We Will All Go Down Together

by We Will All Go Down Together (v5. 0) (epub)

  His therapists thought it was post-traumatic stress disorder, which it sort of was. But none of this “lost time” was ever gone completely. If he strained hard enough he had dim visions of dancing wild, partnerless reels in massive caverns lit by glowing lichen; huge hurling battles fought with suborned humans used as cannon fodder on either side; feasts that were sublime when seen through one eye, foul and dreadful when seen through the other.

  Lady Glauce even took him back through time in a smoky, mirrored way; showed him Callistor and Grisell, the Three Betrayed burning, Juleyan Roke’s body swinging in the wind while his shadow slid away beneath, like dirty black water. Yuir heritage, grandson. These things stayed with him always, colouring his dayside interactions like a horrid filter, a supernatural depth perception.

  Mac remembered hearing in Science class how every cell in the body replaced itself if you only waited long enough, following a strict seven-year cycle—and seven was a magic number too, just as much as nine. A fairy number.

  This much he knew, however: it didn’t matter how many times his cells regrew, the harvest reaped would always be the same. A hybrid legacy, lost between worlds, like having superpowers, only far less sexy. And far less convenient.

  But that same year was also when he met Fr. Gowther—loitering in full cassock and back-tipped Homburg out back of the church, smoking a surreptitious cig and going over the scribbled notes for his homily before revving himself up for Sunday night Mass.

  (Cops drink, son, in the main; priests smoke. Gets you to Heaven just a tad quicker—and better yet, it’s cheap.)

  Mac stood, watching him for a moment, getting up his nerve. Then:

  “Mind if I ask you something, Father?”

  Fr. Gowther didn’t look up. “Be surprised if you didn’t, son, considering how long you’ve been waiting. Is it a Bible question?”

  “Sort of, yeah.”

  “Fire away.”

  Mac crossed his arms. “Well—you know that part, right after Moses gets the Ten Commandments? And there’s this whole chunk of it just goes on and on about all the different kinds of nakedness you can’t uncover—”

  “Leviticus, 1-27. ‘The nakedness of thy sister, even her nakedness thou shalt not uncover for hers is thine own nakedness’; ‘I am the Lord.’ Just in case you forgot who you were talking to there, for a minute.”

  “Yeah. So what’s all that about?”

  “People ask; believe me, they ask. You need to be specific. Which isn’t to say there aren’t inconsistencies. . . .”

  “Like the part where ‘a man may not lie with another man as with a woman, because that is abomination,’ but ‘a woman may not lie with an animal, because that is confusion?’ Must really suck, trying to explain that particular distinction to a bunch of Catechism cram-class eight-year-olds.”

  And now Fr. Gowther did look at him—straight on, through kind but tired eyes, the colour of well-faded denim. “What’s your name again, son?” he wanted to know.

  “Maccabee Roke.”

  “Well, and why am I not surprised.” Fr. Gowther pinched the end of his cigarette out between two callused fingertips, a straight-up Steve McQueen move, and stowed it carefully away inside his inner coat pocket. “All right, then, come on in—there’s still some time yet ’til the big show. Let’s discuss this a bit further.”

  Inside, the church had its usual smell: stale incense, wood lacquer, a faint tang of old B.O. Mac had been in and out half a thousand times by now, and it still made him nervous; he’d already discovered (much to his joy) that the otherwise undistinguished, ugly, 1970s-poured-concrete cocoon really did seem to project enough spiritual force to keep the rest of his relatives securely off-campus, but kept half-consciously bracing himself for the day somebody decided Mac wasn’t fit for entry any more, either. He watched Fr. Gowther negotiate the Stations of the Cross with surprising grace, born of either familiarity or a genuine respect for his job, unlikely as that might seem.

  Saying, as he checked the Formica-tiled floor for spent mousetraps and puddles—“The Levitican verses . . . they’re pure practicality for the most part, aside from the truly out-of-date ones like suffering not a witch to live, and all. First off, let me ask you this: do you want to lie with another man?”

  “Not hugely.”

