Thy Fearful Symmetry (14 page)

Something in his own body must have changed, because the stranger glanced briefly at the door behind him. “Oh,” he said, as though he had only just heard her himself. “That. Sorry. I meant to fix that.”
 

The man whipped the golfing iron in a wide, whistling arc that cracked Calum's temple, sending lightning streaks across his vision that were quickly followed by blood-black darkness.

Melissa watched the fourth shadow in as many hours shred as Malachi emptied the bottle at it with one hand, tightening his grip on her forearm with the other hard enough to make her cry out. Her yell did nothing to loosen his hold, and her dismay deepened as he threw the now empty bottle aside. Against the wall of the alley, the demon-thing writhed and vanished, leaving them alone in the gloom.

“Do you… do you have more of that,” she asked, and her heart sank as he gave a contemptuous shake of his head. Not having the courage to ask anything more, she let him drag her back into the street. Daylight kept the creatures away, but every time Malachi dragged her somewhere secluded to question her, the shadows took form and attacked. With throngs of people on the street, he had avoided quizzing her there. Melissa didn't know whether to be glad or terrified. They couldn't stay in the open forever, and her instincts were screaming at her to get somewhere safe before nightfall. Having the shadows attack you was one thing, but what if the whole of night could coalesce into an army of monsters?
 

In the search for somewhere secure to interrogate her, Malachi had pulled her roughly across the West End, back and forth, and she understood now why he had spent so long wandering the previous night. If she didn't know better she would have said he had grown up on these streets.
 

The park they were going into now brought back memories of scaling the black iron gates that had been closed overnight, stumbling, frightened, in pursuit of Malachi's determined shadow. In the daylight the park was open and airy, full of wide curving paths cut into slopes rising up from the icy river, the University squatting on the left, expensive Nineteenth Century tenement flats cresting the steep slopes on the right. She tried to remember the parks on the map she had studied. Was this Kelvingrove? Bellahoustan? The Botanic Gardens? Whichever one it was, it felt like walking through a scaled down, landscaped river valley in the middle of the city.

Even here, the crowds gathered, and for the first time she saw exactly what had drawn them out.
 

It was as she had foreseen.
 

Malachi moved with such implicit menace that the crowd parted at his approach, herd animals shuffling clear of the predator in their midst. Before them, a cultivated moat surrounded a tiny island, fed by the river she could hear bubbling below her . The first thing to strike her was not the deep red of the water, but the ducks sitting on the shore of the island. Bewildered and confused, they huddled in a small group, casting suspicious looks at the treacherous moat. Melissa was no ornithologist, and broke the ducks into two groups. The brown ones looked as though they had been in an oil spill, their feathers tangled and wretched, and it was the way they were drying to a crust that convinced her that the black stains were blood. The white ones confirmed this, and the red staining their breasts made them look as though a fox had been at them during the night.

Malachi dragged her off the path into a playground. The few children present clung to the legs of their parents, for once not worrying about their independence. Adults chatted and gossiped as though rivers running with blood were a curiosity rather than an omen of doom. Individual conversations were hushed, but as they strode through the crowd the effect of so much muted chatter was like the rumble of distant thunder. Occasionally, somebody glanced up from their huddled state of awe for long enough to notice the tall, dark stranger dragging the exhausted woman among them. Some even looked as though they might step forward, ask him what he was doing and why she looked so scared, but they always thought twice. Melissa was glad. After Malachi had left Stewart Argyle in the ruins with the shadows, she no longer believed he cared for anything but his quest. In her imagination, she heard Argyle scream, heard wet, crunching noises as he died. In reality, there had been only silence behind them as they fled, but her imagination was rapidly blending truth and fiction so that she was no longer quite certain of which was which.

