Melanie knelt down, too. “He may be raising an army of the damned, but we will find the way to stop him.”
The sister lifted her hand and placed it on Melanie’s. “Do you know how old I am, child? Did Lucien ever tell you?” There was suddenly a slight twinkle in her eye. “Not so old as Conte Rainier, but I am over a hundred, and as I measure time, that is a very long life indeed, so long that I am afraid I haven’t the strength to play my part anymore.”
Scott was stunned. It had never occurred to him that she had known all along that she was allying herself with vampires.
“We will be your strength, I promise,” Melanie vowed to her. She patted the canvas bag she had slung over her shoulder. “We’re ready for whatever comes.”
The sister continued to look disturbed. “I can feel that he has found cracks and weaknesses across the world. We must work fast. He can animate the dead, he has collected hordes of the damned, and they all stand ready to do his bidding. Not even I know what you will face down there. He plays with the mind, and he can slip into your thoughts and dreams.”
Yes, Scott realized, he’d had proof of that.
“If we’re going to do this, we must start now, before the moon rises,” Rainier said.
As if the church were a stage and they had received their cue, the sisters fanned out across the pews and fell to their knees.
It was a nice send-off. And a frightening one.
Scott rose, looked at Rainier and started for the trapdoor. He pulled it open and started down, aware of the darkness first, and then of something else.
A pulse. A feeling of hot, fetid breath. The presence of something vile and evil that seemed to throb throughout the underbelly of the church, the catacombs and beyond, into the depths of the earth.
Bael, Baal, Balor…By any name, whoever, whatever he was—he was waiting.
12
Scott paused on the steps, steps that had changed, even in the course of night. The ancient stone now seemed to be covered in something lichenous and sticky, like a strange quicksand.
He lit one of the flares they had acquired at Rainier’s church, and he tossed it down to the ground below. In the light it gave off, he saw the altar with the panels written in three languages and the walls of the crypt. He hurried down the last few steps, letting the flare burn on the cold earthen floor. He waited until Rainier and Melanie came to stand beside him.
Rainier dug into his bag and lit another flare, which he tossed down the nearest tunnel that led away from the altar.
“Wait,” Melanie said, and dug around in her bag until she found a cross.
As she handed it to him, Scott realized it wasn’t just a cross; the bottom end had been honed to make a stake of it, as well. He wondered if he should expect to meet vampires down there. More vampires, he corrected himself, remembering the alley outside the church, not to mention his companions.
From above, he heard a sweet chanting, and he knew that the sisters were in prayer, raising their voices high. He smiled.
“What if he’s called upon Jewish vampires? Or Buddhist ones?” Scott asked, his voice a whisper so as not to drown out the comforting sound of the sisters above.
“It’s not their faith, it’s your faith in yourself and your quest that matters,” Rainier told him.
“And in Sister Maria Elizabeta,” Melanie added quietly.
Scott knew they were all thinking the same thing. She was the Oracle, and they had been called to her side. What were they without her—except sitting ducks?
“Let’s see what he has waiting for us, shall we?” Rainier said.
Rainier’s flare lit the way. They were all tall and the ceiling was low, just inches above them. Scott moved slowly, knowing that he had now truly reached the nightmare place of his dreams. He looked to both sides. Some of the crypts were empty, some held ancient bones.
“God’s waters,” he heard Melanie say, and he saw that she had taken out a vial and was sprinkling water from it on the corpses. He assumed it was holy water, given to Rainier earlier.
She repeated the words, but if she’d been expecting the bones to respond, she was doomed to disappointment, because nothing happened.
Scott led the way farther down the tunnel, and when Rainier’s flare went out and the darkness ahead took over, Scott lit another and tossed it ahead to light their way. He could see that they were coming to the place where the ancient pagan altar stood and where the eleven other tunnels met, and he blessed whatever lucky spirit had led Rainier to choose this tunnel instead of one of the others.
