by Chris Ward
‘Try to spin around me,’ Jun shouted at the wrestler—whose name he had learned was Slav—as they played out a scene above the rising panic below. ‘Swing yourself back and forwards. We have to break free!’
‘And so his friend helped the young man to bury his beautiful wife in the ground. He then wept for seven days. On the seventh, he went back to the dam and smote it until the fragile rock finally burst.’
As his arms made chopping motions, Slav began to swing back and forth. In the moments between the jerking of the wires on his legs Jun shifted his weight forwards and back, building up his momentum until he and Slav were swinging side by side.
‘Now!’ he shouted.
Jun swung out one way, Slav the other. Their wires circled each other and then they crashed together. Jun gasped, the wind knocked out of him. He held on to Slav’s arms, even as he felt the wires jerking, some creature far above trying to untangle them.
‘We have to break it,’ he said. ‘If we can get enough momentum, perhaps we can bring the whole thing down.’
‘And then what?’ the giant shouted. ‘We drown like the rest?’
As Jun stared down at the melée below, the water up to the waists of the people trapped on the floor, he heard a hint of desperation slipping into Professor Crow’s narration.
‘But the river god would not be denied! He cast a spell over the corpse of the young man’s wife and brought her back from the dead.’
Jun looked up in dismay to see the Akane-thing swinging out towards him, followed by Merlin. At the sight of her, Jun’s eyes began to waver, and he wished he’d used the gun to hit himself instead of Nozomi. She was so beautiful, and she could be his. All he had to do was get them both out of here.
‘I love you, Jun Matsumoto,’ boomed Akane’s voice across the church. Jun squeezed his hands against his ears, trying to keep her voice out of his head
‘I have to stop her,’ he shouted at Slav. ‘Help me!’
As the Akane-thing swung towards them with her arms outstretched, Jun and Slav worked the wires back and forth until they swung straight into her path. Jun grabbed her and pulled her close against him. Her hands scrabbled at his arms but he held on as blood dribbled out of fresh scratches and cuts. This close he could smell her, and she smelled like Akane, but there was something worse. A stench of death.
Merlin’s wire was longer than the others. As the wizard swung out and around them, Jun looked down to see him hanging a few feet below, his wire snaking up between Jun and Akane and Slav alongside them. High above, something creaked and shifted, lowering them a couple of feet.
‘We have to swing over to his balcony,’ Jun shouted. ‘If we can stop Crow we can stop all of this!’
Professor Crow’s voice had reached a maniacal pitch now.
‘The river god wanted to give the young man and his new bridge his blessing, but he was consumed by hate! All he could think about was making them burn in Hell, so he used his powers to turn the water of the river into a deadly chemical that would cleanse the world of its impurities.’
The sound of the roaring water stopped. For a moment the crowd seemed to go still. Then, at first in pockets, then uniformly across the whole flooded nave, people began to cheer.
As the scaffolding rig shifted above them, Jun and the others swung towards Crow’s balcony. In the light of the computer screen, his face glowed demonic, his eyes turned up to meet Jun’s.
‘And the chemical was spread throughout the land.’
The pipes started up again, the liquid pouring out less rapidly than before, but this time it had a silvery sheen to it … and an oily smell.
‘Gasoline,’ Merlin breathed. ‘He’s going to burn them all.’
Jun’s heart seemed to fall out of his chest. He wanted to drop into the water with the others and die too. There was no way he could stop this nightmare from happening. It was impossible.
Akane’s teeth sank into his arm, and Jun gritted his teeth as he pulled her hard against him. For a moment she looked up at him, and although he knew beyond doubt that no part of this abomination of a woman was his old love, something in her eyes touched him. The girl he had once loved with all his heart had given up her life for him and others.
If it’s what has to be done….
