The Scarlet Gospels (29 page)

“Quo'oto…” Harry murmured.

An oarsman nodded silently, pointing a single finger down, indicating it was beneath the boat.

Narrowing his eyes, Harry slowly peered over the side of the boat and felt his bowels stir. Harry stared unblinking at a pulsating giant, its body writhing deep in the unspoiled waters. He didn't pretend to himself that he had any sense of its scale or shape. The creature looked nothing like any water-dwelling animal he'd ever seen. It resembled instead an enormous millipede, its knotted innards visible through a translucent carapace.

As Harry stared down at the monster, it raised its complicated head and stared back at him. Its head seemed, at first, to be comprised of no more than the same series of scales such as it had along its entire body, except that they were completely opaque. The scaly, featureless face regarded Harry—or at least he imagined he felt its regard—and then, after a minute or more of fruitless study, the opaque shields retracted and finally revealed the true visage of the leviathan.

Its visage was perhaps thirty feet from brow to chin, but there was humanity there, even in so vast a form; its eyes were deep set, and there was a ring of milky whiteness around the black horizontal slit that was focusing on him now. Its nose was not unlike that of a bat, flattened and gaping, but its mouth was completely human. Even now, it seemed to make something very like a smile, uncovering as it did so twin rows of acidic blue teeth. And as it smiled, the dark slits of its pupils opened in a heartbeat, driving every last mote of brightness out. Then, fixed on Harry, it started to rise, peristaltic waves passing through its anatomy to left and right so its myriad legs moved with maximum efficiency, bringing its enormous body (to which, at present, Harry could see no end) up toward the surface. He watched, silently daring the beast to take him.

As it ascended, Harry realized how wrong he'd been about his judgment of the depth of the water. Unused to staring into water so clear, he had assumed the Quo'oto was relatively close to the surface. He was wrong. It was deep, very deep, and the water so unlimited that Harry had no sense of how truly enormous this entity was. The upper two segments were easily the size of a blue whale, and yet for all its scale it moved with extraordinary grace, the motion of its legs and the sinuous sweep of its body almost mesmeric.

It was Caz's voice that stirred Harry from his hypnotic state.

“Oh fuck,” Caz said. “I can't look.”

“Shh,” Dale urged.

“Jesus Christ,” Lana said. “This can't really be happening, can it?”

Harry looked up and saw, to his surprise, that his friends were not speaking of the Quo'oto. They still had no knowledge of the gargantuan creature beneath their tiny vessel. Their eyes were fixed instead on the first boat, where the old man sitting behind the young Azeel had risen to his feet. The youths in front of him were already standing, their heads thrown back, presenting their willing throats.

“Yaz Nat, ih. Quo'oto, rih,” the elder demon said.

The blade then sliced through the tender young flesh of the first youth. The adolescent demon was given to the waters. His corpse sank quickly thanks to weights tied around his feet. The blood pulsed from the expert cuts the elder demon had made, creating a cloud of swirling crimson. The oarsmen quickly continued the journey, at double the speed.

Watching the young demon struggling to take in his last tortured breaths made Harry feel sick, and his mind began to wander back to that side street in New York when he was forced to watch Scummy take his last gasping cries for help. That had been murder. What was happening now was a sacrifice, though Harry wondered if such a distinction existed for demons.

“Everyone just keep their eyes forward,” Harry said, turning his gaze back toward the creature in the depths. “We shouldn't question their rituals.”

The turbulence around the boat was increasingly choppy and through the bloodstained water, as the boats passed over the creature, Harry saw the vast form open itself up and suck the corpse into its gaping maw.

“Holy hell,” Lana said.

“I told you to look forward,” Harry said.

“What is it?” Dale said.

“The problem is,” Lana said, “as soon as I say the words ‘don't look down' you're going to—”

“Oh my dear lord,” said Dale.

“Exactly,” said Lana. “I vote we walk back.”

“Seconded,” Dale said.

Caz was the only one not looking. His eyes were closed, and he was shivering from more than the cold weather. “I've seen enough,” he said. “And I know I have more to see. So I'll sit this one out, if y'all don't mind.”

