Disciples of the Serpent: A Novel of the O.C.L.T.

by Williams, Sidney

  The captain gave a nod for the communications officer who’d spoken, who turned toward the professor. “I can get you into a headset here,” he said.

  Bullfinch moved to the console.

  On the deck, a small hatch opened in the canopy that housed the cannon, and a small dish with a narrow cone at its center emerged to call on satellite systems.

  “Bullfinch here.”

  “Don’t know if it will help, but we have the man who compiled the symbols,” O’Donnell said. “He just turned up, and I thought it might be good to get him on the horn with you. This is Keon. Keon, Professor Bullfinch.”

  “Sir.”

  “Greetings. What have you got?”

  “The staffs are playing a song based on the lost markings. There’s an order to them. I’d begun to figure that out once, but someone’s done deeper study. It’s mentioned in some pulp the stories, but someone’s figured out even more specifics…”

  “Ideas? If I didn’t make it clear, anti-tank and aircraft shells are bouncing off whatever’s out there. They ought to cut a snake in half, I’m told.”

  “You’re on the other side of the waves. Maybe if the song were played over there it would reverse the effect.”

  “There’s a legend that Patrick dispersed demons with a bell. Maybe the noise was something like we’re experiencing. Maybe he dispersed whatever he faced in a similar way, but we don’t have the staffs over here.”

  “The sounds could possibly be re-created.”

  “Do you have all of the symbols in your head?”

  “Well, I might be able…”

  A message icon popped in on Bullfinch’s tablet. Mack. Perfect timing as always, as if by magic.

  “I have another call on my other line,” Bullfinch said. He thumbed the message icon.

  “Mack, my boy. Do you have a miracle for me?”

  “Looking grim? I’ve been monitoring your situation.”

  As if to confirm that, an operator shouted off to Bullfinch’s right. “We’re getting the shape of two things on the scans.”

  Bullfinch spun toward Curl, who was in turn looking at the tracking screen in front of the man who’d spoken. Two blue rectangles represented the huge figures on the screen.

  “They’re almost as tall as those waves.”

  Red lines indicated the course of the guided shells that the deck’s cannon had belched. They moved in small fractions toward the rectangles.

  Bullfinch looked out the wind screen feeling a stab of fear he’d rarely encountered at the heart of his carefully disciplined resolve. He’d looked at winged Aztec deities and writhing minions of nightmares around the globe without losing optimism. “Those waves” were as tall as a mountain, and he wasn’t sure they’d find an answer.

  “Grim it is,” Bullfinch said, looking at Mack’s image on his tablet. “I’ve been conferring with the—”

  “I was listening. Let me see if I can pull us all together into a circle,” Mack said.

  He looked away from his cam lens a moment, fingers no doubt dancing on a half-a-dozen keyboards.

  “Can everyone hear me?” he asked a moment later.

  “Who is this?” O’Donnell asked.

  “My friend and co-worker Mack,” Bullfinch said. “Miracle worker we hope.”

  “Aileen O’Donnell here, Garda SDU.”

  “Keon Bello. I’m afraid I…”

  “No time for blame,” Bullfinch said. “Solutions.”

  On the radar screen, the red line curved downward, angling toward the center of one of the rectangles. The rectangles advanced by small increments, a far from adequate representation of the horror beyond the waves.

  Bullfinch held his breath. Another second, two at most.

  The red line connected with the blue shape, and a loud sound echoed beyond the waves. Then, the rectangles kept moving. Tiny increment by tiny increment on the screen.

  “Our round just went directly into the center of one of them. Still doesn’t seem to have an effect,” a man shouted.

  “Hit ’em again,” Curl shouted.

  “I’ve been gathering the symbols I could find on the web and the dark web,” Mack said. “If these symbols are being handled as notes there’s a mathematical value, right?”

  “That’s what I was thinking they’d done,” Keon said.

