The Fallen: A Novel

by Dale Bailey

  Yet what else could he have done? What else could anyone have done?

  And then—mere seconds had passed—seventeen years of memory came crashing down upon him. He remembered it all, that first journey into the labyrinth—how he had crept down this same passage, easing past the narrow ell and through the bright aperture beyond; how, then, too, his eyes had fallen first on Perry, rocking against the wall as though he had taken a hammer blow to the stomach, venting that strange and toneless cry of terror and awe; how, at last, his gaze had slipped to the creature at the center of the room, so much brighter then, so gloriously bright.

  Stark, unremitting terror had clawed through his guts, leaving in its wake a glittering vacuum. Never again would he believe in his father’s God—a sane and merciful God, however distant. God, if God existed, was demented, mad, the Old Testament deity of jealousy and wrath, the fire-and-brimstone monster of the preachers who twice a year pitched their tents in the field off Plug Hollow Road and excoriated the men and women who sought from them salvation. God, if God existed, was an evil God, to bear such beauty in one hand and in the other death—

  —his mother’s death—

  Oh, he remembered. The contradiction had shattered him, like so much precious glass.

  Then, as now, the flashlight had slipped from his nerveless fingers. He had reached down and fumbled to pick it up, and he had fled—without pause for thought, without a moment’s consideration for the boy he left behind. Flight. In the moment of that shattering disclosure, he could think of nothing else. Just flight. Flight through endless and ascending dark, a glimmer of wormhole light, the storm-lashed ridge beyond. Rain slammed into his face, mud geysered from his pounding feet, and then Perry’s hand fell across his shoulder, and he turned, not fighting back, too ashamed to fight, hungry for the benediction of those blows.

  Now, looking back, he saw that even as he fled in terror through those black tunnels he had begun the process of forgetting—of transforming the creature into his nightmare pursuer. For seventeen years he had been running and only now, here, buried in the heart of the mountain, could he face the past at last. Only now, when he no longer had a choice, could he tear away the final veil of memory.

  And then the thing moved.

  He swallowed hard against the knot of awe and terror in his throat as it drew breath and shifted in the grip of some unimaginable dream. Like a man, but not a man, more massive than any man in the world—

  —a giant, there were giants in the earth—

  —cold and terrible in its glamour, the thing curled, fetal in its agelong sleep, and fell still once again, naked but for a bright mantle of wings, white rapturous wings, like a cloak of molten ice.

  Chapter 25

  Emily’s scream startled time into motion once again.

  It also saved Henry’s life.

  Dazzled with beauty, paralyzed with it, he might have sensed movement from the shadows a moment too late.

  As it was, he was already in motion when a half-glimpsed figure—

  —Crawford was it Crawford—

  —plunged from the darkness right of the tunnel’s mouth, gathering Emily under one outstretched arm without even slowing down. They barreled into Henry at full speed, but Crawford’s lowered shoulder merely grazed him, spinning him off balance. The glittering blade, which might have gutted him had he been standing still, slashed through his jacket instead, exposing the lining.

  Henry staggered to the floor as they rocketed past into the circle of radiance. Crawford went down as well, skidding across the stone. Emily twisted free, scrabbling on hands and knees to get away. Crawford was too fast. Moving with the grace of a younger, lighter man—

  —an altogether different man—

  —he lunged after her. One thick hand closed around her ankle, dragging her back. Emily screamed, flailing at him with her flashlight, and Crawford struck her arm. The flashlight spun away. It shattered, spilling echoes into the silence. Batteries skipped across the stone floor.

  In the same instant, Henry came to his knees, gun in hand. Without a single wasted gesture, Crawford dragged Emily into the line of fire, knotted his hand in her hair, and yanked her head back. Then the blade was at her throat. Her flesh dimpled, blanching at the pressure. Her eyes rolled in terror.

  For a moment, everything held, a deadly tableau: Ben at the tunnel aperture and Henry clutching the gun, Crawford and Emily tangled on the floor, backlit by that weird shifting glow. And then the creature drew another labored breath and that strange radiance flickered, dimming. Something gave way high in the vault overhead. A glittering cloud of black dust eddied down around them.

