Free Thy Fearful Symmetry by Richard Wright

for the exploitation. It would take only a little work, some suggestion and cajoling, to have the priest cavorting through fields of debauchery. Even now, the temptation to meddle was almost overwhelming. The chuckle that fluttered past his lips caused the priest to turn, his lips white.  
    “Apologies,” Ambrose said. “Just meditating on old habits dying hard.” Calum twitched, and Ambrose wondered what he had inferred from that.
    “Will you tell me what's going on?” The priest was persistent. Sighing, Ambrose looked around the room, at the uncovered, dusty floorboards, the white plastered walls flaking gently to dust, the moth-eaten curtains.
    “Are you sure you want to know?” Calum opened his mouth to speak, and Ambrose shushed him with a finger. “Think about it. I could leave, take Pandora with me, abandon you to live your life in sweet ignorance. That's almost as good as bliss, so I'm given to understand.” Pausing, he watched Calum's face to see if his words were sinking in. “I'd be doing you a favour.”
    Calum stared, and Ambrose realised what it meant for them if he had actually managed to talk sense into the man. Where would he and Pandora go? To his relief, the priest shook his head. “Tell me.”
    Ambrose paused, knowing he was avoiding doing that very thing. “Close the curtains first. We had best keep them drawn from now on. Prying eyes, and so forth.” Calum nodded, pulling the coarse brown curtains to, throwing the room into shadow until he flicked the light switch. Above them, the bare bulb flickered to half-life. Lacking natural light, the room looked bleaker than ever. All the better for delivering harsh truths.
    “Very well. You're right. That was no visitor from Hell. Not even Lucifer can walk on sanctified ground without suffering consequences like I did before you absolved me.” Guilt washed over Calum's face, and Ambrose realised something else was bothering the man. “In fact,” he continued, watching closely, “it gets worse the more powerful you are. You'd have worked that out by now, if you were thinking clearly. Sinners don't spontaneously combust when they cross the threshold every Sunday morning, do they? Only the extreme worst among humans can accumulate a fraction of the sin in one lifetime that an immortal demon can over millennia. So, they feel discomfort in church, maybe a little hot and bothered, but only rarely will they actually burn.” Calum nodded, some of his anxiety dissolving beneath the force of his intense curiosity. Doubtless he was thinking back to the few examples his fellow clergy might have mentioned of people bursting into flame in the pews. Were they urban myth, or reality? Ambrose knew they were a mixture of both. “I'm a fallen angel, who warred openly with God. When I step into these places, I burn like dry tinder. At least, that was the case until recently.” Again, that dark flush spread over Calum's cheeks, and he averted his eyes. Curious.  
    “It’s a question of scale,” he continued. “If the Lord Leviathan set foot past the church gate, there'd be an explosion, a big one, like Michael when he tried to take me.” Ambrose knew that Calum had been by the site of that encounter, and had seen the ruins of the tenements that so recently stood there. “Nobody knows what would happen if Lucifer tried it. I expect that not a lot of Glasgow would be left. If one of my former brethren had been stupid enough to manifest next to you inside a church, I'd be wiping you off whatever remained of the walls.”
    Calum shuddered, his imagination obviously good. Ambrose paused to let him come to the natural conclusion. The man's posture told the story before his eyes filled up, his shoulders slumping as the size and scope of what was due him sank in. “That means...”
    “Colloquially speaking, you're fucked.” It was better to be brutal and get whatever reactions were to come out of the way, but the priest rallied better than Ambrose