Thy Fearful Symmetry

Copyright © Richard Wright 2015

Smashwords edition

Cover design by snowangels.org

Interior Art by Malcolm McClinton

All Rights Reserved.

"When the stars threw down their spears,

And watered Heaven with their tears,

Did he smile his work to see?

Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Tyger! Tyger! Burning bright

In the forest of the night,

What immortal hand or eye

Dare frame thy fearful symmetry."

- The Tyger, William Blake, 1794.

First published in Songs of Experience.

CHAPTER ONE

Heaven pulsed around him like a vast, beating heart.

At the very centre of the pulse, he floated in a void of scarlet light. Each silent thump sent ripples of deeper crimson sluicing from him in all directions, man-shaped disturbances in a cosmic pool that had been still before he arrived. There was no question that he was an intruder. His presence was like grit in a delicate machine. He wondered what had summoned. If he was not welcome, why had he been yanked there?

Though he was aware of the question, it barely floated above his subconscious. Most of his mind was devoted to not shutting down in shock and awe. Eyes bulging, his chest quaking with the exertions of his exhausted heart, he waited and watched as the redness shimmered around him. There was peace to be found there, he knew it immediately, but it was not his time to sink into the blood colours and become part of the whole.

A manic snigger escaped his lips, though no sound reached his ears. Heaven was supposed to be lush fields of flowers and newly cut grass, with choirs of angels singing and every wholesome delight on offer. Perhaps he was in the other place then, but that made no more sense to him. Hell was fire, branding, and torture, surely?

No, even though he could not remember how he had come to be there, or what he was doing before he arrived, or even what his name had been before this immense vacuum claimed him, his body and soul knew he was in Heaven. His cells responded to it, and embraced it. His mind could not. Not my time, he thought. Not my place.

When the voice came, it was directionless, emerging from the surrounding colour, from the fibres of his clothes, from his own flesh and hair. The tone was rich and soft, but powerful, like a giant's caress. He was certain that the voice could sharpen in an instant and tear him apart, though he felt love there too. The name of his Lord refused to appear in his mind, and he was glad. Naming the being who wrapped him up was too close to owning Him, and that would be sacrilege. I am your thing, he thought, knowing that he was heard and understood. I am your servant and tool. For the first time in his life, bathed in the red light of his Lord, he understood exactly what the words meant.

Something nagged at his soul, a contradiction that had recently puzzled him, but he could not bring it to the fore. He could do nothing at all but bathe in the voice that came from everywhere, and the light.

At first the words were incomprehensible, just vibration and tone on an immense scale. There was meaning there, but he was too small, too limited, to understand what it was. It was like sitting in a tree and trying to see the forest. Slowly though, as he drifted, the words narrowed, the frequency shaping into something he could comprehend.

Inexplicable dread gripped him as he strained to hear. Again, something nagged the corners of his subconscious. Lingering parts of him, which had clung on tenaciously during the unreal sensory assault that had driven most of his sense of self fleeing from his body, tried to attract his attention. The nagging spread downwards, cramping through his shoulders, locking his gut, seizing his legs in a vice grip. His body was an ugly whorl of tension against the backdrop of soothing red. The ripples cleaving from his body adjusted to the tautness, perverting as they spread, mocking his attempted self-subjugation with ghoulish parodies of his own image, expanding ever outwards.

When the words narrowed enough for him to understand them, his fears proved true.

BETRAYER

traitor

damned

SINNER

Each word hurt him, physically as well as spiritually. The red brightened, morphing from heart's blood to a blazing furnace with such speed that each time he blinked he witnessed an unrecognisable universe when his eyes opened anew. With the colour shift came a heat to match, and his flesh started to cook. Lord, he thought, in his last moments of sanity, what did I do to earn this?

Then his eyeballs began to sizzle and pop, dripping scalding fluids over his cheeks that raised blisters across his blackening face. When he opened his mouth to howl, steam shot forth as though from a dragon's maw. A distant crackling, the first true sound he had heard in that place, told him his hair was on fire.

