Darkest Hour (Age of Misrule, Book 2) (33 page)

Shavi could barely tear his eyes away from those full lips, which moved sensually to make that foul sound. He could feel it rumbling in his stomach cavity, vibrating through his teeth, deep into his skull. He pressed his hands against his ears, but it made no difference.

Although the spectacle was hideously mesmerising, Shavi realised instinctively he ought to get out of there. Before he could move, the largest tremor of all opened a massive fissure in the floor. Chunks of stone dropped from the ceiling and Shavi threw up his arms to protect himself. When he next dared look, he realised a golden light was rising up slowly out of the fissure. The apprehension held him fast; he had to see what was coming.

Within seconds a hand protruded from the dark, and then slowly Maponus’s headless body hauled itself out of the hole. For a brief moment it staggered around as if it were learning to walk and then it moved to clamp its hands on the pillar. The remaining stone that held the head crumbled away. Its eyes ranged wildly; there seemed to be no intelligence there at all.

The thin, delicate fingers clutched until they caught on to the head. A second later it was placed firmly on the shoulders, the eyes still rolling. A sickly light eked out from between the head and the body as the two knitted together. And then Maponus stood erect and whole for the first time in centuries, slim and beautiful and golden and filled with all the terror of the void.

Shavi thought his eyes were about to be burned from his head at the wonder of what he saw. “Please,” he whispered. “Hear me.”

Maponus fixed his monstrous gaze upon Shavi. The eyes flickered coldly; Shavi saw nothing human in them at all. Slowly the god began to advance.

“In Edinburgh, the Fomorii await,” Shavi continued. His voice sounded like sandpaper. “We call on you to help us defeat the Cailleach Bheur. Defeat the Fomorii.”

Maponus listened, and then he smiled darkly.

Shavi sighed, relieved his message had been understood. But when he raised his eyes back to the glowing figure he saw Maponus was still advancing, his features frozen and murderous. The god stretched out his arms and golden sparks spattered between his hands. Shavi could taste the ozone on the back of his throat. One more step and he began to feel the temperature rise, the pressure build in his head. Deep inside, a part of him was trying to drive him out of there, but he was held in the stress of that dazzling regard. The hairs in his nostrils began to sizzle.

“No! If you have to take anyone, take me!” Somehow Marshall was there, trying to interpose himself between Shavi and the god. His face was scarlet with the blood from his wound, and with his staring, terrified eyes, in other circumstances, he would have cut a comical pantomime figure. But there, in the light coming off the creature, he looked like some tormented soul from a painting by Bosch. Despite his fear, he managed to raise his frail, trembling body until he could look Maponus in the eye. “Take me.” His voice was quiet, gentle. He stretched out his arms in a posture of sacrifice, not supplication.

Maponus clamped his hands on either side of Marshall’s head. In an instant Shavi could smell the sickening odour of cooking flesh. Marshall howled as the blood began to boil in his veins. Those sparks danced and sparkled all over the cleric’s twitching body, raising plumes of grey smoke.

The horrific sight broke the spell. Shavi rolled over and scrambled out of the chamber, throwing himself up the steps from the sacristy two at a time. Laura was waiting for him at the top, her face streaked with tears.

“That smell,” she choked.

He grabbed her and drove her towards the door. As they madly threw the pews away from the exit, the chapel began to shake wildly. Enormous chunks of masonry fell from somewhere above, and rifts opened in the walls and floor.

Laura glanced over her shoulder just once at the light gradually rising from the sacristy. “He’s coming!” she moaned.

The last pew was thrown aside just in time and then they were hurtling out into the chill, misty morning air. The Bone Inspector was waiting for them, his face showing all the horror that they felt in their hearts. With a deafening rumble, the chapel fell in on itself, shaking the ground like an earthquake.

The three of them were already at the perimeter wall, pulling themselves over to safety. Shavi paused on the summit to look back at the devastation, hoping against hope that the monstrous thing they had unleashed would be trapped under the rubble.

He was overcome by an awful sickness when all he saw was a golden light fading into the mist, moving out across the countryside.

he first sign that all was not as it should be hit Church twenty minutes after they had entered through the well-head. No longer stale, the air in the tunnel smelled of cinnamon and mint. And it almost seemed to be singing, harmonious melodies bouncing back and forth off the walls. “Is this the start of it?” he asked.

“`This is the best part of the trip.”’ Tom’s voice echoed curiously behind him.

“What?”

“Nothing. Just remembering the sixties.”

“This is no time to be getting nostalgic.” Church was tense with apprehension.

“If you’d enjoyed the sixties to the full you’d be a little mellower in dealing with everything life has to throw at you now.”

“Sorry. I was born too late for the summer of love.” There was a shush-boom effect deep in the stone walls, like a giant heart beating.

“You missed a great time. That smell, it reminds me of California nights, hanging out at Kesey’s parties when he and the Merry Pranksters set up shop after they did the Magic Bus ride. Jerry Garcia doing the music. Two kinds of punch-normal and electric. That was before the Hell’s Angels moved in and ruined it.”

“What are you talking about?” Church said distractedly. “You have done too many drugs, haven’t you.” He reached out to touch the tunnel wall; strange vibrations rippled up his fingers.

“You know, Kesey, Leary, all those psychonauts, they set things in motion that could have changed the world before the Establishment stamped it down. They believed the psychedelics could help them see God, did you know that? And by doing that they were just like all those people who threw up the great monolithic structures around the world where the earth energy is at its strongest. Before our feeble modern culture, psychedelics fired civilisation.”

“Are you saying all those hippies were right?” Church said distractedly.

“We all need to be neo-hippies if we’re going to cope with this new world that’s being presented to us, Jack.”

