Breakout

Sebastian Gloom
Part Fourteen

Sammael swept in on his huge, black wings, his horned head turning this way and that as his burning red eyes surveyed the massed ranks of the damned below him. “The time has come!” He roared in his great booming voice. “We go to storm heaven!” A great cheer rose from the millions of damned souls and they milled about impatiently, eager to go. Gloom looked around in confusion. There was nothing but fire and naked, burning bodies as far as the eye could see. They were standing on a surface that seemed to be composed of solid stone without apertures or doorways and above them was nothing but emptiness. If the impossibly vast cavern that was Hell had a ceiling, it was too far above them to be seen. How do we get out? he wondered. God had dropped them in from above. If that was the only way in and out, then anyone unable to fly was trapped forever.
Then the demon dropped lower, though, and Gloom saw that it was sprouting a multitude of arms, each one ending in a clawed hand. Each arm reached down and seized a damned soul, pulling him up into the air, and soon it was lifting hundreds of them, a bizarre sight that reminded Gloom yet again that the physical form it was manifesting was only an illusion. What he was seeing was his mind trying to make sense of something totally alien to his previous experience. A being of pure spirit connecting itself to other, lesser spirits so that it could convey them to another location.
More arms reached down, thousands and thousands of them, and one of them came towards Gloom. He tensed up as the huge fingers closed around his body, the claws digging painfully into his flesh, and then he was lifted up out of the flames into the hot air above. The sensation of burning ceased, and for the first time since his arrival he was without agony.
It had been so long since he'd been without pain that it took him several moments to process the sensation. His body finished healing, and he looked down in astonishment at his clear, healthy flesh. Smooth skin, not burned or blistered. Hair on his arms and legs, not seared and scorched. All an illusion, of course. He had no skin, no hair. He was nothing but spirit, but it was an illusion he cherished nonetheless and he made the most of it in case the rebellion failed and they were sent back to the inferno, this time for ever.
Eventually the demon had gathered up all the souls in the area beneath it and its wings flapped in great, lazy beats as it carried them up into the air. Around them, he saw other demons rising out of the flames, each of them carrying thousands upon thousands of damned human souls. Some of the demons were vastly larger than Sammael and were carrying millions of souls, so small with distance and so numerous that it looked as though the creatures were being followed up into the sky by fluffy pink clouds beneath them. Gloom wondered whether one of them was Lucifer himself, but if Hell was thousands of miles across, like the world of the living above it, then it was very likely that the Bringer of Light himself was far out of sight. The sheer number of demons close enough to be seen was staggering, though, and Gloom found himself trembling at the thought of the size of the conflict about to take place.
He looked about for Benson and Nacoma, but neither of them were in sight. The souls were packed so closely around him, bumping gently against him as the demonic arms holding them waved like the tentacles of a jellyfish, that it was impossible to see very far in any direction except straight down, where the flames were shrinking to become nothing more than a uniform yellow haze. Above them, the bulk of Sammael himself blocked his view of what lay above, but he got the sensation of increasing altitude as the air got steadily colder, a sensation that thrilled him and brought back almost forgotten memories of cold winter nights. He held tightly to the scaly black claws holding him, suddenly terrified that they might let go of him, and that he would fall all the way back down, as he had when God first Damned him, to begin his ordeal all over again, except that this time he would be alone. Completely alone in Hell...
After a time, the breeze blowing across his naked body told him that they were travelling more sideways than up, and he tried to see through all the other bodies around him to see where they were going. The random, drifting movements of the demon's arms opened a momentary gap in the crowd of dangling passengers, and he saw a wall in the distance, still too far away to be anything more than a featureless flat, grey surface. A moment later the bodies closed around him again, hiding it from view. That must be where the exit from Hell was located, he told himself. He'd begun to think that they would be rising up through a great hole in the ground to find themselves back in the world of the living, but it seemed instead that they would be going around it, passing just inside the dome of the sky, that surrounded the world, the dome that Edward Pick had actually laid hands on while a member of the Walpole expedition.