His flesh erupted in slow-burning flame, his fats fuelling the blaze and finally, blessedly, scorching the sanity from him.

#

The dividing line between dream and waking was lost on Calum Baskille as he burst from fitful sleep. There had been fire, and culpability far beyond his everyday, all-purpose catholic guilt. Despite the frosty breeze sliding through his open bedroom window, he could feel the burning. Taking heaving breaths, certain his throat was still swelling shut beneath the onslaught of his own scalding breath, he beat frantically at his own flesh. Sheets tangled around him as he writhed, soaking up his sweat and adding to the crush of claustrophobia that had him reeling.

His exertions took him to the edge of the bed. Sudden emptiness beneath his shoulders jolted him fully from his sleeping terrors, but too late to catch himself. The bedroom tipped backwards, and he was too entangled in linen to do anything but close his eyes and tuck his head to his chest.

Calum landed awkwardly on his shoulders, his head bouncing firmly against the polished floorboards, and then was still.

Thank you God, he thought, with not a little touch of irony, I needed that. Remembering why he felt so guilty, even frightened, gave him a shudder. He wanted to snatch the thought back, even though it was offered in jest. For a moment he froze, hoping yet again that God had not heard him. Funny, he thought. I've spent the last eight years gambling that He can hear me, that my dog collar isn't the brand of a wasted life. Now that I know beyond doubt that He really is there, I'm hoping He's been struck mysteriously deaf.

In the gloom, the glowing red numerals of the alarm clock on his bedside table reset from 05.59 to 06.00. The colour was from his dream, one of the shades of red he had floated in. Heaven? Or Hell?

There was no point dwelling on it. Calum had never put much purchase in the significance of dreams, and recent experiences gave him cause to believe that if God wanted to chastise him, he'd do so much more directly. No, he'd dreamed out his guilt, and that was all.

Probably.

With a groan he swung his legs down from where they still rested on the bed, wincing as his backside slapped against the floor, and began to wriggle free of his sheets.

#

Breakfast was a bowl of cornflakes heaped high with sugar, and a strong black coffee. In the summer he might have gone for a run first, especially having woken so early, but Glasgow in January was a challenge that bested his already half-hearted motivation to maintain some sort of physical fitness.

His flat would be cold for another two hours until the heating came on, and leaving the windows open overnight had not helped. With his sinuses as they were, sleeping in a closed room always left him groggy and stuffed up, so the chill was something he had learned to live with. That didn't mean he liked it, and he gulped the coffee down while it was still near to boiling, accepting the scalding in exchange for the warmth that spread out from his belly.

Tissues in his throat protested, and he was back in the dream, his own fluids boiling in his chest.

Calum shook his head to clear the thought away. It was hardly surprising that the dream disturbed him so much. Three weeks ago, he had committed to a path of sin unlike anything seen since biblical times. How he had wandered so neatly into his current predicament bewildered him, for he had been a good and honest priest for eight years He wondered whether novelty alone was ensnaring him. Every day, he saw things nobody else alive on the planet did. Was that really enough to cast his eternal soul away for?

No, he thought.

Yes, a sly voice at the back of his mind answered.

Calum winced. If he really had wandered from the righteous path, then he was so hopelessly lost that he didn't know if he'd ever be able to find it again.

Tightening the belt of his bathrobe with a tug, he went to wash some of the night's sweat away. The narrow bathroom, like the rest of the flat, was a modest affair. A year before he had taken on this parish, there had been an expansive house owned by the church, which he would have moved in to had his predecessor not burned it to the ground after falling into a drunken slumber in front of the television while smoking a cigarette. The church had taken on the flat while the repairs were organised. They had been complete for weeks. Calum could have moved back in anytime he wanted, but he liked where he was, and kept inventing excuses to stay. The flat was one of a dozen in an old, converted mill overlooking the river Kelvin. The building stood alone on Old Dumbarton Road. If he turned right out of his front door, he crossed a bridge and came straight on to Byres Road, the bustling heart of Glasgow's West End.

