Pandaemonium (11 page)

Merrick placed his materials on top of an aluminium trolley while Kharkov and Tanner set up the recording equipment. Just the two cameras this time: one standard digital video and one infrared, both stationed a few feet in front of the trolley and trained carefully on the subject.

Merrick then approached the table slowly and connected the first of his sensors. The subject scrutinised him intently, trying to twist its neck to keep an eye trained on him wherever he stepped. Up close, the creature looked rather scrawny, its skin taut against wiry sinews in a manner that reminded him uncomfortably of concentration-camp inmates.

Merrick glanced towards his escort, catching Father Tanner’s attention.

‘You’re giving them water to drink?’

Tanner nodded solemnly.

‘And that’s causing no burning effects, right?’

Another nod.

‘Okay. So what are you giving them to eat?’

Tanner immediately broke his gaze from Merrick and directed it towards Tullian. Merrick didn’t catch what Tanner saw in response from the Cardinal, but deduced that it wasn’t permission to speak. Instead he clasped his hands and bowed his head, almost as though he had been switched off.

After a silence long enough for Merrick to accept that he would receive no answer, Tullian spoke, calmly but gravely, in that odd accent of his, one indicative of many years spent speaking in foreign tongues and talking of higher things.

‘They feed on souls, Dr Merrick. Thus there is no nourishment we could
or would wish to
offer them.’

‘So they’re not fed?’ he responded, trying to ensure that his tone conveyed only incredulity and enquiry rather than outrage or accusation. ‘It’s been months for some of them.’

Tullian closed his eyes solemnly for a moment, and when he opened them, he wore the burdened expression of one charged with conveying news of bereavement.

‘They also feed on each other,’ he said.

‘I see.’

‘No, you don’t, and you ought to give thanks for that. Dr Merrick, I have little doubt you have already seen sights enough in this place to haunt your dreams forever. I appreciate that the jurisdictional inequities necessary to my involvement here must have chafed harshly with your fraternity, but trust me, your end of the deal is not without its privileges, and not having witnessed that particular sight ought to be prized among them.’

Merrick glanced back at the creature, suddenly paying closer attention to the rows of pointed teeth bared across its snarling mouth.

‘I’ll take your word for it,’ he said.

Merrick approached the creature bearing the first test phial, which contained plain water. The liquid rippled inside the small vessel, agitated by the tremors of his hand. He was unsteady with trepidation, shivering in the chamber’s humid, blasting heat, more apprehensive on this occasion than the first time he encountered one of these things. Was this because he knew what he was doing was wrong? He couldn’t afford to think about that. He had to proceed. There would be no second chances at this, and he
had
to know.

The first splash upon the demon’s skin was of a liquid not listed in the protocol: his own sweat. It was running in rivulets from his forehead into his eyes, and as he wiped them with his free hand, a few droplets whiplashed clear of his fingers and landed on the creature’s abdomen.

There were no observable effects.

Taking a breath and steeling himself, he then extended his arm over the table and poured a small volume of water on to the demon’s thigh. Observing no dermatological reaction, he quickly looked at the creature’s face for a response. He saw only anxious curiosity amid that constant simmering aggression.

As part of the agreed protocol, he then handed the phial to Tullian, who would bless it right there under the rite of exorcism, so that they could be sure it was the same sample of water. Even a difference in mineral properties from a phial bottled in Rome, for instance, would have to be accounted for as a possible explanation, and that wasn’t what they were testing here.

Merrick returned to his trolley and retrieved the next phial: a strong alkaline solution. It was as he picked it up that he realised he had not brought the protective gloves he used when preparing it. The thought vividly magnified the reality of what he was about to do.

Behind him, Tullian began his declamations, chanting the rite. As Merrick approached the demon once more, the loud calls for a purge of evil sounded like an admonition towards himself.

His hand was still trembling even as his wrist remained locked, awaiting the will to rotate it and pour the solution. In the end it was the danger that his shaking would spill it on to his own fingers that prompted him to act.

‘That Satan may be crushed under our feet, that every evil counsel directed against us may be brought to naught.’

The alkali hit the demon’s skin with a blistering hiss that was immediately drowned by the creature’s screams. Not roars this time. Screams. High, keening, an electrical jolt through the calcium of your bones.

‘Free us from every attack
. . .’

He couldn’t do this again, couldn’t visit this harm.

‘And every temptation of the enemy
. . .’

But he couldn’t give up, couldn’t
not
do it. He needed to know.

