Ghosts of Manhattan
Page 23
The other opened his mouth to call out and just as quickly a flashing blade embedded itself in the back of his throat, passing between his teeth to pierce the soft tissue behind his tonsils. His head detonated on the count of three, spreading brain matter across the walls, just as the other body toppled to the floor beside him, a hole where its throat used to be. The sounds of the explosions echoed in the confined space, and the Ghost hoped they wouldn't be heard elsewhere in the house. He kept his weapon at the ready just in case.
The Ghost strode on down the hallway, his heart hammering in his chest, his palms sweating inside his leather gloves. He faced the door, tried the handle. It was locked, of course. He glanced down at the pulpy mess of the two goons by his feet, had to look away in disgust. He backed up, careful to avoid tripping over the bodies, and then kicked out at the door, crunching the lock and bursting it open, the top hinge splintering away from the frame to come to rest at a jaunty angle. He pushed it to one side and rushed forward into the room.
Celeste Parker was sitting on the edge of the bed, staring up at him, her eyes wide with surprise. He didn't see anything else, didn't pay attention to the room around her. She looked immaculate, untouched. Her auburn hair fell in a perfect wave about her shoulders, framing her pretty, pale face. She was dressed in a short blue dress that revealed her shapely legs, and to the Ghost she was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.
He ran to her side and she leapt up, flinging her arms around his neck. Then she pushed him away, grabbed at his face in both hands, and kissed him deeply on the lips. "Oh, Gabriel. You brave, stupid fool. What are you doing here?"
The Ghost grabbed Celeste by the shoulders, holding her firmly, as though scared that he might somehow lose her again. "What do you think I'm doing here? I've come to rescue you. I have a car outside. We need to make a run for it."
She gave a minute shake of her head and pulled away from him. The look on her face was of someone grieving, distraught. "No, Gabriel. You don't understand. I can't go." A pause. "Haven't you worked it out yet?"
The Ghost grunted impatiently. "No, I haven't. I haven't worked anything out. What the hell is going on here? We need to go." Celeste was weeping now, and he clutched her to him, holding her head against his chest. "Celeste, we can talk later. Whatever it is, whatever you think you can't tell me, we'll work it out. We'll fix it, together. But right now we need to get out of this house before someone finds the bodies I've left in the hallway."
She beat her fists against his chest, as if trying to drive him away from her, as if trying to fight against some terrible enemy that only she could see. He grabbed her by the wrists. Her body was wracked by sobs as she poured out the emotion she had bottled up for so long. She looked up into his face, her mascara running in long tributaries down her cheeks; black rivers that coursed all the way from her heart. All he wanted to do was hold her, comfort her, but he needed to get her to safety. He felt his heart rending in two.
"Celeste ..." His voice was a whisper now. "Celeste-"
"I love you, Gabriel, but you have to know something."
"Tell me. Anything."
She sucked at the air, trying to regain her composure. "Gabriel, I can't be with you. I'm going to die."
The words were like ice to him, causing him to stiffen in fear. He forced a smile, confused by her sudden outburst. "No, Celeste. You're safe now. I'm going to get you home."
She shook her head. "I only wish it were that simple. But the lives of thousands of people depend on it." She dropped to the bed and the Ghost glanced at the door, anxious that they didn't have very long before the alarm would be raised and they suddenly found themselves with unwanted company. Her words slowly registered through the haze.
"Celeste, you're confused. Look, come on. We can talk later."
"No!" She was suddenly furious with him, frustrated that he seemed not to be paying attention, hearing what she had to say. "This runs deeper than you think, Gabriel, deeper than the mob, deeper than the Roman and Gideon Reece. This is a story that spans centuries, and there's no other way of ending it."
The Ghost stared at her, dumbfounded. "What are you talking about?"
"The Roman. That's who I'm talking about. Do you know who he is? Who he really is?"
The Ghost shrugged. "He's a mob boss, a plague on the city. A madman. He needs to be eradicated."
Celeste was shaking her head. "He's all of those things, true, but he's something else, too. He's a Roman centurion from the first century. His name is Gains Lucius Severnius."
The Ghost didn't know whether to laugh, or to break down. Her mind had snapped. The shock of her abduction, of the way she'd been treated: it had taken its toll on her, and she was caught up in some terrible fantasy regarding her captor. He considered bashing her on the head and carrying her out to the car over his shoulder. But there was Donovan to think of, too; he needed her capable so she could drive the car.
He wondered if Celeste could see the disbelief in his eyes. When she spoke again, her voice was soft, measured. Disconsolate. "I knew you wouldn't understand." She looked up at him, her eyes pleading, and then continued, trying again. "There are more things in this universe, Gabriel, than you could possibly imagine. The Roman made a pact with one such thing. Now it's time for him to do so again. I have to be here to stop him."
Gabriel frowned. "I know more than you think, Celeste." He thought back to the farmhouse in France; shuddered at the unbidden memory. He knew about the things that lurked in the darkness. Could she be telling the truth? She clearly believed it herself. He felt as if he were trapped in some sort of terrible waking nightmare.
