25.
“The Brethren?” I repeated. “Not much. I mean, I’ve heard the stories. A group of Collectors who, centuries ago, banded together and found a way to break hell’s bond of servitude. Of course, they’re nothing but a fairy tale —a Collector’s pipe dream.”
“A fairy tale,” Dumas said, smiling. “Right.”
“I miss something funny?”
“Funny? No, not too,” he said. “Come on —this little tour of ours ain’t done.”
Dumas led me deeper into the cavern. The corridor, so broad at its outset, dwindled until it was more fissure than tunnel, and could no longer accommodate the intermittent torches that had marked the way thus far. Dumas snatched the last of them from the wall —a concession to my human eyes, no doubt —and took me by the elbow, dragging me reluctantly into the narrow, winding pass.
The walls pressed close as, sideways, we squeezed through. A time or two, stone outcrops dug into my back and chest as I forced myself through a particularly narrow spot or around a tricky corner, Dumas’s light all but disappearing ahead of me as, despite his apparent girth, he pressed onward without incident. When that happened, I was left alone with my thoughts, my fears, my shallow hitching breath —all three of them threatening to spiral out of control and leave me panicked, trapped, damned to be stuck here in the darkness until the clock ran out and the bugbeast came to claim me. But that thought alone was enough to keep me moving, and eventually, the passage widened. Not much, mind you —the walls in this new, smaller chamber were maybe three feet across, and the ceiling here was low enough I had to stoop —but after the sidewalk-crack we’d slipped through to get here, it may as well have been Montana.
As I cleared the fissure, brushing filth from my lapels, Dumas turned to me and smiled. For a moment, with the torchlight glinting off his eyes and yellowed teeth, he looked every bit the demon that he was. “Welcome to the monkey house,” he said.
“Excuse me?”
“The monkey house. This is where I stash the Collectors in my employ. Out of the way, so they can fling their poo or whatever it is they do without troubling my Fallen employees or bothering the clientele.”
I looked around. By the torchlight, it looked like the cavern continued on another seven feet or so and then terminated. Three low openings, each shored up with rotted four-by-fours, extended outward from the room on either side —two left, one right. I ducked my head to see inside the one beside me. It was no larger than a coat closet, and apart from a heap of blankets in one corner, it was empty.
“They’re rarely occupied,” called Dumas, his stentorian voice echoing off the close stone walls. “Save for Danny, none of my Collectors ever had much interest in sticking ’round once the job was done. Not all of them are as eager as Danny was to sample the product, so most of them are outta here as soon as the soul they brought’s done processing. But Danny was another matter. Danny liked to stick around. I always figured he came back here to fix, that the ramblings on the wall were nothing more than skiminduced delusion. Stuff’s awful to come off of —for your kind in particular —and it’ll fill your head with all manner of wacky shit you’d be hard-pressed to explain once you finally touch down. Truth is, I never thought much of it. But you factor in these ramblings with his interest in watching Psoglav ply his trade and his theft of the Varela soul, and a pattern emerges.” He gestured toward the doorway furthest back. “That’s the one you want. That’s where Danny staked his claim.”
Once I crawled inside, I could see why. It was bigger by half than the other I’d seen, and set a little ways apart, providing some small measure of privacy. At first, of course, the room was black as pitch, but as Dumas shimmied in behind me, his torch’s light crawled up the walls —first illuminating the bare military cot that took up much of the chamber’s floor, and then the tattered photo of two strangers I presumed were he and Ana that rested on the framework of the door. And as the light climbed toward the ceiling, I realized the walls of Danny’s chamber were covered with writing —writing of all shapes and sizes, in a dozen alphabets and at least twice that many languages. I recognized Arabic and Hebrew, Sanskrit and Akkadian —all scratched onto the wall with charred bits of wood or pointed rock —but most of the tongues were foreign to me. They looked to be the work of a crazy person, with no rhyme or reason to their placement —some scrawled over older snippets, some halted halfway through; some flecked with blood as if the scribe’s hand had split at the effort required to mark the stone. It was hard for me to imagine Danny had done all this. It was hard to imagine anyone could have.
“What is all this?” I muttered.
“Folklore, mostly. Tales transcribed centuries ago from the oral tradition. Or, more accurately, fragments of tales. See, these stories were thought lost to your kind, and for good reason —the forces of heaven and hell aligned to purge them from this Earth, for fear of the damage they could cause.”
“And these stories,” I said, “they’re about the Brethren?”
“Yes. Most of it’s nonsense, of course —an oblique passing reference, a half-heard conversation written down a hundred years after the fact. But some of them are quite specific. Dates. Places. Descriptions of rites the likes of which I’ve never seen. And it’s the latter, of course, that our Daniel seemed most interested in —they’re the ones writ large across the wall.”
My eyes settled on one black char inscription scrawled atop all the others, and wrapping around three quarters of the room. The script itself was crude and angular, though if that was Danny’s doing, or the appearance of the language itself, I didn’t know.
“What is this,” I asked, “Phoenician?”
“Close,” Dumas replied. “It’s Ancient Aramaic. Predates Biblical Aramaic by nearly five hundred years.”
“Can you read it?”
The look he gave me, you’d think I just insulted his mother. “It says: ‘As the worlds drew thin, the unclean spirit was cleaved, which in turn summoned forth a Deluge that purged the Nine of sin, and cast their bonds of slavery aside.’ Or, you know, something to that effect.”
“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”
Another look, this one like I’m the kid in class who eats the paste. “What does it sound like it means?”
“It sounds like Danny aims to crack Varela’s soul and wind up a normal boy,” I replied —glib, dismissive.
Only Dumas didn’t take it that way, which, truth be told, kind of freaked me out. “Yeah, that’s what it sounded like to me, too. Only it don’t say ‘crack,’ it says ‘cleave.’ As in fucking rend asunder.”
“The hell’s the difference?”
“The difference, Sam, is all the difference. That shit that went down in San Fran? That was on account of a ‘crack.’ A mean one, yeah —the worst I’ve ever seen —but the soul we cracked was only damaged, not destroyed. I think that Danny’s aiming to destroy Varela’s soul, and that’s a whole other ball of wax. We’re talking split-the-atom bad. Worse, in fact. ’Cause ‘cleave’ ain’t the scariest word up on that wall.”
“OK, I’ll bite —what is?”
“Deluge.”
“Deluge.” Me, playing parrot; skeptical.
“Yep.”
“Like, the Deluge? As in Noah and a giant fucking boat?”
“The very same,” he said. “Well, more or less.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning I don’t know crap about some bearded jackass collecting zebras or whatever, but there ain’t a civilization worth a damn that doesn’t have a flood myth of some kind. To this day, Hindus tell the tale of Manu, who saved Mankind from the rising waters of an apocalyptic flood. Ancient Mesopotamians had Utnapishtim, a man who survived the Deluge only to be granted eternal life. You people got that Noah deal. Point is, the particulars may not agree, but when you add up everything that does agree, it looks to be that once upon a time there was a bigass flood.”