The Scarlet Gospels (37 page)

“Lana! Is that you?”

“What do you mean? I'm right here.”

She was at his side now, touching his face. Harry's eyes were open but could see nothing.

“Fuck. I … I think the fucker blinded me.”

“Thank God you're awake.” Harry heard pain in Lana's voice. “Harry. It's horrible—”

“Hey. Don't worry. Not my first time being blinded by a demon.”

“No,” Lana said, close to weeping. “Not that.”

Harry stopped dead. “Lana?”

“He…”

“No!” Harry said. “Lana! Tell me Norma's okay.” Lana had given in. Harry could hear her crying now. “Lana! For fuck's sake! Tell me what's happening!”

“She's still alive, but Christ, she's a mess. I tried to stop him once he knocked you unconscious, but … I couldn't move, Harry. He'd thrown some fucking words in my face and I was down. All I could do was watch while he…”

“What?”

“He fucking violated her, Harry. Right in front of me. And made me watch. I couldn't even close my eyes.”

“I'm gonna fucking kill him. I swear, I'll rip out his fucking heart. Where is she?”

“I'll take you.” Lana put her hand beneath Harry's elbow.

Harry talked as they walked, some to break the silence in the air, mostly to drown out the noise in his head.

“Something had to give sooner or later,” he said. “The number of times I should have been the one in the body bag, but somehow always unharmed. A few broken bones. Never anything serious. Norma used to say I had an angel looking out for me. She said she'd see it sometimes when I came to visit her. But I guess it had other business today.”

“Easy now,” said Lana.

“I got it,” Harry said, climbing the slope of the beach, all the while loose stones were sliding away beneath his boots.

“Slowly—”

“How much further?”

“Two, three strides, then it starts to level off again.”

“Can you see Norma?”

“Yeah. She's lying where I left her.”

“How is she?”

“She's still breathing. I knew she wouldn't let go till you came back. Thank God you woke. It's just a few more steps.”

“Norma! Norma! It's Harry!”

The old lady murmured something.

“Lie still,” Harry heard Lana instruct her, but Norma had fashioned a life of creating her own laws and she wasn't about to start taking orders now.

“What did he do, Harry? Tell me. No lies. Just tell me. What did he do?”

Harry heard the pain in her voice. It hit him like a blow to the gut. “I always wondered what the world looked like through your eyes,” he said to her. “Now I know.”

“Oh … child…”

Lana took her hand off Harry's elbow and stepped back to allow Harry to settle down into a cross-legged position. Norma immediately reached up and found his face as easily as she would have if she'd been sighted. She stroked his unshaven cheek.

“So you're not hurting?”

“No. But you are, aren't you? Lana told me the fucking—”

“Don't waste your breath, Harry. There's other stuff we need to talk about. Just you and me. Lana, would you give us a moment?”

“Absolutely,” Lana said. “I will be waiting nearby. Just yell if—”

“They'll hear me in Detroit if there's a problem,” Harry said.

At that, he heard the fading sounds of her feet crunching on the stones as she left Harry and Norma to share their last words together.

“She might be your soul mate, Harry.”

“Come on, Norma. We both know I don't get one of those.”

“People are complicated. Of course a lot of the time they're putting on faces, at least when they're alive. But once they're dead, you know, they stop all that nonsense. So you'll get to see the truth. And it's so much richer and stranger than you'd ever guess from having looked at their masks.”

She was no longer speaking in the raw, hesitant fashion she had been using when Harry first got to her. Now she talked in an urgent whisper.

“I've left all the instructions with a man named George Embessan.”

“What instructions?”

“For what happens once I'm gone. Which will be very soon.”

“Norma, you're not going—”

“Yes, I am, Harry, and you do neither of us any favors by wasting time with platitudes. My body's meat, pure and simple. All Pinhead did was hasten me toward my exit, for which I am not ungrateful, to be honest. I need to die awhile. Get my appetite for life back before I choose new parents, and set back into the game with all that I've learned hidden away at the back of my soul. It's going to be quite a life next time 'round, knowing all that I know.”

