2012 (41 page)

With a roar so huge that it would over the next few hours echo around the entire world, a massive red column of material shot out of the hole where the lens had been. The lens itself arced into the stratosphere, turning over and over, and as it turned changing shape, twisting and melting and then falling and becoming black, then blacker still, and landing in the Arabian desert not far from Mecca, a city of corpses of those who had died praying, surrounded by a desert coated with wanderers who had fallen beneath the sun.

None saw it strike, but Wylie and Brooke did, and Nick and so also Trevor and Martin. Deep in their traps, the souls of Lindy and Winnie sensed some signal from the outside, and for the first time since she had been pulled from her body, Lindy realized that she was not buried alive in a coffin, hideously and inexplicably unable to die. She began to call the name of the strongest and most trusted person she knew.

“I hear my wife,” Martin said. “Lindy is calling me!”

At the same time, though, diamonds began to appear in the air, shimmering black, as Samson prepared to move the souls that would make him rich in Abaddon.

Winnie, who had been alone and cold and feeling drawn to some great joy she could not reach, now felt herself in the arms of her friend Kelsey, and heard a lullaby her mom had sung her every night of her life, “the nightjars calling upon the heath…” and rested in the knowledge that somebody was at last saving her from the monsters who had bound her here.

In Mecca, a new black stone now lay not far from the Alhajar Al-Aswad, and of the same material and the same shape and color, for the last one that fell here had started from exactly the same place thirteen thousand years ago, as Abaddon failed in its last attempt to steal the human worlds, and the raw hole it had left had been filled, and the pyramid built to close the wound, and remain as a warning-one that Abaddon had spent thirteen millennia tricking and deceiving mankind into forgetting.

The rest of the material that had blasted like lava from the huge gateway came to the top of its trajectory and began sailing back down. Far below, the seraph began to see arms and legs of their own kind, torsos, heads, shoes, falling around them, striking one and then another of them and causing their yellow brains to splash out. Heads bounded along like great hailstones, or rocks catapulted down by a siege army. As they bent to protect children or possessions or eggs, they were smashed, they were all smashed in a maelstrom of destruction from above that seemed never to end, a storm made of body parts.

A roar of terror and woe rose up from their throats, but was quickly buried in the wet thudding, as the living seraph disappeared beneath the mountains of their own dead.

Brooke lay her hand over Wylie’s for a moment. He glanced up at her, and in that glance they shared exultation, perhaps also sorrow at the suffering that was being experienced, but it was nothing compared to the rage of battle that was breaking out in the lands of the Corporation, gnashing so intense that it was shaking even the pearly walls that enclosed the Union, and rustling the leaves in the peaceful lands they protected.

They were being torn apart, the minions of Echidna, who had ruled for so long. Wylie looked for Samson, but did not see him. He wanted to identify him, because Samson, who knew human customs and understood gateways, was not defeated until he was destroyed.

“They need us,” Nick said from behind closed eyes. “They need us now, Dad.”

“I can’t help where the story goes.”

Nick pushed his father away from the laptop.

“Hey.”

“Dad, it’s another deception! They’re fascinating you with their own destruction, so you won’t go where you’re needed.”

He began to type, and when Wylie tried to stop him, Brooke intervened with a sharp shake of her head.

Nick’s eyes closed. His fingers flew.

Before him was a huge room. It was lit by faint blue light that dwindled in the massive space to a blue haze on the distance. The haze flickered slightly, and then he saw why. It was coming from millions upon millions of lozenge-shaped tubes, each emplaced in a socket that was connected to thick, black cables that ran between the hundreds and hundreds of rows.

Martin was quite familiar with the large cartouches that were depicted on the walls of the Temple of Hathor in the Dendera complex. He had not dated this temple, but he had known since he’d read of Al North’s ordeal, that the accepted explanation for the oblong cartouches, that they were simply borders meant to enclose hieroglyphics, was not correct.

In each one, a multicolored light flickered along a copper filament. It twisted and turned, flying now against the glass of the tube, now twisting itself around the filament, now flashing in a million colors.

