The Scarlet Gospels (31 page)

“What the fuck happened here?” Harry said.

At Harry's words, a beleaguered voice called out from within the chamber.

“Harry? Is that you?”

“Norma!” Harry shouted.

“Norma! My God, girl! Where are you?” Caz said.

Norma appeared in the doorway, clutching its frame for support.

“Oh my stars!” she said. “It is you! I didn't believe it, but it is!”

Harry stopped when he saw her state. Though Felixson's magical workings had taken away her pain, they'd done little to heal her broken body, which was now a mass of purpled bruises and weeping wounds.

“Jesus Christ! Did he do this to you? I'll fucking kill—”

“Harry, just hug me, you fool.” He did.

“We're gonna get you the fuck out of here. Where's Pin—”

From the dusty shadows behind her stepped the tallest, broadest demons Harry had ever laid eyes upon: Hell's soldiers. Harry reached for his gun. Caz, Dale, and Lana, equally alarmed at the sight of the massive guards, all made for their weapons.

“Norma!” Harry said. “Behind you!”

“Harry D'Amour. Don't you touch that weapon,” she chided. “I wouldn't be here if they hadn't carried and protected me. There will be no fight here. I forbid it. You hear me?”

“Norma…” Harry said, his distaste for the situation evident in the way he said her name.

“I mean it, Harry,” she said as she gestured toward the biggest demon of the bunch. “Knotchee. This is the man I told you about,” she said, then, turning to the detective, “Harry, this is Knotchee.”

Knotchee squared his shoulders. Harry bit his lip and took his finger off the trigger of his holstered gun. He pointed to the giant demons and said, “I just want you all to know, if she hadn't said what she just said, you wouldn't exist right now.”

The demons stood their ground, motionless. Knotchee cracked his knuckles, the bones inside his massive hands popping so loudly the din bounced off the walls of the entryway.

“Okay,” Harry said, looking back at his group. “Everyone, make sure Norma gets out of here safely.”

“She goes nowhere,” Knotchee said.

Harry turned toward the soldier, staring intently at him, while speaking to Norma. “I thought you said these guys were team players, Norma? We're not leaving without you. So tell this fucking mountain to move, or else we will move the fucking mountain.”

“Don't threaten me,” the demon warned. “I have orders from my lord. A soldier never leaves his post.”

Norma turned to Knotchee, laying a gentle hand on his bulbous, veiny forearm.

“I have to go now. Thank you for keeping me safe. Thank you all. But your lord said for you to stay here. Not me.”

The other soldiers attempted to protest, but that was as far as they ever got. Norma closed her eyes, and when she did they fell asleep dead away.

“Holy shit, Norma!” said Caz. “I never knew you could do that.”

“The old girl still has some tricks up her sleeve,” Norma said. “I just wish it would have worked on their lord. We could have ended this fiasco a long time ago. But, my God, he's got power.”

“Where is he, Norma?” Harry said.

Norma turned, and with a graceful gesture of her hand indicated the Priest's location inside the chamber.

“Right,” Harry said. “Norma, you go with Caz, Lana, and Dale.”

“Harry, don't. Let's leave together.”

“I can't,” Harry said.

“Seriously, Harold?” Caz said. “Leave him. Let's get the fuck out of here.” Harry gazed into Lucifer's chamber.

“I have to see,” he said.

“No,” Dale said. “You have to watch.”

“Just go,” Harry said. “I'll be okay.”

Norma kissed Harry on the cheek, then turned to the Harrowers who began ushering her up the stairs.

“You better fucking come back,” Caz said.

“If you do,” Lana said,” I want details!”

“That makes one of us,” Dale said. “I already have enough terrors in my head to keep me rich in nightmares for two lifetimes. See you upstairs, Harry. Hopefully literally. Maybe metaphorically.”

Harry silently watched them ascend the stairs and only when he was certain that Norma had been safely delivered into the hands of his friends did he turn to face the chamber. He took a deep breath, then stepped into the room where he would meet the Devil face-to-face.

