Authors: Andrew Mayne
“
Y
OU KNOW WHAT
you have to do,” said the distant voice at the other end of the phone.
Sheriff Jessup nodded. Moonlight glinted off the cars parked in front of the small church: the Alsops' rusted Jeep, Bear McKnight's new pickup truck, Reverend Curtis's Cadillac that had been a bequest from Elena Partridge when she passed. All of them were here.
He
was here.
Jessup was a powerful man. Six-foot-three, weighing close to three hundred pounds, he was more muscle than fat. The teenagers and wise-asses in town gave him a wide berth. His handcuffs usually stayed on his belt. One grip of his iron fingers on your collar and you knew you were up against a force of nature.
The occasional fool who tried to outrun the sheriff found out the former high school football player who could sprint with the best of the track team hadn't lost much speed with age.
Jessup walked up the stone steps to the church and entered the doorway. Adam Alsop turned in the pew where he was sitting next to his wife and watched with confusion as Jessup bolted the door shut.
“Carson?” asked Adam, calling the sheriff by his first name.
Natalie Alsop, with her gray hair pulled back in a bun and the same tired eyes as everyone else, froze when she saw the ferocity of the sheriff's expression.
Reverend Curtis and Bear McKnight were huddled at the lectern turning the pages of the church's oversized Bible.
“Christ,” McKnight said as he saw the sheriff.
Jessup walked first toward the Alsops. Adam was paralyzed with panic as the sheriff clenched his neck, thick fingers stabbing into his throat. His wife tried pulling at Jessup's thickly corded arm, but was backhanded so hard her head cracked against the wooden pew, knocking her out cold.
McKnight ran toward Jessup to intervene. His heavy footsteps were the only other sound in the hall besides the gurgling noise coming from Adam Alsop's mouth as he tried to breathe.
Reverend Curtis hurried to the back of the church, toward the fire exit he'd reluctantly installed after the fire marshal had demanded it. His frantic hands pulled at the crossbar. The door wouldn't open. Something was blocking it from the outside.
Curtis turned back as Sheriff Jessup grabbed McKnight by the arms and bit into his shoulder, tearing away a mouthful of flesh. Even more shocking than the savage act was the cold dispassionate look in the sheriff's eyes. It was the lifeless stare of a great white shark on the hunt. A predator that didn't see another life, only something to be eaten.
McKnight screamed and dropped, falling next to Adam's body. He tried to cover the wound with his hand, but the blood kept pumping relentlessly through his fingers until the cold, tingling sensation of consciousness fading overcame him.
Jessup kicked him aside and strode down the aisle dividing the pews. His boots left prints in the growing puddle of blood. Shreds of McKnight's shoulder muscles and skin still hung from his mouth, his face misted with arterial spray.
“Carson . . . Carson,” pleaded the reverend. “I can help you. I can help you rid yourself of this . . . this thing.” He fell onto his knees, hands grasped over his head in prayer.
Sheriff Jessup looked down. “Rid me of the thing? Rid me?”
His vacant expression broke for a moment. He grabbed the reverend by the back of the jacket and pulled him to his feet. “I am the cleansing fire! I'm the one ridding you of the evil!” Spittle flew from his mouth, a sputtering teakettle on the verge of exploding.
Reverend Curtis futilely kicked and punched. In an act of desperation he clawed at the large man's cheek. But the deep gouges didn't even faze Carson Jessup.
Jessup punched back, breaking the smaller man's nose. He pounded again and again until the entire bridge collapsed, sharp fragments of bone embedded into his raw fist like pieces of coral.
The reverend fell to the ground in a bloody heap. The whistling sound of his breath through what was left of his nose faded.
Sheriff Jessup pulled the phone from his pocket. “It's done.”
The phone had been dead for days, yet the sheriff heard a voice tell him, “Good, my son.”
He closed his eyes and waited for the fire to cleanse away the wickedness and evil.
On his knees, he folded his hands and thanked the guiding archangel for showing him a clear path. He thanked the Lord for the strength to do His bidding. He thanked God for bringing this long nightmare to an end.
W
HEN THE EXPLOSION
ripped through the church, a sleep-deprived grad student at the Seismology Lab at the University of West Virginia jerked upright in his chair, spilling his coffee as his computer sounded an alarm. His first reaction to the sudden spike was that there had been a plane crash, or a meteor strike.