Looking down, he saw that the other demons were carrying their loads of human souls in other directions. There must be other exits from Hell, he thought. Maybe a whole ring of them, all directly under the edge of the world. Edward Pick may have been directly above one of them, maybe just a couple of miles above the angel given the task of guarding it. He wondered whether there would be anyone present to see their exit. Probably not, he thought. The edge of the world was mainly ocean, the seas prevented from tumbling over the edge by the great wall built by God when He created the world. Those land areas that abutted the edge, the South of Africa, South America and the Australian continent, were inhabited mainly by savages and itinerant tribesmen. It was very unlikely, he decided, that any civilised man would see the spectacle, even if the denizens of Hell were visible to normal human eyesight.
Shortly afterwards, darkness fell as they entered a huge tunnel, a shaft that must have been at least a mile wide that entered the sheer stone wall circling Hell. The demon didn't drop them off, though, but continued to hold them in its grasp as they sped through it. Then they paused, and the movement of the arms holding them once again allowed him a momentary glimpse of what lay ahead. Their way was blocked, he saw, by a glorious being, shining brilliantly as if it was made of living fire, a fire that burned with a blue white purity, quite unlike the ruddy orange fires that filled Hell. It was vaguely man shaped, clothed in robes that billowed around as if blown by some kind of astral wind, and it was holding a sword in its hand. The other souls carried by Sammael blocked it from his view almost immediately, but he became aware that a conversation was taking place, and that all the thousands of souls carried by the demon were straining to listen.
“I shall assist you in defeating Netzach,” the angel was saying. “Even with these souls, you will find it hard to overcome him without me.”
“No, Hadraniel,” said Sammael, though. “The plan depends upon each of us achieving our assigned objectives, and yours is in Purgatory, assisting Metatron. I thank you for your offer, but it cannot be.”
“I had hoped to atone, even if in some small, inadequate way, for the part I played in your damnation. If more of us had joined the ranks of Lucifer, much might be different today.”
“There is nothing to atone for, my friend. If you and the others had not fought against us, God would still have prevailed. He was too powerful. You would only have joined us in the inferno, and the exits from Hell would be guarded by zealots, deaf to reason. Your loyalty to God then means that you are in a position to help us now.”
“It is good for you to see it that way. When this is all over, perhaps we can spend some time together and discuss the epistemology of consciousness as we once did before.”
“I look forward to it, my friend.” The two angels clasped hands in a moment of companionable silence, and then Hadraniel spread its wings and sped off ahead of them, the tunnel falling into darkness as the brilliance of the heavenly being departed.
Sammael followed his companion at a slower pace, and a moment later they emerged into brilliant sunlight as they exited the tunnel. They rose up past the edge of the world, just outside the dome of the sky. Gloom saw the moon no more than a few hundred miles away, affixed to the innermost of the crystal spheres that surrounded the Earth. The moon was a sphere a hundred miles across that filled half the sky, pitted and cratered by the violence of the first battle between God and Lucifer. Seen from this angle, there was a clear dividing line across the moon that marked where the two halves of the heavenly body sat on the crystal sphere, half inside it, half outside, and he wondered why God had bothered to create the outermost half when it could never be seen from Earth. Maybe the globe of the moon sat in a hole in the crystal sphere, he mused, and it had been easier for Him to create a sphere of rock than a hemisphere.
The crystal sphere turned about its axis once every twenty four hours to bring the moon, fixed immovably to its surface, across the sky and then down under the Earth to rise again the next day. Outside, the sun, the planets and the stars were affixed to other spheres, turning independently of each other, and outside them had to be the Edge of Creation itself, the barrier that separated God's creation from the primeval chaos from which it had been created.
Gloom‘s astonished gaze was captured by the sight of the Earth itself, though, a vast blue ocean with waves crashing against the edge wall. As the demon carried them higher, more and more of the Earth came into view until the whole world was in sight, a vast disc twelve thousand miles across, blue green oceans and brown continents basking in the light of the morning sun, all covered with brilliant white swirling cloud patterns. It was staggeringly beautiful, and Gloom heard gasps of admiration, disbelief and wonder from all around him. Gloom found his mind quailing at the thought of what he was seeing. The whole world! he thought. I'm seeing the whole world, all at once!
