“Who is she?” Pam asked.
For a moment, Martin was confused. Then he saw her, too, a shadow standing in the corner of the chapel, so still that she at first appeared to be little more than a thickening of the dark. But he could see her eyes there in the corner of the room, her gleaming eyes, and her slimness.
Jennifer Mazle sprang at him. One second, he was wondering if the figure was even alive, the next he had been slammed to the floor.
Her hands came around his throat, closed. His head felt as if it was going to explode. At that same moment thick light surged in the windows and the door with the force of a tidal wave, causing the glass to shatter and the door to slam all the way across the chapel, where it hit the wall and dropped the cross to the floor.
Martin looked directly into Mazle’s face, into eyes that bulged until the contact lenses popped out, revealing the reptile eyes of the seraph. In the light that was all around them, he could see the kids moving with method and direction, and could hear the whispering of their minds.
Mike pulled Mazle’s head back. Her mouth opened and her long, black tongue came out as she screamed. Trevor thrust the shotgun into her mouth and pulled the trigger, and her lithe body shot backward in a shower of green blood. The head burst.
“But the light!”
“Don’t think, Martin!” Pam yelled.
“Just let yourself happen, Dad!”
As he took his attention away from his mind and into his body, he felt his soul return also, and knew that the light had been taking him so stealthily that he hadn’t even realized it.
Then Pam marched into the corner where Mazle had been standing and simply disappeared.
For a moment, Martin thought she’d gone through a concealed gateway, but when he heard echoing footsteps, he understood. Cunning doors like this were seen in some Egyptian temples he’d worked on, but especially in Peru, where there were many of them in old Cuzco, doors that to this day only the Inca knew. But to find one here in Kansas—well, he would have been surprised once.
Concentrating on his breath, on the way his body felt as he moved, leaving his thoughts and his fears behind, he found that he could move through the light easily and without danger. The kids weren’t even concerned by it.
He crossed the ruined chapel with the others, walking straight into the corner, feeling it give way, seeing the darkness, then finding his footing on steep black steps.
They had defeated the light, and if only mankind had recognized his own soul before it was too late, the whole world would have been able to do the same thing. But the seraph had infiltrated us with the lie that we were a body only, that there was no soul that was admissible to understanding and to science, and that science itself was a strange exploration having nothing to do with the kingdom of God, when, in fact, there was no real science that did not address heaven and satori.
As they went down, the air changed, growing thicker and warmer, beginning to smell stifling. This was the air of Abaddon, air as it would be everywhere in this world of theirs very soon. It was heavier, their air, and would be filling low places first.
He was last in line, going down the iron steps. Faint light came from below. From above, now only darkness.
They went down for a long time, and Martin remembered the part of Wylie’s book about Al’s descent. He had been taken miles into the earth.
As the light from below got brighter, it took on a blue cast, and the narrow shaft they were descending became more distinct. “It’s our guide,” Mike said.
Martin knew that the blue light of souls was also the color of good worlds, and that Abaddon was brown, but the human earths were palest blue, the color of their waters and their skies, and the glow of their dead.
“Are we sure?” Martin asked. They were a good two hundred steps down, and he was beginning to feel a distinct sense of claustrophobia in the narrow space. He forced himself not to think of the depth or the closeness. He’d found reading Wylie’s description of Al’s descent beneath Cheyenne Mountain to be almost unendurable, so vivid was the sense of being enclosed in rock, and he could never forget the feeling he’d had here earlier.
“Oh, my God.”
It was Pam, calling up from below. “What?”
He reached the bottom of the steps. At first, he was only aware of color—gold, green, red, tan. He couldn’t understand what he was seeing. Then he could. “This is the most extraordinary room in the world.” He’d seen it before, of course, but not in the body, not with all the vividness of his living eyes.
“Back down, Dad. Try to put your mind away.”
“I can’t put my mind away! Don’t you see what this is? It’s where we saw the hieroglyphics. But now we’re here in the flesh, and it’s all so—so vivid and so real. This is the most superb example of Old Kingdom bas-relief on the planet. And it’s in the middle of the United States!”
“Dad, listen to me. If you don’t just let it take you over, we’re in trouble. Because we’re not in the United States, dad. This is Abaddon, and the second they realize that we’re here, we are done.”
“We’ve come through a gateway?”
“We’re still on earth, but in the physics of Abaddon.”
“Come on,” Mike said. “We’ve got work to do. Stuff to figure out.”
Martin followed him across the room where Al North had been deprived of his life and his soul. He followed them through a low doorway, which was the source of the light, which was a living light that penetrated the flesh and made you weep to feel it upon your body.
Then he saw why. He was in a cavern, blue-lit like a submarine cave just touched by sun from the surface. Before them stretched a sea of glass tubes, each three feet long, all plugged into huge black sockets, all living, exact replicas of the images on the wall of the temple of Dendera. Except these tubes were sparking with life, and you could see the lights inside them leaping and jumping and struggling, causing the whole room to flicker continuously.
Slowly, Trevor, then Pam and Mike went to their knees. Martin followed them, because the light shining on them was not just alive, but richly alive, and they could see millions of summer mornings, dew on the flowers of the world, signs of struggle and happiness, and hear, also, a roar of voices that was vast.
The flower of mankind was here.
“What do we do now, Dad?”
“I have no idea.”
TWENTY-THREE
DECEMBER 21,
THE FINAL HOURS ON ABADDON: THE UNION
WYLIE HAD REALIZED THAT HE was being dieseled when he saw that they were crossing the same sodden shopping street again. There were piles of yarn, there were farm implements, there were baskets and paint- brushes, and hatchets polished to a high shine.
He might be a shape-shifter like the rest of them, but he was not on their side. No, he was a Union man, he had remembered that. They were right about him being an intelligence agent. He was, but not a very good one, given that he’d gotten his sweet ass caught just when that was the worst possible thing that could have happened.
Wylie had examined every inch of the wagon, but it was made like a fricking safe. The goddamn driver would open a little hatch from time to time and shit and piss into it. Wylie stayed well back, but the place stank. He wondered if his own shit was yellow now, too?
The wagon had been stopped for some time before he understood that it wasn’t going to be moving again. There was a series of clicks, and the door went hissing open. Even in this place, with its dirty brown sky, coming out hurt his eyes.
He was coming to the crisis of his failure now, he knew.
