by Briana Snow
But there had been no guns… a small part of her mind protested. Valiantly, however, the rest of her tried its best to ignore the facts.
“How could I believe all of that stuff about demons and portals to hell and what have you? It’s crazy!” she murmured to herself. The sort of thing that her dad had once believed in perhaps, not that it had helped either of them in the end.
David Harp had been a senior lecturer at the Metropolitan University of New York, teaching English Literature and Contemporary History, although his real passion had been folklore. He had left his alma mater of Washington State with a Doctorate in Comparative Folklore, and set to become one of the fields rare, but leading lights—or so Penelope later believed.
But he had met the woman of his dreams, Mirabella Harp, and they had fallen in love. Mirabella had also been an academic—this time of Archeology and History, but with a passion for passing on the flame of civilization to the next generation. They had started to work here in New York, and the rest had been history. A rather short history, Penelope thought, as she couldn’t escape the fact that she had only been four years old when both of her parents had been killed in a freak automobile accident.
But my father, for all of his wild theories about religion and ghosts and faeries and monsters… Penelope sighed. He had still died, in the end, of some very natural and material causes.
All of this made Penelope even more convinced that she had been misguided; temporarily out of her mind, perhaps, to believe in monsters. Her own parents had, after all, died without any monster involvement whatsoever.
“Penelope! Sorry to rush, but do I have to remind you that we have a demonic entity that could quite happily rip us both to shred heading this way,” Verity called out.
No, you don’t have to remind me at all—but we also have an FBI agent coming right here, and he is going to throw you in prison, lady! Penelope called out, “One second!” She wondered how long it was going to take for the FBI agent to get here. Weren’t they supposed to have secret enclaves or safe houses all across the nation? Would they come with the cops as well?
I bet it was because of the Luminaire. Penelope’s hand moved over to the heavy grimoire that sat, balefully, on the floor beside her. Maybe this is all some scheme to steal it and sell it. Hadn’t the woman called herself some kind of book trader, before all of that crap about being a part of a secret conspiracy sisterhood?
Penelope’s addled mind tried to piece together what had happened to her. That she had been delusional, and that Verity Vorja had been working with Leonidas somehow, to get the Luninaire out of its secure facility in the New York Public Library vaults, and then she was going to sell it and split the money with Leonidas.
The fact that the elderly security guard must have had plenty of opportunity to make his move over the years, and with far better prospects than obscure mystical tomes which few people had ever heard of, did not make a dint into Penelope’s rapidly deploying defence-mechanism of belief. The only other alternative would have to be that she, herself was in possession of a portal to hell.
“Which is clearly ridiculous,” Penelope said to herself, her hand reaching out to touch the top of the hide-bound grimoire itself.
“Ach!” Something like an electric shock seemed to pass through the document and her hand, causing her to snatch her hand away—only it didn’t move. When she blinked her eyes once again, her hand was stubbornly stuck on the cover as if nothing had happened.
“Penelope! Are you alright in there? What’s happening?” Verity’s voice came from the other side.
“Nothing! I’m fine,” Penelope lied to both her companion and herself. It’s just my mind playing tricks on me. Spooked out by what Verity has been saying. She watched as her hand reached the corner of the manuscript’s cover, and flipped it open.
66, the page read, and with the familiar inscription that she could somehow decipher.
It must be in English after all, Penelope thought, reading the words that warned of the coming end of days and tragedy that would befall everyone. Penelope felt her head spinning slightly, and she wondered if all of this stress today was making her ill. That perhaps she was starting to come down with something, as she felt the floor suddenly wobble—but not physically.
“Penelope?” It was Verity’s voice once more at the other side of the door. “I can feel something—something has changed. Have you opened the Luminaire?”
Outside, Blake the cat started to howl, as Penelope stared at the grimoire, as a page turned over, all by itself.
65.
“This is madness. This cannot be happening,” she said to herself, as suddenly there was a scrabbling against the bathroom door.
“That’s it Penelope, I’m coming in!”
64. The page turned, and the alien, occult glyphs and diagrams inside started to resonate inside Penelope’s mind; talking to tunnels and veils, the different planes of existence, all standing as thin and as fragile as gossamer, waiting for a strong mind to push its way through.
THUD! The bathroom door thudded, as the woman on the other side of it bounced off.
“No—this can’t be happening! This is all a trick,” Penelope called out. “You stay away from me, Verity Vorja! I can’t trust you—that’s what Dante said!”
The crashing stopped for a second, replaced by Verity’s voice. “Penelope? What is the meaning of this? Don’t tell me that you believed that oily little twerp, did you? Look, this is the effect of the grimoire itself, it corrupts minds, it perverts your perception, it draws to it bad luck! You have to let me in and together we can get out of here before…”
THUD-THUD-THUD! There was a different loud banging this time, from the front door of Penelope’s apartment. A muffled voice on the other end, that Penelope couldn’t quite hear—but it was low and gravelly, and had to be a man’s voice.
63. The page turned as the librarian watched it in horror.
“Penelope? What have you done? There’s a man saying that he’s the FBI at your door,” Verity whispered through the cracks.
