The Sum of Zero: Part Nine

by Dex

The Number stared reverently up the imposing facade of St.Patrick's Cathedral, and felt the numbers in his head pause. This was the House of the Final Sum. After years of searching, he had finally come to the end of the quest; his place in the Tapestry. His solution to his own Great Equation would now be offered up to the final judge. He would look upon his creation's work and find it was Good.

St.Patrick's Cathedral was a splendor of Gothic revisitation. For more than a hundred years, it sat as one of the premier examples of American religious architecture. The twin spires soared over three hundred feet into the night above the Number's head; their pale grey stone illuminated by the spotlights on the ground. They served to bracket the immense rose window of stained glass that looked out over Fifth Avenue. The window was the work of Charles Connick, the greatest artisan in stained glass the Twentieth Century ever produced. His windows were also set in the churches that John Martin conceived the start of the Number's equation, and he trembled at the twinning of fates.

The Number ascended the broad steps, worn smooth by the passage of countless millions of devout. The massive doors were open, and a thin trickle of evening worshipers filtered in and out of the portal. While there was no service scheduled for tonight, the church was always ready to receive and succor those in need, at all hours. The Number exalted as he passed through the doors and into the great nave. Above him stretched the fluted columns that merged to the ribbed vaulting, zigzagging down four hundred feet to the altar. The lights of the city and the streets drove crazed beams of colour through the lancet windows of stained glass along the nave and the transepts, sending them racing and fleeting over the solemn grey stone.

The Number knelt before the alter and crossed himself, feeling the last nervous flutters in his soul die away. They were soothed and replaced by a deep sense of calm satisfaction. He moved off to set in one of the pews, thumbing through the service books sightlessly. He had several hours to wait before it was time to trigger his explosives. At the exact stroke of twelve he'd touch off the fiery holocaust of Manhattan. In his mind's eye he could see the gas ignite, blasting great holes in the buildings and streets above. The intense heat would flash boil the water in the pipes, causing them to rupture from the steam pressure. The tightly packed bundles of utilities would be destroyed, and the loss of electricity would destroy the effectiveness of the emergency services of New York. The firefighters would have a desperate struggle trying to find intact water lines to combat the inferno around them. As they searched, the fires would gut the great skyscrapers, raze the foul slums to the ground, and still the heart of the Great Beast.

"Good evening, my son."

"Evening Father." The Number said reverently to the old priest. His heart swelled with pride at his act, and he longed to tell the priest of the coming of His work. But he clamped down the desire and made his fevered eyes blank behind his smile.

"Do you need some help?"

"No Father. I'd just like to wait here for a while."

"Who are you waiting for, my son?"

"God, Father. I'm waiting to see God."

"This would be the place to find him. It is His house, after all." The priest smiled kindly.

"He will be here soon, I'm sure." The Number said to the priest, who smiled and moved further down the aisles of pews. Only a few dozen people dotted the two thousand plus seats in the cathedral, and he was left to consider his own thoughts.

The Number lifted his eyes to the Medici-wrought altar of God and considered the final sum of the Godhead. The cellphone with its detention code was in his pocket; almost hot to the touch, he felt. It was ironic that his code '666' would be used to slay the very Beast it was supposed to herald. The Number rasped out the words from the Bible before him, his voice brittle and hoarse with passion.

"For the great day of his wrath is come; and who shall be able to stand?"

***

Sidney Lyttle dragged himself into consciousness like a drowned man breeching the surface of the water. He sucked in huge gasps of air, trying to still his racing heart and terror addled brain. His body was drenched in sweat, and the single thin blanket on his cell bunk was twisted into a tight rope around his legs.

The dream had come again.

Lyttle was a hard man. He had worked in the military before joining Operation: Zero Tolerance. His own speciality was as an administrator and organizer, but that didn't shield him from making unsavory decisions in the field. He had ordered peoples deaths, and carried some of them out himself. Sidney didn't have the sort of grandiose imagination to commit large scale atrocities, but he was aptly suited for local terror and destruction. In short, he was not a man who was prone to twinges of conscience about his actions. Nor nightmares.

