The God Hunter Page 24

  “Chris . . .”

  “They’re goading you. They want you to react. It’s like a film. Stay separate. Don’t think. Don’t get involved . . .”

  But it could not be helped. The longer we were there, the more we sank into their world. Nothing was fixed. Seeing them, it was like peeling away masks, pulling the layers off an onion, except here, there’d be no heart, no core, no face under the covers. Shadows, mirrors, smoke and dreams. Hoops of light and wings of eyes; great visages of bronze and fire. The gods were limitless, infinite, but in an inward way, so that to come upon them was to fall unceasingly, and risk becoming lost within. My eyes—­my mind—­adjusted, and they changed their shapes accordingly (or no, no: they were the same, always, and only their appearance in my mind changed—­so I reasoned it, at any rate). They shucked off first their clumsy affectations of organic life, replaced them with a string of abstracts, resonances and sensations: childhood landscapes, one after another, washing over me; places I had never been, yet which filled me with a terrible nostalgia, desolate and longing: a seaside prom under a winter sky, a seagull veering sideways in the wind; a garden gate set open in a privet hedge; a yellow-­painted door, a stepladder, a wall crusty with soot . . . Not my childhood, not mine, though it affected me more than the real scenes of my childhood ever could. I was fixed on it. I couldn’t look away. It seemed all else was emptied out of me. My thoughts, my feelings, everything slipping away . . .

  Someone said, “I cannot stand this, Chris.”

  I jerked around in surprise.

  Anna. Anna Ganz. She pressed against me. Her arm was linked in mine. But for five, six seconds, I’d forgotten her. She’d vanished from my mind. And I think that scared me more than anything I’d witnessed up till then.

  “They want us,” she said.

  I felt hollow, emptied out. My chest, my belly . . . I could have run then, back into those empty corridors, back up the stairs and out, over the fence . . . anywhere, away from there. I wonder whether I’d have done it if I’d been alone, with nobody to see. I don’t know. In any case, I stayed. I stayed, and calmed myself. Remembered, and grew strong in that.

  I’d been a field op for a long, long time. I’d had my share of strange and often harrowing experiences, and nothing I’d felt here was wholly unfamiliar to me. In scale, yes; in power, in sheer intensity—­that’s what had thrown me. But the nature of it, the quality, the thing itself, I recognized. I’d dealt with that before.

  I stepped back, mentally. I took a breath. Distanced myself. And instead of being buffeted about, thrown one way and another, I began to calculate, to organize and analyze the things I’d seen, as if I stood above them, looking down. Just as I’d done a hundred times, facing those lesser powers in the world outside.

  I couldn’t understand the gods. But what went on around them—­the shadows that they cast, the shapes they left upon the world—­those things I could grasp at, maybe even comprehend.

  I felt the pressures change around me. We walked, passing through veils, through unseen walls that marked off one god from the next, and kept us, at least in part, from all of them.

  I saw then how they’d been confined. Not by a single wall but a graded system, like the one we used in capture. Incremental forces. There were circuits in the floor, under the tiles. There had to be. Containment fields, just like the flask, but with the power cranked up a thousandfold.

  I had it now. I was no longer dazzled by the visions that they threw me; or if I was, then that part of my mind I sidelined and set apart. I told myself the same thing I’d told Shailer, all those years ago: be professional.

  And one thing more: be alone.

  I took Anna to the middle of the hall. The tides were weaker there. She whimpered, and I squeezed her hand, but already now, my mind was elsewhere, carefully unraveling my feelings, the waves of energy my nervous system recast as emotion, with its sloughs and sudden, empty joys, its passion and anxiety, succeeding one another in a wild, manic-­depressive fairground ride, forever on the edge of revelation, never reaching it . . .

  I felt that I was shaking, glowing in some unseen way, burning with the load of alien sensation. Every nerve alight, blazing, roaring . . .

  Anna wrenched herself away from me. She yelled. She had the gun again—­always the gun. It boomed, and the air seemed to recoil, flooding back to press upon us like a blanket. She turned quickly, this way and that. She sobbed. I heard her breathing, harsh and fast.

