Thy Fearful Symmetry

by Richard Wright

  The air shifted, stroking Malachi's cheek. All of a sudden, he heard the soft, anxious hitching of a heavy man, out of breath but trying to make no sound. With his eyes still closed, Malachi focussed down, narrowing his awareness until there was no cellar, no darkness, just an auditory world made up of that frightened, desperate breathing.

  There. He had placed it. Ten feet away, to the left but moving very slowly towards a point directly in front of him. Malachi fought the urge to cross his fingers. Luck had not been his lady for a long time, and he knew better than to gamble when the stakes were so high. A true demon would be able to see in the darkness, as clearly as if it were a summer day. Malachi had absolutely no idea whether the same applied to a demon in a man's body. Logic told him no. Logic also told him that these creatures should not be walking the same reality as he did. By shutting the door, he had placed his trust in rules that did not apply. Had he transformed himself from hunter to prey?

  He would find out in just a few moments.

  Very carefully, he took two broad, gentle steps to his left, picturing the room's layout from the half second of light the bulb had offered before blowing out. If he was correct, he was now standing next to a row of metal kegs stacked two high against the left wall. Moving slower than his taut nerves told him he should, he slipped his right hand into the pocket of his overcoat. As soon as his fingers brushed the lead weighted cudgel he carried there, he felt some of his panic die away. Taking a firmer grip, still moving with exaggerated care, he withdrew the weapon. The demon's careful, creeping movement had stopped now, and the pace of the breathing had increased. It was waiting for a signal to action.

  Malachi gave it one.

  Swinging his right arm out in a wide arc, he cracked the blackjack into the wood of the door, then dropped his arm out of the way. It was enough. Panicking already, the sudden noise was all the trigger the demon needed to launch itself. For a drawn, slow motion second, Malachi thought he had misjudged, and the demon was flying straight at him. When it smashed into the door just feet away, he flinched with expectation as it howled frustration and fear.

  The shock of the moment stilled Malachi's arm, and he lost a vital second in which the demon could have retreated into the darkness and the unknown. Fortunately, its wits were reeling, and the air swirled with its panicked thrashing. When he swung out his arm a second time, it was still there. The blackjack made bone-crunching contact, whether with the back of the thing's head or its face Malachi could not tell and did not care. All that mattered was that it squealed, and thudded to the floor.

  Sliding the blackjack into his right pocket, Malachi drew his small torch out from the left, thumbing it on. Half closing his eyes to combat the moment of blinding disorientation the light induced after near total blackness, he swung the beam round to the grimy concrete floor. A fat, suited man lay there, clutching his shattered nose, smearing the blood across his face as he snorted pain.

  Placing the end of the small flashlight into his mouth, Malachi dove back into his pockets for his handcuffs. Kneeling, he yanked the demon’s pudgy arms away from its face and rolled it over, ignoring the snarl of protest and the suddenly thrashing legs. Binding the wrists, he rolled it again, seizing it by the lapels to haul it to a sitting position against the door.

  One of the feet jabbed into Malachi's calf, and he winced. Drawing back one of his large fists, he slammed it into the mass he had already made of its face. The thing in human flesh shrieked agony, tears dribbling from its eyes as its head slammed against the wood behind it.

  “Be still,” Malachi told it, the torch dropping from his mouth into his waiting hand, “or I'll hurt you some more.” The message struck home and the demon quietened, staring balefully at its captor. Piggy eyes, made yellow and bloodshot by the presence of the demon inside, glared from a fighting mask of glistening blood. Deep red stains spread across the creature's crumpled white shirt and cheap grey jacket.

  It smiled, and Malachi fought the urge to shrink back. “You have a strange sense of humour, creature.”

  The smile broadened. “And you don't know what you're dealing with. Do you think you are the first to trap me? Do you think I am unprepared?” The voice came from the demon, not the man, and was a gurgling cesspool that hurt Malachi to hear. Parts of his soul felt like they were detaching and recoiling, the better to put distance between themselves and this thing whose presence he had to endure.

