Clive Barker's Tortured Souls

Book Three

The Avenger I

Zarles Kreiger was human once. An assassin working for the gangster Duarf Cascarellian, Kreiger was a man who would do anything for a price. But there are some tasks that have an unforeseen price, and this proved to be one of them. Caught red-handed by the  Senator's daughter, the exquisite Lucidique, Kreiger was persuaded that he in his turn had been a victim. The rulers of the city in which they all lived—-the vast, degenerate city-state of Primordium—-were the truly guilty souls; and until the dynasty was brought down life would continue to be a bloody confusion in which men like Kreiger acted like rabid animals and women like Lucidique lost their loved ones.

It had to stop. And Lucidique knew how. She persuaded Kreiger to put himself  into   the  hands  of  an  ancient  entity  called  Agonistes,  who  would traumatically reconfigure him.He did as Lucidique suggested, and after eight days and nights out in the desert, he returned to Primordium as The Scythe-Meister: a powerful engine of destruction, who in a matter of hours brought the Perfetto Dynasty to a close.Before disappearing into the desert, he had three words for Lucidique, three teasing words:

"...you cannot imagine..."

II

They  called  that  night-—the  night  the  Emperor  and  his  family  were murdered-—the Great Insurrection. In its wake, a host of minor insurrections took place, as old enmities erupted. Powerful figures who'd used the decadent reign of the  Emperor  Perfetto  as   a   cover  for  their  corruptions-—judges,  bishops, members of the clergy, guild and union leaders-—found themselves unprotected, and face to face with the people they'd exploited.Even those  amongst  the  criminal  classes  who  had  private  armies  to protect them against this very eventuality were fearful now.Take, for example, Duarf Cascarellian. He wasn't by any means a stupid man. The fact that his assassin, Zarles Kreiger, had disappeared the night of the Insurrection made him highly suspicious that Kreiger's fate was tied in with thealmost supernatural fall of the Emperor. Indeed one of Cascarellian's spies, who had been a guard at the palace the night of the slaughter, had seen the creature everyone called The Scythe-Meister washing his weapons in one of the Palace's many fountains. The informant had escaped the massacre without harm coming to him, and reported that unlikely as it seemed the semi-mythical figure of The Scythe-Meister bore a subtle but undeniable resemblance to Zarles Kreiger.Was it possible, Cascarellian wondered, that the missing assassin and The  Scythe-Meister               were                           somehow                      the         same         person?         Had         some incomprehensible sea-change been worked upon Kreiger, turning him into this unstoppable avenger? And if so, what part did Lucidique-—who had been seen in a brief exchange with The Scythe-Meister--play in the process?

III

Cascarellian did not sleep well any longer. He had nightmares in which The Scythe-Meister broke down his doors, as it had broken down the doors of the Emperor's  Palace, killing his lieutenants, as it had slaughtered the palace guards, and finally come to  the  foot of his bed--as the killer had come to the Emperor's bed, pulling him from limb to limb.He decided the best way to protect himself from this unknowable force was through Lucidique. He sent three of his sons out to take had the Senator's daughter captive, ordering them to do as little as possible to arouse her wrath. In his heart (though he would never have  admitted this to anyone, not even his priest) he was a little afraid of Lucidique. She needed to  be treated with more respect than he was used to proffering women.Unfortunately, his offspring weren't as smart as he was. Though they'd been told to respect their captive, they took the first opportunity to test the limits of their father's patience. Lucidique was taunted, abused, humiliated. No doubt worse would have come her way had Old Man Cascarellian not returned from his day of business early, interrupting his sons' taunting of the woman.Lucidique  instantly  demanded  to  know  why  she  was  being  held.  If Cascarellian intended to kill her, why the hell didn't he get on with it? She was sick and tired, she told him. Of him, of his sons, of life itself. She'd seen too much blood.

"You  were  at  the  Palace,  weren't  you?  The  Night  of  the  Great

Insurrection?"

"Yes. I was there."

"You have something to with this creature: this Scythe-Meister?" "My business, Cascarellian."

"I could give you to my sons for half an hour. They'd have it out of you!" "Your sons don't intimidate me. And neither do you."

"I don't wish to make you uncomfortable. You're here under my protection; that's all. Do you know what it's like out there on our streets? Pandemonium! The city is coming apart at the seams!""Do you think holding me here is going to protect you from what's coming your way?" Lucidique said.A look of superstitious fear crossed Cascarellian's face. "What's coming my way?" he said. "You know something about the future?""No." Lucidique said wearily. "I'm not a prophet. I don't know what's going to happen to you and frankly I don't care. If the world ends tomorrow, I don't think you'll be judged very kindly, but-—" she shrugged, "--why should I care? I won't be there to see you suffer in Hell."Cascarellian had grown pale and clammy while Lucidique spoke. She only half-knew what she was doing to him, but she took a certain pleasure in it. This was the man who'd orphaned her; why not enjoy his superstitious fear?

"You think I'm a stupid man?" he said.

"To be afraid the way you're afraid now? Yes. I think that's pitiful."

"I don't want your contempt." Cascarellian said, with a strange sincerity. "I have enough enemies."

"Then don't make one of me." Lucidique said. "Let me go. Let me see the sky!"

"I'll take you out, if that's what you want."

"You will?"

"Yes. We'll go wherever you like."

"I want to go out into the desert. Away from the city." "Really? Why?"

"I told you. I want to see the sky..."

IV

The next day, a convoy of three cars wound through the chaotic streets of Primorduim and headed for the West Gate. In the first car, two of Cascarellian's best men--loyal bodyguards who'd seen him through many attempts upon his life. In the back car, the three brothers,  wondering aloud (as they increasingly did these days) if a kind of lunacy had overtaken their father. Why was he indulging this woman Lucidique in her whims? Didn't he understand that  she had every reason to hate him, to plot against him?In the middle car, chauffeured by Marius, Cascarellian's driver for three decades, sat the Don himself, accompanied by Lucidique."Satisfied?" he said to her, once they were outside the gates, and in sight of the open sky.

