The Singularity Cycle 02 Song of the Death God

by William Holloway

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  RAUCH

  FLAMME

  VERBRENNEN

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR

  PART THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY THREE

  PART FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY SIX

  CHAPTER THIRTY SEVEN

  CHAPTER THIRTY EIGHT

  CHAPTER THIRTY NINE

  CHAPTER FORTY

  EPILOGUE

  THANK YOU FOR READING

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ALSO FROM HORRIFIC TALES PUBLISHING

  The Song of the Death God by William Holloway

  First published in 2017 by Horrific Tales Publishing

  http://www.horrifictales.co.uk

  Sign Up to our Mailing List for a free Ebook

  Copyright © 2017 William Holloway

  https://twitter.com/HollowayHorror

  The moral right of William Holloway to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  eBook Edition

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organisations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  For my wife Brenda, who doesn't read fiction but believes in me.

  Prologue

  RAUCH

  He opened his eyes. He lay in a drainage ditch, numb in the frigid water. His teeth rattled together as he inhaled. The steam of his breath crossed the path of his vision, and his eyes burned from the acrid smoke blasting from the jagged crater, the impossible smell of burning concrete and vaporized steel. He closed his eyes to put the pieces back together.

  How long have I been in this ditch?

  How did I get here?

  They call me Liche, these men that know of me.

  Once they discover me, they will kill me wherever I go.

  He clenched his eyes shut and gritted his teeth together.

  He knew who he was.

  He knew what he was.

  He knew the years and the price he paid.

  He was in Peenemunde, 1944, and there was nothing to be gained by staying in Germany. They were on the losing side of this fight and their utility to him was over. The British came and The Amulet was gone, vaporized in the blast and buried under millions of tons of earth. He could no longer feel its effect, its ripple in the fabric of this universe.

  It was gone, the Great Work undone.

  He had played his hand against nature, and nature won. The universe abhors cheating, cannot abide its rules broken, and he most certainly had broken the rules.

  He did not scream, he did not pull out his hair, he did not curse God for his misfortune. He was expressionless. That is not to say that he wasn’t angry. The fury blazing inside wasn’t measurable in standard human terms. If he could relieve his anger with simple murder then he would have, but that would be nothing more than a waste of time.

  To Liche, born Carsten Ernst, the lesson this life taught was that time was the most valuable commodity. There was never enough, and time must be spent to gain more time.

  That’s what this whole thing was about: Time.

  Nothing more, nothing less. And what he had lost in the last few hours was the culmination of the past sixty years of effort.

  He did not scream, he did not pull out his hair, he did not curse God or his universe for this seemingly divine interference. He knew the stakes of this game. His life was spared, but his life’s work was ruined. On balance, he was still in the game, but the game had simply… changed. This happened before, this could happen again.

  He must be doubly diligent, doubly vigilant.

  When a man of his ambitions reaches the apex of his questing, the tides seek to turn him back. That is the natural course, the natural current of the universe. Events themselves become far more than events—they became adversaries.

  God doesn’t play dice with the universe, but for some reason God allowed many sets of dice to be made. Carsten Ernst sought to throw the dice, to rig the game in his own favor.

  This time he lost. Next time he would not.

  FLAMME

  Carsten Ernst was born in the German Kingdom of Bavaria, in Munich in the latter part of the 1800s, to a family whose wealth derived from their ownership of a foundry. A few years after his birth, an arrangement with the Krupps ensured their wealth in perpetuity. They wouldn’t need to administer the foundry. That would be handled by the Krupps, and they would simply receive a large share of the profits.

  The timing was providential. The Ernsts were running the business into the ground, stealing from it hand over fist. This transfer of management removed their last remnants of responsibility, completing their descent from prominence and admiration to decline and scandal. They were no longer a member family of proper and wealthy society, no longer in the proper social registries.

  That is not to say they were not wealthy by any rational measure.

  Young Carsten was the black sheep of the family, studious and quiet. His father and siblings quietly hoped that he would resuscitate the family name so they wouldn’t have to. He was their tiny white hope, teased constantly for his serious demeanor and lack of interest in picking on people weaker than himself.

  That is not to say that he was without his own indiscretions.

  There was a daughter of one of the housekeepers. She had been in love with him from the moment they could walk. She was his playmate, and the older they got, the darker their games became.

  Her name was Ava.