Somewhere, in La Sagrada Familia or beyond, were people who had helped him and now needed him in return. Nozomi, Ken’s daughter, who had been Crow’s prisoner for five years; Jennie, dear sweet Jennie—in another time, another place, how sometimes I wish it could be so—and even that little boy, Jorge, a homeless street orphan with nothing who had given everything to help him.
Not to mention the thousands toiling below who could become part of one massive funeral pyre at any moment.
It was time for payback.
Time to make good on his debts.
‘Swing!’ he shouted at the others. ‘Get me over to him! We have to end this!’
The scaffolding above creaked and groaned. The weight of four of them combined pulling down on one part of it was starting to break it away from its fittings.
‘We can do it!’ Jun shouted. ‘Let’s bring this show to an end!’
The scaffolding was peeling off the roof. Behind him, Jun heard a splash as one of the spiders fell, then screams from the people below as it landed in the water, its legs kicking and flailing.
They were less than thirty feet away from Crow’s balcony now, and about fifteen feet above it. Another man might have cut and run, but not Crow. He needed to finish this thing, to see his performance end. You’re right, this finishes tonight, Jun thought. But not in the way you hoped.
‘And the young man turned on his friends, killing those closest to him.’
A series of clicks came from Slav’s braces, then the wrestler’s eyes widened. His face filled with a look of absolute despair before he plummeted to the crowd below, hitting the water with a huge splash.
With the giant’s weight taken off the wires, the others bounced back up about ten feet. On the balcony below, Crow wore a look of triumph.
‘Wrap your hands around the wires,’ Jun shouted to Merlin. ‘He’s going to release us all.’
The wizard, though, stared at Jun with wild, desperate eyes. ‘Is Slav alive down there?’ he whispered. ‘Is he still alive?’
Jun looked down but he couldn’t be sure. Slav had disappeared into the churning crowd.
‘And with his final act, the river god flung himself into his own fury and perished.’
Merlin’s braces opened and he plummeted towards the water, his cape billowing out around him like the wings of a huge grey bird. He struck the water head first and disappeared beneath the surface.
As they bounced a few more feet upwards, Jun stared down towards Professor Crow.
‘Before his death, his final act was to plant the seed that would ignite the land and cleanse it from impurities.’
As Jun and Akane bounced on the creaking wire, Jun stared in dismay as Akane’s hair began to ignite.
#
Standing high up on a balcony on the left side of the nave, Nozomi felt forgotten as Kurou’s puppet show reached its climax. In her master’s bizarre story, she had been killed off and replaced by Akane, and now waited for perhaps some final curtain bow.
As Slav and then Merlin fell into the mire below, Nozomi started to climb up on to the wall above the balcony, pulling herself up over the sculptures protruding from the walls. She wrapped the wires around her wrists to give her a better grip, then slipped her hands and feet out of the shackles.
Kurou had made them to a standard size, but Nozomi could squeeze out of them if she let the metal graze the skin off her thumbs and toes, the blood from the shallow wounds helping to lubricate the shackles as she slipped them over her wrists and ankles.
Out in the middle of the nave, a small flame appeared. It took Nozomi a moment to realise it was coming from the Akane-thing.
She had smelt the gasoline like everyone else, and her master’s devilry shocked even her.
She had stood by him while he turned innocent people into monsters, watched his experiments fail, watched people die. She had done it all with a detached acknowledgement, that this was something that was meant to be.
But not this. He was about to slaughter thousands of people, either by fire or water. They could choose their fate.
As Jun began to struggle beneath the growing flames on the Akane-thing’s scalp, Nozomi pulled the wires tight and leapt out from the balcony edge.
#
It took Galo an age to drag himself back to his feet. All he wanted to do was sit and rest, but through the stone walls came a huge commotion like the sound of a football match in progress.
He was in some kind of circular passage that connected the bases of each of the twelve towers of the Apostles. He passed a few internal windows looking down into what seemed a direct view into Hell itself: thousands of lost souls churning in a mass of liquid that stank of gasoline, while a pair of apparent lovers hung from a wire over the middle, sparks of flame leaping from the hair of the woman.
