Pandaemonium (3 page)

This inability is, of course, irrelevant, because even if he did know how, he would not be allowed to make an attempt. Monitoring and observation, as has been made unambiguously clear to him and his team, are the absolute extent of his parameters, the demarcation of which will be enforced, if necessary, by the twitchy-looking muscle-bound fuckers carrying the very big guns.

He checks the monitors. He’s getting readings above the baseline from the ECG and the EEG. There is cardiac output and there is intracerebral electrical activity. What that’s going to tell him, beyond that the subject
has
a heart and a brain, he’s not sure.

Merrick looks up from the table and finds himself locked in Steinmeyer’s gaze. It is only marginally more comfortable than the last pair of eyes he just stared into, but Christ, what does Lucius want him to do? Steinmeyer looks to the main door, then back to the table.

‘This is insane,’ Steinmeyer says. ‘This is completely fucking insane.’

‘Lucius,’ Merrick appeals, though he can see it’s futile. His face is stone-set in a coolly resolute anger: no sudden, precipitate fury. Steinmeyer shakes his head. Something here has broken, something inside of him. He hauls off his headset and slaps it down on to a nearby tray, upending scalpels, lines and canulae on to the concrete floor.

Steinmeyer then strides towards the exit, but finds his way barred. The main door is no longer in lockdown, but there is a soldier between him and the swipe dock for his security card.

‘I’m sorry, Professor Steinmeyer,’ the soldier states. ‘I’m not authorised to let anyone leave this chamber until I have full clearance that the procedure is complete.’

He doesn’t look quite so coolly resolute any more. Merrick can see the sinews tense in the back of Steinmeyer’s neck, and fears for a moment that he is about to do something rash. Just then, however, he hears the susurrus of the pressure release as the main doors glide apart. The soldier looks around quizzically, then snaps to attention and gives a salute as he sees Colonel Bud Havelock stopped in the entryway, arms folded as he waits for the two halves of the door to slide fully home. The seven other soldiers also salute as he steps into the chamber.

The men in the radiation suits react not at all, their collective attention remaining intent upon the subject on the table.

With the door now open, Steinmeyer attempts to walk towards the passage but the soldier manning it steps across his path.

‘Colonel Havelock,’ Steinmeyer appeals.

‘Sir,’ the soldier barks, looking past the physicist, ‘my orders are to secure the chamber until I have full clearance, sir.’

‘Stand easy, Corporal,’ orders Havelock. ‘You have my clearance to let Professor Steinmeyer pass.’

‘Sir, yes, sir.’

The soldier moves out of Steinmeyer’s way with an exaggerated step, his eyes front and away from the professor the second the order is given. This leaves Steinmeyer with only Havelock to get past.

‘Where you off to?’ the colonel asks. ‘Forget something?’

‘I have no role here,’ Steinmeyer replies. ‘
You
have no role here,’ he insists, inviting Havelock’s agreement like he’s sure he knows how the army man feels about the issue. Turns out he’s wrong.

‘I would strongly dispute that, Professor. We both have a role here because we may be dealing with a threat to national and international security. This is the US Army. This is what we
do
. Now this ain’t a war, not yet, but if it becomes one, it’s men like me, men like Corporal Clark and the other soldiers you see right here, who’ll be in the shit, fighting it. So if this helps us learn more about what we’re up against, if this in any way helps save my men, if this helps us
win
, then goddamn right we’ve got a role here, and goddamn right so have you.’

‘There will be no war unless you create one. We’re the ones holding the door open, remember? The only barbarians at the gate are on
our
side of it.’

‘Ah, bullshit, Lucius,’ Havelock replies. There is frustration in his face, indicating that his concern is genuine. ‘You’ve seen as well as I what’s on both sides of the gate. What I’ve seen has given me serious grounds for worry about what would happen should ever the twain meet, and it’s my job to worry about that shit. Yes, we’re holding open a door: we’re holding open
one
tiny door so that we can gather us a little intel that just might come in handy if it turns out that meanwhile, on the other side, they’re getting ready to tear down the walls.’