  “Drop the gun. It won’t work here.”

  “Drop . . . ?”

  “They’re too big.”

  “Chris, I, I . . .”

  But she put the gun in her pocket. It dragged her coat down. “Come on.” I took her hand once more.

  And that was how we came to him at last, the creature I had glimpsed in Esztergom, six years before. Then, he’d danced, a hurricane of spirit and desire. Now, at twice the size, he hunched, a squatting beast. The great head sunk between his shoulders, the neck ballooned with fat. Slabs and curves of torso glistened in the shabby light. His legs were folded under him in some bizarre, inhuman way, great thighs like beams of an unholy architecture; a shinbone sleek and sturdy as a girder. Tendrils of flesh had pushed up from his shoulders, forming a collar of immense, dendritic forms that spread around him, vanishing into the gloom. He scented me; as I drew near, the big head thrust towards me, the nostrils twitched, one vast arm lifted as in greeting, knuckles resting on the concrete balustrade between us.

  Shadows rippled. Voices twittered in the dark.

  “Chris—­”

  “Go back. The door where we came in—­I’ll see you there.”

  I turned her, guiding her. The air here glittered with activity. Nothing looked the same, everything was changing.

  She stumbled a few yards, then stopped. I went across, I touched her shoulder.

  “See it?”

  She said something in Hungarian.

  “Stay in the middle of the hall. It’s easier. Look to the left. It’s yellow, right? The frame. It’s painted yellow. When you’re level with it, turn, walk straight towards it. OK?”

  “Yes . . .”

  “You can do that?”

  “I don’t know. I think so.”

  “Go.”

  “You . . . ?”

  “I’m going to stay a few more minutes. Then I’ll follow.”

  I watched her go. She dithered, paused a moment. Then she pulled herself up, walked straight and fast, holding the course. I heard shouting somewhere—­or I thought I did. And then I took a breath, turned, looked back towards the deity they’d labeled Seven.

  Its arm stretched out towards me, like a frozen road, gleaming in electric light.

  “You know me,” I said. “You recognize me, don’t you?”

  It was a weird thing, like talking to a building, or a tree.

  But trees and buildings never answer.

  Seven did.

  CHAPTER 57

  THE AVATAR

  I said, “I sent you here. I didn’t plan it, but that’s how it turned out. And here you are. Are you bothered? Does it matter to you? Is it like being in a church? It feels like church. Some kind of church . . .”

  I heard the hiss of air, the humming of the vault over my head. Then, although the creature never moved, a voice said, “Not like church, no. This is different. Not a church.”

  The voice was small and human. More: it was a voice I knew.

  I stared up at that huge, impassive face, the dark eyes fixed on something I could never see; the blunt nose, the nostrils steaming like a horse’s in a race; the lips as thick as truck tires . . .

  “I came here of my own free will,” he said. “In part, because I knew that you’d come, too. So once more: you, and I.”

  He hadn’t spoken. There was someone else, much nearer, a shape down in the shadow of that
massive fist. A darkness moving in the dark.

  “Oh Chris, Chris! You’ve not forgotten me?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “The blade on the tongue. Blood in the mouth, blood on the ground. An offering, libation to the gods. That’s one way we can know each other, when you open to us that way. In such moments—­at such times, you and I are one.”

  He lingered in the shelter of his monstrous parent, speaking in my voice, using my face, my form.

  “You knew us long before you knew us, Chris.”

  I squinted, peering after him.

  “Come out. I can’t see you. Come closer.”

  Nothing. No response. I’d lost him in the gloom.

  Had I imagined it? Another mask, another figment I’d allowed myself to think was real?

  “You’re telling me the gods drink blood?” I said.

  A high, sharp trilling. Voices on the very edge of consciousness, the limits of perception.