Tired as she was, so weighted with the need to sleep that the scene around her felt like a bizarre stop-motion animation, she didn't realise Malachi had ceased moving until she lurched into his back, barely making him flinch. They were standing in front of a bench, wooden slats on a Victorian frame, green paint flaking from the metalwork. The varnish had long ago been stripped by the Glasgow weather, leaving unprotected wood to be monikered by kids declaring love forever or sketching obscenities. Three students sat there, talking animatedly to each other until Malachi loomed over them.

“Move,” he said, and they didn't argue, grabbing their bags and leaving rather than debating the point with this spectre of death. With the one hand that had continuously gripped her arm, cutting off the blood and making her fingers tingle, he swung her round and dropped her on the bench. They were in broad, pallid daylight. The nearest shadows, web shapes made by the bare branches of trees and the hard lines of garishly coloured plastic playground equipment, were too fragmented to allow a shadow-thing to appear. There were witnesses by the dozen, but she knew that not one of them was going to get involved. She might as well be trapped alone with him back in the ruined tenement.

Malachi crouched before her, saw in her eyes that she understood her situation, and nodded. “I don't want you hurt,” he said, but knowing the difference between what he wanted and what he would do stamped the fingers of what little hope was trying to cling on inside her. “There are things you know that you shouldn't. You're involved in something, same as me, and I want to know why. Give me answers. Now.”
 

Looking into his lean, strong face, she wondered how her feelings about him could be so confused. Love? Infatuation? Whichever it was remained powerful, despite what she had seen him do to Argyle. Were her desires actually fuelled by those acts? Did his single-minded determination to avenge the woman he loved cast him as the perfect tragic hero? If that was the case, she was disgusted at her judgement.
 

Against the backdrop of the crowded park, the thunder-rumble of conversation, it felt ridiculous to be weighing the matter up, and she blinked the thought away.
I'm with a brutal man, who will get what he wants in the most efficient way. Remember that, worry about everything else later.

Taking a breath, finding no sympathy in his face, no help in the eyes of the strangers beyond him, she realised she might be about to die. “I know what happened to Stacey,” she began, her words quiet, but blunt.
 

Malachi nodded.
 

“I know you've been preparing for this for a long time, and how important it is to you. I understand why. I see her every day, Mr Jones. More than you do.” Creases of guilt washed briefly over his face and were gone. “Believe me, I understand why you're here.” There was a certain relief in being able to confess like this, in having the choice taken away from her, but she knew she couldn't tell him everything. Malachi Jones had a mission to complete, and the truth might distract him. “I know it's important that you destroy this Pandora. More important than you think. You see the blood in the water? That's the first sign of many, and then the world ends. Pandora's brought it all forward. Everything's confused.” Malachi was expressionless. If anything was going to cause his single-minded determination to falter, her next statement was going to do it.
 

“There are powers who want you to destroy her, because that will stop the world ending. You can stop Judgement Day. I want you to save the world.”

Malachi blinked. That was all.
 

The silence between them shut the rest of the world out as he waited for her to go on.
 

Melissa tried not to cry.
 

“I can't tell you how I know.” In the background, she heard the ducks quack their blood-soaked misery at each other, and she knew how they felt.

“Please don't kill me,” she finished, and tried to find some reason to hope in his inscrutable eyes.
 

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Ambrose parted the blinds in Calum's office with his fingers, and did a quick head count. Maybe ninety people, suddenly devout, were milling around the churchyard. Some were looking for an open door into the nave, but most seemed happy just to be close to a church. Stepping back, Ambrose wondered how many people Calum saw at an average service. Twenty? Thirty, if he was lucky.
 

Nothing like the end of the world to bring an epidemic of piety over humankind. It was frustrating, knowing that those who fled to church in times like these were the most likely to be concerned about their guilts and sins. Perfect fodder for his sort. There was a great deal he was going to have to get used to, now that he was a reformed character. Had it been as difficult as this to switch from saint to sinner, after the Great Fall?
 

He couldn't remember.
 