He reached out; put his hand on her arm, as much to ground himself as to comfort the woman before him. "So you're saying the Roman has walked this earth for nearly two thousand years, that he's mixed up in some sort of supernatural union that extended his life?"
Celeste shrugged. "Not supernatural, no. These entities, they're all around us. They're here, now, in this very room, just out of step with us, inhabiting a different dimensional space. We cross paths with them all the time, but neither is aware of it happening. Do you understand?"
The Ghost shrugged. "Yes, I think I understand."
Celeste continued, "The Roman discovered a means to collapse those dimensions together, to give those creatures a physical presence in our own space and time. And they rewarded him for it. A hormone they secrete from a gland in their abdomens, it arrests the aging process in mammals. It slowed his aging for nearly two thousand years, kept his body repairing itself, over and over. But now he's started aging again, and he needs to bring another entity through if he wants to live."
It all made a terrible sort of sense to the Ghost. The things he'd seen in France, the monsters he'd encountered when he was alone and delirious following the crash. The sights that had made him the man he was. Could this be the explanation? The hair on the nape of his neck was prickling, standing on end. "How do you know all of this, Celeste? And what has it got to do with you? Why does it mean you're going to die?" He almost choked on the question.
She fixed him with an intense stare. "Because I'm the only one who can stop it. The Roman cares only for his own life. That much is obvious. He'll gladly sacrifice the city to the creature, give it up and move on. When you've lived for two thousand years, other people's lives, they must seem small and unimportant, flames that flicker briefly before going out. The creature is dangerous, Gabriel. It will hurt people. A lot of people. And I can stop it."
"If what you're saying is right, then we'll stop it together." He hefted his flechette gun as if to underline his point. "There's no need for anyone to die."
Celeste sighed. "Your weapons won't stop it, Gabriel. But my blood is poison to it." She wiped away the remains of her tears with the edge of her palm. "I've always known this might come to pass. I come from a long bloodline, reaching all the way back to those first days, when the Roman Empire was at its height and the world's religions were being born. My ancestors
stopped that first creature, back in Rome, sacrificed themselves for the greater good. And ever since, my family-a large, extended family, with branches all over the worldhas kept watch on Severnius and others like him, patiently waiting, observing. It's just my damn bad luck he's chosen this place, and this time, to act." She reached out, took his hand in hers. They were damp with her tears. "I love you, Gabriel Cross. Never forget that." It sounded final.
The Ghost's heart was hammering in his chest. He felt dizzy, confused. He couldn't let her go through with it, whatever she was planning to do. He had to find a way to help her. And then a thought occurred to him. "So why does the Roman want you here, if he knows the truth about you, about the risk you pose to his plans? Why didn't he just kill you like the others?"
"I'm his insurance policy. If it goes wrong, if the entity won't cooperate with him, I'm his loaded gun."
"Then it's clear what I have to do." He spoke with a firm resolve, but inside he was dying, shaken to the core by this confession from the woman he loved, the woman he had vowed to protect with his life. "I have to kill the bastard before he gets anywhere near to summoning this creature."
Celeste stood, then, clutching him to her, her face so close to his that he could smell the sweetness of her breath. "Then we'd better be quick. He's planning to do it today."
The Ghost kissed her again, long and hard, and then turned toward the door. "Stay here," he commanded, knowing full well that she would not. Then he ran for the hallway, her soft footsteps falling in behind him.
The Ghost could hear voices from the hallway down below. Waving for Celeste to keep back, he leaned cautiously over the banister, using the targeting zoom of his goggles to take a better look. Donovan was there, held by two moss golems who lumbered along behind a middle-aged man in a black suit, a man with jet-black hair and a bronzed, tanned complexion. Mr. Gardici. The Roman.
The small group approached a posse of mobsters who were waiting near the foot of the stairs. The Roman had his back to the stairs. "Take him down to the Mithraeum. He's inquisitive, and I'd like him to see what we're doing here. Bind his hands so he can't get up to any mischief." The Ghost imagined the Roman grinning as he continued: "And besides, he'll make a rather interesting morsel for our visitor."
The Roman watched as the moss men dragged a subdued Donovan out of view. He dusted down the front of his immaculate black suit, apparently pleased with himself. Then, turning, he disappeared after the others, a wide grin splitting his face.
The Ghost flicked his lenses back into place and turned to Celeste, pushing himself away from the banister. "I'm going down there after them. Find somewhere safe and stay out of sight."
"The safest place I can think of right now is with you." Celeste stared defiantly into his eyes, then continued to follow him down the stairs, treading cautiously to avoid giving them away. Near the bottom, she caught his arm. "The Mithraeum is his temple. It's underground. We need to find the entrance. That's where everything will take place."
The Ghost gave a curt nod, still unsettled by her unexpected knowledge of these things. He wondered what the hell they were walking into, what hideous things they would see. He swallowed, wiped his brow on the sleeve of his coat. He wouldn't let it come to that. He'd get there first, finish the Roman before he had a chance to summon the creature, before Celeste had an opportunity to do anything stupid. He would damn himself to hell before he'd let her give her own life.