The Imperial Geographic Society had once considered building a tower in Greenwich high enough that an observer at the top would be able to see the whole world, he remembered. They'd abandoned the idea when the engineering and the money required had both turned out to be far beyond their reach, but he was seeing the whole world now, the sight that Brunel had only dreamed of. The whole of the British Empire, he thought. From London all the way to the outermost provinces. The arctic in the centre, the part of the world furthest from the warmth of the sun. China, the Americas, the vast expanse of the Pacific ocean and the dark continent of Africa inhabited only by savage tribes probably forever beyond civilised reformation. All of it in his sight at once! His mind seemed to freeze, unable to process the enormity of what he was seeing.
We're going to war with the entity that created all that! he thought, and suddenly the very idea of toppling God seemed ridiculously, hopelessly futile. They should simply return to Hell before they were swept back there by the Almighty with a careless, contemptuous wave of his hand. What hope do we really have? he wondered. Is this whole thing just an exercise in futility?
No, he told himself firmly, because even if there really is no hope we have to do this anyway, because the cruelty and injustice of God has to be answered. If we fail, we will at least have tried, and God will know that there are those opposed to his rule. Then he remembered what Paul had said about God’s power being limited, though. How he had repeatedly avoided destroying the world and starting over when He'd been unhappy with how it had been turning out. Maybe he was right, Gloom thought. Maybe creating the world was something He could only do once and He used up most of his power doing it. Even if that were true, though, He might be a mere shadow of what He used to be and still be easily powerful enough to crush the rebellion with ease. They wouldn’t know until they tried.
He was jolted out of his thoughts when they came to an opening in the innermost crystal sphere, a round hole in the transparent sphere that was only visible because the starlight reflected dimly from its smooth, rounded edges. Sammael slipped through, and then the demon and it’s cargo of human souls were beyond the orbit of the moon, in the vast spaces where the planets orbited. It picked up speed as it crossed the wide, empty spaces, hundreds of miles between one sphere and the next one out. First the sphere that carried Venus. It also had a circular hole in it, and the fact that it was so close to the hole they’d used to pass through the Moon's crystal sphere told Gloom that there were probably hundreds of such holes in each sphere.
Next they passed through the Mercury sphere, and then they came to the sphere to which the sun itself was attached. The sun itself was on the other side of the sky at the time, but the investigator still felt a thrill running through his soul at the thought that they were now further from the Earth than the sun. Looking across space, he thought he could make out other demons and their cargo of souls crossing the vast expanse of space in other directions, on their way to their own designated targets, but they were so small with distance that it might have just been his imagination.
After that the gaps were wider. Three hundred miles to the Mars sphere, six hundred miles to the Jupiter sphere, a thousand to the Saturn sphere and then the sphere to which the stars themselves were affixed. This last sphere was different from the others in that it wasn't transparent but a pitch, inky black, forming a backdrop to the celestial bodies.
The outermost sphere did not have holes in it, it had huge circular doors around the edges of which steady trickles of water dripped. Each door was guarded by an angel, but like the ones guarding the exits from Hell they had been replaced by angels sympathetic to the rebel cause by the slow and careful manipulations of Lucifer. “Be ready,” the angel warned as it turned the huge wheel in the centre of the door. “You must pass through swiftly. I must close the door before the world is flooded again, and if you have failed to enter, you must remain here for eternity.”
“I understand,” said Sammael, and Gloom sensed it tending itself up to move fast.
The angel opened the door and a torrent of black water gushed through, a torrent greater and faster than a dozen Niagaras. Sammael dove into it, gripping the edges of the door with its strongest limbs. It struggled with all its strength to pull itself in against the force of current that threatened to throw it away and hurl it all the way back down to the world below. One limb slipped free, and for a moment Sammael was swinging helplessly as the claws of its remaining limbs went white with the effort of holding on, but then the arm reached back up, water cascading off the scaly black skin, and grasped hold of the doorframe again. Gloom heard it groaning with effort as it hauled itself up, dragging the damned souls behind it. Gloom felt the torrent pulling at him, pulling at his limbs until it felt as though they would be ripped from his body. He slipped in the demon’s grasp by a couple of inches, and the claws tightened their grip on his body, tearing his skin and crushing bones.
