The cages were made of a strange, transparent material. They were arranged neatly around the room like kitchen utensils.
Inside the cages lay angels--or what remained of them.
The room was filled with cages occupied by angels. Torn wings, bodies convoluted in impossible ways, bloodied scars that ran from a few centimetres to the length of an entire body. Incisions, excisions, mutilations. The angels stared at me through bars, from faces beaten and empty, and their eyes were uncomprehending.
They screamed.
It was as if my presence alone was responsible for such fear in them, such agony that they could not unleash it in any other way. Their screams were terrible skull-piercing protestations of anger, fear and hate; they were both inhuman and awesome, grotesque and horrifying. The sound of their agony made me ill.
I nearly retched, their sound a violent, soul-tearing, penetrating knife, scoring blindly. There was no escaping that sound. I would have retched and stained that spotlessly clean floor if I hadn’t spotted a pair of ear mufflers and reached for them, desperate, and put them on. They had been hanging on a hook above the door.
As soon as I put them on the sound ebbed. The angels continued to scream, but the tonal pain was being filtered out. I took a deep breath. It was a clean, well-lit place full of mutilated angels.
It was difficult to tear myself away from the sight; the once-majestic creatures, so arrogant in their dominance of our world, now crouched like beaten animals behind icy glass cages. And yet, as I examined them, I began to understand that there was something different about them, something different from the angels I had encountered before.
Perhaps it was simply the fact they were not, like Behemoth or Metatron had been, gigantic and obese. They were human-sized or smaller, but then so had Raphael been, so had the dark angel in Lubyanka.
Their feathers looked dishevelled and worn, and the wingtips less sharp somehow, less of a deadly weapon. Their faces looked less human than I thought they should, the inherent alien nature of them more pronounced. I had a strange feeling these angels were unknown, that their names did not appear in any of the lists, but the idea was preposterous; the Coming began and ended after the Second World War, and no new angels had manifested since then, anywhere.
Or so I’d thought.
Cages, benches, and as I went through a door in the wall, an operating theatre. The table was crusted with blood and less easily identifiable body liquids, some congealed into a sort of grey scum. There were various instruments on display, screens currently turned off, an array of surgical implements, a sink with more blood stains on it, and the massive table in the middle like a slab of ice that looked as if whatever patients were brought to lie on it did not get the chance to rise from it again.
It made me feel sick, and I remembered where I had seen things like this before: the German death camps in Poland where the Nazis had experimented on countless victims in the name of science. That’s what they looked like: the German laboratories.
There was a second door at the other end of the room and I opened it, glad to discover it led into another corridor, not another butcher’s shop. I needed to locate Eldershott, and I needed to know what was being done in this place, or rather, to what purpose it was being done.
Fact: the entire facility was likely German. It looked as if the Russians had bitten off more than they could chew when they brought back Nazi scientists to work for them. That the Americans, the Brits and even the Egyptians had done the same was not a welcome thought.
Fact: they were conducting experiments on angels. On angels. While angels could be killed--for example, human blood caused them damage, at least if delivered in the right way--and there were stories of internal killings, when angels fighting for the same territory might dispose of each other. No-one knew how angels died, or why they died at all. They never discussed much--not where they came from, not God, nor what their ultimate goal was, or even if they had one.
Fact: someone was killing angels around the world. Archangels.
Fact: they had probably set me up to assassinate Raphael.
Hypothesis: the Germans were behind the killings.
Somehow I wasn’t convinced. The Germans, or their ODESSA agents, had tried to get rid of me three times already, and failed. Whoever the killer really was, I thought they were actually trying to help me.
It wasn’t a comforting thought.
And then, how did Sophie fit into it? And how did Eldershott?
Fact: there was nothing in the briefing about missing angels, and I had to assume there weren’t any.
Fact: I left behind me a room full of caged, broken angels. Unknown angels.
Question: where had they come from?
I remembered my dream again, the white, sterile land and, high above, angels flying on the winds.
Was that their real home? Had I somehow stumbled, in my dreams, on…on heaven?
Or had I been taken there for a reason?
And another question, working its way slowly into my mind like a thin drizzle of black water: Had the Nazis somehow found a way into it?
That would explain the captured angels.
But then, why hadn’t the Archangels done anything about it?
There were too many questions, and the time to ask them was running out. I needed some answers. I needed to reach the core of this operation and break it apart. I took off the mufflers and left them behind me, and walked away to the sound of the diminishing screams, choosing paths almost at random, with a strange belief they would lead me to my destination.
I traversed the corridors of pale silent ice, meeting no-one. I was entering that same dream state as I had on the way here, and I tried to fight it, to wrest control of my mind from this alien intrusion. It was all about control, and always has been--but the influence over me was growing, leading me across a blank icy map as if it intimately knew the layout of this underground complex. It was a chessboard, and I was a pawn, and a hidden player was pushing me to the edge of that board towards checkmate.
It was about control, because that’s what I have to have when the mission is in its final phase. I had to be in control of my actions, the organism shutting down all unimportant routines and concentrating on one thing: survival. I was losing that control and I knew I would have to break it if I wanted to survive.
The feeling had a more sinister quality to it than the one I’d had on the skis. I tried to turn back, to choose a different path, but my body disobeyed me as if the instructions from my brain were not reaching their destination, and I tried to fight that and the apathy that was stealing over me.
It wouldn’t go away and then I punched the wall of ice on my left, hard, and again, and again, until blood came out and the pain exploded in bright shards of ice, cold, dead, distant stars shimmering before my eyes.
When I stopped, my hand was caked in blood and slivers of ice, and there was a small crater in the wall where it had cracked.
I tried to move in the opposite direction to the pull and succeeded, my movements my own again, and then I ran, ran in the opposite direction, and as I did I heard the great gushing sound of water behind me and knew they had flooded the corridor and that, unless I reached higher ground, and fast, I would very soon become a sculpture of cold, dead ice.