And it might yet come to that, he considered, as he padded silently across the hallway, searching for the door that would lead him to the subterranean temple.
Donovan allowed himself to be dragged along by the shambling monsters, seeing no benefit in trying to fight back at this point in the proceedings. If he did try anything, the moss men would likely rip him apart, each one tearing at a shoulder until his limbs were wrenched painfully from their sockets. Instead, he allowed himself to become floppy, a deadweight, and hoped that this ruse might buy him some time to consider his options. He hoped also that the Ghost was on his way back from the car by now, but he couldn't count on the vigilante arriving in time to help him. He'd already relied on the man too much in the course of the last few days; perhaps now was the moment for him to stand up for himself. He would be patient, wait for the opportunity to present itself. But at the back of his mind was a nagging doubt. He feared it was already too late.
As the moss men squeezed through a small doorway and into a brick-lined passageway that appeared to descend beneath the house and garden, he wondered what the Roman was planning. The tunnel had clearly been mined out beneath the foundations of the old house, probably sometime in the last few years, and electric lamps had been strung on long, fat cables at regular intervals along the walls. The walls were slick with damp, and there was a rank, musty smell in the confined space; partly, he assumed, emanating from the two golems who were forcing him along, his boots scraping on the dirt floor of the sloping passage. His shoulder had begun to ache again, the gunshot wound open and oozing blood down the inside of his sleeve.
He saw a pair of tiny red eyes in the distance; wondered momentarily if it was the Ghost lying in wait, but then realized his perspective was shot in the darkness, and it was nothing but the hungry eyes of a rat, regarding him eerily in the gloom. It scuttled away as the moss men lumbered closer. They continued on.
Presently, after what felt like an age, the floor of the tunnel leveled out and the moss men came to an abrupt stop before a pair of wide double doors. They were roughly hewn, banded with iron fittings, and he wondered if they had been stolen, too; a relic from an old monastery or church, brought here for the Roman's deluded rituals, the doorway to his subterranean dungeons. Christ-the thought suddenly occurred to him that the lunatic might actually have built an arena down there, that the reference to him being an "interesting morsel" might mean he was about to find himself thrown to the lions, literally, like the Christians of old. That was no way to go.
A mobster from the leading party stepped forward and pushed one of the twin doors aside, offering Donovan a glimpse of the room beyond. It wasn't what he'd been expecting. It was a large, open space-a cave hollowed out from the bedrock-with two long, parallel stone benches lining the walls to either side. The floor was compacted dirt, and a row of wooden torches sputtered and guttered in iron brackets affixed to the walls. The cavernous space terminated in a high stone arch, about a hundred yards beyond the doors, above which an intricate and elaborate fresco of the celestial heavens was painted in startling blue and yellow. It looked like something from a history book, a painting in the ancient tradition, dedicated to the magnificence of a powerful, mythical god.
Beyond the arch was a large recess that housed two rare items. The first was a life-size marble sculpture of an armored man killing a bull, his cape flapping open behind him, capturing the movement so well that it looked almost as if the man had been frozen in glistening white marble, caught in the act. A snake and a dog were drinking from the wounds of the slain beast, and a large scorpion was attacking the man's testicles. Donovan had no idea of the tableau's significance.
The second item was the marble wheel that Donovan had witnessed being stolen from the museum. But now the wheel was suspended vertically in a large wooden frame, flanked on either side by two tall metal towers that fizzed and sparked with veins of dancing electricity: the channeled energy from the power station. The glow of the two towers lit the underground room with flickering, brilliant light.
The mobsters led the way into the room, filing through the door one by one, taking seats on the stone benches along either side of the chamber. The moss men heaved Donovan through behind them, handling him roughly, dropping him on the floor at the foot of the marble wheel so that he jarred his hands as he tried to prevent himself from landing on his face. They lumbered away, leaving it to one of the mobsters to bind Donovan's wrists behind his back with a silk tie and maneuver him to a space near the end of the bench. It seemed he was going to be awarded a good view.
It was only a matter of minutes before the Roman himself put in an appearance, striding across the center of the room, his head held high as he approached the recess at the far end of the chamber, just a few feet from where Donovan was seated. He turned to regard his audience. "Gentlemen. Welcome." He followed this with something in Latin, an elaborate litany that sounded very much like a religious verse, although Donovan had little experience of the language or its meaning. Then, more in English: "Today marks the culmination of all of our efforts. Today great Mithras himself smiles down upon us from his place in the Heavens. Today we grant life to those who have known no life, and reward those deserving few amongst us who have given themselves over to the worship and instruction of the constant soul."
The Roman was breathing hard, barely containing himself as he drew out those last few words, and from where Donovan was sitting he could see the mad gleam in the man's eyes, the sweat standing out on his forehead, the spittle frothing from his lips. Donovan didn't doubt it at all-the man was utterly insane.