“Now that’s what the brother wants to hear. Your Oliver Prudhomme, he stays in an old school about twenty minutes up the state highway. It’s one of the old towns, been dried up for a while. You’ll know when you get there.”
“Thank you, Jake; you’ve been a very gracious host.”
“Oh, the pleasure was all mine. Make sure you come back and see me sometime. You can even bring your smart friend, there.”
“Fuck you, eggplant.”
“Bye, now.” Jake waved good-bye with the limp hand of the girl beneath him.
Isabel and Chas waded through the motley crowd of partygoers at the top of the stairs, stopping only to push aside a sailor stuffing a huge wad of weed into a pipe made from a fresh apple.
“Wanna take a hit off the apple?”
“No, that’s all right,” Chas brushed the sailor off.
In the front, on the lawn, the two Giovanni Kindred saw another pair of police cruisers pull up just as they made it to the gate that let them out on the street.
“Pretty rowdy in there, no?” One of the police called to the pair as he climbed out of his vehicle and tucked his baton and flashlight into their loops at his belt. As if to punctuate the question, something on fire tumbled out of a hole in what must have been the house’s attic, and a bum leaning against the fence issued forth a gout of vomit.
“Yeah, it’s a circus in there,” Chas muttered offhandedly. “Oh, yeah, officer; one more thing. There are absolutely no drugs in the room on the left at the top of the stairs.”
Isabel slapped Chas and shot him a look that the cop and his tardy partner noticed.
“Mm-hmm. You two have a fine evening,” the officer replied, checking his holster and pepper spray.
“Oh, we will, sir. You, too.” With that, Chas swung the Audi into the lane and through the darkness that pressed in from the edges of the city’s border.
Friday, 29 October 1999, 2:02 AM
The Ponchartrain School
La Lac Blanc, Louisiana
Chas parked the Audi curbside, where a decrepit staircase began its ascent and climbed upward for a good twenty feet. At the top of the stairs loomed an abandoned school. Because local government worked differently in Louisiana—the state had no counties, being instead divided into dioceses managed by the Church—the school had simply fallen into disuse after the community around it had been swallowed by the swamp over sixty years ago. The town had just vanished, leaving behind only a few legacies of its existence, which themselves now lay beneath layers and layers of vines and calcium deposits. The rain had left the six buildings that still stood streaked with mildew and rot. The whole area looked sick, like a pile of chalky bones slowly, inevitably crumbling into the ground where they had been left. Even the road had been overgrown, the dirt of its surface providing ample soil for malicious new vegetation to take root. The car’s all-wheel drive had slipped a few times when Chas had guided the Audi too quickly into an easy curve.
It didn’t help that the trees grew into an unnatural canopy, shielding much of the moon’s light from the area and casting skeletal shadows where illumination managed to fight its way through the web of branches. Even the air was still, dead. Heavy and wet, like the still waters of the swamp itself, beneath the surface of which untold horrors slid effortlessly through the murk.
“How the fuck is anyone supposed to find this place, out here in the middle of fucking nowhere?” Chas wondered aloud.
“I think that’s the point,” Isabel replied. She shifted the shoulder bag she carried, which held the strange manuscript Marcia Gibbert had given her.
They climbed the stair, fumbling inelegantly in the darkness, but making it to the top without any grievous injury. Chas’s small electric flashlight did little to light their environment. Its beam seemed to vanish into the gloom only a few feet before them, and faded completely by the time they stood before the front door of the building.
Isabel heard a wheezing, hissing sound as she reached toward the door. “Do you hear that, Chas?”
“Sorry. That’s me,” Chas answered, and Isabel could hear the smile on his face in his tone of voice.
“Is something funny?” She looked at him as best she could, the ivory of his teeth and his sunken eyes making his face a demonic apparition floating in the darkness before her.
