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

  WHAT AM I DOING IN THE MIDDLE OF THE REVOLUTION?

  (An excerpt from the book by Patrick Irish)

  I WAS NOT alone.

  “I knew this place would capture you,” said Alonzo’s voice, proving his spirit had not dissipated as quickly as he had led us to believe. “As a storyteller, how could it not?”

  I looked around for him, eventually spotting the faintest of glimpses in the far corner. He was little more than a breath on a cold day, a wisp of white in which I could just about discern a single eye, perhaps a nose.

  “I can’t say I’ve quite got the method of it yet,” I admitted, pacing across the floor which still showed the glowing heart of the Fundament.

  “That’s why I stayed,” he admitted. “One last bit of assistance. Or interference perhaps, I’m no longer sure I can differentiate between the two.”

  “I’ll take either,” I told him. “Better that than to be in a room filled with possibilities and never master them.”

  “It’s all about thought,” he said, “like everything here. You need to be clear in your thinking. Visualise what you want it to do and it will do it.”

  “I always did struggle with clarity,” I admitted.

  “Drinkers do.”

  “I don’t drink anymore,” I told him, wondering if he knew that the first thing this room had offered me was a chance to break that pledge. I realise my coyness may seem absurd as clearly I’m happy enough to admit what happened in print, where anyone can read of my weakness. I suppose, however much as his actions may have proven to the contrary, I still looked upon him as something heavenly, something I should aspire to. He certainly seemed to have similar thoughts as he began to tutor me in the ways of the Observation Lounge.

  “This place,” he explained, “it’s a great gift I’m offering.”

  I didn’t know what he expected me to say to that. Was he after my thanks? If so he had it, profusely expressed.

  “You must understand though,” he explained, “it is not just about witnessing. There is that, of course; from here you can see everything, anywhere, at any time. But by witnessing these things you will become involved.”

  “How?” If this place was a book, with all of the history of the worlds written on it, then that I could understand. It was amazing but I could understand it. But how could I affect them? A reader doesn’t alter the flow of words simply by reading them.

  “How can you not? That was my problem. I was incapable of knowing so much, seeing so much, without wishing to involve myself. And, as I told you, this place responds to thoughts and desires. It helped me.”

  I didn’t understand and it seemed he was reluctant—or perhaps unable to—be clear. “You are in a place of power. This room gives you a kind of omniscience. It changes your perspective. You are used to a life lived from a single perspective, experienced in a chronological line. That is not how this room works. Here you will move forward and back in time, following threads of the world’s story as you switch between perspectives. You wish to see your friends?”

  “Of course.”

  “But when? Do you want to see how they die? Do you want the end of their story? Or do you want find out what they were before you crossed their paths?”

  “I just want to know how they’re doing now.”

  “What is ‘now’? I’ve already told you time is inconsistent outside the mortal world. There is no ‘now’. It is simply lives lived, only a straight line when viewed by the person living it. To us, here, now, that line is complete, it can all be viewed. So what is the point of ‘now’?’”

  “That’s terribly confusing.”

  “It’s omniscience. Or close to it. You cannot hear their thoughts, know their inner selves, but you can know everything else. Let me show you.”

  And he did so. I found myself watching a man I didn’t know as he visited Wormwood, then travelled up into the mountains to find Father Martin, a man broken, I fear, by so many of his recent experiences. Then he showed me two people in the Dominion of Clouds. I watched as they made their decision to travel to the Dominion of Circles to rescue lost human souls. Finally, I saw Henry Jones, countless miles away, hatching plans in the city of Golgotha.

  “How did he get there so fast?” I asked.

  “You still don’t understand. There is no now, it doesn’t matter whether what you have just seen happened, will happen or is happening in this moment. You need to stop thinking in linear terms. Time moves differently in the Dominions anyway, it has less meaning than you’re used to. You have to start thinking bigger. Henry Jones rode from here to Golgotha, no doubt he talked to several people on his way, gathering information, making plans.”

  “Which must have taken him time.”

  “For him, not for you. His time is not yours, you’re not riding with him, you don’t share his line. When it intersects with yours you synchronise, your time runs in parallel, then, when you part, you go your own way.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “It is the way of the Dominion of Clouds. You’ll get used to it.”

  I wasn’t sure that was true. So I changed the subject. “Why have you been showing me these things? That man outside Wormwood, the couple in the garden. I don’t even know them.”

  “All of these stories intersect, they are all part of the greater story. The story of what we have done here.”

  “We?” I wasn’t being humble, I was far from willing to take my portion of blame in these matters. It was responsibility I was avoiding, not credit. “I think this was all your doing.”

  “That’s what you think at the moment, but this is only because you have yet to see what lies ahead on your own personal line.”

  “And can I do that here?” It was an obvious question, though I was by no means sure I wanted to do so.

  “No, only He could ever do that. This room gives us powers close to His but we’re not God.”

  I was relieved, the decision removed from me. His answer exposed another question.

