The Tower A Novel (Sanctus)

VI



And I heard, but I understood not: then said I, O my Lord, what shall be the end of these things?

Daniel 12:8





88





Shepherd parked the Durango in long-term parking and headed for the ticket office.

Charlotte/Douglas International Airport was the usual cavernous barn of a building and was in total chaos when Shepherd stepped

through the door. There were long queues snaking away from every ticket desk and the whole building vibrated with noise and

stress. A lot of it was coming from the large crowds of people gathered round the TV sets dotted around the waiting lounges and

Shepherd felt sick when he saw what was on them.

It was the countdown Shepherd had seen in Douglas’s cabin, the same one that was installed on his own phone, ticking down now on

every screen. A caption beneath it read COUNTDOWN TO THE END OF DAYS? A sombre news anchor was talking to camera as a montage of

images played out behind him – more riots, more roads clogged with migrating people, more cities dark and burning, and not just

here but in major cities all over the world as the slow creep of panic spread. The picture cut to the smouldering wreck of the

building at Marshall, then a heavily censored photo of Professor Douglas flashed up, hanging from the wall of his cabin, the word

Heretic, highlighted on the wall next to him and a new caption flashed up: WHAT DID THEY SEE?

Shepherd drifted over to one of the ticket desks, avoiding eye contact with all the waiting passengers as he cut in at the head of

the queue.

What did they see indeed …

‘You’ll have to wait in line, sir.’ The man behind the counter was rail-thin and had the thickest eyebrows Shepherd had ever

seen on someone under the age of fifty.

Shepherd flashed his ID. ‘Government business.’

The skinny guy looked up. The eyebrows underlined the deep furrows in his forehead, reflecting the day he was having. ‘OK, let me

just deal with this gentleman and I’ll be right with you.’

Shepherd waited while the man collected his boarding card then wheeled his carry-on away into the crowd.

‘Now, sir, where do you need to go?’

‘I need the first connecting flight to a place called Gaziantep. It’s in southern Turkey.’

The eyebrows shot up and his fingers drummed across the keyboard. ‘Best I can do is an indirect flight via Istanbul. Good news is

it leaves in just over an hour.’

‘OK, let’s do it.’

‘You have travel vouchers?’

Shepherd felt the blood rise to his cheeks. ‘No. I’ll pay for it on a card.’

Usually federal agents travelling on commercial flights had pre-paid tickets or documents that entitled them to fly. ‘Checking

anything into the hold, sir?’

Shepherd shook his head. The eyebrows shot up again in surprise. Shepherd hoped this guy never played poker for money.

The clerk finished tapping. ‘That will be one thousand two hundred and fifty-eight dollars, sir.’

Something twisted in Shepherd’s stomach as he handed over the card. It was more than he had anticipated and he wasn’t sure if it

would exceed his limit. The guy with the eyebrows swiped the card and stared at the ticket machine for what seemed like an

eternity before it chattered to life and spat out a receipt. Shepherd retrieved his card.

‘Boarding has already started, gate number twenty-two. Have a nice day.’

Shepherd took his passport and boarding card and moved quickly away from the desk. He shuffled through security, dumping the

contents of his pockets into a tray. All he had was a phone, some loose change and a couple of credit cards. He’d had less in his

life, but not much.

He stepped through the metal detector and stuffed everything but the phone back in the pocket of the coat he had borrowed from

NASA. He took a deep breath and dialled Franklin’s number.

‘Morning.’ Franklin sounded as tired as he felt. ‘You made it to Charlotte?’

‘Yeah, kind of. Where are you?’

‘Driving home.’

‘You seen the news?’

‘Yep. Seems the end of the world will be televised after all. You got anything new for me?’

Shepherd ran through everything he had learned in the last few hours. It was cathartic, like a weight gradually lifting off him

with every word he spoke. ‘I’ve left the car in the long-term parking lot,’ he said. ‘Smith’s laptop is in there and so is

Williams’s gun.’

‘You’re unarmed?’

‘I didn’t think they’d let me on an international flight with it seeing as they’re not even letting people take large bottles

of water on board.’