"A little further, please..." she said.

"Don't think you can fool me, woman. You may be cleverer than most of your sex, but you won't escape me, if that's your thought!"

They drove on in silence for a distance.

"I think we've come far enough. And you've seen enough of the sky for one day!"

"Can't I just get out and walk?" "Walking now, is it?"

"Please. There's no harm in that surely? Look...open ground in every direction."

Cascarellian considered this for a moment. Then he called the convoy to a halt.

A dust storm was on the horizon, slowly approaching the road.

"You'd better be quick!" the Don told her.

Lucidique watched the approaching wall of sand, then glanced round at

the men who were getting out of the cars; particularly the brothers. They smiled slyly as they  eyed her. One of them flicked his tongue between his lips, the obscene inference plain.

It was the last straw. Lucidique turned her back on him--on them all--and began to walk towards the sand-storm.

A chorus of warnings instantly erupted behind her. "Don't take another step!" one of the brothers said, "Or I'll shoot you!"

She turned to him, her arms opened wide. "So shoot! she said. Then she turned again and strode on.

"Come back here, woman!" the Don yelled. "There's nothing out there but sand."

The wind from the storm was whipping up Lucidique's hair now. It was like a dark halo around her head.

"Do you hear me?" the Don called after her. Lucidique looked over her shoulder.

"Come walk with me," she said to him.

The old man drew hard on his cigar, and then went after the woman.

His sons set up a chorus of complaint: what was he doing? Was he out of his mind?

He ignored them. He simply followed in Lucidique's footsteps across the sand.

She glanced  over  her  shoulder  at  the  old  man,  who  wore  a  curious

expression. In some strange way he was happy at that moment; happier than he'd been in  many years, with the wind hot against his face, and the beautiful woman calling to him to come with her-—Seeing that he was obeying her, she returned her gaze to the sandstorm, which was now no more than a hundred yards off. There was something moving at its heart. She was not surprised. Though she hadn't planned the reunion that lay ahead she had nevertheless known in her heart that it was coming. Her life since she'd stepped into her father's death-chamber, and seen Kreiger at work, had  been  like  a  strange  dream,  which  she  was  somehow  shaping  without conscious effort.She stopped walking. Cascarellian had caught up with her and seized her arm. He had a knife in the other hand. He pressed it to her breast."So that's where he is!" said Cascarellian staring at the dark giant in the heart of the storm. "Your Scythe-Meister."As he spoke, the sandstorm picked up a sudden spurt of speed and came at them--

"Don't come any closer!" the Don warned the creature in the storm. "I'll kill

her."

He pressed the knife into Lucidique's skin, just enough to draw blood.

"Tell him to keep his distance," he warned.

"It isn't Kreiger. It's a man called Agonistes. He has God's finger-prints upon him."The heresy of this made Cascarellian's devoted stomach turn. "Don't talk that way!" he said, and with a sudden spurt of righteousness he drove the knife into her heart. She reached  out, and touched the wound, then with her finger bloody grazed his forehead. A death mark.Cascarellian let the body drop to the ground and ordered a quick retreat to the cars before the storm reached them. This grim business wasn't finished, just because she was dead. He knew that. It was just beginning.He turned the house into a fortress. He had the windows sealed, and blessed with holy water. He bricked up the chimneys. He had guards and dogs patrolling the place night and day.After a week he began to believe that perhaps his faith and his gifts of money to the diocese, buying congregations praying for his safety, were having some effect.

He started to relax.

Then, on the afternoon of the eighth day, a wind came out of the West: a sandy wind. It hissed at the sealed doors and the windows. It whined beneath the floorboards. The old man took two tranquilizers and a glass of wine, and went to sit in his bath.A pleasant torpor overcame him as he sat in the warm water. His eyes fluttered closed.And then her voice. Somehow she'd got in. She'd survived the knife to her heart and she'd got in.

"Look at you," she said. "Naked as a baby."

He grabbed his towel to cover himself, but as he did so she stepped out of the shadows and showed herself to him, in all her terrible glory. She was not the Lucidique he'd known; not  remotely. Her whole body was transformed. She'd become a living weapon.

"Oh Jesus help me..." he murmured.

She reached forward and she castrated him with one sweep of her scythe. He clamped his bloody hands to his empty groin and stumbled out to the landing, calling for help. But the house was silent from roof to cellar. He called his sons' names, one by one. None came. Only his old dog Malleus answered his call, and when he trotted through from the kitchen he left red  paw-marks on the white carpet. He was eating something human.

"All dead." Lucidique said.

Then, very gently, she took hold of the back of Cascarellian's neck, the way a mother-cat catches hold of an errant kitten, and lifted him up, effortlessly. The blood from his vacant groin slapped against the carpet.She put her blade to his chest and cut out his heart. Then she let his body tumble back down the stairs.Later, when the wind had dropped, and she could see the stars clearly, she went out into the street, leaving the door to the Cascarellian mansion wide open so that atrocity there  should be soon discovered. Then she headed out, through a variety of back streets and alleys, to the West Gate, and thence into the waiting desert.

