Thy Fearful Symmetry (37 page)

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

Calum fell, and threw his arms wide to stop himself. There was nothing to grab, only a sensation of warmth that wrapped him tight as a linen shroud.
 

Something had happened.
 

The monkey-demons had thrown themselves at him, and Pandora had swept to his rescue, fierce and beautiful. Ambrose had been with her, fighting back the ranks of the dead.

Calum had been crying.

Opening his eyes, he couldn't tell if he was falling or not. Around him was a void of all colours, and no colours, that smelled of roast turkey, spent fireworks, human faeces, paint stripper, and a thousand other odours. While his body tried to convince him that he was plummeting downwards, his eyes told him he was floating peacefully in one place.

There were voices, some near and some distant, that moaned and wailed. There was no sense of torment but rather a feeling of absolute abandonment.

A burning sword had plunged into his chest.

Calum looked stupidly downwards, searching for the wound, but there was nothing to see. Calum had no chest, or legs, or arms, or body. Calum had no head, or eyes. Calum was nothing but a tight ball of essence, plunging through a strange limbo.

Limbo.

Fear sparked in the chest he no longer had, sending ugly black jags through the rainbow void. Whether he was actually falling was moot. Metaphorically, he was plunging to hell, where he would meet his eternal tormentors.

Something chewed on the back of his panic, trying to make itself known, a memory of…

Calum was at the wheel of the Mondeo when it careened off the road and into the tree, and despite the tearing whiplash in his neck, he still saw Clare shooting from the passenger seat, shattering the windscreen as she was catapulted out.

Falling. He had to remember that he was falling. Colours danced discordantly around him, so chaotic that it was easier to remember the past than stare at the present.

Drink-fuelled, he was in the student union bar, his girlfriend Clare at home and his tongue down Sandra Leslie's throat. Retreating to the car park, oblivious to passers-by, they did their inebriated best to fuck each other's brains out. Clare never knew, and never had a chance to find out.
 

Ambrose had said something, something so important that Calum had died in hearing it. A name. Names had power. An important name.

Taking his vows, Calum had known that he would be a bad priest. Men like him were not worthy of service. How long before he grew restless, and betrayed the God he had known existed ever since the first moments of waking after the car crash?
 

How long did he have in this void, snapping in and out of his lowest memories, before he dropped into Hell? Was he going to a literal place? What name had Ambrose killed him with?

Calum remembered when…

No. Struggling to stay in whatever moment of time he hurtled through, he strained at the memory of Ambrose leaning over, gentle hands on his cheeks.

“Then know that God has a name. It is YVWH.”

Calum's soul flinched, a bright blue contraction, as though the word could kill him all over again. It didn't.

Freed of mortal lips and tongue, Calum formed the word in his mind. Blotting out distractions, he made it crystalline.

Gnat-like, not knowing what he was supposed to do afterwards, Calum summoned his God unto him.

Leviathan stared after Pandora and Ambrose, the cold radiating off him growing more intense. Gemmell gritted his teeth, tightening his grip on the sword's hilt. The flicker of fire dancing across the metal played enough warmth across his fingers to stop him dropping it, but he had to force his shoulders not to shiver and make the blade shake.
 

Leviathan snorted, and looked down at him. Gemmell stepped back as those cold, arrogant eyes scrutinized him. “Would you care to repeat that, Inspector?”

Gemmell swallowed. When he had picked up the sword, his anger had been vast. Having helped Malachi to find a weapon to kill Pandora, he had watched him plunge it into the chest of an ordinary man. Now, that man was dead, and it was partly Gemmell’s fault.

That the whole world was dying, that angels, demons, and dead men walked the streets around him, didn't matter. It wasn't an excuse. Guilt and horror had mixed in the pit of his stomach, and in a shaking voice he told Summer to get somewhere safe. Then he had picked up the discarded sword.

Glasgow, his city, had been raped over and again since nightfall. Ordinary people had been driven to extremes, before having their lives snatched away just because those bigger and more powerful had decided that it was their time. Somebody had to pay, and it was Gemmell's job to make that happen.

