Authors: Al Ruksenas
“
Hurry! Before the moment is past!” Sherwyck commanded.
Senator Dunne stepped up to the gurney and took the container from the attendant. He gazed longingly at the naked body on the red velvet cloth, then dabbed two fingers deeply into the greasepaint.
The Senator smeared a line from one shoulder down her side, across her body just above the pubic area—sighing at how luscious she looked—and swirled it back up several inches along the outside of her opposite thigh.
He did the same—longingly—along the other side of her body and across to the other thigh.
Victor Sherwyck came up to Senator Dunne, who cringed slightly when he did, and took the container from him.
“
Our time has come! May this night bear us fruit, so tomorrow we rule!”
Sherwyck dabbed his forefinger into the greasepaint with a flourish and smeared a V from between her legs several inches up her belly then crossed the tops like a T.
At this point she began stirring into consciousness.
“
Behold the
Grimorium Verum
! Behold the vessel that will carry our plea!”
Victor Sherwyck nodded to Senator Dunne, who approached the gurney.
He then nodded to Mr. Knowlton, who stepped up next to him.
Sherwyck nodded again and Philip Taylor came to the other side of the autopsy cart with the woman looking back and forth in terror at the faces leering down at her.
He nodded one more time and Mrs. Knowlton approached the cart next to Taylor, looking with sneering envy at the beautiful body before her and eager to destroy it.
A small circle of other cultists loomed in the background, droning their infernal chant.
Victor Sherwyck gazed up along the shaft to the floor above. He stretched out his hands in a dark embrace formed by the long flowing sleeves of his black velvet robe.
“
The aura of the Devil’s Eye! Enfolding all around! Its ageless power moves the earth, to grant our deserved plea!”
“
Raise your daggers!” he commanded.
The two attendants stepped back towards those gathered in the background. The closely bunched group blended with the darkness like a sinister, swaying velvet wall.
Those around the gurney grabbed at the handles of the sacrificial knives lined along the struggling woman’s body. They raised them slowly over their heads.
The woman let out a piercing, elongated scream.
“
Let nature act to hide our hand! In causing what’s to be!” Sherwyck shouted above the shriek. “Strike at our foe, high placed and: ‘Lo! Bring on our victory!”
At that instant, Philip Taylor, tingling with expectation of world renown, and excitedly poised to strike at the breast of the woman, fell in a heap to the floor, hitting his face on the edge of the gurney and tumbling onto his back. The blade was still clutched in his limp outstretched hand.
A stream of blood was spurting between his death glazed open eyes.
All froze in shocked silence and peered in the darkness toward the light of the door that had opened from the storage area.
There stood Colonel Christopher Caine, slowly unscrewing the silencer from his Beretta.
“
Sure enough,” he said icily. “The center of the Star.”
He looked to his right and left and strode toward the group.
“
Unlock those shackles!” he snarled in a slow, commanding voice.
Senator Dunne, closest to him, immediately raised his hands in surrender, then clumsily placed his dagger behind him onto the gurney. It touched the woman’s knee. She vigorously shook it aside.
Knowlton, still entranced, recognized Caine immediately as the quarrelsome Colonel at the reception and shouted: “How dare you?”
He flashed his dagger in defiance and shouted again: “How dare you?”
Knowlton slashed the blade downward toward the woman’s torso amid a loud report from Caine’s pistol. He dropped instantly on the opposite side of the gurney from Taylor; the dark blade catching the edge and flopping onto the ground next to him just as the echo of the shot subsided.
Mrs. Knowlton looked on in horror as her husband fell and scurried comically around the cart in her oversized robe. Pushing past Dunne, who jostled the obscene altar, she saw the velvet clad body alongside it and turned on Caine in a rage.
“
You beast!” she hollered and charged him with her dagger poised to strike.
He wagged his pistol to ward her off, but to no avail. She was upon him in seconds. Caine squeezed the trigger and she fell at his feet; his shot resounding through the chamber.
Victor Sherwyck edged along the gurney and looked down in shocked disbelief at Philip Taylor—his instrument of glory—mouth agape in the same way Taylor’s was locked in terminal surprise.
Caine saw one of the supplicants beyond the cart fumbling at his hip for something under his robe. Caine sensed it was a weapon and fired unerringly across the room. The bullet whizzed audibly past Senator Dunne’s ear and instantly dropped a disciple who was one of the night shift guards.
Sherwyck kept edging around the autopsy cart—followed by the terror stricken eyes of the struggling woman upon it—until he was next to Senator Dunne. Dunne shuffled slightly, but perceptibly away from him.
Caine waved his pistol at them. “Get back! Away from her!”
Dunne quickly joined the others, while Sherwyck hesitated, staring, testing.
Caine aimed demonstratively at Sherwyck’s head. Sherwyck was confident he would not fire. Caine squeezed another round, the noise of which reverberated once more through the chamber.
Sherwyck’s face was pale. He felt the searing heat of a bullet passing next to his ear inside his hood. He was not sure if this arrogant interloper was a bad shot or deliberately provocative.
He looked back at shuffling noises behind him and saw the remainder of the robed group mumbling over the fallen body of the union steward.