Dale reached out and squeezed Caz's hand. Harry glanced up to see that their destination—the opposite end of the lake—was close now. As soon as they came within a short distance of the rocky beach the oarsmen leaped out of the boat and hauled it up onto the shore. There was good reason for haste. The waters just beyond the shore were swelling, and foaming in the frenzy. The second boat came in and, catching a frothy wave stirred up by the Quo'oto's writhing, was upended and all the Azeel upon it thrown into the turmoil. Harry rushed the beach, dragging several demons out of the water. And no sooner had all its occupants reached the shore than the third boat came at them with force. It rode the eruption, whose power was sufficient to drive the fragile vessel all the way out of the water and up onto solid ground. With everyone safely ashore, save for a lone sacrifice, Harry stumbled up the beach, moving between everyone to get a clear view of what existed, as he'd put it, beyond the rainbow. When his eyes landed upon it, he felt his knees go weak.

It was a tower so massive Harry's mind failed to wholly grasp the image. This monument before him rose to such impossible heights that he had difficulty discerning between sky and skyscraper. It was Lucifer's masterwork; there was no doubt about it. From the obsessively decorated stepping-stones upon which Harry was presently standing to the highest of spires whose numbers defied his confounded wits to count, this was clearly the Devil's working, and the sight filled Harry with equal parts dread and awe.

Harry knew very little about architecture but enough to know that Lucifer's labors here had later inspired a whole architecture of the living world and their own Gothic creations. He'd been inside some of them on his travels around Europe, in the Cathedral of the Holy Cross and Santa Eulalia in Barcelona, in Bourdeaux Cathedral, and of course in Chartres Cathedral, where he'd once taken sanctuary, having just killed in the blizzard-blinded streets a demon who had been seducing infants to their deaths with corrupt nursery rhymes.

But none of those buildings, vast and ambitious and elaborate though they were, held a candle to this mountainous structure. Buttress upon buttress, spire upon spire, the cathedral rose with an arrogance that only a creature systematically confident of his powers would have dared dream, much less make real.

Harry thought back to the vast age-ravaged devices that had littered the route here. They weren't the remnants of war machines, as he had assumed. They were what was left of the devices that had been built to quarry the stones and carry them where the masons could work the raw rock and prepare it for its place in the immense design.

Even with the powers of a fallen angel at Lucifer's disposal, the creation of the cathedral must have been a challenge. To take his fellow fallen angels—and other generations of demons who had come from the fallen's seductions and rapes—and turn them, by force of will and intellect, into the kinds of masons, foundation layers, and spire raisers who would have been required to create this structure must have tested Lucifer's wits and ambition to their limits. But somehow it had been done.

“Has anyone here ever heard of the Harrowing?” Dale asked, breaking the silence.

No one replied.

“It was in the time between Christ's crucifixion and his Resurrection,” he went on. “The story goes, Christ went down into Hell, walked among the damned, and set many of them free. Then he returned to Earth and broke the bondage of death. It's supposedly the first and only amnesty Hell has ever known.”

“If it's true, and stranger things have happened,” Caz said, “then that means there's a way out.”

“Deus ex Inferis?” Harry said. “Those are big shoes to fill. Let's hope we don't fall too far.”

 

BOOK THREE

The Mourning Star

We have never heard the devil's side of the story, God wrote all the book.

—Anatole France

 

1

Harry passed the word that they all should spread out and look for a way into the cathedral. Lana and Dale, accompanied by a few demons, went one way. Harry and Caz went the other. It occurred to Harry as he made his way around to the side of the cathedral that faced the shore that if ever a thing cried out to the maker of its maker,
“Look what I've done, Father! Aren't you proud?”
it was this abomination. The pleading question, Harry assumed, had remained unanswered.

As he searched the cathedral for any type of entrance, the placid waters of the lake were briefly stirred by the Quo'oto, rolling and raising one of its segmented legs out of the water, a reminder of its lethal presence. Harry turned his attention from the lake to the cathedral, walking back toward the front of the building with Caz shadowing him.

