The Day Before Tomorrow (12 page)

When Peirce came and reported to him that Satan was now ejected Askphrit gave a satisfied sigh.  He had done it – stage one complete.  He laughed.  ‘Good, good,’ he said.  ‘Let him “walk the Earth” for a while, the rest will do him good.’ 

He left the celebrations in full swing, and stalked into the palace, taking Peirce with him.  It would, he thought, need extensive renovations to make it fitting for his new status as the ruler of the world.  But he must not get ahead of himself.  First, there were things to take care of. 

He turned to Peirce.  ‘Send for the Fates,’ he said settling into what was now, after all,
his
throne.  ‘And bring me a cup of tea.’

* * *

Up on the thirteenth floor, the news was out.  Satan had been overthrown, now was the time that had been foreseen from the beginning (they had been overseeing the human world for so long now that they were even beginning to talk like them). The time was at hand (see what I mean?)  Anyway, it was the first step.  It was time for the program to begin its final run.  Time to set up the Apocalypse program. 

‘What
already
?’ said Matlus who had been promoted recently – well about thirteen hundred years ago. 

‘Yes,’ said a senior programmer, name of Dylosius.  ‘’Tis a bit sooner than we expected, but these things are not always quantifiable, not when you are dealing with –
people
.’  He gave this word all the contempt he was capable of, and that was a lot.  ‘Anyway, it’s right enough.  I expect the program just ran a bit faster in places than we expected.  Besides, you have to remember, we did edit out a large chunk of the mythological age.’

‘I suppose,’ said Matlus doubtfully.  ‘That shouldn’t have made a difference to the time up here,’ he thought.  But he decided it would be wiser to say nothing.  After all, he was new.  And these guys ought to know what they were doing. 

That had been a year ago – in human terms – and still no Apocalypse.  Matlus was smug. He had been right, in some indefinable way, it was too soon.  (He was, by the way, dead wrong about this)  He wondered if he ought to mention his doubts about the wisdom of their editing of the mythological age, in the face of what had happened to the box.  (He may have had a point about this) but he refrained from making this observation on the basis that in this job, as in so many others, “he who points out the problem, invariably get the blame”.  But the possibility remained that the box itself, being a part of the mythological age, may well have been lost somewhere in the deleted files of mythology. 

~ Chapter Eighteen ~

C
indy watched Stiles and Hecaté. There was a definite “vibe” (as it was sometimes called) that said to her “married” –  with a dash of confusion on his part.  But there are many married men who appear confused about how they ended up that way. 

Cindy turned her attention to Jamie, giving him an inviting smile; she was rewarded with a confused grin. 

The “gang” had split up.  Hecaté had left unobtrusively and Tamar, Denny and Stiles had formed the nuclei of the group, leaving Cindy and Jamie on the fringes, listening.  They were talking intently together, explaining everything that had happened to them. 

Denny told them about the Athame and Tamar told of the underground vampires.  Stiles told them about the house and the Hall of Idols. 

‘Well,’ said Tamar eventually, ‘at least we can all agree that we probably all know each other.  We just don’t know that we know each other.’  She tried this sentence in her head.  ‘Well, you know what I mean,’ she added. 

‘Except me,’ interrupted Jamie.  ‘I’m damn sure that I don’t know
any
of you.  I’m not a part of this.’ 

‘You’re a part of it now,’ Denny told him. 

‘Yes but,’ said Cindy, ‘a part of what?  Does anybody have the least idea about what’s going on?’

‘Where’s Hecaté?’ asked Tamar.

‘She’s not going to tell us any more,’ said Cindy. 

‘I didn’t mean that,’ lied Tamar, reluctantly realising that this was true. 

‘I think we’re stuck, personally,’ said Stiles.  ‘I mean look, we can’t remember who we are until the world changes back, and we won’t know how to change the world back until we remember who we are.’ 

‘I can remember
some
things,’ said Denny. 

‘Me too,’ said Tamar.

‘And so can I,’ said Stiles, but it’s not enough.  ‘Take Tamar, was she a Djinn or not?  Was it because of her that the world has been changed?  Or was it because of one of the other of us?  Or
all
of us?  If it was someone else, do we
know
who did this, but we just can’t remember? Surely, whoever this was aimed at can’t have made such a powerful enemy without knowing it.  I think we probably all know who did this, or we would if we could just remember it.  And we probably have a good idea why, too.  Or we should.’

