Evil Eternal (14 page)

He ran up Fifth Avenue, a pale, mountain of a man clad in black so even jaded New Yorkers out for a stroll in the snow had to take a moment to stare. He skidded to a stop at the steps of his destination. A homeless man quickly approached him, crossing himself as he did so.

“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. Do you have any change? I ain’t no Christian as such, but I swear allegiance to the flag of invisible under God.” He went on and on with his gibberish until the words lost all meaning. Father Michael placed his hand on the man’s head.

“Rest,” he murmured and the man grew silent, shuffling away with a contented smile on his face.

Saint Patrick’s Cathedral loomed before him, a majestic symbol of faith and the beacon he very much needed. The immense gothic cathedral, so large it took up an entire city block, had opened its massive doors to the faithful in 1879. With imperial spires rising over 300 feet, it was considered by many to be the centerpiece of Catholicism for not just New Yorkers but everyone in the country. A sacred edifice, the archbishops of New York were buried in a crypt under the altar. He would soon seek their strength to perform the task at hand.

“Oh my God, you look awful,” Aimee said the moment Shane walked in the door.

It was true. One glance in the hallway mirror revealed an exhausted, pale, haunted man.
Great
, he thought,
it looks like I’ve aged ten years in one night.
It wasn’t an aging process that left any physical traces, like crow’s feet, graying hair or liver spots. It was all in his eyes, as if a decade of solid despair had been poured into them like molten lead.

His hair hung like limp spaghetti over his face.

He let the luggage carrier go and it crashed to the floor with a resounding
thud
.

“What do you have in there, bricks?”

“Good question,” he said, shaking snow from his hair. “I wouldn’t know. You remember Father Michael?”

Aimee nodded.

“It’s his bag. He asked me to hold on to it for him. Something about his church not being safe because of a rash of burglaries.” It was a small white lie but one he was sure she’d forgive him should she ever learn the truth. “That’s a shame. What kind of person would rob a church?”

She grabbed his coat, which was quickly becoming wet from the melting snow, and placed it on the radiator.

“Honey, I’ve been on the streets long enough to know there is no shortage of guys who would mug a nun if they thought she had some cash. It ain’t pretty out there.”

And about to get uglier
, he thought.

Aimee reached over and felt his forehead with the back of her hand.

“You don’t have a fever.”

“I’ll be all right. I’m just frozen and I haven’t eaten since breakfast. What time is it?”

“Almost eleven o’clock. Go sit on the couch. I’ll fix you some soup and leftover pasta.”

For the first time that night, Shane smiled. “Can you possibly be more beautiful?” Without waiting for a reply, he pulled her close and kissed her, savoring the warmth of her body pressed against his, the taste of her tongue, the fading scent of her perfume.

“Mmmmm,” she purred. “You want me to go fix the main course or would you like to start your meal with dessert?”

He replied by locking her in his embrace for another deep kiss, unhooking her bra with two fingers and carrying her into the bedroom. He placed her on the bed, gasping at her beauty when she removed the last stitch of her clothing. It was as if he were seeing her for the first time, his sense of mortality and the fragility of the future bringing the present into sharper contrast. The flawlessness of her soft, white skin, the fullness of her breasts as they parted to the side when she lay on her back, the sensuous crook between her thigh and hip, the wanton look in her eyes; it was almost too much to bear.

They made love for hours, alternating between absolute tenderness and total abandon, thoughts of the apocalypse momentarily pushed aside as he hungrily devoured every touch, taste and moan of the woman he loved and feared losing above anyone else in the world.

Father Michael had scaled his way to the top of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral with the dexterity of a monkey. The only one to observe his ascension of the city’s holiest site was a lone businessman who had happened to glance up moments before Father Michael’s black coat vanished from sight into a recess of the roof. The man had just emerged from a bar two blocks away after spending a good five hours drinking his stress into a Wild Turkey semicoma. He would not remember come morning the bug-like figure that climbed the church, though the image would play prominently in his nightmares for years to come.

If there was anywhere in this city that Father Michael could commune with the dead, this was it. Still reverberating within its very structure were the ethereal silent prayers of millions of people, dead or alive. Their hushed whispers for guidance, deliverance, safety and thanks cloaked the holy church in a gauze of human spirituality so thick that it could even be seen by Father Michael as a kind of gel-like haze that softened every edge of the church itself. Each day, thousands and thousands of petitions were either conducted within or towards Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, making it a balefire for all souls as they passed from one plane of existence to the next. His only hope was to snatch a solitary soul before it was sucked into the wasteland that was Cain’s graveyard.

From atop the spire, he could see how the building itself was built to resemble an enormous cross, a beacon for God to see as He looked down from heaven.

The snow came down like a blizzard and the temperature was rapidly dropping into the teens. The wind hurled sheets of snow and ice in alternating directions. Had Father Michael been human, he would have either frozen to death atop the cathedral or been thrown by the biting breeze down to the unforgiving street below. He merely grunted as a hard gust slammed directly into the center of his chest. He was completely deafened by the howling winds but it wasn’t his ears that would do the listening for him.

Settling down into a crouch, Father Michael looked like a living gargoyle. He reached into his pocket to retrieve the ten-inch-long shaft of gold he had placed there while in Monsignor Stanton’s office. He ran his fingers over its edges while offering up a prayer for his impending journey.