  “Think any of the gals you know want to lie with animals? And no, young Hugo Chance doesn’t count.” As Mac smiled: “Ah, now you’re gettin’ it. Then it doesn’t much matter, does it? Except for purposes of argument, and purely for the sake of arguing.”

  He fixed Mac with a hard stare, at that last part, then grinned when he saw Mac nod, ever-so-slightly.

  “Is this what you do all day, Father?” Mac asked him. “Read the Bible, answer stupid questions?”

  “Usually, though they’re not always as stupid. Why?”

  “And . . . you get to stay in here.”

  “Well, sometimes, I do get invited to dinner at parishioners’ houses, which can be a bit dicey if you don’t keep a close watch on how the wine in your glass might be affectin’ your tongue.”

  “But then you come back, after.”

  “Oh yes, I have to. I sleep here.”

  “In the Rectory?” Fr. Gowther nodded. “That’s part of the Church too, then. Right?”

  “Technically, yes.”

  “In fact, pretty much everywhere you go is part of the Church. Technically.”

  “I’m not quite sure what you’re after with this, son.”

  “Mac. I was just thinking . . . I mean, I could do all that.”

  “Probably; anybody could, and that’s the sad fact. But could you care about what you were doin’? Or more importantly—care about the people you were doin’ it for?”

  Mac took a breath. “. . . I think so, probably,” he said, at last. “Event-ually.”

  “Then you might have a vocation, is what this is about.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, that does bear further examination. Sit down, son—Mac. Let’s talk it out.”

  Fifteen years of preparation on, meanwhile—finally hovering on the brink of ordination, with a Connaught Trust internship in his metaphorical back pocket—he found himself back at Fr. Gowther’s side, still trying to fake it ’til he made it. Not knowing why he should care if the old man actually believed in his . . . belief or not, aside from the fact that, if the same man who’d once championed his plans to profess suddenly withdrew his recommendation, the likelihood of Mac ending up anywhere but some crap-hole war-zone posting—or back out on the street, where any shadow held the possibility of Enzemblance’s grip suddenly tightening on his arm and yanking—would shoot through the roof.

  “I can’t write that letter, son, and that’s the plain truth.”

  “It’s a formality, Henry. Monsignor Chu’s already given me the stamp, just not on paper.”

  “Sounds like you don’t need me anyhow, then.” Fr. Gowther busied himself with milking his tea, eyes kept scruplously elsewhere. “Good for you on all your hard work, Maccabee.”

  But Mac refused to look away, arms automatically crossing, well aware how pugnacious it probably made him look. “You don’t think I should get this job, do you?” he demanded.

  Fr. Gowther sighed. “Not for me to say. It’s God you’re swearin’ yourself over to—my opinion doesn’t mean much, long as He lets you. Be honest, though, son . . . you don’t even know for certain He actually will, your ownself.”

  A stopped breath hung between them: the phouka in the room, visible at last. Mac’s heritage, hitherto kept carefully unmentionable, ability and disability, all in one.

  “Is that what you believe,” Mac asked, finally, “after all this time? That I have no soul?”

  “Now, how can I possibly know? How can—”

  (—either of us?)

  “I can’t change what I am, Henry.”

  “Which, some might say,
makes a plenty good enough argument for stayin’ as far away from the Trust and them sisters who keep it as you possibly can,” Fr. Gowther shot back; Mac snorted.

  “So you do care,” he said, sarcastically.

  At this, Fr. Gowther flushed bright red. “And why would I bother to say anything at all, if I didn’t?”

  Around Mac, the room lurched and dimmed, and he spent the next minute giving some random point on the wall minute attention, unable to trust himself with any other sort of response. Because what he felt was the urge to curse, to overlook, to blast Fr. Gowther (his one human friend, his father-of-choice) to a God-damned pillar of salt, pricking at the roots of his optic nerves like a static-charged, double paper cut.

  “Listen,” Fr. Gowther began again, voice softening. “It’s a sad fact to admit, but you’re just not priest material, Maccabee. Sure, you know your Bible—better’n me, probably. You even believe in God. But you don’t love Him; you fear Him. Only part of bein’ a priest you’d like is tellin’ other people what t’do—and believe me, that particular joy gets old a lot faster than you’d think it would.”

