A Lower Deep - A Self Novel About 3300 wds (11 page)

"You don't know that it's not."

"I do know, but you won't believe me."

I could tell he was eager for the rope. "You've made a heinous error that's endangered us all," he wheezed. "You have no concept of what wheels you've allowed to turn."

Or stopped from turning. "Okay, so tell me."

His fists opened again and the candlelight flickered across his palms, looking like the running blood of elderly women. "Janice is my sister." His chest heaved as he fought to control himself and all that was inside himself. "Catherine, my niece."

He couldn't say any more. His words caught in his damaged throat, his fresh wounds oozing across his scapular. I realized that as abbot of Armon he felt equally responsible for my oath as he did for any other unanswered plea or ill-kept promise on Magee Wails island. Events had already spiraled out of his minimal control. He stroked his upper lip as if wanting the mustache he'd once worn when gathering dogs from the pound.

He whispered a word I knew well.

The rage didn't need to build, it erupted alive and throbbing while my second self snored daintily with his eyes open. I breathed through my teeth. "What the hell's gotten into you people?"

He repeated himself. "Sacrifice." Even with his gasping I knew he threw a little something extra in how he said it, as if making the word his own. Melting wax dripped loudly and candle flames wavered in the draft. He blinked his lashless eyes at me. "Jebediah may be strong enough to succeed."

"No," I said. "He isn't. He won't."

"Even you don't sound very certain."

"I am."

"Perhaps you shouldn't be." Swirls of blurred moonlight made their way across the room. "I've seen the faces of the two hundred seraphim who consented to the fall, the 'sons of God, who saw the daughters of man and that they were fair.' The angels Sanyasa, Armers, Ramuel—"

"And Saneveel, Batraal, yes, I know their names. Why is everyone giving me Bible lessons today?"

"They descended upon Armon, Mount of the Oath, and became men no more contemptible or noble than any of us. Imagine them giving up all of paradise for what was to be found on earth. Imagine how far they'd go to get what they wanted."

"And what did they want?" I asked. "Affirmation."

I slumped farther down in my seat and tried not to sigh. "I've got a feeling that you don't know the first goddamn thing that you're talking about."

"Sacrifice is purity. I do know that."

"Are you speaking of redemption or murder? You think you can find atonement by killing children?"

"You've a narrow view of sacrifice."

"No, I don't, John."

My lost love Danielle had been an offering of many kinds to many forces. To my ardor. To the sins of my father. To the obsession of Elijah, and the egomania of Jebediah. To the virtue of her own soul. When she should have left my side at the covine tree and run for her life she'd instead chosen to say behind. In the moment of her death her integrity had been hacked to bits in the dying light of church fires, and each of us had stolen as many pieces of her as we could.

Arcane energy leaked from my eyes and mouth and drifted around the room. Hexes formed under my tongue and I kept sucking them back down. Abbot John drew back and his shining head reflected flame.

I said, "I know about loss."

"My apologies."

"If the angels wanted humanity, then they had to take everything that went along with that decision. They should have learned as much from Cain as from any other man. One of the earliest lessons of the world is that sometimes God doesn't accept our sacrifices."

As a man who hanged himself every day, the thought terrified him. "We ... we are all only instruments and follow the natural course of His will."

He only heard what he wanted to hear. "Your recitations and metaphors have been puerile for twenty centuries, John, and this is a place of clarity. I made my oath succinctly, the least you can do is talk to me without such banal platitudes."

He nodded once, and his face went blank like a knight's visor suddenly lowering. "It's only partly metaphor, the rest is up to you. I had a vision. She is to die here."

"You don't have visions anymore."

"I've dreamed a great deal lately." He frowned, not wanting to share something. "Some about you. Some about Archangel Michael."

"I don't care about them."

If he had a voice he'd be yelling, but his resolve could only eke out of him in a diminutive whine. "Cathy is to die. She carries Elijah. Jebediah has sent him to herald the resurrection of the messiah before—"

"I know. It's my problem, you can't hold her responsible. I'll take care of it."

The coarse chuckle from his strained voice sounded like a handful of gravel being tossed across the room. "Your vanity is boundless."

"It's not conceit to know your enemy as well as I know mine." He wasn't afraid of the will of Jebediah. He'd taken in two descendants of Pierre DeLancre, and spent his life in a stone fortress reinforced by age and consecration. "What are you really afraid of?" I asked. "What stalks the mount?" He started to choke as if the rope were already tightening around his throat. "Tell me."

"What is here hides on its own accord," he whispered. "Among us now and forever. You already know that."

Self continued to slumber and I didn't know why. He never slept and even now just sort of drowsed with his eyes open. It made me nervous and my sweat dripped onto his forehead and slid into the corners of his mouth. He murmured in a language I'd never heard him speak before, and he kicked out occasionally as if running from me in his nightmares. Perhaps he was already preparing for the worst.

"You're starting to sound like my father, John," I said It was the most awful insult I could offer.

Abbot John, looking so pink and foolish, bowed his head before the weight of the irrevocable epochs of Armon. I knew he'd go to the noose early tonight, and without any prayers he'd hang himself until he came within sight of alluring Azreal's outstretched hand.

T
he boy Eddie lay vivisected, his chest cavity opened wide.

The flesh had been peeled back in layers and pinned to the bed with thick needles engraved with the holy names of God.

All his major organs had been carefully removed and set aside in ancient pottery, each vessel of terra-cotta inscribed with Sumerian, Persian, and Babylonian phrases. His rib cage had been sawed in half and set aside upon the Seal of Solomon flawlessly drawn across the glistening black tile.

