A Lower Deep Read online

  I'm sorry, I said, but he didn't answer.

  Uriel plodded through the knee-deep snow to stand beside me, staring down the cliffs uncertainly. In all the time I'd known him he'd said only a handful of words to me. He remained stoic as stone, immovable perhaps, but never unfeeling. Even his brother didn't know his capabilities or the extent of his convictions. He wore dangling crosses, some inverted, others not. The ebb and flow of his hidden inclinations brushed against me.

  Eventually he picked up the blankets and wrapped himself in them. Occasionally the living idols would clamber over his tunic, gaze around, and squeak to him. Nip was nowhere in sight, but his tears flowed from Uriel's brow as if he were sweltering. The plastic saints started playing peek-a-boo. Uriel's prayers were of a kind I'd never heard before. He spat wards into the wind but they froze in midair.

  After another hour, as the blizzard worsened, Uriel gestured to me and said, "Don't peer into that darkness too closely." He spoke little enough, but managed to really say even less. He turned, fought his way through the snow, and plunged back inside the abbey.

  Time became tangible and smeared all around me. The weight of the past came down again, bloated and crushing. I no longer heard my mother singing. Instead my father's giggles reigned over me. Maybe that was the way it was supposed to be right from the beginning. The steam dissipated, and so did the majiks. My fingers grew numb. I fell over and shaped a snow angel for myself. I nodded off, slumped against the gates. The friezes rolled under my cheek. I slept for a time and only awoke when my father's frigid bronze lips kissed me.

  I couldn't see much of anything besides the thrashing snow and revolving hexes. I thought I heard jingling and I spun around, listening intently for the sounds of my dad's humiliation. There was nothing but my heavy breath in the battering wind. Self frowned and pointed high. I shielded my eyes and looked up.

  The possessed nun who'd tried to seduce me had climbed out my room window to stand shaking on the ledge. She'd gotten dressed again, and the folds of her habit fluttered and rippled like a spreading black stain. Thick ice rimed the precipice. Hands groped for her ankles. She inched along the ledge, reaching back to steady herself against the rampart, but continued on. Other people sprouted from the window trying to reach her. They began whipping themselves right there, invoking God and other deaf creatures. The bride of Christ crouched and waited, denouncing herself before the vast chasm and crashing floes below.

  She managed to smile though, and plucked at the snowflakes in front of her face. I thought I could understand why she might do that. Perhaps because the flakes, at least, were so close and solid in an otherwise ethereal place. Her arms came up as if she could hang on to the air, and simply step out onto the falling snow and drift back down to earth. She leaped and floated, or maybe flew for a moment, buoyant in the howling jet stream. Maybe the mount didn't want to let her go yet. Perhaps it would pull her back inside. She hovered there for another instant and dropped into white silence.

  Is this my fault?

  Ask yourself. My ass is cold.

  Gales ripped across the courtyard. I got lost along the outer curtain. I stumbled towards the monks' Chapter House and found the access tunnel to the cloisters but the doors were frozen shut. I wandered and lost my bearings. I fell asleep again for a few minutes, until more jingling bells roused me and I came awake half buried and shivering violently. I wondered if they'd abandoned me or if I'd deserted them instead. Self was gone.

  The moon had set but there wasn't any dawn. I felt utterly alone and thought of Christ in the garden of Gethsemane. While he awaited the kiss of Judas and the arrival of the Roman soldiers, Christ could have called on twelve legions of angels, but he went to his fate alone. What guts.

  I followed the jangling toward the inner curtain and back into the monastery. Two sets of wet footprints led a trail to the west wing.

  I'd waited all night and had still missed the return of my father.

  That awful stink of burning tallow wafted on the draft. Smoke formed new shapes of damnation. Ash on the walls spelled out the names of my high school graduating class, rows of those who hadn't become students of hell. Supplicants and monks lined the corridors, giddy and anxious. Assertions were being made.

  Priests murmured their masses as I stalked past. The tinkling bells withdrew farther into the distance. I heard a baby crying, and I started sprinting.