“I said you're under arrest. I'd read you your rights, but I don't know if you're entitled to any. To be honest, I don't give a rat's arse.”

Leviathan snorted again, this time with mirth. “I expect you would like us to come quietly?” The wind whistled around them, as the twisted army behind the demon shuffled with anticipation.

“Actually, no. I'd like you to resist arrest. Every last fucking one of you.” Gemmell's voice was fierce in the gale.

Leviathan stepped forward, until his chest was just inches from the tip of the blade. “I'm going to relish tearing you apart.”

“You going to share me with your friends?”

Leviathan glanced over his shoulder. “I don't think so, sweetling. There isn't enough of you to go around.”

“They're really going to sit back and watch me kick your arse?”

Leviathan was delighted. “You have such a suspicious mind Inspector!”
 

Gemmell flicked a glance over Leviathan's shoulder. “Better tell that big guy there, then. If he gets any closer, we're going to be a threesome.”

Leviathan frowned, half turning to look, and Gemmell thrust forward with the sword.

The void was a storm of rage that blasted around Calum where he floated, awed and frightened. That incomprehensible wrath was aimed at him, and his soul cried at the stabs of hatred and accusation that lashed into him. The emotions were too much for his tiny being to endure, a torment that would drive him mad with guilt and self-loathing. He wondered whether he was in Hell after all, and this was to be his eternity.

No, he knew the void for what it was. He had been there before, once in the wreckage of a car, when the vast, rich colour had suffused him with love and the will to live, and the second time in a dream.

Calum was at the heart of his God. YVWH had come to him, but not in servitude or query.
 

Calum tried to project his thoughts outwards, but they were slapped back at him, and he knew his voice was too small against his God's rage. Pieces of him started to dissolve before the storm, and he felt himself lessen with every second that passed. Soon, there would be nothing left of him to make his case.

What was his case? What was he to do? Ambrose had given him a word, knowing that true names have power, but Calum could not make himself understood. He was a mite on the back of a being made of everything. Perhaps he would have been able to bargain, to plead, if he could only make himself understood.

Yet he deserved this. He had sworn to worship his God, to stand true on His behalf, and in proving lacking he had brought about the downfall of everything. God had given him…

The concept was gone, another piece of him that washed away. Anxiety sparked through Calum's essence as a wave of loathing the size of the Universe washed over him.

God had made him…

That thought was gone too, whipped away by a tidal surge of grief at the way the Great Experiment had ended prematurely.

God had… Calum fought to remember, fought to find something to hold on to. God had…
 

God had come to him when he was dying in a car wreck of his own making, and set him free.

Freedom.

No, that was wrong.

Calum strained with everything in him to remember words, concepts, sights, sounds. The last days came back to him in flashes. Ambrose. Pandora. The price the world was being made to pay because two beings had found a true and proper love.

It wasn't right.
 

God wasn't right.

God had come to him at his most vulnerable moment, and used it to make him a slave.

Yes.

He had broken free, and found himself.

Yes.

Ambrose had given Calum the wrong word. God's essence was too much, and in summoning it, he was overwhelmed. Things could be right, he knew that now. The world would never be the same, but something could be salvaged.

In whose image?

Questions for later. Calum needed to talk to the storm, and his recent memories gave him the name he needed.

Metatron
. He formed the name carefully, thrust it out and waited for a response to his summoning.

Nothing happened. Calum panicked. How long did the world have left? Had he misunderstood? True names have power. Why didn't the Voice of God come to him?

True names.

Calum understood, and very carefully shaped a different name in his mind.

Enoch
. The name punched out of him, and the storm vanished.

Malachi slashed out, a sweeping strike meant to take out Melissa's eyes. His aim was off, falling short by an inch. His momentum was too much, and rather than leave himself open while he tried to recover, he went with it, insides convulsing with complaint as he whirled away from her. Allowing the spin to take him back round, he stopped, breathing hard, trying to focus on her face. Her outline refused to fix in one place. Malachi dragged the sleeve of his coat over his forehead, wiping away rain and cold sweat.

