Tom Piccirilli - A Lower Deep

My promise held more meaning than it should have, and I had angered antiquity. Metal moved as if alive. Scenes in the bronze friezes changed almost hourly, always shifting the way the word of God is forever altering under interpretation. Beautiful penitents scarred themselves with coarse clothing strung with bone slivers and barbs.

Some of them didn't know whether to set the fire or stand against the stake. Perhaps both. And below it all the thrum of conscience flowed from the heart of time.

I sat with Nip on the windowsill, staring out over the abbey and the sisters and monks, the travelers and the lost, smelling the freshly baked bread and opened wine. He gave a six-hundred-year-old sigh that blew tufts of gray fur clear of his quivering nose, and resettled his meaty pink paws on his knees. I could see why he and Uriel got along so well, with this acceptability of silence and uncountable sorrows.

I had to check on the Kinnions.

I could feel the protective power of my own rash promise running out. There wasn't much time left.

In the early evening, when the sun began to settle and the members of the choir hit the same repulsive pitches they reached during their scourges, Fane hobbled in and came to test himself against me.

At that very second signals and symbols abounded. Dogs howled deep in the valley and the temperature dropped ten degrees until my breath billowed and hung in the air. The ice floes drew away with a tremendous groaning. The corpses flopped against each other like exhausted opponents and finally rolled into the lake.

Self drowsed fitfully and uncurled slowly, his eyelids hooded as he blinked at me. I could feel the wheel drawing on, events loosening and becoming fluid again. My oath couldn't stop the motion of the mount, and once more we began our slide toward a ruthless fulfillment.

When I'd last been in the monastery, with my Dam's blood still ingrained in the skin of my hands and neck, Fane had lurked at vespers with his own chronicles written in his eyes. A failed seminary student, Fane eventually became manager of a shoe store and spent most of his time gambling away his paychecks until his wife walked out and moved in with her lesbian lover. He'd been dead for twelve minutes on the operating table after his Harley back-ended a flatbed trailer and he went wheeling through the plate-glass window of a pizza parlor, killing three people and crippling a cheerleader.

Now he went to great trouble in order to properly portray the enigmatic, all-knowing monk furtively prowling the corridors. He wore a severely pointed Vandyke so that his beard angled and split into two sharpened prongs, the way he must've thought the druids kept theirs. He always wore his black habit, scapular, tunic, and cowl together, subverting the identity of the man he'd once been. There was a corrupt scent on him I recognized but couldn't quite place. He'd recently bathed in heavy oils and had made splints from freshly cut pine. He broke his own legs two or three times a year hoping for a touch of redemption or admiration for his self-pitying martyrdom.

Fane was perhaps the one man in the monastery who had not come to appreciate the totality of the dead past. He believed that experiences could be sliced and sorted, with certain events taken as truth while others were cast aside. It's how the Gnostics had piecemealed the Bible, choosing alternate versions of chapters and abandoning others, which led to such confusion and absurdity over the millennia. He didn't have the conviction of a soldier of God, and didn't have the arrogance a vessel of hell required. He had no familiar because no familiar would have him. Like most of us he'd lost and found God-and his soul-several times over already.

He carried several of Eddie's poltergeists in his hands. He reeled them across his fingers like twine and threw them at my chest. Nip turned to glare at us for a moment, then went back to sighing at the waters below. Self mumbled at me and dropped his head to my shoulder, snuggling.

Fane staggered closer. The poltergeists clung and swirled around us, and for the first time I noticed they were all women, and they were fading.

He said, "They're free to leave and die elsewhere but they don't. They trust you, even though you're not worthy to be here."

"Fane, you're a shoe salesman from Cincinnati."

In the last few years he'd devoted a good deal of time and a portion of his essence to his studies. I could feel the straining effort of his will in the structure of his spells. He had a separate well he was drawing from, a depth outside himself-perhaps love, perhaps perversion. Even the poltergeists sensed it, and wavered wildly.

"Do you wish to confess and do penance?" he asked.

"More than anything, but you won't hear it."

When he put his mind to it and recited his evoking prayers in a whispered litany, his face receded into shadows beneath his cowl and it looked as if his clothes emptied and drifted aloft. He drew strength from the weakness of his legs. His voice sounded as if it came from somewhere high near the ceiling, bearing down, with the hushed noises of shattering glass and his out-of-control Harley resonating distantly. A nice effect, and probably a lot of fun at a birthday party for a six-year-old. Mental fibers of his angry unconsciousness pressed outward.

"Is there a particular reason you're starting this?" I asked.

"Of course there is."

At least he was honest. "Feel like letting me in on it?"

"You've done damage."

"I could say the same about you." The noises of the men dying and the cheerleader getting her legs crushed dwindled.

"You've much to account for."

Not only had he been training, but in the past few years he'd picked up a superiority complex somewhere. "Try to hide that judgmental tone a little better, Fane, or someone might think you were beginning to grow smug."

Down the hallways several doors shut at once and the sheep bleated in perfect harmony with the wind. Just another part of the production-pitiful in a way, but also empowering. Even so, I sensed a certain sincerity in him that didn't fit with the attitude he was throwing. Perhaps I was merely jumping to conclusions.

"Why are the Kinnions supposed to die?" I asked.

Without any face he answered, "So another might live."

"What do you people care about Elijah?"

"I care as much as you."

"No," I said. "You don't."

"The prophet Elijah ascended bodily to heaven-"

"Jesus, Fane, I don't need a Bible studies refresher from the likes of you."

"-the only man to do so besides Christ."

"The prophet Elijah didn't die, he ascended alive."

"And according to Jewish faith he will return to usher in the coming of the true messiah."

I squinted at him. "You people don't really believe this is the prophet Elijah returned, do you?"

"Some might," he said, his voice above, behind, and in front of me. "And they might do anything to protect him."

Or kill him, I thought.

There wasn't any anger here. No righteous wrath or petty intolerance. His grin shone through the blankness like that of the Cheshire Cat. He thought he was being honest and proud, but I could see his fear as the air warmed again. "Abbot John would like to speak to you in his chambers."

Fane eased away limping back down the hallway, smiling almost giddily to himself. He was, somehow, a man full of hope.

"Wake the beast," he said. "You're going to need it."

The stink on him was bad milk.

Unlike Uriel and Aaron DeLancre, who'd always been destined for Magee Wails, Abbot John had been born into the typical world and hurled against the mount by his own crimes.

He gave the impression of being almost as wide as he was tall, a solid block of mortal mortar who'd once enjoyed twisting the heads off dogs, raping geriatric women in their nursing home beds, and tracking families relocated by the Witness Protection agency. He'd suffered from visions and garnered a taste for the carotid. When he met my father his hallucinations ended, and in one overwhelming surge Abbot John's sanity engulfed him. Perhaps it was actually my dad's own finite rationality that had been given up, since a short time later he gave in to the rush of his madness.