Apex Book Company

Short Fiction: The Pain, Heartbreak and Redemption of Owen Frost

The old man stood silhouetted in the doorway, a guttering torch in his left hand. He could easily have been some brimstone and treacle prophet stepped miraculously from the pages of the Old Testament to strike the fear of God into him. His unruly white beard and rough-spun clothes blessed him with an air of ragged wildness. Shadows crawled across his face, making it impossible to read his mood.

In the centre of the cell Owen Frost hunched protectively over the page of Buch der Heiligen Dreifaltigkeit he had been inking for almost a month. He had no idea why the task had befallen him but he had laboured painstakingly over the twin faces of Lucifer Anti-Christ and his mother trying to capture the almost cherubic innocence of the woman and the capricious vanity of the fallen angel in the single perfect illustration his unseen masters demanded. Their demands were peculiar: they wanted him to think only of things within him that made him angry or guilty or bitter whilst he set the ink on the paper. It was nigh on impossible but the young man was proud of what he had achieved with his limited skills. It was a passing fair rendition of the devil - the one Owen had grown up with, the Christian image - though the mother was another matter. She could have been any woman. Indeed, she bore an uncanny resemblance to his own mother with just the vaguest hint of Mary, Mother of Christ to offset the Oedipal nature of his creation. He didn’t want to think about the psychological inferences the similarities suggested. In his picture he had given Lucifer and his mother one body and likewise the intimation of one soul shared between them, creating an androgynous being as befitted the hermetic ideal.

A bead of ink dropped from the pen’s nib, bleeding into the edge of the paper’s weave. Owen blotted it.

His hand was trembling.

He wondered, not for the first time, where they had taken Sascha. Were they keeping her locked up somewhere in this hell hole or had they found some other use for her? She was the gentlest of souls. The kindest. Most loving. He couldn’t bear to think about what they might have done to her. Instead he told himself he had given up hoping but it was a lie. He hadn’t given up at all. Every time he heard footsteps in the passage beyond the cell door his heart beat quickened as hope flared and died in his chest. He thought of her face but saw only the fear as the cloaked masters of this strange place had fallen upon them on the roadside, dragging them apart as they kicked and screamed. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. They had come to Italy full of love and hope, to play young lovers in the most romantic of settings.

A small window the size of his fist gave him the smallest glimpse of the world outside. If he didn’t know it would have been impossible to guess where he was being held captive. The window showed a sheer drop down into a vine choked valley, five hundred feet or more below.

“Well?” the old man asked, not unkindly. Owen did not want to look at the shadows crawling across the old man’s face. It was enough to know what caused them. Sickness welled up within him.

“It is nearly finished, Fra Gregori. Perhaps tomorrow.” It was the same answer he had given for a week now. He knew that they were losing patience with him. Whoever they were.

“No, Master Frost. It must be ready today.”

“Impossible,” Owen felt like some grossly deformed goblin sat huddled in the darkness hoarding his treasure but he knew, instinctively, that his unfinished art was all that kept him alive in this subterranean hell. “It’s nowhere near finished. There is so much to do. So much. The faces are unfinished, and the crowns. The clothes are coarse and ugly. And… and… and…”

“Those are just details, child. Had the picture been fed? Have you confessed your sins into your own devil as Fra Sucquet instructed?”

“I have… I have tried.” Owen pleaded. “But it is nothing more than a picture. There is no life in the devil. I thought perhaps, perhaps if I finished the picture first then maybe…”

The old man walked carefully down the narrow stairs. His shuffling footsteps echoed in the emptiness of the dark. The torch threw a fitful light across the floor where insects scuttled to avoid being crushed by his feet.

“Do I frighten you, child?”

“Yes, Fra Gregori.”

“And with good reason, yes? You’re all alone down here, Master Frost. No one but the rats knows you’re here, and believe me, they don’t care.” The old man pulled a sack from within the folds of his robes. Bloody red features had been inked into the sacks’ flat face. “I want you to put this on. It will make things easier if you can’t see.” He held out the sack for Owen to take.

Owen shook his head as though doing so might somehow save him from being bound up and hooded by the sack.

“Please, Fra Gregori… I don’t want to die…”

“Don’t try me, Master Frost. It will go better for you if you do as I tell you.” Close too, the torchlight revealed trails of sticky, translucent fluid that tracked like tears down the old man’s pock marked cheeks; the loving kisses left behind by his Sin Leeches. Owen had only seen the leeches feed once before but that was more than enough. The fat bodied things had crawled over Marco, the unfortunate sculptor he had shared this dark prison during the first few days of his captivity, draining him until there was little more than a human husk left decomposing on the cold stone floor. Fra Gregori smiled and in that second the world around Owen might easily have disintegrated, the threads that bound its bones together unravelling as the future caved in beneath the landslide of hate that filled the old man’s eyes. He was never going to get out of here; never going to see the dawn’s first orange blush kiss Sascha’s still sleepy cheek. He was going to die, alone, in the dark. The jaundiced torchlight played sickly over the swarm of fat bellied leeches that fed on the man’s face; hungry little fingers of white bloating as they sucked the blood from Gregori’s veins.

