Thy Fearful Symmetry (11 page)

The scene shifted to a studio, where a female newsreader with long red hair affected a serious look. Ambrose listened intently. His own misadventure at Queen Margaret Union accounted for some of the unexplained deaths. The serpent was no great mystery, almost certainly Leviathan in the form he felt most comfortable with. Ritualistic murders though?

 

1. “
   In other news, police have asked the public to be on the lookout for escaped prisoner Clive –
   ”
   

Ambrose flicked the television off in frustration. Maddeningly, Calum's computer had no Internet connection, or he would be able to track down some of those previous stories. Swallowing his frustration, trying to imitate a little of the patience Pandora would doubtless demonstrate in the same situation, he picked up the phone and dialled Calum's home number. There was no answer, and he hung up, resolving to remember to check the news at lunchtime. It might all be unconnected to his predicament, but he had an uneasy feeling that he was missing the big picture. Calum was going to collect a lifeline from Ambrose's old flat later in the day, although Ambrose had not told him how important this item was. When he delivered it, they could talk about other matters too. He frowned. To be so reliant on a human for aid made him feel uncomfortable, but if he would trust his future to any mortal, it would be Calum.

Standing, he was about to leave when he noticed the mug. Carefully, he bent down, not touching it, and looked closer. His uneasiness grew as he rubbed his eyes, then looked again.

Four long, tapering marks ran along one side of the mug, with a fifth, shorter, mark on the other side. Peculiarly, he found himself unable to quite focus on those clear smudges. Gingerly rubbing his finger through one of them, he stood back up in alarm when he traced a new mark behind it. Ambrose looked carefully at his fingertip. It was clean and dry. There was nothing to rub off. Bending again, he looked more closely at the marks, making himself dizzy trying to focus on them, and realised they were spreading together.
 

Ambrose stepped back, and that was when he saw that the chair was also marked, as though somebody had placed a moulded piece of ever so slightly frosted plastic in the shape of his body on it. When he looked closely at the floor, he noticed faint, blurry footprints criss-crossing the room.

Whatever was happening, Ambrose had never seen anything like it before. Having identified the phenomenon, he saw it everywhere. On the kettle's handle, on the television buttons, on the telephone. On everything he had touched.

Feeling the first flutters of panic, he strode out of the office and across the hall, trying not to think of the footprints he was leaving behind him, pretending not to notice the blurring anomaly covering the door to the spare room. Pushing it open, he went in, saw the blurring everywhere, turned to Pandora…

Who had her eyes open.

Ambrose blinked.

Pandora's eyes were peacefully closed.

Ambrose rushed to her, not certain of what he had seen. “Pandora? Pandora, can you hear me?” He shook his angel gently. There was no response, and he sat back with a heavy sigh. Was it any surprise he was seeing things, spending all day cooped up in this place?

Shaking Pandora had shifted her slightly on the bed. Though it was difficult to see against the white sheets, Ambrose knew what he was looking for now, and the blurring where Pandora had lain was unmistakable. Whatever was happening to him, was also happening to her.

The flutters of panic grew manic in him, and he paced the small room, clinically running through the possibilities.

Pandora's Master, or Ambrose's own, had inflicted… something… on them.
 

No, that could only be done if they were found, and if they were found then more direct measures would be taken against them. Besides, the effect was limited to what he touched, and so far had led to no ill effects for him personally.

Being on consecrated ground over a long period was having some unexpected effect on them.
 

No, the consequences of being banned from consecrated ground were blisteringly well known. Ambrose was well connected, and was sure he would have heard if anything like this had happened before.

That left… that didn't leave anything at all. Ambrose had nobody he trusted to ask, nowhere safe to research.

Defeated, he sat next to Pandora, unusual sensations of anxiety tingling his insides.

CHAPTER TEN

Calum snapped his arm out, and watched the stone fly over the Clyde. It tumbled, dusty and useless, until it hit the water and vanished. Calum knew how that felt. After spending eight years serving God, he was cast aside as though it had all meant nothing.
 