  “You think He knew Jones was going to kill Him?”

  Alonzo didn’t answer. The smoke shifted slightly, perhaps the ethereal equivalent of a shrug.

  “I can’t stay much longer,” he said. “You must carry on on your own.”

  “But I don’t know what I’m doing!”

  “Do any of us? For all our power? Just do what feels right. That’s all you can ever do.”

  I looked to the floor which still showed the ruins of Golgotha.

  “My friends,” I said, “the Forsets, Billy... I want to know what happened to them.” I corrected myself. “Is happening.”

  “Will happen?” came Alonzo’s voice, weak and fading as the smoke disappeared.

  I stared at the floor and, slowly, it began to show me the plain outside Wormwood.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  A TOWN CALLED HELL

  1.

  AS THE SKY filled with light and the sound of a gunshot echoed across the plain, Lord Jeremy Forset had an epiphany.

  It would seem to him later, after the chaos had died down to be replaced with conviction and decision, that a great weight had been lifted. Something obvious was now understood, the idiocy that had cluttered his life was finally washed away.

  There was a time when he hadn’t been obsessed with Wormwood of course, he hadn’t been born with the curiosity that had dogged him for so many years. Try as he might, however, it was almost impossible to remember those days, the young man unburdened. He must have existed, growing into manhood with hopes and dreams. He must have had his fill of things to stuff his head, to occupy and thrill him. Forset wondered what they had been.

  There had always been the inventing of course but that was a subconscious act, the solving of puzzles that had never concerned others. The physicalisation of the abstract. The wonder of flight turned into metal, cogs, gears, chemical reactions. It was, in its own way, an extension of his obsession with Wormwood. It was the rationalisation that stopped him from losing his marbles when the
real secret, the real mystery, refused to be solved.

  And still he had littered his life with the shadows of that mystery—notes, sketches, the miraculous pinned down and robbed of its magic. His entire library of research was like a cabinet of mounted butterflies, their colour dimmed behind glass, their real miracle, that of flight, stripped away by the killing jar and a pin. Magic was not to be found on paper. You couldn’t paint a sunset, you could create a painting that had a sunset in it, and maybe it was beautiful in its own right, but the actual sunset, the explosion on the horizon, needed to be experienced in the flesh.

  So it was with Wormwood. He had waited outside the town with notebooks and pens, a camera and the urge to document. No, he decided, as the light began to fade, the world taking shape around him again, faint lines at first then the solid shapes of the mountains, the dirt, the town that had ruled his life. No pens, no sketches. Just sight, that’s all I need. Just to experience it.

  His wife had known this truth all along of course, she had despaired of his obsession for precisely that reason. “You’re lost in books and the real world passes you by,” she had said. “Look up once in a while and see the things that are really important. Such a shame that she had never lived to see that penny finally drop.

  “It only took a lifetime, my love,” he said, speaking aloud, though everyone around him was far too disorientated to notice, “but I finally understand.”

  2.

  THE AFTERMATH OF that moment, when God ceased to be and his worlds became ours, affected those gathered on the plain in two distinct ways.

  It wasn’t long before it was discovered that the barrier that had kept them away from the afterlife was gone. The sign of its vanishing came from within Wormwood itself, as a creature with the hide of an elephant but the wings of a fly came bursting from what appeared an empty street and took flight over the plain. It filled the air with a low, vibrating hum, its wings beating so fast they were nothing but a blur bookmarking the sagging, rough body. Its mouth was in its belly, a thing of multiple lips that peeled back to expose the hungry space beneath, howling to be filled.

  The people ran for cover, hiding beneath their canopies or carts, sure that it could only be a matter of time before this thing descended and began plucking them from the ground to satiate its hunger.

  Some reached for their guns and began shooting into the air but it would take more force than was possessed by their bullets to pierce that tough skin. Perhaps they still irritated it, however, as the creature circled a couple of times before returning the way it had come and vanishing.

  The nerves of the crowd had already been at breaking point. The sense that the gunshot they had heard, and the blinding light that had followed it, had caused some essential change in the fabric of the world was something they all felt. They couldn’t begin to guess at the details but they knew their reality had changed and likely not for the better. For many, the sight of such a creature let loose in their skies finally eroded the bravery that had seen them this far. Many had seen worse during their travels but a journey of horrors is tolerable when paradise lies at the end of it. Once you begin to suspect your destination is as terrible as everything else it’s hard not to turn around and abandon the enterprise altogether. Heaven had turned out to be Hell, that was the pervasive belief, and they had been duped into offering themselves to it.

  The evacuation spread contagiously, first a couple of wagons hit the trail and then the exodus thickened. Within a few hours, the camp that had become a town itself was reduced once more to a scattering of nomads. The plain was littered with junk, abandoned to the dust and the shadows of Wormwood.

  There were those who stayed of course, those with strong enough reasons to still want what Wormwood contained—absent loved ones for the most part—and those who weighed the business up and felt they had so little to return to that there was little point in the journey. Bridges had been burned, lives committed, for better or worse.

