For A Few Souls More (Heaven's Gate Book 3) Read online

  The monk’s tent was just large enough for two, and they sat in its mouth and ate a meagre portion of bread and cured meat.

  Once done, Atherton filled his small pipe and listened to the monk’s tale.

  4.

  FATHER MARTIN TOLD Atherton of his trip from England. He detailed the rest of his party: his fellow members in the Order of Ruth; Lord Forset and his daughter Elisabeth; the engineer Billy Herbert and, finally, Roderick Quartershaft, the man of fiction who, as well as Wormwood, found his real self, Patrick Irish, at the end of his journey.

  He told him of the things they had seen on the road to find their impossible town. Of swarms of bats and tribesmen of iron and coke.

  He told him how Wormwood had finally appeared before them, the solidifying of a mirage, a dream writ large in timber and slate.

  He told him about Alonzo, the self-appointed voice of God who had pronounced to those gathered on the plain.

  He detailed the long hours of waiting, of the near tragedy as Lord Forset’s Land Carriage was stolen and aimed at Wormwood like a steam-powered bullet.

  Finally, and by now the sun was beginning to set behind the mountains that surrounded them, he told him of the collision.

  “Light flooded the entire valley. There was the sound of a gunshot, such a simple, earthly noise, and then the air itself felt as if it was being sucked out of the world. A wind roared and we stumbled, blind and deaf as the reality we had always known shifted around us.”

  This was not news to Atherton. It had been felt the world over. A blank moment of thunder and awe, experienced by all.

  At the time, Atherton had been in New York, regretting his transfer from Africa, assisting with the Empire’s expansion. Africa had been a land of monsters too, Atherton felt. Heat and rebellion. Bullets and blood. He had done good work there. When the light had come, washing over him, he had half hoped it was the hand of God, coming to claim him from his new station, a city of boredom, and relocate him to somewhere worthwhile. Perhaps, in a way, that was exactly what it had been.

  “Then, all was normal again,” the monk continued. “The light vanished, the wind faded and the town lay before us. Only now its streets were open, the way no longer obstructed by the unseen barrier.”

  “What caused it?”

  “They say...” and here Father Martin’s nerves truly began to show. “It was the death of God. Felled by a bullet.”

  “You can’t kill God,” Atherton said for the second time that day. This time he found some agreement.

  “I would hope not. Though they say He wanted to die. They say He was wearing the body of a mortal. A child. They say He wanted to know what it felt like to be human. To be finite.”

  “Who are ‘they’ that do all this talking?”

  Father Martin shrugged. “Stories pass around here as freely as the air. I don’t know how much credence I can give any of them. All I can say is that this has become the accepted version of the events that took place on the other side of Wormwood.”

  “In Heaven?” Atherton didn’t bother to keep the cynicism from his voice.

  “I know, it’s a hard concept to grasp, isn’t it? Again the ethereal, the spiritual, given flesh. Heaven is not a place we would ever have granted geography. Even those of us who believed unequivocally in its presence would think of it as abstract, a place of the mind, not somewhere solid. Hell too. These were domains of the soul, that insubstantial, intangible essence. What use did the soul have of walkways? Bricks and mortar?”

  He was looking towards Wormwood, Atherton knew, even though it was not visible here in the crater.

  “I would always have suspected,” the monk continued, “that, however we visualised the afterlife, God or the Devil, we would be doing so in a reductive fashion. The reality would be even more abstract than our human minds could picture. Actually, the opposite is the case. It’s as solid as we are. Perhaps, given that, it’s not so absurd to believe God may be dead after all. Maybe he was as ruined, as tethered by the flesh as we all are.”

  “I remain to be convinced.”

  Father Martin smiled. “And to think, earlier I complained that the intangibility of theology was lost to us. Perhaps we have just as many mysteries as we always did. Except now the answers may be found by explorers not philosophers, archeologists not clerics.”

  “If our government has its way, that soil will never be dug. They will want the doorway closed. Heaven and Hell, if they exist as physical continents, must be vaster than any other on the map. That they should exist, here... That cannot be allowed.”