As the chill wind numbed his face, rushing straight down the river to where he stood on Bell's Footbridge, he wondered if that could be right. Was all his work worthless in the Lord's eyes? Rubbing his neck gingerly, he had to accept the probability. Already blistered along his back and shoulders from the previous day, that morning he had put his dog collar on without thinking, and then tore it off as it seared his throat. What would happen if he tried to lift a crucifix? It was an experiment he was not prepared to undertake.

Follow the stone
. He wanted to. Life had little meaning, cut off from the divine. I
t will only take a second, and then the decision will be out of your hands. Follow the stone.
In the past, he might have thought this was the devil tempting him, but what use would the devil have for a failed priest? Besides, Satan was likely preoccupied with finding Ambrose. How mundane an image to have, when only weeks ago he would have imagined the Lord of Hell in grandiose, fear-inspiring terms.

Join him then
. Calum's eyes widened at the thought, and his gut twisted. So, that was how temptation worked. When you couldn't get what you wanted, accept the only alternative, however vile. Would preaching Satan's will be so much different from preaching God's? Furthermore, of the two preternatural beings he had actually talked to, Ambrose was far preferable to Metatron, despite coming from Hell rather than Heaven.

Of course, he wouldn't do it. The reason he was standing on the cantilever bridge, the steel armadillo of the Scottish Exhibition Centre bulging on the shore, the vast, reaching arm of the Finnieston crane a little downriver, was to consider whether to undo all the damage he had caused. Could he commit the act that Ambrose had pointedly avoided mentioning, if it meant he would avoid his eternal torments? In exchange for salvation, could he bestow damnation on Ambrose and Pandora?

Calum stared upstream, at the motorway bridge that took the thronging rush hour traffic through the centre of the city, and wondered whether he would be able to live with such a thing. Unable to sleep the previous night, he had rationalised the pros and cons, and been so convinced that it was the right thing to do he had found his hands pressing together in preparation for prayer. A lingering respect for Ambrose, that he knew he should not feel, stopped him from going further. Beyond his wonder at Ambrose's existence, he felt a startling admiration for the fallen angel. Would Calum have the courage to turn his back on everything he knew, and offend the most powerful beings in existence, all for the sake of love?
 

His sigh formed a fleeting cloud in the frosty air, before the wind blew it behind him and carried it away. The bridge rattled as a cyclist whizzed by. Calum turned and nodded in greeting, an old habit never to let a stranger pass by without acknowledgement, but the cyclist paid him no heed. Instead, he was looking at the Clyde with keen interest. Calum followed his gaze, wondering what was so fascinating, and remembered a half-heard item on the radio that morning. Something about the river.
 

Below him, the grey waters rolled by, buoyed by heavy snow in the lowlands, chunks of ice carried with surprising speed along the bloated waterway.
 

When the river turned crimson before his eyes, Calum barely flinched. Instead, he watched with his mouth hanging open. Further along the bridge, he heard the clatter of the cyclist coming off his bike.

The process was fast. First there were bubbles, dozens of small ones that made the river look as though it was fizzing. A few seconds later, as though a huge bag of stage blood stretched along the bed of the river had exploded, the grey water morphed to scarlet. Calum gripped the handrail on the bridge tightly, scarcely noting the glacial cold that went straight to the bone, wanting only to keep from falling. As far as he could see, in both directions, the Clyde was now a deep blood red. It flowed as it always had, though the ice was rapidly staining pink, and had he not seen the change himself he would have thought some chemical incident upstream had tainted the waters. If he could dip a hand into those waters, taste the red fluid, would it have the coppery tang of blood?
 

Calum's heart felt as though it had risen up to pound his throat. The cyclist's voice carried clearly to him, even as he watched the cars begin to halt on the motorway bridge, drivers stepping out of their vehicles to stare. “Christ… Jesus fucking Christ… what the fuck happened, man? You want to tell me what the fuck just happened?”

Calum knew, deep inside, but he could not bring himself to admit it. Rather than answer, he shook his head, staring downwards. Because of this, he saw something break the surface of the river, something huge and grey, with scales, that vanished again almost immediately.

