The Singularity Cycle 02 Song of the Death God

by William Holloway

  CHAPTER FORTY

  Haas stood with Hausmann at a large glass window. The drapes were pulled shut, but there was a telescope positioned cleverly where they met. It was invisible from the outside.

  He had a total of twenty men with him. It took several hours of clandestine carriage drop-offs to assemble this many.

  Hausmann was positively ecstatic and had commandeered one of the telescopes to look down on the Ernst estate and gloat. He went on and on about what a clever chap Haas was for designing this ingenious strategy. He kept looking up from the telescope to check his watch, asking when the spectacle was to begin.

  But Hausmann turned suddenly to Haas, his face a picture of shock. “Haas, a naked woman has just run across the back of the Ernst estate.”

  As soon as Hausmann had finished speaking, one of his captains rushed into the room and exclaimed, “Sir, a naked woman has run out of the servants’ quarters and into the Ernst estate! Sir, she tore the glass doors right off their hinges on the way in! The youngest one, Carsten, has followed her into the house and Kreutz’s men are following!”

  Suddenly, his mind was blank.

  What was supposed to be Haas’s greatest moment of personal revenge had turned into something else completely. He was trying out an entirely new formula for police investigation, the kind of thing police inspectors in other countries would read about for inspiration, but it had turned into… this. It wasn’t supposed to happen this way.

  Hausmann crowded in. “Haas, the time is now! Show these deviants what you’re made of! Show Germany the law of Munich!”

  Steel came back to Haas’s resolve. He clasped a hand on Hausmann’s shoulder. “Yes, Hausmann, let’s show them the error of their ways.”

  ***

  Karl slept, his dream a mosaic of flashes of some terrible place where millions of the damned screamed in despair. It was black, completely black, coming through in flashes of lightning, showing him that he was just a face among the multitude of damned.

  Then the sound came, glass shattering, a screaming and roaring, unlike anything he had ever heard, and he had heard a lot in his time. His hand went to the holster on his breast before his eyes even opened.

  ***

  Ava opened her eyes, looking up to see the wooden ceiling of the old servants’ quarters. She was on the floor and her head hurt horribly. She tasted blood. Had she fallen and hurt herself? She opened her mouth to breathe and the air hit her throat, sending rusty spikes of agony shooting through her neck. It hurt worse than anything she had ever felt.

  What in heaven’s name had happened in here? There were patterns drawn all over the floor in salt and ash. She didn’t know what it was, but… she recognized it. It felt familiar. She struggled to her feet. She needed to clean this up or Carsten wouldn’t be able to study.

  Wait… where was Carsten?

  She must have been in here with him and he was doing one of his… one of his… things that he did that caused…

  Ava fell on the floor and vomited, holding her head, trying to breathe. She remembered.

  She saw.

  She knew in as real terms as a human could know.

  No human could really understand or comprehend those things that existed before matter and form. No human could understand their hatred for the universe that invaded their reality and pushed them out. No human could know their black wisdom.

  In every shadow that comes before the sunset.

  In every undoing of the hopes of a child.

  In every lie that destroys the fabric of trust.

  In every knife that stabs the back.

  In every plague that brings the end.

  They wait patiently because they know that in the end, the towers will burn, parent will abandon child, and the seas will come in, taking all. The wind will cease and Silence will again return. The sun will set and never rise again. The worlds will be in Silence and Darkness, and in that place, man will cry out one final time, then never again.

  Ava saw it all. It touched her mind and violated her soul. She vomited again, and again. She stood and faced the Darkness and heard the Silence of the abyss.

  ***

  Karin and Greta were far more drunk than either expected or intended, but neither would say why. They turned on every light and lit every candle and brought still more candles and lanterns from every cupboard and lit them all, turning their rooms into a glaring citadel of light. But why they were doing this? Neither would acknowledge or say. They kept as busy as possible attempting to prepare for an evening out that wouldn’t come, and they knew it. There was no carriage and no carriage man.

