The Scarlet Gospels (41 page)

“Well, you didn't.”

“And I should be grateful, right?”

“Right.”

“Well, I'm not.”

“I love you, Harold, but I don't have the energy to cheer you up. Why don't we put the pity party on hold while you tell me what you want to do with all this shit?”

“This shit is my life, Caz. Try to show a little compassion.”

“You're starting to sound like a bigger queen than me. Brooding only looks good in the movies. Trust me, in real life, it's fucking annoying. Let's start going through the files to figure out what you want to keep? You need to get out of the office by the end of next week.”

“I should have kept it.”

“And done what with it? Open a driving school?”

“All right, all right: I get it.”

Harry reached out and grabbed for the bottle of Scotch on his desk.

“Did you move my Scotch?”

“Sure did.”

“Why?”

“You were slurring at your clients.”

Harry sat for a moment, digesting Caz's words, then changed the subject.

“How's married life?”

“Kinky,” Caz said. “Dale is the best thing that ever happened to me. You should call Lana. You guys have a lot in common. Mostly, you're both stubborn assholes.”

“Yep,” said Harry, wishing he had something to swig.

 

6

The sky-stone had broken into three massive parts as far as the Hell Priest could discern. It had shed pebbles no larger than a hand and slabs big enough to be minor moons.

All of Hell had been virtually flattened by the falling sky, which left the Cenobite guessing his location as he traveled. He sensed now that he had finally discovered the remains of the city, and his instinct was confirmed when he came upon a split in the rock that was barely a crack at one end and yawned to the distance of perhaps a quarter mile at the other. He walked toward the narrow end of the fissure while peering down into its depths. There wasn't enough light, even for one whose eyes were as sensitive as his, to make out anything below, at least not until several planes of yellow flame burst from the crevice and illuminated the rubble.

He saw here the houses of the richest demons: the Crawley Crescent, with its perfect sweep of white marble houses that had once faced out toward an ancient stand of Thriasacat trees to which legend attached the notion that should they ever ail, then the city would also ail. And should they die, so then would the city. Here now was the proof, lying crushed at the bottom of the fissure and lit by the same fire that had first illuminated the depths. He could see several Thriasacat branches, stripped of foliage and split, the sweet swell of their sap hanging in the air.

The Hell Priest was not for the most part superstitious, but there were a few cases that crossed the boundaries of his distrust and had become a profound part of his understanding of the world. The legend of the Thriasacat trees had here been proved true. Strange to say—given that he'd witnessed the stone falling and known that nothing beneath it could have survived—he had held on to the remote idea that the stand of Thriasacat trees would have escaped by some miracle. But no. The sky had killed everything.

And he had played a part in all of this. Were it not for his ambitions there would have been no need to raise Lucifer against him. And if Lucifer had stayed asleep in death, there would still be a sky in the sky. So this was of his making: this silence, this death. It was what he thought he had wanted all along.

 

7

Caz finished packing Harry's things, then left to tend to Dale. Waiting for his friend to return, Harry sat, the window open a crack, and listened to the flux of the traffic as the lights changed at the intersection. The afternoon was slipping away; the passage of blue sky visible between the buildings would be steadily darkening. The traffic would be even heavier now as the flow was swollen by people heading home or out for dinner, their heads still buzzing with what the day had brought. Sure, work could be a pain in the ass, but it was purpose, and what was a life, any life,
his life
, without purpose?

“Nothing…” he muttered to himself, and, uncorking the Scotch Caz finally had relinquished upon leaving, put the bottle to his lips. As he did so, a glimmer of light appeared at the corner of his eye. He lowered the bottle, his heart suddenly beating quick time. He'd
seen
something. His sight
wasn't
extinguished after all!

Very slowly, so as not to upset the healing going on in his head, he turned toward whatever was coming back into view. That's when he saw her.

“Norma?”

“Hi, Harry.”

She looked healthy, more like the Norma Paine whom Harry had first met so many years ago. Her body wasn't insubstantial, like some cheap Hollywood phantom. She was perfectly solid. But it was she and only she who had come into view, a body framed by darkness.

“I can see you. Christ, I can
see
you. I always tried imagining what ghosts looked like to you, but I wasn't even close. Oh, Norma, I can't believe you're here.”

“It's good to see you too, Harry. I've missed you.”

“Can we … I mean … can I hug you?”

“I'm afraid not. But we can sit here and talk as long as you want. I don't have a curfew. I can come and go as I please.”

“Come and go from where?”

“That's between me and … the Architect of my New Accommodations. Just know that I'm very comfortable where I am now. And believe me, it was worth waiting for. But I had to come back and see you, Harry. I miss you so much. And I have a few tips I want to pass on. Dos and don'ts, if you will, when dealing with the recently deceased. I thought I'd be dying of natural causes at a hundred and one. That's how old my momma was when she died. And my grandmother too. So I was pretty damn certain I'd do the same, by which time I would have taught you everything I knew about, you know, getting the dead to move on. And you'd just take over from there.”

“Wait—”

“You can't contain your excitement, right? You get to save people who were kicked into the Hereafter a little too suddenly. They're wandering around half-crazy, Harry, trying to figure out what in the name of sweet Jesus they're supposed to do now. And, good news, you're their only hope!”

“Slow down. I don't—”

“You certainly have your choice of offices,” she said. “A lot of them have a panoramic view of the city.”

“Yeah, where the hell did all the money come from?”

“I got a lot of money given to me over the years, Harry. All from relatives of dead folks I helped. They heard what I'd done for their family members and wanted to say thank you. I gave it all to you.”

“I know. And it was entirely too generous, Norma—”

“Generosity had nothing to do with it. I gave you that money so you could afford to do what you need to do. Don't make me take it back. I can do that, you know.”

