Birds of Paradise by Oliver Langmead (read any book .TXT) 📗

– is a cathedral. I’m telling you that its every shard is devoted to the glory of God. I’m telling you that I am its architect, and its artist, and I have filled its walls with devotion greater than any mere mural or statue. I have rebuilt paradise. Do you understand me? I have rebuilt Eden, in God’s honour.”

When Adam thinks about God, he imagines it’s a lot like thinking about an absent parent. There is the faintest idea at the back of his mind that there was a presence, once, which taught him things like how to walk and how to speak, but following that presence is a long and uninterrupted absence. Adam imagines that there might have been a time when he missed God, but that time has passed. “Open the door.”

“You still don’t understand. This is my cathedral, and I have built its walls strong. My congregation and I are safe in here, and God is with us. You will never be allowed inside. You forsook your chance when you killed my wife. You are too far fallen, Adam.” Frank Sinclair turns to glare at Rook. “As for you, and all the rest of your kind – I am not merciless. I know how much you must long to return to your lost paradise. It wasn’t your fault you were cast out. As such, I am willing to let you in, but only on my terms. On God’s terms. As you were made.” Hauling the lever back on the pneumatic gun, he arms it. Shouldering through his stunned party of friends, he strides through the grasses and up the hill. “Return to your true forms, and submit to my God-given dominion over you, and I will let you return home!” he shouts. He stamps the grasses down beneath his indelicate feet, leaving a trail in his wake, and the bolt gun swings precariously in his grip, his hair wisping around him wildly. All at the airlock watch, paralysed by indecision as Frank Sinclair approaches the cherry tree. Only then do a few break away, realising what it is that he intends; rushing after him too late. “This swine still refuses to submit. Look at it – still pretending to be a person!”

Pig’s head is low, against his chest.

Frank Sinclair presses the bolt gun against Pig’s temple, and his expression is disgust. “Watch now, first man, as I exercise my dominion.”

The bolt gun bucks, and there is a soft thump.

XIII

Adam’s first children were beautiful; helpless creatures emerging mewling into the light of the garden. When they learned how to crawl, they crawled among the reeds, and watched the fishes swim, and mimicked the billowing of their gills, mimicked the flicking of their tails. When they learned to stand, they ran beneath the trees and followed the birds, flapping their arms as if they might find a gust of air and fly. With patience, and time, they began to understand their own domain, the space between earth and sky, where they could stand and squirm their feet in the rich soil as if they might be trees burying their roots, growing tall by the sustenance of the earth. And grow like trees they did, taller and taller, and stronger, arms like branches, faces held up to the sun as if they might soak up all that light.

When his children began to wither, it took Adam by surprise. This weakness running through them, making them hunched and small and wrinkled, was new. Adam had never known weakness, and he did not know the cause of it in his children. Their flesh began to bunch up over their bones, and their eyelids drooped low over their eyes, and their knees buckled beneath them, and then the first of his children collapsed and did not rise. They tried everything they could, he and Eve: they fed the broken child water, and pieces of fruit, and they put it in the full face of the sun as if it was a wilted flower that might only rise with enough light. But then the flesh began to fall from its softened limbs, and the animals of the garden pecked and gnawed at it as if its skin was berries, and soon it resembled no child but a rotting heap of pulp and bones.

They had no name for what had happened to their child, so they called it death.

* * *

As days pass in the flooded mansion, it begins to feel like a tomb.

Butterfly spends her time wandering from room to room and drawing the curtains. The sky is dull, and what little sunlight leaks in through the gaps sparkles in the droplets of water that drip from the mansion’s tall ceilings. She herself is a ghost, having exchanged her colours for drab, dark clothes scavenged from Ada Sinclair’s wardrobes: great black shrouds that drag behind her and snag on the sodden floorboards until they are ragged. Sometimes Adam tries to follow her, to find her and ease her shivering silent sobs, but he always loses her in the gloom of the mansion’s corridors. As days become nights become days, darkness grips the drowned corridors ever tighter, and rain patters intermittently against the windows, maintaining the waters engulfing the house.

Crow has taken to exploring the house’s many bookshelves in search of sheet music. There is a grand piano in the partially submerged ballroom, standing with its feet in the water, and by the light reflected through the tall broken windows she plays the songs she finds. No matter where Adam is in the house, the music is always distant. Notes echo eerily from the waters, as if the piano is itself submerged. Sometimes, when Crow runs out of sheet music, she plays songs from memory instead. Adam recognises tunes from different times – long-forgotten songs by dead composers – and he is not sure which he prefers: the piano’s mournful dirge, or the mansion’s dripping silence.

Rook has housed himself in Frank