Thy Fearful Symmetry (29 page)

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.

When he heard his name, he turned wearily on the spot to see who had whispered it. Could they have found him so quickly, now that he had sinned afresh?

There was nobody there, but he heard his name again.

Pandora was looking up at him, tears in her crystal eyes. “Ambrose?”
 

Though she whispered, to the demon it sounded like song.

Weary, Calum stumbled down the dark stairwell after Mary and Stephen, unable to see either of them, his feet finding the steps on trust.
 

The twisted chant bounced around them on the stairwell. “Am-brose! Am-brose! Am-brose!” Mary was crying, and Calum swallowed to counter the accompanying whimper he felt in his throat. Dead people on the streets had been one thing, a step removed from how the world worked. The owners of those voices though, had no right to exist in the same time and place as man. While Calum knew that the voices came from outside, darkness convinced him he was a step away from running into one of their owners on the stairs. There would be scales, he suspected, or feathers, or viscous slime. Hearing the tones and trills underlying the chant, it was impossible not to let his imagination run away with him.

Even if his imagination was not up to the task of reflecting the probable reality.
 

Stephen was leading them towards the back entrance of the flats. Calum knew in his gut that running was futile, but he couldn't stop himself trying. Perhaps running was the true human condition. Calum had run from his life before the priesthood to God, then from God to the new wonders of angels and demons. Had he been running in search of these things, or had he been fleeing what went before?

Turning another corner, lungs heaving, he continued down the next flight of steps. In the darkness, with the noise surrounding him, it felt as though he had spent a terrified eternity descending into the dark unknown.

Ahead of him, there was a rectangle of grey light to break the blackness, and relief made him want to join Mary in weeping. Finally, they were at the back door. Stephen's silhouette immediately darted in front of him, and beneath the chanting Calum heard the scrape of a key trying to find a lock.

Stephen stood back, opening the door, and cold air washed over them. Abruptly, the chanting stopped, and for a moment Calum's heart did too.
They're here
, he almost screamed, and then realised it wasn't true. Whatever was happening at St Cottier's, it did not yet involve them. They could still escape.
 

“Quietly,” he breathed, following Stephen and Mary out of the door. To his ears, their own breathing was a grating din that could only draw attention towards them.

In the new silence, they crept into the gardens, the fog still thick enough to prevent them from seeing more than a foot ahead, and they were aware of each other's positions only by the little noises they made. The fog was icy, and Calum wondered whether leaving the shelter of the flat had been a mistake. It came down to which was the better death; evisceration by demons, or hypothermia. Knowing the torments that would follow in the afterlife, he realised he didn’t have a preference.

In the space of a footstep, Calum was out of the fog, into the enclosed communal gardens. He was so surprised that he walked straight into Stephen's back. When Calum followed his gaze up, he saw that the fog rose as far as he could see, like a vast, billowy wall to the stars. “It shouldn't just stop like that,” Stephen whispered, and Calum thought he was going to cry.

“No,” he answered. “But it does. That's what the world is like, tonight. Get used to it.”

“And it's your fault?” Unspoken struggles wrote themselves on Stephen's face.
 

Calum paused. “Maybe. Yes,” he whispered, almost wanting the man to mete out punishment. “It's all my fault.” They stared at each other, and he thought he might be about to get his wish.