Tales From the Black Chamber (26 page)

Claire's eyes opened wide, “Chidag Dü, demon of the Lord of Death. Lord Namtar, messenger of the Underworld. Abaddon the Destroyer. Apollyon the Destroyer. It's got to be the same thing.”

“I don't follow,” said Father Lamy.

“I get it,” said Anne. “Those are all names for the Blackness.”

“
Sacre câlice
,” Father Lamy swore. “Sorry.”

“Father,” Claire asked, “why do you keep swearing with religious terms?”

“I'm Québécois. Old habits die hard. And, really, I don't do it except under circumstances
extreme
. This qualifies.”

Mike, Steve, Joe, and Rafe came over. Joe had a fresh bandage on the left side of his neck, and Steve's left pant leg was bloody and torn. A white dressing showed through the gash. “These guys are ready to go now,” said Rafe. “You guys set?”

Claire and Father Lamy looked down at Anne. “Sure,” she said, reaching up for Claire's hand. She got to her feet, tottered a bit, checked her gun, her clothes, and wiped the blood off her chin. “What's next?”

Steve pointed his UMP at the open back door of the house, past a half-dozen dead men. Anne recognized one of the gunmen from the Times Square Marriott, his abdomen shot to hamburger. The iron stench of blood filled her nose and mouth, and she felt queasy. It didn't abate when Steve spoke.

“We go in.”

The back door opened on a kitchen. Rafe, Anne, and Father Lamy stayed put while the others cautiously went from room to room on the first floor, exploring the large, spacious house furnished in a somewhat haphazard combination of Arts & Crafts and nineteenth-century Gothic-revival furniture. They were surprised to find it neat and looking lived-in. When the first floor proved empty, they headed up to the second, then third floors, with not a soul to be found. The servants' quarters on the top floor had been occupied, presumably by the men they'd killed outside.

Returning to the kitchen, they reported it was all clear.

“But where's the monsignor?” asked Claire.

“Monsignor?” asked Father Lamy, surprised.

“Necromancer,” said Mike.

“
Baptême de la vierge
,” swore the priest. “Sorry. I really have to stop that,” he muttered, mostly to himself.

“Unless he got out, he's got to be here somewhere,” said Steve.

“Basement,” said Joe. “We haven't found a basement.”

The door was at the end of a small hallway off the walk-in pantry. The Black Chamber investigators shouldered their weapons, Father Lamy drew his, and they followed Steve single-file down the old, wooden stairs along the exposed stone foundation.

The main room of the basement was an open space, with several doors in the brick walls. The room smelled of blood, incense, and smoke. Anne fought the urge to retch. No lights shone except several guttering candles placed around the floor and along the walls. Two bodies could be discerned in the middle of the floor.

Steve signaled for the others to stay back and cover Mike, Joe, and him while they checked the bodies and the side rooms, the tactical flashlights under the barrels of their UMPs cutting through the gloom. Steve approached the bodies, which appeared to be covered in blood, then knelt beside one, his gun still readied. When Joe and Mike gave the all-clear, Steve said, “Someone turn on the lights, please, we've got a survivor.”

Claire found a light switch at the bottom of the stairs, and rows of tubes in the ceiling flickered and fluoresced. They all blinked in the harsh brightness, then were wide-eyed at what it revealed.

The basement floor was entirely covered by four concentric circles crossed by several lines at angles to each other, not a pentagram but something similar. The candles sat at the intersections of the lines and circles. Latin, Greek, and Hebrew words appeared between the circles, as well as various symbols that looked like, but were not, zodiacal sigils.

At the nexus of the lines in the innermost circle lay the prone body of a man, drenched in blood. His throat had been cut to the spinal cord, almost decapitating him. Anne almost wished he had been decapitated, so obscene was the sight of his head lolling off his body at that atrocious angle. Behind him lay another man, supine. Rafe and Claire were rushing to his side, pulling first-aid equipment out of their backpacks, Father Lamy in tow. Steve kept his gun warily trained on the man, who hardly seemed in a position to resist.

