by Jeff Strand
Thou hast walked up and down in the midst of the stones of fire.
He raised his other arm and brushed away the cobwebs, which clung to his skin and jacket.
“What is this place?” Jess whispered from behind him. She reached to her left and ran her hand along a straight edge that resembled the side of a doorway. Her hand came away gray with dust, but the surface she had just cleared shone like stainless steel.
Thou shalt be brought down to hell, to the sides of the pit.
Gabriel turned back to the room before him and held up the lantern. The walls weren’t as smooth as he had initially thought. He walked all the way across the chamber and brushed off another section of the wall to reveal an instrument panel with a flat-screen display, beneath which was a series of buttons resembling a keyboard.
His heart was pounding so hard he could hear his pulse.
He was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him.
Gabriel headed left, the ground beneath him making a sound like buckling metal under his weight. The lamp highlighted several large mounds of dust-covered debris in the middle of the room. As he approached, the lantern drew contrast on the shapes. It looked like a cluster of high-backed chairs with headrests and—
There was a crackling noise ahead of him and a soft meow.
Gabriel followed the sound around the first seat and glanced down at it. There was Oscar, curled up not on the chair, but on a pair of spindly, desiccated legs. The cat looked up at him, the reflections from his eyes twin golden halos.
Jess drew a sharp inhalation.
Gabriel followed the legs to a collapsed abdomen. The hip bones poked through the mummified gray flesh. A five-point harness crossed a bare chest, thick with dust. The parchment skin peeled away from the buckle to reveal the thin manila bones of a ribcage.
For God spared not the angels that sinned…
He reached across the harness with a trembling hand and tipped the head up by the chin.
“Oh my God,” Jess whispered.
Gabriel couldn’t find any words for the face upon which he now stared.
…but cast them down to hell…
The orbital sockets were far too large, ovular rather than circular, and set too low on the face, to creating an abnormally long and broad forehead. The eyes themselves were absent and the skin had peeled away from the deep black pits. A triangular ridge of bone between them formed a nose far too small for the face. And beneath was a thin mouth. The lips had shriveled and retracted from the bared teeth, which were small like kernels of corn to fit the tiny mouth. There was only a bump of bone at the base of the weak chin.
…and delivered them into chains of darkness…
He wanted to jerk his hand back, but he couldn’t tear his gaze from the face.
The bible had led his sister and her friends to the location where the angels that had been cast out of heaven struck the earth.
…to be reserved unto judgment.
Where they were bound for all eternity, not in chains of darkness, but in their harnesses.
He understood now the secret that had been important enough to kill to protect.
No one can know, Jenny had said. None of us can ever leave here.
Their entire existence was built upon the perpetuation of a lie.
There can be no forgiveness. There can be no more hope.
These weren’t just the fallen angels of Christian lore, the defeated faction from the insurgence in heaven, that his sister and her friends had found high on the northern slope of the mountain after following the stones of fire into the very mouth of hell.
The face into which he now stared was not that of a mystical angel, but that of a being from another world entirely. A being whose existence had provided the foundation for the greatest lie ever told, a lie upon which countless lives depended.
“It doesn’t even look human,” Jess whispered. “What do you think it is?”
“An angel.”
“If this is an angel, then…”
Her voice faded to nothingness.
Gabriel turned away from the remains, looked into her eyes, and finished her thought for her.
“Then what the hell is God?”
Epilogue
Jess held Gabriel’s hand as together they stood before the crimson spring, looking up toward the mountain peak where the cross had been erected to memorialize their vanished siblings. They had just mounted another placard beneath the first to commemorate the more recent lives that had been lost in the search for their missing family members. The warm June sun shined down on them in slanted rays through the wavering branches of the ponderosa pines. Only spotted patches of snow remained beneath the densest thickets. Otherwise, the ground was dry, the kindling and leaves crackling as they rustled on the slight breeze. Soon enough, the rains would come, heralding winter’s inevitable return. This was their window of opportunity.
The Search & Rescue copper had airlifted them down from the mountain the following day as soon as the storm had broken. Jess and Gabriel had joined the police, FBI, and countless volunteers over the ensuing week in a futile search for Maura Aragon, Brent Cavenaugh, Will Farnham, and Kelsey Northcutt. None of their bodies were ever found and they were eventually written off as victims of the cruel mountain and the wicked storm. It happens in the Rocky Mountains every year, the authorities had said. Eventually, their remains would be found.
Gabriel was certain they never would.