  One day, young Carsten and Ava were cavorting in the corridors of the Ernst manse. At the opposite ends of this wing were his brothers Uli and Wilhelm’s rooms. Wilhelm was never home, having taken up residence in Paris after wearing out his welcome with the Munich police. He beat a bartender almost to death for insisting he pay his enormous tab before bringing in another group of rakes to entertain with his largesse. Since then, Wilhelm started fancying himself an artist, yet no viable artwork materialized the way his liquor tabs did.

  Uli was almost always home, in the company of their two scandalous sisters, Greta and Karin. There was talk tha
t Uli was a homosexual due to his almost exclusive association with his sisters.

  By this age, Carsten knew what homosexual meant. It was when one man stuffed his erect penis into the buttocks of the other man. The drunken braggarts at his siblings’ parties talked about this with condemnation, yet Carsten witnessed these same worthies doing this same activity in the back gardens after drinking enough to forget their earlier admonishments.

  Carsten and Ava played one of his favorite games, the one he liked to call Good Dog, Bad Dog. He led her down the hall on a leash, crawling on all fours, told to sniff this and lick that, when they passed Uli’s door. He faintly heard Greta crying while Uli and Karin yelled at her.

  Greta cruelly slapped him earlier that morning, so he was eager to view her punishment. He learned early on that finding the truth often involved peeking through a keyhole, and today was no exception. Today, he learned his brother Uli wasn’t a homosexual, but something else entirely.

  Uli was made up like a woman, wearing a long dress hiked up above his waist, exposing his stiff cock. He knelt at the head of his enormous bed. Greta was tied up, suspended in the air by a system of hoists contrived by Uli and Karin. She wore their mother’s wedding dress while rocked forward and back by Karin, kneeling at the foot of the bed. When she swung forward, her mouth consumed Uli’s penis; when she swung back, her asshole expanded around an impossibly large wooden penis held by Karin. It looked remarkably painful, but Carsten couldn’t take his eyes off the spectacle as Greta swung back and forth between her deranged siblings. After several minutes, her body convulsed in unnatural joy, then Uli’s body did the same thing while his penis was buried in her mouth. Then she vomited, crying and coughing, and Uli and Karin fell off the bed laughing.

  Carsten didn’t understand this, as he didn’t understand many of the interactions between the degenerate adults in his life. But his own penis was rock hard. This was happening more and more, and he hadn’t known why.

  ***

  Carsten had attended an exclusive boys’ school in Munich, a school for the second and third sons of wealthy families. This was the way of titled nobility before them, and for the fantastically wealthy industrialists, this trend continued. Ordinarily, great expectations were handed to the first son. The second and third sons received their share, but only after the first. With the Ernsts, those expectations were inverted, at least by implication. Uli and Wilhelm would only rack up debt; Greta and Karin could only marry someone as debauched as they were.

  But young Carsten was another quantity entirely. He was ferociously intelligent and not given to the slavery of whim and need for consumption. Where his siblings were arrogant, insecure, and indulgent, he was intelligent, confident, and self-disciplined. Where they were impulsive, bullying, and demanding, he was patient, measured, and calculating. His siblings hoped, but did not say, that Carsten would invest monies from the family fortune and make windfalls to prop up their lives.

  By the time he finished preparatory school, they treated him with a measure of respect, at least when sober. His doors were locked, his space off limits. They did not harass or molest Ava, because she was his property.

  Around this time, Carsten and his class went to a local hospital for a tour of the facilities. It was customary for a second or third son of wealthy families to take up a respectable career, often in medicine. After that day, Carsten was obsessed. He saw what his classmates couldn’t: a way out of the mundane and vulgar world.

  To say that Carsten’s desire to escape, to transcend, was exclusively due to his upbringing would be a mistake; he possessed a singular disgust with life, with the very concept of existence, the coming into being, the living as a stupid filthy animal, and the dying as a stupid filthy animal. For all of his art and letters, man was still a form of slime, not all that different from his own excrement in the long view.

  After witnessing the incest of his siblings, years before, he tried to simulate the sensation they felt, thinking if others found this so important then perhaps its mystery could be open to him as well. After he achieved ejaculation, he immediately found it a dangerous foe. His mind turned to it whenever it could. His mind had developed a mind of its own. He hated this because his mind was his property, not the property of that act.

  The idea that this act was the great reward, the be-all-end-all was appalling to him.

  That’s it?

  Something squirting out of your penis?

  Being a slave to the body’s need to procreate?

  And love? What the hell was that? Men, great men, composed epic writings, vast and sprawling paintings, glorious arias to that silliness. It was natural, it was their way. It wasn’t a delusion, it was a necessity. Without it their lives were meaningless. They needed ideas to give their lives purpose.