The old university defined the area, an eclectic collection of buildings between forty and four hundred years old, making up a campus stretching from Byres Road all the way across to Kelvingrove Park. Calum supposed that was part of the appeal. Walking up Byres Road, past students and lecturers, brought back memories of his time at Newcastle University in the north of England, studying philosophy and theology when he hadn't been drinking and partying. That was a different life, before the car crash had hurled him into God's arms. Having now betrayed his Lord in a way that he still could not fully fathom, he wondered if his hell raising days had been a truer reflection of his character than the collar and the crucifix.

Calum ran the cold tap, letting the basin fill. When it was deep enough he plunged his face into the icy water. The shock ran through his spine, but it woke him up. Since he had given up smoking, it was the only thing guaranteed to get him moving in the morning. Without the nicotine igniting his blood, even coffee didn't bring him round to the day, and so shock tactics were called for. Feeling his cheeks go numb, he jerked his head back out, his too long fringe sending droplets of water arcing over his shoulder. Shaking his head, spraying water still further afield, he grabbed a towel from the rail on the back of the door and rubbed some warmth into his face.

He glanced at himself in the mirror. I'm looking at a man damned to Hell, and these days I can't even pretend that Hell is a metaphor. Somewhere, in some reality, there really were hundreds of millions of screaming, agonised souls doomed to eternal suffering. Calum imagined he could hear their pain grating the air, and the word they were screaming sounded suspiciously like his name.

#

By eight fifteen Calum was fed, watered, and running down the carpeted stairwell he shared with his neighbours. Pushing open the security door at the ground floor, he stepped into a morning white with frost. Zipping his padded jacket, he shoved his hands in his pocket and tried to make his neck vanish beneath the collar. It was not a morning for faint hearts, and as he made his way down the street towards Byres Road he engaged in a haphazard balancing act, wanting to rush for the Underground, but needing to keep his footing on the frozen pavement. Clouds hung over the city with vague menace, threatening rain or snow. Crossing the Kelvin, he noticed chunks of ice floating in the waters. The river was running high, which meant that, to the north of the city, those clouds had ceased playing tease.

On the far side of the bridge he came to Partick Cross, where Dumbarton Road sliced across the bottom of Byres Road on its way towards the City Centre. The junction growled with rush hour traffic trying to navigate the random patterns of the traffic lights. Calum waited for what felt like an age before the green man signalled that all would be safe for the few seconds he needed to dash to the opposite pavement. A muttering crowd of gloves and scarves crossed with him, clouds of condensing breath fogging the crisp morning air. Many arrowed for Kelvinhall station and the escalators sliding down into the gloom.

As usual, the ticket machines weren't working, and Calum joined the shuffling queue for the single manned window. There was no rush. His shopping trip into the city centre, a probably optimistic quest to find some credible reference books about earthbound metaphysical entities, was a leisurely one. While he waited, he picked up a copy of the Metro from a stand against the wall, wondering whose job it was to deliver the free newspaper across the city every morning. Even when he was forced to travel at six thirty, just as the Underground opened, the Metro was there regardless of the weather. A minor miracle in the scheme of things, but the miraculous had been playing on his mind of late.

Five minutes later, he slid his ticket into the slot in the barrier, pushed through the turnstile, and scurried down the stairs.

There was only one platform at Kelvinhall station. Trains pulled in on both sides, and when he first came to Glasgow he had thought the walkway ridiculously narrow. For a long time he had insisted on walking down the very centre, as though the slightest slip might topple him onto the tracks. Several months had passed before the six or seven feet of tidy yellow-brown bricks had felt adequate, and he still loathed the thought of having to use the Underground if he ever had a drink in him.

Glasgow's subway had two lines, the inner and outer circles, which did a constant loop around the city centre in both directions, taking in the South Side and West End. The rest of the city relied on buses and surface trains, a network that some overpaid marketing executive had decided to label the 'Overground'. At least those vehicles didn't smell faintly of sewage, Calum supposed, but the subway remained the fastest way to get about if you weren't travelling far from the centre of the city.

