Ghosts of Manhattan (33 page)

"I'm his insurance policy. If it goes wrong, if the entity won't cooperate with him, I'm his loaded gun."

"Then it's clear what I have to do." He spoke with a firm resolve, but inside he was dying, shaken to the core by this confession from the woman he loved, the woman he had vowed to protect with his life. "I have to kill the bastard before he gets anywhere near to summoning this creature."

Celeste stood, then, clutching him to her, her face so close to his that he could smell the sweetness of her breath. "Then we'd better be quick. He's planning to do it today."

The Ghost kissed her again, long and hard, and then turned toward the door. "Stay here," he commanded, knowing full well that she would not. Then he ran for the hallway, her soft footsteps falling in behind him.

The Ghost could hear voices from the hallway down below. Waving for Celeste to keep back, he leaned cautiously over the banister, using the targeting zoom of his goggles to take a better look. Donovan was there, held by two moss golems who lumbered along behind a middle-aged man in a black suit, a man with jet-black hair and a bronzed, tanned complexion. Mr. Gardici. The Roman.

The small group approached a posse of mobsters who were waiting near the foot of the stairs. The Roman had his back to the stairs. "Take him down to the Mithraeum. He's inquisitive, and I'd like him to see what we're doing here. Bind his hands so he can't get up to any mischief." The Ghost imagined the Roman grinning as he continued: "And besides, he'll make a rather interesting morsel for our visitor."

The Roman watched as the moss men dragged a subdued Donovan out of view. He dusted down the front of his immaculate black suit, apparently pleased with himself. Then, turning, he disappeared after the others, a wide grin splitting his face.

The Ghost flicked his lenses back into place and turned to Celeste, pushing himself away from the banister. "I'm going down there after them. Find somewhere safe and stay out of sight."

"The safest place I can think of right now is with you." Celeste stared defiantly into his eyes, then continued to follow him down the stairs, treading cautiously to avoid giving them away. Near the bottom, she caught his arm. "The Mithraeum is his temple. It's underground. We need to find the entrance. That's where everything will take place."

The Ghost gave a curt nod, still unsettled by her unexpected knowledge of these things. He wondered what the hell they were walking into, what hideous things they would see. He swallowed, wiped his brow on the sleeve of his coat. He wouldn't let it come to that. He'd get there first, finish the Roman before he had a chance to summon the creature, before Celeste had an opportunity to do anything stupid. He would damn himself to hell before he'd let her give her own life.

And it might yet come to that, he considered, as he padded silently across the hallway, searching for the door that would lead him to the subterranean temple.

Donovan allowed himself to be dragged along by the shambling monsters, seeing no benefit in trying to fight back at this point in the proceedings. If he did try anything, the moss men would likely rip him apart, each one tearing at a shoulder until his limbs were wrenched painfully from their sockets. Instead, he allowed himself to become floppy, a deadweight, and hoped that this ruse might buy him some time to consider his options. He hoped also that the Ghost was on his way back from the car by now, but he couldn't count on the vigilante arriving in time to help him. He'd already relied on the man too much in the course of the last few days; perhaps now was the moment for him to stand up for himself. He would be patient, wait for the opportunity to present itself. But at the back of his mind was a nagging doubt. He feared it was already too late.

As the moss men squeezed through a small doorway and into a brick-lined passageway that appeared to descend beneath the house and garden, he wondered what the Roman was planning. The tunnel had clearly been mined out beneath the foundations of the old house, probably sometime in the last few years, and electric lamps had been strung on long, fat cables at regular intervals along the walls. The walls were slick with damp, and there was a rank, musty smell in the confined space; partly, he assumed, emanating from the two golems who were forcing him along, his boots scraping on the dirt floor of the sloping passage. His shoulder had begun to ache again, the gunshot wound open and oozing blood down the inside of his sleeve.

He saw a pair of tiny red eyes in the distance; wondered momentarily if it was the Ghost lying in wait, but then realized his perspective was shot in the darkness, and it was nothing but the hungry eyes of a rat, regarding him eerily in the gloom. It scuttled away as the moss men lumbered closer. They continued on.

Presently, after what felt like an age, the floor of the tunnel leveled out and the moss men came to an abrupt stop before a pair of wide double doors. They were roughly hewn, banded with iron fittings, and he wondered if they had been stolen, too; a relic from an old monastery or church, brought here for the Roman's deluded rituals, the doorway to his subterranean dungeons. Christ-the thought suddenly occurred to him that the lunatic might actually have built an arena down there, that the reference to him being an "interesting morsel" might mean he was about to find himself thrown to the lions, literally, like the Christians of old. That was no way to go.

A mobster from the leading party stepped forward and pushed one of the twin doors aside, offering Donovan a glimpse of the room beyond. It wasn't what he'd been expecting. It was a large, open space-a cave hollowed out from the bedrock-with two long, parallel stone benches lining the walls to either side. The floor was compacted dirt, and a row of wooden torches sputtered and guttered in iron brackets affixed to the walls. The cavernous space terminated in a high stone arch, about a hundred yards beyond the doors, above which an intricate and elaborate fresco of the celestial heavens was painted in startling blue and yellow. It looked like something from a history book, a painting in the ancient tradition, dedicated to the magnificence of a powerful, mythical god.