Gregori knelt down beside Owen’s chair, and planted an almost tender kiss on the young man’s forehead; only it wasn’t a kiss in the true sense of the word. It was no loving touch of the lips. First, one of the leeches and then another crawled from Gregori’s pock-marked face onto the artist’s, trailing their acidic ooze. The secretion burned as it came in contact with his skin.

Owen whimpered, biting down hard on his lips so that there wasn’t even the merest sliver of a gap between them for the leeches to crawl through. He refused to scream.

“Scream if you want to, Master Frost. Go on. Let it out,” Fra Gregori continued as though reading his panicked mind. “You see, this is the lesson for today. Learn it; hold it dear. The only good man is a dead man. Virtue, love, honour? There are no such beasts. They are fairy tales one and all. No, where there is flesh and blood there are lies and deceits. That way lies pain. Now, Master Frost, what you can feel is the black stuff of your soul being drawn out by the leeches. That pain that so burns your skin is your own sickness rising out through your skin. It hurts does it not? My pets feed on it much as their cousins feed on blood for nourishment. They draw your sins into them; nurture them, breath life into them. They make them real things. No more hiding the black stuff of your soul.” Strings of spittle clung to the old man’s lips. He licked at them then looked down hungrily. Parts of Owen’s face were gone, eaten away by the leeches’ acidic secretions. Gums and cheeks eaten through with ragged tears, flaps of skin peeled back on his jawbone.

Owen would have screamed now but one of the fat bodied creatures had crawled inside his mouth and dissolved three quarters of his tongue into a pussy swollen pulp, the translucent ooze still eating deep into the flesh of his throat even as his ruined tongue licked at the air, searching for an end to the agony.

“Of course, had you finished your picture as Fra Sucquet instructed you, your pain would be less, likewise your disfigurement. Your sins may or may not kill you, that is for God to decide. I will take your devil now, Master Frost. May God’s love be with you.”

* * *

“You have the devil, Frater?” Fra Antonellus asked as the old man joined them.

Gregori nodded. The old man was bone-tired. Feeding always left him feeling that way. He sagged into the room’s only vacant chair. Sweat peppered his brow. The cloistered air was dead, choked full of dust and decay. Sated, the leeches clung to his weathered skin. Gregori could feel the painter’s sickness and hate swelling them. The others in the room regarded him with something approaching concern. He knew well what the looks meant. They were hungry to feed the Golem. Looking at them Gregori was struck by the similarities the men bore to his beloved sin leeches. Twelve bloated fat-bellied bloodsuckers glistening with beads of perspiration and reeking of stale sweat, dressed up in the raiments of a religion they no longer believed in but which they could not - would not - abandon.

Which of us are the greater parasites? Gregori found himself wondering. It was not a question he felt comfortable answering.

“Will the boy live?” Fra Sardonicus asked.

“Does it matter?” Fra Servillious asked before Gregori could answer. In truth it didn’t matter. Owen Frost was a victim. That was his raison deter. If he lived another day was neither here nor there. He had served his purpose. The darkest aspects of his being had been siphoned off and would be fed to the Golem. In that way the young painter became part of a cycle of life that was so much more vital than the sum of its parts.

“What about the girl?” Fra Julius asked.

“She is different.” Gregori said.

“In what way?”

“She hides her devils well. At first she refused to give them to us. She retreated into a part of herself we could not reach. She huddled up in the darkest corner of her cell. The light went out in her eyes. She refused the food brought to her. Soiled herself and sat in the filth of her own body rocking backward and forward in a madness of broken spirit. Would that it had remained that way. The… The thing that emerged is not the same girl. I doubt she is even a girl anymore. She is a thing of madness. A broken one. She mocks us now with the things that she creates, filling them with both a beauty and wonder that has no place in the grotesqueries she fashions. And every thing that comes from her is a perversion that has no right to life.”

“Is she dangerous?”

“To us? No. To herself? Most definitely. To Alsiso? I do not know.” Gregori admitted. There was no way of knowing what the repercussions of feeding her sickness to the Golem might be. It was one thing to mouth mindless platitudes like: ‘that which does not kill us makes us stronger’ and quite another to believe them. Did they dare feed her to Alsiso or would she be a cancer that ate away at the Golem’s soul? “Come,” Gregori said, not willing to think about the implications of feeding a broken one to their creation. “It is time to feed the painter to Alsiso, before his sins turn sour.”

* * *

For all its sins, the Golem Alsiso was a thing of great beauty.

And well it needed to be. Its flesh, slaved over by a truly talented sculptor, provided a veneer of perfection that masked the levels of sinfulness, perversion and sickness that lay within.

How else dare it ascend to God’s Home to challenge the angels?

With one’s devils bared?

No.

In all of the renditions of Heaven through the ages The Maker was surrounded by things of beauty. It was His vanity. There was no room for ugliness in His Heaven.

