Four - The Vaults Of Hell
Aziraphale couldn't believe his luck.
He'd thought all of the 86 AD Carthage vintage was long gone, but it turned out that Crowley had an entire amphora of it in his wine cellar. Aziraphale couldn't resist opening it to give it a sniff – oh, that was just divine – but then he closed it again. He couldn't come to Crowley's house and start drinking his best wine on the first day.
We're not friends.
Aziraphale closed his eyes to the cellar's semidarkness. No, they weren't anymore. And yet...
The moment Crowley had turned around to face him after nearly hitting him with the car, Aziraphale had felt a strong desire to run up to him and throw his arms around him. To touch his bleeding forehead and miracle it better. To make him smile that wicked smile of his again.
Aziraphale had thought he had pulled up the barriers between them again, but it turned out they were still squarely shattered.
But he didn't do any of it. Pure business was for the best. They had a job to do; Christ was not going to wait for them to figure things out between them.
To be honest, Aziraphale didn't even think they could. Nothing had changed, really. He still knew he had made the right decision. And the right thing was clearer than ever in his mind. Aziraphale had tried getting both what he wanted and what he needed at the same time once before. Of course Crowley had said no to coming to Heaven with him; Aziraphale could have known that from the start. But he'd tried anyway, with all the results that had yielded. He was not going to be so foolish as to try again.
That didn't mean that it didn't hurt. Being around Crowley still felt so familiar, and it sparked equal amounts of joy and pain in Aziraphale's chest. But he couldn't let himself be distracted.
So. To the task at hand, then.
The reason why he was down here in the cellar was to conceal the villa from sight. If he and Crowley were spotted here, he could say goodbye to any hopes of preventing the Second Coming of Christ. As for his own fate, and Crowley's... he didn't know exactly what their punishment would be this time, but it wouldn't be pretty, and there would be no way out.
Luckily, as Supreme Archangel, his miracling was much less monitored than before. So Aziraphale closed his eyes, concentrated, and withdrew the entirety of the villa from the spheres. He nodded, pleased with the result. No one would find them here now.
Up on the ground level, Crowley was taking his plants from the box and putting them into their places. He didn't notice Aziraphale, or pretended not to. Aziraphale watched him place the plants all over the place, seemingly haphazardly, though he suspected Crowley's iron mind had devised a strict system to it. The sun was starting to lower in the sky and shone in through the western window, lighting Crowley's hair on fire.
Crowley threw the last plant towards a window – it landed perfectly upside up on the windowsill – and swirled his lanky body around to face Aziraphale.
'So. How is Christ going to be Coming to Earth?' he asked.
Aziraphale cleared his throat. 'Well, much the same as last time. A woman will be selected for the honour of giving birth to Him.'
Crowley made a face. 'Not much of an honour, though, is it? If I recall correctly, human births are quite strenuous. Something with the size of the head. Bit of a design flaw, don't you think?'
'Well, I think there must be some –' Aziraphale sputtered.
'Now cats, they're good at it. Pop 'em out, one after the other,' Crowley said. 'And horses? They're weird as Hell, as animals go, but their young can stand and run from minute one. And giraffes, did you know they give birth while standing? That's a six foot drop! And then the little one gets on its own feet and merrily runs away. And hyenas, you know about hyenas?'
The smile was creeping over Aziraphale's face before he could stop himself. Crowley was pacing up and down, hands gesticulating, eyes shining. Oh, how he had missed this sight.
Then Crowley saw his smile, stuttered, and trailed off. 'Anyway. So. We have to prevent it.'
'Yes, we do,' Aziraphale said quickly.
Crowley let himself fall onto the couch. 'So, who is this poor unenviable woman to be, then?'
Aziraphale sat down in a chair opposite him. 'I don't know. There is a list of women, with notes on who had declined the honour, or had otherwise been written off. Or at least there was, until Michael managed to lose it.'
'Lose it,' Crowley repeated flatly.
'It must be somewhere, but I am rather sure she hid it from me on purpose. If we had the list, we could figure out who it was to be. But I wouldn't know where to look.'
'It's not in some forgotten corner of Heaven?'
That made Aziraphale think for a moment. Did Heaven even have any corners? He didn't think so. At any rate, it wouldn't be in Heaven. 'She'd hide it in a place where no other angel would find it.'
'Right,' Crowley said. 'Well, there's the Vaults.'
'The... Vaults?'
'The Vaults of Hell. They put all kinds of stuff in there that needs to disappear. Securest place there is. The Vaults would be my bet. '
'But... Michael's an angel,' Aziraphale said, shocked. 'She wouldn't go to the Vaults of Hell!'
Crowley gave him a look from under his eyebrows. 'Two words. Miracle. Towel.'
'Right,' Aziraphale said. He remembered very well – and with some pleasure – the look of utter shock on Michael's face at the sight of him-as-Crowley in the bath of holy water. But she had otherwise behaved like someone who knew her way around Hell. She would know about the Vaults.
'So, the Vaults then.' He clapped his hands together, reinvigorated by the sudden sense of direction. They had a place. They had a plan. 'How are we going to break into them?'
