A Lower Deep - A Self Novel About 3300 wds (18 page)

"Who in particular?"

"It's all right," he said, fuming. His frenzy came across in full blossom now as he swayed on his feet. The words erupted in bitter bites and he gagged on them. "I'm not mad at you anymore." His eyes bulged, straining free of the sockets. "You did what you had to do. That's completely understandable. Really. Don't worry about it. Listen, listen, I forgive you."

"For what?"

"I can help you." He showed his unbalance in a rictus smile. Sweat poured off his face, droplets catching in those thick eyelashes. A mop of sopping hair stuck against his wet forehead. He was generating serious heat. "This is gonna sound a little out there, but listen, listen. Hey, I ... I love you!"

Sparks and ribbons of bile suddenly ran from his lips. His teeth started to break apart. His clothes began to crawl. Coat and trousers distended and ballooned, full and creeping. Ebony motion rippled and peered out from his cuffs, between his shirt buttons, now dropping to the floor.

Salamanders.

They swung their tails, already spraying neurotoxins from their poison glands as he began to ignite and plumes of smoke rose from him in a hundred places. Black and yellow striped creatures swarmed from him.

Griffin. It was Griffin.

The only man I'd ever killed in hate, but in death he'd forgiven me.

Now Griffin's malice was much more alive than he was. I could feel the rage burning as he let it out toward me, thinking of the children with leukemia that he'd roasted to death. He laughed. He was always laughing.

His murder was the worst thing I'd ever done without feeling any regret.

He had loved Jebediah in life but he'd been a slave to his own pyromania. He spoke as if he'd been sent here to help me. What kind of discoveries had the firebug made in the flames of hell?

"Griffin, you forgave me."

"I have!"

"Why this now?"

"I love you!" he shrieked. "He loves you! He is your child, you are his child!"

"Yeah, right."

"You must listen—"

I would've if he'd made any sense. The fires spurting from him had me a little jumpy. "How do those fingers work for you?"

"What?"

"Those fat bulky hands." Herod couldn't even hold a drinking glass without shattering it. He couldn't use silverware or pet a dog. He killed whatever he dared try to caress. Those enormous fingers twitched. "Must be damn near impossible to light a match."

From an ashtray on the nightstand I grabbed a book of matches with the hotel name on them and lit one. Griffin's eyes, already loose and quivering, danced madly, the same way they had the night he came back from burning down the children's hospital. I blew out the match and he let loose with a squeal of frustration.

"Who sent you?"

"Nobody."

He could be playing semantics. Half the demons in hell were called "nobody" or "nothing" or Beliya'al, meaning "without worth." If there was any possibility that Jebediah's demented plans had to do with Armageddon, then all the dukes and lords in Pandemonium might be ready to assist him, despite their general disgust to truck with headstrong witches.

"Who called for you?"

"You did—"

"Why have you revoked your forgiveness? Are you in service to Jebediah?"

"Are you? Are you? Listen here—"

I preferred Griffin's hate to the machinations of some hidden will. He'd been murderously insane but it was a human madness, driven by a human perverse need. Who could have the power to bring Herod's body back and stuff it with the fiery heat of Griffin? And why?

"I want a name," I said.

He was desperate for some kind of release, jittering as the salamanders swarmed over and through and inside him. "I know you do."

"Why've you come back?"

"To tell you a secret, you prick!"

The fireman was fast, and he sprang at me.

He had Herod's body but none of his strength. Flailing, he splashed the room with neurotoxins, the salamanders sticking to the walls. I reached into his chest and squeezed my fist on things that slinked and burned. They poured free of him, squirming from his mouth, out his nose. They shoved aside his eyeballs to clamber down across his distended cheeks. And still he smiled.

"What secret?" I shouted. "Griffin, tell me!"

The djinn had been born in fire, but Pondo wasn't waiting around any longer to see what happened. He grabbed up his cash and made it out the window, and the game broke up.

I'd waited too long.

Salamanders fled under my feet, furious and full of loathing. Like all witches, Griffin believed in irony and symbolism, and the creatures kept leaping to burn my left side in the same place where I'd stabbed him to death. Dozens became hundreds as they dropped from the ceiling and crawled into the drains, a thousand slithering amphibians roiling with inferno.

I was on fire.

Smoke swirled and filled the room. Alarms sounded. My spells and hexes broiled and fractured into pieces. I turned for the door but Griffin lurched forward and held on, even as Herod's corrupted corpse blazed into more salamanders. Poison spewed into my face. My own screams deafened me as my skin bubbled and incinerated, the flames destroying tissue and burning down to the fat, muscle, and bone. The black tissues shredded away. Rolling in excruciating pain, gritting my teeth, I looked up to see Self calmly sitting atop the television.

He only stared at me.

Herod's body wasted away as the salamanders continued to burst from the rags of his clothes. I tried to scream again but couldn't get it out as my vocal cords boiled away. The torture was unbearable.

Burning, I crawled to Self.

Help me!

I do
, Self said
. I did.

Please!

You sure?
he asked. He cocked his head and looked down at this mess, his features so similar yet different from mine, completely unreadable even to me.
You positive you want my help?
He wanted me to beg some more even as I was lost beneath a tide of flame, but I couldn't ask again, even as my seared corneas ripped off against my eyelids. He thought about it for a moment before saying,
Of course.

Invocations flooded his frame. He gripped me by the wrist and yanked me from the room, more layers of my skin coming off in his claws. There wasn't any pain anymore because all my nerve endings were gone.

