It would break the heart he should not have.
“I'm stronger than that,” he muttered, feeling sick to the stomach. “I won't be broken.” His voice was forced, high pitched, and he rested his forehead against the door to gather himself.
If she was gone, then nothing mattered.
Time to find out.
Ambrose could have picked the lock of the door with ease, but instead gripped the handle and shoved. The wood around the door splintered, sending a flat crack into the night.
There was still no movement inside, no sound at all.
The hallway was clean and sparse, created by somebody who watched too many home improvement shows. Narrow and pine clad, it reached for the modern kitchen at the far end, from which shone aluminium fittings, and two closed doors along the way no doubt offered equally clinical dwelling spaces. A narrow flight of stairs thrust towards the first floor. Ordinary places, for ordinary people, with ordinary lives. If Pandora and he had been mortal…
They would never have met. Idiotic, to be idling over fantasies now.
Easing the door closed behind him, he stepped into the hall, pausing at the foot of the stairs. In the kitchen, he saw an edge of white fabric peeking around the corner of a cupboard, and his heart leapt.
Cautious, he padded along the hallway, fighting the urge to stop, sit down, and never have to see.
He stepped into the kitchen. Pandora lay on her back next to the improbably clean cooker, staring at the ceiling with distant blue eyes, her hair spread out on the tiles.
Ambrose's fears thrashed at one another for dominance. What did he expect of this moment? Would it be better to find her comatose, or awake and murderously insane? How could he go on in either case?
“Pandora?” What voice he managed was hollow.
She blinked.
The shock of seeing that tiny sign of life left him breathless. Disparate emotions stormed him as he tried to make himself go to her.
There was a footstep in the hallway behind him, soft and stealthy. Instinct took him over, a blind rage at the fate that had presented him with a flicker of hope, and then set his enemies on him to snatch it away again.
Unleashing his true form, his unfurling wings shredding his shirt and jacket, sweeping pans from the kitchen top and clattering them across the tiles, Ambrose snarled. Talons split his shoes, and his hands flashed agony as they turned to claws. Whirling, a blur of motion, he reached out his right hand to strike.
The small, frightened woman behind him wore only a dressing gown, carried no weapons, and looked as scared as it was possible to be.
She lives here! You woke her when you forced the door, she's come downstairs to confront the intruder, and you're a heartbeat away from killing her!
Talons were already hooking the flesh beneath her jaw, there was too much momentum for Ambrose to stop.
Blood sprayed the wall.
The woman crashed to the floor, shrieking pain and shock.
Looking stupidly at his hand, Ambrose saw that he was holding half of the woman's face.
Malachi was unconscious, unaware of the voices of demons booming outside church walls, or the trembling hands trying to make him comfortable. Memories snatched him from the present, flicking him back through the pages of his own memory.
“Who is Pandora, Mr Jones? I know this is difficult, but the more information we can gather now, the more chance we have of finding the perpetrator.”
Mal shook his head, staring blankly at a police officer barely old enough to shave. Outside the private waiting area, reserved for delivering bad news to the relatives of patients unlikely to leave the hospital on their own feet, trolleys clattered, and doctors shouted instruction. Somewhere, Stacey bled furiously from the wound where her face had been.
“What?”
“Pandora, Mr Jones.”
“I don't know a Pandora.”
“Does your wife? A friend from work, maybe? Somebody she met at the gym and mentioned to you? Please think, Mr Jones.”
Mal tried, but he was sure neither of them knew a Pandora. Before he could say as much, the young officer nodded, glancing across at his female partner, who looked older to the tune of a couple of years. She sat on the vinyl chair next to Mal's, and put a careful hand on his knee. “Is there somebody we can call for you? Somebody who could help?”
Mal stared at her as though she was an idiot. “Help put Stacey's face back on?” Nothing was joining up right in his head.
“Help you, Mr Jones. It might help you to have somebody here.”