He reached for the phial of acid . . .

Now, these weeks later, the screams still echo, still scrape his bones and gnaw at his soul. But the data they heralded reverberated even more disturbingly. Tullian had handed him back the phial at the end of the procedure, allowing him to retest the same holy water sample on dead skin. It still had no effect. The acid and the alkali had the same corrosive impact whether the subject was dead or alive: the only difference was that the effects on the dead sample weren’t accompanied by screams of pain and an anguished wail from somewhere deep within Merrick’s conscience.

Holy water on living tissue, however, had proven more damaging than any hazardous chemical.

The questions were only beginning. Did holy water burn other creatures, or only these ones? If so, why? He had checked the sample before and after the blessing, and at a molecular level it was unchanged. Did the incantation alter the properties of simple water at some level we could neither measure nor detect? Would the rite work if performed by anyone? Did it have to be a priest? Did it have to be a
Catholic
priest?

It was exciting, but in the most nightmarish way. Either his observations denoted the threshold of a whole new frontier of science, or they marked the barrier where the scientific paradigm reached its limit. What was truly disquieting about this was that if science couldn’t offer explanations, then nor could it offer solutions; while what did offer solutions was more worrying still. Our world was in danger of being overrun by these marauding demons, and it was only things he had shunned and scorned that might offer hope: that might offer, to use the now frighteningly appropriate word,
salvation
.

With this thought returns the recurring fear, the one that stalks him every second he remains in this dark and damned place: Here beneath the world, held fast by adamantine rock, impenetrable. Here impaled with circling fire, yet unconsumed.

All his life,
he
shunned,
he
scorned.

He rejected, even ridiculed, the word of God, the very idea of religion. Now he’s confronted with damnation, torment and demons in a sweltering furnace beneath the earth. Wasn’t that what the Bible said would happen? How’s that for cause and effect?

A world overrun by demons.
His
world. Perhaps only his. For what if this truly is Hell,
his
Hell? What if he had died but didn’t know it? Wouldn’t this be the journey that took him there: his unique, personal journey? He recalls some of his many possible deaths: a near-drowning at fifteen; on board a 757 tossed like a toy by an electrical storm above the Rockies. Then one more vivid than the rest: almost falling asleep at the wheel on a rain-lashed night nine months ago, on the drive north, on the road to here. He can still see the view from the windscreen. Lights everywhere, flickering and indistinct: white shapes stretched and pulled by random refractions in the rain and spray before being temporarily shrunk to points and discs by the wiper blades . . .

What if he hadn’t snapped awake before that bend?

Perhaps you didn’t go from your world to Hell: perhaps you brought it to yourself, made your own world
become
Hell. No moment of death, no judgment at the gate, no banishment with your fellow damned; but instead watching, close-up, helpless, as the decisions you had made, the things you had embraced not only proved powerless against, but in fact
precipitated
the advent of Hell on Earth.

The room is warming up by the second, condensation beginning to form on the inside of the glass and disappointingly clouding out Adnan’s view through the windows, where he had previously been able to make out Orion.

A makeshift altar has been constructed at one end of the room, just a low-standing coffee table draped with ceremonial cloths and adorned with standard-issue holyware: a crucifix, a chalice, a bell, a bowl of corpse-substitute wafers and a copy of the
Christianity User’s Manual
. Father Blake is got up in white vestments, arms outstretched and chest proud, like he’s waiting to hug a really fat relative who he secretly doesn’t like. Making his posture more bizarre is the fact that he’s kneeling, so that he’s not towering four feet above the top of his Playmobil Happy Priest Altar Set.

Everyone else is sitting roughly in a circle with one flattened end around the focus of the proceedings. Some are on chairs and sofas, but most are cross-legged on the floor, leaning back into the spaces between the paired legs of the ones who have bagged seats. For once, it’s not the hard men and the cool kids who have secured the prime spots, as none of them wanted to turn up too early to this gig. It’s mostly the God squad and the staff who have those privileges, though there is no sign of Mr Kane, which Adnan finds ideologically satisfying but at the same time slightly annoying. If he had to turn up for this shit, why should Kane get a free pass?

‘May almighty God cleanse us of our sins, and through the Eucharist we celebrate make us worthy to sit at his table in his heavenly kingdom.’

