An Occupation of Angels Part 9

Stop. Think. Breathe.

Execution time. I was entering the final phase of the operation and I knew it. Whatever plan the n.a.z.is had, they were putting it into operation now.

I had to stop them.

I was free and they didn't know it yet, and it would give me some room to manoeuvre. I had to follow Eldershott; somehow he was the key to all this but, at the same time, I had a score to settle, a very personal score with an elderly German scientist who should have been dead long ago.

I was going to help him on that road.

I tested my footing, performed a pirouette, didn't fall over. Decided it would have to do. I still had my suit on and that was good, but I needed weapons.

It turned out there were some in the other room.

I entered the lab area again; all around me broken angels cried through bars of ice. I didn't know what they could do; I didn't know if they were even capable of freedom, but they were my best chance and I took it. I went back to the operating room and grabbed some of Mengele's toys and brought them back with me.

A blowtorch. Good. The thought that he'd intended to use it on me just notched up another point on the score board. For now, I turned the blowtorch onto full power and began cutting the bars.

They steamed and broke, a strange material that was neither ice nor gla.s.s, and the angels stopped keening and stared at me with unreadable eyes through the broken bars of their cages.

"Come on!" I said. And "Shoo!" I waved my hands at them, feeling somewhat at a loss.

Slowly, they began to stagger out of the cages, and I could see for the first time how hurt they were. Scars covered their bodies, oozing puss that dried uneasily in a cornucopia of colours; some had only half a wing or none at all, and ugly wounds sprouted from their shoulder blades; others had eyes missing, or ears. They looked like naked pieces of flesh at a butcher's shop.

I hoped they'd live. I hoped they would provide the diversion I needed, if one was still needed. At least they would add to the general mayhem. I could hear guns being fired in the distance, and screams, some of them human.

I kept the torch and left the angels. As I stepped into the corridor beyond the torture chamber, two soldiers stumbled into my path; they didn't even acknowledge my presence but kept on running, looking back in fear.

I headed in that direction. The direction of the screams.

The screaming intensified the further I moved; at last I reached a wide, circular hall and stopped, holding onto the blowtorch like a promise. The scene in the hall permeated my senses slowly, and then its full meaning finally sank in.

Chapter Twenty-Three.

The thing that was Sophie Stockard stood in the centre of the room, perfectly motionless. She looked like a figurine carved out of driftwood, a still and fragile thing in the middle of chaos.

Filling my vision was the structure. Crude swastikas were carved into it, and angels' wings; it was a circle of strange metal, and I should have been able to see through it to the wall behind but I couldn't. Instead, the air inside the circle vibrated and hummed, acting at times like a mirror, at others, like opaque gla.s.s. Rows of machinery were lined up on each side of the structure; Sophie faced the humming circle, and opposite her was Mengele.

He was holding a gun to Eldershott's head.

As I approached them, Sophie's head swivelled towards me and that horrible voice said, It is time. It was the voice I had heard in Paris when Metatron had died, the same as I'd heard in Lubyanka; the same, I was beginning to realise, as I'd heard in my dreams; the voice of the giant in the land of the angels.

And out of the same mouth came Sophie Stockard's own voice, piercing through the noise--"Help him! He mustn't die!"

Whatever Sophie had been doing had momentarily stopped, it seemed. Fallen blocks of ice and broken, smoking machinery paid witness to the powers she had unleashed.

There were men in smocks working on the machines, and more of the identical blond soldiers watching them, guns at the ready. The air in the giant mirror hummed and twisted in impossible ways.

"One more move from you and he's dead," Mengele said. His voice carried in a suddenly silent hall.

He pushed Eldershott towards the bank of machines. The gun kept pointing at Eldershott's head. Mengele had surgeon's hands. They remained steady. "You have to finish what you've started, Dr Eldershott. Please, you must open the gateway." Behind him, soldiers began to stream into the room in silence, row upon row of blond, large men in uniforms on which the swastika and wings were clearly displayed.

Mengele's face twisted in sudden hatred. "How many years?" he shouted at the unmoving Sophie. "How many years since you brought your own petty war into ours? For years my people have worked to create a new, better world--before your creatures came. Your fallen angels. It is you who are responsible for the defeat we suffered, and it is you who will now pay the price.'

Sophie's face underwent a strange transformation as if two opposing forces were battling inside her, but neither of them seemed inclined to talk just then.

Mengele kept ranting. "You thought you could dump your losers on us, that you could carry on living in savagery with no care in the world. How long has it been since heaven was last challenged?"

He didn't look as if he expected an answer. People like him so seldom did. But he got one.

The war lasted many eons, the terrible voice said through Sophie's lips. Those who challenged us were defeated. It seemed less cruel to send them to a physical prison than to have their essences snuffed out like candles made of human fat.

"I could have taught you a thing or two about that," Mengele said.

I knew I had to do something quickly. I saw Eldershott begin to rock, Mengele's gun still trained on him. As he rocked harder, he began to sing. It was a high, reedy voice, the sound of a human sacrifice. The notes and the words made no sense, but I could feel their impact, see it in the gathering intensity of the shimmer that was the gate. I looked at Eldershott with new eyes. Thought back-- An academic, really, Turner had said, almost apologetically. Cryptography, though you couldn't tell to look at him, good solid work but he wasn't that important.

Cryptography. That, and an interest in angels. What code had he cracked? What door had he opened in the process?

The answer was before me now.

The gateway shimmered and changed. Beyond it, faintly, I could see pale blue skies, a whitewashed beach and in the distance, as small as birds, far-off angels in flight.

