Fearful Symmetries (2 page)

Katz: “What the
shit
, man!”

Lao: “I don’t know, Christ! Those bottles aren’t s’posed to
break
—”

The well
, something dry and small “said” at the back of Goss’s head, barely a voice at all—more a touch, in passing, in the dark.

And: “There’s a well,” he heard himself say, before he could think better of it. “Down through there, behind the walls.”

Katz looked at Lao, shrugged. “Better check it out, then,” he suggested—started to, anyhow. Until Camberwell somehow turned up between them, half stepping sidelong and half like she’d just materialized, the rotating storm her personal wormhole.

“I’ll do that,” she said, firmly. “Still two gallon cans in the back of Truck Two, for weight; cut a path, make sure we can get to ’em. I’ll tell you if what’s down there’s viable.”

“Deal,” Lao agreed, visibly grateful—and Camberwell was gone a second later, down into the passage, a shadow into shadow. While at almost the same time, from Goss’s elbow, ’Lij suddenly asked (of no one in particular, given
he
was the resident expert): “Sat-phones aren’t supposed to just stop working, right?”

Katz: “Nope.”

“Could be we’re in a dead zone, I guess . . . or the storm . . .”

“Yeah, good luck on that, buddy.”

Across the room, the rest of the party were congregating in a clot, huddled ’round a cracked packet of glow-sticks because nobody wanted to break out the lanterns, not in this weather. Journee had opened Hynde’s shirt to give him CPR, but left off when he stopped seizing. Now she sat crouched above him, peering down at his chest like she was trying to play connect-the-dots with moles, hair, and nipples.

“Got a weird rash forming here,” she told Goss, when he squatted down beside her. “Allergy? Or photosensitive, maybe, if he’s prone to that, ’cause . . . it really does seem to turn darker the closer you move the flashlight.”

“He uses a lot of sunscreen.”

“Don’t we all. Seriously, look for yourself.”

He did. Thinking:
Optical illusion, has to be
 . . . but wondering, all the same. Because—it was just so clear, so defined, rucking Hynde’s skin as though something was raising it up from inside. Like a letter from some completely alien alphabet; a symbol, unrecognizable, unreadable.

(
A sigil
, the same tiny voice corrected. And Goss felt the hairs on his back ruffle, sudden-slick with cold, foul sweat.)

It took a few minutes more for ’Lij to give up on the sat-phone, tossing it aside so hard it bounced. “Try the radio mikes,” Goss heard him tell himself, “see what kind’a bandwidth we can . . . back to Gebel, might be somebody listening. But not the border, nope, gotta keep off
that
squawk-channel, for sure. Don’t want the military gettin’ wind, on either side. . . .”

By then, Camberwell had been gone for almost ten minutes, so Goss felt free to leave Hynde in Journee’s care and follow, at his own pace—through the passage and into the tunnel, feeling along the wall, trying to be quiet. But two painful stumbles later, halfway down the tunnel’s curve, he had to flip open his phone just to see; the stone-bone walls gave off a faint, ill light, vaguely slick, a dead jellyfish luminescence.

He drew within just enough range to hear Camberwell’s boots rasp on the downward slope, then pause—saw her glance over one shoulder, eyes weirdly bright through a dim fall of hair gust-popped from her severe, sweat-soaked working gal’s braid. Asking, as she did: “Want me to wait while you catch up?”

Boss
, other people might’ve appended, almost automatically, but never her. Then again, Goss had to admit, he wouldn’t have really believed that shit coming from Camberwell, even if she had.

He straightened up, sighing, and joined her—standing pretty much exactly where he thought she’d’ve ended up, right next to the well, though keeping a careful distance between herself and its creepy-coated sides. “Try sending down a cup yet, or what?”

“Why? Oh, right . . . no, no point; that’s why I volunteered, so those dumbasses
wouldn’t
try. Don’t want to be drinking
any
of the shit comes out of there, believe you me.”

“Oh, I do, and that’s—kinda interesting, given. Rings a bit like you obviously know more about this than you’re letting on.”

She arched a brow, denial reflex-quick, though not particularly convincing. “Hey, who was it sent Lao and what’s-his-name down here, in the first place? I’m motor pool, man. Cryptoarchaeology is you and coma-boy’s gig.”

“Says the chick who knows the correct terminology.”