‘What if it’s a trap? What if Kinderman is drawing you out – ever think about that?’

‘It’s not just about Kinderman.’ He took a deep breath like he was about to take a dive off a high board. ‘I never did tell

you about my missing two years.’

‘You don’t have to tell me if you don’t –’

‘I was homeless.’ He let the breath out and imagined it drifting away in the air, carrying his confession with it. ‘When the

NASA funding was cut I ran out of money pretty fast. I dropped out of school, had no place to live, no family, no job. I was

pretty depressed about how life had turned out and it dragged me down fast. It’s a downward spiral and the lower you get, the

less you care. And no one else cares either. It’s amazing how easy it is to fall through the cracks and end up on the street.

Then you become invisible.’

‘So what happened to pull you out of it?’

‘Melisa happened. You asked me who she was. She was a charity worker, here in the States on some kind of exchange visa. She found

me in the stinking basement of a building in Detroit along with an assortment of junkies, winos and meth heads. I was only on the

booze, which in some ways is even more pathetic. I wasn’t even a proper washout.

‘One day I was sleeping off a drunk when this angel appeared asking for Annie. Annie was a runaway teen who worked the streets to

fund her habit and keep her pimp happy. She was also eight months pregnant. Melisa was part of the women’s health programme,

training to be a midwife and volunteering in her spare time. Annie had missed her check-up so Melisa had come into that stinking

basement just because she was worried about her. That took some guts.

‘Anyway, we found Annie unconscious, lying on a stained mattress in one of the smaller rooms in the basement people used

sometimes to turn tricks. The reason she had missed her appointment was that she was in labour and had turned to her painkiller of

choice. She was totally out of it, the needle still in her arm – and the baby was coming.

‘Melisa was incredible. There was no sense of judgement or disgust about what she was doing or where she was, she just got down

to the business of bringing that baby into the world. And when it was born, something so small and perfect and new in the middle

of all that filth, I felt ashamed.’

He took a deep breath as the memories came fast and painful.

‘I was helping her clean the baby when the boyfriend arrived – a mean son-of-a-bitch called Floyd who kept in shape by handing

out beatings to the women he ran and anyone else who got in his way. He saw the child and told us to leave. Melisa refused. I don

’t know if he was going to kill it and get Annie back on the streets and earning again, or maybe he had a buyer lined up –

everything has a street-value, even a newborn baby.’

Shepherd stared out at the busy concourse but in his mind he was back in that basement room, filth, food wrappers and empty

bottles on the floor, a fading Apocalypse Now movie poster tacked to the wall with a bright orange sun that shone no light into

that dark place.

‘Melisa refused to move. Floyd pulled a knife. I’d heard he’d been known to slice the face of any girl who crossed him so I

reacted, grabbed a bottle from the floor and threw it at him. It caught him on the side of the head, hard enough to knock him back

but not enough to stop him. Next thing I know I’m on top of him, knees pinning his arms down, another bottle in my hand. And I

just kept hitting him with it. I knew if I let him get up he’d kill me and probably kill Melisa too so I just kept hitting him

until he stopped moving. The bottle must have broken at some point and cut his neck. I didn’t even realize. There was so much

blood. It was like someone had turned on a tap.

‘I can’t even remember what happened next but somehow Melisa got us all out of there. She took us to the shelter where she

worked and cleaned us all up. I was all for turning myself in but she told me not to. She said it was an accident, self-defence,

and that I should wait until the police came looking.’

‘Let me guess,’ Franklin said, ‘they never did.’

‘I guess one less scumbag on the streets doesn’t warrant too much of an investigation. So I stayed at the shelter and started

getting myself back together. I kicked the booze, got on the twelve-step programme, started running computer training courses and

setting up networks and websites for the charity, just making myself useful and giving myself an excuse to keep hanging around.

‘God knows how but Melisa and I ended up falling in love. I guess we shared this big secret that created an intimacy and things

just grew from there. Hell of a first date. We kept it all secret because of her father. He was the doctor who ran the project. He

was a strict Muslim and I don’t think he would have taken too kindly to the prospect of having an infidel ex-bum for a

prospective son-in-law.

