Chris Holm - The Wrong Goodbye

“The blast that results from cracking a soul,” I said, “it sounds a lot like an angel’s wrath to me.”

At that, Dumas cocked his head, and then he smiled. “I suppose you would have some experience in that regard, wouldn’t you? Quite the bit of business you got mixed up with in New York. Yes, I suppose they aren’t dissimilar —both unleash the power of the Maker’s might, His grace, His wrath. In many respects, the human soul is a far greater font of power than even the greatest seraph can tap into —after all, you monkeys are, for reasons that to this day escape me, the Maker’s most favored little playthings. But humans lack the capacity to channel such power, and even the best of you are touched by sin, which blunts the damage to my kind. An angel’s wrath,” he said, as if trying on the word for size, “is more directed, more controlled… and because it’s not occluded by darkness, far more deadly to their Fallen brothers.”

“Why are you telling me all this? I don’t believe for a second you’ve even the slightest affection for me, and yet here you are, pulling back the curtain when you probably should’ve sent me packing. So what gives? What’s your angle?”

Dumas sighed and ran a hand through his thinning hair. For the first time since I’d arrived, he looked concerned. “My angle? Same as it ever was, Sammy. I’m a businessman, pure and simple, and as such, I have to protect my interests. And right now, Interest Numero Uno is keeping my ass off the white-hat’s hit-list. I don’t know if you’ve been keeping score, but it’s open season on the Fallen out there. Our Chosen brothers are spoiling for a fight, and they’ll jump on any excuse to send a little wrath our way. Normally, that’s no concern a mine. I run a quiet operation here —keep my head down and my profile low. Only all the sudden here comes Danny Young with a yen to misbehave, and the more ruckus he makes, the worse things’re gonna get for me. See, whether or not he’s operating on my behalf, the fact remains he was once in my employ, and as such was privy to all manner of sensitive information —information that, left uncontained, could lead the feather-and-harp brigade right back to me. So when you wandered in from the desert asking questions about all things Danny, I figured shit —why not point Sammy in the right direction, see if maybe he can catch him? He does, and that’s two problems off my plate. Problem Two is you, in case you ain’t been keeping up.”

“Hold up a sec. You say you wanna point me in the right direction —does that mean you know where Danny is ?”

“Would that I did, Sammy; it’d save us both a hell of a lot of trouble. But I’m pretty sure I do know what he’s planning , and more importantly, what’ll happen if he succeeds. If that happens, the stupid bastard’s gonna unleash a disaster of Biblical proportions —one that’ll make my skimmer’s slip in San Francisco and the subsequent destruction look like a goddamn kitten sneezing.”

“OK then, spill: what the hell is Danny playing at?”

Dumas answered my question with one of his own: “Tell me, Sammy —what do you know about the Brethren?”

“The Brethren?” I repeated. “Not much. I mean, I’ve heard the stories. A group of Collectors who, centuries ago, banded together and found a way to break hell’s bond of servitude. Of course, they’re nothing but a fairy tale —a Collector’s pipe dream.”

“A fairy tale,” Dumas said, smiling. “Right.”

“I miss something funny?”

“Funny? No, not too,” he said. “Come on —this little tour of ours ain’t done.”

Dumas led me deeper into the cavern. The corridor, so broad at its outset, dwindled until it was more fissure than tunnel, and could no longer accommodate the intermittent torches that had marked the way thus far. Dumas snatched the last of them from the wall —a concession to my human eyes, no doubt —and took me by the elbow, dragging me reluctantly into the narrow, winding pass.

The walls pressed close as, sideways, we squeezed through. A time or two, stone outcrops dug into my back and chest as I forced myself through a particularly narrow spot or around a tricky corner, Dumas’s light all but disappearing ahead of me as, despite his apparent girth, he pressed onward without incident. When that happened, I was left alone with my thoughts, my fears, my shallow hitching breath —all three of them threatening to spiral out of control and leave me panicked, trapped, damned to be stuck here in the darkness until the clock ran out and the bugbeast came to claim me. But that thought alone was enough to keep me moving, and eventually, the passage widened. Not much, mind you —the walls in this new, smaller chamber were maybe three feet across, and the ceiling here was low enough I had to stoop —but after the sidewalk-crack we’d slipped through to get here, it may as well have been Montana.

As I cleared the fissure, brushing filth from my lapels, Dumas turned to me and smiled. For a moment, with the torchlight glinting off his eyes and yellowed teeth, he looked every bit the demon that he was. “Welcome to the monkey house,” he said.

“Excuse me?”

“The monkey house. This is where I stash the Collectors in my employ. Out of the way, so they can fling their poo or whatever it is they do without troubling my Fallen employees or bothering the clientele.”

I looked around. By the torchlight, it looked like the cavern continued on another seven feet or so and then terminated. Three low openings, each shored up with rotted four-by-fours, extended outward from the room on either side —two left, one right. I ducked my head to see inside the one beside me. It was no larger than a coat closet, and apart from a heap of blankets in one corner, it was empty.

“They’re rarely occupied,” called Dumas, his stentorian voice echoing off the close stone walls. “Save for Danny, none of my Collectors ever had much interest in sticking ’round once the job was done. Not all of them are as eager as Danny was to sample the product, so most of them are outta here as soon as the soul they brought’s done processing. But Danny was another matter. Danny liked to stick around. I always figured he came back here to fix, that the ramblings on the wall were nothing more than skiminduced delusion. Stuff’s awful to come off of —for your kind in particular —and it’ll fill your head with all manner of wacky shit you’d be hard-pressed to explain once you finally touch down. Truth is, I never thought much of it. But you factor in these ramblings with his interest in watching Psoglav ply his trade and his theft of the Varela soul, and a pattern emerges.” He gestured toward the doorway furthest back. “That’s the one you want. That’s where Danny staked his claim.”

Once I crawled inside, I could see why. It was bigger by half than the other I’d seen, and set a little ways apart, providing some small measure of privacy. At first, of course, the room was black as pitch, but as Dumas shimmied in behind me, his torch’s light crawled up the walls —first illuminating the bare military cot that took up much of the chamber’s floor, and then the tattered photo of two strangers I presumed were he and Ana that rested on the framework of the door. And as the light climbed toward the ceiling, I realized the walls of Danny’s chamber were covered with writing —writing of all shapes and sizes, in a dozen alphabets and at least twice that many languages. I recognized Arabic and Hebrew, Sanskrit and Akkadian —all scratched onto the wall with charred bits of wood or pointed rock —but most of the tongues were foreign to me. They looked to be the work of a crazy person, with no rhyme or reason to their placement —some scrawled over older snippets, some halted halfway through; some flecked with blood as if the scribe’s hand had split at the effort required to mark the stone. It was hard for me to imagine Danny had done all this. It was hard to imagine anyone could have.