“I wish I could be with you.”

“You will be. You will.”

“No doubt?”

“Would I lie to you?” she said with genuine indignation. “We'll be together. Different faces, same souls. So don't grieve. Just take up where I fell off.”

“You mean … helping the dead find their way?”

“Damn right. What else are you gonna do with your time?”

Harry allowed a short, disbelieving laugh to escape his throat. “You knew it'd be me.”

“No. I didn't, actually. That's a complete revelation.”

“I can't help the dead, Norma. I know nothing about them.”

“You knew enough to get down into Hell and save my sorry soul.”

“And that ended great for all of us.”

“You think this is a fuckup?”

“Of course it is,” Harry said. “You're dying.”

“Harry, Harry,” she soothed him, stroking his face. “Listen to me. Things are never the way they seem. You did what you thought you should because you're a good man. You came down into Hell to find me
. Into Hell
, Harry. There aren't many people who'd drive to Jersey for their own mothers, never mind venturing into the abyss for some old, blind, half-crazy woman.”

“You're not—”

“
Listen to me
. It wasn't about me in the end. It was never about me. I was just the bait.”

“I don't understand.”

“I don't either, if it's any comfort. But think about it. Think of how things have changed down here, in this place itself, obviously, and within you, I'd be willing to wager. All because you chose to come looking for me.”

“So somebody set all this up. Is that what you're saying?”

“Not at all. That's magical thinking.”

“But you said you were bait. And that means there had to be a fisherman, doesn't it?”

Norma took a long moment to think this through before she replied.

“We're all in it together, Harry. We're all pieces of the fisherman. I know that sounds like a bullshit answer, but you'll see, when you start to work with the dead. Everyone's complicit: the most innocent little kiddies; babies who live a day, an hour—they still have a hand in things, even their own deaths. I know that's very hard for you to get your head around right now, but take it from someone that's spent a lot of time with death.”

She paused, and Harry heard her make a half-suppressed grunt of pain as she shifted her bruised body.

“I'm still going to kill him,” he said.

“I'm fine, Harry,” she said, “You don't need to worry about me. Or him. He's just one of the Lost and Afraid. Everyone is so fucked-up.” She laughed lightly. “It isn't really funny,” she went on, the laughter subsiding. “The World-Soul is sick, Harry,
crazy
-sick. And if we don't each do our part and try to get to the root of its pain and burn it out, then everything is for nothing.”

“So what do I do?”

“I can't answer all your questions, Harry,” Norma said, her reply tinged with an unsettling remoteness. “They're not all going to get answered. You need … you need to accept that.”

“How about we split the difference? I'll acknowledge it, but I won't accept it.”

Norma reached out and gripped Harry's arm, seizing it with accuracy and a strength that astonished him.

“I'm … hap … I'm happy … just us.…”

“You really are happy?” Harry said. He tried to keep the doubt from his voice but knowingly failed.

“Of … course…”Norma replied. With each syllable her voice grew weaker.

“I'm gonna miss you so goddamn much, Norma.”

“I … love…” She didn't have the strength to finish. She trailed off as the breath that had carried her words ceased with a barely audible click in her throat. He didn't need to speak her name and have his call go unanswered to know that she'd taken her leave.

He reached out tentatively in hope of finding her face so as to close her eyes. To his surprise his fingers found her cheek with the same uncanny accuracy he'd seen her demonstrate; the image of what he was doing appeared in his mind's eye, fixed like a painting:
Attempting to Close the Eyes of a Blind Woman After Death
.

It was easier than he'd wanted it to be. Her eyelids obeyed the slightest touch of his fingertips and closed forever.

 

BOOK FOUR

Fallout

Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls.