He pulled me down the empty corridor. It was easy for him because I weighed no more than eighty charred pounds now.

Clambering up my back, Self licked along the length of my spine, cuddling and cooing as I moaned and sobbed, magic coursing along his radiant hands, stroking the wounds. He spit on me and cooled the burns. I cried out and tried not to bite through my tongue from the torture. I couldn't help it though and my mouth flooded with blood as the damaged tissue grew back and my nerves sang with agony. Self nuzzled my throat, his charms mending me as I held back screeches, ligaments and muscles rebuilding. My eyes healed and I could see again.

He kept working, restoring me with his gentle, loving touch.

Come on, let's go
.

The entire building was in flames now as the salamanders ran freely through the hotel, spewing fire. Naked, I held on to Self's hand and followed him out through the billowing smoke. Somewhere along the way I got lost in the thick haze. He seemed to shake me off, and I lunged for him, grabbing hold again. It wasn't until I was outside that I saw I was clutching on to a man's sleeve.

He was clearly Greek, with curly black hair salted with white, clean-shaven, and teeming with the power of epochs. I'd been burned enough for one night. I stepped away from him, my eyes still tearing, and when my vision cleared enough I saw that he was only a dying old man.

The plowed lines of his face ran to dark trenches that cut so deeply he seemed to have been sliced open with a nail file. His mouth hung slack and his lips were a sickly gray. He was trembling so badly I thought he'd fall over and die in my arms, but he held his ground, regarding me carefully, and slowly backed off.

"Who are you?" I asked.

"A companion in tribulation," he said, and was gone.

Chapter Fourteen

I
walked the Via Dolorosa at dawn.

Dominated by the TempleMount, called the Haram by the Muslims, the OldCity was split into separate quarters: Christian, Muslim, Jewish, and Armenian. Churches showed the architectural touches of the Byzantine and Crusader eras. Eight gates in the wall of Suleyman the Magnificent opened to the smell of spices and the sound of
meuzzins
calling Muslims to prayer.

Along with hundreds of others, I'd spent hours last night outside the hotel watching the firefighters and rescue crews battle the blaze. They carried out the wounded and the dead by the dozens. Someone covered me in a sheet and police questioned me at length. The investigators wouldn't be able to determine that the fire originated in my room. The salamanders had scattered flames all across the building so that it went up simultaneously on several different floors.

They cared a great deal about my passport. Members of the American Consulate appeared and asked more questions and made assurances. I was given a gratis room in a different hotel. Somebody brought me some clothes that didn't fit and Self handed over his poker money so I could get some that did.

Now I stood before the Golden Gate, called the gate of mercy, which is situated on the eastern wall of the TempleMount. It was sealed by the Turks hundreds of years ago because of Jewish tradition that the messiah would return through it after traveling from the east over the Mount of Olives. Now it opened toward the mount and the Garden of Gethsemane. Self stared into the distance as if he could see Jesus walking toward us through all of history.

He sniffed and said
, He came this way.

Christ?

Herod. And Griffin.

And Jebediah, I was certain. He wouldn't have been able to pass up this place of murder. King Solomon's Temple stands alongside the Muslim mosque called the Dome of Rock. Archangel Gabriel carried Muhammad to heaven from there. It's also the place where Abraham prepared to sacrifice his son. Jebediah would have pressed his forehead to the ground, dreaming of an exposed throat offered before heaven, the curved blade edging into the child's skin.

Power calls to power, blood to blood.

David captured the city from the Jebusites in 1000 B.C. It had been conquered and destroyed by everyone from Nebuchadnezzar to Hadrian. There was more bone in this dust than in any other place in the world, and men like Jebediah could put it to use.

Men like him and me.

Israeli flags flew in the Muslim quarter as Jewish Fundamentalist Nationalists gained a foothold by moving into houses in that part of town. The wailing wall comprises the western retaining wall of Solomon's Temple, the only remaining structure still standing from the original shrine. It is the holiest of sites, say the Jews, for it is there where the living God remains.

I could feel the energy throbbing in the stone, but whether from God or from the shrieking faith of misled men, I didn't know.

North of the Haram is the Via Dolorosa, the Way of Sorrows, where Jesus dragged the cross into Calvary. It ends at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, erected by Constantine, the first Christian Roman Emperor, and built over the site of Golgotha, the place of the skull, where Christ and thousands of other men were crucified. To the east of the church is Gethsemane, in which he was kissed by a betrayer and the soldiers came for him while his disciples slept. Jebediah would like the idea that the land itself was tainted with treachery. In his own fashion, he had quite the Christ-complex. So did I.

The bazaars were already busy, the city awake and bustling, selling meat and vegetables, leather, jewelry, pottery, and perfume. The sun was strong and beat down harshly against my fresh pink skin. There was no wind.

Self kept trying to peek under skirts, the heat working on him as well. His thoughts kept veering, circling through the ages, from hell's bedlam to his growing need to lash his tongue against the succulent wound of a torn thigh. My fingers trembled. Nausea swept in low, and within seconds grew so bad that I nearly doubled over.

I said,
Stop
, and he merely looked at me.

What's that?

Quit dreaming of blood.

Say again?

Of red bellies...

I'm not.

... and ripped knees, the taste of pale—

I'm not
, he said, sounding calm and perhaps even concerned.
You are
.

My fingers kept twitching as the smiles of women turned toward me and then turned away again. A tic in my neck kept going for another minute as sweat coursed through my regrown eyebrows. The nausea finally faded.