For A Few Souls More (Heaven's Gate Book 3) (2 page)

“No problem,” said Atherton, though he would love to see if the creature’s mouth could accommodate something larger than a shot of bourbon, a fist perhaps, or a broken bottle.

“What can I get you?” asked the barman, who at least appeared human.

Atherton had given up finding anything that suited his palate in this godforsaken land. “Whisky,” he said, because it couldn’t make his stomach more uncomfortable than the sights that surrounded him.

He gazed into the warped mirror behind the bar as his drink was poured, watching what appeared to be a chimp in a suit as it clambered up the stairs in pursuit of a young woman. She giggled, an enticement, though her suitor needed none; he screeched and raised his hairy fists in the air, a daunting bulge in his trousers proving his appetite was already perfectly sharpened.

“Join me?” asked a woman sat at a table to his right. How her voice had carried over the raucous cheering and cackling was beyond him but, as trickery went, it was small beer considering what else he had experienced.

She was dressed in a frock of satin and lace, the garment blooming in all the places that a proper lady’s would not. A whore, he decided. He had no interest in paying for what fought to expose itself from beneath her skirts but she might be useful in providing information. He sat down.

“New in town?” she asked and he noticed her mouth wasn’t moving.

“Yes,” he replied. “How do you do that?”

“What?” she asked and then touched her lips with her fingers.“Oh, the voice,” she continued and this time her lips moved and her tone was different, as if another person was speaking entirely. “I’m a woman of multitudes. Pay me and you can count them.”

“Maybe,” he said, not wanting to put her off, “but first, tell me a bit about the town, would you?”

“What do you want to know?”

“Well, you hear stories on the trail, I guess I just want to know how true they are.”

“It’s hard to exaggerate about this place, honey, take a look around you. I imagine that, whatever you’ve heard, the truth is richer and harder to believe.” She leaned forward and the next time she spoke it was the other voice, the first voice he had first heard. “Why don’t you explore?”

“The town or you?” he asked.

She shifted her chair and hoisted her skirts to reveal the source of her second voice. “There’s nothing out there to compare with what you can find in here,” her sex said, its lips parting slightly as it spoke.

The look of disgust on his face didn’t anger her as it had the man at the bar, instead she laughed. “Oh, you
are
new around here aren’t you? Or are you one of those boys from the mountains? Here to fire up your righteous anger?”

“He just doesn’t know what he’s missing,” whispered the voice between her thighs, “one kiss from me and he’ll be smiling again.”

Atherton drew his gun beneath the table, leaned forward and stoppered her secondary voice with its barrel.

“I think I’d rather only hear from one of you,” he said, looking into the woman’s eyes. “Now tell me about the people in the mountains.”

“They’re like you,” she sneered, “typical men, cold and afraid of what they don’t understand. They look down on us and pray for deliverance, sweet little words to a God who would have ignored them anyway, even if He weren’t dead.”

“You can’t kill God,” Atherton replied. Her sex mumbled its disagreement around an inch of metal but he cocked the trigger and it ceased its complaints. “Can you say the same about yourself?”

“Oh, it would take more than you’ve got to ruin me,” she said, her words heavy with double meaning, “and the minute you pull that trigger you’ll have half of this bar wanting to make games of your offal. So, by all means, shoot your load, boy, I’ll make children of your bullets and invite them to dance on your grave.”

He met her gaze for a few moments more then withdrew his pistol, stood up and marched out of the bar, ignoring the dual peals of laughter that followed him.

2.

A
THERTON WAS ANGRY
to be leaving the town so shortly after he’d entered it. He had let his anger get in the way of his common sense and could only hope he’d find something of worth in the whore’s words.

He urged his horse towards the mountains that surrounded the town, scanning the horizon for signs of life.

After half an hour’s ride he was forced to accept that he would have to continue on foot. The landscape was too steep for his horse, the route through the rocks too narrow.

Angry and aware that he might never see the animal again, he did his best to find it some shade and cinched the reins between a pair of rocks.

He had been climbing for twenty minutes or so, the sun beating down on him, when he realised he was no longer alone.

He turned to look down at Wormwood, feigning casual interest, a man out for a hike, all the while keeping his hand close to his holster. As he turned he glimpsed a pair of shadows dart out of sight and he tracked their owners to an outcrop just above him and to the left.

“Why don’t you come out?” he asked, keeping his hand close to his gun and looking around for the best natural cover should they decided to reply with gunfire. “I’m no enemy of yours. Quite the opposite.”

“You came from Wormwood?” the voice asked. Atherton was surprised to note the speaker’s accent, it was as British as his own.

“I’ve just been there,” he admitted. “I was sent to investigate it.”

“Sent by whom?”

“Come out and I’ll tell you.”

“Tell me one other thing first: what’s the purpose of your investigation? What do your superiors want to do with the town?”

Atherton smiled. “They have yet to make their intentions wholly clear but I imagine they’ll want me to destroy it. As both a political and spiritual abomination.”

There was a scuffle from behind the rocks and a man stood up. He was wearing a monk’s habit. “Then I can see we are, indeed, allies. I’m Father Martin and I welcome you to our little commune.”

3.

A
THERTON FOLLOWED THE
monk and his companion, a frail-looking man who remained silent, throwing the occasional concerned look in Atherton’s direction.

“You’re from England?” Father Martin asked as they climbed up through the rocks.

“Yes, though I’ve been here a few months.”

“A spy?”

“An observer.”

“Semantics, something I am well versed in as a religious man.”

“What brought you here?” Atherton asked.

“The town. I travelled over with a larger party. We had all heard the myths about Wormwood and wanted to be here for when it appeared.” Father Martin glanced over his shoulder where the town was still visible. “At the time I had thought I was on a holy mission. Perhaps I was, though it’s hard to cling to that.”

