Disciples of the Serpent: A Novel of the O.C.L.T.
Page 23
“No luck with Patrick’s bell here,” Bullfinch said.
O’Donnell had never used a sword, but she’d used a variety of batons. She shoved her sidearm into its holster and gripped the hilt with both hands again. The wounded shoulder was becoming excruciating, but she kept moving into the midst of the alien things, the blade raised high over her head.
They converged around her, and she swung, putting all of the muscle strength she had into the motion and trying to shift her weight into it as she’d been trained in hand-to-hand defense classes.
She raked the blade across a throat, blue tendrils of electricity crackling along the steel as it sliced. Then she stabbed the point into a figure’s core, driving hard before yanking it out.
Another figure tried to move in on her, arms ready and tentacles flailing, and she had to remind herself these were possibly the source of the poison used in the serpent murders. A bite or perhaps a touch could be dangerous.
She raised the blade to a vertical position and slashed from side to side, giving the weapon a windshield-wiper motion, deflecting or slicing tentacles until she was able to change the blade’s course.
She twisted the hilt in her hands and swung straight down. With new blue crackles and jagged tendrils around it, the steel sliced into the gray armor-like surface and bone beneath, cracking and separating.
She leaned in and forced weight and muscle into it, dragging it deeper, seeking brain. The thing staggered, tentacles from its back twitching wildly.
O’Donnell twisted and yanked, freeing the blade then giving a stomping kick to the chest to send the figure down. Then she looked into the dazed face of the girl Liam held.
“Vita Burke.”
She was the girl from the office photo. No wonder the Aisteach hadn’t found her.
“She knew all was lost, but if she could get her turned this way, she might help her help herself.
“Maybe we’re un-ringing a bell,” Mack said.
“Whatever it is, it doesn’t look like it’s working,” Bullfinch said.
“The pulp stories talk about the song as opening,” Keon said. “There’s no mention of closing because the forces overwhelm…”
“But if we wanted to un-ring a bell, our notes are a mathematical sequence, maybe reversing the song sequence would do the trick,” Mack said. “Any chance you could hit it from both sides? You have two walls of water out there, right?”
“Right.”
“I’m told we can’t get this chopper off the ground,” Keon said.
“Where’d Ahlstrom go?” Bullfinch asked. “Can we try to reach him?”
Darcy stepped to a console and tapped a few keys.
“How long will it take you, Mack?” Bullfinch asked as she worked.
“Not long. Hold the fort, Geoffrey.”
“Just work fast.”
“Try not to sweat.”
“Least of the functions I’m trying to control,” Bullfinch said.
Black, winged things were fluttering above the towering water wall.
“I’m afraid that’s not hope we’re seeing,” Curl said.
Bullfinch didn’t want to agree, but he gave a nod. Mack had pulled off some impressive moves, but time was short and the belly of whatever world was out there was about to vomit its contents into this one.
Wherever he was sitting now, probably somewhere in the American Southwest, Mack would be surrounded by screens, keyboards, data, fingers thundering over keys if he didn’t have something rigged to funnel his thoughts directly to a computer. Would even his feverish tenacity and brilliance be enough?
Closing his eyes, the professor summoned up a technique an aging Hindu sādhu with a painted face had imparted to him, one he claimed he’d perfected for pushing good thoughts from his inner being out to the universe.
Bullfinch sent those in what he hoped was Mack’s direction and O’Donnell’s direction as well, even as he gripped a counter edge on the bridge to steady himself and controlled his breathing while the ship shifted from side to side.
“Almost there,” Mack said.
On the radar screen, the rectangles blipped closer and closer to shore.
The girl seemed out of it, not able to put up much resistance, even as O’Donnell shouted her name.
Two more figures stepped in to face O’Donnell. She recognized them too, Alison and Nelda. They placed themselves beside one of the tentacled figures and in O’Donnell’s way as a barrier for their high priest. Or whatever the hell he was.
With a yell she’d been told could aid in focus and the tightening of muscle, O’Donnell charged. If a tentacle got her, so be it. She’d stop Liam’s final ministrations or go down trying, and it would all be up to the professor after that.
Fighting the wind, she closed the distance between her and the younger women by forcing one foot in front of the other. She dodged a tentacle and feinted toward Alison now on her left. As Alison stepped back, O’Donnell slashed to her right, aiming for the point where a carotid artery ought to be on the reptile figure, aiming to pierce scale and skin.
The way the blood spurted around the blue electricity, it seemed to work.
A tentacle slapped her face before she could focus on the next. The impact felt heavy and strong enough to bruise, and her head jerked left, her balance thrown off.
She went down on an elbow.
Her body followed, and she lay on her side on the wet sand, brain not stunned but throbbing. From the corner of one eye, she could make out a wriggling array of appendages. Grips ready to coil and bind her to stop any further defense.