“It’s not really funny so much as it is strange,” he said. “I’ve done this sort of thing a million times, but never in this sort of situation, you know? I’ve done whatever it was that Frankie Gee told me, walking into weird shit and talking to people who made their havens in fucked-up places. I’ve talked to Nosferatu who set up their nests beneath the fucking Chelsea Hotel. I’ve talked to Kindred in the basements of St. Mark’s and spent the day hiding in access tunnels of the New York subway. It’s not like this—that shit is all paved. No trees. No nothing, but concrete. Even Central Park feels, I don’t know, made instead of natural. This shit—I’d never have thought you’d catch me out here. I don’t even care that it’s not the city. What bugs me is that it’s not under control. It’s basically just this fucked-up place that some Kindred found and decided to stay here. Like the rest of the world didn’t want him. Like the other Kindred didn’t have any use for him, and forced him to just go somewhere.”
“Isn’t that always the case, though?” Isabel asked, growing nervous that something was unsettling Chas this much. She had watched his decline dispassionately for several months now; it wasn’t her place to steer him toward some moral end. Maybe it was a product of him becoming more Beast than man—perhaps he was growing more in tune with the nebulous stimuli that animals seemed to be able to feel, to which men and women were oblivious. “Don’t we always have to go where we can? I have a feeling our friend here is more than a little unsettled, and this is as close as he can come to everyone else without them feeling completely overtaken by what he is. Come on, Chas; you know we’re predators. You know we can only stay among the sheep for so long. This fellow probably can’t do it for any length of time at all.”
“I’m not pretending to know what the fuck it is, Isabel. It just feels…dead.”
Isabel opened the door, which Chas held, motioning her inside. He really has become an animal, Isabel thought to herself. It’s not even unchivalrous— he just feels something dreadful inside and his instincts have him sending me in first. Instinctively, she called upon her occult abilities to enable her to look through the veil between worlds. Sure enough, the halls of the school looked even more ghastly in the world of the dead. Thin layers of gossamer wafted in a sickly ghost-breeze and scores of tiny blackish handprints dotted the walls. All of the windows in the ghost-hall were broken, peering into vacant offices strewn with papers or classrooms in which spectral jackets hung from hooks on the walls.
A tinny music echoed down the empty hallways. Chas and Isabel shared a silent look before moving toward it. As they rounded a corner, the music grew louder and they both saw a flickering orange light emanating from one of the classrooms ahead. It must not have had any windows facing the front of the building; surely they would have seen even the faintest firelight from the outside.
At their approach, they discerned a voice just below the strains of the music, which had itself become clearer. The doleful music was Hank Williams, his lonely guitar notes traveling across the still air and sounding a million miles away. Over the lyrics of the song, the voice lectured.
“And what can we do when we can find no hope inside ourselves, children? What do we do when it seems that the world would be better off without us? We must not give in to the loss of our hope—the Lord says despair is a sin, for it denies the faith He wants us to have in Him. Trust in the Lord; He is our shepherd and our salvation. That’s what we must do, children. We must ask God for His help. We must pray. He loves us, and asks only that we give ourselves to Him. Remember that His son, Jesus, died for all of us—he took all of our sins and made it possible for God to excuse them for us. God’s love is infinite; God’s love
is unconditional. But we must allow Him to give it to us. He doesn’t want us to have it if we must take it against our will—God allows us to choose.
“You children know better than I. You are with God. You know. I am still here—I don’t yet know what you do, and all I have is faith. He has heard your prayers, and sent me to let you meet Him, hasn’t He? It’s not as complex as it sounds. I’m not a cruel man. Although there are some among you whose parents would say that I am a tool of the Devil—or even that I am the Devil himself—you know better than that. You know that God has His own designs and that I serve them, not the will of the Devil. Could it possibly be said that the Devil’s tool has God in his heart? How can a man like me, who places his faith and fate in the hands of God, conceivably do the work of the Devil? Am I deluded, children? I don’t think so. I pray. I have spoken to God and He has let me know that even one so far from Him as I am is still not outside the boundaries of His love.
“Pray, children. Pray to see another sunrise. Pray that all of God’s creation remain open to you. Pray that God shows you how to avoid the jaws of Hell—Hell is this world, children, and I have saved you from it. I am in Hell, and I have delivered you unto the eaves of the Lord God’s house. Children, listen! Don’t hate me! I have given you the greatest gift of all! I have given you heaven! Were you to have done this yourself, you would reside here still, or on a circle below. Children! Answer me! Tell me that you have no hatred for me; that you have only the Lord’s love!