Stepping back, he looked across at the cyclist, whose knees were bleeding below his spandex shorts. Struck dumb by the anathema of the river and everything it contained, Calum ran from the bridge, not stopping until he was on the other side of the Exhibition Centre's car park, ignoring the staff and conference attendees pouring out to see this wonder for themselves. Word was spreading fast.

Calum sat on the pavement, and watched the crowds forming, unable to think clearly any more, uncertain whether clear thinking had a place in this strange new world. More than anything, he wanted to pray, but that privilege was denied him. God's ears were deaf to Calum Baskille, and whatever strength he would draw upon must come from elsewhere. The thought frightened him. Having taken strength from his devotions for so long, Calum realised he had almost lost the ability to be self-sufficient, to find that strength in himself. Shaking, he searched for some spark of fortitude to draw on, and found the well dry.

Do it
. Panic's voice, deep inside him.
Clasp your hands together and tell your God the truth of things. Give Him Ambrose. Be a shepherd again
.

He couldn't. Not yet. The realisation that he was dependent on the tenets of his faith to function, utterly enslaved to his Lord, caught in his throat and blocked the words that would give him access to his drug. Calum had to know he was a complete person before he could go back, had to know he was not simply using God to plug gaps in himself. Had he been this weak before he found Christ? To his shock, he couldn't remember.

Besides, to hand over Ambrose and Pandora from a safe distance would be cowardly. If he were to do this thing, he would do it in their presence, and make his apologies like a man as they were torn from this world and unmade.

The previous day, Calum had promised Ambrose he would fetch an item from the demon's old flat, a specific curio that Ambrose thought might hold an alternative to staying in the church. The river, and the thing in it, had changed nothing.
 

Climbing to his feet, shock running through him like cold water, he turned for the footbridge over the motorway, and the West End beyond. Crossing was like fighting the tide, as he pushed against thick crowds of people determined to get to the Clyde. When he reached the other side, he was bruised and exhausted. How many of these people would consider what they saw a religious sign? How many converts would the church win, from one river of blood? Too late, if his heart told him true. Much, much too late.

Despair slapped at him again, that all his good work was meaningless in the scheme of things, and he knew it was only a matter of time before he lost the battle and gave in to it entirely. Whether he would at that point take his own life and embrace the retributions awaiting him in the afterlife, or offer Ambrose and Pandora up as hostages to his own salvation, he simply did not know.

Melissa cowered behind a pile of debris, trying to ease the cramp out of her calves, barely able to keep herself awake. All night, Malachi had wandered the streets at random, as she tried to tail him unseen, mentally begging him to take a break and let her rest. She had been sure several times that he knew she was there, and she had lost count of the number of street corners she had approached in genuine fear, certain that he was waiting to ambush her on the other side. When he had taken a swift detour after finishing his business in the kiosk, she had been sure he was trying to lose her, and he had briefly succeeded. If she had not returned disconsolately to Byres Road she would never have spotted him emerging back onto the street a few hundred feet along from where he had left it.

When he had arrived at this ruin of a building, the despair on his face had told all she needed to know. This had been where Pandora lived, and the thought of somebody getting to her before he did was crushing to him. Melissa, by contrast, was gladdened. If Pandora was already destroyed, she would not be forced to betray this man, and her guilt would melt to nothing.

Glancing away for a moment, she had felt her heart lurch when she turned back to find him vanished, but then realised there was only one place for him to go. Malachi was inside the ruin. Whatever had compelled him to enter, she had to follow. If she missed some vital piece of information, she would not forgive herself.

Entering unnoticed was easy, for the sound of a struggle masked her movements. Making the most of it, she scurried behind the pile of bricks that concealed her now, where she had a clear line of sight through an empty doorway. As she hunkered down, the struggle ceased, and she saw her quarry standing over the slumped form of a wretched, skinny man, who looked as though he had not seen a bath in weeks. Malachi was shaking as he put his knife away. Not sure what had just happened, Melissa was extraordinarily relieved to see the blade was clean. Exposing herself for a second, she leaned out to see the injured man, and saw the blood around his nose and lips. If he had been hurt worse, she would have had no choice but to make herself known, and try to treat him.