A Lower Deep - A Self Novel About 3300 wds (14 page)

The single cell of the dungeon sat nestled behind the altar, as if at any moment the priest might call someone up front and send him to that prison. The trapdoor screeched open like a terrified man. My father said, "Woo woo."

Eddie walked forward and started to climb down into the hole. Gawain put out his hand and gently stopped him, and for a second I thought he might hug the boy.

I could barely squeeze myself down into the hole.

The depth of darkness cut through me as easily and quickly as I moved through it. Self shut the trapdoor. A whole ocean of antiquity existed in every white-capped second. There are moments of distinction when the soul stands to one side and takes full measure. The substance of the forgotten place thickened into a veil sliding over me, encompassing my corpse, a pall over my coffin.

I walked and kept walking, the levels of shadow before me, inside of me, and the endless reams behind my eyes. My father's breath seemed to heat the back of my neck. I tried to grasp my mother's songs but she was too far away, even here and now. My lost love Danielle shifted in my arms, just as she had in the pew when she'd died whispering her devotion. I could deal with the dead but only when I raised them and they didn't raise themselves. All the flaming words of my past didn't light an inch of the way. The gloom went beyond remoteness, another manifestation of doubt and regret. Like all my remorse it was never-ending, as deep and limitless as the dark where all my own failures lurked. I could go no farther.

Get me out of here
.

I hadn't moved an inch. There was no place to move. The trapdoor opened.

My second self said,
Well, that was a stupid-ass waste of time. What did you forget in that place?

Not a thing.

I
was stiff and sore, but I finally knew why Gawain was here.

My father put his whole head into the stoup and blew bubbles in the holy water. It reminded me of when he taught me to swim in our backyard pool, and our dogs paddled beside him and his skin was bronzed by the sun. No amount of blessed water could wash the harlequin stains from his face.

Self thought it looked kind of fun. He clambered up the stoup and tried to do it too, but my father hogged the bowl. They giggled and splashed each other. The tiny bells tinkled until my brain rang with them.

I said,
Are you sure the baby's safe?

Pop's a pretty fun guy! Not like he used to be
.

Sometimes the despair came in too low and fast. It slid under my guard to skewer me so deeply that I didn't know if I was dead or alive anymore. A moan started to ease up my throat but I managed to swallow it in time. My body bucked as if making a stab for a life that no longer—and might never have—existed. My legs went wobbly and then the surge of grief crested and passed.

The girl?

As safe as she can be
, he said.

Gawain, as ever, stood patient and relaxed, free from the turmoil of dull sentience. His parents had prepared him from birth for excursions like these. They'd trained him by driving him out of his mind. They'd punctured his eardrums, put out his eyes, and sliced his tongue apart. By detaching him from himself they'd loosed him from the sensual world and left him to explore that enormity beyond the common touch. He lived in that darkness, disassociated from the rest of us.

A part of me had always been intensely envious of him. He remained the paragon in repose. He was blessed because no blessing would ever matter to him.

He gazed at me with those blank eyes, awaiting my resolve.

"All right, Gawain. You lead, I'll follow."

I pried the jar with Eddie's heart in it from the boy's arms and hid it in the vestibule. I set seven charms with seven locks and seven wards around the pottery. I wasn't going to make it easy for the mount to take this particular pound of flesh.

I opened the oubliette. Gawain stepped inside it easily, without bending or ducking. He slipped into the blackness of the dungeon box and faded until I couldn't see the back of his white hair anymore. I pulled my father's dripping face from the stoup and urged him toward the murder hole. He got down on his hands and knees and stuck his head into the trap. He made funny noises and did something he could never have done in life—he laughed at himself. Self snickered and prodded my Dad in the ass with a claw, and my father shot forward and fell inside. Self held his nose and jumped into the hole as if he were snorkeling in the Bahamas. I heard one of them go "Wheeeeeeeeeee!"

I took Eddie's hand and led him down into the forgotten place.

We were instantly consumed, as if the earth had heaved on top of us. This time I could feel his assent. It was like slipping through regions draped with cobwebs. I could feel the return of my own oath's affirmations. Maybe John wasn't that far off. Gawain's robes flapped against my belly exactly as they had when we'd stood around the covene tree. Even then he had no self-doubt or fractures of fear or buried half-stifled desires. Before the wedge of his purity the black curtain flinched aside, parted for him, and let us pass.

Dad chortled in the shadows. In a space not large enough for even one broken man we walked for miles. Self said,
Damn, my feet hurt!
I could hear him and my father tickling each other and tittering in turns. I kept a firm grip on Eddie's wrist and prayed that when this was all over they could make him whole once more.

He whispered, "I forget. I keep forgetting."

Let it be true, I thought. Forget everything, even in your dreams and your most awful nightmares, cleave yourself from your visit here. Do what the rest of us can't.

Chapter Twelve

M
ountArmon welcomed us into the belly of its granite keep, where the crags trickled shreds of a hopeless heaven.

Hearth fires burned and stoked altars lit our way. Millennia thinned. My pledge didn't matter here and my back straightened with relief. Promises dried up and flaked off like dead skin.

Two hundred angels who willfully turned away from God had given up divinity in order to put on the shackles of mortality. On this spot they had sworn their testimony before shedding eternity and taking their wives.

Gawain's lavender robes held the firelight and cast a purple glow against the rock. Water lapped in the distance, and the air turned much colder. We came to Jakin and Boas—the names of the two pillars originally erected in Solomon's Temple. They were supposed to be black and white, symbolizing good and evil, but both were so dirty with grime that it was impossible to tell which was which.