For the last few nights, ever since his incarceration down in the bowels of the police cells, he had been consumed with dreams of fire and death; all the while he was helpless as the world burned around him and consumed his hapless form. The guards knew and laughed at his nightmares, caused him to hate them even more. Once he was out of this pit and hidden away, he'd have some sort of revenge on them. That he'd already decided.

"Bad dreams again, Lyttle?" The guard jeered and Sidney turned over sullenly. "Want me to get you a teddy bear?"

"Fuck you." He muttered and tried in vain to fall back asleep. The soft noises of the officer shifting in his seat and reading his magazine where the only ones in the small block. Lyttle had been moved to a special isolation area, which only held three cells. The city wanted him alive to testify, and felt that he might be in danger in the general holding population. Since everyone was in danger in the general holding population, it was a smart move.

After an hour or so, Lyttle awoke from his light doze to the sound of the door of the block opening. The guard on duty sat up, yawned and nodded to the police officer coming in. Sidney groggily wondered why they were shifting early, and rose up on his elbows. The duty guard took his coffee and magazine with him out the door, and the new cop slung a nylon rucksack on to the desk, beside a fresh cup of coffee.

Lyttle lay back down, expecting the new guard to settle into the long night shift over a book. The zipper on the nylon hissed, and the soft footsteps echoed as he approached the cell. Lyttle snarled and levered himself back up on his elbows. His curse died on his lips as he saw the silenced pistol in the man's hand aimed at him.

"Goodbye, Mister Lyttle."

"What? Wait--" Lyttle started and thrust a hand out in front of him, as if to ward off the threat. His last words died on his lips.

The silenced weapon spat twice, the first round entering just about the right eyebrow in a small puckered hole. The second followed almost immediately, this time an inch to the left, square in the centre of his forehead. Lyttle jerked, his head snapping back with the impact, and crashed back on the bunk.

"The Friends of Humanity accept your resignation." The cop said, stashing the gun back in his bag and leaving the room. The normal duty guard returned a few minutes later, with a fresh coffee steaming in his hands. He looked at the dim black lump that was cooling in Lyttle's cell, and decided to wait another minute or two before he called it in.

Officer Reggie Dumbronski used to have a younger sister in college upstate. During her frosh week, she let slip that she was a mutant to a few new friends. Eventually, it got to the Friends of Humanity group on the college. They waited until she was coming home from the bar one day, and grabbed her. According to the detective up there, they raped her for hours before finally beating her to death with a tire iron. No charges were ever laid on the unsolved hate crime. Dumbronski thought of his sister as he sipped his coffee and waited to raise the alarm.

***

John Caulder stood at the top step at the rear of number 31 and waited. He scrutinized the door in front of him, trained eyes searching the old wood for clues. It was slightly ajar, and he could detect a faint light coming from somewhere deep inside the house. Straining, he held his breath and listened. He could just make out a strange, muffled sound, slowed repeated. It was steady, like the regular ticking of a clock, a monotonous thumping. Grotesquely, he had the sudden image of a hanged man's hammering heels.

"Steady, detective." Emma said quietly behind him. She was following him up into the house, as Scott lay in wait around at the front. There was no chance he was going to slip by, if he was here. Emma cocked her head to one side and laid a hand on Caulder's arm. "I think we missed him."

"What?"

"I don't think there's anyone inside the house."

"Why?"

"Just believe me on this. We should go in."

That at least made sense, John thought as he turned back to the door. Using two fingers, he pulled the door open and stepped inside, Emma at his heels. There was enough light to see that he was in a scullery, the shelves on either side of him empty. Up three steps there was another door, also ajar, and from somewhere beyond it a deep, rich scent, dark and sour like newly composted earth mixed with an overly sweet incense. Shit and sandalwood. Standing in the house, nerves drawn to the limit, it was easy to be drawn farther in by the dim light and the dark hypnotic sound. He unholstered his gun, and motioned for Emma to do the same. The blonde agent opened her jacket to reveal she was unarmed, and Caulder bit back a curse. What kind of agent goes into a potentially dangerous situation barehanded?