The light was souls, and he understood now what Abaddon’s ages-long propaganda had done to us. It had made us forget the science of the soul so that we would be helpless when the three earths again crossed the plane of the galaxy and they would have their chance-this chance-to return. It had made us forget what these tubes were, which were soul prisons. It had given us generations of scientists who considered the soul a “supernatural” idea and so stayed away from any study of it. But there was no supernatural, there were only phenomena that had been understood, quantified, and measured, and phenomena that had not. That the patterns induced in fields of electrons by changing conditions in a body would persist after death and become a sort of plasma, conscious and richly aware of its memories, had never been imagined. It had been assumed, if it was thought about at all, that any electromagnetic activity in the nervous system simply ceased when the body died.

And so Martin’s earth had been defenseless when the seraph returned-as ours will be, also, on the inevitable day when in their greedy, starved fury, they come bursting in on us in whatever cunning new way they may devise.

Above the ocean of Samson’s soul traps, the long lines of gateways were sparking and shimmering. It would only be moments before it was too late. The souls, seeming to sense this, flickered frantically in their prisons.

There came from along the narrow path between two rows of soul traps, a clanging. It was young Mike in the gloom, hammering at one of the tubes with a rock he had found on the way in.

The sound echoed up and down the great space, rising in intensity until it was the ringing of a great bell, then falling again as he grew tired, finally stopping.

Trevor said, “I think there’s a seam here.” He was down between two rows, where the tubes were connected to the sockets that held them.

“What’s next, Dad?” Nick asked has father.

“You’re the writer now, son.”

“They’re running out of time!”

“And you’re frozen. It happens.”

“Dad, pick it up.”

“I can’t pick it up, it’s yours now!”

Nick sat. Nothing happened. Wylie waited. His mind remained blank.

Brooke said, “What about Al North?”

That did it. Nick’s fingers began to type.

Al North had done wrong and been wrong, but he had never wavered from his duty as he understood it. He knew where his fault lay and what it would inevitably do to him, but also as long as he had consciousness in him, he would strive to right the wrongs he had created.

Even so, those wrongs had led to a horrible catastrophe and billions of deaths, and no small act of heroism could rectify such a tremendous mistake. He could no longer reach the surface of the earth, but this desperate place was far beneath it, and here he could still maneuver.

“Look!” Martin pointed to what appeared to be a star in the vault of the space. At that same instant something rushed past beneath his feet. He looked down in time to see scales, iridescent purple in the blue light, but then the thing was gone.

An instant later Mike screamed as coils surged up around him.

Al North saw all this with the clarity-and, indeed, the peace-of somebody who had accepted his life in full, and was prepared to pay the debt he had incurred. He understood the secret of hell, that souls who go there forfeit their right to be. They no longer have a place in this universe or any universe, not until time ends, and a new idea comes to replace the one that is the present creation.

And then, maybe.

He who had done evil accepted the rightness of this.

Still, he wanted to repair what he could, and there was something he could do here. They had all forgotten, in their terror, to just let themselves happen, to trust the grace that was immediately and always ready to support them. He forgave them. He hoped for them.

Which was a very great thing, that he could surmount his anger and his disappointment and his arrogance long enough to do that one tiny thing, to feel hope.

It seemed small, but the energy of such an act on the part of a lost soul is huge, and the tiny spark of goodness that was still within him was easily enough to open ten million soul traps in one flashing, electric instant.

A roar of voices burst out, the faint blue light became a million times brighter. Memories, thoughts, pleas, cries of relief-a huge, gushing roar of human surprise and joy-flew at Martin and his little band in the form of pictures of happy moments, loving in the covers, running by the sea, leaves whirling in autumn, Christmas tree lights, girls dancing, men in blue water, hamburgers, the faces of happy dogs, and song in a million verses of hallelujah.

In this mass, a thousand great serpents came screaming up from the depths of the place and down from the shuddering gateways, their bodies burning from the goodness around them that they could not bear, and they flew into the air like great pillars of fire, writhing and screaming in the sea of song.