She turned her head slightly to stare into the thing’s round, black eyes as it peered down at her, the slatted pupils spread wide, and the darkness in the depths of the thing’s being threatening and beckoning.
Then the head exploded in a sudden burst of blood, skull fragments, brain matter and other gore that the wind quickly swept backward.
O’Donnell moved the sidearm away from her hip and pushed herself up on the sand.
For one opponent with a neck injury, it served just fine.
She found her way to her knees in a second, ejecting a clip and replacing it with another fresh load. She leveled the barrel toward Nelda and Alison and was getting to her knees. The Red Sea wasn’t closing.
Tentacles from the abyss reached toward Vita and Liam.
“Aaaallllmoooost reaaaddy,” Mack said.
“They’re almost at shore,” Darcy shouted. “Send it straight to my console.”
She grabbed the tablet and typed an address for Mack.
“Okay, sending now,” Mack said.
Nothing appeared.
“You rang,” Ahlstrom’s voice came through the com system.
“Another round,” Curl ordered.
The rectangles blipped forward on screen, while the deck gun roared.
Bullfinch didn’t harbor any hopes the shells would find some exposed weakness this time. The things would keep lumbering, and this corner of the world was about to be devastated. All because of some interrupted hop on an Internet route.
“Where are you?” Bullfinch asked.
“Sat down in a field I found a bit inland.”
“Can you get in the air again?”
“Not sure it’d be the best idea, but aye, aye.”
“Do you have LRAD on board?”
“Aye to that, too.”
“We have an idea.”
Then the mail icon blipped up on Bullfinch’s screen:
Oghamfile2.mp3
“It’s here,” Bullfinch said, motioning over Darcy who began a repeat of the previous process.
“We’re going to max it.”
“Jimmy, I’ve got a song for you to play on the north side. Can you get there?”
“Piece of cake.”
In front of O’Donnell, the women’s hands shot to the sides of their heads as they tried to shut new sound out. The blast came from beyond the waves, shrill, horrible, somehow different than before.
Then she pushed herself up and ran, grabbing for Liam, yanking him aside then grabbing Vita to drag her out of Kaity’s grasp.
She was working to deflect arm movements when someone touched her shoulder.
Rees was suddenly brushing past her. He drove a fist into Kaity’s jaw, shoved Nelda and Alison away and grabbed Liam’s collar, tugging him aside and allowing O’Donnell to concentrate on Vita.
Looking into the girl’s terrified eyes, O’Donnell jerked her head toward shore, and they turned and began the fight to reach some kind of refuge.
In a second, Rees was beside her, taking the girl’s other arm. They managed to get her onto the beach, get her almost upright. Then, together they ran, heading for a crevasse in the castle ruins to hunker down.
“Here we go,” Darcy said.
The speakers on deck blasted through the noise and roar outside.
The walls of water began to shimmy in a new way. It looked like a controlled fountain display about to a change pre-programed patterns. Perhaps it was. If this really worked, they’d be analyzing whatever forces and protocols might be at work here for some time. Mack would be heading over to apply his physicist side to the problem.
“Is it working?”
Bullfinch was jarred by Mack’s voice from the tablet.
“Turn me to the storm,” he said. “Can you see anything?”
Bullfinch moved to the console and picked up the tablet to aim the eye lens out the wind screen. No movement on the water walls.
“In the air,” Ahlstrom said from the speakers. “It’ll take us a few. I’m going to stay outside the worst of the wind spirals.”
Bullfinch focused his gaze, searching for any sign of the walls relenting.
“Nothing yet.”
“We’ll keep the blast going at top decibels,” Darcy said.
“Maxing my speed,” Ahlstrom said. “Heading around the north side.”
Bullfinch studied the shimmering water in front of him. It held fast, looked like a solid.
“In place,” Ahlstrom said. “Can’t see you, but we’re firing up the speakers. Let’s start the party over here.”
With nothing else to do, Bullfinch counted Mississippis. When he was up to thirty-five, he saw a shimmer.
“It’s starting to do something,” he said.
He held his breath. More Mississippis ticked off. Then the tops of the waves were curling downward, spilling inward on the trench. In a few seconds, water showered around the massive figures, outlining them, as if they were draped in cloaks of liquid. Bullfinch took in the shapes, the odd, terrifying convolution of otherness as Rottman might have put it in a pulp tale.
Then they began to sink downward and the water continued to tumble and swirl.
“Are you seeing what I’m seeing?” Ahlstrom asked.
Bullfinch had to smile. “Good job, Jimmy.”
“Full-throttle reverse,” Curl said. “We don’t want to go down with them.”
“Guess we won’t need to call the Brits for a nuke after all,” Darcy said.
“Not this time,” Bullfinch said. “Let’s hope there won’t be another.”
He closed his eyes again and sent another wish O’Donnell’s way, keeping his focus as intense as he could make it while they waited for the swirl and the waves to calm again to a still and silent sea.