Together, they went up the second set of steps, acutely aware that only one of them was armed. Caulder eased open the door and found himself standing in a kitchen. There was a flashlight sitting on the counter beside an enamel sink. Its muted beam was on but dying, accounting for the light that he'd glimpsed earlier. Somewhere, high above, the thumping sound continued. The smell was more pronounced now, the sweet incense unable to disguise the rank, foul odor beneath.

Directly in front of them was a door leading towards the front of the house, and to the left there was a dark bottom step of a narrow staircase. Far above their heads, the pounding went on. Listening, Caulder was able to distinguish it as two sounds: a firm mechanical progression followed by something else, a sound that was barely a sound at all. John pointed up the stairs, and Emma nodded, ignoring the door in front of them. They turned and began to climb the stairs, following the oddly patterned noise and the terrible dark smell. The first floor landing had no surprises. A door gaping widely open, showing an empty hallway coated with great hanging strands of cobwebs. A rotted carpet runner on the floor, stained wallpaper; empty and abandoned years ago. The window at the end of the hallway had been painted black on the inside, and the gloom was oppressive. John turned back down the stairs and snatched the flashlight from the counter below. It was a matte-black halogen light, the same kind that are issued to military personnel. He twisted the beam to a tighter and brighter light, before rejoining Emma upstairs.

Emma took the light from him, freeing up his gun hand, and they went up to the next landing. The door was shut, but behind it the beating rhythm was much louder. A cold heart, beating away in a dead house.

The wood panels of the door had been painted over by a madman, filled with a bizarre motif of twisted snakes, oddly shaped stars, and roughly drawn creatures that could only have come from the depths of an irreparably damaged mind. Half were male, their genitals huge and engorged, eye monstrous and bulging, sores dripping from crippled limbs, mounds of coiled excrement piled beneath withered buttocks. The other half were hermaphrodites, penises small and immature, breasts huge and sagging, each face looking upwards innocently, roughly splashed halos of yellow paint around their heads. The background to the writhing tangle of the figures was a fuming hell of flames in pink and red and orange that licked and framed the hideous scene.

John fell back against the wall and closed his eyes for an instant. The stench here was overpowering, thick and palpable like the killing floor of a slaughterhouse. His mouth filled with saliva and he swallowed, gagged, and swallowed again. He could here a new sound now. The harsh, whispered buzzing of a thousand swarming flies.

Emma turned the light around on the landing, and paled. John followed the beam and almost vomited. In one corner there was a crumpled nest of old newspaper, soiled with excrement. Lines and daubs climbed up the walls around him, dried and caked over everything. A few steps away another flight of stairs led up to the attic floor. The muted pounding mocked him from the far side of the door. The flies buzzed. John hefted his weapon up to a ready position as Emma turned the knob and pushed open the door. They looked through the open doorway and into hell on earth.

They stared, instantly aware that this was something that no one should ever have to see; a tortured, screaming horror more vile and obscene than the most blasphemous imaginings of any demented Brueghel. The entire third story of the house had been transformed into a single, glowing chamber, lit by a hundred candles fixed to rudely made tinplate sconces screwed into the walls and scattered from floor to ceiling. The walls themselves were primitively painted, depicting scenes a thousand times more ghastly than the ones splashed onto the door.

Chasms swallowed entire flaming cities whole; white-hot tongs pricked lolling, pink-wet tongues; rutting boars, tusks red with blood, tore entrails from infants in the midst of being birthed by headless, limbless women; blood boiled in pools; flames rose everywhere, fueled by crudely drawn gas mains. Pale and fine as spider's silk, a thousand careful lines connected one image to the other in a monstrous cosmology. A demon's chart and guide.