‘Anyway, months passed and Melisa’s visa was about to expire so I asked her to marry me – not because of the visa but because I

loved her more than I’ve ever loved anything before or since. We had it all planned, we were going to slip away and just do it.

Then a few days before we planned to run away something happened.

‘Looking back I should have known something was wrong. Her old man called me into his office late one afternoon, said he had a

job for me. There was another homeless organization we worked with way over on the other side of town and their computer network

had melted down or something and they needed to fix it urgently. It was late in the day, rush hour, but I went anyway – anything

to score points with my prospective father-in-law. When I got to the place the guy there didn’t know anything about it so I

turned right around and drove back again.

‘By the time I made it back through all the traffic to the shelter the whole street was blocked off. There’d been some kind of

incident. Someone had thrown petrol bombs into the place and the whole building had gone up. There were racist slogans painted on

the walls too: Terrorists, Ragheads, that kind of thing – post 9/11 hate gone crazy. I tried to find Melisa and her father,

checked the hospitals and everything, but they were gone.

‘At first I thought they must be scared and hiding out somewhere. But when the weeks went by, then months with no word I thought

maybe she’d had second thoughts about me, about living and working in a country that seemed to blindly hate Islam so much.

‘I did what I could to find her, but the police weren’t interested. They weren’t technically missing persons and there was

something suspicious about the fire. An insurance scam they called it.’

‘So you joined the FBI to see if you could find her yourself?’

‘Partly. Though in truth everything I told O’Halloran was also true. I do feel I owe my country a debt for everything it’s done

for me.’

He heard Franklin take a deep breath on the other end of the line. ‘You know sometimes people disappear because they want to. Or

they disappear because they’re dead.’

‘I don’t think she is.’ Through the phone he could hear the white noise of tyres in the background. ‘You asked me a while back

what “home” meant to me, well for me it’s not a place it’s a person, it’s Melisa. She’s where I’m trying to get to and if

she was dead I don’t think I’d feel what I’m feeling. Even if she doesn’t love me, even if she never did, I still love her and

I just want to know that she’s safe. I just want to know she’s OK.’

Shepherd glanced up at the Departure Board and saw Last Call flashing by his flight number. ‘Got to go, Agent Franklin, I’ll

call you if I find anything useful.’

‘Take care, Agent Shepherd. I hope you find what you’re looking for. And if you happen to find Kinderman and the world really is

about to get smashed into a million pieces then do me a favour – keep it to yourself. I changed my mind, I’d rather not know.’





89





Gabriel was woken by the sound of a bell clanging mournfully through the darkness. He opened his eyes and counted the strikes, ten

in all, though there might have been more before. It had been evening when Dr Kaplan had started drawing blood. It was dark now,

the room lit only by the glow of the monitors he was plugged into.

He stretched out in the bed and found his arms and legs were still bound tightly to it.

‘Hello?’ His voice fell away into the silence. It had to be later than ten to be this quiet. They must have taken his blood over

to the main lab and left him to his rest, strapped down in his own private prison.

He listened to the sounds of the room: the faint beep of the monitor keeping time with his heartbeat, the whisper of fans keeping

circuits cool and the soft bang of a door that sounded both close and also very far away as the echo bounced around inside the

warren of the mountain. He looked back over at the window, his one real connection to the outside world, and felt a chill. Someone

was there, a monk – standing by the door leading to the bedchamber. It was too dark to see his face, but Gabriel could make out

the white surgical mask covering the lower portion of it, and above that, the lenses of a pair of spectacles reflected what light

there was in the room, making it seem like the man’s eyes were glowing. The heart monitor bleeped a little faster and Gabriel

tried to calm himself by focusing on his breathing and doing what he could to take control of the situation. ‘Good evening,’ he

said, as if he had met someone out on a stroll. ‘You get lumbered with the night shift?’

The figure said nothing, staring at him with its luminous eyes. His silent scrutiny, the stealth of his appearance and the fact

that he had not answered when he had called out combined to make alarm bells sound in Gabriel’s head. He tensed his arms, testing

the bindings. Too tight. He might be able to work his way out of them, given time, but his instincts told him he didn’t have any.