Harry walked through the maze of technology that was laid out in the vast chamber. His tattoos pulsed as he went, guiding their wearer through the warren of potentially lethal machinery. Slowly, he wove, the sweat beading on his forehead and dripping down the sides of his face. He wondered if he'd ever reach the end. As his tattoos led him through the industrial monstrosity that was this room, his thoughts began to wander. This whole damn thing had started with a puzzle—the simple invention of a humble toymaker—and ever since that moment, Harry's life had been a series of puzzles, mazes, and labyrinths, some physical, some mental, but all challenging beyond belief.

He hoped, after this incident—however it would end—that he at least would be spared from having to solve any more puzzles for a long time to come. And with that thought, Harry's tattoos led him around the final bend. There the Hell Priest stood in front of him, and in front of the Hell Priest, seated on a marble throne, sat the Lord of Hell himself. His robes were white, his skin a mass of purple blotches and yellow stains. His eyes were open, but they saw nothing.

“Dead,” the Hell Priest said. “The Lord of Hell is dead.”

 

4

Harry moved closer. As he studied the motionless body, it became apparent that the throne upon which the Devil sat was, for all its fine carving, nothing more than an elaborate death chair. Harry saw now that the machinery through which he had found his way all led ultimately to this fatal throne. The entire room had been set up to activate a fan of spear-length blades, arranged like the feathers of a peacock's tail. These blades had entered the Devil from left, right, and directly below him and summarily exited him in perfect symmetry.

The blades were close to one another and immaculately positioned so that seventeen blades alone emerged from his head, their bright array forming a gruesome halo that stood seven or eight inches off of the Devil's skull. Blood ran down over his face from the seventeen wounds, dried into a purple stain in the curls of his pale blond hair. God, but he had been beautiful, his brow unlined, with almost Slavic features, his cheekbones high, his nose aquiline, and his mouth serene and sensual in equal measure. It was slightly open, as though he might have loosed one last sigh when the suicide machine drove its armory of weapons into him.

There were mirrored arrangements of blades all around his body as well, entering through slits in the marble throne. They pierced his corpse on one side and emerged on the opposite, the glinting, narrow spearheads seeming to surround his form with signs of glorification, even in death. There was blood from each of these many wounds too, of course, which had soaked into his once-pristine robes, the stains a bright purple in the whiteness of the weave.

“How long…” Harry said.

“There is no knowing,” the Hell Priest replied. “A thousand days. A thousand years. The flesh of an angel never decays.”

“Did you know?”

“No.”

“I expected—”

“A mind turned inward for centuries, wholly in search of divinity. In a word: greatness.”

“Yes.”

“He had seen It, and known It, and been Its most beloved.”

“But losing that—”

“Was more than he could bear. I thought he'd seek the Maker's mark inside himself, and take comfort in its presence. But instead … this.”

“Why the elaborate suicide?” Harry asked, gesturing to their surroundings.

“The Lord God is a vengeful God. Lucifer's death sentence was life everlasting. He was beyond death. He found a means to trick his way past immortality.”

As he spoke, the Hell Priest stepped onto the dais and around the side of the throne, where he reached out and seized hold of the end of one of the spears that transfixed Lucifer's corpse. There was a short, sudden sound of numinous voices, and Harry looked back at the Cenobite to see him defiantly holding on to the end of the spear, which was attached, by means of a cable two inches thick, to a defense mechanism that had come into play due to the Hell Priest's proximity to the body. Even in death, Lucifer clearly desired his solitude.

There was a release of energies through the Priest's body that threw him violently about. The Priest stood his ground and so a second shout of voices was released, ten times more violent than the first, the force of the energies passing through the spear commensurately larger. This time, the Hell Priest could not hold on. He was thrown backward, off the dais and through the entrails of the machine.