Book Four

The Surgeon of the Sacred Heart

I

With the Emperor and his family dead at the hand of The Scythe-Meister, and the head Don of Primordium, Duraf Cascarellian, slaughtered by Lucidique (along with most of his sons and bodyguards) an uneasy peace had settled on the  city.  The  minor  brawls  and   battles  that  had  erupted  after  the  Great Insurrection quietened down. It was as though nobody wanted to draw attention to themselves; not with so many murderous forces abroad in the city's streets.The Military junta that had taken charge of the running of the city during this  crisis  was  headed  by  a  triumvirate  of  Generals:  Bogoto,  Urbano  and Montefalco. They were no  better nor worse than any of their type: men who'd risen to the top of their belligerent trade by showing the greatest propensity for cruelty and control.But beneath  the  institutionalized  sadism  and  their  manic  capacity  for violence, two qualities long hidden in the hearts of the three Generals, there also lay qualities that they would  have been ashamed to confess they possessed. One, a sickly sentimentality (focused upon their mothers in the cases of Generals Bogoto and Urbano, and upon girls of six or seven in the case of Montefalco). Second, a startling capacity for superstition.It went undiscussed, but they each knew the other was touched by a profound fear of the uncanny. And there was no city presently more inundated in unholy matters than  Primordium. Rumour was rife here; and its subject was seldom rational. The stories that  were passed around the soldiers' campfires (and sooner or later reached the Generals'  ears)  were of unnatural horrors: things that defied reason. Tales of monsters that had been bred from the loins of the Scythe-Meister; of the vengeful ghosts of children; of succubi, their  sexual attributes discussed in clammy, but arousing detail.

fears.

One night, after some very heavy drinking, the three men vented their

"It is my belief," Urbano said, "that this damned city is haunted." The other two men nodded grimly.

"What do you suggest we do about it?" Bogoto asked.

It was Montefalco who replied. "Well, for a start...if I had my druthers I'd

burn the illegal immigrant quarter to the ground. It's they who engage in most of these unholy goings-on."

"But the work-force..." Bogoto said. "Who'd empty our shit cans? Who'd bury the lepers?"Montefalco had  to  concede  the  point.  "At  least  we  could  target  any element we suspect of intercourse with demonic forces."

"Good. Good." said Urbano. "Vigilance."

"And punishment," Montefalco went on. "Swift, draconian measures-—" "Public executions."

"Yes!" "Burnings?"

"No, too theatrical. Shootings are clean and fast. And they don't smell." "That bothers you?" said Bogoto.

Montefalco shuddered. "I loathe the smell of burning bodies," he said.

II

While the Generals debated the relative merits of this kind of execution or that,  Lucidique was sleeping--or attempting to sleep--in the house which her father had built many years ago for her mother. Her slumbers were uneasy. So many memories. So many regrets.Often in earlier, simpler times, when sleep eluded her, she would go out walking. Now, of course, she could not go by day. The transformation of her body that had been wrought  by Agonistes had resulted in a physique which was strong, supple and powerful, but  which  terrified many who laid eyes on her. When she did go out--even in the blackest night--she did her best to keep to the quiet back-alleys of Primordium where she would not be seen.Tonight, having given up on sleep, she went wandering in these alleys, and became aware that she was being followed.After a little distance she sensed the rhythm of the step, and realized that she knew  who her pursuer was. It was Zarles Kreiger, the assassin turned Scythe-Meister.

She stopped, and turned.

The Scythe-Meister was standing a little distance from her. His flesh had the same sickly luminescence that hers did; a bacterial brightness that was part of Agonistes' handiwork.  The rawer the wounds (and there were parts of both their  transformed  bodies  that  were  designed  to  never  heal)  the  brighter  the luminescence with which they burned.

"I thought you'd left the city," she said to him.

"I did. For a while. I went out into the desert. Meditated on my changed

state."

"And did you learn anything from your meditations?" Kreiger shook his head.

"So you came back?" "So I came back."

III

A few days after the three Generals had exchanged their fears about the presence of unsacred powers in Primordium, Montefalco brought them together again for a midnight journey.

"Where are we going?"

"There's  a  man  called  Doctor  TALISAC  who  has  been  conducting experiments on my behalf for several years now."

"What kind of experiments?" Urbano wanted to know.

"I hoped he would perfect me a soldier. Make a fighting machine that was not susceptible to fear."

"Has he succeeded?"

"No. Not so far. Nor do I have great hope for him now. He's addicted to many of his  own medications, and...well, you'll see for yourself. But there was one failure of his which might be useful to us now."

"A useful failure?" Bogoto said, somewhat amused by the paradox.

"We need a creature that will drive the unholy elements out of Primordium. I believe he has such a creature."

"Ah..." said Urbano.

"So will you see this creature with me?" "Where is he?"

"I have him hidden away in what used to be the Hospice of the Sacred

Heart, on Dreyfus Hill."

"I thought the place was empty."

"That's the impression I intended to give the world. If anybody ventures in there I have them killed and thrown in the canal."

"Is that what happened to the nuns?"

Montefalco smiled. "Nothing so humane, I'm afraid," he said. "Soldiers can be brutish if left to their own devices."

The subject was left there, and the three headed up towards Dreyfus Hill.

IV

Zarles Kreiger stretched out naked on Lucidique's bed. She looked at him admiringly: at the plethora of scars; at the intricate way the machinations of his flesh had been bound to Agonistes' own creations. Silver bonded with bone and nerve; gold and bronze the same.She climbed on top of him. Arcs of electricity leapt between them: nipple to nipple, eye to eye.What a time this was!, she thought. Here she was mating with the man who had taken her father's life. In a sense there was something even more taboo about their intimacy.  They were both the offspring of the same father. Both Agonistes' children.

"I wonder if he'd approve?" Lucidique said. "You mean Agonistes?"

"Yes."

Kreiger didn't  speak.  It  was  Lucidique  who  realized  what  her  lover's reference to Agonistes implied.

"You saw him in the desert?" "Yes."

"And he sent you back here?" "Yes."

"To find me?"

"To be with you. He said you were the only thing that would make me happy."