They had rolled a number of stones into the hole above the spring where Oscar had entered, sealed it with gravel and dirt, and wedged the largest stone they could lift over the top. That had been two days ago. Ever since, they had done nothing but roll boulder after boulder into the spring to block off the underwater tunnel. The red water now overflowed the granite banks and cut twin streams to either side down the slope.
No one would ever again set foot inside that mountain. No one would ever learn the secret that had cost so many lives. The lies would pass through countless more generations, but hope would persevere as a corollary of the deception.
Levi had been wrong.
Stephanie would never have told. To her, hope and faith were synonymous.
And to honor her memory, he would now protect the faith of millions.
“Are you ready?” Jess asked.
Gabriel nodded, and squeezed her hand.
They turned away from the distant silhouette of the cross and the amassed rocks that now clogged the spring, and began their descent of Mount Isolation for the final time.
***
Gabriel sat on the couch with his laptop on the coffee table in front of him. Beyond that small screen was the much larger television, which Jess watched from the kitchen behind him while she doled out the Mongolian beef and Szechuan chicken onto plates from the take-out containers. He heard the clatter of plates on the eating bar and smelled the divine mixture of aromas. Oscar had taken notice as well. Despite his useless rear leg, he managed to leap out of Gabriel’s lap and scamper around the couch to entangle himself in Jess’s feet.
“Ready to take a break for dinner?” she asked, massaging Gabriel’s shoulders to make sure she had his attention. Oscar meowed and pawed at her legs until she picked him up.
“Yeah. I just need a couple more minutes…”
His voice trailed off.
The rerun of Seinfeld had been interrupted by another news flash showing aerial coverage of the fire in Rocky Mountain National Park, which had now been burning for more than seventy-two hours. They speculated it may have been caused by a lightning strike, or perhaps a carelessly discarded cigarette butt. Either way, it made Gabriel nervous. Thirty-five hundred acres had already been consumed. The remote location and steep slopes, coupled with the gusting winds, made the fire nearly impossible to contain. Pine Springs had been evacuated the day before and the highway closed to all but emergency personnel. Pockets of fire burned from the scorched earth while a halo of towering flames advanced outward in all dire
ctions. The image zoomed out to encompass the greatest extent of the damage. The sharp topography of the mountains looked like the landscape of another planet entirely. Rugged peaks and chiseled valleys aligned in such a way that they almost looked like a—
“Jesus,” Gabriel whispered.
He leaned forward, grabbed the remote from the table, and paused the picture on the screen with the aid of the DVR. Carefully, he saved the paper he had been preparing on the unclassified species of salt-loving microorganism he had been writing for publication in the Journal of Bacteriology of the American Society for Microbiology entitled “On a New Species of Haloarchaea: H. stephanii,” and typed in a quick internet search. He breezed through the sites until he found what he was looking for, and enlarged the image to fill the small screen. It was an image of the surface of the Cydonia region of Mars as captured by Michael Malin’s Mars Orbiter Camera in 2001, the infamous “Face on Mars.”
Gabriel glanced from the monitor to the frozen picture on the TV, then back again. Over and over.
It was the same face, the same seemingly natural alignment of peaks and valleys on planets separated by hundreds of thousands of miles.
The same gaunt, desiccated face into which he had stared in a cobweb-riddled cockpit in the heart of Mount Isolation.
The true visage of God.
About the Authors
Jeff Strand and Michael McBride have written over thirty books, though not together. Their novels include PRESSURE (Jeff), BLOODLETTING (Mike), DWELLER (Jeff), THE INFECTED (Mike), WOLF HUNT (Jeff), GOD’S END (Mike), BENJAMIN’S PARASITE (Jeff), and INNOCENTS LOST (Mike).
Mike likes to write about science and the end of the world, and does a lot of research. Jeff likes to write about psycho killers and flesh-eating monsters, and does significantly less research. Jeff thinks Mike should really be taking better advantage of Facebook as a promotional tool, but the fact that Mike doesn’t waste time on Facebook might help explain why he writes his books at a steady, consistent pace while Jeff freaks out right before the deadline.
You can visit Mike’s website at http://www.MichaelMcBride.net and Jeff’s website at http://www.JeffStrand.com. You should visit both.
Dark Regions Press has been publishing since 1985 and is an award winning press. We specialize in Horror, Fantasy, and Science Fiction. However our favorite niche is Horror. We have published such renowned writers as Bentley Little, Kevin J. Anderson, Michael Arnzen, Elizabeth Massie, Jeffrey Thomas and many others. Dark Regions Press has had many Bram Stoker Award nominations and four award-winning short story and poetry collections.
Visit our website for more exciting books.
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