The Scarlet Gospels (30 page)

“Harold?”

It was Caz's voice that brought him back. Harry looked down from the machines and saw that all eyes were on him.

“Sorry?” he said.

“Did you hear anything I just said?”

He stared at them for a moment, searching for the words to say, and, finding that he had none, simply shook his head in negation.

“Stay with me, okay? We can't lose you,” Caz said in a gentle tone.

“Fuck off, Caz. I'm fine. It's just … not what I expected.”

“Okay. Just checking. I think Dale found the basement.”

As if on cue, behind Caz, Dale's head popped into view from below.

“They definitely went this way,” he said. “I can still smell 'em. Once more into the breach … again.”

“I couldn't have said it better myself,” said Harry. “Hang on, Norma. We're almost there.”

As he spoke, he marched toward the place where Dale's head had emerged. At first it appeared that Dale was floating, but as Harry crossed the vast foyer and drew closer he saw that Dale stood upon a ghostly translucent staircase. Even though he could see that Dale was already standing safely several steps down from him, Harry held out an unwary toe, testing the faint step beneath his foot, and, finding it completely solid, Harry began his descent.

 

2

“At last, my King lies before me,” the Hell Priest exhaled. He was speaking to Norma, who stood next to the demon soldiers in an antechamber at the bottom of Lucifer's vast tower. “Nothing will ever be the same again.” Turning to the soldiers, the Hell Priest said, “Your duties are to wait here until you are given contrary instructions.”

“Yes, my lord.” They spoke in unison, an audible tremor in their voices.

The Cenobite turned his back on them and faced the door. As with everything else in the extravagant cathedral, the door before him was decorated ornately. A craftsman had carved hundreds of lines of hieroglyphics into the wood, their significance beyond the Cenobite's comprehension.

He had educated himself in all languages—even in the semiotics of creatures that barely functioned in the immaterial world, much less that of the solid. And yet a brief scanning of the tiny characters was enough to confirm that the language before him was none he'd ever seen the like of which before. The lesson was plain; however knowledgeable he might have made himself in readiness for this meeting with God's Most Beloved Angel, there could never be complete readiness, or anything close to it. The digested contents of all the libraries in all of history would not be preparation enough for the encounter that lay ahead.

The Cenobite exhaled lightly and put onto his face an expression of humility. It felt utterly alien to his physiognomy. He was not a creature made for subservience. But he had heard countless stories over the years about how little it took to raise the Devil's ire. He was not about to make that mistake. Not now.

Face fixed, he gripped the handle and turned it. The door responded instantly, though not by opening. A flicker ran back and forth along the minute rows of characters. Here and there glyphs briefly blazed, as though they had caught fire. Some code was at work here, the Hell Priest guessed, letters sacrificed to the flame chosen for some purpose that was beyond his comprehension. The scanning of the lines continued all the way to the bottom of the door and then ceased abruptly.

The Hell Priest waited, concealing his impatience with difficulty. Seconds passed, which became minutes. The door did not move. The Hell Priest was very seldom lost for words or action, but in this moment he was at a loss. Phantom images of events that had brought him to this place and time rose up in his mind's eye, assembling themselves in their entire bespattered splendor: the magicians in their penthouses or their hovels, every one of them spitting out curses as the Cenobite's hooks raked their flesh and bent their bones against nature's intention. All but a few gave up their secrets before being granted a quick dispatch for their compliance.

He saw too the stained and yellowed pages of all the rarest books of magic: books that contained the rites of incantation, and banishment, and laws, and hierarchies, and conjurations, books that he had taken by heart, books that, when he was done with them, had been consigned to the furnace so that he could be the only possessor of the knowledge they had contained.

And all the time—slaughtering, and consuming, and moving on—he'd nurtured the vision of what it would be like when he had learned all there was to learn and was ready to meet the Fallen One, offering himself to the service of greatness. Here he was, ready as he could be, brimming with knowledge and ambition, soaked in murder from scalp to sole—and yet the door would not open.

