Thy Fearful Symmetry (10 page)

Catching his breath, he forced himself to think. Could she have survived? Hope buzzed in his chest. She might well have done. Everything he had read, if it was to be believed, told him that her kind were almost impervious to physical harm. He had imagined that meant knives, bullets, and other weapons. It had never occurred to him to think on the scale of explosives, let alone explosives powerful enough to do this to a building. Had she been near to the source of the explosion when it went off? Would it have made a difference if she had been on the fringe of the blast?

Grinding his teeth again, he made himself relax. There was still a chance.

Malachi's jerked his head up as movement caught his eye, deep inside the ruin of the ground floor, a shadow shifting against shadow. Malachi glanced up and down the street, then ducked beneath the police tape before he could think better of it. Uncertain of his footing amidst the scattered debris, he pulled out his torch as he moved carefully into the building. It occurred to him that he was doing exactly what he had promised himself he wouldn't, letting hot blood spur him into haste, but this shell that was once a building represented a dead end for him, and he didn't know what else to do.

Releasing the breath he hadn't realised he was holding, he thumbed the torch on, sweeping it in a wide, fast arc before him. There. To his left. Movement, ducking behind a flimsy supporting wall. Malachi followed, picking his way between bricks and chunks of ceiling. The building smelled of dust and smoke, and the way it creaked made him flinch. Amidst the destruction, he found occasional signs of the people who had lived here, curiously untouched. An outdated Paulo Nutini poster, burned only at the edges, a coffee mug declaring the owner to be the Best Dad In The World, smeared with soot but undamaged. Malachi tried to hope they had survived the inferno that had swept through this place, but was ashamed to find that he didn't care.

Moving silently now, disturbing nothing, he crept to the supporting wall, where he had seen movement. The doorway was untouched, though where the door that had filled it had gone he couldn't guess. On the other side of the wall he heard frightened, hurried breathing, that reminded him of his confrontation with Orloch.
 

Was that really only the previous day?

Pulling his knife free, he focussed his mind on the present, and stepped through the doorway, his torch held high. There was a shriek, a blur of movement, and then the creature was on him.
 

CHAPTER NINE

Clive couldn't feel his freezing fingers. Whatever the angel had done to free him from the police cell had not involved the return of his belongings from police custody, forcing him to sleep rough in the clothes he had been teaching in. Without his keys he had not been able to enter his flat, and he still had no idea how Heather had reacted to his actions the previous day.
 

With a little laugh, he realised that wasn't true. Clive knew exactly what Heather, his friends, and very likely his family by now, would think. Perversely, though he had no sensation in his fingers, he still had almost perfect recall of the dying heat of Jamie's blood between his knuckles, in the grooves of his fingerprints, beneath his fingernails.
 

Shivering with cold and self-pity, he turned back to the front entrance of his tenement building, ignoring the students sauntering past on their way to early lectures and subsidised breakfasts at the University Café down the hill. Where he stood, in the doorway of a building devoted to Theatre Studies, he tried to make himself invisible.
 

Heather stepped on to the street, closing the door behind her. At the bottom of the hill, the University clock tower told all and sundry that it was quarter past eight. She was running late. Watching her scurry up the street, he couldn't help noticing how harried she looked. What had she been told? Did she know he had escaped? Was that common knowledge yet?
 

As she turned the corner at the far end of the road, he made his move. Jogging along to his front door, he scanned the street for any sign that his home was being watched. As far as he could tell, he was in the clear. This delighted him, though it also tickled at the back of his mind, making him uneasy. If he were the police, the first thing he would do to catch a fugitive would be to set up surveillance at their home.
 

Did it matter? It was another sign that God was with him.

Clive licked his palms, smoothing his tangled hair back over his head. Using his reflection in the door's glass panels, he rubbed the worst of the grime off his face. Satisfied that he was presentable enough to pass muster, he pressed the buzzer for Mrs Burke's ground floor flat. Almost ninety-two years old, living on her own, Elizabeth Burke was the least likely resident of the block to be up to date with current events. Her voice creaked over the intercom. “Hello? Hello? Hello?”
 