“God! God, I have given these children back to You. I have returned them to Your table! They have died where their names do not matter. I have cut the thin, silver tether that bound them to this Hell. They are Yours once again!”
“God?
“Children?”
Isabel knocked on the door frame. “Mr. Prudhomme?”
The man betrayed no sign of being startled. He looked to be of about fifty mortal years, a compact, white-haired man with a strangely clean-cut beard and mustache. He wore pleated pants, a white shirt, and a cardigan sweater, all of which were curiously free of the vegetative filth of the forsaken swamp-town.
“Yes? I beg your pardon, children; I have a guest. It is Miss Isabel from the Father Superior’s office. Say hello to Miss Isabel, children!”
Silence.
Isabel looked into the room, beyond the man she assumed to be Ambrogino’s contact Oliver Prudhomme. Rows and columns of small, wooden desks occupied the center of the room, each occupied by the still body of a small child. Some had obviously been there longer than others, having decomposed to the point that the only thing human about them was their vague shape. Others had joined the class only recently, their cool skin and blue lips not yet showing any signs of putrefaction. All had their eyes closed, their tiny hands clasped in a rude approximation of the prayer pose. Boys and girls both occupied the class, roughly two dozen in number, some wearing blue jeans and T-shirts like modern children, others in more formal clothes and even uniforms that suggested decades long past.
The Hank Williams songs twanged along softly, the only sound that broke the quiet.
“Mr. Prudhomme, I was referred to you by Ambrogino Giovanni,” Isabel began.
“I know, Isabel. I know you. I know what you want.” Prudhomme suddenly seemed very tired, as if being interrupted in his fervor had drained him. He removed a pair of pince-nez from the bridge of his nose and rubbed his eyes between pinched fingers. “Children, I beg your pardon. Please begin your prayers, and I shall return presently.” Prudhomme moved to step out of the room, looking expectantly to Isabel and Chas to precede him.
“What the fuck is this, anyway?” Chas reached out his hand, halting Prudhomme at the shoulder. “What the hell is up with these kids? Are you some kind of sick fuck?”
Prudhomme stepped back from Chas’s hand, aghast. “Miss Isabel, does this insolent youth travel with you?” He shrank from Chas’s gesture as if admonished rather than challenged.
For her part, Isabel was shocked, as well. “Chas, what do you think you’re doing?”
“It’s this guy, Isabel. He’s the one who’s responsible for the fucked-up feel this place has. Aren’t you, you freak? You know exactly where those kids are.”
“Chas, what are you—?”
“Don’t fuck with me, Isabel. You know I’m right. I’m right, ain’t that so, Prudhomme? You’ve got all these fucking kids bottled up somewhere. You’re doing some of that death-magic shit to keep these fucking kids around.” Chas stepped forward, grabbing handfuls of Prudhomme’s sweater, lifting him up to his own snarling face. “You fucking pig.”
Isabel grabbed Chas by the shoulder and forced him to turn about, looking her in the face. “Let him go, Chas. Now.”
Chas’s eyes clouded over. He hissed and his eyes squinted as he dropped Prudhomme to the floor. Oliver crawled backward across the ground, away from his tormentor as Isabel looked upward at her companion.
“Don’t try that shit on me. Don’t fucking try it. I’ll break you in half, whore.” Chas loomed over Isabel, but she refused to shrink, placing one hand on his sternum to prevent him from leaning into her any more.
“Please, watch your mouth around the children,” Prudhomme protested.
Isabel reasserted herself, gently pressing Chas away from her and staring into his eyes unfalteringly. “You will stand down.”
And Chas did, unable to resist. He continued to snarl, a veil of crimson cast over his vision. Isabel saw him on the verge of frenzy and moved away from him herself. “Relax, Chas,” she whispered. “He’s not even one of us. One of the family. He can’t do that.” Chas shook, waking from a dream. A scowl still lay etched across his face but the red rage subsided. “I…oh, fuck. I…I’m sorry. I don’t know what happened.”
“You’re not well, Chas. You’re too close to the Beast,” Isabel said.