His fury rose and he raised his hands without awareness of his doing so, unleashing a sound that was the death cries of all those who'd perished so that he might be here. The raised hands closed into fists, and the fists came down upon that intricate, incomprehensible door, carrying in them and behind them the implacable force of knowledge that aspired to deific heights. The sound they made when they struck the door was not that of flesh against wood; it was a sound of seismic proportions, opening fissures in the walls and floors and bringing slabs of marble down from the ceiling. The guards did not disobey their lord's instruction. They stood their ground, striking out at and destroying any falling marble that may have hurt them or their blind cargo.

“What's happening?” Norma wanted to know.

Before any soldier could reply, the Hell Priest's fists came down upon the door a second time, the violence of the blow escalating the damage that the first had done. There was a fissure in the ground a yard or wider crossing the chamber from beside the sealed door to the stairs, which it then ascended, veering from wall to wall. The Hell Priest didn't bother turning back to assess the damage he'd done; the door still mocked him. He paused for a moment to scrutinize the timbers, looking for the merest scratch or crack to indicate that his assault was having some effect. The damn door was unscathed.

He then put his shoulder to it, his entire anatomy swelling with the furies that were running riot in his body. His robes of office, made stiff and brittle by the blood spattered in countless rooms where he had tempted and tortured, split in places, and where the robes were cross-laced with his own flesh the furies now tore new wounds, spilling his own blood down his vestments.

He put his hands into the rivulets, but the blood wasn't coming fast enough to suit his enraged state, so he tore at his chest where his muscle had been permanently skinned and kept from ever healing over by his meticulous scouring of the surface. He went at those chronic wounds with disfiguring vehemence, ripping away the vestments to fully expose his chest where his veins pulsed openly, as though eagerly presenting themselves to pleasure. He then pulled away the shreds of leather and tissue that hung over his belt and selected two of his short-bladed knives—tools he favored for intimate work on particularly defiant individuals—and for the first time in his history, he turned them on himself, using the hooked blade to flick open the veins and the straight one to simply stab into the muscle and bone, then drag the blade up and out before stabbing himself again. The blood leaped from his body. While his veins still gushed, he raised his scarlet fists and slammed them against the door, just as he had done the first time. The blood initiated a new and extremely rapid scanning of the lines of the tiny hieroglyphics; every one of them, it seemed, was combustible.

The Hell Priest, however, wasn't studying the response his assault was having. Fueled by rage, he simply continued to beat the tattoo upon the door, the blood spurting from his chest catching his hands as he slammed them against the wood, over, and over, and over. And then, the sound came, as of a thousand ball bearings all being activated at once.

He stopped suddenly and saw for the first time that the fiery glyphs before him were in motion, flipping over and over, the fire blazing brighter with every turn. He looked down and saw that the pools of blood around his feet were also in motion. In a dozen places at least, the blood had formed separate streams that were disobeying gravity entirely and making their way toward the door. Starting in the bottom right-hand corner and following the indecipherable text from right to left, the glyphs emblazoned on the door briefly burned white-hot and were then consumed, one after the other, until a line was covered, right to left, again and again. The speed of the consumption quickened so that the third line was burned away twice as fast as the first and the sixth twice as fast as the third.

The door was opening.

He had but half a minute to wait before the chamber was revealed to him, and already he felt waves of cold air coming against his face and body. A bitter fragrance stung his sinuses. He turned over in his head the possibility of announcing his presence somehow, but nothing he could conceive of to say sounded anything but pathetic in such momentous circumstances, so he elected to remain mute. The Hell Priest did not doubt that the power waiting inside knew all that it needed to know about its visitor. Better to keep a respectful silence, the Cenobite decided, and speak only when spoken to.

The last line of the glyphs was consumed now, and the door was fully open. He waited, his breath in his throat, thinking perhaps the Devil would offer some words of invitation. None were forthcoming. After some time, the Cenobite took the initiative and stepped over the threshold and into the chamber.