He had discovered the gateway to the world of the angels. Mengele had called it heaven, but I wondered if it really was. And if so, who was the giant who had visited me (or had I visited him?) in my dreams? The one who now seemed to possess Eldershott's girlfriend?

And what were the n.a.z.is planning? An occupation of heaven?

I was about to charge him, terminate Eldershott as I was supposed to, try and end this.

But then the Archangel Raphael materialised in the centre of the hall and everything stopped.

Chapter Twenty-Four.

You, the thing that was Sophie Stockard said.

And, "Yes," said Raphael, his voice a frozen river.

By the gate, Eldershott has stopped moving. The image in the gateway began, slowly, to fade.

I should have killed you myself.

"If so, you should have done it a long time ago."

Yes....

Raphael turned his head and looked directly at me. His eyes were a bottomless grey, sucking me in. "You, I will kill slowly," he said. "Over more years than you can imagine."

I was fast becoming popular. First Mengele, now Raphael. It didn't help that I, too, had thought one of them was already dead.

You were planning a second revolt. Against me. You, whom I let live, you, whom I banished from my side, forever. You dare to threaten me?

"Hardly." Raphael almost smirked. "Only to retake what is rightfully ours."

You planned to invade our world with the aid of humans?

"Plan," Raphael said. "Not planned."

There was a moment of complete silence, as if sound, the nature of sound, were suddenly absent from the physical world.

Then Sophie's body began to convulse and the air about her grew hazy as if intense heat formed inside her mortal human shape.

Out of the haze, wings extended slowly, four, five, six metres in each direction; silver and sharp, they were like a bronze statue come to life in ba.s.s relief. The wings extended, then snapped.

And out of the circle of heat stepped G.o.d.

It is the only description I could think of. It was and wasn't the giant I had seen in that other world, and it was more than that: it was huge and all encompa.s.sing and kind and cruel and all things at once. It was an angel the like of which I had never seen before.

It didn't faze Raphael.

With a strangely human scream of rage, he attacked the bright angel. One wing extended and shot out, almost tearing through the other's bright facade. The thing that was once Sophie Stockard side-stepped him easily, and its own wing lashed and carved a deep wound in Raphael's torso.

It was hard to focus, but I had to. Glancing aside, I saw Mengele point the gun again at Eldershott, saw Eldershott begin to rock again, begin to mutter, begin to sing.

The heat from the Archangels' fight was melting a crater in the hall. I had to do something, had to stop Eldershott, banish the G.o.d-like being before it could kill again, before it started a third world war by its actions.

The cipher and the key. Destroy it. I remembered what it had said. I had to stop the Germans invading the angels' world; to fail would mean suicide for everyone on Earth. But I also had to stop the killings of the angels on Earth, or I would face the same outcome.

I formulated a plan but, before I could move, an awful, unearthly keening sound issued from behind me, and the first of the tortured angels I had freed stepped into the hall.

Chapter Twenty-Five.

When the angels came through into the hall, madness took hold of them. They tried to fly and failed and that seemed to drive them even madder. They came crashing into the n.a.z.i soldiers, ripping them with their wings, with their teeth, with their hands. Some attacked the gate, trying desperately to go through, crashing as they hit an invisible wall. The rest attacked Raphael, who drove them away easily as he battled his real opponent.

You dared to abduct my subjects? You dared to raid my world with what holes you had remaining through which to breach it? It was an awful voice, a voice like the heat of a nuclear reactor. They fought inside a rapidly-growing crater, and I looked at the ceiling, worried. Cracks were appearing in the ice, caused by the intense heat.

"As above, so below," Raphael cried, the tip of his wings nearly cutting his opponent in half. "And now our fellow humans will have all the angels they want for their experiments." A clash of wings as bright as the sun, and I was momentarily blinded. Then: "And when they're finished, I won't have even begun."

I had to reach Eldershott. The angels seemed to avoid me; for the two fighting in the ice I was forgotten, at least for the moment; and Mengele was too busy keeping his gun on Eldershott and the rest of his staff (who seemed to want nothing more than to disappear into thin air) to pay much attention to me.

I approached cautiously along the wall, trying to reach them.

"Faster!" Mengele was shouting. "Faster!"

And Eldershott was praying, and the gateway was again filling up with images, bringing into existence a world beyond our world. I wasn't sure how many soldiers Mengele would have left when the broken angels were done with them, but I suspected there were more, somewhere, only now getting ready for their a.s.sault on heaven.

There was only one thing I could have done and so I did it; I approached the back of the gate. From that side it looked like a clear piece of gla.s.s through which I could see the rest of the hall. The structure itself looked solid, and I needed to unbalance it.

Then one of the angels flying at the screen cried, a single word, and disappeared inside the gate and I knew it was open, and that if it were to be closed it had to be now.

There were corpses belonging to the blond soldiers all round me. I went through their uniforms, picking up what I needed.

I returned to the base of the gate, and I was right: more soldiers were streaming in and the first few looked as though they were about to go through. I had to act fast.

Grenades. Take a bunch in one hand, pull the pin, dump, repeat on other side. Get the h.e.l.l out of there. And counting. Counting all the time. Praying the numbers are right. Praying it would work. Praying it wouldn't kill me.

One. Two. Three.

Four.

Five!

Explosion.

Six.

Seven!

Explosion.

The gate shuddered-- Eight. Nine. Ten.

Eleven.

--and fell, slowly, forwards.

It was even larger than I'd thought. The n.a.z.is seemed determined to go through it en ma.s.se.