  Instead of drawing back, Malachi leaned forward until he was a foot away from the creature. Feeling his face tighten as his thin lips drew back in a sneer, he breathed his challenge. “What are you going to do about it?”

  The demon drooled as the smile broadened so far it looked like it might split its head in two. “Idiot. I will take you. I will shoot myself into your brain like a needle, and grow, and fester. I will keep you alive and aware as I rape, and murder, and defile your name with foulnesses you cannot imagine. At the end, when these crimes must be accounted for, I will give you back your body and leave you broken and mad. That is what I'm going to do.”

  Malachi sighed. “You talk a lot.”

  Orloch’s jowls quivered with wheezy laughter. “I didn't credit you with much imagination. Never mind. Your education will begin soon.” Beneath the pounds of fat it carried, muscles tensed throughout the demon's body. Its bloodshot eyes rolled back in its head, until only the pus-yellow whites remained. As its body began to shake, Malachi leaned closer, curious to see how this was going to work, his face kissing distance from the demon's.

  Orloch's shuddering body stilled. For a moment, Malachi worried that something had gone wrong, and the creature might have chosen to take its own life rather than face the consequences of capture. Then he saw what was happening to the eyes. Quickly, like the last tendrils of morning mist caught in a bright sun's glare, the foul yellow dissipated to reveal tired human whites. The transformation took seconds, and the man's whole body relaxed. Malachi felt a sharp sympathy for the stranger the demon was departing from. What life had Orloch left him to return to?

  Panic supplanted his concern as the demon leaped. Malachi's head snapped back as though he had been punched in the face, and he rocked on his haunches. For a second his cheeks and forehead were aflame with feverish heat, and then Orloch was inside his head. An insect colony had set up in his brain, and thousands of tiny feet were scampering across the inside of his skull. Malachi shook his head, but that only increased the sensation, and provoked a mad, frantic buzzing in his ears. The torch dropped from his twitching fingers, rolling across the floor, stabbing its light at the kegs lining the far wall. He closed his eyes, hoping to better focus on what was happening behind them. Instead, he felt more disorientated, as though his ability to see the world was all that was keeping him anchored to it. When he opened his eyes again, he was staring at the ceiling, and a damp, distant pain at his neck confirmed that he had fallen backwards. Malachi's arms were divorced from the rest of him, following a strange agenda that had them flopping like dying fish on either side of his body, and he couldn't muster the concentration to bring them back under control.

  When the true assault began, Malachi cried out at the force of it, his voice childlike and strange to his own ears. The scampering sensation on the inside of his skull gathered at one place just behind his left ear. The pressure building up was intense, and he wished he could control a hand long enough to probe the area. It felt as though he would find a swelling the size of a cricket ball, pulsing and trembling as it tried to contain the swarm inside. Malachi felt the mass deform and elongate until it formed a long blade pointing inwards, then it plunged down into his brain.

  His defences responded, and there was enough of him left to feel intense relief despite the acidic burning in his head. As Orloch tried to inject itself into his brain, it met a rubbery resistance that forced it back. It tried again, piling brute force behind the razor-edge. Malachi grunted, feeling as though the pressure was going to pop his eyes out of his face and his brain out of his ears in h
ot geysers of blood and pulped flesh. The barrier dimpled, contorting around the sharp point, pushing further in, until it reached the point where something, surely, had to give.

  Orloch broke first, unable to gain entry, and the barrier repelled it with a hard snap, flinging it away with shocking ferocity. Malachi gasped, sucking in air as though he had been too long underwater, and rolled onto his side. A few feet away, Orloch coughed weakly. There was no time to lie around recovering from the ordeal, not with the demon trying to beat him to it, and he forced himself raggedly to his feet.