V

The Hospice of the Sacred Heart was an enormous edifice, its upper floors in darkness. But the Generals didn't have to wait long for a guide. After a few minutes a female dwarf--who introduced herself as Camille--came with candles. She  escorted  the  uniformed  trio  through  the  echoing  cloisters  (which  were heaped with huge mounds of dirt) and down two flights of steep stairs into Doctor Talisac's laboratory.His workspace had been dug out of the earth so as to accommodate the scale  of  the  Doctor's  experimentation  and  still  preserve  the  secrecy  of  his location. In place of tile  there  was hard trodden earth beneath the Generals' boots, and the walls were beaten dirt.  The place stank of cold earth: which served to complete the scene. For if the stench was that of the grave, so were many of the sights before them. The dead were Talisac's raw materials, and they lay everywhere around, in various states of amputation. He was an uneconomic consumer. In many cases the corpses were lacking only a limb, or a portion of a limb; an eye, in one case, lips in another.

"So where is he?" Urbano demanded to know.

Camille pointed the way over a carpet of corpses to a dank corner of the immense chamber, where Talisac awaited them.He looked, to the Generals' astonished eyes, like one of his own victims; a terrible, implausible experiment in the extremes to which a human carcass might be put.He hung by his mouth from a device whose purpose was beyond the Generals' comprehension, his mouth hooked up, as though he were a fish. In his perversity, or his genius, or both, he had created some kind of external womb for himself. A semi-translucent bag hung  from the lower portion of his abdomen, down between his spidery legs. There was life inside.

"A Mongroid," Camille whispered.

Montefalco took his eyes off the foul sight of the womb and its twitching contents, and addressed its owner.

"Talisac?" he said. "We need something from you."

Talisac turned his fluttering eyes in Montefalco's direction. When he spoke the  maimed   form  of  his  mouth  meant  that  what  he  said  was  virtually incomprehensible. It took Camille to translate it.

"He says: What? What do you need?"

"We  need  a  fiend  to  put  fear  into  the  heart  of  the  Devil  himself." Montefalco  said. "A beast amongst beasts. Something to scour the city of its monsters by being still more monstrous."Talisac made a strange sound--which might have been laughter; shaking as he hung from his hooks. The creature in his womb responded to its parent's movement by spasming."How the hell did he come by that thing?" Bogoto murmured to Urbano behind his hand.

"Don't whisper," Camille snapped. "He hates it."

"He was wondering how Talisac got himself pregnant?" Urbano said.

This time Talisac pressed his lips into service, in order that he answer for himself. The reply was a single word:

"Science." he said.

"Really?" Urbano said, sufficiently reassured to step over some of the mutilated bodies to examine Talisac more closely. "Well I'm pleased to hear that. I would have been distressed if there's been some sexual impropriety here."Again, Talisac laughed, though none of the Generals were in the mood to see the humour of the situation. His laughter spent, he spoke again. This time Camille's services as a translator were required."He has a golem he thinks would suit your purposes very well," the dwarf said. "He only asks one thing in return..."

"And what's that?" Montefalco said.

"That you shouldn't attempt to hurt any of his children."

"Meaning that?" Montefalco said, nodding towards the twitching womb. "Es." said Talisac. "Is my ur chile."

"What did he say?" Urbano said to Camille. "He said it was his child," Camille replied. Montefalco shrugged.

"No harm will come of this Mongroid, if we are given a fiend of our own." Montefalco said. "I will personally guarantee that.""Good." said Camille. Then, without Talisac speaking again, she added: "He  would  prefer  if  you  did  not  come  here  again  together.  Only  General Montefalco.""You'll get no argument from me on that account." Bogoto said, waving the horror away as he retreated. "If he gives us our monster, then he can give birth to a thousand little brats as far as I'm concerned. Just keep them the hell away from me."

VI

Lucidique lay on the blood and sweat stained bed beside her lover, and watched the moon through the window.

"This can't last for long, you know. This thing between us." "Why not?"

"For two such as us to find some happiness together?" she said. "It's against nature. You killed my father. I should hate you."

"And you put me through hell at Agonistes' hands. I should hate you." "What a pair we make."

"Maybe we should go back out into the desert." Kreiger said, "We'd be safer there."Lucidique laughed. "Listen to you. Safer! Isn't the world supposed to be afraid of us? Not the other way round."

"I just want to hold on to this...hope that I feel."

Lucidique reached across the bed and ran her blade along Kreiger's arm. "We can't leave Primordium," she said.

"Why not? It's going up in flames, sooner or later. Let it burn."

"But love, we started the fire, you and me. We should stay and watch it to the end."

Kreiger nodded. "If that's what you want." "It's the way things have to end.

"End? Why do you say that?"

"Hush, love. It'll be better this way, you'll see." She leaned over and kissed him. "Do it for me."

"That's as good a reason as any I ever heard," Kreiger said. "So you'll stay?"

"I'll stay."

Book Five

The Haunter of Primordium

I

Having  made  the  arrangement  with  Talisac  to  provide  them  with  a creature, the three Generals--Bogoto, Urbano and Montefalio--returned to Military Headquarters and waited. Bogoto was the most anxious of the three. He'd seen his share of battle scenes; bodies blown to pieces, the stink of burning hair and bone in the air: but the grotesqueries of Talisac's laboratory had left him sickened and nervous.He decided to do what he often did when his life became difficult: he drove across the city in the night to seek the comfort of a woman called Greta Sabatier, a reader of fortunes. Though he would have been appalled if he'd thought any of his fellow Generals knew it,  Sabatier's advice had been behind much of what Bogoto had done over the years: who he'd favoured amongst his subordinates, and who he'd demoted; even, on occasion, how he'd run  some of his military campaigns. And as events in Primordium had steadily become more  crazed, Bogoto had come to rely more and more upon Sabatier's wisdom. Her cards, he had come to believe, carried vital clues to his fate. In a world where madness was constantly in  the  air, and nothing and no one could be trusted, it made a paradoxical sense to seek illumination from a woman who read the future from a pack of dirty cards."You've seen somebody powerful," Greta told him that night, tapping one of the cards she'd just turned over. "I can't tell if it's a man...or a woman."Bogoto pictured Talisac, hanging up from his hooks, with that vile womb of his hanging down between his legs.