“God’s waters,” Melanie said again.
Rainier stopped for a moment. “Did that one just move?” he asked, pointing to one of the skeletons she had just sprinkled.
Neither Melanie nor Scott had an answer.
“No matter, why take a chance?” Rainier asked, and he used his cross to smash in the skull.
Scott continued in the lead, and he was nearing the tunnel’s end when he heard the whisper in his head again.
Vampires. Good vampires. That’s a laugh, a joke. They are vile creatures, tearing at human flesh and thriving on human blood. They are not human as you are, not anymore. They have lured you here. They will bring you to the altar and lay you upon it. They will rip out your throat and bathe in your blood, and then they will fornicate there, slick with the blood of your body as they writhe together in lust and hunger.
Scott stopped short and looked back. Rainier and Melanie just looked at him expectantly.
“He’s whispering to me,” he said, fighting the fear the whisper evoked in his heart. “He’s entering my mind, and he’ll try it with all of us.”
Melanie let out a little sound. “He’s already told me that I’m evil, vile and loathsome.”
“He wants me to believe that I’m a coward. And that I should kill you, Scott, because you’re not one of us.”
Scott smiled. “He thinks we’re weak,” he announced loudly. “But we’re not.”
A roaring sound began to shake the very walls of the tunnel.
A fetid wind rose.
Scott kept walking, and when he turned to look back, they were nowhere in sight.
Melanie and Rainier were gone.
He was alone, facing that ancient altar and the wind that blew, filled now with black mist and sharp grains of sand. He blinked against it, holding the cross in his hands.
Such a fool. They are coming. You know in your heart that they are the evil. See her now, see how she comes. She is naked and laughing at you. Her fangs are bared, and he is behind her, both of them ready to tear you apart. She’ll sink her teeth into your throat, and she’ll rip at your genitals, until the blood pours over her. She’ll watch you die as he stands behind her, and then they’ll touch one another and rut on the floor while you breathe your last and the blood drains from you….
As the words played in his mind, he saw the exact images the whisper promised. He saw Melanie, and she was naked and laughing, her teeth bared, fangs that dripped in salacious anticipation. She was coming toward him, and Rainier, just as naked, was laughing with the satisfaction of a great cat that had finally treed its prey and was now awaiting the first taste of blood.
Melanie kept coming, but something in his heart denied that it was her. He raised the cross and began chanting a prayer remembered from childhood, and when she was close enough, he drove the pointed end of the cross into her chest.
He heard her scream rise shrill and furious into the air, and he finally saw her clearly then. It wasn’t Melanie, but it was a vampire, and as he watched she decayed before his eyes, skin drying and cracking. Her flesh flaked away, leaving only bone, a skeleton with its jaw gaping in that final scream that still echoed through the crypt, and then she fell, dust to dust and nothing more.
The man behind her was real, but not Rainier. In a fury, he seemed to levitate and come flying at Scott, who lifted his weapon in both hands, caught the creature dead center in the chest and twisted, finding the heart.
br /> The man, too, decayed and fell, then exploded into dust upon the hard ground by the altar.
The whisper in his mind came again.
They are watching, laughing at you, whispering, because you are just a man and a fool. Rainier will take what you want, and the witch is ready for him, crawling atop him, licking him, fornicating with him….
Scott almost laughed that time. “Oh, go fuck yourself!” he snapped, and when he turned, he saw that Rainier was there and looking at him curiously.
“What is it?” Rainier asked.
“Nothing important,” Scott assured him. “Where’s Melanie?”
“Right behind me—just like I’m right behind you. I saw you take down those two vampires, and I took down a third.”
“But where’s Melanie?” Scott asked again, beginning to panic. “Turn around and look. She’s not there.”
She didn’t know what had happened. One minute they were right in front of her, and then, suddenly, they were gone. She turned and looked frantically around, then came to a dead standstill.