'You can't break into the Vaults of Hell!' said Crowley. 'It's better guarded than the Ninth Circle. If you even come near enough to put your finger through the door, you lose the finger. Can't be done.'
'Tosh,' Aziraphale said.
Crowley shook his head. 'No way. Even if we got in, we'd never get out.' He put on his sunglasses and got up from the couch. 'You'll have to think of something else.'
'This is the only way, Crowley!' Aziraphale insisted. 'We'll have to manage.' Crowley shook his head and walked out of the room. Aziraphale sighed and added: 'You forget, I am an Archangel now. I can do a lot more thi–'
Crowley turned around in the doorframe. Stone-faced and stone-voiced, but his eyes blazed through his sunglasses. 'I never forget that.'
Crowley hated Aziraphale.
He hated him for a lot of different reasons, but the most pressing one was currently the fact that they were standing on top of a dune, looking down at the gates of the Vaults of Hell. And, worse, the fact that Crowley actually believed they needed to get inside.
The gates rose up from the desert sand like a mirage, but Crowley suspected they would be all too physical when they shut you inside. He couldn't actually see the Vaults themselves; it looked like there were just two doors with nothing behind them. They were thirty feet tall and twelve wide, and the entire three-hundred-and-sixty square feet surface of them was decorated with images of torture, interspersed with sigils. Crowley didn't know them all, but he didn't need to, to guess what they meant.
'Right,' he said.
Aziraphale did not seem to share his sense of doom. He stepped out of the Bentley and wrung his hands. 'That was conveniently nearby.'
'They had the same thinking process as me. No one's likely to find something in the middle of the Sahara, unless they know where it is.'
'Lucky we have you, then,' Aziraphale said with that self-satisfied smile of his.
The sun was rising in the east. Crowley had made two conditions. One, Aziraphale would do as he said. Two, they would go during the day. This was going to be dangerous enough in itself. They couldn't have all manner of nightly terrors added to this ordeal.
But that also meant they had had to wait for the next dawn. This was the second day. Astaroth had only given him three. Crowley had woken with a kind of lump in his throat that he hadn't been able to swallow away.
'So, what's the first line of defence?' Aziraphale asked primly.
'There's a keypad at the door. Secret code, all of that. Then there's the dragons.'
'Dragons!' Aziraphale repeated.
'What, you thought this was going to be easy? There's supposed to be two of them. Once you're past the dragons, there's no more guards that I know of. There's bound to be booby traps, of course. And we'll have to get out, too.'
'Right.' Aziraphale swallowed. 'There we go, then.' He stepped forward, down the slope of the dune.
A muffled screech sounded through the desert.
Aziraphale startled and stopped in his tracks. 'What was that?'
Crowley looked about him. On the opposite slope, right next to the gates, the sand was moving, like something was digging itself out. Or a lot of somethings.
Then an arm appeared. It was dry and partly skeletal, and it groped about from the hole.
'What are those?' Aziraphale asked.
'Oh, did I not mention the ghouls?' Crowley said.
'No you didn't!' Aziraphale's voice was rising in pitch. 'What do we do?'
'Don't worry, they don't like the sunlight,' Crowley said.
Multiple arms had appeared now, in various states of decomposition. He saw a head too now, dark and desiccated. As he watched, the ghoul hauled its entire upper body out of the sand. It looked up, empty eye sockets locking on them, and screeched again.
Two dozen other voices answered from below the sand.
'They don't seem to like us much either,' Aziraphale said. He made as if to grab Crowley's arm, but then turned the gesture into a nervous flapping. 'Crowley! What do we do?'
'Er...' More heads were appearing. The first ghoul pulled itself completely free. 'Run,' Crowley said.
They pelted down the dune, towards the gates. The ghouls screeched in indignation and began to free themselves even more frantically. Three, four were on their feet now, and were staggering in their direction.
Crowley and Aziraphale reached the gates. Crowley whirled around to face the ghouls. There were nearly thirty of them, walking and crawling towards them, screeching and howling.
'The code! What's the code?' Aziraphale shouted in his ear.
'I don't know!' Crowley answered.
'You don't know!?' Aziraphale repeated. His voice was starting to take on an edge of panic. 'Couldn't you have said that before?'
The first ghoul had reached them. It stretched out a rotting arm towards Crowley.
'Begone!' Aziraphale shouted. He made a sweeping motion with his arm and the ghoul was blasted away. It landed ten feet away from them. The head snapped off the body.
'Nice,' Crowley said.
The body got up and began to move towards them again.
'Shit,' Aziraphale said.
'The keypad,' Crowley panted. 'Where is it?'
'Here, you idiot!' Aziraphale pointed.
Crowley ran towards the keypad and peered at it. He grinned. 'Just what I thought.'
The keypad looked like this:
⓶
⓸ ⓹ ⓺
⓻ ⓼ ⓽
The buttons for the 1 and the 3 were completely scorched away. 'Typical. They never bother to douse their fingers properly.' Crowley pressed the 1 and the 3 in quick succession. Inside the door a click sounded.