  “Blood!” I tried to laugh. “I’d have expected something classier, you know? But blood-­drinking? Christ. You’re not gods. You’re just—­I dunno. A bunch of vampires.” I gazed around me, trying not to think what might be out there in the dark. “The Budapest Bloodsucker. That’s pretty cheap, you know? You’ve got to admit. That’s pretty low-­life . . .”

  I planned to taunt him, if he was there at all, to draw him out. Only he didn’t come. He wasn’t human. He might look like a man, but his reactions, feelings—­I had no idea how he worked. None at all.

  I said, “Looks bad, though, don’t you think? Gods in prison. I’d be a bit . . . shamefaced, that was me. It’s not impressive, you know?”

  The hall now seemed to curve away from me, stretching out, as in some optical illusion; as if I’d reached a place so dense, so alien, even the light was twisted out of shape.

  “You should understand. Whatever you come up with, we can beat it. Any strategy. Any strength. It’s not the Stone Age anymore. You’ll always be in prison. We’ve changed since your day. Remember that.”

  The voice said, “Not by much.”

  I whirled around. Somehow, he’d got behind me. I hadn’t seen him pass, yet there he was, not two yards off, looking the way he had that day in Budapest, all dressed in black, his hair worn long, swept off his face in two dark wings . . .

  Now, I’m a normal-­looking man. Regular features, physically fit; I look OK, but I’m no film star.

  It was something in him. Perhaps his stance, the look upon his face, the pride in him, I don’t know what. But he was beautiful. It came to me quite clearly then: beautiful and terrible. He made you want to worship him, to worship or destroy him, nothing less would do; but to stand before him, face-­to-­face, and hold your ground—­that was the hardest thing of all.

  “You all know. In your hearts.” His voice was soft, unhurried; the voice of someone who had never had to speak up to be heard, or rush to keep his audience’s attention. “Children know. Remember that, Chris? One cut, then feeling yourself . . . draining out, falling on the earth—­joining with the world?” He spread his arms, a farmer, sowing seed. “It scared you, didn’t it? Scared you and excited you, both at once. You wanted it. You felt the thrill. The wonder. Like finding your true home at last. To lose yourself in something bigger, to let go, and become . . . whole. Children know. They know how to placate the gods, and how to bargain with them. ‘Oh, I’ll be good, I’ll do this, I’ll do that, if I can only have . . .’ and then they name their heart’s desire. And in that single moment, they’ll give anything. Literally anything. In that moment. You remember, don’t you? The hope that there’s a higher power, a force with whom to strike a deal . . .”

  “That would be my mum. My Dad never gave in on anything.”

  “Flippant, flippant . . .” He paced slowly around me, and I paced the other way, so that we seemed to circle one another. Soon his massive parent came in view again. It was watching him; watching with the pleasure and indulgence of an adult for a favorite child.

  “Sacrifice, Chris, sacrifice. Nothing tastes sweeter.”

  “Take your word for it . . .”

  “We rode you. In the old days, you were our mounts. We had no true form of our own, so we took yours; and before yours, the forms of beasts. We were made with neither shape nor substance, save what we gathered from the world around. So we became that world. We built our homes in you, out of your matter and your lives. And in return, we gave. We gave you so much, Chris; so much. We became you. We became your souls, your aspirations and your dreams. You are the thing you are because of us. Without us, you’d be less than savages. Creatures of mud and dirt—­weak, sickly things, easily broken by the world. What you have, and what you are, you owe to us. You know this. Deep inside, you know I’m speaking true.”

  I said nothing. I felt the sweat run down my neck. I put my hands into my pockets to hide the way they clenched.

  “And yet you cast us out. You cast us out, and we went into the ground. Into the earth, the trees, the rivers. But we stayed close to you. For you could never wholly free yourselves from us, nor we from you. This is the nature of the world, you see; that you might try to wipe your memory of us, or twist and change the truth. Might give us new names and new images, new stories. But you still build temples to us, just the same. You can’t forget us. Nor, alas, remember what we truly are.

  “Unlike you, our memories are long. Longer than yours, just as our lives are longer, too.