Sabatier was studying his face.

"You know this person I'm talking about?" Bogoto nodded.

"Well then you don't need any warning from me. He, or she--which is it?" "It's a man."

"Well he has friends...allies...it's hard to be sure exactly who or what they are...the cards are very ambiguous. But there's harm from this source, whatever it is."

"Harm to me?" "Harm to the world." "Huh."

"That matters less to you, yes?"

"Of course. Do you think I should consider leaving the city?"

"Well...you're a military man. It's not the first time I've seen death in your cards, General."This was the first time Greta had ever made mention of the General's profession. Whether she knew it from the cards or from the broadsheets in which he was regularly eulogized was anybody's guess.

"But I don't think I ever saw it so near to you," she went on, looking at the

cards.

"I see."

"So yes, I think you should consider leaving. At least until this unsettled

period is over astronomically."

"So it's not just the cards, it's the stars too?"

"They're all reflections of one another: cards, stars, palms. It's the same story wherever you look.She sorted through the cards as she spoke, and now dropped one down on  the  table  in  front  of  General  Bogoto.  It  was  called  The  Tower,  and  it represented--in a simplified,  even crude, form, a tower struck by lightning. Its upper half was erupting, raining down  rubble, and bodies; the lower half was cracked and ready to topple.

"This is Primordium?" Bogoto said.

"It's the city's future," Greta replied, nodding. "Or at least one of them."

"So will you be leaving too?" Bogoto said, thinking to catch the woman out. Greta was as old as the antiquated table she read her cards upon and her legs were a good deal less reliable. She'd never leave Primordium; or so he thought."Yes, I'm leaving. This will be the last time you see me, General, unless you should come to Calyx."

"You're moving to Calyx?"

"Tomorrow. Before things get any worse."

II

The  house  on  Diamanda  Street,  which  had  once  belonged  to  the murdered Senator, had gathered itself quite a reputation of late.There were lovers there, it was rumoured; several of them. Night and day, passers by heard the sound of lovemaking: the sighs, the sobs, the irresistible demands.The houses nearby were all virtually deserted, their owners having fled Primordium for safer cities; or better still, for the country. Life on a pig-farm might be boring, but at least it had a chance of being long. Nevertheless people came to Diamanda Street of late, simply to hear the noise of pleasure out of the lamp-lit home. No, not just to hear. There was a feeling about the place, which got under people's skin. The energy seeping out from open windows, was enough to make the fireflies assemble in their many tens of thousands each dusk and describe elaborate arabesques in their pursuit of one another, the air so thick with their passion, and their light so insistent, that the house was festooned with their flight paths,  which  lingered  long  after  the  deed  was  done  and  the  insects  lay exhausted and extinguished in the long grass.Sometimes the  human  voyeurs,  who  lingered  in  the  shadows  of  the nearby houses, hoping to catch a glimpse of the lovers, were granted what they were here to see. As the strange force of the lover's din suggested, they were not natural creatures, not by any  means. They seemed to be hybrids; one third human, one third metallic, one third the no man's land between flesh and devices made to strip it and slash it and scour it. They bled as they rose from their nuptial sheets;  but  smiled,  kissing  one  another's  wounds  as  though  they   were inconsequential, as though these flaps and sores and gougings were proof of devotion.Word got  round,  quickly  enough.  It  didn't  take  long  for  the  General Montefalco  to  hear about the house on Diamanda Street, and the reputation it had got for itself. He went  to the location, late one night. Things were in full swing: the air filled with weaving lights, the houses moaning and shaking. Then shrieks of terrible joy out of the fire-lit interior, and shadows on the blinds, moving from room to room as the momentum of the lovers' passion carried them around the house.Montefalco had never seen, heard or felt anything like it before. A wave of something like superstition passed through his body, weakening his bowels and making his hair, which was a quarter inch from widow's peak to nape, stand on end.He started to retreat from the house, clammy-palmed. As he did so he heard a voice behind him. He turned. It was Urbano. He looked like a man who had just discovered some truly terrible thing about himself, or God, or both.

"These we kill," Montefalco said, very calmly.

General Urbano  began  to  nod,  but  the  motion  was  too  much  for  his sickened system. He puked a yellowish puke, which spattered his immaculately polished boots. He took out a handkerchief and wiped his mouth; then he said:

"Yes."

"Yes?"

"Yes. These we kill."

Later that night, Montefalco went back to see Talisac. He went alone, which turned out to be a wise move. Neither Urbano nor Bogoto had the guts for what awaited him there.The place had deteriorated considerably in the forty-eight hours since he'd last stepped over the threshold; the bodies were still everywhere, but they were in a new condition. It looked as though all the moisture, all the energy, had been sucked out of them, leaving them withered. The eyes had gone from the sockets and the lips had been drawn back from the teeth, giving them all the look of blind, squealing monkeys.The flesh on their torsos had withered to bones; as had the meat on their arms and legs. The skin itself was now like a thin layer of dried tissue, covering the structure of the bone. When the dwarf Camille appeared to greet Montefalco, and kicked a couple of the corpses aside, they rolled away from her kick like so many paper mannequins.

"Is it done?" Montefalco asked her.

"Oh yes, it's done," Camille said with a twinkling smile, "and I think you're going to be very pleased."A voice emerged from the shadows, speaking words Montefalco could not comprehend.

"He's asking me to unveil it," Camille said.