‘Are you here to take more blood?’ he said, improvising. ‘They said they’d be back at next bells …’ He breathed out all the

way at the end of the sentence, creating space where his inflated chest had been. He moved his right arm, the one nearest the

figure, the one he would need to defend himself if it came to it. It shifted, just a little. He tried to bend his arm, breathing

out further, the heart monitor racing again. It shifted a little more, but still not enough. ‘What’s your name?’ he asked,

breathing right out at the end of the sentence and trying again to loosen his arm.

‘I will not give you power over me by volunteering my name.’ The man’s voice was low and filled with malice.

‘Suit yourself. My name’s Gabriel.’

‘I know what you are.’ He moved closer.

Gabriel pressed himself into the bed. He saw something sharp in the man’s hand. He looked around for something to defend himself

with if he could get his arm free. The only things in reach were the wires connecting him to the various monitors now registering

his growing anxiety.

He tried one last time to free his arm but it was no good. He looked back up at the glowing circles where the eyes should be and

did the only thing he could do. He flicked the clip from the end of his finger.

A high-pitched alarm immediately split the silence. ‘Technically, I just died,’ Gabriel said. ‘People will be running here

right now to try and restart my heart.’

The eyes shifted to the door then back to the bed. ‘Then pray they are quick.’ He lunged forward, the metal of the blade

flashing in the dark. Gabriel watched it rise up, breathing out as far as possible to create what space he could inside the cocoon

of his bindings then shoved himself violently to one side as it arced down. The movement was enough to jar the bed and shift it a

couple of inches so that the blade caught the side of his chest instead of the heart where it was aimed, slicing flesh and

glancing off a rib before burying itself in the mattress.

Gabriel felt pain burn in his side, but put it from his mind, staying focused. The stabbing movement had brought the monk’s head

close to his own and he seized his chance, spitting full in his face. The monk recoiled, dragging the knife free from the

mattress, too shocked to raise it again.

‘I carry a mutated form of the infection,’ Gabriel shouted at him, his words the only weapons he had, ‘harmless to me but

deadly to others. That’s why they keep me here. You have maybe thirty seconds to wipe it off or you’ll be dead within a day.’

The monk reached up to his face but did not dare to touch it. Beneath the wail of the cardiac alarm the sound of running feet

could now be heard. The monk looked at Gabriel one last time then turned and ran from the room, heading back to the bedchamber and

the washroom beyond.

Gabriel could feel blood trickling down his side and pooling on the mattress and he wondered if he had any left. The main door

flew open and Athanasius rushed in followed by Thomas, Kaplan and a couple of others. ‘Someone just tried to kill me,’ Gabriel

said, wincing as bright lights flickered on. ‘He went in there.’

A loud bang echoed from the bedchamber and Athanasius ran over. ‘He’s gone into the private stairway,’ he said, disappearing

after him. ‘The door’s locked,’ he shouted from inside, ‘he must have a key.’ He reappeared and looked down at the blood

spreading through Gabriel’s bindings then turned to Father Thomas and uttered a single word with such venom that it sounded like

a curse.

‘Malachi!’





90





Shepherd was one of the last people at the gate but one of the first on the flight. The guy with the eyebrows had apparently given

him priority boarding, another nod to the power of the badge.

He found his seat over the wing and by the window and settled gratefully into it. The sun had struggled into the sky and hung low,

just below the clouds, shining straight into his face. He closed his shutter and palmed his phone, figuring he had maybe ten

minutes before someone made him turn it off. He had used the time queuing at the gate to try and chase down a number for some

local law in Ruin. He was going to ride the Bureau ticket as long as he could, hoping it would take him all the way before he got

derailed. Sooner or later he was going to have to answer questions about the MPD searches and why he had held on to and pursued

leads rather than share them. There was every chance that this particular flag might go up while he was in the air. Which meant he

needed to make contact now while he still had some access and leverage.

He opened the page he had found for the Ruin City Police Department and hit a hotlink to dial the main switchboard. A foreign-

sounding ringtone purred in his ear then someone answered in a clipped, businesslike tone he understood but in a language he did

not.

