeah, I know you’re not.” A pause, then a hitching breath. And then: “What do you want me to do?”
Joe shrugged, or tried to—reached up and aimed one misshapen hand to brush the scalding saltwater from her cheek, or (at least) seriously formed the intention of doing it. Maybe didn’t do either, in the end. Yet he could still feel her leaning closer at the same time, straining to hear him, as he forced the words out in a final barely human breath—
We Will All Go Down Together Page 20