The General scanned the dirt-walled room, looking for what 'it' might be; and there at the end of the chamber he saw a monumental form, covered with a threadbare tapestry obviously brought down from the floor above."That?" he said, not waiting for confirmation before approaching it. As he strode through the bodies, they cracked beneath his heels, erupting into dust and fragments. Soon the room was filled with spiralling bits of pale human stuff.Montefalco grabbed hold of the tapestry. As he did so, Camille named the thing--'VENAL ANATOMICA."

The General pulled the tapestry off and revealed it.

As might have been guessed from its scale beneath the carpet, it was of heroic size, nine feet tall or more. It had death's face, and was equipped with a variety of medieval murder weapons. There were nails crudely hammered into its shoulder and leg. Blood had coagulated around the nails, but when Anatomica began to move (as now it did) fresh blood bubbled up from the wounds and ran down his body.

"Does it know me?" the General asked.

"Yes," said Camille, "it is ready to obey your instructions." Talisac spoke, and Camille  translated! "He says he has no loyalty to its Creator, only to you, General Montefalco."

"That's good to hear." Montefalco beckoned to it. "Come on then."

The creature made a hesitant step. Then another. "Can I come with you?" Camille said.

Montefalco looked down at her nakedness. "Only if you cover yourself up," he said.

She smiled, and then went away to fetch herself a flea-bitten fur coat.

They went out into the night together: the three of them. The General, the

Dwarf and Venal Anatomica.

Daybreak wasn't far off. Neither was the end of certain things. Though Greta Sabatier had been killed by the bandits on the road to Calcyx--a fate she had not foreseen--she had been right about that much. An age was coming to an end: and it was the Age of Lovers.

Book Six

The Second Coming

I

In his bunker of dirt and corpses Talisac waited alone, while his body-- which was a thing without precedent--twitched and jumped and spasmed.There was a child inside of him; the MONGROID, the infant of the Second Coming. Or  so he'd come to believe, after the years he'd spent experimenting upon others, and himself. It  wasn't until he had created an homunculus that would be to all intents and purposes his child, its flesh made up of the same DNA as his, that he had come to believe there was something holy in the imminent arrival. It was another Virgin Birth.

In only a matter of hours now, the child would be in his arms.

He would have no one to share the triumph of what he'd achieved, but so be it. He'd  been alone all his life, even in the company of his fellow human beings. Alone with his  ambition, alone with his failures, alone with the strange dreams that came to find him in the  middle of the night; dreams of his child, speaking to him, telling him that the world was going to end, but that it wouldn't matter, because they'd be together, Man and Child, to the End of Time.He could feel the child struggling to get out now. He could hear its tiny, high-pitched voice as it worked to free itself.The pain was excruciating; a vicious hallucinogen. He sobbed and he screamed; the Convent had never heard such cursings as it heard now.But finally the womb tore as the Holy Child scrabbled with his little hands, his little nails, and in a gush of blood-tinged fluids the Mongroid was disgorged onto the ground amongst the corpses.

II "Kreiger?"

Lucidique went to the window and called down into the garden around her father's  house.  Zarles  Kreiger,  The  Scythe-Meister,  who  had  lately  become Lucidique's lover, had  gone out into the garden to bring her some perfumed flowers. The bedroom stank of the  pungent oil that their violently transfigured

bodies gave off. It was a bitter and unpleasant smell; not the salty smell of natural sex.

But the garden was full of sweet smelling flowers that would conceal the bitterness; and some of the strangest scents were those of blossoms that opened after dark. It was now almost two in the morning; and the smells that rose from the darkened garden were giddyingly strong.She called Kreiger's name again. Then she seemed to see him; a dark presence moving through the bushes.

If it was indeed Kreiger, why didn't he answer her call? Perhaps it wasn't

him.

Keeping her silence now, she crept down the stairs and went out into the

garden.

There was a gentle, balmy breeze tonight: it made the bushes and trees churn. The garden was large, and its layout complex, but she'd been playing here since  she  was  a  child.  She  could  have  found  her  way  down  its  narrow, labyrinthine paths and around its rose patches and secret groves with her eyes closed.She went directly to the place where she thought she'd seen the man when  she'd   been  up  at  the  bedroom  window.  Despite  the  sweetness  of honeysuckle and the  night-blooming jasmine, her nostrils caught the scent of something else, somebody else, in the vicinity. There was a stink that was not the bitter smell of her own body, or that of  Kreiger. This was something else. Something that made her think of disease, of corruption, of death.She stood very still. Something moved through the bushes close by. She saw  its  form,  silhouetted  against  the  starless  sky:  a  vast  misshapen  head, armoured  shoulders,  the  chest  of  an  ox.  Whatever  it  was,  it  walked  with  a pronounced limp, dragging its left leg. The closer it came to her the stronger the smell of corruption became. This trespasser was the source; no doubt of that.

Then, from the darkness close by, the sound of her lover's voice: "Lucidique! Get away from here! Quickly!"

There was something broken in his voice.

"What's happened to you?" she said, afraid of the answer.

Hearing her voice, the trespasser looked in her direction. A hood of flesh slid slickly back from the upper half of its face. revealing its skeletal features. This was--like  them--a   monster.  And  yet  it  was  not  like  them.  Not  Agonistes' handiwork, at least. Not the product of the unsung architect of Eden.This trespasser was a charnel-house child if ever there was one. It was made of parcels of rotten flesh and nerve and bone, all nailed together and given foetid breath.She retreated as it strode towards her. She knew how to kill; that was not in  doubt.  But  the  creature  still  made  her  afraid.  It  was  a  powerhouse;  and indifferent, she guessed, to any pain she might be able to cause it.

"Go!" she heard Kreiger yelling to her.