Scott was there, staring at her—and he had his cross raised, ready to strike. “You’re the evil here,” he said, “and we both know it. You’ve made the others believe in a demon, but we both know that you’re the real demon here. You’re not a woman, you’re a snake. You’re every creeping thing in the night that is filthy and disgusting. When you are destroyed, evil will be destroyed.”
He was coming toward her, and she needed to defend herself. “I am not evil.” She meant to scream, to cry out, but she barely managed a whisper.
“Melanie!”
Scott! He was calling her name from somewhere ahead. The thing in front of her was not Scott. It was a skeleton, nothing more than bones, a skull with black eye sockets and a ridiculous grin clicking its jaws. She screamed in fury and tossed holy water it. It crumpled and turned entirely to dust.
And then Scott was there, the real Scott. He took her into his arms and lifted her chin, and she saw his dark eyes, fierce and protective. “Never believe his whispers—never. It’s a mind game. You are everything that is good and fine. Remember that. I know what you are, and that’s everything pure and decent. Believe it, Melanie. Even if you doubt yourself, believe me.”
She smiled at him and straightened. “Rainier!” she cried suddenly. “We have to find Rainier. We can’t let the demon separate us.”
They rushed forward back to the altar room, where Rainier was just withdrawing the business end of his cross from a decaying corpse, one that smelled to high heaven and didn’t decay into dust. Rainier looked at them as he wiped his weapon clean on the dead creature’s coat.
“Apparently he didn’t realize just how damned old I am,” he said, and kicked the corpse. “New vampires. Idiots.”
The wind rushed at them again with a screeching and wailing that grew in fury and pitch. Suddenly bones began spinning about, and they heard feet running. From each of the twelve tunnels, the dead—and the undead—suddenly came running.
“They’re here!” Melanie cried.
And they were. The three of them braced their backs against the altar as the onslaught rushed toward them. Melanie hurled her almost-empty vial at the slim virago hurtling down at her, flesh not bone, and then, as the vial shattered against her and splashed its contents over her, bone and not flesh. Melanie grabbed another vial as Scott realized in shock that there really was something to that belief thing. Apparently holy water could destroy an evil vampire, perhaps simply because the evil undead believed in its power, while Rainier could cross himself with it with impunity.
And speaking of Rainier, he lit an oil-soaked torch and thrust it into the chest of an attacking cadaver, which burst into flames and, whirling, took more of its fellows down with it. They came, soldiers of the bone army that had to be killed by crushing their skulls, accompanied by Bael’s other army of the undead—vampires, cruel in life, now cruel in death.
Scott felt hot breath at his back, so close. Melanie turned from her own battle to sprinkle the creature with the deadly water.
But they kept coming, more and more of them.
Scott had never felt his own strength so keenly. Like the others, he used fire, holy water, his cross, his fists and his feet, and the ground grew deep around him with the detritus of bone and flesh and decay. But still they came.
Scott began to chant, the words coming unbidden to his lips. He heard Melanie join him, then Rainier, and they followed when he switched to Latin, and then a language he didn’t even recognize, but he knew the prayer was the same each time. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil….
So, so many of them.
And then, so suddenly that the silence seemed deafening, the crypt went silent. The three of them stood, waiting, startled by the sound of one another’s movements.
“It’s over—for now,” Scott said.
“This was just the prelude,” Rainier said.
“It’s him. Bael. We have to find him and destroy him, or at least send him to some eternal damnation. It’s the only way to win,” Scott said wearily.
He looked at the others. “The most important thing is this—we can’t let him into our minds. He preys upon our slightest fear. He’s trying to turn us against each other. He hopes to destroy us from within, just as he hopes the havoc he creates with earthquakes and his minions will cause people to turn against each other, paying with their souls as well as their lives.”
“He was getting to me,” Melanie whispered. “I never knew I could be so weak.”
“You’re not weak,” Scott protested. “None of us were prepared to have him slip into our minds.”