“You're here.” Mal shivered, unable to heat up.
“I mean family.” She was being as gentle as she could.
Stacey's parents were just a telephone away, but he couldn't call them. It was hard enough trying to force the world to make sense to himself, without having to explain it to them too.
“No.” A tiny fire sparked in his head, which he fanned into a full thought. “Why do you want to know about Pandora?”
The officer paused, watching his face. “I think you should worry about your wife right now. When you've had time to take it all in...”
“Please.” For the first time, he recognised his own voice. Since arriving at hospital, he had sounded more like an infant than a grown man. “It will help.”
“Mr Jones… may I call you Malcolm?”
“Why would you want to do that?” He looked at the other officer, confused.
“Mal. Short for Malcolm, isn't it?”
“Malachi. I'm Malachi. I prefer Mal.”
“Okay Mal. You've suffered a severe shock. You need…”
“Officer,” Mal had a moment of absolute clarity, and took her hand. “What I need is some idea of how my wife ended up looking like the phantom of the fucking opera. I wasn't there with her because I was working late again, and now she's in a room being stitched up by people I'll never even meet to thank.” The officer's lips had tightened when he grabbed her, and he noticed that her male colleague was leaning forward in his seat. Mal realised how he must look, and released his grip. “I'm frustrated, and confused, and at some point I'm probably going to melt down. What I need, really need, is to know what I'm melting down over.” The officer’s face relaxed. “Please?”
Nodding, she took a deep breath. “Okay, Mr Jones.” He noticed they were no longer on first name terms. “Bear in mind it doesn't make much sense to us at the moment, okay?” Mal nodded. “All we have is what the ambulance crew told us. She was raving when they picked her up, most of it gibberish. What they made out, over and over, were two words.” She paused, glancing at her partner, who shrugged. Nothing ventured, said the gesture.
“Those words were 'devil', and 'Pandora'. We were hoping you might know what she meant.”
Not knowing that he would one day stand closer to the truth than they ever would, Mal shook his head, took a deep breath, and crumbled to tears.
Clive stood outside the Gallery of Modern Art in the city centre, leaning against the plinth supporting the bronze statue of the mounted Duke of Wellington that guarded the paved square of cafes and bars surrounding the gallery. A traffic cone perched on Wellington's head, a familiar sight since students, alcohol, and traffic cones had first found one another. Clive thought it both sad and funny that the silent sentinel would see the end of times dressed so. If he had the mobility, he would climb up himself, dislodge the cone, and let the statue endure the empty millennia ahead with some dignity. The anti-pigeon net covering the square draped down over the neoclassical building facades in smouldering ruins. It was pretty, in its way, and he wished there were more people to see it. The city centre streets were empty.
Except he wasn't in the city centre, and there were people everywhere, running and screaming. Disorientated by the change, Clive stumbled as one woman fell against him, shoved by somebody pushing past. Wrapping a numb arm around her neck, he prepared to drag her to the ground where he could control her long enough to ram his hand into her abdomen, and fist his way to her
heart. She was slim, and her frantic kicking and pushing did little to deter him. When she bit into his forearm, he was aware of the teeth going in, but felt it as a curiosity rather than an agony.
When he looked down at his arm, panic paralysed him, giving the girl time to wrench free and throw herself back into the furious current of the crowd. Clive had to move the limb up and down to make sure it really was attached to him. The arm was slender and bare, and the coating of gore couldn't hide long fingernails, some torn away, or the copper bangles at the wrist, smeared with red.
Clive was looking at a woman's arm.
A moment ago, he had been in the city centre. Now he was south of the Clyde, on Victoria Road. There were still people on the streets there, and his gifted shambled among them, claiming those too slow to scatter.