“It is the FBI, they’ve come to save me,” Penelope said. “You’ve drugged me, put hallucinogens in the water or something. You want to steal the Luminaire,” Penelope called out.
62. Another page turned, and it was getting faster this time.
“You can’t trust the FBI, Penelope. You can’t trust anyone else. They all think they can control with the Luminaire,” Verity was saying urgently.
THUD-THUD-THUD! Another explosion of sounds at the front door.
61, 60, 59… The grimoire was starting to shake on its own in the center of the bathroom, and Penelope was starting to feel waves of coldness emanating from it, although there was no breeze.
“Penelope, please believe me,” Verity called out.
THUD-THUD-THUD!
58, 57, 56, 55…
Penelope wished that she wasn’t here, she wished that she had never gone into work today, and that she had never even got her job at the New York Public Library. No, she reminded herself. Her parents would have wanted her to work there, they would have been proud of her working there—they were academics, after all, and they loved knowledge.
What would mum and dad do now? Penelope thought, watching as the pages of the Luminaire flickered faster and faster in front of her. Would they give everything up to the FBI?
45, 44, 43, 42…. As the pages whirred faster, it felt at the same time as if time were slowing down and that something dreadful was about to happen. The mirror on the bathroom shelves cracked, and the shampoos and soap rattled their from their places to crash to the floor. Was it Penelope’s imagination, or did she see shadows start to elongate and thicken around the grimoire, seeming to move and take on forms of their own?
Monsters, the librarian thought. Fairy-tale monsters.
“Please Penelope, please. We need you! I need you!” Verity said, and in that moment, Penelope knew what she had to do. She reached out, seizing the Luminaire grimoire, and forced its c
overs shut with a thump.
CRACK! There was a sound like a sonic boom, although no wind could be felt, and suddenly everything was quiet.
Chapter XV
Every hair on Special Consul Maximus’s head stood on end as he felt the wave of energy washing out of the apartment. He raised his hand to knock on the wooden door frame once more, before changing his mind, and reaching for his pistol.
There was shouting and mumbling from inside. Two women’s voices, who appeared to be arguing inside. Verity and Penelope, the man thought. He was so close now, all he had to do was to convince Penelope to come with him, not Verity.
And I can’t very well handle the Luminaire manuscript myself, can I? He could have growled in frustration. The man knew that the curse would be so strong that as soon as anyone else touched it, they would soon be dead. The only thing keeping the rest of them alive was the fact that Penelope was who she was: a natural psychic who was immune to the curse.
Maximus felt his stomach clench like he was falling. He wasn’t psychic at all, but he had been around enough strange occurrences to know when something unnatural was happening. And this is precisely the sort of thing that I have trained for. What the Templars are supposed to do. He gritted his teeth, wondering if he was a match for this challenge.
Guard the realms. Protect the world from the monsters on the other side of the veil. His hand felt the reassuring heavy solidity of the pistol grip, and he started to draw it out of his holster.
“’Ere! What’s going on?” said a voice from down the hall, and Maximus inclined his head to see an elderly, nearly blind old lady with glasses so thick that he couldn’t see her eyes on the other side. She had opened what must have been her own apartment door on the far side of the hall, and was standing with a rolling pin in one hand and a rolled-up newspaper in the other. She looked at the tall man in the black suit outside her neighbors’ door, and scowled. For the first time in his career, Maximus wished that he wore those ridiculous shades that you see FBI officers always wearing in the movies.
At least then it would be obvious to the public to stay outta my way! he thought to himself as he released the pistol and reached for his badge in the opposite pocket.
“Federal business, ma’am,” he said sternly, hearing more shouts and thumps going on inside the Harp apartment behind the door. “Just go back inside, and I’m sure that we’ll get all this trouble sorted in just a moment,” he finished, attempting to use the tone of command that the Bureau and the Knights Templar preferred to use with difficult members of the public.
His ‘commanding tone’ was apparently not even going to come anywhere close to working on this woman in front of him, however, as she just folded both arms containing their weapons of domestic justice across her ample bosom. “So, the F.B.I are answering domestic disturbance cases now, are they?” She arched one eyebrow.
Goddamit, Maximus thought. Trust his luck to have to deal with one of the few citizens who knew about federal and state jurisdictions. “Just go back inside, ma’am, if you please,” he repeated, as the feeling of pressure started to pull against his eyebrows, and his head throbbed with a distant headache. Whatever Penelope and Verity were doing in there, it was getting worse—and that could only mean total destruction for everyone…
“No, if you’ ain’t got a badge, and they ‘ain’t answering the intercom then—” There was the smallest of sounds from downstairs, and Maximus recognized the voice of the block attendant that he had to negotiate just a little while earlier. It didn’t upset or surprise him that the block attendant had others to deal with, perhaps even other police or FBI agents. What did set his ears jangling was the small pained gasp and the thump of a body against the floor.
Moving as quick as his training had taught him to, he passed without a word to the stair well, to look down the gap between the stairs to where the main hallway and the front door could clearly be seen five floors below. There was a body in it now, and it was the body of the attendant, with blood pooling from his face and ruining his caretakers uniform. The man was unmoving, clearly dead.