A train waited on the Outer Circle. Beneath the grime, it was the deep, burned shade that had given the route its nickname – The Clockwork Orange. Calum had often wondered whether the name dated to before or after the Anthony Burgess novel. He still didn't know the answer.

To his surprise, the carriage was almost empty – he must have just missed a previous train – and he slumped into a seat, feeling almost jolly in spite of his ongoing transgressions against God, his dreams, and the possible fate of his immortal soul. As more commuters ran to catch the train before it pulled out, he unfolded his copy of the Metro and glanced at the front page.

His good mood shattered as he scanned the main headline.

DOZENS DEAD IN NIGHTCLUB HORROR – POLICE FEAR DEMONIC NEW DRUG

He read more, as what little heat he had managed to build up beneath the layers of his clothing seeped from him in one swift flow. People had dropped dead on a dance floor, with broken limbs, shattered hearts, and imploded brains. There was no suggestion of violence at the scene. Police suspected drinks had been spiked, but were not publicly hazarding any guesses as to what with. Victims had been smiling, even laughing, as they died. Reports told of one dark haired man who had walked among them, and the authorities had issued a description of him as somebody they wanted to speak to very urgently.

Calum recognised the description. It was unmistakeable. Feeling as though everybody on the train was suddenly looking at him, he wondered how much of what he read was his fault.

CHAPTER TWO

Clive Huntley bit his lip and managed not to swear. In his head, the mental clock that insisted on counting every second of every hour of every day with irritating diligence, ticked again. Jamie, he forced through clenched teeth, "I've told you once already, put that down."

Something in his voice or face must have shown how close to breaking point he was. At the back of the classroom a surly, dark haired sixteen year old, built for rugby and brawling, looked up, startled. As he lost what little concentration he could lay claim to, the tennis ball he had been bouncing off his desk slipped from his hand. Teenage heads dropped as they tried to follow the course of the ball, which bounced from chair leg to wall, to foot, to bag, and on. Clive suspected it was receiving more than one kick of encouragement on its travels.

Sorry sir. Jamie sounded it, and Clive tried to stop his emotions rampaging across his face. For a second he imagined how it would feel to seize a fistful of hair at the back of the boy's head, and hammer his nose against the blackboard. Once. Twice. Third time the charm, and then he would mash the lump of tissue and cartilage that remained back and forth against the green-black slate, leaving wide, damp smears of blood and snot gleaming in the headache inducing strip lighting.

Clive took a slow breath through his nostrils, clamping his eyes closed and counting back from five. The moment passed. With it went the adrenaline that had aggravated his ordinarily mild temper, leaving him feeling pasty and shaken. Opening his eyes, he saw the class watching him, some worried, some simply curious as to what would happen next. Right, he managed, back to Antony and Cleopatra. Mock exams are on the horizon, so today we'll have a trial run. Get your pens ready. There was a disorganised flurry, as pens were unearthed from bags and pockets. The question is this. With the death of Antony in Act Four, the play reaches its natural climax, and the tragedy is complete. Act Five becomes an extended epilogue. Discuss. Forty-five minutes, exam conditions, starting now. Groans sounded across the room, but the whispery scratching of pens scribbling half-formed thoughts soon dominated. Clive sank into the chair behind his desk with relief, surreptitiously pulling the morning's newspaper out.

Still feeling a tremor in his hands, he ran his fingers over the lines of text, searching for any mention of his name. The cover story, which also dominated the next two pages, worried him, and with his heart beating too fast he searched the details to see if any of the victims were named. It took him ten minutes, and when he found nothing to corroborate his fears he sucked in a partial breath of relief. There was a description of a man who could have been Ambrose, but it was so hard to be sure. The nightclub was on the university campus, where faux Byron look-alikes were plentiful. Clive also knew his friend's goodness too well, and could not associate him with a massacre like this.

