The Scarlet Gospels (19 page)

“Cover your face,” the Hell Priest said.

Felixson did as he was instructed and covered his face with his hands, but his curiosity had the better of him. He peered up between his fingers and watched as the spectacle continued to escalate. The smile had not left his master's face. Indeed it grew clearer, Felixson saw, as the Hell Priest lifted his arms into the pose of the triumphantly crucified. The response from the energies was instantaneous. They wrapped themselves around his arms and fingers.

Something was imminent, Felixson knew, and he couldn't bring himself to look away.

*   *   *

Harry looked back at Lana. “How close are we to your place?”

“Another mile or so. What the fuck is going on?”

“Good,” Harry said. Then he opened the door and got out of the car. “Everyone wait here. This can't be a coincidence.”

“Shouldn't we be—”

Harry silenced Caz's protests with a flick of the wrist, looked left, then right. The street was empty. The only other vehicles besides Caz's van had been abandoned and stripped of all but their paint. And not a single light was burning in any of the nearby houses. Despite the inhospitable atmosphere, none of Harry's tattoos were tingling. Either this was the real deal or it was one hell of a mirage.

Harry crossed the street and shouted at the diminutive man standing on its corner, “Hey! Dale! Are you lost or something?”

Dale looked up at Harry as though he hadn't even noticed the presence of another soul.

“Harry?” Dale asked. He stepped into the street, giving five percent of his attention to Harry and devoting the rest to taking in his surroundings.

“Hell of a thing, seeing you here,” Harry said.

“I just go where—”

“Your dreams tell you to. Right. I remember. And your dreams told you—”

“To stand in this exact spot, at this exact moment.”

“Did they tell you I'd be here?”

Dale smiled. “No. But it's a nice surprise,” he said, his voice full of honeyed sincerity.

“Sol and Bellmer didn't feel like coming?”

“Sol never comes along. And Miss Bellmer … well, she was found dead last night with her giant clit stuffed in her mouth. And it wasn't the clit they cut off.”

“So much for friends in high places.”

“Good riddance, I say.”

“Don't see me crying, do you? So, want to take a ride?”

“Oh. The van? No. I'm afraid that's not in the cards.”

“The wha—”

Harry stopped short. Every drop of ink on his skin suddenly unleashed a war cry, the sound of a thousand silent air-raid sirens all going off at once. It was like a kick in his belly. His breath went out of him, and he dropped to the ground, blind to everything but the din of his ink. Dimly he heard Caz yelling to him to, “Get up, get up; Norma says we've got to get out of here!” Then somehow Caz was kneeling beside him.

“Fuckin' A! Your fucking ink is having a primal scream,” he said.

Then, as suddenly as the sound had risen, it fell. Harry opened his eyes and his senses came back to him. He took everything in: Caz and Dale were staring down at him; Norma was listening to the wind.

“Everyone,” Harry said weakly, “meet Dale.”

“As in ‘Alan-a,'” Dale said. “Charmed.”

As everyone traded hellos, Harry took a deep breath and slowly got to his feet.

“He's a friend I met in New Orleans. He's good people, aren't you, Dale?”

“Easy there,” said Caz.

“I'm fine,” said Harry.

“Didn't look fine,” said Lana.

“I'm. Fine,” Harry said. “It just got very loud. Very fast.”

“It must be getting close,” said Dale.

“I guess. Whatever it was, it was big,” Harry said. “We should go now. Before it gets here.”

“Before what gets here?” Lana said.

Dale turned and answered her question.

“Hell.”

“Damn. There's going to be a breach point here,” Norma said. “Something in another pale wants access to this place and … I'll be damned.” Norma stopped short. “I just realized there aren't any ghosts here.” She half-turned and directed her face to the sky. Then, after a few seconds: “Not a one.”

“What's that noise?” Caz said.

It had suddenly begun all around them, not one sound but many. Harry turned to the spot, listening for the source.

“It's the houses,” Harry said.