  Like the whole world was shrinking and thinning, becoming that same membrane which flicked itself across his sight. Mac’s head swum with the rageful unfairness of it all: so much time wasted. And for nothing.

  “As long as I’m in the Church, Henry—any church—I’m safe,” Mac told his uncomfortable shoes, still shiny from this morning’s 4:00 A.M. polish. “Does that sound like God doesn’t want me here?”

  “Mac, God wants every—”

  “That’s not what you just said, and you know it.”

  And—oh Lord, he had to force himself to think clearly, remembering: had this been when he felt the glamer begin to boil out of him? The same moment he heard himself think “words” formed from ice, cold enough to cut and freeze, simultaneously—

  LOOK at me. Do NOT look away.

  —with no shame at all, no breath of regret, only the vicious sodium-bulb flare of victory as he watched Fr. Gowther do it.

  “You’re gonna write me the letter,” Mac heard himself tell him, deliberately. “You won’t contest my appointment, and then . . . well, after that, I guess we’ll just have to see.”

  Because: My family scares the fuck out of me, and I’m one of them. So what do you think they do to real people? People like you? Eat them, from the inside out. Make them into jewellery and wear them. Drag them down into their home, play with them awhile, and when they’re bored, they just leave them there, alone in the dark, forever. Who’s gonna help me with that, exactly?

  Fr. Gowther writhed, a hook-caught worm. Yet Mac still knew him well enough to know exactly what his comeback would have been, had he heard said any of the above out loud—

  With God, Maccabee, all things are possible. They must be. You have to believe that.

  Well . . . yeah. And no.

  You have to, Mac thought. But me?

  “Mac, son. . . .” Fr. Gowther managed, at last. “. . . for God’s own sake, don’t do this. Not to—”

  “You?”

  “. . . yourself. . . .”

  Then it was over.

  Next thing Mac could remember, he was lying face-down on the cathedral stones, swearing over and over: Oh God, if you only accept my profession here, I will never do that again, ever. Not to anyone.

  Which he hadn’t, since—not yet, anyhow. Yet what he knew now, with the Church securely reframed in his rear-view, was that it’d been the human in him that’d driven him to destroy his best friend in order to get something he’d damn well known even then, on some level, he’d eventually throw away.

  That was the end between them, Fr. Gowther and he. Oh, Mac’d tried to cover his tracks, to erase the memory of what he’d done, but it hadn’t helped; every time Fr. Gowther saw Mac after that, he’d known that something must have happened (just not what). That awful feeling of violation, with the poor, good old priest never knowing for sure whether he’d been the rapist or the rape-ee . . . a seed of doubt, shoved down deep inside to bloom slowly, stretching the lobes of his faith until they tore themselves apart.

  Oh, but Mac hadn’t actually killed him, not directly.

  He hadn’t had to.

  Ten years after his ill-fated ordination ceremony, Mac found himself playing secretary during a “debriefing” in one of the Connaught’s infamous Hold Rooms, watching Sr. Blandina beat the (literally) holy crap out of a strix with a Bible roughly the size of her own torso. Smell of burnt flesh and feathers, black blood everywhere, the strix screaming guttural Greek curses—

  And Blandina, right there in the middle of it all, implacably fearless, flushed with a pride that seemed virtually indistinguishable from rage at the prospect of doing God’s good work. Blandina, passing fatal judgment on this bloodsucking owl-lady like it wasn’t just her job, but her actual pleasure. Catching his eye on the rebound, pausing for another swing, The Shield’s Vic fucking Mackey with his phone book.

  She had her own issues with monsters, obviously. Nobody joined the O.S.P. because they were huge Buffy the Vampire Slayer fans, but because they’d known (someone) who’d encountered (something)—with the emphasis always clearly on “thing” and the de-emphasis on whoever that particular someone might have been. Whoever that’d been for Blandina, meanwhile, they’d already been avenged a hundred-fold since her profession—her list of righteous kills was truly legendary, as Mac should know, since a good part of his duties at the Connaught involved updating Monsignor Chu’s copy of the Bestiary ad Noctem with fresh examples of how she’d discovered the best way to kill whatever they pitted her against: a loogaroo, adze, vrykolakos—or an ogre or goblin. A glaistig or knocker, undine or rusalka, a wili, a water-leaper, troll or huldre-maiden, brown boggart, pixie or boggledy-bo. . . .