  They cursed the house staff and swore to fire all of them, starting with that little bitch Ava and her stupid mother, but neither would talk about why the house staff had fled. They kept the banter constant and the topic away from what was happening. For the first time in their ungrateful existences, they spoke with each other and about the world respectfully, if only to avoid acknowledging the Darkness around this island of light.

  All animals, human or otherwise, on an instinctive level can feel the approach of real Darkness and Silence. Primitive man built fires and sang imprecations into the night, never turning his back on the blackness surrounding him. He stood watch until his mind fell into unconsciousness. While this offered no defense against the wolves and lions hunting the forests and prairies—it worked to ward off the shadows that live in the Darkness and the echoes that live in Silence.

  Greta and Karin had no prayers or songs, only alcohol and stupid chatter. They swilled whiskey like it was wine, while pretending that the pure blackness filling the halls was normal, that they didn’t see faces in the shadows staring back at them. Both knew these shadows existed in their home. They saw them forming when leaving for their nightly drinking binges, but were always too drunk to see them when returning home. So they tried without saying to drink themselves into unconsciousness, that this was just a night without a prompt carriage.

  There was a crash as something tore through the ornate glass doors at the back of the house.

  ***

  Karl’s hand went to his gun, pulling it out and pointing it at the open door in one fluid motion. In that second, he knew that opium had been his undoing, because Wilhelm was swinging a heavy silver vase down at his head.

  The vase clanged and all feeling left his arms. The gun dropped, and he fell face down in front of the couch. He wasn’t unconscious, but he was stunned, his eyes unfocused. Being anaesthetized doesn’t prevent a man from being knocked out with a silver vase.

  He saw Wilhelm carefully and painfully reach down and pick up the big American revolver. He kept it trained at the door and put a foot in the middle of his back.

  “I’m sorry about that, Karl, you didn’t deserve it… but I’ve got things I’ve got to do. I have to put an end to this.”

  Karl was still unable to form words. He watched as Wilhelm pulled a sash from the bed clothes and felt him grab his hands and restrain them behind his back. He felt his feet tied together as well. He was now completely helpless.

  ***

  Carsten leapt through the torn open doors and slid through the broken glass covering the floor. He rolled as he hit the flagstones, hoping the thick fabric of the robes would protect him from the worst of the shards.

  In a second, he was on his feet facing his mother as she looked around in utter bewilderment. Karl would be here in moments, followed by his men. He needed to get this under control now.

  “Mother! Stop running—please allow me to explain. I’m Carsten, your son. You’ve been… gone a while, you must let me—”

  She whirled to face him, her eyes at once human and alien. “You are Carsten, I can tell my own infant. You… you brought me here from”—her expression became colder and more confused—”that place. I died, and I went to that place and then…”

  She fell to the floor and a convulsion took her. At the same time, deep wrinkles appeared on her skin and her eyes sank in, becoming cadave
rous as her lips shriveled back over her teeth in a rictus of death. She was coming undone before his eyes.

  He was rooted in place. He couldn’t move. This wasn’t supposed to happen. This was supposed to be a complete resurrection: mind, body, soul. Something was missing, something was incomplete.

  Then the words came swimming back into his mind. “Human blood is required or the human vessel is incomplete.”

  He had used sheep’s blood.

  ***

  He heard Karl’s men before he saw them, but didn’t understand why Karl wasn’t already here. “Herr Ernst! Are you all right? Mein Gott, what happened to this woman?”

  It happened so fast that Carsten’s eyes barely registered the motion of his mother-thing leaping across the room like a cricket and taking the first man’s head off like a cork from a wine bottle and shoving her face into the fountain of blood spraying from his neck. A sound emerged like chicken bones torn from gristle and sinew. She held him upright while his limbs thrashed and she squeezed with terrible force and the flow of blood became a geyser that she sucked and slurped with unholy hunger.

  The mercenaries were human, and like all humans, required time to register the evidence of their senses. When she threw the first man aside and tore the second man open to pull out the still beating heart, their guns began to bark out a stream of bullets.

