Tom Piccirilli - A Lower Deep

Kill her now before Elijah takes over completely . My second self's jaws worked in a frenzy, the stink of nuns and monks everywhere. That's what they're going to want you to do.

Why should the order care about him? What does Abbot John have to do with this?

He shuddered with impatience and sneered at me, looking so much like my father that I reached out and put my palm to the side of his face. Abbot John will call for blood. Kill her.

And prove the woman right? We're getting out alive.

No, we're all dead and always have been.

The Opus Dei choir chants of the daily services drifted in the wind: part song, part plea. The brothers often lapsed into several esoteric languages preserving their rites and secrets. When we'd almost reached the shores of MountArmon, I fell to my knees once more. With an air of indecision Self snapped his claws together, wondering if he should carve into my heart again, and knowing I'd made another big mistake.

On the mount sacred oaths were taken to a new degree, and even the most careless promises held power. Swearing to keep someone alive might result in my own sacrifice. Elijah continued his attack from the warmth of the womb, griping about love just like everyone else. The ferry creaked along. Soon the rope became heavily smudged with blood from their wind-cracked hands. We struck shore and the sheep began to shriek.

Blond hair draped into my mouth, and Cathy gave me a look of flawless pity. She wouldn't be able to lift me alone. Eddie helped, and after a time the mother too. I limped off the ferry, struggling up the curving stone trail forged and smoothed into the side of the mount.

Above us we could see the church and sheltered arcade cloister, the sacristy and refectory, and the snow-covered transverse tunnels leading from building to building. I glanced back and watched the ferry being drawn once more to the far side, and I wondered if my father the harlequin would be joining us tonight.

It took over an hour to make it to the top of the mount, and by then Cathy was near fainting. We held on to each other for support, wheezing in harmony. Self had chewed and snipped free most of Eddie's knotted specters, but the poltergeists continued to float around us like scared children, staring wide-eyed and wandering in confusion. Self was feeling crowded and bit a few in the ass to get them moving, taking out chunks of memory and heartache, but they only smudged themselves harder against the kid. They shuddered in Eddie's armpits and hid in his ears, moaning.

We stood before the outer ward wall of the monastery, staring at the doors with bronze friezes showing images from Revelation and the lost books of the Bible. Scenes from Wars of the Lord, Thomas the Gnostic, and the Book of Enoch reached out, with displays of loss and atonement swirling in the metal.

A copy of the Book of Enoch had been in Jebediah's library. It was a tome devoted to the human and not the hallowed that had been discovered in Abyssinia in 1773, a region of Sheol and place of the wicked. It recounted the story of the two hundred insolent angels who swore a blasphemous pledge against God. They consented to the fall in order to take human wives, and then descended upon Armon, the Mount of the Oath.

A young monk with a shaved head stood there watching, the purple welts across his face bright in the sunlight from where he'd accidentally struck himself while scourging his shoulders.

Janice wrenched my arm forward, dumped me into his chest, and said, "Take him, you idiot." She knew her way around the abbey, and led her children straight to the priory. Her shadow fell heavily across her son, and the signs I read showed Eddie on the floor, disemboweled. The puzzled monk didn't know whether to go after her or to help me up first. He started walking me toward their small infirmary but I resisted and aimed us for the sacristy. Self gave a deep sigh and snuggled against my chest. He loved churches.

Follow them , I said.

No, that bitch gives me the creeps.

I leaned on the stone and felt the waves of the ages rumbling against my back. Inhuman antiquity walked here, filled with human frailties and failures.

It hadn't been easy mending on Magee Wails, and would be even more difficult this time.

The monk had smashed out a couple of his front teeth so he might be able to form ancient cruel words not meant for a man's mouth.

"Take me to Brother Aaron," I told him. "Or Uriel."

We walked the white-stone pathways along the cloister gardens, past the basilica residential buildings. Other priests and acolytes descended the crude pine steps of the scriptorium and stared. Despite being surrounded by the lush expanse of forests and rivers they still carried the desert with them. They'd taken the most severe and unyielding tenets of the Cistercians, Trappists, and Benedictines, and used the harshest doctrines to try to garner harmonious results. They were kidding themselves, and some of them even knew it. Hollow faced and grim in the purpose and rigors of the soul, the heat of their beliefs beat into them, searing as deeply as the sun off the sands of Persia.

Aaron DeLancre stormed down the passageway with his sword drawn, and both Self and I growled. The veil of evil draped over his entire family. They could follow the bloodline with ten generations of doctors or accountants and they'd still smell like the Inquisition. Uriel also appeared from the scriptorium and did his best not to mouth any curses. They both looked exactly like their brother Jebediah, with the same broad features and sorrowful mantle of those born of witch killers. They even kept beards, but only so they could yank out handfuls of facial hair, the way the Roman guards had done to Christ.

Aaron held his sword just as men in the 1950s used to hold their cigarettes, with an easy charisma and a touch of vanity. "We know why you're here."

Of course they knew, but I had a duty to swear it aloud. "I'm going to have to kill your brother." The chills began to wrack me again and the darkness rolled across my mind.

"God help us," Uriel said.

Self guffawed at that, showing off every incisor, and slowly took some of my blood.

Iranted for the next two days while the fever worked through me. Aaron and Uriel stood guard over my bed, muttering charms, with their blades pointed to the west and the east. In the hilt of his sword Aaron kept his familiar, Lowly Grillot Holt, who played cards with Self and was only a slightly better cheater. Uriel's silent familiar, known only as Nip, proved to be as somber and melancholy as his master, and did little more than sit hunched on the windowsill peering out over the frozen forest.

Occasionally Aaron pricked my thumbs to see what glyphs my blood would spatter on the floor. He and Uriel interpreted the signs differently, but neither of them saw anything good. By the time I awoke on the third day and the fever had cleared, my blood staining the tiles had dried to a rusty powder that Lowly Grillot Holt sniffed and gagged on.

In the night, echoes of whips brought the rats squealing out of their dank corners. Prayers and chants merged with sobs of lonely despair and the scuffling of sackcloth covers. There was some trouble with Self running through the nunnery. He stalked among them while they were at prayers, sniffing the incense and shuddering with pleasure. The scent of souls was thick in the air, cloying but heady.

In the past few days two men had already leaped to their deaths into the river, where the crush of ice floes made the corpses look as if they were dueling with one another far below. Age rumbled in the dirt. There was laughter, giddy and saccharine, underscoring thousand-year-old hymns, and the goats gnawed steadfastly on weeds grown in the cracks between blocks of immovable history.