“Let’s go,” Rainier said. “We’re done for now. He’s licking his wounds, and we’re worn out. If he’s preparing, we need to do the same.”
They trudged back along the tunnel. Scott took the rear that time, and he splashed holy water on all the skeletons remaining in their niches. Most fell to dust as the water hit them. Good. That meant there would be fewer left to rise against them later at the demon’s bidding. But Rome was ancient. There were millions of bodies hidden in catacombs and cemeteries all through the eternal city, empty shells just waiting for the demon to reanimate them. Millions of them.
As Scott followed Melanie back up the steps and into the church, he heard her sharp intake of breath.
He quickly followed her to the pew where the nuns were grouped around Sister Maria Elizabeta. Several were sobbing softly.
“No, no, she can’t be…dead,” Scott said. She was lying on the pew, just as she had been before, but her face was the color of death.
“She’s still breathing,” Sister Ana said. “But…” She sat back, stretching her spine and neck as if she had been bent over for too long. “He is coming,” she said. “He is coming.”
“Bael?” Scott asked.
“No,” Sister Ana said. “The Oracle.”
“But Sister Maria Elizabeta is the Oracle,” Scott protested. She couldn’t die. If she did, they were lost.
“Just as you were chosen to receive the power of another, so will there be another Oracle,” Sister Ana said. “We must keep her alive until he comes, lest the weakness of her flesh let Bael in to corrupt her soul.”
“Then let’s get her to a hospital,” Melanie said.
“A hospital will not change things,” Sister Ana said.
Sister Maria Elizabeta opened her eyes then. She saw Melanie and reached out, groping for her. Melanie took her hand and sank down by her as the old nun squeezed her hand painfully. Then the aged nun began to speak.
“The fissures…they are opening all over. Everywhere. Faith comes from within, and it’s what…I’ve seen them. Tell your friends that faith comes from within…. For centuries this church, and even the pagan temple below, have caged him, but he is escaping. The battle begins here, but it will not end here. I was weak, and he broke the seal. You’ve seen…you’ve seen the shadows. There is another place. I
have seen it in my sleep, and you…you have felt it. Do not worry. You will find it. But the word must be spread. Tell them…to remember, faith is what frees us. We bear it within us, and it is different for us all.”
Her grip on Melanie eased, and Melanie stared at Sister Ana in panic. Sister Ana smiled. “She is still with us. She will not leave until the new Oracle is with us.”
“Should we take her back to the convent?” Rainier asked.
“She is comfortable here. I have her heart medicines, and so long as we are here, we can see what comes from the earth, can stand what vigil we are able to, and she can still touch you in her dreams. You must rest now, and prepare for the next assault.”
“Perhaps we should take the offense, rather than waiting for the attack,” Scott said.
Rainier disagreed. “There’s so much we still don’t know. If only we understood what it will take to win the final battle…”
“The Roman Empire did not collapse because of a single great cataclysm,” Sister Ana reminded them. “It was eaten away from within and weakened. You must fight your battle and your battle alone. The answers will come if you hold true to your course. Go now and rest. We are watching, we are guarding.”
There was nothing else to do. Scott nodded. Melanie planted a kiss on Sister Maria Elizabeta’s forehead, and they filed out.
The sun was still high above the horizon. Birds chirped, and a soft breeze blew. It was a beautiful summer’s day. The world seemed ridiculously normal as the three of them stood before the church, looking at one another in shock and exhaustion and fear.
“She is dying. And she’s our link. If we don’t finish this…” Melanie said. “And we can’t finish it without her.”
“You heard Sister Ana. Someone else is coming,” Scott said.
“Well, we’re not getting anywhere standing here,” Rainier said. “We need to reload and rearm, read more, keep going until we do have the answers.”
“I know what we need to do,” Scott said, suddenly certain. “Take a tour.”
“What?” Melanie said, puzzled.