The residents of rural Hawkton ran outside to see the source of the explosion and were horrified to see the huge ball of flame rise from the direction of the old church, a bright orange plume against a plum-colored evening sky. Some felt it was an end to
the darkness that had enveloped the town. Others suspected that the darkness had only just begun.
A
CONTINENT AWAY,
Father Carmichael sat lost in thought as he studied a nineteenth-century letter from a cavalry officer serving in Napoleon's North African campaign. The officer had found an inscription assumed to have been archaic Hebrew. The location of the inscription, Carmichael deduced, was now lost, very likely under a parking lot or apartment building. He turned the page, and as the paper disturbed the stale air of his basement reading room he noticed the smell of cigarette smoke.
Carmichael looked up and saw a man perched in the corner, watching him. Behind the orange glow of the man's cigarette was a tan face worn with wrinkles, and intense, piercing eyes. Gray hair at his temples blended into blue-black. Dressed in a dark suit, suitable for a Brussels banker, he was clearly not a visiting priest. He had the presence of someone who cared little about smoke alarms or the effect the smoke had on old books.
How the man had been able to find him down here in the labyrinth was a feat unto itself. Carmichael liked the old reading room below the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze in Florence, Italy, because it wasn't on any map.
He felt himself a kindred spirit of the man who had founded it some three hundred years prior. Antonio Magliabechi lived and breathed words. He was reputed to have read every one of his forty thousand books and been able to recall them in great detail, yet he paid so little attention to worldly matters that his threadbare clothes would fall apart on his body.
It was through this lens of history that French Lieutenant Chambliss was speaking to Carmichael, after a fact. The library's surroundings gave him a different context to examine these letters. Touching them was like stepping into the past.
Like his hero, Carmichael could be entirely oblivious to the
world beyond the page. He'd no idea when the man had entered the room, but attributed the apparition to his mindlessness and not any stealthy intent on the man's behalf.
“You're the Mandean scholar,” the man stated in English.
Carmichael had written some papers on the language and belief system of the ancient Gnostics of the Middle East. While he didn't consider himself an expert, he wasn't going to argue with his strange visitor. “Yes. I guess.”
The man nodded. He reached his hand inside his jacket and pulled out an envelope and placed it on Carmichael's table. His raised eyebrow indicated Carmichael should look inside.
Carmichael slid the photograph out of the envelope. His cheeks flushed. Bottle-blond hair, a mischievous smile; he recognized the girl immediately. She was a friend of his cousin. A girl he'd met a few months ago in Austria. Carmichael had been drinking heavily that day. The innocent flirtation had turned into something more . . .
Shame wracked his guilt-trained mind. He'd confessed a week later, after much anguish. Not to his usual confessor, but to a priest in a small parish near San Marino. He didn't fear divine wrath as much as he did the long ears of the Vatican.
“I . . .” Carmichael began, not sure where the words would lead him.
The man in the corner raised a finger and wiped away the words with a gesture. His large hand reached out and landed on the photograph, concealing it from view as he slipped it back into his pocket and away from Carmichael's conscience.
There was something symbolic about the gesture. Carmichael vaguely understood there was to be no more discussion on the matter of the girl. He waited.
“Discretion can be a virtue,” the man said.
Carmichael nodded.
“You have mine, and I would like yours.”
“Of course.” Carmichael's knee began to shake under the table.
The man reached into his other jacket pocket and removed a portable cassette recorder. He set it on the table next to Carmichael's pad of paper and pencil.
“I need the words,” said the man. “Just the words. After the words, you're to forget about this. Understood?”
“Yes . . .” Carmichael said, hesitantly.
The man's stare lingered, turning Carmichael's acquiescence into a verbal contract.
Carmichael pressed the play button and held the speaker to his ear. The voice seemed half asleep, or in a trance. The words at first sounded like Hebrew, but they weren't. This language shared a common ancestral tongue, but had diverged a thousand years before; the closest version still spoken would be Syriac. This was different. This was a version of Aramaicâthe language spoken by the Jews in Jerusalem in Jesus's time.
Understanding spoken Aramaic is a challenge because there are no living native speakers. The closest approximation comes from analyzing Syriac, Hebrew dialects and a few other variations. There are maybe a hundred people in the world who could speak conversationally in Aramaic. While computer translation allows anyone to read the words, comprehension is a different matter. Something told Carmichael that the man in his reading room preferred a more thoughtful interpretation.
Carmichael's nervous fingers fumbled with the machine as he replayed the tape to check his phonetic transcription. He had understood the words on the first pass, but wanted to be absolutely certain. He was also distracted by the speaker.
