them in their billions.
Disrupt those controls, and you would set the seraph back. The gateways, which would be wide open tonight, would begin to close. By the twenty-fifth they would be closed entirely, not to re-open again for all those thousands of years.
The secret of Christmas was that the birth of goodness came on the day that the door to evil was closed.
This was a gateway and that little room was in Abaddon. He knew where, of course. It was General Samson’s apartment.
The “earthquake” had been local. It had involved the opening of this gateway.
Should he go through? Dare he?
It must be a trap. A temptation.
Then he noticed that the glow was less. This very unusual gateway was closing.
It could be an opportunity.
It was here that the seraph had originally attacked him.
Except, no, there was something wrong with that picture. As soon as his memories flitted back to that night, he saw Brooke and Nick and Kelsey coming up from the draw with him. And everybody was happy. They were thrilled. He was thrilled.
What?
He’d been raped by seraph marauders in this draw, trying to claw their way into a human universe that had rejected them.
The glow was dropping fast.
He stepped up to the gateway. The room on the other side looked now more like a photograph than an actual opening.
He stepped forward—and found that the surface was now thick, that it felt like stepping into a molten wall. He pushed against it, pushed harder. It was like squeezing through a mass of rubber.
And then he was stumbling forward. He tried to check himself, but windmilled across and hit the far wall hard. He sank down, feeling as if all his blood had been drained right out of him.
Then the noise hit him. Coming from outside was the most ungodly screeching and roaring he had ever heard in his life. Machinery howled, voices squalled and screamed, high and rasping and utterly alien—but not the voices of animals, no. They were shouting back and forth in a complex language, oddly peppered with any number of human words, English included. Worse, they were close by. This was a ground floor apartment.
A greasy stink of sewage and boiled meat came from the bloodred soup. The fact that it was still steaming worried him, of course, because whoever’s dinner it was would be back for it at any moment. It must be Samson’s food, meaning that he was here.
Recalling the story of the Three Bears, and the little girl who had entered their woodland cabin and found their meal ready to eat, he thought that others had passed through gateways like this before. In fact, if you read it right, you could reconstruct the entire fairy-faith of northern Europe as a chronicle of contacts with Abaddon.
He could either leave here now and try to make his way to Government House, or he could lie in wait for that monster.
Maybe he should try to steal Samson’s car. But it had a soul, didn’t it, so maybe it wouldn’t be so willing to let itself be stolen.
The safest thing would be to lie in wait.
There weren’t many places to hide in the room—just a curtain that concealed a still toilet full of puke— yellow goop that was being swarmed by flies as fat as ticks and as red as a baboon’s ass. Or no, look at the things, they weren’t flies at all, they were tiny damn bats.
He could not hide in there. He could not be near that toilet, which had, among other things, part of a rotting seraph hand in it. He knew that they were cannibals, of course, he’d seen this place before, had heard Samson think to himself that the execution fiesta he’d witnessed from the bus would mean lots of soup.
So this was some of that soup. But where was Samson? It had to be getting cold, even in the jungle heat they had here. Maybe he’d been arrested. Could’ve happened in a heartbeat. Maybe he was being tortured to death right now by that sociopathic kid of Echidna’s.
The shrieking rose, and with it came thudding from above. There were crunching noises, more cries, then a sound outside the door of somebody running downstairs. The sobs were unmistakable. A short silence followed. Then, more slowly, a heavier tread. It moved past the door.
This was not good. If somebody came in here, they’d raise the alarm and—well, he dared not allow his imagination to go there.
He decided this had been a fool’s errand. The soup was a trick. Samson was actually on the other side, and he was going to be menacing Brooke and Nick and Kelsey.
It was obvious, and what a damn fool he’d been.
He turned to go back through the gateway.
Except there was no gateway. For a moment, he simply stared at the blank wall.
The door clicked. He watched the crude wooden handle rise slowly. There was a flicker and a sputter, and he realized that the sharp light wasn’t even electric. It was carbide, a type of gas that had been used at home a hundred and fifty years ago.
They didn’t even have electricity.
The door swung open.
A gleaming creature stood there, shimmering purple-black. The vertical pupils in its eyes were bright red, the irises gold. It had in its hand a small disk with two barrels on the business end. Wylie knew what that was, and he decided not to show the magnum just now.
Slowly, carefully, he raised his hands.
The creature smiled a little, a tired smile. “I’ve been waiting for you,” it said in a rasping voice. Its English was good enough, but spoken with a curious singsong lilt that made Wylie think of the voice of a car.
Wylie had been outmaneuvered.
“Where’s Samson?”
“He is with your loved ones, Mr. Dale.”
Wylie knew what the phrase to die a thousand deaths really meant. In a situation like this, it was no cliche, but a dark expression of truth.
The creature made a very curious sound, a sort of smacking. It watched him with ghastly eagerness. He thought that they might be allergic to human dander, but they could eat human flesh, and this thing was hungry.
“At this time, come with me.”
What else was there to do? Wylie followed the creature down a steep, narrow staircase that reeked of something that had rotted dry. The walls were covered with graffiti-squiggles and lines that looked at first meaningless… and then didn’t.
They were drawings, all at child level, but done with the light and dark backward, like photographic negatives. For the most part, they were scenes of torture and murder and orgy. Some drawings showed male seraph with sticklike penises, others females with bared teeth guarding black eggs.
And as they came to the street, he saw some of them. One that looked up was the same color as Jennifer Mazle, creamy and pale, her scales glittering. Her eyes were the same as those of his captor. She gave Wylie a long, melting look as she slowly ran her tongue out and touched it with her fingers.
“A whore,” his guard said. Then some boys appeared, wearing hugely oversized T-shirts painted with images of crocodile-like creatures so perfectly rendered that they seemed about to leap off the cloth and into his face. Some of them. One had a New Sex Pistols T-shirt obviously from home, another a shirt with a big green fruit on it in the shape of a bitten apple, and in the bite, an image of a squeezed human face. This one carried a brutal weapon, an Aztec sword made of steel with obsidian blades jutting out of it. The squeezed face was instantly familiar. It was Adolf Hitler.
They watched him with their brilliant, dead eyes, their heads moving with the clipped jerks of lizards. As he walked, he saw that the street was made of wood—in fact, of cut tree trunks fitted together with an Inca’s skill. Before them was a vehicle looking something like a horse-drawn hearse, but with a tiny barred window in the back
