The Scarlet Gospels (4 page)

 

4

“What's wrong with me?” Ragowski said.

“You're infected with a tiny sibling of mine, Joseph. A worm, made from a piece of me. I passed it from its crib beside my cheek into the hole in your skull. Its body is filled with tiny eggs that need only the presence of warm, soft nourishment to be born.”

Ragowski was not a stupid man. He understood completely the significance of what he'd just been told. It explained the unwelcome fullness in his head, the churning motion behind his eyes, the tang of bitter fluid draining from his nose and down the back of his throat.

Ragowski hawked up a wad of phlegm and spat at the Cenobite, who deflected it with a tiny motion of his hand. When it hit the floor, Ragowski saw the truth of the matter. It wasn't phlegm he'd brought up; it was a little knot of worms.

“You're an asshole,” Ragowski said.

“You have the rarest of opportunities to die twice and you waste your breath with banal insults? I had hoped for more from you, Joseph.”

Ragowski coughed and in the midst of the hacking lost his breath. He tried to recover it, but his throat was blocked. He dropped to his knees, and the impact was sufficient to burst the fragile panel of his skin so that veins of worms fell from his anatomy, littering the ground around him. Mustering the last of his will, he lifted his head to defy his destroyer with his stare, but before he could do so his eyes dropped back into their sockets, his nose and mouth following quickly after. In seconds his face had gone entirely, leaving only a bowl of bone brimming with the Cenobite's writhing descendants.

There was a shrill shriek behind Ragowski, and finally finished with him, the demon turned toward the din, only to find that in his preoccupation with Ragowski's demolition he had missed the only pregnancy Kottlove would ever take to full term. The shriek had not come from her, however. She was dead, slumped on her back and torn in two, killed by the trauma of the infant's birth. The thing that the demon had created in her, however, lay in a puddle of its own fetid fluids shrieking in the tone the demon had mistaken for its mother's voice. The creature was female and, at a glance, virtually human.

The demon surveyed the mausoleum. It was indeed a comprehensive spectacle: the pieces of Poltash sprawled at the door; Heyadat's head and mutilated carcass still swaying slightly as it hung from the Fisherman's Hook; Lili Saffro, forever frozen, her body ravaged by time, her face a distressing testament to the empirical power of fear itself, her life claimed by the only Thing to which every soul must answer; and finally, Ragowski, collapsed into little more than a mess of bone and worms.

The worms, disrespectful guests that they were, had already begun to desert his remains in search of another feast. The first of the departees had found pieces of Heyadat in one direction and the half-mangled corpse of Elizabeth Kottlove in the other.

The Cenobite knelt between Kottlove's bloodied legs and selected a blade from his belt. Taking the purple clot of the child's birth cord in one hand, he severed it and tied it into a knot. He then found her mother's blouse, mercifully unstained, and wrapped the child in it. Even swaddled, she continued to make a noise like an angry bird. The demon regarded her with a curiosity entirely devoid of concern.

“You're hungry,” he said.

The Cenobite stood, holding on to one end of the silk swaddling, and released the child, letting her unroll high above her mother's corpse. The baby tumbled, then dug her claws deep into the blouse and clung there, looking into her caretaker's eyes, issuing a reptilian hiss as she did so.

“Drink,” he instructed.

He shook the fabric to which his creation clung, and she fell upon her mother's corpse. Getting up onto all fours, the child made her erring way to Elizabeth's left breast, where she kneaded the cooling flesh with her hands, which had already sprouted uncommonly long fingers for an infant so young. And when Kottlove's milk began to once more flow from her lifeless bosom the child suckled greedily.

The demon then turned his back on the child and returned from whence he came, his loyal dog Felixson, waiting in the wings.

As the bricks and mortar moved back into their original positions, sealing themselves behind the departing demon, the child, still growing, was now easily twice as large as she had been at birth. It was a little after dawn when the Cenobite left the mausoleum, and by that time his progeny had already emptied both breasts and was tearing her mother's chest open for the meat inside. The cracking of the corpse's breastbone echoed loudly around the small, musty room.