Anne put the safety on her gun and walked across the nightmare room. When she got to the man's side, Rafe and Claire were a blur of medical activity. Claire looked down at the man's face, which was half-covered in gore, the skin torn from the muscle and bone beneath. It was Monsignor Clairvaux. The remaining handsome features were unmistakably his. His limbs were wrecked, lying at unnatural angles. He wore odd vestments, a Roman collar underneath robes covered in odd symbols made obscure by the copious amounts of blood congealing on them. Two books lay beside him, their covers spattered with crimson. Anne picked them up and carefully slipped the familiar Jesuit breviary and the Voynich Manuscript into her backpack.

Suddenly, Clairvaux stirred, his eyes fixing on something, and one claw-like hand trying to push away those treating him. His voice, almost inaudible and hoarse as if his larynx had been damaged, began repeating a word, as he pointed upwards. Claire leaned over his mouth. “‘Priest,'” she said, “he's saying ‘priest.'” Everyone looked at Father Lamy, who was, in fact, directly in Monsignor Clairvaux's sight line, his collar peeking out from under his black jacket.

Father Lamy knelt down, and asked the man, “Do you wish to confess, Father?” Clairvaux closed his one good eye in confirmation. “I'm going to have to ask the rest of you to step back, please,” said Father Lamy, almost apologetically.

The Black Chamber team huddled in a corner.

“Any chance he's telling Lamy how to destroy the demon?” asked Steve.

“Or how to control it,” said Rafe mordantly.

“It's a pain, but you gotta respect the confessional,” Mike said, and Joe nodded. The rest looked slightly askance.

“What's he doing now?” asked Steve. The priest had pulled a bottle out of his pocket and was daubing something onto the monsignor's forehead.

“Extreme Unction,” said Joe. “Last rites.”

Father Lamy waved them back. “Monsignor Clairvaux will talk to you now.” His face black with anger, he stalked off to the stairs and sat with his head in his hands.

“What did you do?” demanded Mike.

“Demon,” whispered the priest.

“Chidag Dü? Abaddon? Apollyon? Lord Namtar?” Claire said. The priest nodded.

“And your men?”

“Little demons followed.”

“Who's this man here?” said Rafe, indicating the corpse on the floor.

“Sacrifice.”

“You murdering son of a bitch,” said Steve.

The priest seemed to nod sadly, but said, “Volunteer. Had cancer. Greater good.”

“Greater good?!” said Mike. “What are you talking about?!”

“Needed power to remake Church. Remake country. Remake world. Better. Just. Perfect. Abaddon is power.” The priest started coughing blood. When he stopped, his eye fixed upon Anne. “Sorry,” he croaked.

Anne ignored his apology and said, “Look, that thing is out there somewhere. What did you tell it to do?”

“Nothing … it wouldn't be bound.”

They all stood in silence for a moment, thinking of the malevolent force they'd felt and what it might do unconstrained. Choking a last time, the bloodied priest spouted a further gout of scarlet from his mouth, then shuddered and went limp.

“God, if we'd been here sooner, we could have stopped him,” said Claire.

“Just bad luck,” said Steve.

“Maybe we were too deliberate,” said Mike.

“Save it for your Memoranda, guys,” said Rafe. “We've got to clean this place up.”

An hour later, they'd rendered the basement spotless and stacked all the bodies, save Monsignor Clairvaux's, inside a tool shed, stripped of their occult vestments. Apparently a CIA asset could be called to come dispose of them, as well as all the cartridge cases they raked off the lawns. Steve and Rafe took off Monsignor Clairvaux's robes as well, put hiking boots and a jacket on him, and carried his body off into the woods to drop into a ravine they found on a map. All the occult paraphernalia were packed in trash bags, and Anne added a few necromantic texts she'd found in Clairvaux's study to her now-burdensome backpack.

On the hike back to the airstrip, Anne found herself next to Steve.