Windows were rattling against their frames, locked doors vibrating as though they were about to tear themselves open. Loose tiles on the roofs were shaken free and slid down, smashing on the ground below, while from inside the houses came the noise of innumerable domestic objects dancing to the same summons. There was an escalating din of objects falling and smashing—crockery, bottles, lamps, mirrors—as though each house was being vandalized at the same time.

“Looks like we're in for a fight,” Caz said.

“God damn it,” Lana said. “Wrong place. Wrong time. Story of my fuckin' life.”

Caz reached beneath the driver's seat of his van and pulled out a piece of rolled carpeting. He laid it on the sidewalk and, crouching down, unrolled it, calling out to his friends as he did so.

“Anyone want in on this?”

Harry glanced at the selection of knives and other lethal tools that were laid out on the two-foot-long piece of threadbare carpet. The longest was a much-scratched machete (which Harry had had need of once before), and there was a selection of six other blades, the longest a substantial hunting knife, the smallest a knife Caz had been given on Valentine's Day by a butcher he'd once dated.

“No thanks. Too many bad memories. But give Norma a knife.”

Caz nodded and made a selection for Norma. Dale picked up the machete.

Still, the loosed energies on the streets took their fill on the houses, blowing some of the windows in and some out, as though there was something almost tidal about the rising powers. All at once, the streetlights went out and, despite Harry's earlier protestation, Caz put a knife into Harry's hand. Harry nodded in agreement.

“Your tattoos?” asked Caz.

“Berserk,” said Harry.

“Any ideas?”

“None I like.”

 

9

The entire wood was in a bewildering complex motion, the air around the Hell Priest a cosmos of mote-freighted paths, so elaborately intertwined that in places they formed knots through which the traffic of light fragments continued to flow. Shock waves spread from the spot in all directions, their force pressing the bright dust away from the epicenter, creating in the process an expanding sphere of steadily more concentrated matter.

“Get inside,” the Hell Priest said to Felixson, who had retreated into the softened thicket as a safe place from which to watch the events unfold.

He trusted his master and immediately did as he was instructed, moving out of the thicket. Still crouched over, he stepped through the wall of flaming brush. It was quick, but it wasn't pleasant. The hair on his head and body was instantly seared off. The clothes he had made himself in a pitiful attempt at propriety burned to gray ash in a second, adding fire to cleanse his groin. He now looked like a child down there, he thought, his manhood reduced to a nub, his balls tight against his body. But he was safe inside the still-expanding sphere, and close to his master.

Then the Hell Priest quickly scrawled something upon the air, leaving a few black characters in front of him. “I'm unlocking the restraints I put on your memory.”

“Re … traints?”

“Of course. Without them, you would have gone mad long ago. But I have need of your assistance. There. A small part of what you knew has been restored. Use it sparingly, and in my service, and I will reward you with more, by increments.”

A few narrow doors had suddenly opened in Felixson's head, each one a book, its contents a piece of his power. The knowledge brought with it a tiny piece of his history and he was suddenly mortified at his state: a freakish, prostrate gibberer, his hairless groin and inadequate genitals humiliating. He would cover himself as soon as he had an opportunity. But for now he put the problem of his metaphorical and literal nakedness aside and returned his attentions to his master.

“The gift is most welcome, Master,” he said, finding that the power to form a coherent sentence had also been restored. Whether it was on purpose or an unintended side effect of his master's working, Felixson knew not, but he knew enough not to question it.

“Remember that,” said the Hell Priest.

“Of course. Your generosity—”

“Not the gift, Felixson.
Master
. Remember my name. Forget it for an instant and I'll wipe you clean. You won't even remember to crouch when you shit.”

“Yes, Master.”

As he trembled, his mind filled with doors opening and closing in howling winds that had sprung up from compass points he could not even name, and in those winds came words and phrases arbitrarily loosed from the remembered pages.

The place where he had stepped into the blazing thicket was becoming brighter by orders of magnitude. So bright indeed that Felixson had to avert his eyes and, shielding his face with his right hand, he studied what he could see at this oblique angle. The Hell Priest wasn't smiling now; Felixson was fairly certain of that. Indeed there were signs suggesting that even the Hell Priest was taken aback by the scale of this eruption.

