Entangled (42 page)

‘So would it be right to say that evil is a negative force that wants to make things less than they might be?’

‘Yes. It’s that. And it’s doing bad, hurtful things to others intentionally. It’s taking pleasure from their pain. And – oh, I don’t know – so much else.’

‘A wide spectrum of horror and unpleasantness, in other words? Of kinds that are commonplace on Earth?’

‘Yes, I guess so,’ Leoni conceded.

‘Hence the so-called problem of evil. Human philosophers deploy the existence of evil as an argument against the existence of God – or, anyway, of an all-powerful and all-good God. You know, either God wants to abolish evil and can’t, in which case he’s impotent, or he can but doesn’t want to, in which case he’s evil himself.’

‘Neat contradiction.’

‘But an irrelevance, like much of what passes for thought amongst humans, because from no world is it possible to banish evil entirely and there exists no benign, all-powerful “god” to do away with it. Rather, in all realms, from the most material to the most ethereal, spiritual powers and principalities are at work, and while some serve the good and seek to spread its light, others magnify evil and seek to become rulers of darkness.’

‘So it’s a sort of contest …’

‘ … Between spiritual goodness and spiritual wickedness, for the souls of all sentient beings. It has continued since the dimension of time took form. In many worlds good and evil coexist in roughly equal measure. In some worlds good is greatly in the ascendant, and in some worlds it is evil that prevails.’

‘And you’re one of those who serves the good?’ Leoni asked.

‘Have you ever doubted it?’

‘Never! You can be scary, but I’ve always known you’re good through and through. Just like I know Jack is evil – whatever he calls himself. That’s what you wanted me to understand, right, when you showed me Sulpa? That in some sort of schizo way he’s also Jack? He was murdering children – butchering them with a black sword. It was horrendous.’

‘You had to see it so you would know the true nature of the creature we confront. The foul sacrifices Sulpa demands, the blood he drinks and bathes in, the fear and suffering he evokes, the joy his followers take in pain – all these things are consecrated to a terrible purpose.’

‘You know that he followed me back,’ Leoni interrupted. ‘He possessed the body of a young woman and when he spoke through her mouth he wasn’t Sulpa any more. He was Jack. I’d have been dead on the floor if you hadn’t sent Matt to save me.’

‘I regret it came so close. I had failed to anticipate how fast Sulpa’s power has grown. Already he casts his spirit far ahead, contaminating and corrupting all in his path. The sacrament that will allow him to pass through in bodily form nears completion …’

‘Pass through in bodily form – what do you mean?’

The Angel didn’t seem to hear Leoni: ‘One final gigantic act of wickedness remains to be performed, one more colossal holocaust of the innocent, and all hope of stopping him will be lost.’ That unreadable expression – was it grief? – once again troubled the eerie beauty of her face, and she fell silent.

‘If he can’t be stopped,’ Leoni prompted, ‘if he … passes through in bodily form. What will he do?’

‘He will wrench the last shoots of goodness from the Earth,’ the Angel replied, her voice so quiet it was almost a whisper. ‘It will become a hellworld, for ever beyond salvation. I cannot allow that to happen, Leoni – but neither can I prevent it without your help.’

‘You need
my
help?’ Leoni was amazed the Blue Angel had suggested such a thing. ‘But you’re a supernatural being. How could I possibly help you?’

‘Look around,’ said the Angel. ‘What do you see?’

Their deckchairs were positioned a few feet back from heavy gold railings that guarded the edge of the balcony. Leoni stood and walked to the railings, placed her hands on the top bar, and gingerly peered over the edge.

‘WOW!’ she exclaimed.

She’d known they were high up from her first views through the windows of the white room behind them. But now she saw the room occupied the top of a dizzyingly tall cylindrical tower, mounted on the apex of a gigantic silver pyramid marking the geometrical centre of the Angel’s city. The pyramid’s square base, as big as six Manhattan blocks, was encircled by a broad canal filled with glistening silver liquid. Arranged in concentric rings around it, separated by gardens and parklands, alternating with zones of elaborate and extravagant architecture, were four further huge canals, respectively of crimson, blue, green and gold, spanned by soaring bridges that hung in the air without visible support. The outermost canal was ringed by a wall of some beautiful copper-coloured metal hundreds of feet high and dozens of feet thick.

Sensing a trick in the Angel’s question, Leoni took her time looking around.

Scattered across all the architectural zones were stupendous ziggurats of white crystal arranged in groups of four around rectangular plazas, and giant chateaux of blue crystal embellished with Gothic spires and turrets. There were edifices that might have been cathedrals or temples or mosques of emerald and garnet surmounted by domes and needle-thin minarets capped with gold. There were immense arches and flying buttresses, forests of skyscrapers fashioned entirely from glass
with no stone or metal visible, and wide elevated thoroughfares connecting all the zones. Most imposing of all were perhaps a hundred obelisks, each as tall as the Empire State Building, seemingly carved from single immense blocks of jade and positioned to form the outline of a giant five-pointed star encompassing the entire circular city.

As though responding to Leoni’s attention the obelisks began to glow and discharge bright flashes of lightning straight up into the clear and cloudless sky.

‘What do you see?’ the Angel asked again.

‘An incredible city! Obviously! I mean, this is utterly amazing! Like something out of
The Wizard of Oz.’
Leoni paused and looked around one more time. ‘So what’s the catch? The way the obelisks reacted to me makes me feel it’s not real. Is it some kind of unbelievably convincing projection? Is it – I don’t know – just an illusion? Like a mirage or something?’ She walked back to the deckchair and sat down: ‘Maybe this whole experience is just one big hallucination?’ she muttered. ‘I took some weird drug, now I’m in the Emerald City.’

