The Third Antichrist (62 page)

Abi burst out laughing. He shook his head, like a horse tormented by botflies. His nose, cheeks, and eyebrows were numb. He could no longer feel any part of his body. It was as if his mind and his physical being were entirely disconnected.

‘No,’ he said. ‘This is not what I am seeing. This is not possibly what I am seeing.’

He raised the AK-47 and brought it to bear on the couple in front of him.

‘This is impossible.’ He dropped the barrel for a second. ‘This is sheerly impossible.’

Calque stepped up behind Abi and shot him in the head. He couldn’t reach the top of Abi’s skull, so he could only fire into the base of it, just above the nape of his neck. The pistol was a .22. Hardly more powerful than a cap gun. But close to, it was devastating.

Abi dropped to his knees, the AK-47 swinging round in sympathy with the movement of his body. His eyes turned up in his head.

The bullet was still lodged inside his skull. No sign of it externally. Hardly any sign that he had been shot at all.

Abi fell onto his back. The AK-47 caught on a cupboard door and hung, transfixed, in space.

Calque took a step forwards.

‘My God,’ he said.

EPILOGUE

Silbury Hill, Avebury, Wiltshire
6.35 a.m.
21 December 2012

‘How are you feeling, Sabir?’ Calque cast a sidelong glance at his friend. He was used to Sabir’s moods by now – the man had been lurching from the mercurial to the exuberant for the past few weeks, with the mercurial winning by a short head. It was as if he were preparing for something – some test, perhaps – of whose ultimate parameters he was still ignorant.

‘How do you think I’m feeling, Calque? I’m camping out in a rental car, in England, in a fucking rainstorm, in the certain knowledge that, in precisely half an hour’s time, the Halach Uinic expects me to slog up a 130-foot-high man-made hill and magic up a rabbit.’

‘A rabbit?’

‘Yes. A rabbit. You know. With big ears. The sort magicians pull out of a hat and the audience goes “aaahhhh”?’

‘I’m sorry, Sabir. You are making no sense whatsoever. What is this thing about rabbits?’

Sabir bent forwards and touched the rim of the steering wheel with his forehead. Slowly, steadily, he began to knock his head against the vulcanized rubber. ‘So that he doesn’t have to drop his trousers in front of a worldwide television audience of half a billion people, Calque, with scrambled egg plastered all over his face.’

Calque rolled his eyes. Why had he asked the question? Would he never learn? Sabir was a delightful companion for the most part, but when he felt under pressure he was apt to swerve off the main road and go cross-country. ‘A sublime use of mixed metaphor, Sabir. You have surpassed even your own towering standards. That was positively Ciceronian.’ Calque cleared his throat. ‘You misunderstood me. What I meant was, how are you feeling about Antanasia and Alexandreina’s involvement in the ceremony of the thirteen skulls?’

‘Oh. That.’ Sabir flopped back against the seat. Whenever he thought of his wife and two-year-old daughter, whom they had nicknamed Sanda, Sabir felt the onset of what the writer G. K. Chesterton construed as ‘absurd good news’. He thanked God every day for the gift of them. When Antanasia put her head on his shoulder and snuggled close to him at night, with the sound of the Mediterranean leaching through the open windows of their bedroom in Mallorca, and with their child sleeping contentedly in the next room, Sabir knew that his life had reached the summit of happiness – things could never get any better than this. ‘I’m feeling pretty good about it, actually. This is the right thing to do. I’m even starting to think that writing that damned fool book wasn’t the unmitigated disaster I thought it had been.
The Second Coming
indeed.
Nostradamus, the Night Serpent, and the Mayan Great Change
. Why didn’t you warn me, man? It was the dumbest idea I’ve ever had. Before that, only the Romani knew about Sanda. After publication, with all the brouhaha about Nostradamus’s connections with the Maya that accompanied it, she belonged to everybody. I clearly underestimated the public’s relish for conspiracy theories.’

‘Your publishers certainly didn’t.’

‘Well, there is that, I suppose. At least I made somebody happy. But I can’t imagine what I was thinking of. The words vainglory and rodomontade spring to mind.’

Calque lit a cigarette and let the smoke bleed out of the partially cracked window. ‘Sabir. There are moments, and this is one of them, when I genuinely fear for your sanity.’

Sabir had the grace to smile. ‘You mean I win on the swings and I win on the roundabouts?’

‘Something like that. And if we’re on to metaphors, you also have a marked tendency to shut the stable door after the horse has bolted.’

Sabir screwed up his face like a child who has just had his ear swiped. Then he checked his watch and glanced out of the window. ‘Look, Calque. We’ve still got a few minutes before the ceremony. Run all that stuff by me again, will you?’

‘What stuff?’

‘The stuff about the plane of the elliptic and the precession of the equinoxes. I might need it if the crystal skulls keep shtum.’