Clive grinned happily. The old dear had never grasped modern technology, and the intercom was a thing of mystery to her. Whenever she used it, she shouted.

“Mrs Burke, it's Clive Huntley, the teacher from upstairs. I helped you carry your shopping in a few weeks ago?”

“Yes? What is it dear?”

“A bit embarrassing really.” Clive could hear the false cheer in his voice, garnished by the stress of the ticking clock in his mind. “I've locked myself out. Could you buzz me in?” A pause. Clive imagined Ambrose's corpse lying steaming on a frosty pavement somewhere, torn apart by twisted chimera beasts. He stopped himself hammering at the door in desperation.

The lock clicked, the door fell open, and Clive was in.
 

Wasting no time on the lift, he bounded up the stairs, his heaving lungs suffering for it by the time he got to the second floor. The door to Ambrose's flat was shut, with yellow police tape crossing the frame. Next along the corridor was the door to his own flat. He had intended to go straight to Ambrose's in the hunt for clues, and had only waited for Heather to leave because she was the nearest neighbour who might hear if he was forced to kick the door in. Now though, he was curious, eager for a touch of normality. Everything was happening too fast, and there had been no time to consider why it all felt so wrong. Clive was on a quest to save an angel from the fiends of Hell. What could be worthier or simpler than that? Why were little voices chanting uncertainty and insecurity at him?

Clive pulled the spare key from under the doormat, and let himself in. Home is where the heart is, and surely God would not be so churlish as to begrudge him a moment's quiet contemplation.
 

The first thing to hit him when he entered his living room was the smell of Heather's deodorant, a sweet, fresh scent that reminded him of woodland mornings, and made him breathless. Glancing round, he was overwhelmed by familiarity. The brown leather suite, an extravagance not yet paid for, the glass coffee table, currently strewn with homework from one of Heather's primary school classes, the computer they negotiated for time on in the corner, the breakfast bar, a handful of coffee grains scattered across the surface – the normality of it all crushed the madness from his mind, released a harsh sob from his throat. Sitting heavily on the couch, the leather still warm from where his wife had been sitting just ten minutes ago, he tugged at his hair until the pain brought tears to his eyes.
 

“What’s happening to me?”
 

Angels? Demons? Even more impossibly, he, Clive Huntley, assaulting one of his own pupils? Frustration and impotence flooded him, spilling a whimper over his lips. How did he stop it? Could he even begin to try?

Ignoring the sharp-edged hollowness that the knowledge of everything he had lost carved into him, he walked to the mirror above the television. Wretched and confused, his reflection stared back at him.
I look insane
, he thought, and then realised with dawning hope that this was very likely the truth of it. Of course he hadn't put Jamie Sullivan in hospital, or been questioned by the police, or been spirited away from a cell by angels. It was all a delusion. Obviously, something had happened to him, he had been somewhere for the past twenty-four hours, but the thought was still reassuring. A nervous breakdown perhaps was preferable by far to the fantasy he was experiencing.

The anxieties diminished a little. Clive knew he couldn't deal with this on his own. Despite the distance that had grown between them, he needed Heather’s help.
 

Hurrying now, terrified that the delusions might take over again, he rushed to the bathroom and stripped off his clothes. Jumping in the shower, he pushed the pressure up as high as it would go and let the water pound the grime from him. Washing away the sweat and dirt was like washing away the madness, and when he stepped back out he felt fully himself for the first time in days. Drying off with a towel, he found a clean pair of jeans and a T-shirt, slipped them on, and collapsed back on to the couch.

Should he call Heather's school, or go in person? Better just to turn up and explain, he decided. She was going to have a lot of questions about where he had been last night, none of which he could provide satisfactory answers for. Leaning forward, he started to gather up the homework she had obviously forgotten to take with her, and looked around for a bag.
 

When he glanced back down at the paper in his hand, he froze. Unnatural patterns, so recently erased, began to reform in his mind, and he found it hard to focus.