  “I wonder if that would have been the case had Wormwood appeared in England?” Father Martin asked.

  Atherton was not going to be drawn into a political argument, however much he knew that the monk had put his finger on the truth. “You said yourself, that place should not exist.”

  “Indeed not. Whatever my beliefs I am no idiot. To have Heaven and Hell on our doorsteps, to be able to walk directly into either...”

  “Or to have whatever inhabits them walk into our world.”

  “Exactly. It would have been better were that not to have happened. I cannot believe it is what God wants, or, perhaps wanted. What chance does any human soul have if it can simply stroll into paradise? The chaos you saw down there, the monstrosities and the aberrations, they will only be the beginning, of that I’m quite sure. Soon, mankind will match it for its excesses. Can you imagine what our world will be like once people realise there are no limitations? That there is no need to await heavenly reward? That Hell can simply be walked away from? Do you think the human race is strong enough to retain its morality, its sense of propriety, in the face of that?”

  Atherton held the morality of the world in low esteem and always had. “No.”

  “And so, if the doorway can be closed it must, for all our sakes.”

  “God’s work?” Atherton smiled.

  Father Martin, for all he knew he was being mocked, nodded. “I believe so. And even if that is the only belief I am left with, I will hold onto it.”

  5.

  AFTER ATHERTON ANNOUNCED his intention to remain in the camp, at least for now, Father Martin instructed a couple of men to gather the man some supplies. A bed roll, a canopy, a little food and water. These people didn’t have much but they did their best to share.

  That night, as the camp slept under the stars, the air filled with the faint sound of smouldering fires and snoring, Atherton lay awake and imagined what might lie ahead.

  Father Martin had been right, of course, his government’s concern was not a spiritual one. The idea that America now possessed both Heaven and Hell on its soil, vast, powerful landscapes with undreamed of populations; such a thing was terrifying to every other country in the world. Certainly he would not be the only agent of a foreign power currently charged to investigate. He imagined swarms of them were descending from all over the globe. Would those who called the afterlife home ally themselves with the country they were tethered to? Would they attack it? Would they occupy it?

  What of the dead? Did they still walk on the other side of Wormwood? How many English citizens were now transported to American soil? How many French? Spanish?

  It was an impossible situation and one that his mechanical, rational mind couldn’t readily process. He was not a politician, he was a weapon, a scalpel whose blade was turned onto the body politic so that it could have its diseased flesh removed.

  After an hour or so, he thought of his horse and, as he was still unable to sleep, decided he would make the short walk down the mountainside to attend to the animal. He had no feelings for it but it was his transport and a man like Atherton always kept an escape route easily to hand.

  He walked quietly between the sleeping people. He was used to moving stealthily at night. The moon was the assassin’s ally and he had worked beneath its light many times over the years.

  He scaled the outcrop that hid the camp from view and began to descend, moving carefully over the une
ven terrain. As he got lower, Wormwood was revealed. It burned at night. He had proven earlier that the real town could not be seen from outside so the lights that flickered in its windows, the fires that burned in its grates, must be illusory. Real or not, they cast an orange glow on the plain around it that brought infernal imagery to Atherton’s mind. Perhaps Heaven was, indeed, on the other side of that gateway but so far all he had seen was Hell.

  His mood was not improved when he discovered the remains of his horse. It was half-eaten, its belly open to the stars, their lights reflected in the black pool that seeped from it.

  “There are wild animals in the mountains,” said a voice behind him and his gun was in his hand before he had even turned around to face the speaker.

  Atherton’s first assumption was that one of the residents of Wormwood had climbed up here to take a look at the opposition. Even by moonlight he could tell that the man’s skin was raw, a mess of shining flesh and scabs.

  “I mean no harm,” the man said, raising his hands, “and I’m as human as you, whatever my face may make you think.” He smiled and his teeth glinted unnaturally.

  “You look like a demon to me,” said Atherton. “You do this to my horse?”

  The man shrugged. “What sort of man would eat a living animal?” He smiled again and Atherton thought the man’s teeth might be false, metal embedded in the gums. “Like I say, there are dangerous creatures out here.”