He had not left the throne without a keepsake, however. He'd held on to the spear long enough to have it slide all the way out of the corpse. As he was pitched across the floor, however, he lost his grip, and the spear ended up no more than a couple of yards from where Harry was standing. The detective stepped a little nearer to it and went down on his aching haunches to look at it more closely. He could not tell what type of metal it was made from. There was a railing iridescence in its substance, which when it had caught Harry's gaze drew him into a place that seemed limitless, as though somehow the angel had caught and sealed a length of infinitude within the spear.

In that moment, the vast engines that filled the chamber beneath the cathedral in all directions made some sense to Harry. He'd seen evidence of almost every kind of magical working with which he was familiar (and many with which he was not) in the labyrinth's devices: ancient icons of primal magic inscribed on devices made of white gold, all shaped to suggest the sexual anatomies of men and women; diagrams that had been etched into polished silver, which were designed—if his memory served—to open doors where there were none. There were more, of course, countless numbers, most of which he'd barely glimpsed. He saw that Lucifer had empowered his final grand act of defiance by drawing together pieces of every magical system that humanity in its hunger for revelation had created, and he had made himself his own executioner, thus successfully bypassing the Will of the Maker.

All this filled Harry's head in a matter of seconds, during which time the Hell Priest had risen from where the blow had pitched him and was coming back at the dais, moving with glacial ease, his hands raised in front of him, motes of glistening darkness pouring from his palms, from the open wounds in his chest, and from his eyes. Harry watched and saw that only at the very last, when the Priest stepped up onto the dais in one stride, did his face betray the fury that was fuelling this counterassault.

He was a creature who held his dignity very high, and the blow from the throne, in casually swatting him away, had violated that dignity. Now he reached deliberately for the throne, despite the power it had just demonstrated, and without hesitation repeated his crime by pulling out a second spear. There was another discharge of energy as he did so, but this time he was ready for it. The black motes that continued to grow in number around and behind him broke like a wave about his head and their dark surf met the force that had emptied from the throne with its own hunger, moving through it like a fervent revolutionary, transforming it as it went.

The Hell Priest was already moving onto the third spear, and the fourth, his face lit from below by the arcs of power leaping from the throne and bursting against his body. If he felt them, he made no sign of the fact; he just went on his business of undoing the death chair's lethal mechanism, one transfixing spear after another. On occasion he separated the serpentine pipe from the handle of the spear into which it fed, releasing a rush of acidic gases. On others he simply pulled the blades directly out of the Devil's corpse, and cast them aside, one upon another, until the dais upon which Lucifer sat had become a nest of metallic snakes forged of alloys unknown to humanity.

The Hell Priest glanced back over his left shoulder and whispered to the assembled darkness, which drew itself closer to him, an anxious ally determined to catch every order that he gave it. Harry watched everything that transpired—his head awash with questions. Was this strange figure—steadily slumping lower in his suicide seat as the blades that had held him were removed—truly the Adversary, Evil Incarnate, the Fallen One, the Satan? He looked too pitifully human sitting there on his death throne. The notion that this thing might have once been God's Most Beloved seemed ludicrous, an urban legend spread by drunken angels. And yet Harry had witnessed enough evidence as to Lucifer's preternatural grasp of occult systems—their code, their sigils, their consequences—to be certain that the creature on the throne was something more than he presently appeared.

Meanwhile the subject of the Hell Priest's whispered conversation with the assembled darkness became apparent as streams of it ran underneath the throne and began the process of removing the spears that had entered the corpse from below. As they went about their labors the Cenobite was pulling blades from the other side of the body, effortlessly transforming the surges of power that flowed from the throne into dark droplets that swelled the thunderhead behind him. Finally, he stood back from the throne, staring down at the Fallen One with hate-filled eyes.

“You expecting him to thank you?” Harry asked.

“There is naught to learn from this pitiful display,” the Hell Priest said.

The Cenobite then whispered again to his attendant darkness, and motes of it flew from him like bullets, striking Lucifer's body. For such tiny forms, they possessed uncanny amounts of power. They caught hold of the corpse and raised it up off the throne, its arms outstretched. The allusion to the scene at Golgotha was not lost on Harry; even the way the Devil's head fell forward put in his mind the Man of Sorrows.