  The bullets pierced her body like they would any normal person’s, ejecting a gout of blood and tissue from the other side. They passed through her torso and head and legs, but she did not go down. The third man lost an eye and she clamped onto his neck.

  The other men fled.

  ***

  Haas ran with his men across the open acres between the Hausmann and Ernst estates. They jumped straight through flower gardens and over neatly pruned hedges and ran around fountains. He didn’t ever take his eyes off the Ernst house. What he was seeing and hearing didn’t make one bit of sense. Kreutz’s five men ran into the back of the house following Carsten Ernst, who in turn followed the naked woman.

  Even a very observant man sprinting across open terrain toward an objective occupied by heavily armed mercenaries might let the details slide, but not Haas. When they left the Hausmann residence, it was nearing sunset, but at the Ernst house it was already night, and the entirety of the place was limned with faint purple phosphorescence. In a matter of feet, they went from evening to midnight.

  He heard shots fired from a revolver and repeating rifles, but none of his men fell. The gunfire wasn’t directed at them, it was inside the house. There was a full blown battle happening inside the Ernst manse. Time stood still. It was too late to retreat. They were in the open; there was no cover. All that was left was to go forward into that bizarre home.

  In mere seconds, it looked like it was over and Kreutz’s men had lost. Two ran out and didn’t stop running, throwing guns away and sprinting for their lives. A third staggered out clutching a neck wound. He fell to his knees, bleeding out before he hit the ground. He was missing an eye.

  ***

  Greta and Karin sat on the couches in the salon of Karin’s room, both extremely drunk, neither brave enough to walk to the door and close it. It sat open as a terrifying reminder that the world was now a black place, so black that they feared this room might be the last place in the world, a dot of light in an eternal black ocean. Neither had ever conceived of such a thing before. Neither had the depth required for such an observation, but the blackness went from bad to worse. It wasn’t just things reaching out from the shadows now, it was that the blackness had become a kind of un-light, shining from the open door, and instead of illuminating, it blackened.

  So they pretended it was not there, despite the fact that it was.

  And then the sounds came, the crashing and shattering glass, the gunfire and the screaming, then… nothing. They both turned slowly to a sound of wet feet slapping on marble, a sound of loud labored breathing. And then she walked into the room, the un-light shrouding her and clinging to her like spider webs as she stepped out of its beam and into the many lights of the room. She stepped out of the blackness and the shadows followed her like a cloud streaming behind. She was red and naked, covered in blood and terrible wounds, some extending all the way through her. She was full of holes.

  She knew them, and they knew her. She had birthed them and watched them grow under her watchful gaze, and she died in front of them holding the infant Carsten. They saw her eyes, and their every fault, every failing, every pettiness and injustice, every perversion and stupidity was visible to her. They saw their lives flash before her eyes and knew she watched them grow into the people they were now. In her eyes, they saw the shame that any parent would have—the guilt and regret for not being there. They saw mercy and love; they saw everything decent that they had abandoned and turned their backs on.

  They saw her terrible wounds knitting together, healing without a trace. But they also saw the woman grow thinner, contracting and shriveling, the process of healing consuming her. They saw her face grow from loving and forgiving mother to predator.

  Neither had the courage to scream.

  ***

  Otto heard sounds, a crashing, then shouting, then gunfire. He lay at the side of his bed. He looked back to the big glass windows and saw the trail of wetness leading to where he lay. He’d left a trail of piss. He didn’t remember crawling over here, just following his wife’s ghost to the window and passing out as she blew on an invisible gale over the back of the property.

  None of these sounds could be a coincidence. These were the sounds of angels coming to take him away. God had judged his penance great enough, his contrition sufficient. His pain, his constant misery was the price, and he had paid enough. Soon, the host of angels would descend, Anna in the vanguard, and his suffering would end.