Her eyes flittered in his direction, and by the light shed from the bedroom window she saw him, on the ground, blood pouring out of him.

"Christ!"

She started towards him, but the trespasser moved to intercept her, its vast hands eager to tear out her throat.But she wasn't going to flee the garden; not with her lover lying there in the dirt, bleeding  from a hundred places. Instead she turned and led the limping slaughterer away from Kreiger, dodging through the darkened garden, using her knowledge of its layout to double the distance between them.Still it came after her, throwing its weight through the tangle of thorny bushes,  emitting a guttural din as it did so, like the noise of some immense mechanism that  imperfectly copied the sound of a tormented animal; a bull, perhaps, beneath the slaughterer's hammer. It was horrible to hear.She had come to the place where she hoped to outwit her pursuer: a tree which she had climbed a thousand times as a child, and now climbed again, so quickly that by the time  the trespasser came in sight of it she was already concealed in its verdant canopy.Now, she thought, if the beast would only wander beneath the tree, she could perhaps kill it. Drop out of the branches and cut open its throat. Even if it was something that  was made from mortuary slops, it drew breath; and if she could open its throat from ear to ear, it would be dead as any other slitted thing.But about six feet from the tree the creature stopped, and sniffed the air, looking around suspiciously. Did it sense that there was a trap laid for it here? She couldn't believe it had the wit to be so cautious. And yet it had halted, hadn't it? And now it retreated from the tree, loosing a low, barely audible noise in its throat, limping off into the darkness.She carefully parted the foliage, to see if she could discover what it was up to. There was some sound from the direction in which she'd come, and then an audible moan from Kreiger.

Oh God, no, she thought. Don't let the trespasser be smart enough to use

Kreiger as bait...

Her fears  were  realized  a  moment  later,  as  the  creature  reappeared between the thorn bushes, dragging a heavy burden behind him. It was Kreiger, of course. This lover of hers, who was now reduced to little more than a sack, hauled behind the nameless fiend, had been a terror in his own right not so long ago. As the assassin Zarles Kreiger he'd once  haunted the city of Primordium from the shanties to the chateaus. Then, after the transformation worked upon him by Agonistes, as the Scythe-Meister, he'd wiped out the ruling class of the city in one scarlet night.But now look at him! His face was torn open, as though the fiend had simply put his fingers into Kreiger's mouth (whose lips Lucidique had kissed an hour before) and ripped it apart like a paper bag. The rest of his body had been just  as  cruelly  treated;  the  flesh  torn  away  from  its  seating,  exposing  the breastbone and the ribs and the long bone of his thigh. The loss of blood from these wounds was traumatic. It was a wonder Kreiger was still alive. But plainly-- having been surprised in the garden while peacefully flower-picking--he'd fought back until he had no strength to fight with, at which point his attacker had simply waited in the garden while one of its two victims slowly bled to death, knowing the other would appear given time.And so she had. No doubt the creature had expected to dispatch her in a heartbeat; now it was obliged to coax her out of her hiding place with this bloody hostage. It grabbed Kreiger's neck and lifted him up by one hand, thrusting his broken face towards the tree. Kreiger's head lolled on his neck; his eyes rolled back into their sockets. He was as close to dead as made no difference.Then his killer lifted its other hand and beckoned to the woman in the tree. As it did so  it  twitched Kreiger's head back and forth, like that of a doll. For Lucidique it was agonizing  beyond words to see her lover, a man who had brought down a dynasty, bobbing around like a ventriloquist's doll. It made her lose all reason. Though she knew the trespasser below had the physical power to kill her, she could not watch Kreiger's last moments played out as a humiliating puppet-show.She leapt from the tree with a shriek of rage, and before the creature could bring down  its  visor of flesh, she had slit both of its eyes with her weapon, blinding it.It dropped Kreiger, and let out a roar that sounded pleasingly like panic. She ducked under its flailing arms and went to Kreiger.

He was dead.

She glanced back at his killer, who was indeed in a state of child-like terror.  His  roar  had  turned  into  howls  that  were  close  to  descending  into whimpers.She could have wounded it again easily enough; and perhaps, after a dozen woundings, or two dozen, she might have claimed its life. But she didn't have any time to  waste with the blinded thing. She needed to take Kreiger somewhere he had a hope of resurrection.

Out into the desert. Out to find Agonistes.

She lifted her lover's body up over her shoulders (he was lighter than she'd expected; troublingly so, as though the mass of his life had gone from him and  would  never  be  returned,  even  by  a  miracle).  She  would  not  let  such pessimism linger in her mind  however. Leaving the blind trespasser to rage amongst the roses, she headed to the forecourt of the house. She gently laid the corpse in the back of the car, and then drove out of the  city,  in search of a sandstorm.

III

Talisac looked down at the creature that had spilled from his body: his Mongroid. He'd seen prettier things, but then he'd seen uglier too. It had more self-reliance  than  any  creature  five  minutes  old  should  reasonably  have;  it walked, crab-like, on four hands; it made rudimentary attempts to express itself.He called it to him, as he might a dog, but it wouldn't come. It was too interested in the bodies that lay everywhere about the chamber, examining them with its inverted head, sniffing at the ranker examples. It seemed to have a well- formed  head,  as  far  as  Talisac  could  make  out.  There  was  some  family resemblance there, he thought.He had given up trying to draw its attention, but now--paradoxically--its eyes came to rest on him, and with its ungainly, sideways gait it approached him. It cast a glance around the charnel house as it did so, and its thought processes were perfectly clear. It was making the first distinction of its young life: between the living and the dead."That's right..." Talisac said, attempting an encouraging tone, "...they're dead. They're no use to you. I'm the one you have to help. I'm your father."How much of this--if any--the Mongroid understood, Talisac had no idea. Very little,  he  guessed. But they had to begin somewhere. It would be a long, weary business, rearing this thing. He had hoped to give birth to something more praiseworthy; something he could  show Montefalco, and thus  be  funded  for further, more ambitious researches.Now, he would have to do some fast-talking to get the General to see his vision of things. The crab homunculus produced from his sac of semen and sea- water was very far from the perfect, vicious child he'd hoped to produce: a hymn to the glories of testosterone.But never mind, there would be others. In time he'd subdue this one, and vivisect it to see if he could work out where the errors lay. Then he'd try again.The creature had come to a halt a few yards away from him, and was studying the sac from in which it had been contained for seventeen weeks. Blood still dripped from it, onto the dirt floor. It scuttled over and put its tongue to the pool, tasting the fluid.