But they weren't there, because he was on his back in the water, floating down the river. Fires rained down on him, sizzling gently as they touched what could only be the Clyde itself. Having no idea what he was doing there, Clive panicked, jerking his previously relaxed body and managing only to sink his head briefly beneath the water. Even as far gone from reality as he was, he retained enough sense to relax again. His body…
Was huge. While staying perfectly still, Clive could feel the layers of fat that were keeping him afloat.
It wasn't his body.
Relaxing as best he could, knowing he could not drown even if he sank, Clive strained to remember what he had been doing before the Gallery of Modern Art, the woman's arm, and this bloated river journey. He had closed his eyes, and then he had reached out, and then…
Clive had journeyed through the heads of those he had gifted, and the realisation snatched him out of the floating corpse, back into his own head. Opening his eyes, he found himself face down on the tarmac of Great Western Road, and dragged himself clumsily to the kerb.
On the pavement, he sat up, trying to piece together what had happened. There was hollowness within him as he recalled the experience of travelling inside the gifted. It had been like stepping into the driver's seat of an empty car. The people they had once been were gone. They weren’t becoming like him at all. They were empty
What kind of gift was it that left them so?
When Judgement Day was over, they could still have their souls returned to their bodies. Clive was doing the Will of God, and it was not for him to understand the details of the Grand Plan. He left his doubts to rot.
More important was that he had seen through their eyes, and controlled their limbs. Crazy ideas started to spin inside his crazy, dead head.
Clive eased open his mind, reaching out in more than one direction, giving guidance to flesh he had never owned, snatching visions from eyes he had never before stared through.
Previously quashed by doubt at the vacancies he had found in place of minds, the rigor mortis grin peeled back his lips, and he began to grasp the scope of the gift he had been granted.
In 1990, Constable Jimmy Gemmell had been working in London when public protest at Thatcher's poll tax culminated in an infamous riot at Trafalgar Square. Along with what felt like almost every other officer in the Met, Jimmy was kitted out in riot gear, and sent to contain the protesters. Even back then, he'd had an overdeveloped sense of responsibility, which put him right on the front line.
Until he stepped out of the church, that had been the most sustained terror of his life. The chaos as bottles and bricks fell around him, smashing against his shield, would jerk him from sleep for years. The rioters slammed against police lines, hate and fear scored their taut faces, and he realised he looked the same. Lashing out blindly at anybody close enough, his control vanished in the blur of violence, even while his heart screamed they're not criminals! They're hurting, and desperate, and terrified, and you even agree with what they're fighting for!
It felt as though nothing could ever be the same after that. It had felt like revolution.
Of course, that was wrong. When the dust settled, there had been cosmetic changes, streets cleaned, Thatcher booted out of office, Major stepping in and rescinding the Poll Tax, but in all the important ways, things returned to how they were before that March day.
Gemmell saw beyond the churchyard gate, and accepted that this time nothing was going to be the same again. Pushing himself back against the church door, his body wanting to melt into it, he willed himself to blink.
In the churchyard, all was quiet and clear. Fire flecks drifted peacefully to the ground, melting snow. The wind that had been rising earlier was gone. The church felt cut off from the rest of the world.
On the other side of the church wall, the fog began. The thick, smoky wall of grey reached as high as he could see, and within it, shadows massed. Gemmell looked up and saw, far above him, a tiny circle of stars. The air above the church was as sacrosanct as the soil, and the fog could not encroach it.
Movement dragged his eyes down, and he whimpered as tiny bodies hurled themselves silently on to the boundary wall, landing perfectly on the wet stone. The things had the bodies of monkeys flayed of fur and skin, all dripping blood and sinew. Gemmell's stomach was strong, and he could handle that. What made him gag were the heads, also skinless. They were not the heads of monkeys, but of newborn babies, except that no baby had ever expressed such hate through their blue eyes.
The monkey-things kept coming, lining the walls solidly around the front of the building, malevolent sentries, their weight on their bloody forelegs, poised to hurl themselves forward.
