Free For A Few Souls More (Heaven's Gate Book 3) by Guy Adams Page A

unsettle.”
    The concierge inclined his head in acquiescence. “I can see that might be the case.” It inclined its head towards the girl. “You claim this man as yours?”
    “I do if there’s a bounty.”
    “There is. A generous one. There is also a penalty for anyone found harbouring him. Surely both are your due. Which do you wish to claim first?”
    The kid thought for a moment and then sighed. She knew when she’d been outmanoeuvred. “Fucking cheat,” she cursed, turning on her heels. She spared a final look to Jones, though she knew his sightless eyes wouldn’t appreciate the fact. “Watch out for them, my little outlaw,” she said, “they’re tricksters all.”
    “I know it,” he replied.
    “Can the man that killed God be tricked?” asked the concierge, amusement in his voice.
    “Of course,” Jones replied, “but he can bite back pretty fucking hard when it happens.”
    “I just bet he probably doesn’t need my arm to guide him either?”
    “He does not.”
    “Walk this way then, God Killer, the council have been looking forward to meeting you.”
    As Henry Jones entered the building, the cool air that washed over him was most welcome. His boot heels echoed around him, bouncing between marble floor and a vaulted ceiling.
    Out of the chaos of Golgotha’s streets, his ‘sight’ began to return to him, that heightened sense of his place in a room. He could map out the size of the foyer, could sense the spiralling stairwell that ran from its end, descending down into the earth for an immeasurable distance. He could also sense the solitary elevator, its doors open, that lay next to the stairwell. Had there been anyone else in the foyer but himself and the concierge, he would have sensed them too, rocks around which the air of the room flowed.
    None of which allowed him to fully appreciate the tone of the place. He could sense a sculpted structure at the centre of the room, could even discern its shape. He couldn’t, however, take in its subject. He didn’t recognise the various human forms that went into its construction. Perhaps, had they been more isolated by the sculptor, he would have recognised them for what they were. That had not been the artist’s vision. The bodies curled and flowed into one another, as if the subjects were terrified at the thought of being unique. It was a grotesque sight as they fought to enter and be entered, not a sexual image, not given the look of terror on their faces, rather a curse that forced them to try and bond, fist into gullet, foot into anus, until there would be only one, amorphous mass left at the centre.
    He could tell that they were surrounded by paintings, their heavy gilt frames standing proud from the walls. But he couldn’t see their subjects.
    In one, a procession of schoolchildren formed a happy queue at the open door of their headmaster. They laughed and jostled one another, peering inside to watch him as he slit and carved, a master butcher at work, breaking them down into their respective cuts on the tiled floor. At the head of the queue, a child, eager to help, was sketching out dotted lines across his skin, helpful directions for the knife to follow. The headmaster appeared quite content in his work, though the artist had worked to bring a sense of exhaustion to the man’s face—when would this work be done?
    In another, while the brushwork was different, a theme was shared: the human animal. Man, woman and child frolicked in the pig pen, naked and jubilant. They ran, copulated, defecated and fought, wild and happy in the straw and shit.
    Yet another, this the product of a very angry painter if the brushwork was anything to go by. In places the canvas looked at the very threshold of having torn, distended and uneven, held together by the paint. The subject was presumably the infernal equivalent of Bosch or Blake, wishing to purge the horrific into art. Not for this artist the landscapes of Hell or depictions of a medieval devil.