Ambrose noticed the blur where his fingers touched the blinds. The effect was quickening. Earlier, it had spread slowly, but the marks he had just left were already bloating up the slat of the blind. It was impossible to look at the floor without getting a headache – it was a solid blur. Demons and angels didn't develop eyesight problems, but Ambrose thought this might be how some people viewed the world when they took off their glasses. Whatever it was, he now considered it a secondary problem. Pandora and he were unaffected by it, so he wasn't going to worry while there were other things happening.

Like the Apocalypse.
 

Except it couldn't possibly be the Apocalypse. The Apocalypse wasn't due for millennia. It was all mapped out, to the last detail.

As soon as Ambrose had seen the people in the street, heard the first few would-be devotees knocking on the locked doors to the hall and the nave, he had switched the television on and seen the rivers of blood flow. The Great Ending was in process, no question. It just wasn't happening right. It shouldn't be now, and it shouldn't be this way. The Book of Revelation was largely accurate, if clumsily recorded, and the sequence of events was very specifically designed to play out over decades. The rivers of the world should not spontaneously flow with blood, just like that. God was a stickler for detail. Events were being rushed through, and Ambrose had no idea why. It made him nervous, for many reasons. What was the point of fighting for Pandora, if they had no time left to be together?
 

As he wandered out of the office, wracking his brain for a way to get better information, he drew up short at the door to Pandora's room. Rather, he was stopped in his tracks by its absence. The frame stood empty, the hinges beginning to lose clarity as the blurring spread over them like a rash. Ambrose swallowed, understanding more than he had.

Unmade. The door was not destroyed, it was unmade. Everything he touched was coming apart.

Perhaps he was more responsible for the imminent end of the world than he had thought.

Ambrose had no time to ruminate further. Downstairs, a pane of glass cracked. It was probably one of the crowd, frustrated at being kept apart from their God, taking matters into their own hands. On the other hand, the crowd would be the perfect cover for somebody with more malign intentions to get close.
 

Moving in utter silence, Ambrose ran along the gloomy corridor. At the top of the stairs, he glanced over the railing to check nobody was waiting for him. The ground floor passage was empty, and he vaulted over the rail, landing so easily on the stone flagstones below that he barely stirred dust. Stepping back into the shadow of the stairwell, he listened.
 

On his right was the annexe, and to his left the nave. For several long seconds, he waited, his eyes closed and his body wound tight and ready. It couldn't be a demon, not on consecrated ground. An angel would simply appear in the church, with little need for the breaking of glass. Whoever was with them in the building, if they had entered at all, was human, so probably harmless. More worrying was who might have sent the intruder. Heaven and Hell both claimed human servitors aplenty, and all it would take was a moment for somebody to send a message and render this hiding place worthless.

There, on the right, a muffled cough, with shuffling footsteps heading his way. Ambrose could smell meaty, nervous sweat on the air. With a second to decide how to proceed, he chose to bluff it out. Why change the habit of an eternity? Fingering the dog collar he had taken to wearing whenever Calum left, a single white strip providing as much disguise as he needed, he stepped forward and pulled open the door of the hall.

The look of honest fright on the man's face was all Ambrose needed to tell him this was no spy. “What are you doing here?” he demanded, his expression far fiercer than he felt. “We don't have any money, if that's what you’re looking for.” The last he spat out with contempt, and was pleased with the righteous indignation underwriting the words.

“I… sorry Father… I…” The intruder was a large man, sweating heavily beneath his unfortunate tracksuit.
 

“You apologise as though it was an accident. Is that what I'm expected to tell the police? You accidentally put a brick through God’s window? You inadvertently fell all the way inside?”

“No Father, it isn't like that, I…” By the mounting panic layering his nasal Glasgow accent, this was a good Catholic boy, advertised further by the hint of a green Celtic football shirt beneath the tracksuit top. Ambrose had never quite understood how religion and football had merged into one in this city, but the violence and bigotry that supporters of Celtic and their protestant opposition Rangers displayed to one another was a demon's wet dream. “I… eh… is Father Baskille about?”