Encased within the gold was a shard of wood, rounded on one end with skillfully smooth edges. The other end was sharp and jagged, the result of having been snapped in half two millennia ago. It had once been the top half of a wooden chair, made almost two thousand years ago by a carpenter named Jesus. The church had several pieces of Jesus’s handiwork in a special safe deep within the Vatican vaults. His mother, Mary, had given them to the apostle and eventual first pope, Peter. These were some of the holiest and most secret relics in the entire world and many men had gladly given up their lives to keep them so. Tales of saved splinters from the crucifix upon which Jesus had been executed and the Ark of the Covenant being guarded in Africa were nothing more than fabrications designed to divert any attention away from the truest of all Christian vestiges.

This particular piece had been dipped in the purest gold by Father Michael himself hundreds of years ago under divine direction. He had emerged from a long, meditative state with a direct compulsion to preserve the shard of wood. The process had all been outlined in his mind, fully formed from somewhere beyond his own consciousness. Its purpose frightened even him, one who was not permitted by God the right to die. He had had very little cause to use it over the centuries.

His respite had ended.

Death would be a mercy. What he had to do now would be agony.

Chapter Sixteen

Cain had sent his newly created demonic apostles back to what had been their homes, ordering them to force down their unnatural impulses and to give the appearance of a normal life. All of the thoughts, memories and emotions of each person had been retained through death and now resided in the walking, nefarious corpses of Cain’s minions. They returned to homes in the suburbs, apartments in the city, bars that they regularly frequented. Just another night in the life of Paul or Muriel or John.

Cain, too, drove to the mayor’s home. He threw his briefcase across the floor, a mere prop, as he marched through the doors. The air inside the mansion was pungent, with just a hint of rotting meat.

“Daddy’s home!” he shouted.

All was still as a tomb, which is exactly what he had transformed the mansion into the night before. Reaching into the refrigerator for a cold beer (satiating all of the pleasures of the flesh was orgasmic to him), Cain casually ignored the five severed heads of the domestics on the top shelf, just in front of the green bottles of Heineken.

With the flick of his thumb, he popped the cap off the bottle and guzzled every ounce in one long pull. He grabbed three more, stuffed them in his coat pockets and headed to the master bedroom. The wall along the stairs was filled with portraits of the Spinelli family. Too bad neither of the mayor’s children lived at home. Both were at boarding school, safe, for now. He would have loved to torture them, especially the girl. She had tits that gave men sleepless nights. He thought of calling her home, perhaps on the premise of some vague family emergency. Yes, that would be splendid. He’d fuck her until her pussy literally exploded.

Tiptoeing into the bedroom, Cain stripped off his clothes and drank another Heineken.

A still figure lay under the covers of the sleigh bed. He gently sat on the edge of the bed and stroked the rounded curves hidden just beneath the maroon satin sheets.

“It’s been a long day, honey. A mayor’s work is never done,” he said just above a whisper. “But now I’m home and I want to play.”

Cain threw back the sheet to reveal the bloated, bruised corpse of Susan Spinelli. The horror of her death was still etched upon her face. Pools of blood had settled on her side, rendering it the color of cancer.

His cock raged at the sight of the cadaver, swelling to the size of a man’s forearm until it split in two, with both ends capped by angry mushroom heads dripping with anticipation.

“I know you used to fantasize about having two men at once,” he hissed. “Don’t say I never gave you anything.”

Father Michael blocked out the raging squall around him and gripped the remnant of Jesus’s labor. Things were getting more difficult with each passing century. The world had become too crowded, the crush of humanity bearing down on the walls he had created to keep it at bay. It was why he lurked in the shadows of the Vatican, avoiding all human contact until it was necessary. The less interaction, the easier it was to cast aside all emotions, wrap them in lead and bury them in the pit of fading memories of his life before death. Now, with cities that housed millions of souls, it was becoming harder and harder to keep what shred of humanity was left to him at bay. To feel was a weakness and any form of fragility at this time was unacceptable.

And now there was his Ailis, nestled unknowingly in the body of Aimee.

A clap of thunder reverberated through the stone beneath his feet.

It was time.

“Bless me,” he whispered.

He drove the golden shard into his chest, piercing his heart. The swarming winds of the blizzard drowned out his cries of pain. His back arched to the point of breaking from the searing hot agony of the now-glowing dagger in his chest as he raised his hands to the heavens.

He shouted again, a sonic boom of suffering. The windows of nearby buildings rattled in their frames. Within the church’s catacombs, the bones of cardinals past danced in their sarcophagi as the knife’s edge between life and death pierced deeply into Father Michael.

His body shook once as if electrified. Tears cascaded down his face while his mouth worked, open, closed, in a silent scream until he slumped forward and fell into silence.

Aimee lashed out, all legs and arms, kicking and thrusting in a spastic frenzy, startling Shane from a fitful sleep. He ignored the pain of being kicked in his side and threw his arms around her. Aimee’s eyes flew open and for a moment she looked at him with no recognition, a feral child forced into a corner.

“Aimee, it’s me, Shane. I’ve got you. You’re safe.” He whispered the words into her ear, smoothing her matted hair from her face. Slowly, she settled down. The bedsheets were a gnarled mess, gathered mostly around one of her ankles.

She shivered uncontrollably, overcome with a swirl of emotions so dizzying it was hard to pinpoint any central cause for her sudden ascent from the world of dreams. The reality of her surroundings came to her like a slap in the face.

“You okay?” Shane asked, reaching out to touch her arm. It was slick with sweat, yet cold to the touch.

Aimee brought her knees up to her chest and tried to control the chattering of her teeth. She had fallen asleep naked after making love to Shane. Shane was quick to wrap her in the comforter. He rocked her in his arms, saying, “You’re all right, baby. I’m here. It was just a dream,” over and over again.

Gradually, she settled down and warmed up beneath the comforter and Shane’s embrace. Her heart stopped pounding in her chest and the chills quickly dissipated.