Calque sighed. ‘It’s the plane of the ecliptic, Sabir, not the elliptic. Please let’s start how we mean to go on.’ He closed his eyes. At times like this he wished that he was back with the police force, apprehending felons. He took a final drag on his cigarette and dropped it through the half-open car window. ‘At this very moment, somewhere high above our heads, the sun is conjuncting the Milky Way and the plane of the ecliptic for the first time in 25,800 years. This is considered a significant event, Sabir, both to the Maya and to ourselves. Such a wobble always precedes a great change – whether spiritual, geological or transformational, nobody rightly knows. Whether humanity is swept away in the process is clearly a moot point – and something that we may discover today via the thirteen crystal skulls. Rabbits permitting, of course.’

Sabir grinned. He faked a gravel-throated movie voiceover. ‘And while heaven, with its 400 billion stars, is grinding into gear above us, and Father Sun is kissing the cosmic womb good morning, earthlings patiently wait, a million trillion light years from the action, and discuss rabbits.’

Calque cleared his throat. ‘Precisely.’

Thanks to the worldwide success of Sabir’s book, tens of thousands of people were gathering at the foot of Silbury Hill in the pre-dawn murk. Most had staked out their spots near one or other of the great video screens, but others were camping at the foot of the slope in the hope, clearly, of sensing at least something of what was happening on the summit. Torches, headlamps, and candles in all manner of holders shone out from all sides, illuminating the landscape in every direction. TV cameras and news crews were on standby. People had pitched wind breaks, two-man tents, and hazel bowers covered in plastic sheeting in a vain effort to protect themselves from the weather. It was hard to work out if dawn was actually on the way, or if the orange glow surrounding everything was not merely the residual lustre from ten thousand artificial lights.

Calque squinted through the streaming windscreen. ‘Maybe we should move.’

‘Maybe we should.’

Calque threw his side of the car open and stepped out into the rain. ‘Pah. This English rain.’

‘It rains in France too.’

‘Yes. But that is French rain. English rain is as thin and sour as English beer. French rain is sweet. You are half French, Sabir. You ought to know that without my having to explain it to you.’

The two men shouldered their way through the crowd to the very base of Silbury Hill. The pair of them blended in perfectly. Calque had pulled an anorak hood up over his head and partially across his eyes – thanks to the rain, this did not seem remotely out of place. Sabir, who had categorically refused the Halach Uinic’s offer of a shamanic robe for the ceremony of the thirteen skulls, looked like any other gloomy, nondescript man in his mid to late thirties, intent on seeing for himself what the newspapers insisted on calling ‘The Scoop of the Millennia’, or, in the case of one notorious tabloid’s headline the previous day, ‘The Maya Take A Flya’.

Silbury Hill had been cordoned off so that the slopes leading to its summit were entirely clear of people. Ingress, too, had been safeguarded via a manned ropewalk along which the Halach Uinic and his priests would proceed with the thirteen crystal skulls, which would then be placed on plinths, with the exact distance stipulated by the codex separating each skull. The skulls would be positioned facing outwards, not inwards, with twelve of the skulls representing the twelve points of the original version of the compass rose favoured by the ancient Romans and the Chinese – the formulation known as the Rose of the Winds, or the Windrose. This was in turn based on the twelve signs of the Zodiac, each positioned at 30° of the circle. The thirteenth skull would be located directly in the centre of the ring made up of the twelve other skulls.

The women’s party, led by Ixtab, would then approach from the direction of Avebury on the far side of the hill, the theory being that Alexandreina was to be placed on a cushion beneath the plinth holding the thirteenth skull, directly between her mother and father, who would be symbolically meeting over her, as if in a handfasting.

Sometimes, when contemplating the miracle of his wife and child, Sabir found it hard to believe that he owed everything he possessed in this world to that piece of filth, Abiger de Bale. It had been de Bale who had saved Antanasia from her brother. De Bale who had treated her wounds when she was at risk of dying from them. De Bale who had transported her all the way to the camp at Bogdamic. De Bale who had killed the Third Antichrist and destroyed the Corpus Maleficus. De Bale who had made them both rich. It was even de Bale who had provided them with their home – the home in which Sabir had hatched his disastrous plan to write the book that would finally resuscitate his reputation. Maybe that was de Bale’s ultimate revenge? Give a man what he most wanted in life and he was sure to wreck it. God acted in strange ways indeed.

When he and Calque had finally opened the letter de Bale had written before his assault on the camp at Bogdamic, it was to find that, in the unlikely event of his death, he had left his entire estate, free of any encumbrance whatsoever, to Antanasia.

The day after Abi’s death, Amoy, Radu and Alexi transported his body high into the Carpathian Mountains. Leaving their car, they hauled the corpse, which was still in an advanced stage of rigor mortis, towards the burned-out shell of the hunting lodge.

Finally, when they were within ten minutes’ walking distance of the lodge, they sat Abi in a hidden cleft in the rocks and forced his hand around another of the pistols – a .38 this time – that they had liberated from the Coryphaeus’s Crusaders. Alexi – a self-styled expert on firearms ever since he had botched his shot at Abi’s elder brother the previous summer due to a misunderstanding about the principles of lock and load – raised Abi’s hand and angled the ensuing shot down into the corpse’s head, so that the exit route of the bullet would disguise the entry route of the .22 Calque had fired into the back of Abi’s skull.