  He could look down on them as weak, but that would be lying to himself. He needed it, too. This was perhaps the gravest insult of all. Not just knowing he needed these ideas too, but knowing they were just ideas concocted by creatures not all that different from their own excrement.

  And he was just like them.

  This was the root of his disgust. He wasn’t disappointed with himself, but he knew there had to be a remedy to the human condition of slave to the body, slave to ideas.

  VERBRENNEN

  What Carsten found in that tour of the hospital was order and rationalism. Charles Darwin was correct; humans have ancestor species, some still living in the jungles of Africa. When dissected, they were like machines. He horrified his peers by proposing that the human machine could be disassembled and reassembled in new combinations, and through these experiments man could perhaps transcend his frailties and limitations.

  One of the instructors, however, wasn’t disturbed by Carsten’s questioning, and asked if he were a humorist who read Mary Shelley. Carsten wasn’t joking; he wasn’t one for humor. He felt it a distraction. Carsten saw that science was truth, but that the understandings of science were too few and too subject to being thrown aside for the newer insight. Galileo was every bit the troglodyte as the accusers who wished him burned at the stake, compared to Darwin and Nobel.

  The lives of men were nasty, brutish and short, as the Englishman said, but what to do about it? Perhaps Bismark answered this question politically, heading off the frightening visions of the socialists, but even Germany couldn’t give Carsten what he wanted: knowledge, understanding, and time to appreciate it.

  Appreciation and time were in short supply. Carsten vowed he wouldn’t become a fool like his siblings. He would be serious, not a moment wasted. But it wasn’t enough. He must be hard, ruthless, and undeterred by anything, including “morality.” He would shape himself; he would not allow himself to be shaped.

  As the carriages ferried the shouting, laughing, frivolous mass of wealthy youngsters back to the private school, Carsten sat silently. He looked out at the streets they clattered and crashed through. They passed the tenements of the poor and the tidy homes of the middle class. None of them had the singular opportunity he had. He lived in a golden age of prosperity and opportunity—prosperity and opportunity for him.

  He asked himself, Where should I start? He took stock of what he had access to now. First, he would need space.

  His chambers, bedroom, sitting room, parlor… definitely not. Even if his brothers and sisters didn’t loot his room anymore, the house staff were there constantly.

  Then he knew, the servants’ quarters behind the garden.

  When his mother died giving birth to him, her possessions were moved in there. He hadn’t been there since he was nine years old, to escape from one of Wilhelm’s parties that had turned ugly. That night, he found it piled high with his mother’s belongings. For a moment, he felt that he could weep, that his family’s fortunes would be different if she had lived. Her children wouldn’t be the scandal of the county, he wouldn’t have to hide when they drank, he wouldn’t have to see the fucking of frenzied party guests, or of his own brother and sisters. But the tears st
opped as soon as they began. He hid because he had to. Survival wasn’t sad. To dramatize it or to romanticize it was stupid and weak.

  The servants’ quarters were in a tidy one-story brick cottage, built seventy years after the main house was built. It was covered in ivy and barely noticeable from the house. When Carsten opened the door, he felt an intense fury, but it subsided. It was completely empty, and he knew why instantly. His siblings had sold his mother’s possessions. He didn’t know when they had done it, only that they had. His father certainly wouldn’t have, and the servants wouldn’t have dared.

  His anger faded quickly for two reasons. First, it didn’t surprise him. Yes, this was an act of scavengers, but that’s what they were. Perhaps they told themselves they needed to do it, that their mother would want them to. But they just did it to continue the party. Second, it spared him from clandestinely moving everything to the attic, and now that he knew of their guilt, they would be less inclined to make inquiries of their own.

  It would be hot in the summer and cold in the winter, but it was a solid structure. Not much noise would escape. He would have Ava sweep and mop. There were heavy shutters that locked securely, and he would have Ava put up thick, light-blocking drapes. There were fixtures for lanterns and candles. And he would have new locks placed on the door that only he would possess the keys to.

  Ava.

  He smiled as he realized how fortunate he was to have her. She was beautiful and affectionate, devoted to his every whim. She would be very helpful. She was trustworthy and wouldn’t talk. She could be sent on errands and would accomplish them without hesitation. He would have her supervise the staff to clean and set up to his specifications, with tables and chairs and bookshelves. He wanted it ready by the following evening.

  PART ONE

  REVELATIONS

  CHAPTER ONE