And so Alsiso was beautiful beyond words.

The thirteen holy men circled the Golem, each of them marvelling once more that such an exquisite creature could be fashioned by the hand of man. It was a work of genius. The Golem was the masterpiece crowning a life of fantastic creation by one of the last true Renaissance artisans. Something of such magnificence made one hungry to believe in the divine spark. It was ironic then that it existed to hasten the downfall of angelkind from their high seats at The Maker’s side.

And it was giant.

Fra Gregori walked to the edge of the wooden platform. The old monk approached the Golem with something like reverie. He touched its cheeks with his trembling hands, and leaned in to rest his own cheek against the stone as though listening for the faintest stirring of life within. Alsiso’s face was more than twice the old man’s height, weathered with the touch of lichen from the damp air, and vines grew across its heavily lidded right eye and around the Golem’s forehead like a crown of thorns. The Golem’s body disappeared down into the darkness beneath the platform where it stood on the floor more than seventy feet below.

“So smooth,” he said so that only Alsiso might hear. “How long have I known you, friend? Too long is the answer, I suppose. Too long for me at least. Where my flesh finally grows old and fails yours still retains that sweet perfection gifted it by your maker. Would that my Maker’s gifts were so long lasting.” He kissed the Golem’s cold cheek and tore a shred from Owen Frost’s devil, slipping the paper between Alsiso’s slightly parted lips.

A shiver rippled through the Golem’s stone flesh; a spark of light dancing across its blind eyes.

Gregori tore another strip from the painting Owen Frost had laboured so painstakingly over, feeding more delicious sin to the construct. Alsiso’s nostrils flared causing the cheeks to twitch and the muscles beneath the grey stone to bunch before sinking once more as the Golem’s massive nostrils relaxed.

“Will you finally wake?” Gregori asked, placing a third strip of Frost’s sin on Alsiso’s clay tongue. The Golem moaned in response. A murmur of excitement rippled around the room as the watchers dared to hope that their long wait to wake the unliving might finally be coming to an end.

Gregori had to force himself to slowly place the final piece of Frost’s painting inside the Golem’s mouth. The paper bore the likeness of a woman, Lucifer’s mother, and a ragged edge where she had been separated from the devil himself. This was the fragment of the whole that Frost had poured most of himself into - that was why she bore his mother’s face, filled as she was with all of the blackness that consumes a normal man’s heart. This was truly Owen Frost’s devil, and as such this was the piece of parchment that would wake Alsiso, if Frost’s sins had the power to wake the centuries old construct.

Fervent prayers whispered around the chamber.

A smile touched the Golem’s lips as it absorbed the last of Owen Frost’s sins, and its stone skin seemed to take on an almost golden radiance as it turned those sins into whatever strange fuel it needed to truly live, but it wasn’t enough. Even with the last threads of power still chasing through its manmade face Alsiso’s head lowered and the life flickered out of it.

At a loss, Fra Gregori stepped back, the bitter tears of frustration glistening in his eyes.

“So close,” one of the others barely breathed and the spell that had held them all quiet was broken.

* * *

Miraculously Owen Frost was not dead.

Fra Gregori found him long hours later, in the darkest part of the night, clinging to life. Looking at the ruination that had just a few hours earlier been a vibrant, talented young man, the old monk might easily have been forgiven for thinking that it would have been better if he had died.

“He might still,” Gregori muttered, kneeling over him. “If he’s lucky.”

“No.” It was barely a sound and lacked definition because the speaker had no lips with which to better shape the word.

“Determined to be one of us are you, Master Frost?” There was no answering murmur this time. Gregori shuffled back to the door and summoned Sucquet and Julius who waited in the passageway. The two men had expected to bear a corpse up to the small cemetery plot and so hadn’t brought a stretcher with them.

“He is alive,” Gregori said, seeing the look on Julius’ face.

“Then God pity the poor wretch,” Sucquet said studying the remains of Owen Frost’s face.

“How?”

“The same way you survived the leeches, Fra Julius. He emptied enough of his sin into his creation.”

“Barely.”

“Indeed, but be that as it may, young Master Frost is alive and it is our duty to tend to him as best we can. He is one of us now. A part of Alsiso.”

Sucquet grunted. “And still we cannot wake the behemoth. How much more will it take to fill the monster, Gregori? Did the sculptor tell you that? Or are we on a fools’ quest? Is there no end to the sickness Alsiso can absorb?”

“There is an end,” Gregori said with conviction. “And it is close now. Can’t you feel it, brother? Had this one given more of himself Alsiso might even now be doing what he was made for.”

Sucquet laughed bitterly. “Who’s the bigger fool, brother? You for thinking that we might finally bring life to a stone giant? Or me for believing you?”

Between them, Sucquet and Julius bore their burden with great care up the narrow passage that led away from the cells and the even narrower stairway that coiled up from the very depths of the earth to the dizzy heights of the monastery’s highest tower where they lay Owen Frost on a bed with a mattress of feather and down and drew heavy blankets up to his chin.