  “You wanted to be joined with us, yet you became afraid; and so instead, you gave others to us, in the sacrifice. First beasts and prisoners of war; later, you gave us your own lives, comically distorted, bent to rules you knew that you could never keep. You sacrificed your appetites to us because you were aware, deep down, that appetite was something over which we held command. We are your other half, as you are ours. You made a payment, for you knew payment was due. You made it because, in your hearts, if not your heads, you nonetheless still longed to be subsumed. And you could not remember how.”

  “But you remember.”

  “From this point—­ah.” He held out open palms. “From this point, I can see it all, the whole, poor history of our divided lives. As neither your kind nor mine has ever done before.

  “When you abandoned us and we sank down into stone and wood, we had the thoughts of stone and wood. Long, slow thoughts, taking a century or more to form. Yet now, I live at your speed, and everything is bright, ephemeral. Here and gone. I catch a glimpse of it, reach out, and then, just as I clutch it in my hand—­pft.” He tossed his head. “It’s gone. Like that.”

  “How many have you killed?”

  “How many gave themselves to me?”

  “I doubt they were willing.”

  “You’d be wrong.”

  “How many?”

  “I don’t know. At first—­oh, I counted every one. First a dust mite, scavenging behind the wallpaper, then up, through the mosquitoes and the coleopterans . . . There was a special piquancy in moving to the vertebrates. My first dog . . . it’s a small step from a dog to a man, you know. So much alike. The social instincts are already there, the need for company, approval. All I did was just stretch out my fingers . . .

  “It took a long time, Chris. After you did what you did. For a year or more then, I was almost the way you think of dead; no thoughts, no will . . . no shape. Dead, like that. So long in dark and emptiness . . . But later, when my strength came back, when I could think again . . . I saw how different things might be. I had no home. But also, I was unconfined. Set free. It was confusing for me, at the start. I was unused to it. I . . . oh. Look. There’s water here.”

  He gestured down. I half expected some kind of a trick, but no; a tiny rivulet was dribbling between our feet, nosing this way and that, following the minute variations in the floor. He bent to it, his large hands moving, nodding as if wonderstruck.

>   “And that’s how I was, too. You see? Feeling my way. Staying near home. Learning—­remembering—­the way it felt. To be a man. You understand? The way that you—­you could remember, too. Remember how it felt to be a god.”

  He straightened up, and at the same time, something moved behind him, seemed to flash across my vision, hunched and running.

  “Come closer, Chris. It takes a simple gesture, nothing more—­a kiss, perhaps. Is that appropriate? A kiss. Is that too much to ask? A kiss, and we’ll be one again.”

  I stepped away from him.

  “Your form, Chris. Yours, and mine. Almost alike. I’ve come to realize this: that while in the old days we took our mounts just as they came and rode them till they dropped . . . It seems to me that you and I might share a special bond. Try to imagine it, that giving of yourself, so poignant, so . . . ecstatic. Your very substance, granted to another. No more loneliness, no more hurt. Just think . . .”

  This time I saw it. A man ran past me, almost close enough to touch, and as he drew away, his feet struck great sparks from the concrete, rising up before him like a bow wave.

  “Chris, Chris . . .”

  “There are ­people here. ­People—­”

  I saw shadows moving in the dark. Scattered shapes—­off to the right, the left, the right again—­then, all at once, a dozen of them, racing through a surf of fire. They were tiny, dwarfed by the enormous walls, the machines, the gods themselves. But they were here.

  And in that second, he leapt at me. I ducked. Slipped. Went skidding on the wet floor, then smashed down hard, pain jolting up my forearm, and I moaned, lost in the sheer hurt of it. When I looked up, he stood above me. “Chris . . .” He shook his head, a jilted lover. He kicked me in the ribs. I folded up and tried to drag myself away. But at the same time, I realized something. It had been an ordinary kick. Nothing terrible, nothing superhuman. Nothing meant to drain the life from me. If I could just get up, get away from him. If I could run . . .