"No," Talisac said, faintly revolted by its display. "Don't do that."

He didn't want it getting some unnatural appetite; for blood, or flesh, or whatever other juices ran from him freely as he hung there. He was altogether too vulnerable in his present state.

"Bad." he said, effecting a tone of disgust. "Bad."

But the creature wasn't interested in being forbidden anything. It was a creature of instinct, and its instinct told it that there was a meal to be had here. It traced the source of the  pool to the hanging corpse of flesh that had been its makeshift womb.He didn't like the look in the creature's eyes at all. Nor did he like the way its belly was distending, as though its aroused appetite was awaking a change in its anatomy.The Mongroid was pulling on the loose bloody tatters of his flesh now, its belly skin still swelling obscenely."Camille!" Talisac yelled, forgetting in his fear that the dwarf had left in the company of General Montefalco. He was alone.And now, as he swung there, helpless, the belly of his offspring split open, revealing a vast mouth, completely arrayed with glistening teeth.

"Jesus! Oh Jesus!"

They were the last words Talisac uttered.

Using it's four hands to spring up towards the womb from which he had so recently  been  delivered, the thing closed its gaping jaws on the groin of its parent, its teeth digging deep into Talisac's flesh. The cries to Jesus became a

solid shriek. The Mongroid took a healthy mouthful of gut and manhood and womb, and dropped down to the ground again to devour what it had bitten off.

Talisac's innards, with their lower half removed, simply fell out of his body:

uncoiling innards followed by liver and kidneys and spleen.

The genius of the Hospice of the Sacred Heart stopped screaming.

IV

Thus in one night Primordium lost two of the monsters that had haunted its streets, and gained two new ones.Venal Anatomica--or The Blind One, as he became known, was, in truth, something  of  a joke. Despite his bulk, and his phenomenal strength, he never developed the  compensating skills that often come after a blinding. He lived always  as  though  he  had  just  been  blinded.  Always  flailing,  always  raging, always violent.Montefalco took care of him, however, out of a bizarre sense of loyalty. He ordered  that  anyone  found  taunting  the  once  mighty  Venal  Anatomica  be summarily shot. After a dozen such casual executions, the message made it out to those who liked to torment the creature. The Blind One was left alone to haunt the city's graveyards, often digging up and eating the recently dead.

V

Lucidique never found Agonistes. Though she drove for several days, looking for the sandstorms where he hid himself, the desert was preternaturally still. Not a breeze to move so much as a grain of sand; much less a storm.Aftsr a week, when The Scythe-Meister's body was beginning to smell, she dug a  hole with her bare hands, and put him in it. Even as she sat there beside the mound, keening, she thought she heard Agonistes calling her name, and got up, ready at a moment's notice to reclaim Kreiger from his dry bed, and let the genius of Eden work his Lazarene magic on her lover.But it was not the Resurrection she had heard. It was just a trick cf the wind. Indeed, not once in the next forty-one years, during which time Lucidique seldom strayed more than  a  quarter of a mile from the place where Zarles Kreiger was laid, did Agonistes appear.

VI

Then one day, waking to the same bright sky she'd woken to for over four decades--she was seized by a desire to see Primordium.The house her father had built was still standing, she was surprised to find; left by authorities too superstitious to knock it down. She occupied it again, and after a few nights of  sleeping on the bare boards overcame her fear of memories that would unknit her sanity, and moved up into the stained, ancient bed where she and Kreiger had made love all those years before.There were no nightmares. He was with her, here, more than he'd ever been in the desert. He held her, in her dreams, and he whispered mischiefs to her, that sometimes she  acted upon, for old time's sake. Blood she let freely, when it pleased her to do so. Nobody was safe from her. She would have happily murdered a saint if he'd looked at her in some fashion that irritated her.And one  night,  just  for  the  hell  of  it,  she  killed  the  three  Generals, Montefalco, Bogoto and Urbano, who were by now fat and old and put up little protest at her arrival.

Another night, she went to find Kreiger's killer, The Blind One.

She found him in the cemetery, weeping from his slit eyes, the weary tears of a man who weeps every night, but knows no cure for them. She watched him for a while, while he wept and ate the dead. Then she left him to his suffering.It was cruel, of course, to let him live, when she could have put him out of his misery with a well placed blow. But why should she dispense mercy, when no one had ever been merciful to her? Besides, it pleased her to know that there were three monsters in  Primordium. The Mongroid (whom she'd also gone to view in his excremental kingdom) in the sewers, Venal Anatomica in the charnel houses, she in her father's mansion. I had a certain neatness.Sometimes, when she became lonely, she thought about going out into the desert, and lying down beside Kreiger's mummified corpse; letting the sand smother her. But  something stopped her from doing it. Perhaps she'd have to watch the city of Primordium  burn  down first; or feel insanity creeping up her spine.Until  then,  she  would  live  out  her  destiny,  in  blood  and  tears  and loneliness;  in  the knowledge that she was named in  the prayers of tens of thousands of God-fearing  citizens every night, who begged the Lord to keep them and their faces safe from her.

It was a land of immortality.