  “Clever ones too. The beast’s mouth is strapped shut with a belt, to stop it from screaming as it was attacked I assume?”

  “They call me the Geek,” the man said, ignoring the question.

  “What sort of name is that?”

  “The only one God left me with. Just ask Father Martin, he used to dream of me. Maybe he still does when the moon’s full.”

  The Geek sat down on a rock, refusing to show concern towards the gun Atherton pointed at him.

  “I was listening to you earlier,” he continued, “when you were talking to the Father.”

  “I didn’t see you.”

  “Not many do. I’m not so pretty as I used to be and I prefer to keep to the shadows. But I keep my ears open. I like to know what’s going on. You’re here to kill the devils.”

  “I’m here to try.”

  “I imagine they take some killing. I ain’t tried myself, as tempting as it is.” The Geek looked towards Wormwood. “I’m always interested in unusual creatures, things I ain’t got my hands on before.”

  To Atherton this sounded dangerously close to perversion and he was quick to move the subject along.

  “How long have you been here?” he asked.

  “Since the beginning. I saw it born. Maybe I’ll see it die too. You ain’t alone in wanting that. Can’t imagine you’ll struggle to find an army.” He laughed. “I don’t mean the little mice up there, neither,” he said. “They mean well I guess but they ain’t got a strong arm between them. It’ll take more’n prayers to kill Hell.”

  “You’re right,” Atherton admitted. He holstered his gun. It wasn’t as if it scared the man anyway. “But I imagine Hell has an army too.”

  “For sure,” the Geek agreed. He smiled and, again, those metallic teeth glinted by the light of the moon. “I wonder if any of us will be alive by the end of it? Not that it matters.”

  “Why?”

  “If we die, it ain’t like we have so far to go these days is it? It ain’t nothing but a short walk.”

  So saying, the Geek stood up, turned around and vanished into the night.

  Atherton, his audience over, took one last look at his gutted horse and returned to the camp and to his plans.

  Once he was gone, the Geek re-emerged from the shadows to retrieve his belt from the dead horse’s mouth.

  “He seems a mite intense,” he said, aware that he once more had company.

  “Doesn’t he?” the man replied. The Geek looked up and smiled to see the look on the man’s face as he gazed down on the dead horse.

  “Sight of blood troubles you?” The Geek asked. “I’m surprised, with what you’re planning I reckon you’ll be ankle deep in it before long.”

  “Maybe,” the man agreed. “I hope not. So,” he paused for a moment, “you’ll do as I ask?”

  The Geek shrugged. “I can’t exactly refuse God, now can I?”

  WHAT AM I DOING IN THE MIDDLE OF THE REVOLUTION?

  (An excerpt from the book by Patrick Irish)

  HISTORY IS BUILT on uncertainty. Nothing grows in barren soil, it needs rain storms, it needs the food brought by rot, it needs heat. The status quo can be a pleasant place to live, but nothing great will ever flourish from it.

  When Wormwood appeared it changed the world. At the time of writing, I cannot accurately predict what will come from it. I am still too close; it will be for historians to judge, looking back from the vantage point of years gone by, as to what those changes were and what damage they caused. Still, I am a writer, it is the one and only worthwhile skill I possess, and it would be impossible for me not to put pen to paper and attempt to document my place within it all. Perhaps it will be of use to those future historians as they sift through the reports and the articles and draw their conclusions.

  I have no doubt that many books will be written about our current times. Though it may seem arrogant, I chance to suggest that mine will be the most valuable. After all, I do not write simply as a spectator. I write as a man who played a part in these proceedings. When the bullet was fired that changed everything, it rang out across the world. That was something we all experienced, every single person on the planet.

  But I saw it land. I watched it open a hole in the forehead of its victim. I watched God die.

  I was there.