‘You speak English?’

‘Little.’

‘My name is Joseph Shepherd, I’m a Special Agent with the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation. Do you have an

international liaison officer I could speak to?’

‘Moment please.’

Non-descript music filled his ear as he was put on hold and he watched the rest of the passengers embark. They were all dark-

skinned and black-haired, Turkish people heading back to their country of birth he guessed, answering the call to go home.

‘This is sub-inspector Kundakçi. How can we help?’

Shepherd told him everything he had learned about Melisa, only stopping short of revealing the real reason he was looking for her.

He threw in some details about the missing American journalist Liv Adamsen, hinting that she might be in some way connected. He

needed a plausible reason to be calling from an American law enforcement agency to ask about a Turkish national and this was the

best he had come up with. He left him his name and number and then hung up just as a stewardess marched towards him, her over-

made-up orange face a mask of stern disapproval.

‘You need to turn off all electronic devices and have the shutter in the upright position until after take-off, sir.’ She

continued down the aisle looking for further infringements of the rules. Shepherd turned his phone off, slid the shutter back up

and turned his head away from the direct glare of the sun. He was exhausted, and his nerves were shot after the unbelievable day

he’d had. He’d been blown up, crossed six states in various forms of transport, discovered the brutal murder of someone he knew

personally and found out that the love of his life was still alive. The flight time to Istanbul was nearly nine hours and he

planned to sleep for as much of it as he could.

He closed his eyes and thought of red threads stretching tighter, to pulling him towards her. He smiled and settled down in his

seat, not daring to tilt it back for fear of incurring the stewardess’s wrath. He was asleep before they turned the engines on.

He didn’t see the only other Americans get on the plane and take their seats ten rows in front of him, a man and a woman. She

glanced in his direction once before she sat down, briefly registering the man she had last seen through the sights of her sniper

scope, then settled in her seat and rested her head on the shoulder of the man, cosying up and getting comfortable for the long

flight to Turkey.





91





Athanasius and Father Thomas reached the top of the stairs and stopped, listening to the still darkness of the upper mountain

chambers. By the time Athanasius had retrieved torches and the key to the staircase Malachi had a five-minute head start on them.

‘He’ll get to the library long before we will,’ Thomas said through grabbed breaths, ‘then he’ll lock the reading room door

behind him.’

Athanasius nodded. ‘We should make for the main entrance, it’s nearer. How quickly do you think you can break in?’

‘If we’re not worried about tripping any alarms it will be easy.’

‘I think the time for stealth has passed,’ Athanasius said, and started to descend.

It took them ten long minutes to snake down the stairs and reach the library. Athanasius leaned against the wall, relishing the

cold of the rock as Thomas prised the hand scanner off the wall with his pocket-knife, bared two wires and touched them together.

The door slid open with a hiss and a puff of air showing that the positive pressure within the climate controlled library was

still active. It was designed to keep mould spores and other undesirables out of the air surrounding the priceless collection of

texts. It would also be an effective way of slowing the penetration of the airborne infection into the library. Malachi was

clearly being selective about exactly which parts of modernity he was turning his back on.

Thomas stepped forward and looked up, bracing himself for the shriek of the intruder alarm. ‘He must have de-activated the motion

sensors,’ Thomas said when none came. ‘That’s why the lights are not working.’

Athanasius moved past him heading into the main collection. It was a strange experience, moving through the library without the

usual glow of a follow light. The sweep of their torch beams revealed much more than he had ever seen before. The follow lights

usually only allowed one to glimpse isolated parts, so seeing it in its vast entirety like this, the vast bookcases filled with

every great thought mankind had ever had, made him profoundly sad: it was like finding a whale kept captive in a tank when it was

used to having the whole ocean to roam in.

‘Reading rooms,’ Thomas said, shining his torch over to a set of doors up ahead. Athanasius reached the door to the reading room

of the Sancti and twisted the handle. ‘Locked. Do you think he’s passed through already?’