Gregori sat by his bedside for the days and weeks it took for the young man to regain his strength, at first in silence, contemplating what it would mean to finally wake the Golem, and then in the later days deep in conversation with his new brother, explaining what was in his power to explain.

“The angels,” he said, as dawn’s first rays crept through the room’s small window, “have sanitised the world, brother. They have brought beauty and wonder and kindness and joy, and with the fall of the Angel of Light everything is clean and good. We no longer need to pray, or even believe. Do you understand? The angels have removed our need for God. And He is dying for it. An unbelieved God is no god at all. It is a memory. Less, even. That is why Michelangelo created Alsiso: to save Elohim, The Lord Our Father from his own creations. It was by far and away his greatest work of genius. To feed Alsiso, to release your sins to become a part of the Golem means life, Fra Frost, as long as Alsiso exists so will you. Though you may long for death given the monstrosity you have become, it is true, believe me. At one time his maker was my dearest friend.”

Propped up in the bed, Owen looked at the old man. “You realise that this is all completely insane, don’t you? That would make you four hundred years old…” It was painful to talk and his words still slurred into one and other. “And if he had that power how do you explain the fact that Michelangelo is dead? He could have fed the Golem and lived forever…”

“He is dead because he chose to be. Not everyone craves eternal life. If Fra Sucquet had explained to you that to survive the leeches meant immortality of a sort, would you have tried to pour even more of your sins into your painting or would you have deliberately sabotaged it? The sculptor knew well what he had created with Alsiso, which is why he poured his own sins into a painting that could never be consumed, on the ceiling of a chapel within the shrine of the papal city. The darkness of his soul found its own immortality in that one painting on the ceiling of the Sistine chapel where it can be seen by all of the millions who make the pilgrimage to the Vatican. It is a great irony, wouldn’t you agree? That within the very heart of the Catholicism lays the greatest testimony to man’s sin ever fashioned. You cannot say that my friend lacked a sense of humour. With Alsiso he created something that could challenge the angels. Remove them one by one from the Maker’s side so that war and strife, injustice, ugliness, malice, hatred, sloth, greed, and corruption will once more have a place in the world. ”

“And for each injustice, each murder, each solider dying on a foreign field, for all the pettiness and ugliness and hatred in the world, you will be giving people a reason to pray?”

“And to believe, making Him stronger. An unbelieved God is no god at all, but a god that is believed in, worshipped, prayed to, is the God amongst a pantheon of lesser gods.”

“That is so fucked up.”

* * *

And of course as he healed they trusted him, bringing him into the fold, because, after all, he was one of them.

Fra Frost.

Trust meant privileges. It also meant duties. One of these, he discovered was to tend to the needs of the crazy woman. He was left in no doubt as to her craziness after his first visit to her prison. Instead of a single piece of art she had surrounded herself with a gallery of perversion unlike anything he had ever seen - and the thought that all of it, the images and the junk sculptures, had come from inside Sascha like the faeces and urine that smeared the walls, sickened him to the point where he could barely stand the thought of going back into the cell the next day and seeing her like that again.

Most startling of all, perhaps, was the fact that his wife had enough sin within her to give life to an army of Michelangelo’s Golems.

He knew that he couldn’t allow them feed Sascha to Alsiso.

And because they trusted him he would find a way to betray that trust, even if….

* * *

It meant killing Sascha.

He lay awake that night, plagued by the certainty that the only thing he could do was kill his own wife.

No one was coming to rescue them. The outside world might well have forgotten all about their existence: two honeymooners lost in the Italian mountains. How long would they be news worthy? Days, a week at best. No, help wasn’t going to arrive in the form of the cavalry or the polizi.

He tried to comfort himself by pretending that it wasn’t really Sascha in that cell, that the monks had broken her and that death would be a blessing over the madness of life. It was a crock of shit and he knew it.

* * *

How long would they wait before they fed her to Alsiso?

Doubt haunted him.

There was no way of knowing but the prospect of the feeding loomed over him like some gaunt spectre. Its presence was enough to provoke a rashness that Owen Frost had never thought himself capable of.

It was a murder of opportunity.

He chose poison because it was the most readily available means to the end and the least immediately apparent. A knife or other such brutality would have made his betrayal painfully obvious, though it did occur to him that with Sascha being so dangerously unhinged death by her own hand could never be considered out of the question. This way it would be clean. She would suffer a brief but violent illness from which she would never recover, thanks in main to a steady diet of detergent courtesy of her ever-loving husband, who would of course tend to her night and day. The others would be grateful for what they would see as his selflessness. They were all equally if not more disturbed than he was by the macabre gallery she had surrounded herself with. It was after all the kind of sickness they craved for Alsiso but had long since purged themselves of.