Maximus’s hand moved his badge back to its pocket and then returned his grip to the pistol, as someone—no, something stepped over the threshold.
It had the body of a man, but Maximus knew that it was no man. He even knew whose face it wore, as he had flicked through the personnel files on his way over here. It was a man named Leonidas Shreeves, a sixty-two-year-old security chief of the New York Public Library. Hair white and cut short, face lined and wrinkled, with a heart operation just a year ago. Leonidas moved surprisingly gracefully and purposefully for a man who was supposed to be on the mend from an operation. He paused over the body, and craned a head on a neck that appeared to have too many bones in it, like it was double jointed. The Special Consul Maximus could have sworn that he heard a cracking noise as the head swiveled upwards to glare straight at him.
Crap. “Get back inside your apartment, now!” Maximus shouted over his shoulder at the old neighbor, not taking his eyes off of the twin sparks of fury from the Archon wearing Leonidas’s body below. He didn’t understand how the thing had got here so quickly, but he knew that it would be inevitably drawn to the Luminaire for as long as it was on this plane, and that, when it had reached it, it would keep the psychic alive and torture her until the three portals to hell were opened.
CRACK! There was a sound like a sonic boom, and everything went quiet, stilling the tableau. The sensation of pressure and sick cold finished in an instant, and Maximus knew that Penelope—or someone—must have closed the Luminaire behind those doors. That was a good thing. It would no longer be calling to every demon, spirit, and restless ghost or teenage occultist this side of the river.
Not that the Luminaire needed to anymore, the Special Consul had a fraction of a second to think. The Archon was already here.
BLAM! BLAM! BLAM! The spell of silence was broken and Maximus drew out his pistol in a smooth moment and put three nine millimeter slugs into the thing’s chest. Leonidas went down of course, knocked back out of the front door by the force of the impacts, but Maximus didn’t for the life of him believe that he had killed it. Archons, and their vessels, were notoriously hard manifestations to kill.
There was a scream and a slamming of the neighbor’s door, but Maximus was already pushing himself off the stair banister to kick at the wood surrounding the apartment door handle. He heard it creak, and an echo of a scream inside the building.
That’s right, Vorja, he thought grimly, I’m coming in, and the first thing that I’m going to do if the Archon doesn’t kill us all first is to put a bullet between your sweet little eyes.
There was a coughing, wet-sounding shout from below, as he heard something heavy skittering and sliding on the floor. He turned his head just in time to see the shape of the Archon racing past the first-floor landing and up the stairs. Panic clutched at him as Maximus kicked at the door again, hearing it splinter and start to break, before turning and reaching out with an arm to catch the security chief on his ascent up the second floor.
BLAM! BLAM! BLAM! At least two more shots hit the creature, Maximus was sure. Once in the leg, and the other took some skin from his back. He had a chance, a slim chance that he might be able to do enough damage to the vessel that it wouldn’t be able to move—but he only had a couple more floors to do that in, as the Archon would only be visible as it raced around the stairwell opposite and below him.
A shout and a scream from inside, as Maximus gave the door to the apartment a final kick, forcing it open to reveal a disheveled and broken-up apartment, but no women. A very fluffy black cat hissed angrily and ran past his feet and straight through a cat-flap in the door opposite, belonging to the older neighbor with the newspaper, rolling pins, and knowledge of the judiciary.
Another gurgling call from behind and below, and Maximus turned to swear. He had missed the next floor window of opportunity. He waited, listening to the scampering steps. The Archon was scuttling like a
dog or a spider, using the man’s legs and hands to charge past rapidly opening and closing doors.
BLAM! BLAM! BLAM! BLAM! Maximus fired as many times as he could as soon as his eyes registered movement. He saw the crouching man-thing spin out of trajectory, slamming back against the wall of the stair landing below, blood spattering up the wall as he took aim and fired again.
Aim for the knees, Maximus! he growled at himself as he let rip. The figure of Leonidas suddenly crumpled over to a heap on the floor, amidst the screams of the onlookers and a growing pile of blood.
A little time. Maximus turned and ran into the Harp apartment, gun still raised as his eyes scanned the wreckage around him. It might have been a nice apartment once, had it not been for the magical energies that had ripped through here, upsetting picture frames and cracking glass and exploding television screens.
“Penelope? Miss Harp?” he tried, not waiting for an answer but kicking open the bedroom, peering into the kitchenette, and then rushing into the only room left in the house. The bathroom.
The door was ajar, and if the living room had seemed to him to be ravaged by a whirlwind, then here was its epicenter. Not one tile remained unbroken on the walls, and the sink lay in two halves on the floor. A fine goo of mixed shampoos, conditioners, and other cosmetic congealed in a cracked bath—but still no sign of the two women or the manuscript.
Instead, there was an open window with its shutters flung open, and blind half-torn and fluttering into the New York city air outside.
“No!” Maximus snarled, launching himself at the shelf to peer through the window at where a series of metal fire escapes spidered across this side of the apartment block to an alleyway below, and at their bottom the pull-down emergency ladder appeared to have been used.