The scent on the air was one he associated almost entirely with teaching this age group. Hanging pungently over everything else was the heady, clashing odour of perfumes applied by girls obsessed with sex. Those not already doing it soon would be, and the elaborate nasal mating game they brought into his class made it smell like a whore's boudoir. Underlying the cloying sweetness like a festering sore was a foetid mix of male sweat, and the chemical aftertaste of enthusiastically applied deodorant. Half the boys drooled over the girls, while the others dreamed of joyriding, petty thuggery, and other ways to pass the time after school. Sluts and criminals in the making, all of them.

Clive shook his head, drawing curious glances from the front row of desks. What was wrong with him? When he became a teacher, he had believed no kid was irredeemable, and had tried to bring out their best by engaging them instead of standing aloof. Maintaining his idealism wasn't always easy in practise, but he had remained determined not to become one of those who started their careers with lofty ambitions and quickly fell by the wayside. Recently though, the most disturbing, horrific thoughts had slammed into his head, leaving him feeling rank and violated.

Resting his chin on his hand, he looked back down at the paper spread across his desk. Worry was doing this to him. Since his next door neighbour had vanished nearly three weeks ago, he had been distracted and anxious.

Heather didn't know the cause of his stress, and Clive couldn't find a way to make clear why the man was so important to him. How did you explain to your wife of two years that you couldn't sleep at night for thinking about another man's eyes, the way he looked at you in the corridor, the quiet, sensitive conversations you had about Shakespeare, and Milton, and Keats?

Clive knew in his heart that he wasn't homosexual, but the way it looked was undeniable. Sometimes, when it caught him by surprise, he even found himself reacting to the man physically, his erection straining before he could reign his daydreams in. But he wasn't gay. He had just never had a male friend quite like Ambrose before. That was all.

Even before his violent disappearance, Ambrose had been preoccupied, less willing to pass time than he used to be. Clive had worried that he had inadvertently done something to push him away. Perhaps Ambrose sensed how Clive felt about him and panicked, reading more into it than was meant.

Now Clive might never have a chance to put that right. Disturbed by the deep, unfamiliar lines of worry his fingertips could trace in his forehead, he sat back and gazed out of the window. Spidery frost patterns still clung to the schoolyard where the shadow of the old Victorian building held back the sun. There was something strange and mournful about the shapes they traced, and the longer Clive gazed at them, the more distant he felt from his own body. Yes, he had worried for a long time that Ambrose was pulling away from him, that this beautiful, magnificent man had been scared off. Since that night three weeks ago though, darker, more frightening alternatives had presented themselves to him. Now it was possible that Ambrose had not been running from what they felt for one another at all (when he was distracted, Clive could acknowledge those feelings he would not otherwise concede). Instead, he thought his friend had protected him from something dangerous, violent, and treacherous. Something that visited at Ambrose's flat that night, and howled.

Clive's memories danced out at him from between the trailing crystals of the frost-strewn playground, swarmed up, and engulfed him.

#

Clive woke with a start, not sure whether the clamour belonged to a dream or the real world. His head had barely touched the pillow, so he could not yet have drifted into dream worlds. When he felt Heather's hand on his arm he knew it had been real. Was that next door? she whispered.

A cold fist wrapped around his heart, at the same time as something heavy crashed into the ceiling and dropped hard to the floor in Ambrose's flat. More chilling was the vicious roar that had preceded it – the sound that had dragged him from sleep in time to hear the crashes. I think so, he murmured.

Should we...