“You might have to. I don't think I can do what you're asking of me.”

“You feeling sorry for yourself again because of a little darkness in your life? I heard you with Caz. He was right. All that brooding? Ain't healthy. Don't make me lecture you from beyond the grave. I've done enough of it already.”

Harry smiled. “God, I missed that. But it has nothing to do with being blind, Norma. You made it look easy. But you're so much stronger than me. How does a lost soul help lost souls?”

Norma smiled and the darkness in the room diminished.

“Who better?” she said. “And while you're thinking about it, open up your blinds and look down.”

“When I open that window, I'm going to see what you saw every day of your sightless life, aren't I?”

“Maybe,” she said, smiling.

Harry turned his chair around and stood up, reaching with uncertain fingers for the cords of the antiquated venetian blinds, which were knotted and truculent and near impossible to open even when he'd had eyes to help him separate them. Today was no exception. Harry gave up tugging on the cords and reached down to lift the blinds with his hand. When he did so, he looked down at the street as Norma had requested, and he knew that nothing would ever be the same again. It felt like the bottom dropped out beneath his feet and he'd fallen ten stories in the blink of an eye.

“They're everywhere,” he said.

 

EPILOGUE

Prima Facie

Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore.

—Andr
é
Gide,
The Counterfeiters

 

1

Lucifer came up into the world with an unerring sense of how the lines of power were laid and which was best to follow if he wanted to get into the heart of the human story the same way he had so often in the early days. The lines converged in the city of Welcome, Arizona, where he'd lingered for two days to sit in on the trial of a man who'd murdered several children in the region and partaken of their flesh.

There was nothing new about the spectacle: the parents of the dead children sat in the court, pouring out wordless venom toward the murderer; the madman sought refuge in his madness; and outside the courthouse demonstrators threw makeshift nooses over the branches of the sycamores that grew amid the square. When Lucifer was certain that there was nothing for him here, he skipped unnoticed through the crowd, pausing to look up at the churning trees, their boughs creaking in the gusting wind that snatched away fall's early deaths.

Then he was on his way again, following the flow of energies that seeped up out of the ground. He knew already what city awaited him at the end of his journey. He'd seen its name many times in the newspapers he plucked out of trash cans or out from under the arm of some human being. New York, it was called, and all that he'd read about it made it seem the greatest city in the known world, somewhere he could linger awhile and taste the times. For long distances he walked, because the line did not lie beside a highway. But when it did he never waited long for a ride. A woman driving alone picked him up when he was still three hundred miles from his destination. She said her name was Alice Morrow. They talked a little, of nothing significant, then lapsed into silence. Ten minutes passed. Then Alice said, “I had a night-light when I was little, which I kept beside my bed to make sure the bogeyman didn't get me. Your eyes have the same light in them. I swear.”

They stopped at a motel for one night, Alice paying for his room and for food. He ate pizza. Thereafter, it would be all he ever ate. In the night, he lay naked on his bed and waited for her. She did not come immediately, but after two hours she knocked at his door and said something about wanting to see his eyes in the dark. Alice and he had sexual congress six times before dawn, and by the fifth she was in love with him. In the middle of the next day she asked him if he had a place to stay in New York and when he told her no she seemed happy, as if this confirmed the rightness of what she felt.

They arrived in New York at one in the morning, the city an astonishment to Lucifer. Alice checked them into a hotel, promising that tomorrow she would take him out and buy him some good clothes. The long drive had exhausted her, but sleep would not come. She went to his room, where he was waiting, twin night-lights flickering in his head.

“Who are you?” she asked him.

“Nobody yet,” he whispered.

 

2

The Cenobite was climbing the steps to the fortresses, which were littered with pieces of stone but still climbable, when a shock wave passed through the air and ground. He turned to see bright bursts of gold and scarlet flame spouting from the fissures in the stone that had demolished the city, the force of the eruptions sufficient to make the fissures gape, which unleashed still-greater torrents of fire. He watched for a little time and returned to his climb, his long, thin shadow, thrown by fires, preceding him to the top step. He was two steps shy of reaching the top himself when a second shock wave, much more violent than the first, erupted. The tremors didn't die away this time. They steadily became more powerful. Very cautiously the Cenobite took a backward step while keeping his eyes on the flame. The vista of stone, smoke, and tremors was changing in nature, the shocks giving way to tidal motions that had the scale of tsunami surf.

Another shock wave threw him off his feet, and he fell. The cracked slab of the threshold dropped away beneath him into the throw of the wave, making his fall all the longer. When he landed, the bones of his face cracked in a dozen places, and the sudden rush of pain, which had been such a reliable source of pleasure in years long lost, was now only agony. His system rebelled. His body was marked by its own tsunamis, driving deep into the cankerous pit of its stomach and deeper still, into its gut, where rot turned to shards of stone. It was as if his body were attempting to turn itself inside out. He loosed a sound that was part belch, part sob, and then vomited, a rush of blood that was nearly black and as thick as phlegm. Through the noise of its splattering he heard a far deeper sound, and some fraction of him that was able, even in the midst of this violent decay, to assess circumstances with detached thought.

That's the end beginning.

The violence of his vomiting left him powerless to control his body, his battered face so distrusted by his scream that his lips tore like wet paper. There was nothing left in him now except his last poor hope of willing his eyes to open, so he might look and see whatever final vision Hell had for him.

He drew every last mote of will from the furrows of his collapsing body and gathered them, turning them to a single purpose.

“I will open my eyes,” he ordered himself.

Reluctantly, his body obeyed him. He unstuck his lids, sealed with the gray glue of his dissolving flesh, and focused his eyes on whatever was in front of them. He had the whole panorama in view: the flames emptying to a higher point than ever, as the motion in the ground put new stresses on the stone.