  That she had materialized from the shadows and then was blown from the room by the invisible wind didn’t occlude his focus. He knew that the time had come to thank God for a second chance after all he had thrown away and squandered. He began praying and praising God for his mercy as the door opened and the blackness from the hallway extended into the room like a beam of light through the fog. He raised himself slowly off the floor and walked over to the open door to greet his wife.

  ***

  Carsten backed into Wilhelm’s room, his little Derringer aimed even though it would do nothing to his mother should she want his blood. But he suspected she couldn’t harm him, that she was bound from doing so, but that no one else was safe from her.

  She was a monster.

  This shouldn’t have happened. The fact that he’d used sheep’s blood and not human blood shouldn’t have mattered.

  But it did, and this carnage was the result.

  He didn’t know why Karl hadn’t come. That didn’t make sense either. He knew that Karl’s opium habit was at a dangerously high level in order to cope. It was a very real possibility that Karl had overdosed and was comatose or dead. Karl’s last task was to make sure that Wilhelm was sedated enough that he couldn’t possibly cause trouble. Wilhelm had an almost preternatural ability to intrude at precisely the wrong moment.

  He had to get Karl and Ava and the books, and get out of here now. Get away and sort this out by the light of day. He would claim they were elsewhere when this happened and as bewildered as everyone else. Even if it meant losing a lot of money to make this problem go away, enough money would achieve it.

  The whisper came from behind him, but it wasn’t Karl’s voice. “Little brother, drop that gun. I don’t want to hurt you, but you’ve done something… I can’t let this go on. It’s evil, Carsten.”

  Carsten lowered the gun, but didn’t drop it. He turned around slowly. “Evil, Wilhelm? I’ve performed a miracle.”

  “I didn’t see what happened out there, Carsten, but I heard those men die. Tell me, what… blasphemy have you brought into this world?”

  Carsten saw Karl tied up on the floor. “You’ve no right to use that word, Wilhelm. You s
hit on every decent thing and every decent person you’ve ever known. What could I have done that could compare?”

  Wilhelm held the gun shakily in Carsten’s direction. He was beaten, broken and torn, but held the gun upright. He shouted, “You killed Uli, Carsten! You did something to him, and he lost his mind, then he hung himself!”

  Carsten smiled coldly. “Uli and Greta were trying to find a way to steal the family fortune because… because they wanted more.”

  Wilhelm winced in sorrow then looked back to Carsten. “Uli was a bad person. Greta and Karin are bad, I know this. What you’re doing is sicker than all of that, Carsten! You’re not seeing the truth of it. It’s affecting the world; it’s poking holes in reality. You have to stop.”

  Carsten just shook his head in amusement. “Wilhelm, you really are a sad, pathetic specimen. I’m untying Karl, and we’re leaving. You’re not going to shoot me because you’re weak. Don’t ever come back here.”

  Wilhelm let out a hoarse sob. He knew the truth of what Carsten said, and he knew that he couldn’t shoot. Instead, he pointed the barrel of the big American revolver down at Karl’s head and pulled the trigger.

  Carsten screamed, “No!”

  The derringer in Carsten’s hand came up and both barrels erupted in flame, taking the top of Wilhelm’s head off.

  ***

  Anna Ernst cradled her husband’s dying body in her arms. His blood dripped from her chin onto his face. She was a monster, a blood drinking abomination, but a fragment of her actual humanity lived on in her mind. She had died, had been resurrected, and then killed her own daughters and husband. She watched her hands tear them open and tasted their blood as she drank from it like a river. Bullets pierced her over and over, but her body healed, and the instinct to kill and drink blood took over. When in the grip of the craving, the monster could not be denied. And even now after feeding on her own husband, the impulse was building again.

  She threw one of the kerosene lanterns on the floor, then another and another. She walked to her daughter’s room and looked at the bloody and lifeless bodies. She knew what they’d become. They were who they were because she had died in childbirth and wasn’t there to guide them. She picked them up with her monster’s strength and dragged them into the room to lie next to their father.