The Skeleton Key (18 page)

A dark figure had arrived at our table.

‘Excuse me, Miss Pandora English. I am sorry to disturb you, but your presence is required urgently.'

Deus.

He was impeccably groomed, long-lashed and magnetic­ally beautiful to look upon, and I swore every person in the restaurant – male and female – was doing just that, staring at him, open-mouthed. Despite the urgency of his words, Deus had that eternal Kathakano smile on his face and it seemed impossible that anything could be so important that he needed to disturb my perfectly normal, perfectly nice date like this, smiling at me and telling me my presence was required elsewhere.

‘It can't wait until tomorrow?' I ventured, trying not to sound put out. It was quite unprecedented for me to see Deus outside the mansion. In fact, I realised I had never seen him outside the confines of Celia's antechamber. (The time on the roof didn't count because I hadn't seen him at all.)

‘I'm afraid it is quite urgent,' Deus replied, his dark gaze seeming to speak to me.

After a moment I managed to break from his gaze to notice my date's expression, which was one of surprise and jealousy.
Who is this man? How does he know Pandora?
I could imagine him wondering.

‘It is quite important,' I told him, though I had no idea what could be so important that it couldn't wait until I got home. I sure hoped it had nothing to do with those Sanguine troublemakers who'd already had a fair stab at ruining my evening.

‘I'm so sorry. I will make it up to you, I promise. Can I call you tomorrow?' I said to Jay.

‘If you must go, I understand,' he said diplomatically, and stood.

He got the attention of our waiter, who he asked to bring my coat and his car. Actually, we already had everyone's attention, so it wasn't much of an effort. Jay and Deus walked me to the door and stood side by side as we waited, not exchanging a word. Jay towered over both of us and he seemed to stand particularly tall, chest out. He was more than half a foot taller than the powerful Sanguine. The waiter brought my coat and Jay helped me into it and gave me a quick, slightly possessive kiss. He and Deus exchanged a long, hard look while I buttoned up my coat, Jay apparently trying to size up the older man. Of course, he could have no idea just
how much
older Deus was.

‘I'm so sorry for this,' I told Jay again.

I stood on tiptoe to plant a quick kiss on his cheek and walked out of the restaurant with the ancient Kathakano Sanguine at my side.

I
stood outside the service entrance for the restaurant in Little Italy with my arms tightly crossed hugging my satchel. The entrance was in a narrow alley paved with old cobblestones and it hadn't been easy to negotiate in the dark. Inside, Jay Rockwell was probably settling the bill and wondering why in the world he'd bothered to take me out. I should have at least put some money on the table to cover the meal, but I hadn't thought of it in time. I might have also said something about Deus being a friend of my great-aunt's, but it was too late now.

‘What is so important that it couldn't wait?' I asked Deus, feeling a bit proud of myself for not completely succumbing to his Sanguine magnetism. Still, I had come out here to a dark alley with barely a thought for why, or for my own safety.

‘Pandora, please get on my back,' Deus said.

‘
Pardon me?
'

‘Miss Pandora, I implore you. Please get on my back. Or permit me to embrace you,' he urged.

‘I most certainly will not,' I protested, and took a step away from him. I shouldn't have left the restaurant at all. What was I thinking, leaving Jay like that? What kind of Sanguine trickery was this?

‘Do not trifle with me. There is no time,' Deus said, and seized me so suddenly it took my breath away. His hard arms locked tightly around me – an embrace so steely I could not break it using all my strength. ‘Just try to relax. You are perfectly safe with me,' he assured me.

And we shot into the air.

We must have been a hundred feet above the restaurant before I dared to open my eyes. We had left the ground so quickly I felt like my stomach was still down in the alley. I looked past my shoes – which now dangled without a foothold hundreds of feet in the air – and saw the lights of Little Italy grow smaller by the second, the low rooftops fading away. I spotted the illuminated strip of green trees by the Grand Street Metro. The lights of Chinatown. The Brooklyn Bridge. The air whistled past my ears and my mouth opened and closed a few times, but nothing came out.

I was glad I hadn't eaten a whole lot.

Once we'd reached a truly dizzying height, Deus flew us uptown, our bodies sailing sideways, his over the top of mine. I watched the stars and the night clouds race past above us as I held on for my life. I shut my eyes again.

Don't vomit.

Don't.

‘Can you hear me, Pandora English?' Deus asked.

I nodded, my eyes closed tightly. His face was inches from mine. Despite the wind roaring in my ears, I could hear him just fine.