“Watch,” the Cenobite had said,
“
every detail.” And then the remark from which Felixson had taken the greatest comfort: “The future will want to know.”

How much better might the Hell Priest be persuaded to treat him now that he wasn't simply a naked runt of a man but had witnessed a part of his master's journey toward apotheosis? Nor was it just any part; it was the beginning he'd witnessed, the purging of the old, the piercing of his flesh, and the striking of a spark that was going to blossom, if he judged the Priest's nature and ambition correctly, into the conflagrations that would change the shape of history forever.

Felixson's speculations ceased there. The Hell Priest was walking toward the ignited air, and Felixson followed step for step. The brightness divided around them, but not without leaving traces of its energies that, as they advanced, broke against their faces.

The effect upon Felixson was not unlike that of his first snort of very pure cocaine—the heart quickening, the skin suddenly hot, the senses more alert. The sudden rush of confidence was there too, and it made Felixson want to pick up the pace of their advance, eager to see what, or who, lay on the other side of this bright passage.

Felixson saw a sliver of that other place now: specifically, a dark street, by night, with some figures retreating from the spot where he and his master were emerging. Felixson was disappointed. This wasn't the way he'd expected it to be, not at all.

They were almost at the end of their passage now: two more steps and the Hell Priest was standing on asphalt—another two and Felixson had joined him. This was the place where Felixson had done his time wearing the mask of a magic man—Earth—and memories flooded him. It wasn't the sight of the street and the dark houses that pricked Felixson's memory most deeply, however; it was the smell of the city air and of the sidewalks. A feeling of intense loss overwhelmed him for a moment as he thought of his once-charmed life—of love, and magic, and friends, all of it, and all of them, dead.

If he hadn't quickly governed himself, tears would have blinded him and this outward display of weakness on this of all occasions would have been the end of him. His punishment, he knew, would be severe in contrast to the already-limitless acts of unspeakable butchery that could be found in his master's grimoire.

It was difficult after the blaze of the passage and the onslaught of familiar, unwanted recollections to make much more than rudimentary sense of the scene into which he and his master had stepped: lightless street, lightless houses, lightless sky, and some figures, visible only because they were illuminated by the wash of brightness from the fire-framed door through which he and his master had emerged.

A young woman caught his eye first, her loveliness a welcome respite from the innumerable forms of ugliness that existed in the place he had just left behind. But there was nothing welcoming on her face. Her gaze was fixed on the Cenobite, of course, and while she watched him her lips moved, though he could not catch a word of what she was saying.

“D'Amour!” the Hell Priest called, his voice, though never loud, easily heard.

Felixson turned, startled by his master's words. They had come back to Earth for the detective. They had come back, Felixson assumed, to finish what they'd started in New Orleans.

Felixson, naked as the day he was born, searched the musk for the man his master was summoning. There was a short man who wielded a machete and a bemused look. Next to him was a tall, broken-nosed fellow who seemed to be protecting a blind black woman. Like the younger woman, there was no hint of welcome in her expression; she had curses on her lips, no doubt of that.

And then, from the darkness off to their left, much closer to the doorway than any of the others, walked a man with a face that showed the marks of a life lived hard. Felixson had only a moment to scan the man's scars, because the man's eyes demanded his attention and they would not be denied. He seemed to look at both the Hell Priest and Felixson at the same time.

“Nobody touched your goddamned box,” D'Amour said. “You shouldn't be here.”

“I no longer have need for the box and its games,” the Hell Priest said. “I have begun my sublime labor.”

“What in fuck's fuck are you talking about?” said Harry, tightening his grip on the knife Caz had given him.

“I have brought an end to my Order, so as to begin an endeavor I have been planning for most of your life. A life, it would seem, that refuses to be snuffed out. You have survived that which no man ought. I have given great thought to the choice of eyes that should witness the birth of the new world. I have need for a mind that will preserve the events that are to unfold from this moment on. I have chosen you, Harry D'Amour.”