“And the rest of your party?”

Father Martin sighed. “Some are still with me, the majority of my brothers. The rest are lost to me. I’m afraid we suffered from a divergence in philosophy.”

“Not unusual for someone in your line of work I’d have thought.”

“My ‘line of work’ has irrevocably changed. We’ve moved from the dust of the library to the open plain. No more discussion of beliefs and theoretical ethics, now the work of Hell is as physical as these rocks, an inarguable thing for all to gaze on.”

“Perhaps that’s a good thing for faith?”

“The very point of faith is that it’s a matter of belief. Fighting against that,” Father Martin gestured towards the town, “is not about faith, it’s about fear.”

“Did you see it appear?”

Father Martin nodded. “And I saw it collide.”

“Collide?”

The monk nodded. “That’s our word for it. The moment when it became a fixed part of our world. We can discuss that later. We’re here.”

The track through the mountain dropped down, leading into a hollow space where Father Martin’s people had made their camp. Being a man of practical considerations, the first thing Atherton analysed was the camp’s security. It was well hidden, surrounded on all sides by rocks, and would remain unseen until you were right upon it. That said, once discovered, the advantage would rest with the attacker, able to maintain the high ground and shoot into the crater. The camp’s residents would be captive targets. Fish in a barrel. All of this rushed through Atherton’s head before he took in the human details.

It reminded him, unsurprisingly, of a travelling church congregation. The kind of evangelical folk who toured the country en masse, pitching their tent and preaching to the locals before folding the words of Jesus away into their packs and trunks and carting them off to the next town. The people looked drawn and severe, a flock of hungry birds wrapped up in plain feathers. Here and there, fires burned, heating thin stews and watery soups. It was a place of abstinence. A camp of grey people. A place of puritanism and disapproval. Atherton liked it.

“Are you hungry?” Father Martin asked.

Atherton had travelled too far and too hard to refuse a meal when it was offered so Father Martin led him through the camp to a small tent on the far side.

Their companion, sparing just enough time to offer Atherton one last cautious glance, peeled away to rejoin his family.

The monk’s tent was just large enough for two, and they sat in its mouth and ate a meagre portion of bread and cured meat.

Once done, Atherton filled his small pipe and listened to the monk’s tale.

4.

F
ATHER
M
ARTIN TOLD
Atherton of his trip from England. He detailed the rest of his party: his fellow members in the Order of Ruth; Lord Forset and his daughter Elisabeth; the engineer Billy Herbert and, finally, Roderick Quartershaft, the man of fiction who, as well as Wormwood, found his real self, Patrick Irish, at the end of his journey.

He told him of the things they had seen on the road to find their impossible town. Of swarms of bats and tribesmen of iron and coke.

He told him how Wormwood had finally appeared before them, the solidifying of a mirage, a dream writ large in timber and slate.

He told him about Alonzo, the self-appointed voice of God who had pronounced to those gathered on the plain.

He detailed the long hours of waiting, of the near tragedy as Lord Forset’s Land Carriage was stolen and aimed at Wormwood like a steam-powered bullet.

Finally, and by now the sun was beginning to set behind the mountains that surrounded them, he told him of the collision.

“Light flooded the entire valley. There was the sound of a gunshot, such a simple, earthly noise, and then the air itself felt as if it was being sucked out of the world. A wind roared and we stumbled, blind and deaf as the reality we had always known shifted around us.”

This was not news to Atherton. It had been felt the world over. A blank moment of thunder and awe, experienced by all.

At the time, Atherton had been in New York, regretting his transfer from Africa, assisting with the Empire’s expansion. Africa had been a land of monsters too, Atherton felt. Heat and rebellion. Bullets and blood. He had done good work there. When the light had come, washing over him, he had half hoped it was the hand of God, coming to claim him from his new station, a city of boredom, and relocate him to somewhere worthwhile. Perhaps, in a way, that was exactly what it had been.

“Then, all was normal again,” the monk continued. “The light vanished, the wind faded and the town lay before us. Only now its streets were open, the way no longer obstructed by the unseen barrier.”

“What caused it?”

“They say...” and here Father Martin’s nerves truly began to show. “It was the death of God. Felled by a bullet.”

“You can’t kill God,” Atherton said for the second time that day. This time he found some agreement.

“I would hope not. Though they say He wanted to die. They say He was wearing the body of a mortal. A child. They say He wanted to know what it felt like to be human. To be finite.”

“Who are ‘they’ that do all this talking?”

Father Martin shrugged. “Stories pass around here as freely as the air. I don’t know how much credence I can give any of them. All I can say is that this has become the accepted version of the events that took place on the other side of Wormwood.”

“In Heaven?” Atherton didn’t bother to keep the cynicism from his voice.

“I know, it’s a hard concept to grasp, isn’t it? Again the ethereal, the spiritual, given flesh. Heaven is not a place we would ever have granted geography. Even those of us who believed unequivocally in its presence would think of it as abstract, a place of the mind, not somewhere solid. Hell too. These were domains of the soul, that insubstantial, intangible essence. What use did the soul have of walkways? Bricks and mortar?”

He was looking towards Wormwood, Atherton knew, even though it was not visible here in the crater.

“I would always have suspected,” the monk continued, “that, however we visualised the afterlife, God or the Devil, we would be doing so in a reductive fashion. The reality would be even more abstract than our human minds could picture. Actually, the opposite is the case. It’s as solid as we are. Perhaps, given that, it’s not so absurd to believe God may be dead after all. Maybe he was as ruined, as tethered by the flesh as we all are.”