  It was no surprise that Forset was amongst those that stayed, his recent epiphany having, if anything, sharpened his compulsion to cross the town line. Elisabeth remained with him; she hadn’t abandoned her father yet through a lifetime of obsessions and wouldn’t do so now. Billy Herbert stayed too, under a pretence of ‘seeing through what they’d started’ but really because it would have taken more than the threat of monsters to pull him away from Elisabeth.

  The Order of Ruth were not quite so devoted. They had lost some of their number to the cause. The results of Brother Clement’s conviction in the righteousness of their goals still lingered, both in their minds and spattered across the windows and carpets of the sleeping carriage. It’s hard to remain philosophical about death when you’re forced to clean up the results of it with a mop. Their leader was absent, last seen wandering in the mountains. After a brief conversation, all but one of his order decided to follow his example. They were sure that once they found Father Martin, conviction would be restored and the way forward would be clear.

  It was Brother William who stayed. The young novice had slowly begun to feel more at home with the rest of the party than his ecclesiastical brothers and now, when the choice had to be made between them, he knew which way his future lay. He had changed his clothes and shed the name that went with them. William had made his choice.

  No more than an hour after the death of God and the exodus it inspired had started, the crew of the Forset Land Carriage was reduced to four.

  3.

  “I WANT TO go in,” Forset announced. “No more waiting. Alonzo isn’t coming for us, and neither,” he added after a moment’s consideration, “is anyone else.”

  “I’m in,” said Billy.

  “Me too,” agreed William, “I didn’t come all this way just to stare at it.”

  Elisabeth looked at her father and smiled. “No pleas for me to stay here?”

  “Would there be any point?” he replied.

  “None whatsoever.”

  “Then no, we all go.” He patted one of the wheels of the Land Carriage. “And we take this.”

  “It’s hardly worth it, surely,” said Billy. “It’s only a short walk.”

  “If there’s one thing we do know,” Forset replied, “it’s that the town is only a door. A gateway that leads to the worlds beyond.”

  “It’ll have to be a big gateway,” said Billy, looking at the town. “I reckon it’ll fit between the buildings but we’ll struggle to turn her.”

  “We’ll ditch one of the carriages,” said Forset. “There’s only four of us now, I’m sure we can manage with just one plus the engine.”

  “True,” Billy agreed.“Even then...”

  “We’ll manage,” Forset insisted. “It will let us through, I’m sure of it.”

  “You speak like the town’s a living thing,” said Elisabeth.

  “Yes,” Forset admitted. “I do rather. I somehow feel like it is.”

  4.

  IT TOOK THEM some time to effect repairs. The Land Carriage had been through a fair ordeal over the last few hours, driven to breaking point, shot at and attacked by an angry mob.

  The work was rough, they had little choice about that. This was not an engine yard and materials were limited to what they had onboard, or could salvage from the carriage they intended to abandon or pick up from the detritus left behind by the parties who had given up the plain. Windows that couldn’t be replaced were boarded up, holes patched, rough edges cut loose and made safe. The vehicle that took form over those hours, with the four of them working until the sun set and the moon rose over the plain, was an ugly thing. But the following morning, having forced himself to take a few hours’ sleep, Forset watched the dawn light pour itself over every harsh line and tatty edge and fell in love with it all over again. It seemed to him to be the perfect example of practicality over draftsmanship. His initial designs were just lines on paper, the beginnings of beauty; here was the real thing, hard, powerful and awe-inspiring.

  “You’ll do,” he told it.
“You’ll have to.”

  Throughout the night, there had been further signs of life from Wormwood. Flashes of light as a slow traffic began to build in both directions, some of those on the plain gathering up a few belongings and setting out to explore its streets just as a few of those from the dominions beyond decided to step out and take a taste of mortal air.

  After a hasty breakfast, they made the few final checks before setting off.

  “Fuel is going to be our first problem,” said Billy. “She can burn pretty much anything and I’ve topped us up with whatever I can find that’s combustible. She’s designed to run more efficiently than a lot of commercial steam engines but we’ve still used two-thirds of our coke reserve and we really don’t want to grind to a halt in the middle of nowhere. If we see anything we can use we should get it onboard, I don’t want to be on the run and losing power.”

  “Noted,” said Forset. “We’ll top up when we have the chance.”

  “Food’s fine,” said William, who had checked the stores. “Now there’s just the four of us, our supplies will stretch a lot further.”

  “We’re short on munitions,” said Elisabeth. “I’d like to think we wouldn’t need them but given where we’re going that’s probably naive.”

  “Not that bullets were much use against that creature yesterday,” said Billy.

  “No,” she admitted, “but knowing we have something with which to defend ourselves will make me feel safer.”

  “Agreed,” said her father. “Perhaps Wormwood will be more than just the facade of a town? Maybe some of its stores will contain supplies we can use?”

  “No harm in looking,” said William.

  “I wonder if we’ll find Patrick?” said Elisabeth.