That night he prepared a thick mushroom soup, the creaminess of which he hoped would mask the taste of the one-third detergent he had blended it with, and spoon fed it to Sascha. As she slobbered and slurped at the soup he wondered if she knew he was killing her. It could not have been good. The ammonia in the detergent was still sharp enough to sting his eyes as he spooned mouthful after mouthful of the poisoned soup into her and still she came back hungrily for more.

“Thank you,” she whispered, leaning in to his ear. When she drew away all trace of madness had gone from her eyes. It was replaced instead by tears as she looked upon the ruination the sin leeches had left where once he had a face. “I want you to have this,” she said, offering him one of the pictures from the wall. It was of a ladder that seemed to span all the way to heaven and it was being climbed by men who were being spawned by an array of demons and devils on the earth below. Each of the men was twisted or malformed in some way and each of the devils seemed to be feeding on the aberrations in an endless cycle of depravation that mocked life and creation. “Keep it secret, promise, Owen.” And he knew then that she understood.

“I will.”

* * *

Alone in his room at the top of the tower Owen studied Sascha’s picture. He could only think of one safe place for it and that was inside of him. It felt right. Instead of letting the monks feed her to Alsiso he would steal her creations one at a time and take them into himself. That way she would be with him always, no matter what they did to her flesh. She would be part of him. He tore it into thin strips and placed the first on his tongue. It tasted of paper. He wasn’t sure what he had expected but the sheer mundanity of tearing and swallowing paper wasn’t it. It wasn’t until the acids of his stomach set to work dissolving the paper that he began to understand.

She was the kindest, most gentle of souls and she had poured that goodness into her creations, masking them as things of ugliness and perversion. He remembered Fra Gregori’s words: In all of the renditions of Heaven through the ages The Maker is surrounded by things of beauty. There is no room for ugliness in His Heaven.

But of course there was room for ugliness because in all things, both beautiful and abhorrent there is beauty if you know where to look. Where the surface showed grotesque sexual images, blasphemous icons and the feverish workings of a tortured soul the truth was altogether different. Sascha had not poured her sins into her creations. She had given up all that made her beautiful; the kindness of her spirit, the openness of her heart, the forgiveness, the gentleness, her willingness to laugh and cry, to feel pain for and with others, to dream, to hope, the quickness of her wit, the unflinching bonds that were her friendship, the generosity that was her love, all that made her who she was. That was why the shell living in its own filth was not her. There would be nothing left when the leeches took her. She was in all the art that she had created.

He felt the heat flare within his stomach as his body absorbed a fragment of the essence of the woman he loved.

Owen Frost savoured each and every strip of paper as they slowly digested in the pit of his stomach.

* * *

Sascha Frost died four days later. She never recovered from the strange sickness that took hold of her after her husband’s visit with the thick mushroom soup. The monks neither mourned nor celebrated her passing. Owen wondered if perhaps they viewed it as no more than a transition, the human imago metamorphosing into a beautiful, unearthly butterfly. They buried her in the small cemetery with a view of the vineyards and the Florentine hills. Fra Marquand said a final farewell prayer over her grave. Owen didn’t allow himself to mourn. He wanted the strange monks to continue believing that he had somehow become one of them after the disfigurement of the leeches. Fra Souquet had gathered her creations and was preparing a pyre when Owen wandered up to stand beside him. The juice of an orange stuck to his fingers as he peeled another segment of the juicy fruit and placed it in his mouth. It was difficult to enjoy the flavour but Owen forced himself to. Without the simple pleasures like a juicy orange there was little left for him. He refused to let them rob him of everything.

“Shouldn’t we feed them to Alsiso?”

Souquet looked up, startled. “Don’t sneak up on me, boy. It isn’t polite.”

“I wasn’t sneaking, Fra Souquet.” Frost said, licking the juice from his sticky fingers. “I saw you struggling with the wood and thought to help you. Then I noticed what it was you meant to burn.”

“Aren’t we lucky that Gregori’s leeches didn’t damage your eyes, Fra Frost.”

Ignoring the jibe, Owen lifted one of Sascha’s creations from the pyre and turned it in his hands as though studying every conceivable angle. “It really is quite magnificent,” he said. And it was. The carving was so elaborate, the grain of the wood picking out the face of a querulous sprite with elongated features and beady eyes. By accident or design a twig acted as a grasping hand. She had called a pixie from the wood pulp, binding it to the grain of the wood. Pixies, in most cultures were notoriously mischievous, and in some down right evil. It was a good choice. “I mean, look at this thing… it gives me the creeps. It’s… evil.” And with that one word he knew he had planted the seed.

Souquet seemed to look at the treasures he was piling on the pyre in a different light. Instead of seeing ugliness and the corruption of a mind gone mad, he saw the feverish creations of hate and bitterness, the essence of evil made tangible.

“Good boy,” he said softly, looking at what appeared to be the copulating bodies of a two palsied lovers sharing a last desperate embrace before plague or sickness robbed them of each other. Only the embrace went beyond desperation, the man’s arms reached around his lover and into her where they pulled and clawed desperately at the parted flesh spilling her entrails down her back. It was a disturbingly parasitic image too close by far to what passed for love in the eyes of some people. “This is not madness…” Souquet reasoned. “This is a perversion of God’s love; one lover devouring the other. This is everything that is wrong with the world today. This is the kind of insidious evil that creeps and crawls into each and every one of us.”