‘You will learn nothing from this here today,’ Steinmeyer states calmly. ‘This is superstition and barbarism.’

‘This is
cancer
, Lucius. This is AIDS. Times ten. Times a thousand. This could be the greatest threat we’ve ever faced as a species. It’s the Black Death and you’re saying lay off being cruel to the goddamn rats. We cannot afford to be squeamish right now, and we definitely cannot afford men like you closing their minds to
any
possibility.
What’s been discovered here alters our whole understanding of the nature of the universe
: those are your own words. There’s nothing about this we can take for granted, so that’s some pretty fucking bad timing for you to abandon the scientific principle of observe-and-deduce.’

‘You abandoned
all
scientific principles when you brought in Tullian.’

Havelock drops his voice again; looks like he bit back an initial reply, but this one, while quieter, is no less unequivocal in its import.

‘That wasn’t my call, but it ain’t my place to second-guess it, and I don’t get to pick sides. I’m on the side of the US Army - that’s my job. But I’ll say this much for Tullian: it ain’t him who’s backing away because he’s afraid of being proved wrong.’

Steinmeyer gives the bitterest laugh.

‘Tullian’s not afraid of being proved wrong, because from his perspective, being
proven
wrong is conceptually impossible. I’d advise you to understand the danger inherent in that before it’s too late.’

That’s his last word. Steinmeyer walks through the main door and into the mouth of the entryway where, heading towards the chamber, is an unmistakable silhouette. No radiation suit, no fatigues, no lab coat and no uniform can cast that shape: only flowing robes, gathered about the waist by a cummerbund. The words ‘speak of the devil’ flash into Merrick’s mind, but he dismisses them with an almost superstitious level of haste. We’re talking closer to the other end of that particular spectrum, and the phrase is not one anybody around here would utter with any degree of flippancy.

The two men stop in the passageway; or rather, Cardinal Tullian stops, hands clasped, head slightly bowed in greeting. Steinmeyer makes like he’s going to storm past, ignoring him, then changes his mind and halts. They look at each other for a moment but exchange no words. Steinmeyer evidently changes his mind once more, swallowing whatever he had stopped to say, and continues his exit.

Tullian watches him pass, waiting patiently should Steinmeyer decide he does wish to speak to him after all. He stays there until the physicist has turned the corner out of sight, before turning almost reluctantly and proceeding into the chamber.

His entrance through the doorway elicits a mirror image of Havelock’s: the soldiers respond not at all, while the men in the yellow suits divide into two facing lines, each trio side by side, hands palmed, heads slightly bowed; the Vatican equivalent of ten-hut, Merrick guesses.

The subject responds also to this new presence, though pinned by the neck brace, there is no way of seeing the entrance from flat back on the table. Its head strains, trying to turn, the forearms testing the fortitude of the bonds. Logic tells Merrick that this is simply a reaction to detecting the nearby movement that was prompted by the Cardinal’s arrival, but he nonetheless fails to find this explanation entirely satisfying or of any reassurance. He looks at the elongated nails, the parallel serrated saw-blades of teeth and again, in awestruck, frightened fascination, at what lies just above each temple.

Then Merrick looks at Tullian, striding slowly across the chamber floor, and feels only relief. He has endured the frustration of impotence, the resentment of being subject to the rule and authority of other parties, other bodies. Now he understands he’s only been straining at the leash like the yappy little dog who knows deep down that it’s the leash that’s protecting him. It’s at this point that he admits he is more than happy that other people have control of what is going on here, people who know what they are dealing with. And he doesn’t mean the people with the big guns.

His misgivings evaporate as he realises his qualms were truly fear. He told himself he didn’t want to be working on this on someone else’s terms, but he can admit now that the prospect of working on it on his own terms would have been far worse. He is grateful, therefore, to defer to someone who knows the territory, someone who understands what he’s dealing with. Merrick would never have called himself a religious man, but they say everyone cries for intercession in the deepest darkness, and the darkness didn’t get any deeper than down in this place.