“Look who I work for.”

Goss sighed. “Okay, I’ll bite. What’s in the well?”

“What’s
on
the well? Should give you some idea. Or, better yet—”

She held out her hand for his phone, the little glowing screen, with its pathetic rectangular light. After a moment, he gave it over and watched her cast it ’round, outlining the chamber’s canted, circular floor: seen face on, those ridges he’d felt under his feet when Hynde first brought him in here and dismissed without a first glance, let alone a second, proved to be in-spiralling channels stained black from centuries of use: run-off ditches once used for drainage, aimed at drawing some sort of liquid—layered and faded now into muck and dust, a resinous stew clogged with dead insects—away from (what else) seven separate niches set into the surrounding walls, inset so sharply they only became apparent when you observed them at an angle.

In front of each niche, one of the mosaicked figures, with a funnelling spout set at ditch-level under the creature in question’s feet, or lack thereof. Inside each niche, meanwhile, a quartet of hooked spikes set vertically, maybe five feet apart: two up top, possibly for hands or wrists, depending if you were doing things Roman- or Renaissance-style; two down below, suitable for lashing somebody’s ankles to. And now Goss looked closer, something else as well, in each of those upright stone coffins . . .

(Ivory scraps, shattered yellow-brown shards, broken down by time and gravity alike, and painted to match their surroundings by lack of light. Bones, piled where they fell.)

“What the fuck
was
this place?” Goss asked, out loud. But mainly because he wanted confirmation, more than anything else.

Camberwell shrugged, yet again—her default setting, he guessed. “A trap,” she answered. “And you fell in it, but don’t feel bad—you weren’t to know, right?”

“We found it, though. Hynde, and me . . .”

“If not you, somebody else. Some places are already empty, already ruined—they just wait, long as it takes. They don’t ever go away. ’Cause they
want
to be found.”

Goss felt his stomach roil, fresh sweat springing up even colder, so rank he could smell it. “A trap,” he repeated, biting down, as Camberwell nodded. Then: “For us?”

But here she shook her head, pointing back at the well, with its seven watchful guardians. Saying, as she did—

“Naw, man. For
them
.”

She laid her hand on his, half its size but twice as strong, and walked him through it—puppeted his numb and clumsy finger-pads bodily over the clumps of fossil chunks in turn, allowing him time to recognize what was hidden inside the mosaic’s design more by touch than by sight: a symbol (
sigil
) for every figure, tumour-blooming and weirdly organic, each one just ever-so-slightly different from the next. He found the thing Hynde’s rash most reminded him of on number four, and stopped dead; Camberwell’s gaze flicked down to confirm, her mouth moving slightly, shaping words.
Ah
, one looked like—
ah, I see
. Or maybe
I see you
.

“What?” he demanded, for what seemed like the tenth time in quick succession. Thinking:
I sound like a damn parrot
.

Camberwell didn’t seem to mind, though. “Ashreel,” she replied, not looking up. “That’s what I said. The Terrible Ashreel, who wears us like clothing.”

“Allatu, you mean. The wicked, who covers man like a garment—”

“Whatever, Mister G. If you prefer.”

“It’s just—I mean, that’s nothing like what Hynde said, up there—”

“Yeah sure, ’cause that shit was what the Sumerians and Babylonians called ’em, from that book Hynde was quoting.” She knocked knuckles against Hynde’s brand, then the ones on either side—three sharp little raps, invisible cross-nails. “
These
are their actual
names
. Like . . . what they call
themselves
.”

“How the fuck would you know that? Camberwell, what the hell
.
”

Straightening, shrugging yet again, like she was throwing off flies. “There’s a book, okay? The
Liber Carne
—‘Book of Meat.’ And all’s it has is just a list of names with these symbols carved alongside, so you’ll know which one you’re looking at, when they’re—embodied. In the flesh.”

“In the—you mean
bodies,
like possession? Like that’s what’s happening to Hynde?” At her nod: “Well . . . makes sense, I guess, in context; he already said they were demons.”

“Oh, that’s a misnomer, actually. ‘Terrible’ used to mean ‘awe-inspiring,’ ‘more whatever than any other whatever,’ like Tsar Ivan of all the Russias. So the Seven, the
Terrible
Seven, what they really are is angels, just like you thought.”