  All the while, a crazed litany was chiming in Henry’s head—

  —is it Crawford is it—

  He clamped down on it, silencing it. He could see the man clear enough, couldn’t he—the same blue eyes, the same bulky frame? And yet, there was a subtle change all the same—a deft certainty in the way he moved, an ache of emptiness behind those eyes. He reminded Henry of a very fine actor, one who looked the same from role to role, but nonetheless somehow—Henry couldn’t say how—managed to shift, visibly shift, the personality at the core. The man across the room was Harold Crawford—and he wasn’t. It was that simple.

  Henry inched forward, gripping the pistol in trembling hands. Perry Holland moaned in the darkness at his back.

  “Easy,” Ben whispered.

  “That’s right,” Crawford said, and the change was in his voice, too—a way of biting off the vowels, so the words were sharper, free of that slow mountain cadence. “You ever want to see your lady friend again, you want to take it very, very easy.”

  Then he did something so unexpected, so bizarre, that Henry felt the shock jolt through his guts. He leaned his face into the crook of her neck and licked her. He licked her, a long, lingering caress, his tongue curling obscenely before it slipped back into his grinning mouth. Henry felt the shock of the gesture reverberating through him, shock and anger, too, igniting that molten core of rage.

  “She’s a pretty thing,” Crawford was saying. “I’ll keep you in mind when I’m—”

  “Fuck you.”

  The voice was barely his own. The room seemed to spin, his mind exploding with flashbulb memory—his father in the casket, the bodies of Asa and Cindy with their wounds like bloody mouths, and Emily, Emily last of all. Emily. The light in her eye as she bent to meet his kiss. The taste of her beneath his lips. Emily. Bleeding out on the stone floor of this nightmare fissure, her throat slashed to the bone by the bearish monster across the room.

  Fuck you, the rage said. He’d lost enough, enough, and somehow the rage was screaming in his voice, screaming through tears, “Fuck you, fuck you—” Somehow, it was winding the tension on his finger, dragging the firing pin slowly home—

  Crawford let the knife jump a centimeter or two, just biting into Emily’s flesh. She moaned as a jeweled droplet of blood beaded up at her throat.

  Ben’s voice was sharp with warning. “Henry!”

  In the same moment, a hand closed over his shoulder.

  “Don’t do it,” Perry Holland whispered.

  Henry stole a glance over his shoulder. Perry’s face glistened with blood under the mining cap. “It’s not mined out down here. There could be gas, anything.” He gestured vaguely at the room around them. “With all this dust in the air, you could start a fire that might burn a decade.”

  Henry drew a breath. The rage held the trigger at the tension point for a moment longer, and then slowly released it. The hammer came to rest with a barely perceptible click.

  “That’s better,” Crawford said. “Now why don’t you just drop the gun altogether?”

  As of their own accord, Henry’s fingers separated. The revolver clattered to the floor by his flashlight. Crawford gestured with the knife, and Henry sent the pistol skidding over the stone, a shimmering wheel of silvery reflection. It came to rest by Emily’s foot. She whimpered once again, and Henry met her gaze fo
r a single moment. Then he looked back at Crawford, possessed once again by that strange sense that this wasn’t the man he knew. Another personality, colder by far than the deputy who had driven him home all those years ago—

  —I’m sorry, son. I’m so sorry—

  —stared back from behind those chill blue eyes.

  The words were out before he had thought them through: “Who are you?”

  Harold Crawford laughed. “Oh, that’s good. That’s very good. I’ll let you in on a little secret. It doesn’t matter who I am, and it doesn’t matter who you are, because when you get down to it we’re all just random collisions of atoms, and a man has to take his pleasure where he finds it.” He leaned forward to lick Emily’s neck once again, and this time he let one hand close over her breast. He grinned. “But since you asked, I’ll tell you. You can call me Grubb. My name is Delbert Grubb, and down inside it always has been.”

  Once again, that rage flickered far inside Henry. He bit down upon it, forced himself to speak calmly:

  “And Harold Crawford?”