  “I’ve been through quite a few sources,” Mack said. “I found a bit of data someone tried to erase from a server at one of the Groom’s think tanks. I’m missing the last symbol. Wait a minute. I had a scan running. Looks like it was transmitted between a couple of sources recently… Looks like it’s a fit with the others.”

  “They have some prototype portable 3D printer,” Keon said. “They calibrated these loops on their staffs for the sounds and they sent the last symbol, my control symbol a little while ago.”

  “Let me just run of couple of programs. I should be able to re-create the values and then the sequence should be a matter of calculation.”

  “I could help with the order of the symbols,” Keon said.

  “Let’s get this man a laptop,” O’Donnell shouted off her mic. “Let’s get you two in a huddle.”

  “Hold tight. We’ll have you a version of the tune very quickly,” Mack said.

  As Keon fired up a laptop they had pulled from a cabinet set in the helicopter’s bulkhead, Quinn shook his head.

  “This looks insane where I sit,” he said.

  “From this angle, too,” O’Donnell said. “Blowing a flute at a monster, but then everything looks insane just now. We’re in the middle of a nightmare.”

  “Agreed.”

  Quinn put a hand against his earpiece, pressing into his ear, listening.

  “Go ahead.”

  He turned back to O’Donnell.

  “People are standing down.”

  “What?”

  She looked out. Wind tore at the people on shore, pulling at hair and clothing, resisting their movement, threatening to topple them, fresh gale force or greater.

  “The people on shore. They’re putting their sticks down.”

  Quinn repeated that into his mouthpiece.

  Keon stopped typing. “They must think it’s finished. The opening is complete.”

  “We need your song!” O’Donnell shouted.

  “Working with them,” Keon said.

  “I’m surprised anyone’s able to stand up out there,” Quinn said. “Another few minutes, this bird probably is going over.”

  “We’re getting it pretty hard,” an officer said from shore. “Wind’s trying to pick the tourists up by their parka hoods.”

  O’Donnell turned toward Keon. “What happens next?”

  “The gates are open. People on shore become the first meal, I guess. Then it moves inland.”

  O’Donnell turned back to Rees who’d been sitting silently, watching the chaos outside.

  “Can we get them to scramble an air strike?”

  Kaity had heard the phrase “the heart of midnight” in her lifetime. That seemed to define what unfolded before her as she guided Vita Burke along the beach with Nelda and Alison assisting. She looked into the space in front of the abyss. In the channel where a sea floor had been, moving through mist and haze and showering water, writhing, towering, inconceivable forms approached. She caught hints of giant appendages, and yawning mouths, blisters of odd eyes and around the massive figures, she thought she saw winged, demonic forms and shapeless others with hints of more massive contours beyond.

  The thrill inside her, even as wind whipped behind them and threatened to knock them forward was akin to orgasm mixed with shock and astonishment.

  “It’s incredible,” she said, knowing the word to be almost a joke, an inadequate grunt.

  She turned to Liam to see glazed eyes and an expression of amazement. He’d lost awareness of almost everything around him except the witching hour-vision, the death dream, the abyss in front of them.

  Then he blinked.

  His absent conscio
usness returned. And a new focus. Even with the hurricane winds that swirled around them, his body language suggested a sudden awareness of purpose. He grabbed Vita’s arm, above the elbow, then stepped toward the crevasse in front of them and the sea of leviathans, tugging her along.

  “Time for the offering,” he shouted. “We’ve always known there’d have to be a sacrifice, something offered, an illustration of our submission and our regret for closing the door.”

  Though dazed, the girl tugged at his shackling fist with no luck.

  “You’re insane.”

  “No, not crazy, carrying on. My grandfather worked with Rottman,” he shouted. “Compiled the research for Rottman’s stories. Gave him the whispers that were in the tales, but he amassed much more knowledge. Happily, Keon came with the ideas to fill in the gaps, and he was easy enough to nudge in the right direction. Most of the time, until he hid things even from me. This is to be the final component. The sacrifice as invitation to step back into our world.”