“She’s right. You’ve spent too much time with the wrong half of you,” Prudhomme conjectured, rising to his feet. Still a bit tentative, he approached. “Let me see—look at me.” Prudhomme held his hands out before him to show Chas he had no ill intent. “Just let me look. Yes, you are not far at all. The Man has been overcome.”
“The fuck does that mean, old man? That I’m trouble? Fuck, yeah, I’m trouble. Trouble for someone like you.”
“Chas, I’m warning you. Calm down,” Isabel’s voice rose.
It was Chas’s turn to be wearied. His posture slumped and he leaned back against the wall. “Oh, fuck. What’s wrong with me?” he asked no one in particular. He caught his head in his hands as it tilted forward. Isabel eased him down to sit on the floor. “What’s going on in there, Prudhomme? You’re the teacher?”
“I’m as much student as teacher, I’m afraid.”
“What was all that shit in there about God and returning the children to Him?”
“It’s as I spoke it. Those children have all died. Someone needs to take care of them.”
“You sent them all back to God? You killed them all?”
Oliver Prudhomme looked sheepishly at Isabel, who intervened. “Chas, would you wait in the car, please. Everything is all right here; thank you for making sure I arrived safely.”
Chas rose, giving a wary glance to Prudhomme before turning and taking his brooding leave. His shoes left cold echoes in the hall as he stalked away.
“I apologize for that. He’s not been the same since…” Isabel’s voice trailed off. She couldn’t make excuses for him. Not only was it not her place, she’d watched as Chas had slowly allowed the Beast to erode what had been left of him after the Embrace.
“Don’t mind it, my dear,” Oliver Prudhomme rubbed his forehead with the arch of his thumb and forefinger. “Please, just let me see the papers. I knew to expect you.”
Isabel looked skeptical. “Ambrogino told you?”
“Ambrogino? I don’t know who you’re talking about. I saw that you would come. The children were very excited; they’ve been whispering about you all night. Young Cleveland Thibodeaux ha
s quite the crush on you. You have something you need me for.” Isabel thought it best not to ask any unnecessary questions. She opened her bag and handed Oliver the journal. “I need your keen powers of memory, Mr. Prudhomme. You’ve been here for as long as Ambro—as long as the man who told me to seek you can remember. A while ago, an acquaintance of mine found this and I was hoping you could tell me anything about the place. Any strange occurrences, anything out of the ordinary you remember. We know where the place is, but it seems to have once held something decidedly unpleasant, and we thought we should consult with an expert on the matter before opening it up ourselves.”
Prudhomme looked over the sheaf of paper, placing his pince-nez back on his nose and shuffling the individual sheets. Slowly, a look of recognition crossed his face, which gave way to a look of horror. In the darkness, he became even paler than his Cainite complexion normally allowed for. “Oh, my God,” he stammered.
“What? What? You remember something about this? You know what it’s talking about?”
“I certainly do. I know exactly what it’s talking about. I remember this as vividly as if it were last night. It’s talking about the monster that made its haven not far from here—the dead thing that slept beneath the cold water and ate everything it could lure down there.”
“Yes, yes!” Isabel grew excited as a tremor of excited terror ran through her. “You remember it! What do you know? What do you know for certain about this thing?”
“Why, I know everything about it. You see, over a century and a half ago, I wrote this.”
Wednesday, 27 October 1999, 11:24 PM
Highway 95
Outside Las Vegas, Nevada
Benito heard the thrum of an automobile’s engine and felt the air vibrate around him. He could see nothing; the black bag over his head had been tied tightly around his neck and he found himself swallowing blindly, involuntarily. He could smell the dried blood caked on the side of his face, feel it crusted beneath his right eye. He could also smell the reek that had accompanied his captors for the past—God only knew how long. Nights? Weeks? Jesus; months? He had no idea. His odoriferous hijackers had fed him enough blood to keep him cognizant but not enough to risk his breaking free. They were as strong as he—perhaps they were Brujah, or maybe Nosferatu. They might even be rival Giovanni, but he couldn’t imagine that overbearing Nickolai having enough sense to play two factions of Giovanni against each other.
Clan Novel Giovanni: Book 10 of The Clan Novel Saga Page 17