  “A mask,” Crawford said. “A convenient fiction, that’s all he ever was.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  Through the glittering clouds of coal dust, Henry saw a flicker of uncertainty in the big man’s eyes. Forcing himself to ignore Emily’s panicked expression, her small body rigid in the sheriff’s grasp, he tried to reach whatever fragment remained of the man who had told him of his mother’s death, the man who had said, I’m sorry, who had meant it.

  “You’re a good man,” he said. “Or you were once and you can be again.”

  “Shut up,” Crawford hissed, lunging forward a step. His face paled and twisted. The knife jerked at Emily’s neck, drawing forth another bead of blood. “Shut up, shut up, you shut up, I was never a good man, I never wanted to be—”

  “No? What about when I was a boy? What about that day in the rain—”

  “It was an act.”

  “You couldn’t fake that—”

  “You’re a fool if you believe that.”

  “You told me you were sorry,” Henry said. “You meant it. You meant it.”

  Crawford’s grip tightened. Gravity captured the droplet of blood at Emily’s throat. Henry watched it slide down her neck, leaving a bright red wake. He could not turn away.

  “This is getting old,” Crawford said. “Now what we’re going to do—”

  But Henry never learned what they were going to do, for an uncanny, pain-racked moan filled the cavern, drowning out Crawford’s words. Something gave way with a groan of tortured earth in a distant corner of the fissure, releasing a clamorous torrent of rock. The creature shifted on its stony slab. Crawford shrank back, dragging Emily with one hand. In the same breathless moment, the creature too was moving. Turning in a feathery waterfall of wings, it rose, up and up. With a kind of dread inevitability—

  —Henry’s heart seized within him—

  —the massive head wheeled about on the great stanchion of that neck. It opened its eyes, featureless and blank as hammered silver, without iris, without pupil. Blind, Henry thought, it’s blind—

  But no. It was worse, far worse, for it saw: it saw everything. With a pitiless awareness that passed through him like a flame, it penetrated Henry in a glance. Even had he wanted to, he could not have hidden. Even had he wanted to, he could not have fled. He merely stood there, skewered on the glacial spike of that regard. And then, as impersonal and remote as the white-hot blast of a star, the bright gaze swept past.

  Henry sagged, terrified and exhilarated, unable to tear his eyes away. He drank in the sight of the thing, wasted, gaunt, a dream in sculpted flesh: the great wings thundering from the knotted roots of its back, the ropy muscles twisted under flesh scored with a dozen wounds healed to gleaming scars, the polished dome of its skull. Its sex dangled like a club between its legs. Air gushed in the clotted bellows of its lungs.

  Crawford cowered before it, transfixed. His mouth gaped and tears glistened like tiny jewels on his trembling cheeks. The hand knotted in Emily’s hair opened as of its own accord. She scuttled away like a crab. Henry was there to meet her, to lift her to her feet. He held her fiercely, watching over the dark crown of her head as the light washed over them in waves.

  His eyes caught Harold Crawford’s gaze, and he saw that it was Crawford, now, really Crawford, the man he had seen so many years ago, through all the shifting veils of rain.

  “I’m sorry,” Crawford said, and Henry was so caught up in that strange sense of the past laid over the present like a palimpsest that at first he thought he must have imagined the repetition of those words. But no, it was real. He was saying it again: “I’m so sorry. I’d take it back—if I could, I’d take it all back—”

  And then the thing seized Harold Crawford.

  It lifted him as a man might lift a child, as a child might hoist some blind crawling insect for closer inspection. Crawford’s feet dangled above the floor, kicking impotently. The knife gleamed in his hand. He stared in silence into that enigmatic gaze, so deep and cold you could drown there.

  “All I ever wanted was to be a good man,” he whispered. “It’s all I ever—”

  His voice broke. With a protean stir of wings—Henry felt the blast against his face—the thing raised Harold Crawford higher, and still higher. It held him effortlessly, like a rag doll, its face radiant and chill. Crawford extended a trembling hand. His fingers brushed its cheek. The gesture seemed to calm him.

  “I even prayed for it,” he said, “just like my daddy told me. I got down on my knees and prayed.”

  Emotions flickered across his face: awe and wonder and a hate so deep and corrosive that it was nearly love. Maybe it was love.

