The big guy with the long earlobes came back with a fresh pillow, a man in a white lab coat right behind him.
“Another doctor,” I said. “Great. How sick am I?”
Abigail Smith pulled out the pukey pillow and Operative Nine slid the new one under my head.
The doctor took my pulse and prodded my torso and stared into my cavities with a penlight. He measured my blood pressure and drew some blood. Except when he shone the light into them, he avoided looking into my eyes. He nodded to Operative Nine and left the room without a word. Abigail Smith came back to hover over me. I looked over her shoulder at the droopy-eared Operative Nine. “What’s his story?”
“Op Nine is a demonologist, conversant in history, characteristics, classification, and possession. Best in the field.”
“So that’s why I’m here—I’m possessed?”
“Not precisely,” he answered. “You have been—pried open. You cast your eyes into the very windows of hell, Alfred. Not the fabled or poetic visions of hell, of fire and brimstone and souls writhing in eternal agony, but the true vision of hell: the absolute and irreparable separation from heaven. What that experience is like I cannot say and hope you cannot remember.”
Abigail Smith said to him, “Alfred told me it’s still with him.”
“Perhaps it is,” Operative Nine said. “The Hiroshima bomb seared the very shadows of its victims into the pavement.”
“This is not good,” I said.
“On the contrary,” he said. “This is extraordinarily good.
You survived with your body and mind intact. That is more than can be said for the majority of our party.”
“Well,” I said. “Everybody’s definition of the word may be a little different, but seeing that my memory’s shot, I’m covered head to toe in bandages, tied down to a hospital bed, and talking very calmly about demons like they were the most natural thing in the world, like butterflies or Honda Preludes. I’m not sure I would call that intact.”
“Your memory will return in time, I think, and your body will heal. The other person who met the Fallen’s eyes is dead. He awoke in the desert and tore his own heart from his chest.”
“So what’s that mean? I’m gonna be tied to this bed for the rest of my life?”
Neither of them said anything, which I took as a maybe bordering on a definite yes.
“While they are free, no one who has gazed upon them can be fully free themselves,” Operative Nine said, choosing his words carefully.
“What’s that mean, ‘while they are free’?”
“They have taken the Great Seal of Solomon—and vanished.” “That would be a good thing, wouldn’t it?”
“The Seal is the only thing that controls them, Alfred. Now Pai—now the demon itself commands. We must retrieve the Seal or watch all life submit to the will of the damned.”
“I don’t understand.”
“In the beginning, there was a war, Alfred.” He had a glassy, faraway look in his sad eyes. “Before there were men or green fields or the untamed sea. Before there was anything at all, before Time itself existed, there was a terrible war. A war that these beings you saw today lost. The Archangel Michael, with the Sword mortal men would name Excalibur, cast them down for their transgression against the throne of heaven. When the proper time arrived, they were sealed inside the Holy Vessel, to be ruled by the ring given to Solomon.
“After Solomon’s passing, they slept for three thousand years, if such beings as these can said to sleep, safely imprisoned within the Holy Vessel. Before he bound them for the final time, however, Solomon commanded them using the gift of the Great Seal. Seventy-two lords, each with legions of minions under his rule, all conveying great wisdom and power to the one who wielded the Seal.
“Now they are free, for the first time answerable to no one but themselves. So you see the first war is not yet over; indeed, it may also be the last.”