“Will it be enough to wake Alsiso?”

“Who knows, boy. Who knows.”

“Should I gather the others, Fra Souquet?”

The older man appeared to be lost in contemplation of the carved lovers.

“Fra?”

“No, no. We shall take these trinkets to the Golem and feed him ourselves. No need to wake the others.”

* * *

“Do you believe in it all? God and stuff I mean?”

Fra Souquet smiled the indulgent smile of one who holds a secret close and yet burns to share it with any who desire that knowledge. “That is a question, boy, that perhaps someone other than I should answer for you. That said, my tongue is loose. The need to talk comes with great age, I think. In my youth I could bite my tongue but now I prattle like a fishwife. Do I believe? In the Risen Jesus? No. There is not a religion on the planet in which a virgin does not bring some immaculate spawn of God into the world. There is nothing original in the concept. It arises from our fundamental need to believe that we are made in His image. As a species we aspire to being like our maker. The Egyptians gave us Osiris, son of Heaven and Earth, the Phoenicians had their own version with Adonis, the Aztecs Vitzli-Putzli, Phrygians’ had Attis and the Persians’ Mithras. Of course logically none of these son’s of God ever existed in the sense that we need to believe that they did and that logic destroys our belief in God himself because we can disprove all of the proofs one might conjure to defend the Divine Existence. It becomes all part of a great story. In the missing Gospel of Jesus we are told ‘We are all sons of God, made in his image. I stand before you as a son of God.’ This is a carpenter’s son saying I am one of you, talking to you as one of you, not I am the son of God, heed my words. So to answer your question Fra Frost, I believe in God not in the trappings of His religion. Do you understand the difference?”

“Not really,” Owen admitted, struggling with the old man’s logic. Could you really believe in one and not the other?

“Consider the Gospel of Thomas, then: If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you. The Holy Spirit is what is within, the essence of God. If we do not bring it forth it will destroy us all. That is unequivocal wisdom; the great Truth. Nos in novitate vita ambulemus, in the tongue of the old Bible: we must walk in the newness of life. We must give ourselves to the exploration of the unknown. We are all, each and every one of us, adventurers, boy, and each step further along the path of adventure leads us inevitably a step closer to death and whatever lies beyond. And then the question must be: what lies beyond? And there can only be one answer: God. Though not the Christian God, nor the Buddhist God, the Islamic God, any of the many Phoenician Gods or the Greco-Roman pantheon. Not the Biblical God who would command fathers to dash their offspring against stones to find happiness. Not the God with the vanity to consign His most faithful, most brilliant angel to Hell’s fires for daring to question the Ineffable Plan, nor the God who would engineer the murder of his own son to ensure the perpetuity of His religion but God, the one true force that shapes and binds the universe. God the Engineer of Mankind, God the Saviour, God the Maker, God the Forsaken and Forgotten, and God the Ender. For all things must end, it is the way of the flesh.”

Owen Frost followed the old man along a cramped passage as it wound its way deep into the heart of the mountain monastery. The shuffle of their feet echoed clammily off the damp-smeared walls. The air was cold on his lungs and tasted old, like air that hadn’t been breathed for centuries. His head swam with Souquet’s peculiar religious belief system. It made sense, of course, but for a monk to utter such thoughts verged on the heretical. It was both profound and profane. He looked at the man as he laboured beneath the weight of Sascha’s monstrous creations. How old was he, truly? He had the frail stoop of a septuagenarian and the lines to match weathered into his face but he moved with a deceptive grace that belied his age, and despite the labyrinthine twists and turns of the passageways that led to Alsiso Souquet’s breath sounded disturbingly regular and untroubled in comparison with his own laboured gasps. Coupled with Fra Gregori’s talk of Michelangelo Bounarroti, well, it didn’t seem altogether impossible that the man in front of him might have lived for five hundred years no matter what he thought he knew of the mortality of the flesh.

They stood for a while outside the door that led to the Golem’s chamber both lost in thoughts of their own. Souquet dreaming of the death of angels, Owen Frost imagining the humanity Sascha’s sacrifice would bring to Alsiso. After consuming her creations the Golem could not be the Divine Assassin the monks craved. The sins of generations would be held back by a single flickering spark of good. He couldn’t allow himself to think that it might fail. Light always pushed back the dark. It was the nature of a single candle to light an entire room.

“It is also the nature of a candle to fail and be consumed by the darkness,” he confessed the gnawing fear to the old man beside him. Souquet’s face brightened.