'Begone!' Aziraphale boomed again. A flash and a wave of pressure passed by Crowley. In the corner of his eye, he saw three ghouls fly away. More were coming from the other side. Their screeching was deafening.
He kicked the door open. It moved only a little, but it was enough.
'Quick!' He slipped inside. Aziraphale squeezed in after him. Together they grabbed the door handle and pulled. Squeaking, the door closed, shutting out the screams of the ghouls and enveloping them in darkness.
There they stood, panting, hearts beating, their backs pressed against the doors.
Crowley began to laugh.
After a moment, Aziraphale joined in. They bent over, gasping for air with helpless laughter until the darkness echoed with it.
'Ah! That was great,' Crowley said when he had regained his breath. He took off his sunglasses to wipe the tears from his eyes. The adrenaline was still coursing through his blood. He felt alive again. He didn't know when he had last felt like that. He didn't know when he had last laughed like that either. It felt good.
'Impressive, that trick with "Begone,"' he said to Aziraphale in the dark.
'I thought so too,' Aziraphale said, a smile in his voice. 'Now, let's have some light...'
A silver orb glowed up close to where his voice came from. It lit up his face and eyes, and then the rest of the room.
Crowley looked around.
They were standing on the topmost step of a staircase that went down so deep Aziraphale's light could not reach the bottom. What they did see were the dim shapes of two serpentine tails, draped over the steps like a stair carpet.
'I actually thought dragons were all extinct since the sixth century,' Aziraphale said.
'This is the last breeding pair,' Crowley answered.
'Ah.' Aziraphale swallowed. 'Well, here goes nothing.'
'You should have brought your flaming sword,' Crowley muttered as they began to slowly walk down the stairs. Aziraphale's light hovered after them.
'Bit too late to go back now, don't you think?' Aziraphale answered.
Step by step more of the dragons were revealed. Huge scaled backs, leathery wings the size of football pitches. Crowley swallowed at the sight of a hind leg with claws longer than his arm. Then they could see the heads. Horned, teethed, and with scorch marks around them. The eyes were closed.
'Hello?' Aziraphale called out carefully.
Crowley spluttered. 'What are you doing, you idiot?' he hissed. 'Don't wake sleeping... well, dragons!'
Aziraphale motioned his hand and the light brightened a little. 'Crowley, I don't think they are sleeping.'
Now Crowley saw it too. One of the dragons had a sword planted in its forehead. The other's head was completely severed. A dark stain of blood covered the floor around it.
Aziraphale walked up to the sword. He pulled it out with a zzzwap like a plunger coming loose. 'This is a Heavenly sword!'
'Well, we know which Archangel likes to slay dragons,' Crowley said. He felt a great anger rising in him. 'Oh, you'll pay for this, Michael!' he growled.
'Michael – yes, that proves she's been here, at least,' Aziraphale said. 'Come on. The list must be here somewhere.'
'The last breeding pair!' Crowley cried. He looked around at the two motionless shapes. Their scales glittered in Aziraphale's silver light. The eyes were closed, but he knew exactly what they looked like. They looked like his own. He felt tears welling up. True, he hadn't relished the thought of facing two live dragons, but to see them dead... Now they were truly extinct.
Crowley stalked up to where Aziraphale was still standing and reached for the sword. Aziraphale held it back. Crowley tried to reach past him, but Aziraphale held up a hand to stop him. 'Crowley! We have a job to do. We have no time for indulgences.'
Something in the tone of his voice and the faint flush that coloured his cheeks suggested he meant something more than murdering Michael. It was that which brought Crowley back to himself. He dropped his hand.
'Fine,' he grated. 'But as soon as we're out of here...'
'Yes, well, we'll talk about that later. Now let's go.'
Aziraphale beckoned the floating light, and they descended down the stairs.
.
The Vaults of Hell looked like an office basement that had been used for storing files since the beginning, and never been cleared out since. The walls, rising up out of the circle of light, were filled with shelves, which were filled with boxes, which were filled with papers to the point of overflowing. In the centre of the Vaults stood a chest, on top of which were piled more boxes. Loose papers littered the ground. Crowley looked at one in front of his feet. Someone with pointy teeth had taken a bite out of it.
'Right,' Aziraphale said. He clapped his hands together. 'You go right, I go left?'
Crowley nodded. Aziraphale snapped his fingers and his light split in two, one orb bobbing towards Crowley. When it came near him, it turned red.
They went their separate ways.
Crowley opened a random box. It contained a stack of papers. The cover page said: Jack the Ripper – Evidence and Identity. Crowley let out an amused huff.
Next to the box was an envelope. On the front was written in a hasty handwriting: The Secret to Curing Smallpox. 'That one's been here for a while,' Crowley muttered.
The next box was labelled L. Beelzebub – Things to be Swept under the Rug. Crowley made a face.
He had already moved to the next box (labelled Rongorongo cypher) when a thought occurred to him. He looked back at the Beelzebub box. This was a secret of Hell, hidden in the Vaults. What if there were more? What if the instructions for the technique of Stripping, which Astaroth had so relishingly related, were hidden here?
Crowley put back the Rongorongo box and began to search in earnest.