Chapelwood (The Borden Dispatches #2)(114)

“No,” he corrected me gently. “It is a single beat, offered once every thousand years. It is His knock upon the door.”

A scrap of scripture sprang unwelcome to mind, and I whispered it without meaning to. “Behold, I stand at the door and knock.”

He finished it for me. “‘If any man hear my voice, and open that door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him—and he with me.’ From Revelations, of course. The last book ever written that ever meant a thing. And tonight is the last night. They will find Ruth, and they will bring her to me. She will serve as the door, and a new world order will begin.”

“No.”

“You might as well argue with the dawn. You might as well fight against math.”

“No,” I said again.

A thought bubbled up and I pushed it down; I used all my experience working down the hall from Drake, who reads minds by accident or design, and I shrouded the thought—I buried it with other thoughts, smothering it with my senses. I concentrated on the smell of the curling smoke rising up around us. I concentrated on the salt, and the cold feel of the floor beneath my feet (so cold I could feel it through my shoes). Could I thwart a god? It depended on whether the god was paying attention, and I truly did not think that it was.

“No,” I repeated for a third time. “None of that can happen.”

“There’s nothing you can do to prevent it.”

“You’re wrong. About everything,” I told him. I gazed down through that window, at the wonders of the universe that I surely would never see again, and I concentrated on that, too. Anything to hide what I was really thinking.

Because I was really thinking of grabbing the reverend by the lapels (or whatever bit of robe was there about his throat) and drawing him forward—yanking him off his feet, and throwing him through that one-way portal. I didn’t think it, not with the forefront of my brain. I only acted upon it.

It happened fast. We were both surprised.

It happened easy, because I am so heavy and he was a lean man. I used my weight against him, and I hefted him up off his feet, and I flung him through the window—nearly toppling in after him.

He said nothing. He screamed nothing. And he did not appear on the other side like I might have expected; he only vanished, a tiny dot of nothing that did not rouse his slumbering god in the slightest.

But I . . . I took a moment to regain my balance.

In that moment I was half tempted, against all reason, to let go and fall in after him. Would it have been the worst of endings? To see, in that final glimpse, the wonders of creation, or evolution, or random nonsense that became the glorious cosmos with my own two eyes?

I leaned back and gripped the edges of the lovely white altar. It grew colder beneath my hands. So cold that when I removed them I left some skin behind. Then I was frightened, because the light was dimming. The room was dimming. The little cairns with their scented offerings were dimming, the coals going pink, then white, then gray.

The great chamber shifted beneath me, and I stumbled.

I fell backward down those three stairs and landed on my (now very sore) hands, but I rolled and righted myself—back onto my feet. I’d done something. I didn’t quite know what, but I was pretty sure I’d sent the reverend well away from Ruth.

The floor shifted. The salt lines scattered.

A loud crack sounded overhead, and there were the stars. Just like that. The black, smooth nothingness above me was a proper night sky lit up like it damn well ought to be. But that wasn’t possible, because I was four stories belowground (at least) and it didn’t matter how lifelike the moon and stars appeared, because they couldn’t be real. They didn’t make sense.

The altar was dimming down to nothingness. In another minute, it’d be as dark as the cold ashes where the planets used to be. The moon and stars (real or false) were the only light I had to show me the way up and out, and even with their help I could barely find my way back to the stairs.

Another loud crack, and the altar went dark.

A third, and the floor heaved violently—flinging me forward onto the stairwell, thank God (whichever one). Again I landed on my hands, which now bled and (I would later learn) one had been broken in two places, but I used them to scramble up the stairs, regardless. The chamber was settling, twisting, and collapsing—and I did not know what became of the moon and stars. Were they ever there with me at all, or was it only some helpful gasp of some lesser deity out to lend a hand?

I climbed for all I was worth, fast as I could, leaning against the wall and holding my injured hand as I stumbled upward. The nearer I got to the top, the louder I heard voices—angry ones, confused ones—swearing and yelling back and forth to one another over the sound of a place collapsing, or a god deciding it was time to move on to other things.

I wanted to yell, too. My left hand was aching and beginning to swell. But my right one was undamaged enough to hold a gun, so I had to quit pitying myself and arm myself instead. I drew the weapon for the last few steps of the flight, though I was panting so hard I couldn’t hold it steady enough to fire.

No one noticed at first. No one (or no thing) in the smooth dark robes turned to look at the gasping fat man with a gun, and that was all right with me. I pushed myself onward, past the ones who paid me no mind as they debated loudly what was going on. Their arguments sounded as weird as everything else—like they weren’t speaking English, or Latin, or any other language known to man. They conversed in hisses and whines, like animals. (Not like angels at all.)