The man took the sheet of paper from Carmichael, quietly read the translation, then pocketed it along with the cassette recorder. He straightened the creases in his slacks and stood. “This never happened,” he said flatly.
There was something about the man that implied there would be no choice but to agree.
Carmichael waited for the man to leave. After his footsteps faded down the miles of bookshelves, the young priest leaned back in his chair and stared at the ceiling and breathed for the first time in what felt like an eternity.
The Austrian girl, Anya, was the furthest thing from his thoughts. The words on the tape recorder echoed through his mind as clearly as they had when he first heard them.
I am the
one who walks in darkness. I am the one who is fallen.
T
HESE WERE NOT
the words of a disciple of God. These were declarations of evil. These were the proclamations of a demon in a religious text. This was the voice of Lucifer, or another fallen angel.
But by themselves, the words weren't anything extraordinary. Not in this day and age. He'd recently watched his nephew, Pietro, play a video game featuring an antagonist who spoke in a demonic style. Carmichael only had to turn on the radio to hear a thousand sung phrases like that, or watch them uttered on television. This was different.
Context was everything.
The speaker on the tape had used an almost forgotten tongue, and he was also someone Carmichael knewâa man that, to Carmichael's knowledge, could not speak Aramaic, Syriac or even Hebrew.
Anyone could have memorized the words. But they had no business coming out of the mouth of a man of the cloth.
Least of all the mouth of the Vicar of Christ, the Bishop of Rome, His Holiness the Pope.
I
REMEMBER THE FIRST
time I experienced fear. Not a child's fear of a scary noise outside the window or an unexpected face. Real fear, the fear a young girl feels when she sees the faces of adults around her as they realize that they are no longer in controlâeven though they're telling her that things are going to be okay, she can see the lie in their eyes and hear the hesitation in their voices.
The old black Buick didn't scare me, not at first. I was seven and had been told countless times to look out for creepers and other weirdos. As a kid, though, this was an abstract threat, like germs or mortgages. The car was just a car following me.
I was careful, and smart enough to know this wasn't a good thing, but I wasn't
fearful
. I didn't know what it meant. The fear came later.
By this time, Dad and I had moved back into Grandfather's house and I was going to a small private school on the edge of Beverly Hills. I knew it had been a rough year for Dad, but somehow he found the money to send me there. In the evenings he'd be in the workshop, making magic tricks and collectibles to sell through ads in magic magazines. Grandfather, who prided himself on making his keep as a performer and not by selling his secrets, looked down upon this, but he kept his sarcastic comments to a minimum. He knew Dad was trying his best for my sake.
At seven I was already articulate enough for people to assume I was eleven or twelve. Letting me walk home by myself in my school skirt and Nintendo backpack didn't seem like a bad idea to my dad. Far be it for seven-year-old me to tell him otherwise.
While the other kids were being picked up in Mercedes or minivans driven by nannies, I walked away up the hill toward the sprawling house where we lived.
A mansion that would have looked like a haunted house on a studio back lot if Grandfather hadn't made sure to keep it well-coated in paint, it was set back on a path that wound through overgrown trees and bushes, which took an army of gardeners to tame.
Grandfather cultivated a certain degree of theatricality to impress reporters and other guests. Although overrun was fine, dilapidated was not. The former implied he was an eccentric who wanted his privacy, but the latter suggested he was on the edge of financial despair.
With its pointed spires and steepled roof, the mansion was more medieval Disney than tony Beverly Hills. It was built by one of the first Hollywood studio heads, who had been heavily influenced by the fairytale stories of his native Germany.
I was only blocks away from school when I heard the car's brakes squeal as it came to a stop. With tinted windows almost rolled up, the interior was dark. I saw blue cigar smoke wafting from the small gap between the top of the window and door, then turned back to my walk.
I liked the peace and quiet of my neighborhood. Each front yard seemed like a private diorama built for my own amusement. I almost never saw anyone on the sidewalk or on their lawns. At least not a gardener. I stopped from time to time to stare through the bars, or gaps in the hedges, at some of the more lavish landscapes.
My favorite had a small curved koi pond with a bridge. The
brightly colored fish liked to gather at one end, near a fountain pouring from a cement waterfall, and huddle like a rainbow tied in a knot. Occasionally one would thrash and break the surface, forcing them to line up again in a new pattern. I hadn't yet been to Japan then, but I imagined that this must be what it was like there.