My father crept forward and waved a friendly greeting. Dust flew upward as an immense weight shifted. The stone grumbled and the ground swayed.

So, this was their sired legacy.

I beheld the Heir of the Mount, the offspring of Armon.

It lived upon a heap of ash and bone.

The mammoth mutant, a human-Seraph hybrid-child called a Nephilim, laid on its back rubbing its colossal feet together. It drooled down its massive silken neck. More unborn than born, without umbilicus or navel or fully formed digits, its murky eyes never settled anywhere too long and they fathomed nothing. It had no genitalia. Not only would it be sterile, but even an imitation of the act of procreation would have been intolerable to the universe.

That mouth had been opened in a perpetual silent cry for centuries. The hybrid seemed carved from shale and marble. The skin was even paler than my father's white-face. It had needs but didn't know them.

A grotto yawned open beside it. Currents of the twin rivers dragged corpses in from the bottom of JamesLake, depositing bodies here where the Nephilim could dip in a hand and sup on the suicides. Heir of Armon swallowed their despondency and licked out the marrow.

In one fashion the gargantuan Nephilim resembled Gawain—separate, unique, removed, and altogether abstract. It stared blindly at him, and he stared blindly back.

Uriel's idolatry ran around my legs and he stepped free from the dark to stand proudly in front of the hearth fires. Nip sat curled, hiding his face in shame and vainly attempting to stifle his sobs.

"Glory of God be unto you," Uriel said. "Oh boy."

Is there any myth that isn't real?
I asked.

No.

Abbot John had been more right in his tenets than I'd given him credit for, and also more mistaken than he'd ever accept. Maybe the two hundred fallen angels had become men no uglier or noble than any other, but their progeny had devolved into parasites sponging off the penance of others. Those angels who'd torn off their own wings had given up too much in becoming men, and yet they hadn't gained enough to make the cost worthwhile for the rest of us.

Mankind found immortality in the thread of their blood.

Armers, Ramuel, Sanyasa, Saneveel, Batraal, and all the others—from their own ashes—must have found only remorse in the irony of their woeful living child.

It had the reverence of rock.

The Nephilim had no soul.

"I don't want to kill you," Uriel said.

"Why not?" I asked, genuinely curious. "Where is Catherine's child?"

"Hidden," I told him.

"You can't contain the holy prophet of God."

"Uriel, I'm telling you, the reincarnate is not the prophet Elijah."

He didn't believe me. He could not distinguish between piety and fixation. For that, at least, I couldn't completely blame him. The prophet Elijah had taunted the four hundred and fifty priests of Baal into a battle of burnt offerings they could not win. When they finally admitted defeat the prophet Elijah personally beheaded them all in the name of Yahweh.

My former coven brother had dreamed of doing the same. The wrath that had been loosed from Cathy's womb would once again become the man who tried to steal my love and castrate me in the moonlight. He would be a pawn that Jebediah would use as the harbinger of a hell to come.

Uriel had no rage, but his deranged passion added up to the same. He thrust his spells into my face. They were filled more with devotion than aggression, majiks of arrogant sincerity rather than applied arcana. My fists burned black with my hexes, and I swiped aside his ridiculous sanctity and watched it skitter and pop against the walls. His plastic saints started chewing on my ankles.

My father, always the fool even when he wasn't a clown, wanted to entertain and play with the offspring of the mount. The Nephilim, sensing his damnation, reached down and plucked my dad up in one of its monolithic hands. My father gave a strange painful cry that was still tinged with his laughter.

Uriel found strength in his dedication to stone and the stone's love for him. I grimaced and tried to put an end to this encounter by letting my angry instincts take over, but the bedrock of his faith scattered my spells.

To hell with it. I brought a roundhouse left all the way up from my knees and aimed for his jaw. Nip let out another groan and flung himself away. Uriel merely frowned at me, disappointed and appalled, and dropped back into shadow. I wheeled through the gloom and ran to save my father.

If the hybrid found flavor in damnation, then my dad would be a cuisine for discriminating tastes. He didn't thrash or cry out as the mutant offspring lifted him in its tremendous fist. I dug in and rushed across the banks of bones, arcana discharging from my eyes and mouth, but the Nephilim completely ignored me.

Nip blundered into Self and Eddie, who both went over backward and lay sprawled on the cave floor.

I heard the unmistakable sound of tearing flesh and turned.

Oh, you—

Hey now...

You maniac!

Hey now, you wanted her to be safe.

Two buttons on Eddie's shirt had popped open and his flayed flesh had flopped aside to reveal the pink infant with her thick brown head of hair. Self had nestled the sleeping child within Eddie's emptied chest cavity.

Fane's daughter began to slide free as if being born a second time within a few hours, her tiny lips quivering as she screwed up her face. Covered with blood and mucus, her matted hair stood up in rusty clumps. Eddie's heart might have burst if he'd still had one, as the utter horror hammered him. The kid's eyes bulged out so far I thought he might have a seizure. I hoped he'd faint but he merely watched the grisliness of his own violated body.

Fumes of Elijah's madness packed the width of the cavern. I hesitated, listening to my dad's laughter as the Nephilim tousled him closer to its gritty, rigid mouth. I was torn between moving and watching Fane's daughter slip like a snake from the boy's hollow chest and slap down into the sand at his feet. I started back for Uriel.

But my own damnation must've been appetizing enough, and before I got ten feet the Nephilim rolled aside atop the crushed bone and ash and scooped me up like the hand of God. Its hungers, like all of ours, incited its mindless actions. I was hefted twenty feet in the air and shrieked as it squeezed me tightly in its giant fist.