  “Why did you abandon me?” he asked.

  And then he drove the knife into its breast.

  Sauls Run

  The Labyrinth

  The Present

  Chapter 26

  For Del Grubb, the descent into the coal mine with Perry Holland was an apotheosis.

  For Crawford, trapped and voiceless in the straitjacket of his own flesh, it was an exercise in frustration. For more than two decades, he had resisted the siren call of that angry tide. Lashing himself to the mast of his aspirations, he had sought to atone for the sins of his past. With the work of his hands he had fed the hungry ghosts—the girl in the warehouse, LeMarius Oxford, the others, too many others. Compensation, they had cried. Provide, provide. And he had tried: He had sought to do good works, as his father’s God commanded. So it was a bitter draught indeed to swallow, this drowning mouthful of his own failure.

  And there was worse to come.

  Del Grubb suffered insult without grace, betrayal not at all. Before the night’s work was done, Perry Holland would bleed for his deceit. But first he’d watch this other die—this servant and attendant of Grubb’s father’s God, this mystery that Perry Holland had worked so hard to save—and maybe that would be the sweetest vengeance of all, to master such magnificence and revenge himself in the very same breath upon a mortal enemy.

  Ah, yes. Grubb’s penis stiffened just thinking of it.

  For Harold Crawford, imprisoned deep in Del Grubb’s flesh, even that was not the worst of it.

  The worst of it was this: Crawford was a secret sharer in Grubb’s aspirations. Even now, those hungry currents were beating in his soul. At some level, no matter how much Crawford denied it, he and Grubb were one and the same—as Grubb himself had put it all those years ago.

  The worst of it was this: When Perry Holland rose against Grubb, anxious to protect the thing buried in all those depths of earth, Crawford too derived some pleasure in striking Holland down. It was a paltry thing, to be sure, that pleasure, shot through with remorse, but it was there all the same.

  As Grubb had said: He’d always liked the wet work.

  When he heard noise in the corridor a few minutes later, Crawford felt another muted surge of that pleasure. With Holland unconscious
, Grubb had turned to gaze in awe at the thing sleeping on its stone pedestal. Another man might have missed the signs—the whispers, the faintest echo of a footfall—but even so enraptured, Grubb heard. He was like an animal, preternaturally sensitive, immersed in the physical. Crouching in the shadows, watching them step into the inner chamber, he congratulated himself on his luck. Sleep was weak, the reporter old and sick. But the symmetry of their deaths appealed to him.

  The girl was an unexpected bonus. Grubb didn’t know who she was, didn’t care. But after two decades of watching Harold Crawford stroke himself to fruitless spasms in his darkened bedroom, taking her might be the sweetest bit of work that night.

  Just for a moment, he let his mind sweep him back to the moonlit warehouse, back to the girl. He’d become a man that night. A shattering orgasm had rocked through him when the knife bit into her throat, and he knew he’d found his one true calling. Afterward, in celebration, he’d had her once again, spending in her moist box before the corpse went cold.

  Now, Grubb eased the knife from his pocket. The blade licked out, ashimmer with that molten glow. To his shame, Crawford shared Grubb’s surge of excitement, the tingle of anticipation in his loins. But he felt a wave of remorse as well. Watch out, he screamed. Get away! But Grubb was too strong. Nothing emerged but a strangled grunt.

  Maybe it was enough, for even as Grubb uncoiled from his hiding place, the girl spun to face him, screaming.

  And then Grubb was moving, gathering her to his side as he plunged out of the shadows with the knife. But the stroke that should have finished Henry Sleep went awry instead, and after that, nothing went as planned. In the hurried moments that followed, everything went wrong. Grubb felt his control slipping away when Perry Holland awoke. And while Sleep at last surrendered his gun, he wouldn’t surrender his voice, and the more it talked, that voice, the more Grubb sensed his old adversary stirring within him, growing stronger.

  Grubb felt suddenly uneasy. Things had gotten out of hand here. Sleep should have been dead, Perry Holland unconscious at the very least. He should have mastered this situation from the beginning, yet now he found himself facing three angry men with that—