‘There is a powerful necromancer loose in Manhattan. He must be stopped.'

‘A necromancer?' I shouted.

‘There,' Deus announced, and pointed down, holding me with one strong arm as we continued through the air at a heart-stopping pace.

I did not much like this change of grip. It made me hold on to him even more tightly, my knuckles white. Deus turned in the air, pulling me upright, and as the earth came into view again I saw that the most extraordinary scene was unfolding on a street in lower midtown, where cars were stopped and a group of people were gathered, circled by a strange, glowing green mist. The mist shifted, tendrils reaching out and flicking back like the arms of some tentacled sea creature. We flew closer, and I saw a familiar figure in the centre of the mad scene. It was Dr Barrett, or rather his passenger. The creature on Barrett's back had its arms raised and was shrieking in an unintelligible language, manipulating the swirling mist with the grand movements of a conductor.

We swooped past and to my horror I saw that the necromancer was, somehow, pulling corpses from the street like they were weeds. Bodies burst through the grass on the median strips, or straight from the pavement, and swayed on bony legs.

By now a dozen skeletons were following Barrett down Second Avenue, shuffling and moaning.

‘Where are they all coming from?' I shouted. They were coming right out of the ground and I could see no graveyards nearby.

‘Every major city has bodies buried beneath the streets in unmarked graves. Most have been there for a very, very long time,' Deus explained as I held him.

I guess Deus would know. He may have even put some of them there.

‘How does he know where to find them? What is that green mist?' I asked.

‘It is the necromancer's spell, Pandora. Only you can see it, but I can feel it. I cannot get too close to this necromancer or he'll have me under his control.'

Like Luke.

Luke was under the necromancer's spell. Those green eyes had been like the necromancer's, had been the colour of that strange mist. And now I was sure Barrett's passenger had been the reason for that couple shuffling through Spektor, risen from the grave . . .

‘Where is Celia?' I asked, panicked. I needed to ask her what to do. We needed her help.

‘Your great-aunt is at the mansion, holding them back. She cannot help us.'

‘She's holding who back?'

‘The dead,' Deus shouted against the wind. ‘She has created a spell to keep them at bay, but if the necromancer comes back he will be too powerful for her. I fear the protection spell will not hold. If they succeed in opening the portal, reuniting the spirits of the dead with their bodies, the revolution of the dead will begin.'

The revolution of the dead
, I thought.
It's real.

‘You need to stop him, Pandora English.'

I gaped, still holding on tight. ‘
I
need to?! But how?'

‘You are the Seventh. You have the power of necromancy, Pandora English. Use it.' Deus flew towards the ground, landing a block or two away from the reach of the tendrils of green mist.

‘But I don't know how!' I protested as he set me down. ‘I don't know what to do.'

I stood a little unsteadily on jittery legs on the pavement, and looked around me. Somehow, strangers passed us on the footpath as if they hadn't even noticed our quite unconventional arrival. They seemed to not even see us.

Deus took my hand in his. It was cold. ‘I'm sorry I must leave you here. I cannot stay. I must keep clear of the spell. I'll be watching from above and I'll do what I can,' he told me, and before I could respond he shot up into the air again in a rush of black, like the flapping of dark wings.

I blinked.

This was the East Village – the street sign next to me said ‘E. Houston'. I turned and jogged in the direction of the mist, dodging and weaving between pedestrians, realising with some fascination that everyone appeared to be going about their evening routines as if nothing were wrong. ‘Humans reject the supernatural,' Celia had told me. ‘They are blind to it
.
' But how could they be
that
blind? We'd fallen out of the sky! There was a swirling green mist on Second Avenue! Even if they could not see the spell and the corpses, as I could, couldn't they hear the shrieking?

But by the time I reached Second Avenue the mist was gone and it was quiet – too quiet – particularly for nine o'clock on a Friday night. Cars rolled past slowly, far below the speed limit, wheels crunching on the road as they passed. Through the windshield of a Cadillac I spotted the vacant, open-mouthed expression of a driver as she gripped the wheel, her car trundling past in odd fits and starts. Others rolled as if the engines were off, moving almost without sound. They moved so slowly I could probably have walked out between the vehicles without being hit. A couple shuffled past me on the footpath – a man in a suit and a woman in jeans and a trench coat, holding hands. At first I thought they were zombies, they moved so slowly and their faces were so slack, but their clothes were clean, their skin untouched by decay. I looked into their eyes, from one to the other and back again. They were glazed over. Both of them. I stood to one side to let them pass.