  They'd put Gawain and my father in the highest tower, near the principal hall of the church. I took the stairs three at a time and barreled over acolytes. The hushed crowd huddled in the narrow stairwell and fought to get a glimpse of what was happening. I threw elbows and shoved past everyone, hoping to hold in my rage and failing as usual. Incantations boiled from my mouth and eyes, and my touch set fire to their cowls.

  Abbot John tried to slam the tower door in my face and I howled my hexes into his chest. He blew over backward into Aaron's arms, who looked at me deciding whether to draw his sword. We could go this route if they wanted. My teeth wriggled with the taste of coagulating spells. Aaron kept his hand on the hilt of his sword but didn't attack.

  Self said, You're late.

  My father skipped from foot to foot, giving raspberries and chuckling. Just another dead man harlequin sticking his tongue out and making faces. The bells chimed on his hat and clown costume. My hair was thick with ice crystals, and when I turned aside my curls rang together in harmony with my father's jangling. I had a flash of deja vu. This had never happened before but it would happen again.

  Gawain held the infant in his arms, and I knew he could hear Elijah's whispers. He stroked the baby's head as if trying to calm Elijah's fury-or perhaps he merely wavered before he squeezed the soft spot of the child's skull.

  While I'd waited all night, another clown in the storm, comparing myself to Christ on his way to the crucifixion, Cathy had given birth in the house of her enemies.

  Gawain had survived the destruction of our original coven, and the permutation of the one that followed. I thought he could endure almost anything. Protected in his blind and deaf muteness, eardrums punctured by his own parents, his long white hair fell across his face as he stared at me with his seared corneas. His forked serpent's tongue slithered between his lips. I wondered what it was that he found in me.

  He was still dressed in a lavender cloak, his pale lost face nearly translucent in the torchlight. I tried hard not to run. He remained something more and less than the rest of us, a holy man in an unholy place. The younger monks pressed their foreheads to Gawain's feet and listened intently to his silence, hoping for revelation. I'd done it myself back when I'd first met him.

  Gawain made no motion or gesture toward me or anyone. He sat holding the baby and anticipated nothing I understood. He was eternally patient within the retreat of his own mind. I couldn't be sure if he'd come to the mount in order to aid me against Jebediah, or if he actually wanted to help resurrect Christ.

  Abbot John's lethal hands kept twitching, capable of twisting all our heads off, but he was impotent before the beauty and promise of Gawain's unreadable face.

  John's chest still poured wisps of smoke from my hexes. I glared at him and said, "You'd take a newborn from its mother?"

  "Haven't you criticized enough?" The petulance in his throaty whisper almost brought an anxious bark of laughter from me.

  "Did you have to kill Janice to take the child?"

  "No." He bore his blame well, and hardly looked humbled for having been his sister's lover. "Cathy is sleeping comfortably. After midwifing the birth, Janice collapsed. She hadn't slept in four days."

  "That's because she knew you were coming for the infant. And her children." He didn't even bother to nod. "Eddie's condition?"

  "The same."

  I looked at the baby but couldn't tell its sex. "Is it a boy or a girl?"

  "A girl."

  "I won't let you have her." I wanted to murder somebody, and the killing strokes swirled around in my palms, growing more and more conce
ntrated. "Are you the father? Did you sleep with your daughter as well as your sister?"

  Those hands came together in a bash of bone, clasped in prayer. "I should kill you."

  "Is that one of your affirmations, John?"

  In some obscure sense he might have believed Cathy and Eddie to be unclean, the products of the profane union of himself and Janice. If he wanted to completely wipe out the man he'd been, he might also want to destroy all that man had given birth to.

  But I didn't quite believe it. I might have considered him capable of murdering his own flesh if only I wasn't so certain that he'd find suicide a more courageous act of martyrdom. He probably wouldn't have throttled his own kids-but the baby?

  "Revoke your oath," he said.

  "No."

  "You'll be destroyed, and we'll all die with you."

  "Nobody else is going to die."

  "You fool."