—E. H. Chapin

 

1

Lucifer, once the Most Beloved Angel in that incandescent dimension that mortal men called Heaven, exiled from its glories and its powers by his Creator, thrown into a place of rock and darkness where, in defiance of his Creator's torments, he'd made a second Heaven or at least attempted to, which mortal men had come to call Hell, stood amid the wreckage of his cathedral and planned for the second time his farewell to life. He wouldn't make the same mistakes this time as he had the first. There'd be no cathedral to serve as a place of pilgrimage for those who wished to meditate on the injustice and tragedy of his story. Nor would the underworld be populated with the bastard children of the damned and their tormentors, the latter rebels like himself, thrown down from Heaven for conspiring with him to rule from its Throne.

“Enough,” he murmured to himself. And then, raising his voice to a bellow that could be heard at the farthest reaches of Hell:
“Enough!”

The shout caused the stones on the beach to leap up as if in terror, then drop and rattle down the incline toward the lake, whose surface was also stirred into agitated motion. Caz and Dale had failed to return, and rather than wait at the side of their departed den mother, Harry and Lana set off in search of their friends. They had just reached the Azeel's encampment when Lucifer unleashed his shout and the noise brought the old dreadlocked demon woman out of one of the shacks. She had a knife in her hand, and her locks were in disarray as though she'd been interrupted in the middle of something important and physically demanding.

Upon seeing Harry and Lana at the edge of her property, she waved the knife in the air with wild threat.

“What do you here?” she demanded.

“Have you seen our friends?” Lana asked.

“No. Please now going,” the demon woman hissed.

“But your tone is so convincing,” Harry said.

“Really,” Lana said to the demon woman, “I'm sure you wouldn't mind if I look around, do you?” And, so saying, she headed straight for the demon's tent.

The demon woman's response was to spit full force in her face, the saliva stinging Lana's skin and burning it so viciously that she stumbled and clutched her face in agony.

“Fucking bitch!” Lana said.

“Lana! What's happening?” Harry asked.

The demon woman seized her advantage without hesitation. Clutching her knife, she first sliced up across Lana's chest and then came back down across her belly, spilling blood with both attacks. Before she could wound Lana a third time she retreated clumsily into the dying fire near the tent's entrance, turning up the red-hot embers hidden beneath the ashes. She smelled the stink of boots cooking and felt the heat on her soles, but she wasn't going to stumble back out into the path of the old demon woman's knife, so instead Lana kicked the embers in her direction. The demon loosed a stream of curses as they sprayed in all directions and met with her flesh.

“Don't worry, Harry,” Lana said. “I got this.”

The demon, as if in response, took two unhindered steps before she came at Lana again, but this time Lana was ready for her and dropped down to avoid the swing of the old woman's blade. Then Lana threw herself at the demon and grabbed her by neck and knife arm, shaking the latter till the demon released her knife. With the demon woman unarmed, Lana released her scaly arm and put both of her hands to the old woman's neck.

“Where are our friends, you ugly old cow?”

The demon woman hissed by way of reply. The wounds she'd given Lana hurt, and the pain fueled her rage. “Fine. I'm just going to kill you,” she said, half meaning it, “and throw you in the fire, then find them myself.”

“Crazy woman man! Slaughterer of demonation!”

“I'm happy you've been paying attention, cunt,” Lana said, tightening her hold on the woman's throat.

The old demon woman's strong bony fingers pulled at Lana's hands, desperately trying to loosen Lana's grip. But the half of Lana that truly intended to strangle the life from the demon had her pressing her thumbs side by side against the demon woman's windpipe. The old woman started to make a nasty rattling gasp, and her hands lost their strength and slid away from Lana's, whose sanity prevailed as she finally let go of the demon completely. The old woman dropped to the ground, using the first available breath to begin cursing Lana again.

Lana picked up the old woman's knife and tucked it through her belt.

“Sticks and stones, bitch,” she said. “Come on, Harry.”

“Wait.” Harry held Lana at bay, turned in the direction from which he'd last heard the demon woman's hissed curses, and addressed her. “You said something about wyrms leading the way out. Tell me what that means. Are they wormholes we can travel through? Answer me!”