The naked girl's anatomy was undergoing a violent growth, and every so often could be heard the sound of pain, muted because it came through gritted teeth. Utterly unaware of her father's desertion, the young demon girl moved about the room like a pig at a trough, gluttonously devouring the remains of the once-powerful magicians, effectively erasing the last remnants of an order of magic that had moved behind the shadows of civilization for centuries.

By the time the police arrived, alerted by the unwitting soul who discovered the hideous spectacle that was the mausoleum—a frail and broken groundskeeper who vowed he would never again set foot in a cemetery—the girl, fully a woman after less than twelve hours, was gone.

 

BOOK ONE

Past Lives

Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.

—Benjamin Franklin,
Poor Richard's Almanac

 

1

Two decades ago, Harry D'Amour had turned twenty-three in New Orleans, drunk as a lord on Bourbon Street. Now here he was in the same city that had taken terrible wounds from hurricanes and human greed but had somehow survived them all, its taste for celebration unscathed. Harry was drinking in the same bar on the same street, twenty-four years later. There was music being played by a jazz quintet led, believe it or not, by the same trumpet player and vocalist, one Mississippi Moses, and there were still one-night love affairs happening on the little dance floor just as there had been almost a quarter of a century before.

Harry had danced then with a beautiful girl who claimed to be Mississippi's daughter. While she and Harry danced, she told him that if they wanted to do something “bad tonight”—Harry remembered perfectly the way she'd smiled as she said “bad”—then she had a place where they could play. They'd gone up to a little room above the bar where her papa's music could be heard loud and clear coming up from below. That little fact should have warned Harry that this was a family affair and that men who have daughters can also have sons. But all of his blood had gone south once he had his hand up her dress, and just about the time he had slid a finger into the moist heat of her the door opened and the girl made a pantomime of being surprised to see her two brothers, who were now standing in the room looking almost convincingly upset. The two intruders into Harry's bliss had played out a scene they probably performed half a dozen times nightly: informing him that their lovely little sister was a virgin and that there wasn't a man in the bar who would ever testify to having seen him if they dragged his Yankee carcass to a tree hidden behind a wall just a minute's walk from there, where a noose was already hanging, waiting for a taker. But they assured him that they were reasonable men and if D'Amour had enough money on him they could maybe overlook his transgressions—just this once, of course.

Naturally, Harry had paid up. He'd emptied his wallet and his pockets and almost lost his best Sunday shoes to the taller of the two brothers, except that they had been too big for him. The brothers knocked Harry around a little as he made his exit, tossing his shoes back at him and leaving the door open so he could make his escape, the lighter for a few hundred bucks but otherwise unharmed.

All these years later, Harry had come to the bar half-hoping to find the girl still there, changed of course by the passing of so many years but still recognizable. She wasn't there and neither were her ostensible brothers. Just the old jazz musician, eyes closed as he played, riffing on the bittersweet love songs that had been old when Harry had first heard Mississippi Moses play them all those years ago.

None of this nostalgia, however, did much to improve Harry's state of mind; nor did his reflection, which he caught in the age-eaten mirror behind the bar whenever he looked up. No matter how much liquor he downed, it refused to blur, and Harry saw all too clearly the scars of battle and time. Harry noted his own gaze, which, even when hurried, had taken on a distrustful cast. There was a downward tug at the corners of his mouth, the consequence of too many unwelcome messages delivered by unlovely messengers: notes from the dead, subpoenas from infernal courts, and the steady flow of invoices for the services of the janitor in Queens who would burn anything in his furnace for a price.

Harry D'Amour had never wanted a life like this. He'd attempted to make a normal life for himself, a life untainted by the secret terrors whose presences he had first encountered as a child. The keeping of the law, he had reasoned, would be as good a bastion as any against the forces that stalked his soul. And so, lacking the smarts and the verbal dexterity required of a good lawyer, he became instead a member of New York's finest. At first the trick seemed to work. Driving around the streets of New York, dealing with problems that reared from the banal to the brutal and back again twice in the same hour, he found it relatively easy to put to the back of his mind the unnatural images that stood beyond the reach of any gun or law that had been made.