At the end of the block I turned the corner. Walking under the shade of the trees, I passed the house with the large female sphinx surrounded by a circular driveway. Every now and then a heavyset man would be out washing a Rolls-Royce, and he would wave to me as I passed. I'd wave back and continue home.
He wasn't there that day. But the Buick was. It was when the car made another turn shortly after me that I got a little suspicious.
Lots of people drove through the area hoping to see a famous resident, as if they expected Paul Newman to be out mowing his lawn. The funny thing is that it was almost impossible to tell the vacant houses from the ones that were lived-in. If people went outside, it was almost always in their backyards.
The low rumble of the car engine was making me anxious so I picked up my pace, but tried not to make it too obvious. Eyes forward, I listened carefully. I was all set to run if I heard a door open. In class they'd told us the tricks a pervert might use: that he was lost, that he knew our parents. (I had retorts to all of them. Logic told me the best response would be to just get away.)
At random, I picked a back alley that ran between the big avenues fronting the houses. This was a side road the garbage men took, or where the âhelp' would unload groceries. Hardly anyone else ever used it.
I didn't have to look back to know the Buick had followed me. The sound of the engine echoed down the back fences along the alley.
In my still-innocent mind, I thought of a million reasons why
someone could be following me. Maybe it was a friend of Dad's or Grandfather's who was lost. It didn't matter.
At the end of one lot a long hedge ran perpendicular from the street to the avenue in front. The wall of the neighboring mansion was only a foot away, forming a dark, narrow corridor. I was certain rats, raccoons and other nasty creatures used it as an expressway to the trashcans. But it didn't matter. I ducked into the passage and ran toward the other end.
Behind me, the Buick's brakes let out a high-pitched noise as the car rolled to a stop. I could feel the eyes of the driver looking at me from behind the tinted glass. I didn't turn back. I sprinted toward the keyhole of light at the end of the path. A twig, sticking out like a skeletal finger, scraped my cheek. My blouse and skirt were covered with dry leaves.
I kept going until I reached the road that led to our block.
I slipped through the bars of the huge wrought-iron gates at the end of our driveway and clambered up it to safety.
Out of sight and no longer a threat in my mind, the Buick became just one adventure among others in that particular day. It was just one more anecdote, like when Hayley Siegel announced to our class that her sister had got her period the day before. None of us knew what it meant, but it seemed like a big deal when she said it. From the entryway, I heard voices in the back kitchen and found Grandfather and Dad sitting around the large wooden table, looking at sketches for a new illusion Grandfather wanted to add to the show.
“Hey, kiddo,” said my dad, not looking up.
“Looks like you rolled your way home,” Grandfather remarked before crossing out something on the sheet of paper.
I poured myself a glass of milk, then scooped in some chocolate powder. Being careful to not hit the spoon against the side of the glass and get myself shushed for overzealous mixing, or a quip from Grandfather about ruining a martini that I didn't understand, I stirred as quietly as possible before placing the spoon
in the sink to be washed alongside the glass when I'd finished.
I peered between their hunched shoulders and kept as quiet as I could. They tolerated my presence as long as I avoided interrupting. If I was in a curious mood, that could be only seconds.
Dad traced a line across the page and gave me a quick glance. “Uncle Darius will be coming over tonight.”
I hadn't seen Uncle Darius in ages. More lighthearted than either Dad or Grandfather, I always liked having him around the house. Although referred seemingly behind my back, and to his face, as a “fuck-up” by Grandfather, he seemed pretty okay to me. He was fun.
Remembering the kind of thing he should ask as a Dad: “How was school?”
“Hayley Siegel's sister got her period,” I replied nonchalantly.
Dad's face grew red. Grandfather let out a chuckle. “Heck of a school you're sending her to.”
I knew I'd said something funny, but I didn't get it. Trying to change the conversation, I said, between quiet slurps, “An old black car followed me all the way home. I tried to ditch it in the alley, but it kept following.”
Grandfather jerked around to face me. His words came out slowly, as if he were giving me stage directions. “What kind of car?”
I knew the names of dozens of cars from watching Grandfather's mentalism act. I'd even made my own little mnemonic to remember them. My finger made the shape of a shield. “A Buick, I think?”
Dad looked to Grandfather, his eyes wide and his mouth slack. That was the moment I saw it. That was the moment I knew fear.
They knew something I didn't, and that knowledge scared them. My hand grew numb, and the chocolate milk spilled to the floor.