The ceiling was dull black, and from it hung one hundred lengths of bright, stiff copper wire, the ends of some hooked to impale small leathery things that might once have been flesh, while dozens more were twisted to hold larger splintered lengths of bone. On a wire close to the door, a big automatic pistol had been hung as a final trophy.

Emma's quick opening of the door had disturbed the air, and the fresh currents set the wires moving, bone tapping dully against bone like a terrible wind chime, flies thrown from their meaty perch and whispering in angry muted counterpoint. The flickering candle shadows danced, and John thought he saw small scuttling insect movements amidst the other hideous artifacts cast across the dark, oilcloth-covered floor.

In the centre of the room stood the worst of all.

A dozen metal poles stood at clock-hour distance from each other in a large circle on the floor. Atop each pole was a skull, wax flesh built up on human bone, eyes made of bits of coloured glass. Below each poorly sculpted head was a small metal square, and on each square, neatly printed with a draftsman's hand, there was a name, twelve in all. Christ's apostles, clockwise in alphabetical order.

In the circle, on the floor, symbols had been drawn in chalk. A crude pentacle in yellow, a snake in white, and over everything, overlapping and in bright scarlet was the letter 'X', chalked over four times, in lurid spikes. Above the symbols was a horrid device. Eckert's savage realization of deus ex machina, its application witnessed by the blind bottle-glass eyes of the surrounding saints and the buzzing, swarming flies.

A metal frame rose as tall as a standing man, forming a cage above the runic images. Scaffolding bolted to the cage held cogs and cams and wheels and pulleys, all powered by a huge, crank-wound main spring in a boxlike framework of its own. The strange, oil-gleaming system of descending gears, looking for all the world like the works of some giant clock, drove a piston through a long, angled tube that ended at the back of a high wooden throne. A rod of tungsten steel, sharpen to a chisel point, was steadily pushed forward by the piston, each movement marked by the metronome swing of a weighted pendulum attached to the spring. This was the source of the thumping sound; the impact of the piston on the rod.

The target of the slowly moving spear sat rigid on the throne, facing the door. A man, dark, with a deep bruise vivid on the black skin of his temple, black eyed and naked, palms flat on the chair's broad arms, hands hideously pinioned by a pair of heavy spikes hammered flush between the bones. Some crushing tool had been used to tear away the nails, and the ends of the curled, talon fingers were chewed to bloody stumps.

The eyes bulged madly, held open by gleaming curved taxidermist needles threaded through the lids, and the man's spine was arched away from the seat in a vain desperate attempt to escape the descending rod. It had pushed through the flesh of his neck, one fractional movement at a time, digging slowly down through fat and muscle, narrowly missing the spinal cord, eventually cutting through the esophagus, silencing the tortured screams that had caused the man to bite through his tongue, then rupturing the madly beating heart. It had continued beyond the death throes, slicing onward and then coming out through the chest wall, letting the thickly flowing apron of blood ooze down the belly and the groin, pooling in the dead man's lap.

"Good god..."

"I don't think He had anything to do with this." Emma said quietly, eyes frozen on the horrific sight. How long had it taken for the man to die? He would have felt the first cutting stroke, knowing what was to come, felt it puncture his screaming throat. And after that- Emma tore her mind away from the thoughts.

A glitter of light reflected from the array of candles, and they turned upwards. It came from the ceiling, high above and back from the throne.

Eyes. Flashing chips of deep red glass. Eyes in the yellow wax face of the apostle that never was. Eckert's avenging angel- St.Patrick: The Final Judgement.

"Scott, you'd better get in here." Emma said into her phone, and turned her back to the grotesque seated horror to examine the mad paintings. John shook off the horror of the room, and viciously quashed his wish to flee.

Carefully reaching around the throne, he patted the pockets of the dead man, looking for a wallet or identification. All her found was a blood soaked sheet of note paper, with the address scrawled on it.