The Blue Angel smiled and shook her head: ‘All of this is real.’ She made an expansive, proprietorial gesture. ‘But look.’ Suddenly the small device like a laptop computer that she had used to send Leoni to Sulpa had appeared in her hands and she flipped up its screen.

‘WHOA!’ Leoni objected. ‘I’m not doing any more transits until I get some answers.’

‘Don’t worry. I only want to show you this.’ As before, the Angel turned a dial on the control panel beneath the screen. ‘Observe,’ she said, pointing to a distant complex of four white-crystal ziggurats. There was a shimmer in the air around them and they disappeared. ‘Or how about this?’ offered the Angel. She turned the dial and the ziggurats were back but their crystal structure was now cobalt blue. ‘I can also do this.’ She turned the dial a third time and the ziggurats morphed into four huge glittering spheres that united into a single larger sphere and rose a hundred feet into the air, spinning rapidly.

Leoni was puzzled and a little annoyed: ‘Why did you say it was real? You couldn’t do any of that if it was real.’ She leaned over and took a closer look at the instrument the Angel was holding. ‘It has to be a projection. You control it with your laptop-whatever-it-is gizmo like you did the colour of the skies the last time I was here.’

The Angel shook her head: ‘I know it looks that way, but that’s not
what’s happening. Everything around us is real in every meaningful sense of that word. These pyramids and ziggurats and obelisks and towers are made of matter. So is the body you find yourself in. You know it doesn’t suffer from the same constraints as your Earth-body but you also know it feels pain and you’ve probably guessed – rightly – that it can be killed …

‘Like you killed Don Apolinar and he killed Don Emmanuel?’

‘Yes. A bit like that. Although utterly different in all other respects, the fundamental structure of matter in the realm where Apolinar built his torture chamber is almost identical to its structure in this realm.’

‘Fundamental structure of matter? If you mean atoms and such then this is already way over my head.’

‘Atoms are child’s play. I’m speaking of much deeper levels.’

Leoni started to object again but the Angel quieted her with an upheld hand and continued: ‘Dear impatient one, this is not an examination. I don’t expect you to master knowledge that the greatest human minds have yet to grasp. I simply wish to inform you that my powers to confront Sulpa on the Earth-plane are finite. I am constrained by certain immutable constants, certain limiting conditions of the Totality. Because of these I need your help.’

‘Totality, Angel? Immutable constants? You’re losing me again.’

‘The Earth is a single planet in a single solar system amongst trillions of solar systems in one universe. This universe, in its turn, is a tiny speck within the Totality – the multiplicity of all possible universes, and all the possible worlds they contain, comprising the whole of reality. Matter is organised and coheres at many different levels, across all these numberless realms – from the lowest, most physical and embodied states to the highest, most ethereal and
dis
embodied states …’

Leoni pinched her own arm, stamped her foot on the balcony and tugged at the fabric of the deckchair. ‘Feels pretty solid to me,’ she said.

‘Oh, it is. But the fundamental structure of all the wondrously organised matter of this realm lies close to the lowest level at which I can be effective on the physical plane. There are other worlds, where matter resonates at far lower and heavier frequencies, in which physical intervention becomes impossible even for me. The Earth is such a world.’

‘That helps to explain something I’ve never understood. You came to me in my dreams, you even comforted me, but you never tried to stop my dad from raping me.’

A sorrowful expression crossed the Angel’s face. ‘It was beyond my power to prevent him, Leoni. You have no idea how many others there have been – in greater need by far than you, in pain, in difficulty, in fear – whom I have also failed.’

‘So you’re a bit like God in that contradiction you told me about? Good but powerless?’

‘On the Earth plane, yes. Almost powerless.’

‘Almost – but not completely?’

‘Sometimes,’ said the Angel, ‘I can perform miracles.’ She sounded wistful, not boastful.

‘Miracles? Like in the Bible?’

‘By definition they’re exceptional phenomena that don’t occur often – and this quite exactly describes all my attempts to intervene physically on the Earth plane. At rare intervals – when I work the magic – I’m able to step down and do something excellent. But with such unreliable access to physical power I can’t use it to influence events on any significant scale in such a realm. I must reach out to people through their dreams and visions – as I have done with you – when I want to do that. In other words, I must work through human consciousness.’ She sighed: ‘And unfortunately that also raises huge problems …’

Leoni laughed, remembering the way she’d been before her near-death experience, the things she’d valued and enjoyed: ‘A lot of us live pretty much unconsciously,’ she said. ‘I did, for a long time.’

‘I would not say unconscious. I would say shackled, limited, tied down. You humans are spiritual beings in physical form who have fallen so deeply into the heavy material realm of Earth it has enchained your consciousness. You don’t remember your true origins, or the purpose of your incarnation. You imagine that the infinitesimally small section of the Totality you are able to know through your limited physical senses, and through instruments devised to extend them, is all that there is or ever will be to know. You are easily convinced you are just your bodies and there is no such thing as the soul, or if you do believe that the soul exists then you often do so blindly, according to religious dogmas rather than personal inquiry. You must understand, therefore, how frustrating it is for me, as a being of intelligent, conscious, non-physical energy, to have to deal with you. Except for the occasional miracle I cannot manifest physically in your realm. I should be able to reach you easily at the level of consciousness, but
humanity’s imprisonment in matter is so complete that most of you block me out.’