Gemmell gritted his teeth. They couldn't get in. They could sit and stare as much as they liked, but they couldn't touch him. Summoning every ounce of defiance he could, Gemmell pushed himself away from the door, onto the path.
The monkey-things opened their baby-mouths, and screamed. The cries were those of infants in the night, howling for their mothers, except for the malice streaking through the sound. Gemmell slapped his hands to his ears, the cry deafening, and crashed painfully to his knees. How much more could his sanity take? What would he see, if a sudden wind blew that fog away?
Water soaked into his trousers, ice-cold. The temperature was falling rapidly. Gemmell looked up, confused. The fog behind the gate was suffused with blue light. The two monkey-things on the gate turned, hurling themselves back into the fog to make space for the naked man emerging from the fog. The light shone from his body, as did the intense cold.
Gemmell climbed to his feet, refusing to stare in wonder, a grimace twisting his lips down as he forced himself not to shiver.
The figure spoke. “Another of Ambrose's loyal playthings, is it?” Leaning with his hands on the gate, the chiselled nightmare smiled. “Very well. My name is Leviathan, little man. You're harbouring something of mine. An errant employee. I want him back. If you don't bring him to me, then tomorrow morning, when the world ends, I'll eat your soul for breakfast.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Ambrose stared at the heavy fold of fat and muscle in his hand. Blood dripped to the floor, and despite the woman's whimpering, that wet beat transfixed him.
Ambrose had been without sin, but no longer. Holy ground was enemy territory again. In one blind moment of instinct, he had lost his immunity.
Slick with warmth, the flesh slipped from between his numb fingers and slapped to the kitchen tiles. Ambrose would in that moment have embraced his own destruction, if there were anybody there to offer it.
Except Pandora had blinked, and there was something to hope for again.
The woman he had introduced to madness and pain didn't even flinch when he stepped over her and lifted the telephone by the front door. He switched to his human guise anyway. If she survived, she was going to have trouble enough accepting what had happened, without him reinforcing the insane picture he had presented to her.
“Emergency services? I'd like to report… an accident.” That was what it had been, after all.
Try telling that to the next Archangel you meet.
“I don't know the address. No, wait,”
he picked an envelope from the small table the telephone sat on. “7 Cramlington Drive, South Gosforth. Yes.” The woman's sobbing was audible to the operator. “That's the victim. She's bleeding a lot. You might want to hurry. You don't need to know my name. Just send help.”
Hanging up before the operator could ask any more questions, he went to the woman, now curled into a foetal ball, shivering and sobbing. Turning her onto her back, he surveyed the damage with a scowl. Of the left side of her face, only meat and bone remained, traces of yellow fat clinging to the cheekbones. The eyelid and part of the forehead had come away, leaving the eye rolling unprotected in the socket. Ambrose did not know whether that whirling eyeball was seeing anything in the real world. She had been pretty, if his memory of the half second before he pulled her face off was right. Perhaps he was wrong, and was so used to destroying things of beauty that he simply accepted that she must have been.
Carrying her to one of the closed doors, he opened it and found the sitting room. The sofa was white. They'll never get the blood out, he thought, then clenched his jaw in frustration at his own callousness. Was genuine compassion ever going to come naturally to him?
Ambrose laid the woman on the couch, and checked that the front door was ajar. The ambulance would not be long.
Retreating to the kitchen, he opened the back door. Scooping Pandora into his arms, hoping her lack of resistance did not mean she had returned to the coma, he took a final look around him.
Blood ran down the pale hallway walls, and pooled at the entrance to the kitchen. The gristle and skin that a woman had once worn as a face sat in the middle of it all like a butcher’s cast offs. He was doomed ever to be fleeing the scene of disasters he did not mean to create.
Ambrose walked out into the garden, seeing a back gate that led to a path running behind the houses. Along the street, bedroom lights were on. It had probably been a wasted effort, calling the emergency services. The woman’s screams had attracted plenty of attention.
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