Chapter 100

CREATION STORY

Birth is brutal, Tash knew that. Every birth is the same—whether it’s a mouse or a universe.

It’s always an ordeal.

And Tash experienced it—the pain of every birth that had ever been, from the first to the last.

She learned about this birth and this pain through Jack. The knowledge flowed from him and into her. He was there, very nearly at the beginning, so everything she experienced was true; she knew that.

She felt the heat from the explosion—the explosion that made everything.

She witnessed what followed—galaxies and solar systems materializing, stars being born, planets forming.

The sun was made, and she stared right at it without blinding herself and knew immediately that like everything else that had been born, it would die.

Hurtling through a sky that went rapidly from dark to light, she surveyed a world of green beneath her. Forests sprouted from the soil and spread over the planet. Mountains tore themselves out of the ground, the groaning world splitting as the great rocksreared up. Water gushed out from the cracks in the earth andwashed across the land in great oceans.

As she viewed creation, Tash had a sense that everything she was seeing had a supernatural hand guiding it. It was certainly not a natural event. She became more convinced of this as more life developed.

After the trees and the plants came the animals, the fish, and the birds. She couldn’t name some of the creatures she saw. They were strange. Behemoths slicing down jungles with their tails. Leviathans sweeping through the seas. Clouds of insects, miles wide, darkening the skies.

The earth bloomed. It was beautiful. But one part of it was more beautiful than the rest—it was greener, more brightly colored. It was a garden. And stumbling through it, two people. A man and a woman. They were naked, and their bodies were bloody, as if they had just been born.

Tash gazed at the oasis. She felt jealous that these two humans were allowed to live in such peace and beauty.

Then she spotted something else.

A shadow.

It moved through the undergrowth, taking on the form of a serpent.

Tash felt sick. Its vileness made her skin crawl.

The first evil, she thought and wondered how she could’ve known such a thing.

And a name came to her. Was it . . . pillow? Yellow. Something like that?

Pillow . . . pillow . . . up-elo . . .

Tash’s chest tightened.

Down in the garden, the serpent beckoned the woman. Tash tried to warn her, but she had no voice. The woman reached for a bright red fruit hanging from a tree.

The images whirled. Tash saw the woman give the fruit to the man, telling him to eat it. And when he did, darkness filled the sky. Suddenly, everything decayed. Weeds sprang from the earth. Thorns wrapped themselves around the trees. Animals that had lived together harmoniously began killing each other.

There was blood, and there was hate.

Tash wept.

She saw two brothers, clad in animal skin. One worked hard, skinning a goat. The other lurked nearby, watching—and the shadow clung to his shoulder.

It whispered in the brother’s ear.

Tash heard the words, Murder him and I will make you king.

So brother killed brother. He mutilated his sibling’s dead body. Soon the killer was coated in blood and gore. He dug his hand into the corpse and lifted something out of it, holding it up triumphantly.

Tash blinked. It was a golden orb. It shimmered. The shadow took the orb and swallowed it and the light dimmed and gloom fell across the land.

The shadow flashed away and raced over the earth, and wherever he went, there was savagery.

Tash cried because of all the suffering she witnessed.

Cities were built. The evil stain passed over them. Men killed. They built armies. They raided other cities. They made slaves of the conquered peoples. They raped women and murdered children.

Empires rose and fell, and blood stained the world.

There was nothing but darkness, nothing but pain.

But then the heavens opened, and what Tash could only describe as angels fell down to the earth. All across the world they mated with human women, and their offspring had light coming from their eyes. Tash felt an affinity with these children of angels and humans. She felt she was one of them. She knew she was one of them.

“Who are you?” she heard herself ask. “Who are we?”

We are nephilim, came the answer from somewhere.

The nephilim were all gathered together, and a voice Tash thought she recognized told them, “You are my new creation. You have sight beyond man. You are seers born as adversaries to the up-elo. Find him and curse him. But if he kills you in five, the world will be his. It’s my bargain with him.”

After their arrival, the world, although not perfect, became better. Evil was still on the earth, but it was counterbalanced by more goodness.

Tash saw the seers hunt the shadow. Many times they caught him and imprisoned him with a curse. But he got free each time, because he was able to persuade someone to kill for him. And then he’d hunt the seers, and although he wasn’t allowed to kill them, he could employ someone to murder for him. Murder and rip. So many times he’d been close to killing five. So many times the world teetered on the brink of chaos. So many times the seers saved the day.

But how long could this go on for?

The voice she thought she’d recognized came again, saying, “I made a terrible world. What kind of God am I?”

Tash wanted to scream, “Don’t abandon us,” but she had no voice.

Time swept by. Tash felt sick and dizzy. Suddenly beneath her, a city appeared. Dark and vast. The streets seemed familiar to her, but she was convinced she’d never seen them before.

The closer she got, she realized the place was London. Whitechapel. And the people wore Victorian clothes.

Everything was dirty and smelly, and corruption soiled in the air.

A man she recognized from the illustrations in Jonas Troy’s notebooks raced through the narrow streets. At his shoulder was the shadow again.

The man carried a knife that glinted in the moonlight.

The man, Tash knew, was Frederick Abberline.

The Ripper.

As if watching on fast-forward, Tash saw him savage four women. From the bodies of three, he tore out organs, and he salvaged a golden orb, exactly like the one she’d seen the brother hold up. He had killed one woman and was about to disembowel her when a group of men appeared in the alley.

Elizabeth Stride, thought Tash.

The Ripper slipped away before the men saw him. He slipped away before he could rip.

A fifth woman waited in a grubby, little room. She looked scared, waiting for death. She sang a song.

Sweet violets sweeter than the roses covered all over from head to toe . . .

Tash wanted to comfort the woman and found herself calling out to the her, despite not knowing who she was. But then she did know.

“Mary,” she heard herself say, “Mary . . . ”

The shadow came to the woman’s door and went in, and it was soon followed there by Abberline.

Terrified, Tash watched him murder Mary and eviscerate her, removing the golden orb from inside her body. He handed it to the dark figure, who swallowed it whole.

The door burst open. Men spilled into the blood-stained room. They were angry. They pinned the Ripper Abberline to the floor. But the shadow fled, despite being stabbed and assaulted.

Some of the men, including Jonas Troy, chased the shadow through the streets.

They called his name . . . up-elo . . . up-elo . . . up-elo . . .

They cornered him and cursed him and threw him down a well.

The world reeled on after that, and Tash followed its evolution—technology, wars, famine, she witnessed it all at high-speed. Finally, life slowed, and she stared in horror at a familiar scene.

Her dad in a flat with Spencer Drake. Outside the flat, a dark figure lurked. Tash cried out, trying to warn her father. But he couldn’t hear. And he answered the door when the stranger knocked.

She grabbed her hair and screamed as the ugly, strange looking trespasser pummeled her father with a hammer, before Dad’s own snake coiled itself around his throat and strangled him.

Tash shrieked. And then Tash felt she was falling. She gasped for breath and flailed at the air. She started to scream. Gravity dragged her towards the earth, and the ground rushed up to meet her.

She crashed on to a bed, the springs creaking under her weight. She rolled over quickly and took in her surroundings.

“No,” she said, “no, please . . . ”

It was the room where Mary Kelly had been murdered in 1888.