She was barely aware of him, staggering forward like a smack addict looking for a fix, dozens more dead in her wake. Trying to keep his knife arm steady, fighting against the watery tremor gushing through his muscles, he wondered whether his aim was off because he had known this woman.

Behind him, Summer climbed to her feet. “You don't have to do that, Mr Jones,” she said, her voice sleepy. She had tried to help him, and her sanity was proving the price. Further back, he heard other voices. Gemmell was one of them. The other wasn't human. Malachi blocked them all out. It was difficult enough concentrating on Melissa.

She grabbed for him, and he brought the knife down across her hand, the blade's weight doing work that his muscles wouldn't. Three of her fingers flew, and he had a clear impression of her once perfectly manicured nails hanging ripped and torn from the ends before they splashed against the kerb. Nausea rushed him, and he swallowed down blood and vomit. Big movements left him unbalanced, and with the feeling going out of his left leg, he couldn't waste time.

Stabbing out in one quick, clean movement, hardly feeling the blade puncture her left eye, he knew he was successful only when it jarred the bone of the socket. Yanking the knife out, he stabbed forward again, taking her other eye and snapping her head back. Cold jelly slicked her cheeks, pooled at her chin, and Malachi was glad the creature felt no pain. Its scream would sound too much like Melissa. Better to hear only the wind, the rain, his own ragged breathing, and those thousands of sliding footsteps.

Unable to see, Melissa's corpse flailed blindly to his left, and he stepped around her, focussed on his balance and poise. Wrapping his free hand around her head, keeping his fingers away from her biting jaws, he yanked her skull back and dragged the knife deep through the cold meat of her neck. Slitting her throat would do little good, but decapitating her might be effective.

Sticky fluids oozed over his fingers. He didn't have the strength to saw through her spine, and a hand pawing the back of his coat was enough to make him move again, ducking around the front, and dropping to one knee as exertion overcame him. Melissa loomed over his exposed back. He didn't have the strength to move away. The finger and thumb of her slashed hand smeared blood over his hair.
 

Summer stepped in front of him, and he looked up as she swung a bloodied tyre iron over his head. He heard a cruel snap, and jumped as Melissa's head sailed to his left, her face pulping against a door, and leaving a stain of blood there as it bounced to the ground.

Summer held a hand out, helping Malachi up, and they staggered away from the dead.
 

Gemmell lunged forward with every desperate ounce of strength in him. Only then did he realize that he had almost nothing left to give. Stress, lack of sleep, injury, and more, had made him pathetic.

It still should have been enough. With Leviathan distracted, and the burning blade almost scratching the demon's chest before the thrust even began, he should have skewered it.

Instead, he stumbled forward, finding nothing in the way to slow him down. Leviathan had moved, sliding aside with ludicrous ease and leaving Gemmell staggering in the wind. A roar went up from the demons as he found himself face to face with their front ranks, the racket dizzying him. Pulling himself to a halt before he crashed into the first body, he whirled, trying to forget the brief glimpse of an oversized man with flesh sloughing of his bones, and holding his breath against the putrid smell of the creature. Was Leviathan's word good, or would he be attacked by the monstrosity at his back?

Leviathan stood calmly, waiting for Gemmell to turn, and the Inspector knew it didn't matter either way. He was dead. The scorn on the demon's face told him that he could have been dead a dozen times in the moments he had squandered recovering from his lunge. Leviathan was playing with him. Rain drizzled down Gemmell's face, and he felt faint. Behind him, Hell was spitting forth its multitude. The sword in his hand no longer looked like a tool to slay the damned, and instead felt like clumsy steel licked by matchstick flames that threatened to die beneath the wind. Gemmell felt like that flame.

Had he thought that in some way he could continue doing his job as the world fell apart, that he could protect the weak? Images from the slaughter in the church flicked through his mind, each hammering failure harder into his bones. What had he achieved, that justified his absence from his son. When the sky rained fire, and the dead marched up to their door, Gemmell should have been there, holding his boy tight.