Beyond the arch was a large recess that housed two rare items. The first was a life-size marble sculpture of an armored man killing a bull, his cape flapping open behind him, capturing the movement so well that it looked almost as if the man had been frozen in glistening white marble, caught in the act. A snake and a dog were drinking from the wounds of the slain beast, and a large scorpion was attacking the man's testicles. Donovan had no idea of the tableau's significance.

The second item was the marble wheel that Donovan had witnessed being stolen from the museum. But now the wheel was suspended vertically in a large wooden frame, flanked on either side by two tall metal towers that fizzed and sparked with veins of dancing electricity: the channeled energy from the power station. The glow of the two towers lit the underground room with flickering, brilliant light.

The mobsters led the way into the room, filing through the door one by one, taking seats on the stone benches along either side of the chamber. The moss men heaved Donovan through behind them, handling him roughly, dropping him on the floor at the foot of the marble wheel so that he jarred his hands as he tried to prevent himself from landing on his face. They lumbered away, leaving it to one of the mobsters to bind Donovan's wrists behind his back with a silk tie and maneuver him to a space near the end of the bench. It seemed he was going to be awarded a good view.

He sat down heavily, testing the bonds by flexing his arms discreetly behind his back. They were firm, but he guessed he could free himself, given enough time. He set to work, angling his body away from the others so that they wouldn't see what he was up to. He scanned the faces of the mobsters on the opposite side of the chamber. There were five, no, six of them, and each of them wore an identical expression: a mix of awe and terror, their faces pale and frozen in rigid fright. He wondered how the Roman managed to hold such sway over these men, whether they were simply weak-willed, or whether he had some other means of keeping them in line. He supposed he might find out, if he could stay alive long enough to discover exactly what was going on.

It was only a matter of minutes before the Roman himself put in an appearance, striding across the center of the room, his head held high as he approached the recess at the far end of the chamber, just a few feet from where Donovan was seated. He turned to regard his audience. "Gentlemen. Welcome." He followed this with something in Latin, an elaborate litany that sounded very much like a religious verse, although Donovan had little experience of the language or its meaning. Then, more in English: "Today marks the culmination of all of our efforts. Today great Mithras himself smiles down upon us from his place in the Heavens. Today we grant life to those who have known no life, and reward those deserving few amongst us who have given themselves over to the worship and instruction of the constant soul."

The Roman was breathing hard, barely containing himself as he drew out those last few words, and from where Donovan was sitting he could see the mad gleam in the man's eyes, the sweat standing out on his forehead, the spittle frothing from his lips. Donovan didn't doubt it at all-the man was utterly insane.

The Roman moved round to stand beside the electrical tower to the left of the marble wheel. Donovan noticed for the first time that there was a large lever there, wired up to the metal pylons, and was able only to sit and watch as the mob boss took this lever in both hands and cranked it toward himself. The mechanical contraption gave a long, grating moan, and then suddenly the room was flooded with light.

Reflexively, Donovan tried to shield his eyes, but as his hands were still tied securely behind his back he was able only to squint into the sudden pulse of bright energy, white and hot and painful. The massive electrical currents being drained from the power station had somehow been discharged into the marble wheel, and most bizarrely of all, the circular hole in the center of the wheel was now filled with a puddle of crackling blue energy. It looked to Donovan like the surface of an azure sea, rippling with waves of intense light. He felt himself being drawn into that light, being swallowed by its embracing depths, entranced by its hypnotic movements as it hummed and spat with the sheer intensity of the power involved.

Then the air was filled with the fetid stench of death, and something terrible burst forth from the surface of the light, something so exquisitely otherworldly that Donovan felt himself almost swoon with shock. Six vast, translucent tentacles whipped out from the puddle of blue energy, each a full ten feet long, probing around the mouth of the portal inquisitively, patiently, as if searching for an anchor to pull the rest of the creature through the opening, or else searching for prey. Each glistening tentacle dripped with a thick, cloying mucus and ter minated in a tiny mouth filled with needle-sharp teeth that snapped hungrily at the air.

Donovan was overwhelmed by a desire to run, to get as far away from the creature as humanly possible. But the mobsters had each had the same idea, and they were scrabbling frantically for the door, fighting amongst themselves to be the first out of the cavern. He'd never be able to fight his way out, not with his arms still tied behind his back. He rose to his feet, backing away slowly from the hideous thing, attempting to keep out of the reach of its monstrous, questing mouths.

And all the while, the Roman stood beside the marble portal, his hands behind his back, laughing insanely to himself as he watched his people flee in abject fear.

rom the shadows at the back of the chamber, the Ghost watched the tentacles emerge from the puddle of light and was filled with an upwelling of panic, fear, and a sense of sudden loss. He'd failed. For a fleeting moment he was back in France, climbing out of the wreckage of his airplane, stumbling toward the nearby farmhouse, almost blinded by his own blood streaming down his face from a terrible wound in his scalp. He witnessed himself open the door and fall in, replayed that initial sense of dawning horror as he saw what was waiting for him there in the darkness.