The soul locks were only meant to loosen everything, what came after was the etheric quake meant to tear us apart, like a thresher separating the grain from the chaff.
"We need shelter," I Whispered to Father Cristobel.
"Here," he Whispered back, and I realized he wasn't trying to support himself against the altar. He was trying to move it.
I stumbled toward the front of the church, moving as quickly as I could in my vertiginous state. I half-fell, half-knelt next to the altar and put my good shoulder against the marble stand. It moved, slowly, turning on some hidden pivot. A hinge that hadn't been used in a very long time.
The Chorus started keening, a rising crescendo of psychic terror. I couldn't tune them out. They were down there in my soul, their screams vibrating me like a tuning fork.
The altar moved aside, revealing a black hole down into the subbasement of the church. Father Cristobel's hand fell upon my back, and he pushed me forward. "Go," he Whispered. "I will follow you." With nothing to brace myself against but the side of the altar, I slipped and pitched forward into the hole.
The ley flood hit, and the etheric implosion lit up the inside of the church. Father Cristobel looked back at the burst of psychic light, and it must have been like looking at the sun going supernova. His Vision couldn't protect him from this psychic detonation; if anything, it would only magnify the spiritual impact of what he saw.
Tears streaming from his right eye, he smiled.
Unafraid. Without pain. Do not be afraid; this is your reward.
I fell, the world bleaching to empty whiteness in my wake. The wave of the quake hurled me away from the church, and my vertebrae started to separate. Like a leaf in a hurricane, I was blown away, falling further and farther than the ground beneath the church.
THE SECOND WORK
"For the present it is enough to have told you these two stories which seem to confirm two things in particular. First, that the souls of men which are almost separated from their bodies because of a temperate disposition and a pure life may in the abstraction of sleep divine many things, for they are divine by nature; and whenever they return to themselves, they realize this divinity. The second thing these stories confirm is that the souls of the dead, freed from the chains of the body, can influence us, and care about human affairs."
IX
A montage of memories flickered, a greatest hits collection: David Cristobel as a young man, standing beside the raised canvas of a boxing ring, intently watching a pair of fighters, soaking up every jab and swing; Cristobel, sun-browned and glistening with sweat, breaking up stumps with an ax; behind him, the brick farmhouse and a river I knew to be the Aude; in the ring, in a different time and place, fighting a lean Filipino man; the glowing heat of the hot shop furnace, rods of colored glass jutting from its mouth.
I lay in a field of glass, silver light caught in the fragments. I lay on this glassine ocean, a sea that chimed as I moved. There were no stars overhead, and the air was heavy and musty, filled with a fetid dryness. The sort of dead atmosphere found underground.
Memories of Cristobel's life continued to flicker past like images projected on clouds scuttling across a black sky: the gilded ostentation of Versailles; a chandelier, glistening with emerald drops of frozen light; a ladder, collapsing, and the chandelier falling; an explosion of green fire, a coal lodged in the left eye socket. I felt sympathetic pain, as if a poker had been shoved into my brain.
I blinked, unable to move any other part of my body-caught in some sort of sleep paralysis. I blinked again, and again, and kept on doing so until the green fire winked out, its light draining away into the churning depths of the Chorus.
I could hear him praying, as if he were kneeling beside me. His voice gave me strength, enough to break the lassitude holding me down, and I sat up slowly. Shards of glass fell from my limbs, tinkling into the surrounding sea.
Father Cristobel floated on the glittering surface. His rosary was looped around his fingers, the silver and black cross glittering with spectral light. His eyes were closed, and he was intently reciting an old Latin prayer. The whisper of his words had no echo, as if we were lost in a place that had no horizon.
The Chorus moved slowly, turning like frozen gears, and eventually they generated a spark. This tiny spark escaped my mouth as I sighed, and it floated up, casting its glow across the floating surface of the ocean.
Underground. Not on a sea. Walls of ragged, unfinished stone. A hard floor covered with sand and glass. The subbasement beneath the chapel. I hadn't fallen all that far, regardless of the prior, endless sensation I had experienced.
I sent the light higher, trying to find the hole through which I had dropped, and found a ragged tear in the ceiling plugged by wood and a long piece of glass. The Christ figure had come off the wall, smashing the altar and sealing the hole. Parts of the sculpture were scattered across the floor of the subbasement, scattered across my body. Shortly after Cristobel had shoved me, the cross and Christ had fallen.
I glanced at him again, and realized he wasn't really there. Just a retinal afterimage of a strong memory.
The Chorus light floated through Cristobel's ghostly shape. He raised his head as the light moved through his chest, but he didn't open his eyes. The beads of his rosary reflected the spirit light, tiny sigils dancing along the curve of the beads.
The catacombs, he said, his voice a phantasmal echo in my head. One of the old ossuaries that riddle the underground. A remnant of the Resistance.
That explained the smell.
I glanced up at the dark ceiling once more. "Why didn't you jump?" I asked.
I did, he pointed out.
"No," I argued. "Not like that."
Father Cristobel was dead, crushed beneath the cross and glass first, and then the rest of the chapel as it had come down. The etheric implosion had brought the walls in too, the whole building crumbling in on itself. The Chorus had reached back for his soul as it had fled his crushed body, and apparently, he had come willingly.
I can guide you.
"When I said yes," I pointed out as I slowly got to my feet, "I thought you were talking about doing so while alive." More glass fell from my frame and I carefully shook out my coat and pants to divest myself of the tiny shards clinging to my clothing.
Cristobel didn't answer, and when I glanced around, his phantom was gone.
The rosary was in my coat pocket, coiled pleasantly like it had always been there. Right next to Philippe's tarot deck.
In law enforcement circles, the Chorus hinted, drawing on Nicols' memory, this would be classified as keeping souvenirs.
As Cristobel intimated with subtle shifts in the mood of the Chorus, there was a way out-there's always a way out-but it was a complicated route through a maze of unmarked passages. He might have known the route once, but all of his sensory data was aural and not visual, which meant it was next to useless for me. I didn't have enough experience to know what to do with the collection of clicks and bumps. The Chorus built a mental map as we progressed, supplemented by their reading of the spaces just beyond the nearest wall. My reserves were low, and I was tired; focusing the Chorus to extend them further would sap my remaining strength. Following Cristobel's hints was a slow process, but it was the most effective use of my resources. Frustratingly slow, but at the same time, I had to remember I was in enemy territory, and they had agents out hunting. I had to be careful.