The first thing he noticed was that the light sources in the chamber came from the floor itself; there were thousands of finger-high flames that sprang from invisible sconces in the marble, all burning with a sepulchral chill. Their light illuminated a chamber that bore no resemblance to either the cathedral's grandiloquent exterior or the spectacle of half-made things that had filled its interior.

This place was, the Priest saw, almost as wide as the cathedral above them. Its length, however, was a mystery. The space was occupied by pulleys and pistons, cylinders and crankshafts, all humming in complex configurations over the ceiling, then dropping down to feed into devices that had once clearly been in a delirium of motion. They ran in byzantine patterns, blocking his view and preventing him from calculating the true size of this chamber.

Though the parts had still the shining clarity of well-serviced machines, there was no sign of their having been in motion recently. The pistons were polished but not oiled, and the floor beneath the pipes and the mysterious devices they entered into was dry. There was not so much as a single stain where a drop of fluid had seeped from a joint in need of tightening or from a crack in one of the iron and glass receptacles the size of balled-up human beings that were part of the machinery in a number of places, like parts of an ancient astrolabe. Altogether, they resembled frozen satellites circling a dead sun.

What purpose any of this served was as inscrutable to the Hell Priest as the lines of hieroglyphics on the door. But it wasn't his to understand. He simply followed the parts of the engine as they became larger and therefore, he assumed, of more significance. This truth, however, presented just one problem: the farther he ventured from the door—and thus, he presumed, the closer he came to the creator of all this silent machinery—the more often its mechanisms grew so large they blocked his way completely, and five times he had to investigate until he found a fresh throughway, and by the time he'd done so he was often very far from his projected route. He realized he had come into a labyrinth and he was deep in its coils—not that he cared a whit about the way back; there was no life back there, no pleasure that he would again desire to taste. The sum of his life had led to this maze and the creature waiting at its heart.

Glancing up, he saw that the complex shapes had been cut out of the marble to gain access to the cunningly constructed pipes, so as to have the looseness of sleeping serpents. And there he saw capillaries of glass globes linked by short lengths of tubes no thicker than a finger that dropped in their many hundreds from the ceiling and wound around one another in their lazy descents. There was nothing left in their gleaming beauty that spoke of any recognizable function. He was in a world that had been built by a mind so very far beyond his own that all he could do was hope to glimpse the mysteries it held.

He stopped for a moment or two, just to savor the pleasure that suddenly suffused him. His lord was near. He felt it in his marrow and in the tips of his fingers. He looked up once more and studied the way the ducts led down from the supplementary engines. They were set in the heights of the cathedral and converged—multitudes of beaded pipes and pristine tubes, draining together (or so his limited vision suggested)—no more than ten yards from where he stood.

Had he ever mastered that most elusive piece of magic, which allowed its wielder to pass unharmed through solid matter, he would have walked directly to the part of the convergence where surely his host waited, watching remotely no doubt, to see if the trespasser could prove himself a worthy audience member by getting to the heart of the quieted engines. What would happen then, when he finally reached the throne of his lord? Would a whispered word from the creator set these immense engines into motion and he be rewarded for his tenacity and his ruthlessness by being shown the Devil's masterpiece at work?

He fixed his eyes on the converging arteries and, picking up his pace, made his way toward the spot above which they collected. A turn, another turn, and yet another: the labyrinth teased him with its wiles even now, so close until he turned the last corner and found that his journey was at its end.

 

3

Harry reached the last step and stood before the Hell Priest's masterwork: the shattered remains of the door to Lucifer's bunker. Lana followed shortly after, with Caz and Dale last to arrive. They were all privy to the same sight; something had broken the marbled floor and ceiling wide open just twenty yards from where they had set foot. Cracks spread out in all directions, some of them reaching out far enough to zigzag under the very feet of the weary travelers.