That's fine
, he told himself desperately.
Don't focus. It all starts again if you focus.
It would be so simple to put the childish drawing, entitled 'The Best Thing About My Holiday', face down on the table. He could forget about taking Heather's work to her at the school, and go straight to hospital where they had drugs, and professionals who would be able to tell him how and why his mind had broken.
 

Yet his eyes had outpaced him, and he was already staring at a picture of a street at night. Something about the street was familiar, even as rendered by Minna Gilroy, aged six, who three weeks before had signed her name in purple crayon, and carefully put the date in the corner.

What had drawn his attention though, hung above the street. A man flew high above the boxy row of buildings, a huge sunny smile pencilled across his balloon head. Instead of arms, he had sail-like wings. Six curly scribbles of dark hair blew behind his head.
 

At the bottom of the page, above the artist's signature, was one word.

AYNJEL

Brushing his fingers over the paper, feeling the waxy texture of crayon beneath them, he knew this was no delusion. There was another witness. Clive's jaw clenched, and his eyes hardened, even while tears trickled down his cheeks.

Ambrose boiled the kettle in Calum's office, plucking an Earl Grey tea bag from a box on the counter and dropping it into a cup. Outside, the sun was finally showing signs of making an appearance, though the flat pre-dawn light was still dull enough for the amber street lamps to remain on. In the small churchyard, frost rimed the path that he had forced himself to stagger across three weeks before, giving no hint of the bubbling heat it had inflicted on him then. Now Calum had also tasted Heaven's warmth in person, though Ambrose had managed to dump him over the gate before the human could burst into flame.
 

Wondering whether the priest had blisters this morning, Ambrose sat at the desk next to the window and flicked the portable television on. Unused to constraining his urges, he was having difficulty forcing himself to remain on the church grounds, and was hungry for news of the outside world. Pouring hot water into his mug, he watched the breakfast headlines while he mused over his problem.

The Church of St Cottier was a good place to hide from Pandora's people, especially as Metatron had personally interrogated Calum there. It would never occur to the archangel or his Superior that Calum had not divulged the whole truth, and that bought Ambrose time. As for his own people, they were blind to events on consecrated ground. While they might guess he was in a church, they wouldn't know which one. They remained a bigger worry than Heaven's folk, as they had no reason to rule St Cottier's out. Eventually, his trail would lead them to those same wooden doors he had tumbled through aflame. Logically, it might even be the first one they tried.

In his favour was the sheer difficulty of the search. Time had little meaning unless you were in it. When they stepped into the time stream, angels and demons were bound by its rules, but looking at it from outside was very different. Time ceased to exist, as all of it was displayed at once. In looking for Ambrose, they were searching every moment that had existed for traces of him, looking at all Glasgows, in all time zones. They would have found him in the past already, but couldn't act against him then without causing a paradox. If they jumped into the Nineteenth Century and destroyed him, then he would never have existed to commit his crimes in the first place, so they would never have destroyed him, meaning he would commit his crimes, so they would have to destroy him, and so on ad infinitum. No, they had to find him in the linear now, and the best way to do that was to put as many agents in the city as possible.

Letting the tea burn his lips and throat, he took a huge swallow and grimaced. Earl Grey was not an experiment he would be repeating. Unfortunately, he could not say the same for leaving the church. Eventually, he would have to go, and as soon as he stepped through that gate he'd light up like a beacon, and the chase would be back on. He couldn't leave without them finding him, but eventually they'd find him if he didn't leave. Stalemate. Unless Ambrose could find a door they wouldn't be monitoring.

Setting the mug down, he reached to turn the television off, then paused. On the fuzzy screen, a woman was standing beside the Clyde.
 

“
…in Glasgow, where the police have received several sightings of a huge sea snake going up and down the river Clyde. It's the latest in a series of bizarre reports, and comes as light relief to officers exhausted from dealing with ritualistic killings, unexplained deaths, and more. That public paranoia has reached such heights has been noted with concern by Councillors and Police Chiefs alike. Back to the studio, Jackie.
”