For the first time since he was ensconced in America, Victor Sherwyck felt unsure. A fleeting thought of failure crossed his ancient mind. It could not be! Philip Taylor was dead. Still, he was but a temporary cog. Capitulation could still be had. Everything was still in place.
The sacrifice could yet be made. She lay before the group.
The President would fall. Sherwyck, through his force of will, could still impose on the next in nuclear command.
He will, he thought. He needed just a little time to outwit this despoiling intruder. He would salvage the triumphant moment.
Sherwyck raised his hands, as if in compliance, turned and walked slowly around the shackled woman to the group behind him. He looked intently at her, spread eagled on the red velvet cloth, then resignedly at Philip Taylor’s body, spread eagled on the floor.
In the momentary silence, footfalls and shouts filled the hallway amid urgent banging on the door to the chamber. Then, gunfire.
Sherwyck smirked at his remaining followers. Their sentinels would save the night. He would have his victory. Sherwyck stared at his supplicants in cold calculation.
“
Our people are at hand! The infidel has used all his bullets! Take him! Kill him!”
At this, Sherwyck’s sycophantic butler shouted: “Take him! Kill him!”
His stupefied followers flayed their hands and charged at Caine on the other side of the gurney. Their robes flowed as one, covering Sherwyck’s quick move to grab Philip Taylor’s sacrificial dagger from his lifeless hand.
Only Dunne, the Senator, stood frozen in place.
Caine opened fire on the charging line, cursing the Sorcerer, and toppling his cultists in rapid succession. Two of the infernal worshippers pitched onto the gurney, pushing it towards him. He quick
‐
stepped back as he fired. Several realized too late that bullets were spewing from Caine’s empty pistol. They fell in a line, deceived by their false Master.
The terrified woman looked helplessly on, but heartened by the bedlam around her that she might still survive.
Sherwyck stood still with his hands crossed, the obsidian blade deep in his sleeve.
Senator Dunne stood nearby staring in fear at Caine.
The other robed figures lay in various positions of death along the floor.
“
Where’s the other woman?” Caine demanded as he roughly unbuttoned his shirt, then deftly switched his Beretta from hand to hand as he pulled each arm from the sleeves.
A flash of perplexity in the Sorcerer’s piercing eye betrayed to Caine that Sherwyck didn’t know. His goons have her elsewhere, he thought. Alvin Carruthers knew every corner of the building. He’d find her. He had to.
Caine moved to the autopsy cart. She huddled to the limits of her shackles as he stretched the shirt over her torso, barely covering her. She winced seeing the prominent scar on his chest.
“
Where’s the key?” he commanded.
“
One of these poor souls must have it,” Sherwyck replied in a cynically innocent voice. “They provide. I merely preside.”
“
You have the smell of hell about you,” Caine said dismissively.
“
And how is it you presume to know?” Victor Sherwyck asked haughtily.
“
I’ve been to your roost.”
A look of rage came over Sherwyck. “You lie!” he shouted. “Only those who rise from there are witness to the place! An ageless legion of disciples preparing the way for our Prince!”
Senator Dunne listened quietly, hunched slightly in humiliation.
“
Now, now,” Caine said in deliberate belittlement, baiting the ever composed Presidential adviser. “You overreach!”
“
You impudent fool!” Sherwyck raged. “The power of the Devil’s Eye is seared in every page of history!”
“
Now! Now! Now!” Caine goaded—keen to the shuffling outside the door and eager to get the woman off the gurney.
“
The spell of our Prince captivates all! It pulsates through every fragment of the priceless Eye so purposely given in shares to the world!”
“
And we’re supposed to thank you for it?”
“
You are supposed to worship it!” Sherwyck yelled, his veins bulging at his neck.
“
I’ve seen it, Victor,” Caine said derisively, using his first name. “I spit on it!”
“
You lie!” Sherwyck shrieked again, his body throbbing with increasing rage. He had never been challenged before. “How dare you? You saw nothing!”
“
Warlock told me.”
“
Warlock? Warlock?”
“
Nikolai Kuznetsov. Remember him?”
“
How? What?” Victor Sherwyck felt vulnerable beyond the Beretta pointed in his direction.
“
So long ago. Smuggling you here. You shouldn’t have killed him. He wouldn’t have talked.”
“
Nonsense! You lie! Dead men don’t talk!”
“
Ahh, but what is this?” Caine said with a grand sweep of his pistol. “Human sacrifice. Necromancy. Seeking favor through the dead?”
“
You insolent infidel!”
“
Your vocabulary is diminishing,” Caine scoffed with narrowing eyes.
Victor Sherwyck breathed heavily, sputtering with rage. No one alive had ever insulted him, much less dared flaunt authority over him.
Senator Everett Dunne unexpectedly lifted his round, boyish face and blurted: “He told me to say it! He told me to use ‘Warlock’ all these years! He told me it was Nikolai Kuznetsov! He gave me all the leads out of Moscow! He told me what to do!”
Victor Sherwyck’s rage suddenly found an outlet.
He pulled the hidden dagger from his sleeve and drove it wildly into Dunne’s chest
“
You said you would never betray me!” he yelled and followed the collapsing Senator to the floor with his hand still on the handle of the blade. “Traitor!” He snarled into the Senator’s fading face. “You’re not worthy!”