The note of tenderness in Tom’s voice surprised Church so much he looked around and was instantly disoriented. He appeared to be viewing Tom through a wall of oily water, the image stretched, skewed, distorted.

“Tom?” He reached out a hand, but his friend seemed to recede with the action until he appeared to be floating backwards along a dark corridor, growing smaller yet glowing brighter.

“It will be all right, jack.” Tom’s voice grew hollow, deep and loud, then faint, as if it were cycling between two speakers. Church blinked and Tom was gone.

Unable to understand what was happening, he was overcome by a sudden wave of panic. They had been walking along quite normally, and now he was alone; it made no sense.

Desperately, he clamped his eyes shut, focusing on Tom’s advice to be mellow, and then he remembered how Tom had warned him that space and time could warp that close to such a potent source of the earth energy. He composed himself with a deep breath, accepted that he was on his own, and forged on down the tunnel.

After following its undulating path for about fifteen minutes, lulled by the background harmonics of the air, he suddenly rounded a corner into a large cavern. He could tell it was enormous from the change in the quality of the sound of his breathing and footsteps, although the roof disappeared into the deep shadows above him. The danger of getting lost in such a place was a distinct possibility. He could follow the walls with their faint phosphorescent glow around the perimeter, but he instinctively felt the correct path was directly across the floor of the cavern, through the darkness that could hide treacherous fissures, sinkholes and pits. His fears were confirmed when he glanced down and noticed a carved rock set in the floor by his feet. It was well-made, polished and indented. It showed a dragon, its tail curling to form an arrowhead which pointed the way into the centre of the cavern. He hesitated for just a moment, then strode off into the shadows.

It seemed like he had been walking for hours, although he guessed it was only about fifteen minutes. In the enveloping dark the going was laboriously slow, feeling with each foot before taking another step. At times the visual deprivation was so hallucinatory he felt his head spinning and he had to fight to stop himself from pitching to the ground; in that warped atmosphere he was having trouble discerning what was happening in his head and what was external.

Without eyes, sound took on added meaning and he was alert to any aural change in his surroundings. When he first heard the distant, reverberating chingching-ching of metal on metal he froze instantly.

Listening intently, he held his breath as the noise grew louder until it was accompanied by the trudge of heavy footsteps. A faint light began to draw closer, which he at first thought was just his eyes playing tricks on him. Gradually, though, an enormous figure presented itself to him, but it seemed unreal, like an obvious movie effect, with the light buried deep within it and seeping out through its surface. As it came into focus he felt a sudden pang of fear. From the sickening waves that rolled off it, it was undoubtedly a Fomor, but it was encased in black, shiny armour; the chainmail that glinted darkly beneath the plates was making the metallic sound that had alerted him to its presence. The oddly shaped armour with its gnarls and ridges was like a carapace, making the figure resemble a giant insect; on the head was a helmet which concealed most of the hideous face, two curved horns reaching out from the temple with a row of six smaller ones beneath. It was gripping in both hands an unusual but cruel weapon with on one side a nicked and sickly smeared axe-head and on the other a line of sharp tines of irregular length. Church heard its breath rumbling like a traction engine, the vibrations churning in the pit of his stomach.

The figure was terrifying to see. Church had the sense it was more powerful than any of the Fomorii he had encountered before. And as it advanced, the threat around it grew until he felt queasy from the potency of the danger.

His shock at what he was witnessing finally broke and he took a couple of staggering backwards steps before turning and running. He hadn’t gone far when he stumbled over an outcropping rock and crashed down, winding himself. But as he glanced back to see how close the Fomor warrior was behind him, he saw the figure begin to break up into tiny particles, as if it were made out of flies. There was no sound, and a second later it had completely disappeared.

Church rolled on to his back, breathing heavily, trying to make sense of what had happened. He had felt the Fomor was definitely there, yet it didn’t seem to have been aware of him. Was it simply a hallucination or a by-product of the strange atmosphere that existed in that place?

As he climbed to his feet a more important concern pushed all those questions from his mind. In his attempt to get away he had done just as he had feared-lost his sense of direction. It was impossible to tell where he had been going. There was nothing for it. Despondently, he selected a path at random and set off.

The mesmerising darkness became claustrophobic. He was flying, he was falling. He was hearing voices singing from the void, fading, rising again in anger or despair. There was Marianne, his Marianne, saying, “So the real Dale is still in the Black Lodge?” He scrubbed at his ears and it went away.

To his right he saw a dim golden glow pulsating with the beat of the blood in his brain. As he drew near, figures separated from the light, all shining, all beautiful. He recognised faces he had seen when the Tuatha De Danann had swept to his rescue at the Fairy Bridge on Skye. Lugh stood, tall and proud, reunited with his spear, which he held at his side. And behind him was the Dagda, a starburst from which features coalesced, alternately ferocious and paternal, always different; his own father appeared there briefly. And there were others who seemed both benign and cruel at the same time; some were so alien to his vision it made his stomach churn. They were talking, but their communication was so high-pitched and incomprehensible it might as well have been the language of angels.

He almost stumbled among them, but they were oblivious to his presence. He had the sudden urge to lash out, a childish desire born of his own powerlessness, but he knew it would be futile, and so restrained himself, if he admitted it to himself, there was some fear there too.

But were they hallucinations? Or was the potent energy drawing him towards real moments plucked from the flow of time? As if to answer his unspoken question, Lugh pointed to an image which coalesced among them. It was Veitch, obvious despite the mask that covered his face, clutching a shotgun, his nervousness masked by anger. Church knew instantly what he was seeing: the moment when his friend had his life torn from him. Veitch waved the gun back and forth. In the background the building society was still, tense.