The Cathedral of Bones

CRUCIFER, Bk 2. Chapter 2, scene iii:

Peter approached a giant archway made of silver bones, which framed a pair of metal doors, smooth and without handles. Atarah and Penuel stood several steps behind him, silently watching him to see what he would do. A pair of angels twice his height guarded the doors, both praying on one knee and angled toward each other, but these were not the marble statues 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. He realized the angels were identical twins, with the same cold blue light shining from their eyes. The backs of their skulls tapered into crescent fins. Their lips parted as they sighed, exposing silver fangs. Wings like enormous scythe blades curved down their backs. Cables ran down their arms. Black daggers tipped their fingers. Both of them had large breasts with nipples like drill bits. Ribbed cocks curved up their bellies with knives below the shafts, the long, serrated blades attached like giant bayonets.

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. He felt a surge of panic.

“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 thunk and the doors slowly parted.

“Behold the Cathedral of Bones,” Penuel said.

Peter stepped inside and gasped in awe and horror, his soul expanding, shrinking back, rushing up and falling. The sanctuary was immense, the rib cage of a Titan, with a vaulted, steel ceiling soaring high above him. Gunmetal vertebrae supported the vault, braced by gleaming ribs that curved along its sides. Each rib descended to a massive phallic pillar, the steel shafts crowned with heads of polished hematite. Between the pillars, black lanterns hung from heavy chains, but instead of flames, blue-plasma seethed inside the cages. 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 single slab of black glass that stretched to the chancel. A Tau cross, made of steel, stood behind the altar, four meters high with pipes and screw rods embedded in its arms. Interlocking teeth ran down the middle like a zipper.

“Oh, no.” He shook his head. The cross was fucking real. Just like Tony’s painting and the one in his vision. He looked back at his guides for an explanation. Their faces were impassive--they didn’t have a clue.

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

Filled with dread, he faced the cross. He didn’t want to know.

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

Who was this Prophet they kept talking about? He sighed with resignation and started down the aisle. He saw the pews were sculpted from black-lacquered bones. Every sideboard had a skull embedded in the center. They leered at him as he passed and whispered, “Ave Peter.”

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 and bones of the missing colonists? How many people died to furnish this cathedral?

He made his way across the transept and looked to his right. A steel statue of the Virgin stood inside the chapel, not the Mother of God, but the Queen of Agony. 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, his namesake, had been crucified upside down. Like the Virgin, his eyes bore the glow of the furnace. A pair of golden keys hung from a chain around his waist. The tip of his rigid penis pressed against his navel. This was how ROM saw its rock, its very foundation.

Peter reached the chancel steps and stood before the altar. He wondered if the front of the cross opened like a cabinet, and thought about 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, but 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 lean bodies were hairless. A morbid bas-relief covered the wall, shiny metal arabesques cast from human bones. He noticed strange organic forms that looked like octopi, and horseshoe crabs with splayed legs, working pumps and valves. Serpentine pipes converged around the cross-shaped niches, divided by spinal columns that ran up the dome. Three gunmetal steps circumscribed the wall, looking like crescent moons 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. Dark green webs fanned through their translucent skins, as if their tortured flesh was sculpted from moss agate. Were the webs created by a pathogen? Or were they side effects of their preservation? Cannulas punctured their sunken abdomens, attached to clear tubing filled with lime-green fluid. 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 groaned--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. What now? he wondered. Has his presence triggered a locking mechanism? He went and stood before the cross. Gears and screw shafts turned. The doors of the cross were slowly sliding apart. Fog poured through the gap and boiled across the floor. Through the gap, he saw a man. The cross was a sarcophagus.

A man with long, black hair was 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.

A halo of surgical steel rods pierced the dead man’s brow, a crown of thorns fit for the Messiah of Machines. 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 tufts made him more human. But was he really dead? Did his ghost haunt the machine.

Two fiber-optic cables snaked out of the cross and attached to bio-ports on the back of the Prophet’s head. Blue light pulsed through the cables, transmitting data. Peter clutched the back of his neck and saw a blinding flash.

Clouds of steam boiled over him, trapped in blazing glass. He was back in the shower stall of his last apartment. Blood sprayed from the shower head and pooled around his ankles. Two needle-headed cables slithered up his legs. They pierced his groin, bored through his torso and burst from his shoulders. His eyes rolled up and he started thrashing, suffering a seizure. The cables snaked around his head and drilled into his skull. He saw another blinding flash and stood before the Prophet.

Every horror of his life was part of God’s plan.

A grand-guinol puppet show.

He sank to his knees and screamed.