The massive figures and the ancillary beings were caught in the downward onslaught and swirl. O’Donnell and Rees poked heads out through the wall’s opening in Ballinskellig to watch.
A whirlpool looking like a fiercely tended stew began to spin, and hints of tentacles and black wings swirled as flailing ingredients.
“Looks like the professor did it,” she said. Words were lost, she put her arm around Vita and rested her cheek against the girl’s head. Someday they’d talk of fear and loss, but for the moment, it was time to weep and cheer.
Forty-Eight
The Liffey rolled in a steady ripple beside the railed sidewalk in Dublin, but it looked almost still in comparison to the waves they’d seen at Ballinskelligs Bay. O’Donnell leaned against the hard iron with the arm not in a sling and watched the flow, calmed by this movement and its familiar certainty.
“Looks constant and inevitable,” she said.
“Not letting go of fatalism?” Bullfinch asked.
He was natty and perfect again, homburg sitting in a firm, faint tilt on his head, newly dry-cleaned overcoat crisp, creased and pressed into perfect alignment.
The doctors said the ringing that persisted in her ears would subside given time. She felt impatient, but that would have to do. She could make out the professor’s words enough to shrug.
“It’s ingrained, but I think we wound up doing some good,” she said.
“You wound up doing a lot of it, Officer. You helped change the course of things. You are indeed a very special detective.”
He leaned against the railing beside her and watched the water move.
“It’s been a while since it’s been an area of focus for me,” he said. A corner of his mouth ticked up. “Other things demand attention, but when I read Aristotle and the philosophers, a point or two about fatalism stuck with me. Ultimately he rejected the notion that a proposition is always true or false. Memory gets fuzzy, but I believe when we’re given two possibilities, great serpents emerge or great serpents don’t, there are a lot of probabilities between the two. A determined woman at the center between the ‘do’ and ‘do not’ can mean a lot with those probabilities.”
He turned toward her now and smiled again. “I’d say you had a good bit to do with eternity this week. You saved the world, dear lady, or a significant piece of it. We don’t know what would have happened after the emerald isle was overrun.”
“Saved it for now,” she said. “I’ve never read the philosophers, but my mam used to read me Tolkien, and when things look bad there’s a fellow who says ‘…in this hour I do not believe that any darkness will endure.’ I’ll give it an hour.”
Bullfinch smiled.
“Then perhaps another after that?”
“After that, we’ll see. There’s work to be done. We keep getting mention of a pair of American brothers.”
Bullfinch nodded. “They’ve been involved in think tanks for years, pulling political strings, shaping educational agendas, planting ideas where they can. They haven’t managed to make the winds of change as chaotic as they’d like in the U.S. I think they were hoping to use destruction and rebuilding here as a cauldron for study, something that could be re-shaped into their vision.”
“We can’t actually prove that. They were on hand for some discussions, we show Liam Hennigan and his father pushed all the actual buttons. We can’t pinpoint who was behind the deaths aimed at pushing Keon and acquiring his lost calculations and markings.”
“Bright young man. I hope he does well in whatever he does next.”
“We have him in protective custody for now. Freya is a little different story, a player in the mix though misguided. It’s almost always the case that women bear the brunt.”
“Perhaps at trial some truth will emerge,” Bullfinch said.
“Maybe she or this Mike will finally testify. It’s the brothers’ heads that most need to be hoisted. They planned a long time.”
“A long game.”
“So, back to the U.S., Professor?”
“I must get back to O.C.L.T.’s efforts. Wherever I’m needed. You still have quite a few review boards and the like to face?”
“A few. I’ll get through it. If I’m not going back to special detective, staying with Aisteach won’t be too bad. Maybe the powers that be will feel a little more comfortable with me tucked away in a weird little agency. Clearly, I can do a bit of good here,
too, Professor. I’ll give you this as what I’ve learned. You do the good you can where you can, when you can, and hope it has an impact.”
“Clearly.” He tipped his hat. “Perhaps we’ll meet again, perhaps under less cataclysmic circumstances.”
“Or perhaps not.” She smiled. “Maybe I did read a bit of Aristotle in school now that I think about it. He’s the one who said happiness is related to the cultivation of virtue didn’t he?”
“I think he might have,” Bullfinch said. He took her hand to accept her hearty grip.
“Cheers to pursuit,” he said. “Cheers and good wishes.”
Report from the paranormal website Unexplained Oddities
Strange winged being spotted near ancient Irish ruin
By Shawn Drury
A mysterious winged figure, dubbed Batswings by Americans, has perplexed and frightened tourists and residents near the Ring of Kerry site at Ballinskellig Castle.
At dusk a number of people have recently reported seeing the figure either crouched on the top wall of the castle ruins or winging in wide circles across Ballinskellig Bay.
Harkening back to U.S. accounts of Mothman, the creature…