Maybe it’s the growing warmth, maybe it’s his fatigue, maybe it’s the fact that where he’s leaning back, his shoulder is in contact with Caitlin Black’s leg and she hasn’t recoiled it in a deliberately conspicuous show of disgust, and maybe it’s a combination of all of the above, but Adnan would have to admit he’s actually finding the mass quite pleasant. There is a very mellow vibe around the room: no tension, no aggro, nobody being a pain in the hoop, everybody quietly contemplative. There is something cosy and genuinely communal to it, like how he’d always been told religion was supposed to be. However, there is also something inescapably ridiculous about it, kind of the elephant in the room that’s being steadfastly ignored by the faithful. Really. There’s Blake in his superhero costume, striking crazy poses and talking in this elevated semi-singing register that
so
isn’t the guy’s normal voice; like he’s channelling or something. Meanwhile everyone else is nodding here, bowing there, all in unison, all on Pavlovian cue, and chanting like they’re entranced, their own voices altered, their delivery uniform and unsettlingly identical.

‘
I confess to almighty God
,’ they all chant, ‘
and to you, my brothers and sisters, that I have sinned through my own fault, in my thoughts and in my words, in what I have done, and in what I have failed to do
. . .’

Shit, that doesn’t leave much space for plea-bargaining, does it? Sins of thought, sins of speech, sins of deed, sins of omission. Forgot sins of respiration and sins of spatial occupation, but otherwise we’re all owning up to being a shower of spherical bastards: bastards any way you look at us. However, our damnation is not a done deal, there is hope:

‘And I ask blessed Mary, ever virgin, all the angels and saints, and you, my brothers and sisters, to pray for me to the Lord, our God.’

Yeah. The blessed virgin, the angels and the saints got our backs.

It was at his dad’s insistence that he and his two younger sisters went to Catholic school. Like many devout Muslims in Scotland, faced with the absence of their own faith schools, he decided he’d rather entrust the education of his kids to Crusader infidel Christian hardliners than to the scorched-earth godlessness of the non-denominational system. Besides, the Muslims and the Catholics might disagree on the divinity of Jesus and the veracity of Mohammed’s secretarial skills in transcribing the word of God, but they had as much in common as divided them, mostly concerning who and what they disapproved of. This, according to Adnan’s most recent calculations, was pretty much everything, especially if it could be described by the words ‘enlightened’, ‘forward-looking’ or ‘fun’.

His dad would be less than delighted to hear that sending him to a faith school was what really accelerated his apostasy. Having been immersed so thoroughly in one religious culture, to be then plunged in close-up alongside another served to illustrate how arbitrary your allocation of faith was. The stork drops you down one chimney in Gleniston and you’re a Muslim, down another and you’re a Catholic; each with their own silly outfits, bizarre rituals and absolute certainty that their way is right. The Christians who were vociferously railing against Islamic extremism were precisely the ones who would have turned out hard-core fundies themselves, railing against the Crusaders, had they been born in Jordan rather than Jordanhill.

Despite the glass steaming up, Adnan can tell it’s going to be clear tonight. Being so excitingly removed from urban light pollution, he knows the seeing will be different class, which is why he’s already set up his telescope in the room he’s sharing with Radar and Matt.

Most people had never known quite what to make of Matt, but he had gone from enigma to borderline pariah since the incident. Nobody could possibly blame him for it - at least, nobody rational, which unfortunately ruled out the folk most likely to give him grief about it - but there was an inescapable sense that he was tainted by his involvement nonetheless. Adnan had seen something of the same phenomenon back in second year when Radar’s mother died. Everyone steered clear of him for a long time, and while part of that was because they didn’t know quite what to say, it was also as though they feared bereavement might be contagious.

Adnan had always got on okay with Matt. They were both geeks in their own different ways. Matt, however, was not one to pour forth his geekish enthusiasms, whereas Adnan didn’t care who he bored or baffled. What a lot of the chuckleheads at school didn’t appreciate was that you didn’t have to be gibbering away incontinently with lame jokes and stolen patter to be good company. They always needed vocal affirmation of their own presence every thirty seconds or they got twitchy and self-conscious. Adnan felt relaxed in a room with Matt because he understood Matt felt relaxed in a room with him. He knew that just because Matt didn’t say anything didn’t mean he wasn’t listening. That, in fact, was the big mistake people made about the guy. They assumed, because he was quiet, that he was withdrawn into a world of his own, when in fact he was probably the most attentive and keenly observant person among them. It was Adnan’s bet that Matt had everybody’s number, and they should all be grateful that he didn’t say much, because if he did, he’d nail them to the walls.