"Who do you think this is?"

"The other hunter."

"What?"

"When I was at the hospital, I discovered that another man was looking into Eckert's files." Emma explained. "He was described as a short black man. Our victim fits the profile." Emma neglected to mention that she knew it was him from the telepathic scan she'd pulled from the staff.

"I wonder why..."

"Christ!"

"Come in, Scott."

The X-Man entered the room, holding a hand over his mouth and nose. Even after seeing the culling pits of Apocalypse first hand, this was still a scene of ingenious horror. Emma motioned them both over to the paintings on the wall, away from the thumping device in the middle of the poles.

"Look at the paintings. They mirror the same symbols as those I found in Eckert's file. Fire, destruction, the Final Coming. But look at the buildings in these." Emma pointed, and both men made out the familiar buildings of the New York skyline.

"What are those things? Gas mains?" Scott motioned to the large hubs that were gouting flames in the painting.

"Yes. Wait a minute... those are the real mains for Manhattan. Look at the surrounding buildings. He's got each of the exploding mains at the right intersections." Caulder said, turning back to the others. "What if this isn't just delusion?"

"Planning to blow up New York seems a little fanciful." Emma started, but Scott waved her silent.

"I think I see what John is getting at, Emma. Eckert was a mechanical genius, right? He'd know that New York utilities are designed in bundle packets. If the gas lines exploded, it would likely cut electrical power as well. And the water pipes would go from steam pressure." Scott said.

"This is a big maybe. I'm going to take a look through the rest of this hellhole. If he's mining gas mains, we'll know about it from here." John headed towards the door, and Emma nodded.

"I'll be here a little longer." She said. Scott looked at her for a moment, waiting for Caulder to leave.

"Are you sure about this, Emma? This is not exactly--"

"Please Scott, the alpha male superhero concerns are tiring. Run along." Emma said, and Summers winced slightly at the steel in her voice. He nodded silently and followed John down the stairs. Emma circled the room slowly, finding a progression in the images; a sort of spiraled thread of madness.

The cycle of images aligned with the poles in the centre of the floor, and she was mentally counting hours as she followed the destruction. The last step was a church, sitting amidst the flames, its twin spires reached into the heavens, wreathed in the flames around it. A copper wire was pinned into the wall at the painted doorway of the church, and it threaded up to the mock skull of St. Patrick hanging from the ceiling. She looking back, to find herself at the pole for number 12. The scattered jumble came together, and she raced out of the room, almost tripping as she tore down the stairs.

John Caulder and Scott Summers were in the tiny cellar of the house, standing around a workbench with equally grim expressions. Emma dashed up to them, as they were pushing around the scattered bits of trash and supplies with a pencil.

"He was making thermite." Scott said offhandedly to Emma as she came up behind them.

"And he's got blueprints for the twelve mains in lower Manhattan. Wires, sparkplugs... he could have made any number of bombs." Caulder finished.

"He made twelve, and he's going to detonate them at midnight from St.Patrick's Cathedral." Emma said.

"What?"

"That's what that mural was. It's not totally an insane ranting. It's a plan. He's going to do it in," Emma checked her watch, "a little under an hour from now."

"Are you sure?" Caulder said, and edged back from the sudden ice that formed in Frost's expression. "Alright, alright. I'll call this into Piper. Scott, you get the car. We can make the church in time if we hurry." Scott took the keys and bounded up the stairs, leaving the hellish atmosphere of the house behind him. Caulder holstered his gun and turned away from the table.

"Midnight?"

"Midnight, detective." Emma said, her mouth set in a grim line. Caulder pulled out his celphone as the both went up the stairs, calling Piper and trying to arrange police to the house and the church, on the slimmest of excuses. He passed the door and a shivered worked down his spine. He was not able to dislodge that feeling inside; the voice that screamed 'Too late! Too late!' in his mind. John looked at the night sky, and in his minds eye, a thousand tongues of flame leapt into the velvet black sky.

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