  I later discovered how that moment impacted elsewhere, the light, the sound, the shared knowledge that something of universal importance had just happened. From my front row seat, there at the storm’s heart, I fear my experience may seem anti-climactical. It appeared to us, those few in the room, as nothing more or less important as the death of a child. We knew our eyes deceived us; Henry Jones, the blind gunslinger, was a man capable of great horrors but I dare to suggest that even he would think twice before emptying his gun into the head of an innocent infant. The child, the young girl, her toy train pulled along behind her by a length of string, was not all she appeared. She was a skin worn by a greater other, the Greatest in fact. Hankering after a mortal existence, God had poured itself into the flesh and bone of a human child. Jones, having a knife to grind with the Almighty, saw a chance and took it. God had wanted to experience mortality. God did so. At least, that is what we have to assume. Certainly the aftershocks lend credence to the act. As tragic and horrendous as the death of a child might be it doesn’t alter reality. Our history, built on the countless corpses of children, has proven as much.

  Many have argued since that God cannot die, whatever complex game He might wish to play. I don’t know. I suspect that is the (understandable) response of a devout mind in fear of losing its anchor in the world. All I can say is: if God is all powerful, God can do anything. That includes putting Himself in a position where his own extinction was not only possible but somehow desired.

  Jones certainly considered his work successful, holstering his gun and walking out of that immaculate room with a renewed sense of purpose. I suppose you think one of us should have stopped him? The execution of God is certainly a crime that most would consider worthy of punishment. I can only admit that I—and I presume my companions also—were so shocked at his sudden slaughter that we hadn’t the power to move. I know we were still stood there for long moments after he left, staring at the body of the dead girl—and however much we knew she had been more than that, it was the image we were faced with, a child shot in the head.

  It was Soldier Joe that made the first move. He removed his jacket and laid it over her. It wasn’t long enough for the task, her feet poking out from beneath the hem, and the slowly expanding pool of her blood
would not be concealed by it for long. It was better though, not to have to look at that face fallen slack, the small, red hole just above her left eye.

  “I don’t know what else to do,” he admitted, running his hands through his own hair, touching, or so I imagined, the old scar of his own bullet-wound. He had survived his, after a fashion.

  I know his history now, of course. All of those years as the brain-damaged messiah for the unscrupulous preacher Obeisance Hicks. Here, in the Dominion of Clouds, he had his faculties, could think and speak and express himself. In the world of the mortals all of these things had been beyond him. He had been at the mercy of his owner, his only friend the woman who stood with him now, his nurse Hope Lane. She doted on him, her feelings for him clearly more than those of nurse and patient. I wonder whether that was another blessing that might only be fully enjoyed now that they had been removed from the narrow-minded beliefs of the mortal world. I am sure the colour of her skin would have been a source of victimisation and disapproval were they to have tried to become a couple. We are not a species known for our acceptance of those we view as different to ourselves, though, of course, the median by which we judged such things was soon to change.

  Soldier Joe. I wish I knew his real name, it seems foolish referring to him by such a childlike nickname. On reflection though, perhaps not. Whoever he had been before his accident, it had been a rebirthing. A long and painful one that had only just concluded. Perhaps it is only right in such circumstances that a man be allowed to shed his old name along with his old life.

  “What will it mean?” Hope Lane asked, the first of us, I think, to really grasp that the murder we had just witnessed was a beginning, not an end. “Will all of this,” she gestured around us, “just crumble? How can the world go on without its God?”

  The peculiar, bright white world we had been brought to showed no sign of failing. There was no tremor beneath our feet or distant sound of devastation. While it would be understandable for one brought up on the notion of God as the Almighty glue that both birthed the world and, indeed, controlled it, to expect the Apocalypse in his absence, there was no sign of the End of Days just yet. I am now speaking with the advantage of hindsight of course, I know that life continued, much as a son or daughter might outlive their mother or father. Even then, with Hope’s question fresh from her lips I don’t think I truly feared Armageddon. I think it was partly the fact that we had already been led to believe that God was an absent ruler. We had been brought to the Dominion of Clouds by Alonzo with a view to us helping him fill the vacuum he already claimed to be there. Wormwood, the very myth of it, was purely a method of securing the living souls he had set his sights on. I was to be the author of his new bible, Soldier Joe was the noble martyr, Jones the Devil. In that role, he had certainly made a most promising start.