Cathedral of Bones

Crucifer, Bk. 3, Chapter 2, scene iii

Peter approached a giant archway made of silver bones, which framed black metal doors, smooth and without handles. Atarah and Penuel stood behind him, watching in silence to see what he would do. A pair of angels twice his height guarded the doors, both with their heads bowed and kneeling in prayer. These were not the marble angels that wept over graves; these were the children of Azrael, God’s executioner.

The angels had sloped heads with grey, glossy skin, and though bald, their faces were clearly feminine. Their narrow eyes shone with sapphire light, and he realized the angels were identical twins. They sighed like lovers, exposing silver fangs. The backs of their heads tapered into crescent fins. Wings like enormous scythe blades curved down their backs, and between them exhaust pipes flanked their silver spines. Both of them had large breasts with nipples like drill bits. Between their legs, ribbed cocks curved up their bellies. Fingernails like daggers tipped their praying hands, and cables snaked along the joints of their metal fingers.

Peter approached the doors, but the angels didn’t move. He pushed on the massive slabs. The doors wouldn’t budge. The angels turned their heads and focused on him. Their fingers curled into claws, clacking like crabs.

“Stand back,” Atarah said.

Peter backed away, his heart pounding so hard he thought he’d blow a gasket.

Atarah raised her hand and her eyes burned brighter. Peter heard a dull thunk and the doors slowly parted.

“Behold the Cathedral of Bones,” Penuel said.

Peter stepped inside and gaped at his macabre surroundings. He felt a rush of awe and fear--the beauty and the horror! The sanctuary was immense, the rib cage of a Titan, its vaulted steel ceiling soaring above him. Gunmetal vertebrae supported the vault, braced by gleaming ribs that curved along its sides. Each rib descended to a massive phallic pillar, their steel shafts crowned with polished hematite heads. Between the pillars, black lanterns hung from heavy chains, but instead of flames, blue-plasma seethed inside the glass. The plasma was the same color as the biomechs’ eyes, as if they had all been lit from a single torch. Was this the light of their souls? Did they share a power source?

He dropped his gaze and saw his reflection in the center aisle, a slab of obsidian that stretched to the chancel. A Tau cross, made of steel, stood behind the altar, four meters high with pipes in grooves along its arms. A row of metal skulls connected the pipes, and ran like a zipper down the front of the cross.

Peter shook his head. “Oh, no,” he groaned. The cross was real. Fucking real. Just like Tony’s painting.

He looked back at his guides for an explanation. Their faces, what they had of them, were cold and impassive.

“We will wait here for you,” Atarah told him. She nodded toward the cross. “Go and learn the truth.”

Peter faced the cross. He didn’t want to know. The truth was that even his nightmares weren’t his own.

“Peter,” Atarah prodded him. “The Prophet awaits.”

Peter sighed with resignation and walked down the aisle. He saw the pews were sculpted from black-lacquered bones. An ivory skull had been embedded in every sideboard. They leered at him as he passed and whispered, “Ave Peter.”

I’ve lost my mind, he thought. I died and went to Hell. Did it happen when I jumped, or when the Priest stabbed me?

The skirt of his vinyl cassock shimmered with each step. He reached out and touched a skull, hard and dry as chalk. Were these the skulls of the missing colonists? How many people died to furnish this cathedral?

He reached the transept and looked to his right. A steel statue of the Virgin stood inside the chapel, not the Mother of God, but the Mother of Pain. The Virgin was larger than life. Her red eyes burned like coals. She was an iron maiden, cruel and without mercy. A wedge of scarlet flames roared between her thighs. He shuddered and looked away, feeling violated.

If she wasn’t bad enough, her counterpart was worse. The statue in the chapel to his left put the fear of God in him. The naked giant had been crucified upside down. Like her, his eyes bore the glow of the furnace. A pair of golden keys hung from a chain on his waist. The tip of his erect penis pressed against his navel. This was how ROM saw its rock, its very foundation.

Peter reached the chancel steps and stood before the cross. Closer now, he made out details distance had obscured. The cross had a narrow gap running down the middle, which divided the zipper of skulls. He wondered if the Tau cross opened like a cabinet, and remembered the story of Pandora’s box. The box had unleashed all the horrors of the human condition, but hope remained inside, a promise of salvation. It looked like those horrors had spilled into the cathedral. What he saw behind the cross filled him with terror. The perverse need to know goaded him forward. He circled behind the cross for a closer look.

A dozen naked men and women were trapped inside the wall, crucified in cross-shaped niches like a row of statues. None of the colonists looked older than thirty. Their heads were bald as polished stones. Their bodies were hairless. A morbid bas-relief covered the wall, shiny metal arabesques cast from human bones. Zippers of vertebrae ran down the walls, and serpentine pipes converged around the cross-shaped niches. There were strange creatures too that looked like octopi, and razor-edged horseshoe crabs, their bellies exposed. Three gunmetal steps circumscribed the wall, looking like horseshoes of frozen intestines.

Peter hugged himself and walked along the steps, examining the bodies of the colonists. Steel rods pierced their temples, holding up their heads. Silver spikes pinned their hands and feet to the wall. Green webs fanned through their translucent skins, as if their tortured flesh had been carved from moss agate. Steel tubes punctured their sunken abdomens, radiating from their navels like spider legs. The tubes were attached to loops of clear vinyl tubing, which pumped bright, lime-green fluid into their organs. Embalming fluid, he realized. He shuddered in revulsion.

Then, as he paused before a woman in her twenties, he noticed rings of scar tissue around her puncture wounds. “Oh, my God,” he moaned--the woman wasn’t dead. Or at least she hadn’t been when the tubes were inserted.

He heard a rumble of steel grinding against stone. The sound was coming from the cross behind him. What now? he wondered. He slowly turned around. Has his presence triggered the locking mechanism? He went to the front of the chancel and stood before the cross. The doors of the cross had split open and were sliding apart. Fog poured through the opening and boiled across the floor. Through the gap, he saw a man. The cross was a sarcophagus.

Soon the interior was fully exposed and the doors ground to a halt. A man with long, black hair had been crucified inside. A fist-sized garnet cabochon glowed over his heart. Organic machinery pulsed and whirred around him. Oily pistons fucked tubes of grey, glossy meat, and green embalming fluid pumped through vinyl hoses.

A halo of surgical steel rods pierced the man’s brow, a crown of thorns fit for the Messiah of Machines. Atarah had told him, “The Prophet awaits.” Peter realized he was looking at him. Like the other colonists, his skin was translucent, but fewer of the mossy tendrils wormed through his flesh. The Prophet’s crotch and armpit hair hadn’t been shaved. Somehow, those curly patches made him more human. But was he alive? Did his ghost haunt the machine?

A pair of small portals opened above the Prophet’s shoulders. Two fiber-optic cables snaked out of the holes and attached to bio-ports on the back of his head. Blue light pulsed through the cables, transmitting data. Peter winced and clutched the back of his neck.

Suddenly, he was back in the shower stall of his apartment. Blood sprayed from the shower head and filled the stall to his knees. Two needle-headed cables slithered up his legs. They pierced him, tunneled through his flesh, and burst through his shoulders. His limbs shook as if he was suffering a seizure. The cables snaked around his head and drilled into his skull. The vision ripped away and he stood before the Prophet.

Every horror of his life, the rape, the Slam, the murders, all of it was part of the Hanging God’s plan.

Peter sank to his knees and screamed.