Far above, I saw a dark shape move across the night sky.

A shriek rang out and I snapped my head around. Down the street in the other direction I caught a glimpse of the peculiar mist as one green tendril flicked out across the pavement and disappeared again. Against my better instincts I ran towards it, wishing for all the world that I was someone who could flee the other way, not someone who was inexplicably caught up in all this, responsible for putting a stop to it – responsible enough that a powerful vampire had plucked me from a restaurant in Little Italy to enlist my help.

How did my boring little life lead me here? To this?

And how the coldness in my belly ached. The closer I got to where I'd seen the flash of mist, the worse it was. Whatever the necromancer was up to in this part of town, the dread in my belly told me it was very, very bad. I turned up a narrow alley and saw the green mist waving in the air like luminescent seaweed, just past an old stone wall. I squinted. ‘New York Marble Cemetery', a sign said.

Oh boy. So that's it.

This was Manhattan's first non-secular burial ground, a deceptively simple-looking half-acre lawn above one hundred and fifty-six underground Tuckahoe marble burial vaults, famously built at a time when traditional burials in coffins were outlawed due to concerns about the outbreaks of yellow fever. It was believed that the sealed vaults could prevent contagion from the supposed miasma emitted by corpses. Hundreds were interred here in the 1800s, though some were later moved. How many were there now?

The old cemetery looked like a small park or secret garden with crumbling stone walls, if you didn't take a closer look. By the time I caught up with Barrett and his passenger, they were in the middle of the cemetery on the other side of the two wrought-iron gates, which they appeared to have broken.

And he/it/they were not alone.

Skeletal creatures paced the cemetery, moaning and turning in circles. Two dozen of them at least. Most were centuries old but two of them were more recently dead, raw flesh and gore still hanging off them, their clothing dishevelled or torn away. Had he pulled them from a nearby morgue? From an accident? I shuddered to think.

‘
Ahhhhheeeeeeeekkkkkkk!
'

I stood by the gates and covered my ears as a terrible shrieking filled the air, loud enough to . . . well, wake the dead. And I supposed that was precisely what it was for.

The shrieking from Barrett's necromancer was so high-pitched and so unnatural a tone that I thought my eardrums would bleed. Each of the zombies had also joined in the blood-curdling chorus, rousing the remaining dead beneath them. I covered my ears with my hands. Mercifully the shrieking stopped after less than a minute, and I uncovered my ears. There was a brief, blessed silence, but then I heard moaning, and muffled voices rose up through the dead earth. The words were not clear, yet it was apparent to me that dozens upon dozens of souls were waking from their deep slumbers in the vaults below. I wondered if the living residents of Manhattan could hear it? The shrieking? The moaning?

Then came the knocking. The pounding against marble.

The ground began to move. Something shifted beneath me and I stumbled backwards.

A hand shot up through the dirt.

Then another.

Pure terror threatened to overcome me.

Think, Pandora.

The shrieking began again and I covered my ears, trying to clear my head. All around me the green mist circled and the crowd of corpses walked through the cemetery, agitated and agitating for more company, apparently unaware of or unmoved by my presence.

Do something!

Dr Edmund Barrett's head hung down limply, the scientist evidently quite unconscious as the necromancer on his back pulled at the earth with invisible strings, the green mist coiling in the air and coating the lawn in an eerie, glowing carpet. How long had he been unconscious? I wondered. How long had his passenger been in control?

The old cemetery continued to come to life, the dead knocking and breaking against the marble tombs deep in the ground. I danced across the grass, trying to keep clear of the bony fingers shooting up through the dirt. The cemetery's residents – New Yorkers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – were stripped to the bone, their muscles long since decayed to dirt, yet they were charged with enough unnatural power to break through the earth and climb unsteadily to their feet, or what was left of them, their burial clothes in tatters or rotted away to nothing, soil dripping off them like dark cremation dust. Who knew what they were capable of.

‘Go back!' I shouted to them. ‘Go back to your resting places!'

My words meant nothing to them. The necromancer had willed them on their unspoken mission, and now that hundreds of them had risen, the skeletal figures began a slow death march out of the broken cemetery gates and onto the street, animated by the glowing green mist swirling at their feet. The necromancer floated before them, leading the march. I turned and watched them, horrified and feeling useless, while behind me, even more corpses continued to rise.

And now there was a living crowd, too, I realised. Groups of stunned New Yorkers screamed or stood gaping. How on earth would they explain what they were seeing?