“Fallen angels.”

“Nope, those are Goetim, like you call the ones who stayed up top Elohim—
these
are Maskim, same as the Chant. Arralu-Allatu, Namtaru, Asakku, Utukku, Gallu-Alu, Ekimmu, Lammyatu; Ashreel, Yphemaal, Zemyel, Eshphoriel, Immoel, Coiab, Ushephekad. Angel of Confusion, the Mender Angel, Angel of Severance, Angel of Whispers, Angel of Translation, Angel of Ripening, Angel of the Empty . . .”

All these half-foreign words spilling from her mouth, impossibly glib, ringing in Goss’s head like popped blood vessels. But: “Wait,” he threw back, struggling. “A ‘trap’ . . . I thought this place was supposed to be a temple. Like the people who built it worshipped these things.”

“Okay, then play that out. Given how Hynde described ’em, what sort of people would
worship
the Seven, you think?”

“. . . terrible people?”

“You got it. Sad people, weird people, crazy people. People who get off on power, good, bad, or indifferent. People who hate the world they got so damn bad they don’t really care what they swap it for, as long as it’s
something else
.”

“And they expect—the Seven—to do that for them.”

“It’s what they were made for.”

Straight through cryptoarchaeology and out the other side, into a version of the Creation so literally Apocryphal it would’ve gotten them both burnt at the stake just a few hundred years earlier. Because to hear Camberwell tell it, sometimes, when a Creator got very, verrry lonely, It decided to make Itself some friends—after which, needing someplace to put them, It contracted the making of such a place out to creatures themselves made to order: fragments of its own reflected glory haphazardly hammered into vaguely humanesque form, perfectly suited to this one colossal task, and almost nothing else.

“They made the world, in other words,” Goss said. “All seven of them.”

“Yeah. ’Cept back then they were still one angel in seven parts—the Voltron angel, I call it. Splitting apart came later on, after the schism.”

“Lucifer, war in heaven, cast down into hell and yadda yadda. All that. So this is all, what . . . some sort of metaphysical labour dispute?”

“They wouldn’t think of it that way.”

“How
do
they think of it?”

“
Differently
, like every other thing. Look, once the shit hit the cosmic fan, the Seven didn’t stay with God, but they didn’t go with the devil, either—they just went, forced themselves from outside space and time into the universe they’d made, and never looked back. And that was because they wanted something angels are uniquely unqualified for: free will. They wanted to be us.”

Back to the fast-forward, then, the bend and the warp, till her ridiculously plausible-seeming exposition-dump seemed to come at him from everywhere at once, a perfect storm. Because:
misery’s their meat, see—the honey that draws flies, bi-product of every worst moment of all our brief lives, when people will cry out for anything who’ll listen. That’s when one of the Seven usually shows up, offering help—except the kind of help they come up with’s usually nothing very helpful at all, considering how they just don’t really get the way things
work
for us, even now. And it’s always just one of them at first, ’cause they each blame the other for having made the decision to run, stranding themselves in the here and now, so they don’t want to be anywhere near each other . . . but if you can get ’em all in one place—someplace like here, say, with seven bleeding, suffering vessels left all ready and waiting for ’em—then they’ll be automatically drawn back together, like gravity, a black hole event horizon. They’ll form a vector, and at the middle of that cyclone they’ll become a single angel once again, ready to tear everything they built up right the fuck on back down.

Words words words, every one more painful than the last. Goss looked at Camberwell as she spoke, straight on, the way he didn’t think he’d ever actually done, previously. She was short and stacked, skin tanned and plentiful, eyes darkish brown shot with a sort of creamier shade, like petrified wood. A barely visible scar quirked through one eyebrow, threading down over the cheekbone beneath to intersect with another at the corner of her mouth, keloid raised in their wake like a negative-image beauty mark, a reversed dimple.

Examined this way, at close quarters, he found he liked the look of her, suddenly and sharply—and for some reason, that mainly made him angry.

“This is a fairy tale,” he heard himself tell her, with what seemed like over-the-top emphasis. “I’m sitting here in the dark, letting you spout some . . . Catholic campfire story about angel-traps, free will, fuckin’ misery vectors. . . .” A quick head-shake, firm enough to hurt. “None of it’s true.”

“Yeah, okay, you want to play it that way.”