“Son of a bitch,” Harry said, turning to Caz, “there's no door on this end.”

“None that we can see,” Caz said. “But we both know that's not the same thing.”

“You're so wise, Caz.”

“Don't mock me, Harold. Next time you need a new tattoo, my hand might slip.”

“Tell me something, Caz old friend,” Harry said, changing the subject. “Why would anyone put all this work into something and keep it hidden from everyone?”

Caz looked up at the obscenity and shrugged his shoulders.

“Wish I knew.”

“Yeah,” Harry said as he looked up at the heights of the fa
ç
ade. “Maybe there's an opening up there. That would make about as much sense as anything else in this godforsaken—”

“D'Amour! D'Amour!”

“That's Lana,” said Caz

“I see her,” said Harry.

She was sprinting along the beach.

“What is it?” Harry yelled to her.

Lana yelled a one-word reply: “Door!”

The entrance to the cathedral was at the rear of the building, the doors themselves fifteen feet high and made of dark, weathered timber studded with row upon row of nails whose heads were in the form of pyramids. One of the doors was slightly ajar, though nothing of the building's interior was divulged.

“Anyone else feel that?” Lana asked, touching the back of her neck.

“Definitely.” Harry nodded.

Harry had worried that his tattoos, overwhelmed by the danger around him, had exhausted themselves. But now, as he stood before this immense portal, his gaze tracking back and forth over the flow of designs on the arches, he felt the tattoos twitching with full force. Their warnings would not change anything; he had not gone in search of a door only to falter at its threshold.

“All right,” Harry said, “just so we're clear on this, there are no heroes here: only dead and not dead. Got it?”

“What happens if you die while you're in Hell?” Dale asked, staring at the crack in the door.

“If you find out,” Harry said, “let me know.”

And, so saying, he walked into Lucifer's cathedral. As Harry entered, taking three or four steps away from the threshold he paused, waiting for his eyes to make sense of what the interior contained. What he could see when his eyes finally adjusted filled his vision in all directions—from the floor a yard where he stood to the vaulted ceilings held up by twin rows of pillars whose girth would have dwarfed a mature redwood—but precisely what his eyes were witnessing was difficult to comprehend.

Everything that was not essential to the structure itself—the stone, the paved floor, the titanic pillars, the ribbing of the vaults, and the intricate stonework between them—looked spectral, its transparent state allowing him to see through to the layers in all directions. The entire interior seemed to have been filled with the work of hundreds of ambitious scaffold laborers whose efforts defied every law of physics. Gaunt towers rose from floor to ceiling in half a thousand places, lending another solidarity with networks of rods crisscrossed between them. In some places ladders ran up to the heights, while in others there were zigzag stairways that connected tower to tower. And just as he flattered himself that he was getting some grip on the general design, it threw out some startling surprises. In one place the scaffolding seemed to have been possessed by thaumaturgic spiders, creating huge vertical webs that strove for elegance but repeatedly lost themselves to chaos; some were ceaselessly turning spirals, some bearing steps, others bristling with barbs. And all throughout this entire phantasmal interior moved the strangest of machines: forms that resembled gigantic crystalline human skeletons, wearing translucent shells, turning over and over—some in majestic processions, others with solitary grace.

These forms and devices that filled the cathedral were utterly silent, only adding to their mystery. Harry stood watching them for a long time, both mesmerized and vaguely disappointed. None of this sat comfortably with his expectations. His experience of Hell's work on Earth had always been physical. The demonic soul—if such existed—knew the nature of physical being: it was libidinous, and gluttonous, and obsessed with the pursuit of sensation. Harry always imagined that if he ever got close to the Devil he would find that philosophy writ large. He'd always assumed that where sat the Devil so too sat all the excesses of the flesh. But this display of vast whispering forms did not suggest a hotbed of debauchery; rather, this was peaceful—even beautiful in its way. Where the Devil belonged in this world of veils and dreams Harry could not fathom.