About fifty metres further around the side of the nave Galo’s hawk-like eyes picked out the man he had come to kill, standing behind a glowing computer screen, a smirk of delight on his ugly face.
He was standing on a balcony on the same level as Galo. One more minute and he would be dead. The big question was whether Galo would get to him before the thousands of trapped people were set alight.
Only time would tell, not that it really mattered.
Galo turned away from the window and hurried on.
#
Elenora couldn’t stop herself from crying even though she knew it was a waste of time. All around her was a bedlam of screaming people climbing over each other in an attempt to find some way out of the deadly water.
The gasoline was still pouring out of the pipes, pools of it expanding their rainbow reflections out across the water, coming closer.
She thought about her parents. She craved the warm embrace of her mother and even the stern boom of her father’s voice, but she hoped they didn’t find her. If they did, it meant they were in here too, and they would all die together.
Several bodies had floated past. Another was beneath her, used as a step to keep her head above the water. At first, the soft compression of what wasn’t hard enough to be stone had made her scream, a wail of horror that had been taken up by those around her in some kind of hideous war cry. Then, the realisation that to step down from the submerged corpse would put her mouth level with the sloshing water and the plumes of gasoline drifting in her direction made her snap her mouth closed.
She looked up again at the bizarre puppet show that seemed to have come to a halt. A group of the actors—whom she was sure were as much prisoners as those of them in the water—had managed to tangle themselves up in the wires. As she watched, two of them fell away, leaving just the young man and his resurrected girlfriend hanging in a tangle fifty feet above the water. The narrator was muttering something complicated in English about an inferno.
Then a flame appeared on the woman’s head. The shadow of it flickering against the giant ceiling screen—now skewed to one side—was huge. A gasp of terror went up from the people around her.
Elenora wanted to scream, but all she could do was stare wide-eyed at the shadows of her destiny.
43
Battle on the balcony
‘There!’ Jorge shouted, as they veered around a corner, the front bumper squealing as it scraped along the ground, to see La Sagrada Familia rising up ahead of them, its spires lit up by spotlights against the night sky. Jennie brought the truck to a slow stop as she stared up at the breathtaking building.
The roundabout route they had followed had brought them close, but it had taken a toll on the truck. One bumper hung loose, and one of the two huge front tyres on the left side had been punctured. It was an effort of exertion to keep the vehicle in a straight line now, as it constantly wanted to veer to the left.
‘Stay here,’ Jorge said, then without another word he jumped out of the broken side window and dashed off across the wide plaza.
They had stopped in a side street barely wide enough to fit them. Perhaps half a kilometre of mostly open plaza lay between them and the church. Once there had been a block of buildings here, her guidebooks had told her, but it had been razed to make way for a larger plaza more fitting for the greatest church in the world. Now streams and ponds gurgled and shone between landscaped gardens, paved walkways and rows of trees. She could imagine cool summer nights here, lovers making promises and breaking them, laughter and tears set against the illuminated spires rising a hundred and seventy metres into the sky.
Jorge came running back a few minutes later. Jennie, still aching from her wounds, had just started to doze off into a sleep probably brought on by the pills Jorge had made her take. She slapped herself lightly across the face to focus as the boy jumped up into the cab.
‘Go!’ he shouted. ‘Faster, faster!’
‘What’s going on?’
‘People inside. Many people. Doors closed.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Many death. Open doors.’
He reached out and patted the dashboard. Jennie gulped, but she understood. There was only one way those doors were being opened.
#
Akane’s hair was now a ball of flame. The heat was licking at Jun’s face, and little cinders kept breaking off and threatening to set the whole church floor alight. He had burned his hands already catching one clump of burning hair that fell away, but soon her clothing would catch too and he would have no way to stop it. They were pressed against each other, and he couldn’t get up enough momentum to swing them across to Crow’s balcony.