  Shaking his head clear of the lingering fog that remained, Malachi took two steps towards his torch. The effort was almost too much, and his stomach heaved. Rather than wasting time fighting the urge, Malachi went with it. Bending at the waist, he was quickly and functionally sick, his small breakfast of cereal splattering beneath him. Wiping his mouth with the back of one hand, he scooped up his torch with the other and turned to face the demon. The motion made his head spin, but he kept his disorientation from showing on his face as he levelled his light at the demon, and gave no visible sign of relief when he saw that Orloch had not moved. If anything, it looked in worse shape than Malachi, its skin an almost luminous wax white, its limbs twitching and trembling. There was a dazed, numb look in those yellowed eyes that Malachi didn't like. He crouched over the demon and gave it a hard backhand slap.

  Orloch whimpered, but its eyes found a steadier purchase on the world. “Wh-what did you do?”

  Malachi gave a tight grin as he reached beneath his shirt and pulled out the pendant.

  “Sapphire?” Orloch groaned. “I've read about it, but nobody has ever tried to use it. I thought it was idiot folklore.”

  A chill went through Malachi. “Me too,” he admitted, pulling two sets of handcuffs from a pocket and rolling the demon on to its stomach. “Glad I was wrong.”

  Disbelief spread over the still disorientated face the demon wore. Malachi yanked the left leg back to meet the left arm, and snapped the cuffs around the ankle and wrist. He repeated the binding with the right leg and arm, finally relaxing when he had the creature fully trussed. Giving each side a sharp tug, eliciting yelps from his captive, he nodded his satisfaction and let the body roll to its side.

  Yellow eyes glared up at him from the shadows of the face. “Fool,” Orloch snarled. “I can go anywhere, be anyone, anytime I like.”

  Malachi nodded, and slipped the pendant from round his neck. The demon's eyes widened as it saw an opportunity, then widened further as the chain slipped deftly over its own head. “Thought you might be thinking that way,” Malachi said. “Want to try it now?”

  Orloch went white, the shift in colour particularly evident in the harsh light of the torch. Closing his eyes, he tried to jump, and to Malachi's intense relief its eyes shot open with a start seconds later, as it found itself trapped inside its own head. “What do you want?”

  Malachi knew he was in control of the situation, and finally let all the wild hate, the unparalleled loathing, clench up his face. “You’re not going free, you son of a bitch. You’re going to tell me what I want to hear, and you’re going to find out all about human pain on the way. What I know about demons I got from books making wild guesses. I know a lot about humans though. I know what hurts.” Slipping a hand into his voluminous coat pocket, Malachi retrieved his knife, enjoying the look on Orloch's face as the demon saw the weapon emerge. It was thirteen and a half inches long, eight inches of lightly curved, stainless steel blade, set in a die cast zinc grip with finger holes surrounding a strong wood handle. Malachi rested the blade lightly across Orloch's cheek, the point a slice away from its rapidly blinking eye. The demon in man flesh went very, very still.

  “You're going to tell me where to find one of your brethren. The demon who ripped my wife from me. You're going to tell me where I can find the bitch Pandora.”

  Orloch blinked in confusion. “Demon?” A chuckle spluttered past its podgy lips and to Malachi's bafflement and increasing rage, the demon began to laugh.

  Malachi set to work with the knife, and soon the laughter stopped.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Christ looked down on him with crying eyes, and Calum could not meet His gaze. Kneeling before the hand-painted carving of the Saviour dominating the rear wall of the church, Calum clasped his hands together to pray, but could not pierce the shroud of guilt wrapping him up. Apologies crowded his forebrain, asking to be delivered, but he did not know where to start. How did you apologise to your God for breaking His most fundamental laws, both written and unwritten?

  The church had a cold, stone quiet to it that made the act of communion somehow harder. Not for the first time, he wondered why these imposing stone edifices were designed to stand between God and man, instead of unifying the two. Where he knelt between the pulpit and the outsized Christ, he could sense the church's vast, silent nave at his back. Rows of empty pews accused him, and he could almost feel the dead stares of churchgoers past and present drilling into his neck. A bizarre picture of himself getting up and turning each bench around to face the front door, just so that he could have some guilt free praying time, popped into his head. The image made him laugh mirthlessly.