“Is this job always so bloody?” she asked.

“No, not always,” he said, less than reassuringly.

After a pause, she voiced a question that had been nagging at her. “So this guy wasn't a supervillain after all? He was just a misguided idealist?”

“From here, they don't look much different.”

“I keep finding myself thinking of that little boy, Darrell. He loves him. It'll break his heart when he finds out he's dead. And he confessed to Father Lamy, right? So that meant he was sorry?”

“I don't know.”

“I'm almost sorry he died,” she surprised herself by saying.

“Saved me a bullet,” said Steve.

She turned to him, shocked. “You would have shot him?”

“Look, Anne, there's no hoodoo jail. And even if there were, maybe he finds a way to get his buddy the Destroyer to bust him out. It's an impossibility. When someone's messing with stuff like that, they've got to go.”

“That can't possibly be legal—much less moral.”

“It's not only legal, it's mandatory under our charter. Ask Claire or John or Mike about morality. Me, it's just my job.”

“You can't possibly kill people all the time,” Anne said, agitated. “You'd be a sociopath.”

Steve fixed her with a stare. “I don't kill anyone that I'm not compelled to kill by law or who isn't a threat to myself or others. I don't like killing people, but nor do I keep myself up nights worrying about the poor demon-summoning necromancer who may have unleashed God knows what horror on the world because he really wanted to have his stupid church ordain women or something. We aren't assassins, Anne. But it's a hard truth that some people have to be killed. So I do it, I don't regret it, and I don't lose sleep over it.”

“Jesus Christ,” said Anne, and fell back a bit in the line of people. Eventually she came abreast of Father Lamy. “Father,” she said, “I know you can't talk about what people confess and all, but, I mean, was he sorry about what he did?”

The priest, who'd looked stricken since the basement, stared at his shoes. “He seemed sorry. The thing is, I wonder if that's enough. Even if he's genuinely repentant and God is infinitely merciful, how can God treat a man who not only committed a human sacrifice but brought a powerful diabolical being into the world, then confesses to those enormities—and more—when dying? How many more deaths will be at his feet before this ends? How could his confession be sincere? I granted him absolution, but the magnitude of his sin is crushing. I would not want to be in his place in judgment before God. Nor can I quite bring myself to pray for mercy on his soul. Whatever his intentions—and I suspect I'd not find them worthy in any case—he was consumed by pride and the Devil from whose hands he may never escape.” Seeming to snap from a reverie, he looked up at her. “
Ciboire et câlice de tabernac
, I can't be telling you this. There is the seal of confession. Now I'm going to have to go confess to this.
Maudit
.” He shook his head and fell into silence again.

Anne tried to give him a reassuring hug when he left them at the stream that led to the road where his car was parked, but he just said to the group, “God bless you, my children,” and wandered off in morbid taciturnity.

When their plane took off into the night, Rafe, Steve, and Joe were asleep before wheels-up. Everyone else sat in silence with their thoughts. When Anne saw the sky pinkening with dawn, she felt her despair lift a little, as the beauty of the sunrise seemed to testify against the world's depravity.

14

A round noon, having been home long enough to catch a couple hours of sleep and shower, Anne went to work, although it was the last thing she wanted to do. She grabbed a coffee, pastry, and sandwich to go at the crowded little Tea Room in Kensington and lunched
en voiture
. Heading underground from the office front, she found herself sharing the elevator with Joe McManus, who'd been signing in when she arrived.

“How are you doing?” she asked.

“Terrible,” he smiled. “All I want to do is stay home, pull my kids out of school and take them down to the Smithsonian and out for ridiculous amounts of ice cream. And to convince my wife that this cut here was really nothing serious.” He pointed to the bandage on his neck. “She was, um, excited to have me back safe, but she's not dumb. She knows I'm doing something dangerous, and she's not really happy about that. This really is no job for a family man. I keep thinking, that bullet's an inch or two off, and my kids are burying me.”