The professor was standing there at the edge of the parapet, watching them, a grin of satisfaction on his face. If a face could convey a thousand emotions, most of them were there in Crow’s cocked birdlike visage, from complete jubilation to a near sense of regret that the long-fought battle was about to be won. Jun was sure that on some deeper level, Professor Crow had enjoyed their joust and was sad to see it come to an end.
And then Crow’s head turned to one side, his mouth parting in an expression that could only be surprise.
Jun grunted, the air knocked out of him, as someone barrelled into him from behind. He heard Nozomi screaming at him to swing, to shift his balance, and then her arms were around him, holding him tight as he held on to a burning Akane. The flames had passed on to his clothes now, and were licking at the skin under his shirt. There was nothing he could do but grit his teeth and try not to bat them away through fear of endangering the people below. With every second that passed the pain grew more intense.
‘Say goodnight, Matsumoto!’ Crow screamed, and his voice amplified out across the church, even as above them something gave way, and they pitched forward towards the balcony edge, Jun, Nozomi, and Akane wrapped together, a ball of burning metal and bones. The nearest gasoline pipe was just ten feet to their right, and Jun gagged as the fumes filled his lungs. Nozomi was screaming at him to hang on to the wires. He hooked one under his arms just as the shackles on his wrists and ankles dropped off. Crow was trying to jettison them, to drop them into the water. Akane became a dead weight in his arms, and it was all Jun could do to hold on to her without losing his own grip on the wires still entangling them.
‘Stay back! You’ll die!’ Crow was screaming at the shadows, his face turned away from them. Then they were crashing on to the balcony and landing in a heap behind him. Akane landed nearest, and her flaming hair swiped against Crow’s cloak. Within seconds rings of fire were making their way up across the grey wool that billowed around his feet.
‘You do not know what I am!’ Crow screamed, throwing his computer aside, the machine smashing on the hard stone floor in a shower of plastic and bits of circuit board. ‘I cannot be stopped!’
A man stepped out of the shadows, and Jun realised Crow had not been shouting at them, but at th
e newcomer.
The man was short and wiry, thinning grey hair almost silver. He was limping on one leg, and held his left arm against his body with his right.
He eyes were colourless black coals.
‘I enjoyed the hunt,’ he said in a quiet voice. ‘You were worthy prey, Professor.’
‘That’s him!’ Nozomi gasped, starting to stand. Crow reached her in two steps and slipped an arm around her neck, pulling her back towards the balcony edge.
‘I’ll kill her!’
‘Fine. The life of Okamoto’s daughter means nothing to me.’
The man hobbled forward. Crow scowled and lifted a hand towards Nozomi’s throat, his talons close to her skin. His eyes and the girl’s met, then Crow gave a frustrated snarl and pushed her away.
‘Then we shall joust, you and I,’ he growled at the assassin. He spread his arms wide, dropping into a fighting stance and screeching like the bird he resembled. Jun shivered as Professor Crow leapt at the assassin, claw-like fingers little more than a blur.
The assassin met him in the middle of the balcony, catching one of Crow’s hands with his good right, but taking the other across the face, the claws opening rivets in his skin. The Professor cut and slashed like a hawk tearing at its prey, but the wiry man pushed him backwards towards the balcony edge.
For a moment Jun was unsure who would win, then Crow gasped and fell back against the wall, the newcomer with a hand around his neck. Crow, his cloak burning all around him, fell to his knees.
‘Goodnight, Professor. Sleep well.’
The assassin lifted Crow up by the neck, holding him above his head in a display of strength that was stunning for a man so slightly built. Jun watched in fascination, then a sudden realisation of what was about to happen hit him like a speeding train. The assassin was pushing Crow out over the balcony edge, and would drop him into the crowd below. Crow’s clothes were burning, the flames licking up his trouser legs towards his thighs.