“Exactly my boy, exactly. The Belohim are merely beings of light and all lights must fail, every fire must burn out. Together we shall bring the great God Almighty back to the world. Imagine… Marlowe’s Tamburlaine had it right in part to suggest that we march against the powers of heaven and set black streamers in the firmament to signify the slaughter of the Gods. Only where he saw Gods we see angels in their place. Where he looked to pierce Atlas’ breast with a charged spear and cause the axis of the world to topple we look to throw down the angels and dash their brains out against marbled walls of heaven.”

Owen took no comfort from the monk’s assurance that angels would fail. He opened the door and passed through to the other side.

* * *

The Golem was like nothing Owen Frost had ever seen before. He stood speechless before it, painfully able to imagine it smiting even the Holiest of Holies with one savage blow of its mighty fist. A scaffold had been erected around the giant statue with an elaborate series of ladders and gangways to allow the supplicant to climb high enough to feed the beast that was Alsiso.

The thing was truly a giant; an elemental monster carved of stone.

He felt the first stirrings of fear as he followed Souquet toward the lowest of the ladders. The rungs groaned beneath the old man’s weight as he climbed, the rough-spun sack containing Sascha’s creations slung across his back. Owen Frost looked up to the dizzying height where Alsiso’s mouth lay open and hungry. Their footsteps echoed eerily around the huge vaulted chamber, the echoes folding over on themselves and being transformed into a constant gathering storm of noise. His scalp crawled and his hands trembled as he struggled to make the climb. Surely the noise couldn’t pass unnoticed by the monks in their dormitories? It rang deep and sonorous like the tolling of the prayer bell. It could only be a matter of time before they came running to see what the disturbance was.

Half way up the second ladder, Owen paused to catch his breath. He touched his ruined face, drawing from it the strength he needed to continue the climb. They had done this to him. They had locked him in the dark and stolen from him his worst imaginings to feed to their precious angel-slaying Golem. After the pain and heartbreak of the last month he would find redemption. He would be whole again, in spirit if not in flesh, and even if it meant cracking the Golem open with his bare hands to free the Pandora’s Box of sins pent up within its clay corpse, at the end of it all, he would find peace and Sascha would be avenged. That last thought caused him to smile. Had he followed Fra Souquet’s orders perfectly his flesh might have remained whole but his spirit would have lacked the darkness essential to plot this treachery. It was ironic that his failure to purify his soul gave him the strength necessary to redeem it. The monks would fail in their ill-conceived quest to return religious fervour to the world. He would make damned sure of it.

He climbed the last few steps empowered by the certainty that Sascha’s sacrifice would be enough to undo the centuries of perverted sacrifice the monks had made and it would be the salvation of both of them.

Fra Souquet waited for him before the mouth of Alsiso, his face sheened with beads of perspiration, his eyes aglow with rapture. As he withdrew the first of Sascha’s treasures from the sack, a miniature recreation of some devil carved out of the leg of her chair with her fingernails, the old man physically shuddered as though in the grip of some all-encompassing epiphany.

“Feed the beast,” Owen Frost urged.

“Yes, yes, yes.” Souquet hissed, reaching up to stuff the wooden devil into the Golem’s mouth.

Once more, a spark of golden light arced along a fault in the Golem’s stony face, causing the stone of the cheek to shiver.

“Oh yes,” Souquet crooned, reaching in to place one of Sascha’s sexual grotesqueries on Alsiso’s stone cold tongue.

The Golem moaned in response. The thin clay membranes stretched over its blind eyes fluttered as though they were finally about to open.

“More,” Owen Frost urged the old man, suddenly afraid that the Golem might awaken before it had absorbed enough of Sascha’s goodness to be of any difference against centuries of absorbed evils. He joined the monk, reaching into the Golem’s huge mouth to force the carving of the twisted wood sprite down its throat.

“Yes, yes…” Souquet moaned, forcing an intertwined creation of coupling - and self-consuming - bodies into the Golem’s hungry mouth with a cry of triumph as Alsiso responded with a vicious shiver as it accepted his offering. “Wake, my stony angel-slayer. Wake!” Fra Souquet shouted joyously. His words resounded in the chamber.

The Golem’s head rolled laboriously on its enormous neck and one at a time its cold grey eyes opened to regard the fools that had finally stirred it into life.

“I am infinite,” Alsiso intoned in a voice that shifted through countless registers and tones as each and every sinner within it struggled to be heard. “I contain the souls of the lost multitudes of man. I am sinner and saint, madman and prophet. I am broken and I am whole. I am the death of angels and the birth of gods. I am Alsiso.” And with that proclamation a fissure opened in the stone above the Golem’s right eye, tearing deep into the darkness beneath where the sinners lived on forever. The fissure widened, running down through the grey eye and through the flawless cheek opening a cleft in Alsiso’s top lip. Souquet was on his knees. Others had come: he heard Fra Gregori’s scream as, raising above the sea of ever-changing voices, a woman’s voice - Sascha’s voice - rang out: “And I am nothing!”

“What have you done?” Souquet moaned as the fissure split the Golem’s head in two unequal halves and continued widening. There was a resounding crack and the right side of Alsiso’s head parted from the left, and fell, crashing through the wooden scaffold.