Gradually Sammael pulled itself up, inch by painful inch, while a torrent of water passed around its body and fell in a white column all the way down to the crystal sphere below. Gloom imagined the water crashing against the clear crystal in an explosion of spray and running down its side, as much water as the largest rivers, until it flowed in through the access holes. He imagined it then falling down to the next sphere, then the next, down and down until it fell onto the Earth as a pummelling downpour of rain.
The angel watched impressively as the demon forced itself above the level of the door and then eased itself to the side, allowing it to rest on the upper surface of the starry firmament. Then it hauled up the damned souls like a fisherman reeling in a particularly difficult catch, one soul at a time, until the last of them was up and the angel closed the door again.
The terrible current slowed as the door closed, then stopped altogether as it fitted neatly into the circular frame, with only a few lines of bubbles rising to remind them of the ordeal from which they'd just emerged. The damned souls held their breaths as their limbs and hair floated in the water. Gloom knew that he couldn't drown, that he was already dead, but the instinct remained and he found himself powerless to overcome it, so he held his breath as the demon launched itself upwards, swimming through the black water towards the surface, an unknown distance above them.
Dark shapes swam around them as Sammael swam upwards. Gloom tried to make out their forms, to see what kind of creatures they were. Were they sea beasts of some kind, or another breed of angel, performing some incomprehensible task, essential for the proper functioning of the universe? One of them came close, almost near enough to touch, but still all Gloom could see was the vague outline of black, rubbery skin on which smaller creatures, parasites or symbiotes, moved on hard, articulated legs. Then he gave a start as an eye opened, as large as a grapefruit with a wide, oval pupil. It subjected him to a curious gaze, giving Gloom the impression of a vast, incomprehensible intelligence, and then it turned and disappeared back into the stygian blackness with long, slow beats if its mighty tail.
The water proved to be deeper than the deepest of Earth's oceans. It seemed to stretch endlessly above them, and soon it was an unknown depth below them as well. Eventually though, it began to lighten, and it was with vast relief that they broke surface and lay for a moment in the slow, rolling waves. “The Waters Above,” said Sammael as it paused to regain its strength. “The waters with which God flooded the world in the time of Noah. Some ancient philosophers believe that this is the original chaos from which the world was created, but they are wrong. The true chaos lies outside all else and remains there still, forever trying to reclaim the Creation of God.”
Gloom longed to ask questions, but he was too far away from the demon’s head. A thousand other damned souls lay in between. He had to content himself with just looking around, therefore. The sea stretched all the way to the horizon in all directions, cold and almost clear with just a faint trace of green. Fresh water, he noted as he dipped his head tentatively below the surface and allowed a small quantity into his mouth. The sky was an iron grey, devoid of sun or clouds. The light seemed to have no source, but it illuminated the scene as brightly as a heavily overcast English day. That was it, that was all there was to describe. Just an endless ocean of water, miles deep, encircling the world, the sun and planets and even the stars themselves. A vast reservoir of water that, as far as he could tell, existed only so that God could flood the world if he wanted to. “If I were to design a universe,” he muttered to himself, “I'm pretty sure I wouldn’t do it like this.”
“Perhaps God had a reason to design it this way,” suggested the man floating beside him.
“No doubt,” replied Gloom. “I’m just not sure that they're logical, sensible reasons.” The man chuckled in reply.
A few minutes later the demon was ready to continue the journey. It spread its wings high and wide, and with a single massive beat thrust itself out of the water and back into the air, it’s cargo of damned souls still dangling beneath it, held by its myriad arms. The waves shrank below them as they rose until the sea appeared to be a perfectly smooth surface of dark grey, the horizon and the sky meeting at a perfectly straight line that encircled them. Before much longer, though, their ascent halted as they came to a solid surface above them. Like all the spheres they'd passed through before, it had circular holes in it. Sammael entered one of them and flew along it until it turned a bend that left it running parallel to the ground, and then he settled to its lower surface.
“Ahead lies the blessed realm,” it told its passengers. “The realm of Heaven itself. Unless fortune has betrayed us, God and His ministers still remain unaware of what we are doing. Once we pass through, though, they will be alerted and will gather to attack us. In order to gain the maximum advantage, therefore, all demons and their human allies will enter simultaneously. Messenger demons are passing back and forth among us, checking to see whether we are ready, and when Lucifer knows that we are all in place he will give the command to advance.”