‘We thought it might have been the Fates,’ said Tamar, who was impressed at Stiles’ neat summary of their situation. 

‘Okay,’ said Stiles, ‘but does any of us know how we can find out?  Can any of us say how we can go and ask them?’

‘
Ask
them?’ gasped Cindy. 

‘Sure, it’s called interrogating the suspect, or suspects as the case may be.’

‘I wouldn’t know where to begin,’ said Tamar gloomily. 

‘Exactly,’ said Stiles.

‘Maybe the answer is in one of those books of yours,’ said Tamar to Denny.

‘What books?’

‘Ah.’

‘The Fates are part of the Underworld,’ volunteered Cindy.  ‘But the only way down there is to die.’

‘Any volunteers?’ said Denny with an evil grin.

‘Ah,’ said Tamar, who was beginning to catch on to Stiles way of thinking.  ‘There probably is another way. We just can’t remember it.’

‘Right,’ agreed Stiles.  ‘Only …’

‘What?’ they all said in unison.  Even Jamie leaned over to listen.  ‘Well, I’m not good at thinking laterally,’ began Stiles, uncertainly, ‘except where criminals are concerned.  But it seems to me, that maybe we’re being a bit too literal, I tend to think in straight lines.  A follows B leading to C.  But there’s nothing straight about all this, is there?  We need to think in loops, d’ya see?’ 

The blank expressions told him that they, did not, in fact, see.

Stiles cleared his throat.  ‘Okay, I’m not good at this, so bear with me.  What if we had already found the Fates in the Underworld or wherever, how would we have done that?’ 

‘By dying,’ said Jamie.  There was laughter. 

‘Okay,’ said Stiles carefully when their laughter died away.  ‘Or?’

There was silence. 

‘So, we’re in the underworld, and we’re not dead, how did we get here?’

‘Ooh, I know,’ said Cindy.  ‘The river Styx, like Hercules.’

‘Oh yes,’ said Denny, ‘And how did we find
that
?’ 

‘Um.’

‘Okay,’ said Stiles, realising this line of enquiry was petering out.  ‘How about this?  The Fates, right, how did we bring them to us?’

‘We haven’t,’ said Denny, puzzled. 

‘Shut up,’ said Tamar. ‘I see what he means. He means if we
had
, how would we have done that?  But go back a bit.  How did we discover that the Fates were responsible for this mess?’

‘Now you’re getting it,’ Stiles nodded approvingly. 

‘By a process of elimination,’ said Tamar. ‘And now … if we’re sure that it
was
them, how do we …?  Wait, I lost it.’ 

There was a collective groan from everyone except Stiles.  ‘Just keep following your thought through,’ he said encouragingly.

‘No, it’s all wrong,’ she said.  ‘It’s like, okay, we keep saying that we’re not who we think we are, but we are.  This world is just as real as the other one.  They’re both real now.  Running side by side maybe, I don’t know.  But we know that the other world is still there, because we can remember bits of it.  And I even think I saw it once.’  

‘I did too,’ said Denny excitedly.

‘Right. And sometimes I feel – different.  So, if the other world is still there, how do we get to it?’ 

‘Through the back of a wardrobe?’ said Denny. 

‘Very funny.’

‘Look,’ said Cindy, wearily.  ‘It’s a spell. There aren’t
two
worlds, just two versions of the
same
world, in our heads.  The Fates will have changed history at some crucial point and then altered our memories to fit in with it, so that our lives were totally different from that point on.  Why, only the gods know, and they’re not telling.  And we have no idea when it happened either, not that it matters.  But the problem is in our
heads
.  Tamar was right about one thing.  This is the real world. We can’t change that.  But our memories, I don’t know, maybe we can get them back somehow.’

‘How?’ said Tamar.

Cindy shrugged.  ‘Break the spell,’ she said. 

Tamar thought of what Stiles had told them about the Hall of Idols.  ‘What would happen, do you think, if the Fates no longer existed?’ she asked. 