There’s another guttural, idling ante-growl from the table. ECG and EEG show a slight rise, but Tullian isn’t in line of sight yet. There are spikes when he begins speaking, though; or declaiming might be the word.

‘
In nomini patre, Trinitas, Sother, Messias, Emmanuel, Athanatos
. . .’

Merrick sees the neck muscles stretch as the subject tries to locate the source of the voice. There’s another spike on the monitors when finally it does, accompanied by an agitated growl: defensive, territorial, threatening.

‘
Pentagna, Salvatror, Ischiros, principium et Finis
,’ Tullian continues, moving closer still. Then from the folds of his robe he produces a crucifix, hanging on a chain around his neck, which he holds out at arm’s length, less than a metre from the end of the table.

Tullian lets the crucifix fall, and from elsewhere in his robe produces a phial of clear fluid, which he holds out to one of the figures in yellow. He takes it in both hands and kneels in front of the Cardinal, presenting the phial above his bowed head. Tullian holds his hands apart, either side of the phial, and speaks, in English this time, his accent all but shorn of its American roots by its heightened register:

‘Let these waters be sanctified by the power, the agency and descent of the Holy Spirit; Let descend upon these waters the cleansing of the Three who are One, and endue them with the grace of redemption and the blessing of Jordan, that Satan may be crushed under our feet, that every evil counsel directed against us may be brought to naught, and that the Lord our God will free us from every attack and temptation of the enemy.’

He gives another short blessing in Latin, while the kneeling man unstops the lid and hands him the phial. Tullian makes a pronounced, ceremonial sign of the cross with his right hand, blessing the subject. The eyes of the blessing’s recipient follow the hand intently, its fury either ebbing or temporarily spent. The blessing complete, Tullian transfers the phial to his right hand, and gives it an equally pronounced and equally ceremonial flick with his wrist, sending a spray of the holy water on to the subject.

As soon as it hits that grey, crenulated skin, the monitors spike a new high and the chamber reverberates as Merrick finally gets to hear the roar he sensed those low grumblings warned of. It overloads the audio, reduces everything to crackling white noise, shakes Merrick like a sapling in a gale. The ferocity is paralysing, accompanied as it is by a writhing, shuddering frenzy against the braces and cuffs that gives a terrifying measure of just what physical power is being contained. Even the soldiers flinch, a ripple of human recoil passing along the stocks and barrels of all those tightly gripped weapons. The skin fizzes, bubbles and blisters along a three-foot arc where the water has streaked it, and once more all of the welds are given a mortal proving as the subject struggles desperately to free itself.

This is when he appreciates what stern stuff Tullian is made of; sterner than him, maybe than Steinmeyer too. Merrick has come up against his limitations, said ‘let this chalice pass from my lips’. Tullian is stronger than that. Merrick sees him shudder in the face of the roar, sees fright and horror in his eyes, and that makes him a stronger man still. Courage is not fearlessness. Courage is not even overcoming fear: it’s being able to operate, to carry out your duty, in the face of it, in the grip of it.

Tullian sends a second arc of the holy water perpendicular to the first, describing a cross on the subject’s torso. The EEG spikes again while the ECG flatlines, but this is because both chest sensors have popped off in the flailing, screaming tumult, adding the urgent whine of the asystole alarm to the cacophony.

And it gets suddenly worse. The subject . . .

The subject.

Come on. What is he trying to hide from himself? Who is he trying to kid any more? This is not a special effect. It is not a man in a latex mask. It is not even of this world, and he knows this for certain, as he has seen the portal it came through: one considerably more daunting than the mag-locked circular door.

The creature, then.

No. Say it. Say it. No mere creature. No refuge in feigned ignorance. He can’t hide from what this is.

The demon
.

The demon ceases its screams, holding its head up as far as the neck brace will allow, the better to look straight at Tullian. Its jagged mouth opens again, but delivers no base primal cry. Instead, it bellows forth a twisting, gravelly, punctuated issue like a grim parody of Tullian’s declamations. It stares at the Cardinal and snarls its venomous defiance. The language is unintelligible but all of its searing hatred is conveyed nonetheless.