  I might have too much ego, or not enough, but a promise of protection was still valid. I struck the rock behind me and could sense its sickness. "No one else leaps from the buttresses. Nobody else gives in to misery. Not even you, John. You're staying off the rope tonight."

  The thought of not torturing himself made him frantic. His hairless pink face became even more ridiculous, and he looked like a piglet trying to escape a butcher.

  Gawain offered the child to me and I held the infant girl. I felt the newborn soul entwined with Elijah's despondency. There was nothing of the true prophet Elijah here, but Jebediah's greatest strength was in forcing the verse of scripture to fit his intent. Maybe I was supposed to be the one to sacrifice her upon the altar of my fears.

  "She's beautiful," I said.

  Give me the kid, Self told me.

  What?

  Give her here.

  No.

  I'll keep her safe.

  Where?

  Trust me.

  Are you back? I asked.

  Are you?

  I handed him the baby and he took her gently, careful of her fragile neck, and hopped away down the tower stairs. Monks and nuns fell over themselves. Abbot John dove and missed, and Aaron's panic crowded his eyes. They ran out to give chase.

  If the mount hadn't been so set in its course and manner its spires and roofs might have come thundering down now, if only to state its case. The charge in the air grew until tiny pinwheels of ball lightning sparked in the rafters. My father tumbled across the room.

  "Leave me," I said, and I was astonished when all the penitents and priests left without an argument or fight.

  My oath wouldn't affect Gawain, and whatever evil stalked these corridors could not drive my dead father any more insane.

  "Why are you here, Gawain?"

  Only he and I remained of Jebediah's first coven, but Gawain carried the others with him in some fashion, even now. He sat and stared into me, and never so much as mouthed my name.

  My father grinned through his painted black lips. His leer was something set loose from a bottomless terrible dream. I floundered against his chest and held on to him as tightly as I could, waiting for his arms to encircle me, but they never did.

  He kept giggling and dancing, and we swung around the room like that for a while, until I was left in a heap and couldn't catch my breath for all the sour tears coursing down my face. I cried for him with my fists in the air just as I'd done when kneeling at his grave, whimpering, "Dad . . . oh, Dad. . ."

  Chapter Eleven

  Cathy and Janice slept fitfully, with their hands snatching out to each other across the space between their beds. The bloody sheets had been hung aside to dry for later use, along with the stored afterbirth, which would add potency to any spell. Janice's scars took on another hue. All the ghosts of herself sat on the mattress, cuddling and patting her thighs and listening to the deep regular breathing and frequent angry snorts.

  The empty robes of Fane pressed a wet cloth to Cathy's forehead. The floating cowl turned to me. Slowly his face reconciled and filled in angle by angle. He stroked and washed her brow and neck, and spoke quietly in her ear. She smiled warmly in her sleep.

  Just as his features had been scribbled in, so was the truth that Fane was the father of her child.

  Eddie's bed was empty, though the pins remained stuck through the blankets. His organs were still intact in the clay jars, but the jars had been rearranged. His lungs worked their steady rhythm like a bellows.

  "Is my daughter safe?" Fane asked.

  "Yes."

  "Where is she?"

  "I don't know."

  He nodded, and oddly enough added, "I trust you."

  "Apparently you do. Why?"

  "You're the only man I've ever met who truly has nothing left to lose, and absolutely nothing to ever gain." He pulled no parlor tricks, but his voice still sounded as if it came from everywhere around me. "I pity you."

  "Knock off that crap. Where did they take Eddie?"

  "He vanished right before Catherine went into labor."

  "When this is over you should take her and go back to selling shoes."

  "Perhaps I will. As soon as Elijah is expunged and I get my daughter back." He kissed Cathy's lips, and for a moment my jealousy grew as bright as Elijah's. Fane wiped her face again and said, "I used to think being a shoe salesman was hell. No wonder God killed me."

  The smell of curdled milk made me want to sneeze. I left Fane pressing his mouth to Cathy's chin while Janice's ghosts glanced down at her. They saw her one poor seedy life being led despite their potential and expectations, and it revolted them. Her ghosts looked angry enough to kill her.