~ Chapter Nineteen ~

T
here was a feeling of timelessness in the hall, which was not altogether surprising, since it was one of those places where time does not exist.  Tamar had had this thought in the back of her mind ever since Stiles had described it to them. 

‘It felt like it had been there forever.’ He had said.  ‘But it also felt like it had only just sprung into existence when I walked in.  Like it had been waiting, just for me to arrive, before it became real.’ 

Tamar had already got her head around the idea of there being no time on the astral plane, as Cindy had explained it to her.  And she had theorised in her head that this was, no doubt, how the house had moved continents apparently overnight, because it existed on the astral plane, or at least, the inside of it did.  This had seemed important to her at the time, but she had not known why.’

Now, as they stood in the hall, courtesy of Denny and the Athame, she realised why. 

From here the gods had been destroyed – deleted might be a better word – so that they had never existed at all.  This was entirely possible in a place, which existed at all times and at none.

The gods never really existed – everybody agrees on that.  The stories about the gods still exist, but the gods themselves were never real.  At least not anymore. 

A god, or any anthropomorphic personification can only exist as a product of belief, and it needs to be seen, if only in people’s minds, to be believed.  Therefore, every deity and other unreal form of life needs an image.  For that is all they really are – an image.  And the Hall of Idols is where the image is held. A place without time or space, except the space in people’s heads.  The gods that had been reduced to dust, had now, never existed at all.  It was Stiles, who had first put this idea into her head. 

He had said: ‘I knew that Zeus and all that lot weren’t real, but I knew that Hecaté
was
because I’d
seen
her.  But why had their statues been hammered to bits?’

 Who knew which way round it had happened?  Had the belief faded and the images crumbled because of that?  Or had the images been destroyed first?  Cause and effect – effect and cause.  In this place, Tamar did not think it actually mattered. 

‘Because,’ as she finished explaining, ‘it works either way.  Without their images, they will never have existed.  And all the things they have done will never have happened.’  

She turned to Stiles.  ‘Where is the statue of the Fates?’ she asked. 

As it turned out, destroying the statue was not as easy as just hitting it with a hammer.  They even tried explosives, which Denny had “popped out”, as it were, to get.  But the statue remained intact.  Only Jamie, who had not quite followed all of Tamar’s reasoning, was uneasy about the situation, saying that it was either property damage or murder they were committing, and he was not happy about either. 

‘
Attempting
to commit,’ corrected Tamar grumpily.  It just wasn’t fair.  She had reasoned it all out so beautifully and now, they couldn’t do anything about it.  The damn thing did not have so much as a scratch. 

‘Maybe it only works the other way around after all,’ said Denny, taking out the Athame and dangling it idly from his fingers. 

Tamar’s eyes followed the gleaming blade, back and forth, back and forth.  Denny looked down at his hand and then at Tamar.  Their eyes met; Denny nodded and flung the Athame – a blade so sharp it can cut through dimensional space – straight at the heart of the middle Fate.  There was a thin, high scream from somewhere, and the statue crumbled. 

‘One down.’  This was Tamar. 

As the last high-pitched wail died away, the world rocked on its axis and then began to fall away from them. 

Only Jamie was unaffected.  He watched in bewilderment as they all fell onto their knees.  To them, everything was spinning. They had all been having this feeling recently, but in smaller doses, one memory at a time as it were.  Now they were under deluge.   

Then, just as suddenly, the world returned to normal and stood still like a good world should.  Feeling sick and dizzy, they stumbled to their feet and met each other’s eyes and knew.

Tamar looked at Denny. ‘Askphrit,’ she said.  Her fists were clenched, her face white with rage. 

Denny nodded. ‘He’s gone too far this time,’ he said. 

‘He
always
goes too far,’ said Stiles.  ‘Remember when he killed me?’

‘I remember everything,’ said Tamar grimly.  ‘And I do mean everything.’

They all did. 

‘Which memories are real?’ said Cindy.

Tamar manifested a spoon.  ‘Everyone’s except mine,’ she said.  ‘I’m the only one whose memory was actually tampered with.  Because it had to be.  I see it now. The rest of you just led different lives from the point history was changed.  But, before that point, my memory
had
to be changed, because I’ve been around for so long.  I became a Djinn over 5000 years ago.  But I wasn’t able to remember that.’