That wasn't to say that he didn't recognize the signs when he sensed them, however. A gust of wind carrying the scent of corruption was enough to call up a black tide from the base of his skull, which he only managed to drive back by sheer force of will. But the labor of normality took its toll. There wasn't a single day in his time as a cop in which he hadn't needed to cook up a quick lie or two to keep his partner, an occasionally affable family man known affectionately as Sam”Scummy” Schomberg, from knowing the truth. After all, Harry wouldn't wish the truth upon anyone. But the road to Hell is paved with the bubbling mortar of good intentions, and ultimately Harry's lies and half-truths weren't enough to save his partner.

“Scummy” Schomberg's nickname, however lovingly used, was well earned. Besotted as he was by his five children (“the last four were accidents”), his mind was never far from the gutter, which, on nights when he was on duty and the mood struck him, ensured that he'd spend time driving up and down the squalid streets where hookers plied their trade until he'd found a girl who looked healthy enough (“Lord knows I can't take some fucking disease home”) for him to arrest and then subsequently set free once he'd received some complimentary service in a nearby alley or doorway.

“Another Jack?” the bartender asked Harry, shaking Harry from his reverie.

“No,” Harry replied. A memory of Scummy's libidinous leer had come into Harry's head, and from there his mind ran in quick autonomous leaps to the last moments of his partner's life. “Don't need that,” Harry spoke more to himself than the bartender as he rose from his barstool.

“Sorry?” the bartender said.

“Nothing,” Harry replied, sliding the ten-dollar bill he'd left toward the man as though he were paying him not to ask any more questions. Harry needed to get out of here and put his memories behind him. But despite his alcoholic haze, his mind was still faster than his feet and, his protests notwithstanding, it brought him back to that terrible night in New York, and he instantly found himself sitting in the patrol car down on 11th Street waiting for Scummy to get his rocks off.

 

2

Scummy and his chosen receptacle were out of sight, down some steps leading to the basement of a building. The place was empty, its doors and windows bricked or boarded up more thoroughly than Harry ever remembered seeing before. He glanced at his watch. It was ten after two in the morning, in the middle of June. Harry was getting a little antsy, and he knew why. His body always knew before his brain that something bad was in the vicinity.

Harry tapped impatiently on the wheel, scanning the deserted street for some clue to the whereabouts of whatever was inspiring the irritation in his system. As a kid he'd called it his UI, which stood for “Unscratchable Itch.” Adulthood hadn't offered him any reason to change the name, so the UI was still in the private vocabulary he'd created to help him put some order into the mental chaos its presence had always produced.

Was there something under the flickering lamp on the other side of the street? If it existed, it did so at the very limit of his eyes' power to separate substance from shadow. The Possible Thing seemed to Harry to move with a feral feline grace. No. He'd had it wrong. There was nothing—

But even as he formed the thought, the Possible Thing confirmed his initial suspicion by turning back and retreating into the shadows, its muscular form shifting like breeze-quickened water as the shadows erased it. The Thing's departure, however, failed to ease the I in Harry's UI. It hadn't been the cause of his prickling skin. No, that was still nearby. He opened the door of the patrol car and got out, moving slowly so as not to attract attention. Then he studied the street from end to end.

A block and a half up 11th he saw, tethered to a fire hydrant, a goat. It looked both pitiful and unlikely there on the sidewalk, the peculiarities of its anatomy—distended flanks, bulging eyes, bony skull—positively alien. Harry got out of the undercover patrol car, leaving his door open, and started to walk toward his partner, his hand staying instinctively to the handle of his gun as he did so.

Harry was three strides across the street when he felt the UI come over him like a tidal wave. He stopped, glancing at the short stretch of empty sidewalk that lay between him and the darkened stairway where Scummy had gone with the girl. What was taking so damn long?