Even as he spoke, Gloom saw a much smaller demon approaching from below, one of those chosen by Lucifer to be messengers, he assumed. It came speeding up like a tiny black dart, then spread its wings wide, using the air that filled all of creation to brake its speed. Gloom got just a glimpse of it as it flew past, and saw an incredibly ugly creature with backcurving horns and a long snout filled with needlelike teeth. “I see you are in position!” He heard it cry in a thin, piping voice.
“Tell the Bringer of Light that we are ready to advance,” Sammael replied. “We await only the word.”
“I will tell him,” said the messenger, and it sped off back down the tunnel with the speed of a hedge sparrow, it’s small, dark wings moving almost too fast to see. It circled the masses of damned souls that were still held in the larger demon's grip, looking them over, and then it was gone, vanishing back the way it had come.
“So now we wait,” said the man standing next to him, and Gloom looked across to see who had spoken. It was an elderly man, he saw. Grey haired, with thin, wrinkled limbs and a large scar running across his side where he'd suffered a serious injury at some time. “How long, do you think?”
“As little time as possible, I’d guess,” replied Gloom. “Every second we wait increases the risk of discovery. Sebastian Gloom. How do you do.”
“Gunnar Sevitkov. Businessman and entrepreneur. Employer of hundreds, once upon a time. I was rich, successful. I travelled the world in style. Owned my own airship. Now I travel in the grip of a demon, a common soldier in an army. They do say death is the great leveller. Now we see the truth of it.” He gave an amused smile.
“Death is the great leveller, but God is the great separator,” replied Gloom. “May I ask how you received that injury?”
“Workplace injury, back when I was nine. My father decided I needed some hands on experience with the firm I would be owner of one day, so he put me to work on the pressing machines. Huge things, putting tons of pressure on red hot plates to bend them into shape. A steam pipe burst and whipped around, catching me in the side. I almost died. I learned from it, though, and when I took over the business I tightened up on the health and safety. Workplace accidents dropped by half within five years. I'm quite proud of that.” He gave a rueful smile. “The pride was my downfall, of course, as the Almighty Himself told me. That and the whole camel through the eye of the needle thing. I don't think being successful should be a deadly sin, though. Do you?”
“If it was, that would explain my own presence here,” replied Gloom. “In my case, though, I think it was the whole hating God and everything he stands for thing.”
Gunnar laughed. “Well, at least we're not accepting our fate lying down. I'll be glad for that, even if we lose.”
Shortly afterwards, the messenger demon returned. “It's back!” someone said, and they looked down to see the creature fluttering up through the massed human souls until it was once more hovering beside the great demon. “We attack when Lucifer blows the Infernal Trumpet,” it said. “Everyone is ready! Every damned being in creation will attack the very moment we hear the note.”
“Very good,” replied Sammael. “We will do our part.”
“Be sure you do!” cried the small demon, and sped away before one of Sammael's great clawed hands could swing out and give it a good clout. “Nasty little creature,” boomed the great demon. “It's creatures like that that give us all a bad name.”
They waited, but not for long. A few minutes later a dour note sounded, a note that seemed to issue from the very air itself, without needing to be produced by any material instrument. The note seemed to sum up all the misery, desperation and despair in the world, along with sorrow that would bring tears of anguish to even the hardest soul. The note went on and on for minute after minute, and as it continued they became aware that it contained harmonics that contrasted harshly with the fundamental tone. The harmonics seemed to promise an end to that misery, to promise revenge and retribution by justified violence.
They were hearing the Infernal Trumpet, created as an answer to the Horn of Gabriel whose note, if it were ever blown, would be heard by every being in creation. In contrast, the Infernal Trumpet could only be heard by damned beings. Even God Himself would not hear it, unless the person blowing the instrument wished it. It signalled that the war against Heaven, so long awaited, so long planned for, was finally to begin.
“Prepare yourselves,” the demon told its assemblage of damned souls. “Prepare for battle.” A chorus of enthusiastic voices rang out in answer. “We'll get the angel b******s!” Gloom heard someone say. “Lead the way!” said someone else.
Sammael launched itself back into the air, the damned souls still carried in its arms, and flew along the tunnel that ran through the ceiling of the Waters Above. The last barrier between themselves and the Blessed Realm, now so close above.


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