They were another design like the outriders and the nighthawks, especially fashioned to terrify human beings, but they had been unleashed too late to save Samson’s wealth. No doubt, the huge snakes were a rental, and he hadn’t wanted to spend the money unless he had to.

The song ended. The hot bones of the serpents tumbled down through the ruined masses of shattered tubes. The gateways shimmered and went out.

Samson’s enormous cry of rage echoed, faded, and died away. He dropped to a stool in his simple room, his narrow head bowed. Outside, the city roared. Another revolution, another aristocracy burned, and now this, his fortune lost.

So it went, in the unsettled misery of this age.

Unnoticed by the raging crowds, the hour of midnight had passed. The weak had won the day.

With a quick swipe of his hand across his face, Samson shifted into his human form. Outside, torches flared. Feet pounded on the stairs, fists pounded on his door.

He stepped through his quickly closing gateway, but not into his old world, not into Martin’s world. He had a plan. If there was vengeance to be tasted, he intended to drink deep.

“Dad, he’s in our woods!”

They got their shotguns and took off after him, both of them, and Brooke and Kelsey agreed that they’d gone mad.

The woods, though, were empty. From along the ridge above the house, they could see the lights of Harrow. Faintly, one of the church bells sounded. Snow was falling, whispering in the woods, drawing pale lines along the dark branches of the winter trees. The peace here was so deep that it seemed impossible that Samson could have passed this way.

They went back to the house, the two of them. They lingered on the deck.

“The Belt of Orion,” Wylie said, gazing up as the snow clouds made a window for the stars.

“And his bow,” Nick said, pointing.

“You did good, Nick.”

“Thanks, Dad. Dad?”

“Yes?”

“Is it real? The book?”

“I thought Samson was in our woods. But he wasn’t.”

They went inside, then, and made a fire for the girls. Popcorn was popped, and hot chocolate produced, and Wylie even managed to slip a goodly shot of whiskey into his.

They spent the remainder of this quiet night speaking of the things of ordinary life. “Past midnight,” Nick said. “I think we won.”

Nothing more was said, and after a time, Nick played cards with Kelsey and Wylie, and Brooke broke out the celebration cognac, a hundred-year-old bottle that was sipped at moments of victory.

Tomorrow, Christmas vacation began for the kids, and in the very late hours, Wylie went into his wife’s arms for what felt like the first time in an age.

At breakfast, the radio said, “The world ended last night, but it seems that nobody noticed. New Age gurus from China to Scotland stood on mountaintops and chanted, but guess what, Chicken Little stayed home. We are now living on the first day beyond the end of the ancient Mayan calendar, a date that has no number in their measurement. But then again, they went extinct a long time ago.”

Later in the morning, Nick found boot prints back in the woods, where Samson’s gateway had been.

“Could’ve been left by us,” Wylie told him.

“I was wearing sneakers when we came out here. You had on a sock. One sock.”

“I went out in the woods without shoes? In the dead of winter?”

Nick nodded. “We did not make these tracks, Dad.”

They’d put a throw rug over the bullet holes in the floor above the crawl space, and they both looked at it at the same time, and for the same reason. It was now gone and the floor was unmarked.

“Brooke, what about that little rug in the kitchen?”

“I put that horror back in the mudroom where it belongs and leave it there please. In the future, if you want to rearrange my house, submit your request in writing.”

“Dad, it was all real! It happened! And we’re-” He stopped. Frowned a little, shook his head. “I lost it,” he said. “It was right on the tip of my tongue.”

Wylie called Matt, but nobody had reported anybody strange wandering around in Harrow, or anywhere in Lautner County, for that matter.

“What about the body in my crawl space? Is that resolved?”

“You want me to come out there with a net?”

“I thought you were gonna arrest me.”

There was a silence. Then, “Oh, yeah, you’ve got that absinthe, not to mention the cigar theft issue.”

He had no memory whatsoever of Al North, then.