Something clattered to the floor in the distance giving them their answer and they hurried after it. The noises continued as they

made their way through the library. It sounded like some great creature was lumbering through the dark, bumping into everything as

it made its way. They passed into the next chamber and discovered the cause of the noise. There were books everywhere, swept from

the shelves by the armful onto the floor. It was like a horde of vandals had ransacked the place, pulling everything from the

shelves and shredding the pages.

‘Why is he doing this?’ Thomas surveyed the devastation as they moved through it. ‘No one loves the library more than Malachi.

It makes no sense for him to do this.’

‘I don’t think he is in full possession of his senses. I think his world has fallen apart and this is a manifestation of it.’

They rounded a corner and saw light up ahead, coming from inside the Crypto Revelatio.

‘Malachi!’ Athanasius called out. ‘We just want to talk.’ He switched off his torch and inched down the corridor towards the

light, the room beyond the arch coming gradually into view. It was in even greater chaos than the rest of the library with books

and piles of paper spilling out of the door into the corridor. ‘There’s only one way out of there, Malachi. It’s a dead-end. If

you don’t come out then we will come in.’

‘Stay back,’ Malachi’s voice boomed from the chamber.

‘We’re just here to talk. We want to help you but we need to understand what you read in the Starmap that has made you do this

to your beloved library, and try and take a man’s life?’

‘That is no man.’

Athanasius glanced over at Thomas who was inching his way forward along the other side of the tunnel. ‘For mercy’s sake,

Malachi, tell us what you read.’

‘It doesn’t matter, it’s too late anyway. You should have let me kill it before it becomes too strong.’

Athanasius reached the edge of the arch and peered into the room. It was a riot of mess, the neat order of the library turned into

a scene of chaos with shelves half-emptied and the floor crammed with paper and scrolls like the nest of a huge rodent. Malachi

sat at the centre of it behind a desk piled high with more paper and illuminated by a row of guttering candles.

‘Tell me what you read, Malachi. Let us look at it together and perhaps we will see something different in it.’

Malachi looked up, his eyes huge behind the pebble lenses. ‘You are wrong,’ he said, picking up another candle and holding the

wick to the flame of the last one. ‘You have been wrong all along: wrong about modernizing the Citadel, wrong about allowing

civilians inside the mountain.’ The wick caught and he turned the candle in his hand until the flame grew brighter. ‘And wrong

about there being only one way out of here.’

He dropped the candle into a pile of paper and it erupted in a whoosh of flame. Athanasius leaped forward to try and stamp it out

but Malachi stood up fast, heaving the table over as he did so, tipping the row of candles onto more piles of dry paper to create

an instant wall of flame.

Father Thomas looked up at the ceiling, expecting the CO2 system to activate and smother the fire. But nothing happened. Malachi

had de-activated that too. He grabbed Athanasius and heaved him backwards. ‘We need to get out of here.’

‘And you are also wrong to think you have stopped me,’ Malachi shouted after them from inside the inferno, smoke rising up

around him as his cassock started to burn. ‘There is more than one way to kill a demon.’





92





Athanasius staggered backwards from the entrance, disbelieving the horror of what he had just seen. Already the smoke was thick in

the air and the fire was spreading from the Crypto Revelatio, igniting pages from spilled books lined up along the corridor in

readiness.

‘Run!’ Thomas shouted.

‘But Malachi …’

‘Malachi is gone. He cannot be saved, we must do what we can to save the library.’ He kicked a pile of books aside, trying to

create a firebreak, but there was too much loose paper lying around and the flames caught them instead and sent burning embers

floating through the air towards the tinderbox of the next chamber. ‘Positive air pressure is feeding the fire,’ Thomas shouted

above the roaring flames. ‘Our best hope is to get back to the control room and turn the gas extinguishers on before the whole

lot goes up.’

They stumbled away from the fire, feeling the heat at their backs and tasting smoke in their mouths. The main entrance was a

fifteen-minute walk away, maybe five minutes’ running, but they were both exhausted and Athanasius was also in deep shock from

what he had witnessed. He could not get the image of Malachi out of his mind, eyes blazing in victory, ecstasy almost, as he

himself started to burn.