  Vita tried to swing at him, strike a blow, but the force of the wind slowed her motion, weakened her strike. He barely felt it, and then he wrenched her arm behind her and shoved her forward.

  Kaity had to admit he’d kept his secrets hidden well. If his grandfather had worked with Rottman, the old man at Clew Bay had been his father. She’d never known.

  Vita tried to find purchase in the soft sand, but Liam kept pushing, and Kaity joined in, shoving her toward the maelstrom.

  “We’re bouncing pebbles off a stone wall,” Curl said. “Even the incendiaries aren’t doing any good. We need jets scrambling out of Baldonnel, but they’re gonna take a while. What else can we hit it with, Professor? Do I try to push the whole ship through that wall and ram ’em?”

  Before Bullfinch could speak, his tablet vibrated.

  Mack was back.

  “We almost have a tune,” he said. “We get this worked out, you have a player?”

  “I got blessed out the other day with the reminder of our Garda LRAD systems,” O’Donnell said. “But we can’t get a bird up over here anymore. Are they equipped on the OPV?”

  BullfinchHe looked to the captain. “I should have asked already. Sonic equipment?”

  Hearing him, Darcy said: “They want to know if we have LRAD?”

  Bullfinch nodded.

  “We were fitted with a new system for the Mediterranean operation,” Curl said. “Ships have used ’em against pirates but…”

  Bullfinch put a finger in his right ear, pressing the bud in as he listened, trying to make out all of the words from O’Donnell, nodding. Then he looked toward Darcy and the captain.

  “We’re going to play a song,” he said. “Something that may close the lid again out there.”

  “A song?” Curl asked.

  “This brouhaha started with sounds, notes on shore. We’re going to have to play the tune from here. We’re going to ring Patrick’s bell.”

  “And we have a long-range acoustical device, we can send a blast of it,” Darcy said.

  “Less showy than what the people did on shore but hopefully effective,” Bullfinch said. “Something in the frequency created by these symbols intensifies energy from the elements.”

  “Have them get the speaker into position,” Curl said. “Let’s get your song beamed in if we can.”

  “We’re ready for your mix tape,” Bullfinch said into the tablet’s small mic opening.

  He was surprised he’d found that term in the back of his brain.

  “Almost ready,” Mack said. “I’m going to be sending you an MP3. In a few seconds. Watch your inbox.”

  Bullfinch stretched a thumb up to click his message box.

  Then he waited.

  Beyond the wind screen, as waves crashed across the deck, he watched crewmen heading along to the bow to the front railing, restraints around their waists to keep them from being hurled overboard.

  Still nothing in his inbox.

  He tried to think through the hops needed for the file transfer, plus the potential interruptions out here. Would it make it?

  On the deck, connected, twin gray rectangles were being placed on the railing, clamped into place on a mount, the sailors ducking into the sloshing water as they worked.

  And a message appeared.

  Oghamfile.mp3

  “Where do we put it?” Bullfinch asked.

  “There’s a player,” Darcy said, pulling out a small box with rounded corners made of heavy gray plastic. “Heavy duty.”

  She yanked out connector cables as well.

  “Can I see your tablet, sir?”

  Bullfinch passed it over, wishing he had Mack on hand. Technical systems were second nature to him, and then Mack would have been just as comfortable securing the speakers on deck.

  While Bullfinch’s proficiency was improving, he was glad Darcy was on hand.

  “I’m going to forward the file and then transfer it to the player,” she said.

  On deck, the sailors had the speakers in place. One turned toward the portal and raised a hand, thumbs up, while he kept his other hand curled around the railing.

  “Are we close enough?” Bullfinch asked.

  “For the sound to reach?” Curl asked. “Should be, but there’s a lotta racket. This unit’s supposed to be good for an audible message at eight thousand meters. That’s, what did they say in the training session, Lt. Darcy?”

  “It diminishes by distance, but the specs say eighty-one American football fields.”

  Bullfinch tried to remember sitting in U.S. stadiums accompanying friends. Then he looked at the wall of water and what he could see of the movement beyond.