Shh. Listen. They turned their heads, straining to hear through the wall behind the bed, all that separated them from Ambrose's living room. Clive heard voices. One was Ambrose, definitely, his elegant, cultured tones easily identifiable even though he was speaking too softly for the words to carry. The second voice was one Clive did not recognise, though the accent was English like Ambrose's own. A relative, perhaps? A brother or cousin, come to visit, and in the middle of a family row? The darkness around him sharpened his focus, and he thought he made out words. Horns… Pandora… Michael…

Clive climbed out of bed carefully, searching with his feet for his trousers. It felt very important that he be as quiet as possible. If this were a family argument, he wouldn't want Ambrose to think he had invaded his privacy. Curiosity prevented him from staying warm in bed with Heather, and something more, a protectiveness. If Ambrose was in trouble, Clive wanted to be there to help him. Clive wanted to be the man Ambrose could rely on when there was trouble. Perhaps in helping now he would make amends for whatever offence had driven his friend away.

Clive, Heather whispered, where are you going? Clive's eyes had adjusted enough to make out his wife's silhouette sitting up in bed. Not too long ago, he would have been worried about her, about what might happen if the trouble next door spilled over. They had been married two years, and Clive knew deep down that there was something wrong in putting Ambrose's safety above hers.

Still, he could hardly sit back if their neighbour needed help, could he? The thought settled in his mind, smothering his doubts like a heavy blanket.

Don't worry. I'll knock on the door and check that everything's okay. Be right back. Heather huddled in the bed. For some time now, Clive had been aware that she backed off rather than challenge anything to do with Ambrose. She was a perceptive woman, and no doubt sensed that this area was off limits. Besides, she knew as well as he that, since moving up to Scotland from Birmingham, Clive had made few friends outside of work.

Be careful, she whispered, and her urgency was not lost on him.

Of course. Pulling on his trousers and t-shirt, he padded towards the bedroom door, fumbling for the handle.

As his fingers touched the metal, a long, wailing shriek cut through the night. Where the scream that woke him had been full of fury, this was the sound of agony and desperation balled up into one primal howl. Clive froze, barely aware that Heather was out of bed too, her footsteps taking her to the light switch on the wall. When the bulb flashed to life, he saw the clammy shock on her face as she waited for him to take the lead.

Yet Clive couldn't move. Imagination seized him, and he played through the scenarios that could lead to a scream like that. The cry was Ambrose. Though he wanted to rush next door and burst into the flat, ready to throw himself at an attacker, adrenaline was squirting him in the other direction. Hide, it urged his muscles. Stay away.

Heather grabbed his arm. What should we do?

Another scream, and this time Clive heard stumbling movements to go with it. The second cry rallied him, and he opened the bedroom door. Six months from his thirtieth birthday, Clive was still in good shape, unimposing but far from incapable. He could handle this. Call the police, he told his wife.

What are you going to do?

Never mind that. Just call them. Heather rushed for the phone by the living room window as Clive stepped to the front door. Pushing his ear to the wood, he tried to hear what was happening outside, hoping to make out the running footsteps of Ambrose's attacker fleeing the scene. There was nothing, and now he couldn't hear anything from the flat next door either. He stood there, torn, knowing that if he stepped outside now he was going to get badly hurt.

Behind him, Heather was on the telephone, stammering over the address. Resting his head against the door, he tried to find the will to move.

A new clatter arose, three or four sharp, hard thuds, as though a cricket ball had rebounded off several walls. Moments later the cold, cultured voice that did not belong to Ambrose was speaking again. Clive was too far away to make out any words.

When Ambrose's door slammed open, and somebody fell into the hallway, Clive shrank back. A howl sounded from the flat, full of rage and hate, and this time the words were perfectly clear.

Aaaaammmmmmbrooooossssse! I will fiiiiiiiiiiiiiiind yoooouuuuu….

Relief poured into Clive like warm water, and he slid to the floor as he heard footsteps stagger down the hall. Ambrose had overpowered his attacker and was fleeing the scene. Clive wanted to cry, and when he looked over at Heather he was surprised to see she was doing just that. I thought… she stammered. I thought he was… For once, Clive's instincts as a husband won out, and he stood to embrace his wife.

Me too. Clive said. But it's over now. Everything's going to be fine.

Whoever was screaming next door refused to stop, and the threats that filled the night chilled Clive's soul. Pulling Heather tighter, burying his face in her