  With the chuckle dying in his throat, he climbed to his feet. Though it was almost noon, the church remained gloomy, the elaborate stained glass windows seizing and holding the light rather than sharing it with those within. Turning, Calum stepped into the pulpit, resting his hands on the oaken edges and surveying the room. At the far end was the door to the vestibule, and the large double doors to the outside. Three weeks ago, the most extraordinary creature had toppled through those doors, his body aflame, in search of forgiveness. Flustered and amazed, Calum had been able to think of no reason to deny the request. Where in the bible did it say that demons were beyond forgiveness? If repentance was more valuable when it was required in quantity, surely nothing was more precious than a demon shedding his sin?

  Knuckles whitening where they gripped the wood, Calum bowed his head, the weight of what he was rapidly appreciating as a horrible error pressing hard on him. The description of the longhaired man from the newspaper coverage played in his mind, read in clear BBC newscaster English. Police even described the unnamed stranger as Byronic in appearance. Who else could it be but Ambrose? It was impossible not to read between the lines. A demon that would be dead if Calum had not intervened was being sought by police for the kind of massacre rarely seen in the United Kingdom. Though the police were being careful not to state the possibility of intentional homicide, it was all white noise to Calum. He had allowed Ambrose to confess his sins, and innocent people were dead.

  Nothing he had experienced compared with the miasmic guilt he wallowed in, but he suspected that worse things were biding their time. It was all different, now he knew there was an afterlife that he would, without question, experience. Before Ambrose, when faith alone had fuelled him, he had been sure that Heaven and Hell were literal truths - he had never succumbed to the lazy, convenient modern rethinking that insisted they were clever allegories. In Hell, he had known in his heart, devils cavorted, torturing sinners under Satan's watchful eye. In Heaven, vast choirs of angels sang and danced while departed souls played before a benevolent God.

  Now that he knew these things as a concrete certainty, everything had shifted. Calum no longer had any use for his faith, because it had been overridden by cold, hard fact. Despite Ambrose's existence confirming that the wonders of an afterlife were waiting for him, Calum was empty in those parts of himself he had reserved for his Lord. The discomfort was almost physical, like a heat. Calum ran a finger around the inside of his dog collar, and found that he was sweating. Not as bad as on the Underground then, when he first read the story. Then, he had fought back the urge to vomit, missing his intended stop and spending the rest of the circuit around Glasgow's heart in a clammy daze until he was back where he had started. Three streets from Kelvinhall station sat the Church of St Cottier where he preached
, and he found himself drawn there through a perverse mixture of hope and shame. Enlightenment had not been waiting, and no priest could be his own confessor. A creature that had warred openly with God had come to this building seeking forgiveness on a massive scale. Why was it so hard for a strayed follower of Christ to do so?

  Calum wiped his brow. He really did feel warm. Strange intuitions pulled him from his reverie, and he took a cautious step back from the pulpit, scanning the shadowy corners of the nave. Something wasn't right. Even at the height of summer, the church interior maintained an obstinate chill that kept it from ever being comfortable. With the heating at full blast, the temperature stayed forever a few degrees colder than those within would prefer.

  Yet it was undeniably warm now. Retreating from the pulpit, Calum felt the touch of cool air at his back, realising with something close to terror that the heat was spreading from the pulpit itself.

  Smoke curled from its edges. Amazement bred a sluggish inertia in his muscles, preventing him from jumping back when his instincts were driving him to do so.

  The pulpit exploded, blasting charred shrapnel in all directions. Calum felt hot, sharp slices of pain across his arms and face as he fell back. Runnels of blood dripped into his eyes, but he could not close them or look away. Roaring above him, from the spot where the pulpit had stood, a billowing column of flame writhed, lighting the inside of the church in Armageddon shades. Scorching heat squeezed Calum's breath from his chest, leaving him gasping as his dream rushed back to him.

  Scrabbling back to the cool stone of the wall, Calum raised a hand to shield his eyes, trying to take this new miracle in. The fire was the core of a crazed maelstrom. Air whipped around the flames in a tightly spinning storm, streaked with flickers of lightning, each of which split the air with its own peal of thunder. Calum was torn between shielding his eyes from the light and heat, and covering his ears against the cacophony.