  They were none of them harmless, these pathetically stranded slop-overs, who’d either failed to make the last boat for Tír-na-nÓg or decided, for reasons all their own—much like Lady Glauce—to stick around and give it the old college try, even while iron swarmed across the world around them. Hell, Mac had raised his hand, too, at a few of those hunt-planning meetings; who really wanted a nucklavee in Lake Ontario, aside from the nucklavee itself? But they were still his blood, his distant relatives, and the further they crept to the top of Blandina’s hit-list, the more comfortably he could see his own name one day being written there, once she figured it all out. As he knew, without question, that she would.

  “But what if they’re not actually doing anything . . . monstrous, these creatures?” He asked her, later, over a late-night snack at the local greasy spoon. “What then, Sister?”

  To which she responded by looking at him with a kind of blank-pure lack of understanding that would have been oddly touching if it hadn’t been so damn scary.

  And said—“It’s not what they do or don’t do. It’s what they are. You should know that, Father. . . .”

  Mac went home that night to the Saint Mike’s Rectory, alone, as ever. He sat chain-smoking in his room, thinking about how badly he wanted to call Fr. Gowther and tell him something, anything. He didn’t even know what. Except that Fr. Gowther probably wouldn’t have remembered who Mac was, at that point, even if he hadn’t already been dead for a year and a half and buried back home in Nova Scotia, on the wrong side of the cemetery.

  Mac could still see things other people couldn’t; the Church hadn’t done shit about that, though it did keep most of them at bay. What he hadn’t initially known, however, was that he could even see things his own family couldn’t—and those things, the Church had no visible effect on at all. They breezed in and out like the seal of God’s protection was made of tissue paper, maybe because they didn’t recognize it, or maybe because it didn’t recognize them. Either way, Mac remained the one caught seeing, having to see. And if he didn’t want to anymore, there was only one way out: through the front fucking door.

  Blandina had b
een a reason to stay too, once. But all the hot-eyed looks in the world couldn’t change the fact that, one day, she’d realize there was a specific reason he kept on suggesting that maybe monsters might just be people with something a little bit extra, if you only gave them the chance to prove it. And that’d be when he’d have to make a separate peace with the Ordo or die like a dog. Or live on in a cage, which would be far, far worse—

  Which returned him, rather neatly, to the conundrum at hand: how to do Le Prof’s job, yet emerge with skin intact, given who Mac might find himself dealing with. How to make sure he got paid, and also that the blame (if any) fell directly on the person who’d set this particular snatch-and-grab in motion, rather than the person whose hands did the actual snatching and grabbing.

  Blandina at his mental ear, her hot breath intimate as ever: Did you think we didn’t know what you were? Chased by Saracen, a half-second later, murmuring just as low, burred words apple-scented: Yuir no’ like them, coz; ye never will be. Yet ye may come by the brugh when it suits ye, by high way or low—if ye’ve no’ forgot how tae walk either road yet, in all yuir human wanderings. . . .

  That would take a toll, he knew—a tithe, rather. As everything did. And would it be worth it, in the end?

  Well.

  How could it not be?

  | chapter five

  Five hours later saw Mac ducking and dodging his way through the eddying airport crowds with the Templars already at his heels.

  They’d been easy enough to spot, all hanging around by the baggage carousel like that—a sleek group of dudes in suits, with discreet little red cross-pins at their lapels and wicked little ceramic machetes nesting in scabbards sewn along the spines of their coats. Nothing that’d set a metal detector off, not to mention nothing someone who wasn’t already used to hanging with covertly armed nuns would probably pick up on, but it made Mac nervous, nonetheless . . . so much so he’d turned his glamer on early and moved towards them only in sketchy, sidelong increments, like an invisible crab.