Liver, heart, lungs, and stomach sack sat on display—healthy despite being extracted. The peristalsis of his intestinal tract kept pumping clean and potently. Eddie's eyes were open too.

The monks couldn't have done this alone. Not without service, provision, and
affirmation
. They hadn't become so advanced in the medical applications of necromancy to complete a ceremony of this magnitude—doing this to the boy, raising his soul before it had time to leave this plane, and keeping his life force in stasis.

Uriel kneeled in the Kinnions' room, chanting quietly before a small chantry platform of idolatry. He worked well with dolls. Porcelain figurines and wooden statuettes of saints immediately turned away and crossed themselves as I entered. Snow piled up outside on the sloping roofs, and burning paw prints of familiars, demons, and djinn formed circles around the colonnades. Shadows of furtive figures surged like children in between the columns.

Aaron stood near the door, keeping watch, his sword lashed across his back. Lowly Grillot Holt kept shuffling cards and practicing his three-card monte. Nip sat in the darkest corner of the room, facing the wall, sobbing against stone.

Self snapped fully awake with a start, kicking and yelping. He didn't recognize me for a moment and drew his claws back to rake off my lips. Then his nostrils quivered and he sniffed, smiled, and stretched until his vertebrae crackled.

What's the matter with you?
I asked.

Me? Nothing. What's wrong with you?

Aaron approached. His grimace described his honest confusion and helplessness. He hefted his sword and cradled it, hands fluttering because he knew there were seldom foes that could be cut. The monastery thrummed around us; the skeletons of two hundred angels who had become men were now only dust in the breeze. We breathed them in and could taste their insurrection.

"This was simple poltergeist activity," I told him. "Most of the eidolons were snipped away before we even arrived on the mount. You should've been able to cure the boy with a mild charm. What happened?"

"You should know more than us. You deal with the dead. He fell into a coma and soon died. We resuscitated him and thought it best to eviscerate."

"You did this, Aaron?"

"No, I haven't the ability. Uriel and some of the other friars and mendicant worked in tandem, as directed by Abbot John."

"Can they actually cure him this way?"

"Abbott John believes so."

"I don't."

He shook his head. "Neither do I." Finding nothing else to cut, he worked the blade across his thumb, finding resolve in his own angry flesh. The red droplets ran down his forearm but he couldn't bleed out his frustration that easily. "All that's keeping the boy alive is your oath." He gestured toward the beds. "We need your help. The mother won't let us near."

Janice sat beside Eddie holding his hand, her eyes much more dead than his. Her cheeks were drained of so much color that I could see each of the burst capillaries in her face. She stared at the row of jars and seemed to be focusing on his heart, beating and still alive. She looked as close to the line of lunacy than I'd ever seen someone stand and—perhaps—not yet cross.

Eddie said, "It's not so bad, Mom."

Now that I saw her again, in my right mind, I could make out more clearly the fiber of her sins and guilt. Her life stood as open and empty as her son's body. I knew whose knuckles fit the indentations of matted scar tissue, who'd fathered her children, and who'd murdered her dogs.

Cathy sat up in bed and stared at me over her swollen belly. She said, "I was getting worried, but you've recovered."

"Yes." The honeysuckle caught in my throat but I managed to ask, "How are you feeling?"

Self cackled savagely.

"They're ... they're taking good care of us." Her face twisted out of focus and became clouded, as if seen underwater. With a ripple it suddenly shifted into a guise containing too many emotions at once. She was terrified and in shock. Her smile seemed soldered to her face. She almost couldn't make her mouth muscles move enough to say, "Can you help my brother Eddie?"

"Yes."

"Will you?"

"Yes, I promise."

She reached over and stroked my face, and for a moment the contact felt electrical and made my cheeks flush. I could see the curse in her genetic alphabet, the corrupt arrangement of her doubly recessive genes. Children of incestuous relationships are occasionally polydactyl. The small nub of the extra finger they'd removed from her at birth scraped along my jawline. She glanced down at her belly and rubbed it with slow circular motions, the same way Elijah had begged Danielle to do to him.

Cathy said, "My baby hates you."

"I know."

Janice snapped her chin up, as if taking the first breath of her life. "Of course it does." She waved me over and said, "Come here, I need to talk to you." The murder in her voice was as distinct as the palpitation of her son's heart in the jar. "Hold my boy's hand."

I swallowed thickly. "He's going to be fine."

She carried her own ghosts. Other versions of herself, mostly without the scar tissue. The same but also different women, some of them smiling and waving to me, some of them not making love to her own brother John. All her unborn lives flung themselves flapping over her shoulders like flayed hides or old clothes no longer worn. The fever had made me stupid. The poltergeists that had been strung across Eddie, all of them women, were other forms of Janice, clinging to her son in order to protect him. I never should have cut them free.

Self sat on the headboard and crooned some hushed Sinatra tunes to the boy, swaying as if he were performing in front of thousands of teenage girls. Eddie beamed.

What's going on here?
I asked. He didn't want to stop singing, and I had to wait until he finished the chorus of "Strangers in the Night."

You tell me. You made the promise.

Help me to keep it.

You can't keep it. You never could.

He crept across to Catherine's bed and sniffed at her womb, then swept her hair from her eyes. I knew he could make one quick incision and give her a cesarean section if it became essential, or if he felt the need to steal the baby.

Elijah's animosity, for once, slumbered too. Self dropped off the sheets and put a hand on Nip's shoulder and whispered in his ear. Nip nodded once and continued to weep. Lowly Grillot Holt approached them for a game of five-card draw and Self screamed,
Stay out of my face, you little cheating bastard!