  “Environmental factors have their impact, but this should carry for a while,” Darcy said. “It’s ready to plug in. The big question is will the magic work.”

  “It may be some kind of physics we need, actually,” Bullfinch said. “But as we’re seeing, it’ll seem damned close to magic.”

  O’Donnell ran, or pushed forward at least, in almost slow motion into the wind, shoulder to shoulder with Rees and the armored operatives from the regional squad, grabbing for the confused crowd members. Some seemed only dazed, but as they had looked forward, others, upon looking into the void, seemed to be driven instantly insane. They wailed and tore at their hair or tried to fold themselves into balls. She began pulling them back from the crevasse. If the professor couldn’t work things out on the other end, the mission became saving as many lives as possible.

  The dazed patrons complied with being urged in a direction away from shore, letting themselves be led inland as the armored team began to split the job up. The others were balls of agonized insanity.

  “Take them toward the castle wall.” Quinn motioned with a broad gesture, pointing with his entire hand as if he were on a runway directing a jet.

  Then O’Donnell looked to the sea and caught sight of the long-haired man framed by the bipedal figures who had crouched in the water earlier. Then she spotted Kaity and the younger woman, a girl who struggled against his grip while incredible things loomed before them.

  What the hell was he doing?

  She handed off a man she’d been guiding to one of the team members and started toward the opening’s edge, hand on the grip of her sidearm. Then she paused. She’d left the sword behind. Bullets had worked on the snake man Bullfinch had battled, but the professor had softened him up.

  She changed direction and found herself in a wind that made her movement feel like a climb up a mountainside. She felt just like a mountaineer in a photo on Everest, frozen in a moment that looked immobile.

  Her coat billowed around her like a cape. Her cheeks were slashed by wind, her hair follicles strained as her hair swept back from her face and the crown of her head.

  She slogged on, forcing steps, compelling one foot to find purchase, then the other.

  When she found the sword, she wheeled for the trip back to the beach. That did go a little faster, though crosswinds threatened to topple her
first in one direction then another.

  One of the gray things surrounding the man greeted her, bulbous eyes staring, and just like before, an array of tentacles sprang from its back. Ignoring the pain in her shoulder, with the hilt in both hands, O’Donnell slashed, aiming a diagonal that took one tentacle tip off in a crackle of blue electricity before it raked across a shoulder and across the torso, driving the creature back.

  She drew her sidearm then and fired two rounds, staggering it further before it fell back to the sand. She didn’t risk more shots with the wind and the variables such as the girl on the far side of the opponents.

  Behind the creatures, in fact, the girl continued to struggle as the man, Liam, forced her forward, his weight and strength compelling his steps. O’Donnell didn’t shout. Words would be lost. She had to get to her before he forced her into the mass of nightmare that was a few meters after that.

  Forty-Seven

  The rugged MP3 player as it was described in the documentation had been plugged in. Kieran Darcy held a finger above the remote’s large button, devised so that a person wearing gloves could still handle the controls.

  “Are we ready?”

  Bullfinch nodded.

  “Like I said, it’s worked on pirates. Let’s hope,” Curl said. “Fire.”

  Darcy dropped her thumb, and in spite of their ear plugs, the wind, storm, waves and the indefinable roar of the uplifted water and whatever was beyond, the shrill noise that broadcast through the LRAD speakers sounded and stabbed nerves, ears and consciousness.

  More discordant than the wind through the staffs on shore, the noise blasted forward, and Bullfinch imagined it as a wave rushing toward the wall of water. For a second, there was nothing, but then the wall of water reacted, as if a wind had suddenly begun to push it.

  No longer was it looking solid and immobile. It was almost straining.

  “Are you at your maximum?”

  “We’ve got a couple of decibels left,” Kieran said.

  “I’d up it. All the way.” He gestured to the sky in case she couldn’t hear him.

  “Here goes,” she said and thumbed the control.

  No effect.

  “Dammit,” she shouted.