He turned a corner and felt cool air wash over him as he ran through the snowdrift of torn pages littering the Bible room. He was

coughing from the smoke and could hear the crackle and roar of it behind him. He risked a look back. The flames had not made it

into the room. He could see the glow of the fire but it was still contained in the corridor beyond. Maybe they would have a chance

to stop it spreading.

Just as this thought crossed his mind a figure straight from hell burst through the door, arms outstretched and dripping fire as

it ran straight at them, covering half the distance before it stumbled and fell, straight into a pile of torn pages and tortured

Bibles that blazed instantly into flame. The whole room was burning in seconds, flames sucking ravenously at the air and billowing

thick smoke. They were running now, all thoughts of fatigue banished by pure fear. The fire was almost keeping pace with them,

leaping from shelf to shelf and room to room, roaring at their heels like a hungry predator with the scent of blood in its

nostrils.

They made it to the reading rooms and hammered on the doors, rousing the few black cloaks still resident there. ‘FIRE!’ They

both shouted, pounding on the next door. ‘Run to the exit.’

The black cloaks emerged sleepy and stunned. A few, feeling protective of their domain, saw the fire and started running towards

it. ‘It’s too late,’ Athanasius shouted after them, pointing at Thomas who was already at the door of the control room. ‘We’

re going to switch the fire extinguishers back on. Just get out and warn the others what has happened here.’

Athanasius followed Thomas into the control room and found him standing in the middle of it staring at the smashed control panels

and broken screens. There would be no quick fix of the fire systems, Malachi had seen to that.

Athanasius tugged at Thomas’s arm, dragging him out of the room and over to the entrance. The door to the airlock was still open

and a steady flow of air was breezing through it, sucked by the conflagration now feeding on the library. The black cloaks had

already gone and the fire was almost at the entrance hall now, its expansion like a slow explosion that was tearing the library

apart. Thomas fumbled in the wall cavity where the scanner had been, found the wires he’d stripped earlier and touched them back

together just as the smoke reached them and vomited from the door. The wires sparked and the door slid shut, slicing through the

smoke and cutting off the noise of the fire.

‘Will that hold?’ Athanasius asked between gulped breaths.

‘Only for a while.’ Thomas levered off the cover of the second scanner and worked fast to strip more wires and hot-wire the

second circuit. The second door slid shut, cutting off the sound of the fire entirely. Athanasius looked through the glass panels

in both doors. The fire had reached the entrance now and was creeping along the desk and casting Halloween orange light over

everything. It was like staring into hell.

‘We have to get away from here,’ Thomas said. ‘When these doors give way the whole mountain is going to turn into one giant

chimney and every corridor will fill with smoke.’

Athanasius remembered the last thing Malachi had said – there is more than one way to kill a demon – this must have been his

plan. But he had forgotten about one thing.

‘Follow me,’ he said, hurrying away down the corridor. ‘I know where we will be safe.’

The garden was quiet and dark when the first stretcher emerged into the cool night. The trees were all gone, burned along with the

bodies, and shadows flickered on the high moonlit walls picking out the first columns of smoke leaking from the mountain as if the

long-ago volcano that had formed the crater had woken again and was starting to boil.

‘We should occupy the very middle,’ Athanasius said, ‘in case the heat causes rockfalls.’

More and more stretchers came out of the mountain and began to collect in neat rows in the middle of the garden, like eggs from a

broken anthill. Everyone worked in silence, the earnest urgency of their task focusing all effort on saving those who could not

hope to save themselves. Only when the last stretcher had been carried out into the cool night air did anyone stop to take stock

of their situation and perform a head count. There were only five people missing, Malachi and the four doctors who had chosen to

remain in the Abbot’s quarters, their contamination suits protecting them against the smoke and their desire to continue their

work outweighing any fear they had of the fire.

Athanasius patrolled the rows of beds, struck by how quiet everyone had become. Inside the cathedral cave the sounds of suffering

had been like a solid thing, trapped along with everything else. Out here the few moans that escaped the cracked lips of those

bound to their beds drifted upwards, mingling with the smoke on their way to the heavens. There was a freedom out here in the

garden, you could close your eyes and imagine the walls away. He closed his eyes, and did just that, imagining himself far, far

away from here, while all around him his world continued to burn.