  They pleaded and followed me down the passages, plaintive and clutching. I tried to get them to show me where Eddie had gone, or been taken, but the tragedies of their unlived lives suddenly became too much. Their teeth fell out and their gray roots kept showing through, and their husbands pre-ejaculated and their hysterectomies left them vacant and bitter, and the welfare checks kept getting stolen out of their jimmied mailboxes.

  The torchlight dispersed them. I tried more and more doors. Penitents kept their flagellation down to a minimum tonight. They chewed leather and their attempts at atonement were halfhearted at best. When the storm broke I knew that at least half of them would go back to the common world. Out there they'd be normal again. They'd screw around on their spouses and lie in confession. They'd get creative on their 1040s and forget to rewind their tape rents, and they'd cut each other off in traffic and buy shoes from Fane that didn't fit.

  Where are you? I called when I came to the chapel.

  Self carried the jar with Eddie's heart in it. He and Eddie stood holding hands before the door.

  What are you doing here? I asked.

  Self remained silent, panting. The flaps of Eddie's chest had been shut, and he wore a soggy shirt. He said, "I want to go to the place."

  "Which place, Eddie?"

  "The one of forgetting."

  I worked my arm into Self's mouth and slashed myself against his fangs. I fed him blood hoping to sever the link between him and whatever else haunted Armon. His Adam's apple bopped as he sucked, and he soon began to burn and flood with our rage again.

  Oh, my head.

  You've been in contact with it.

  Me? With what?

  You tell me.

  No, you tell me.

  Where's the baby?

  Safe.

  Where are the others? Where's Aaron? And John?

  There are no others. None who count.

  He sniffed the jar and his mouth watered. I'd given him a taste, and his appetite grew as he watched the beating heart, thinking of the juice and raw flavor. The force of his own desire seemed to startle him, and he wavered a step and held the jar away from his face. It surprised the hell out of me. He handed Eddie's heart back to the boy, who held the pottery close. I felt something in my second self that I'd never felt before, and the icy sweat prickled my hair.

  He'd almost felt guilty.

  I asked, What's the place of
forgetting?

  Where did you hear that?

  You think you can stop answering me with questions?

  Can you?

  Yes, I said.

  L'oubliette, Mon Capitaine.

  An oubliette was a miniature dungeon reached through a trapdoor that was so small only one person could be in it at a time, hunched over.

  Do they even have one here?

  A room of torture. Of course they do. For purging if not for adversaries. They have everything else.

  It was also called a murder hole.

  I said, Show me.

  We entered the chapel. Gawain and my father were already inside. As we passed the metal stoup that held the holy water I nearly dabbed and crossed myself with it. Some habits died hard and others didn't die at all. We continued into the vaulted aisles, the arches of ashlar, and the sheltered arcade, knowing that beneath us were the cloister tombs.

  The single cell of the dungeon sat nestled behind the altar, as if at any moment the priest might call someone up front and send him to that prison. The trapdoor screeched open like a terrified man. My father said, "Woo woo."

  Eddie walked forward and started to climb down into the hole. Gawain put out his hand and gently stopped him, and for a second I thought he might hug the boy.

  I could barely squeeze myself down into the hole.

  The depth of darkness cut through me as easily and quickly as I moved through it. Self shut the trapdoor. A whole ocean of antiquity existed in every white-capped second. There are moments of distinction when the soul stands to one side and takes full measure. The substance of the forgotten place thickened into a veil sliding over me, encompassing my corpse, a pall over my coffin.

  I walked and kept walking, the levels of shadow before me, inside of me, and the endless reams behind my eyes. My father's breath seemed to heat the back of my neck. I tried to grasp my mother's songs but she was too far away, even here and now. My lost love Danielle shifted in my arms, just as she had in the pew when she'd died whispering her devotion. I could deal with the dead but only when I raised them and they didn't raise themselves. All the flaming words of my past didn't light an inch of the way. The gloom went beyond remoteness, another manifestation of doubt and regret. Like all my remorse it was never-ending, as deep and limitless as the dark where all my own failures lurked. I could go no farther.