Owen Frost felt the wooden planks buckle beneath his feet as the scaffolding collapsed. He looked around desperately for something to cling on to and grabbed at one of the struts that supported the collapsing platform but it was pointless, the whole thing was coming down and there was nothing he could do but fall. It struck him as bitterly ironic that in saving the angels and redeeming himself he had to fall. He would have laughed but as soon as the thought had come to him the platform was gone from beneath his feet and he was falling.

The huge vaulted chamber suddenly reeked of the sickly sweet aroma of vanilla, as though the scent had somehow been released from within Michelangelo Bounarroti’s collapsing masterpiece.

Alsiso continued to come undone.

Stone and wood came down on top of him, leaving Owen Frost partially buried beneath the debris. A host of pains flared within his broken body but none of them mattered. He looked up at Fra Gregori and Fra Marquand, Antonellus, Servillous and Sardonicus huddled in the doorway as they sheltered from the fallout of the death - can a thing of stone truly be thought of as living? - of Alsiso and laughed. He had wanted to hurt the Golem. He never dreamed that Sascha’s purity would be enough to crack the very -flesh’ of the monster like that, a few shreds of goodness enough to undermine its elemental evil.

And the smell…

“What do you think angels would smell of, daddy?” The boy asked.

“Vanilla,” his father answered without a doubt.

The words came flooding back to him. They were the opening lines from a story he’d read as a child. He couldn’t remember what it was called but it didn’t matter. Was that what was happening here? Had Sascha’s sacrifice roused the angels into destroying Alsiso? Were the Belohim with him now? Was he lying - dying - amongst the divine?

The cacophony of voices spewing from the Golem’s mouth rose into Pandemonium drowning out every other sound.

He was hallucinating. He had to be. Through the rubble and dust raised by the Golem’s collapse he saw the first ethereal wisps slip out from the darkness within the monster; a lost soul.

As the pain in his chest grew worse the shrieking intensified - although the multitude of voices themselves dwindled - and more and more smoke-like wraiths emerged from the dark heart of Alsiso. The stone seemed to collapse in on itself until there was nothing left.

If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.

That was the truth. The sins of Alsiso’s many fathers were both its greatest strength and its ultimate weakness.

A number of the wraithlike spectres hovered while others were drawn toward the glittering vault of the ceiling. The fragrance of vanilla was momentarily overpowering as three winged figures descended from the brilliant white sun that burned where the ceiling ought to have been. They gathered some of the lost souls to them, drawing them up toward whatever lay beyond but others seemed to resist their lure. Owen felt it enter him through the hole torn in his chest by a jagged spar of wood torn free of the collapsed scaffold. His sins, things he had never thought of or imagined, flooded back through his veins and he was whole again. Redeemed.

The same could not be said for Fra Souquet or the others. Souquet’s own sins had found him and flesh that should long ago have surrendered to death gave in now to the years of delayed corruption and decay. Within seconds he had no mouth with which to scream as his chest rose in one last hitching breath before the cavity collapsed in sigh of dust and Souquet was gone. One by one the lost souls were being drawn back into the flesh that had spawned them, and one by one the monks were suffering the same fate as Souquet as the ravages of time caught up with them in mere seconds.

And in moments those who would have challenged angels for their right to attend God were gone, blown away like dust on the wind and Owen Frost was alone in the chamber but for a single lingering soul. A soul so pure its light stung tears from his eyes. It hurt to look at her but he couldn’t look away.

“I am in you,” he heard the words inside his head. “I cannot leave. Not without you.”

He felt his grip on consciousness slipping as the life leaked out of him.

“It won’t be long,” another voice comforted. “Then he may take his place amongst the beloved.”

Owen felt - or imagined he felt - her hand soft on his brow, soothing him.

“It hurts…” he managed to say and in saying it realised that the damage of the leeches was almost mended, that his sins were rebuilding his face so at least he would die as himself.

“I can feel it… let go, love. Let go.”

The smell of vanilla faded - or his awareness of it faded - and all he could say was: “I am ready to die…” even as his lips stopped moving and Owen Frost slipped into darkness, finally redeemed.

END

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Steven Savile won the Writers of the Future Award in 2002 for his novellete “Bury My Heart At The Garrick.” His debut anthology, Redbrick Eden, was runner up in the British Fantasy Awards, and his second anthology, co-edited with Alethea Kontis is forthcoming from Tor in the US in May 2006. “The Pain, Heartbreak and Redemption of Owen Frost” originally appeared in The Alsiso Project, edited by Andrew Hook, which won the British Fantasy Award for Best Anthology in 2004. His short story collection Angel Road was published by Elastic Press in 2004 and in 2006 his fantasy novels Inheritance and Dominion are being published by Black Library. He is currently working on a trilogy of Celtic fantasy novels featuring Pat Mills’ classic hero Slaine, who first appeared in 2000AD, for Black Flame in the UK.

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Order Temple: Incarnations by Steven Savile from Apex Publications.

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