by Bruce Talmas
“You’re an angel?” He didn’t look like any angel I’d ever seen.
“I was once. Maybe still I am. Who’s to say?”
So the guy was either a nutcase or an angel with Alzheimer’s. This just kept getting better.
“I am old,” he said, rather unnecessarily in my opinion. “My protection does not extend as it once did. Entire nations I once protected. Now, I protect only a few children, and even they tax me to exhaustion.”
“So you’re a guardian angel who protects children?”
“Yes, yes! Keep up!” He whacked me in the shin with his cane. I almost punched him in the face. Fucking old people. Think they can get away with anything.
“The children are in danger. Evil has found them. Evil too great. I cannot protect them.”
This was not how I wanted to end my day. I was tired and hungry. I was still feeling the effects of the alcohol and the beating. I didn’t have time to entertain the ramblings of a madman. But I also needed to know how he found me. Not just found me, but tracked me. That took someone with real skill. His knowledge could be useful, even if it was only so I could learn to cover my tracks from lunatic old men with angelic delusions.
“Who can’t you protect them from?”
“An old evil. An ancient evil.”
“More specific please.” In my world, ancient evils came around about as often as a full moon.
“Belial,” he said, his voice shaking. “Belial has Ascended.”
“Get out,” I said incredulously. “There’s not a chance in Hell that he would willingly accept coming here.”
Belial was a Destroyer, like me. Probably Lucifer’s Number One now that I was up here. He wouldn’t have Ascended of his own will. He loved Hell. He sure wasn’t going to possess anyone; he’d rip any human apart if he tried to enter them. And I certainly couldn’t see him getting snared by a magician. I highly doubted there was any magician alive that could Summon him, even if he was willing.
“I studied the emanations, but they are gone now.”
That damn word again. I didn’t know what he meant when he said they were gone, but I’d already heard enough about the emanations tonight.
“There is no doubt,” he added.
“When?” I asked.
“Less than two days ago. He has arrived, and he is not alone.”
Azazel’s words were echoing in my head: Something big is about to happen, and you’re intimately involved.
“Who’s he with?” I asked. Belial always worked alone. If he had a traveling companion, that was very odd indeed.
“He walks with a human. At least, a human I think he is. Very evil. Evil thought long gone, but is now returned.”
This was like trying to have a conversation with a fortune cookie. “Human? What human?”
Volkov’s eyes got very wide, and he delivered the line with such gravity that I would have laughed if I weren’t trying to keep down the bile: “The Ferryman has returned.”
“Ha.” I said the word. It was not a laugh. Not even close. It was, quite frankly, the only sound my throat could make at the moment.
That’s not possible, I wanted to say. The Ferryman is long gone.
Instead, I just said “Ha” again.
Volkov looked like he was about to have a seizure. His face was pale and his hands trembled as if from some sort of palsy. His eyes started to roll back into his head. I tapped him on the arm to bring him back around and made him look at me. “You don’t mean The Ferryman. You mean someone similar to The Ferryman? A copycat?”
It took a couple seconds for his eyes to come back down to earth. “I don’t know. Cannot see. Kills the same, he does. Mischa has seen glimpses. He is a powerful mystic.”
I looked over at the schoolboy. He didn’t seem like much of a mystic to me.
“Mischa sees the same. Same coins placed on the eyes. Cuts the same. Bleeds the same.”
I tuned him out after that. Obviously the man, or angel, or whatever he was, knew something of what he was talking about. But trying to sift through the detritus of his mind wasn’t going to get me anywhere. I was trying to piece together what all these fragments could possibly add up to, and the only answer I came up with was not good.
The only reason Belial would come to Earth was on Lucifer’s bidding, and the only thing that could enrage Lucifer enough to send his best general to Earth was me. My refusal to do Hell’s bidding had drawn Lucifer’s wrath, but that was nothing new. I’d been dealing with his wrath for years. If he was willing to risk his Numero Uno on bringing me in, I must have really pissed him off somehow.
A sense of gratification rose in my chest. I’d been stepping up my antics in recent years to try to throw a wrench in Hell’s plans whenever I could. It was good to see my efforts being recognized in this way. Even so, Lucifer wouldn’t risk such a dangerous Ascendance without being sure he could find me. That was where The Ferryman came in.
The Ferryman was a serial killer who’d last been active almost twenty years ago. He would kill entire families. He was a nasty piece of work: he would bleed them out one at a time while the rest of the family watched. He was truly a monster. Even though he was only active for a little over a year, he killed six families. Twenty-one people in all died by his hand: men, women, and children. The entire nation had been gripped by fear during his reign of terror. His calling card was to place ancient silver coins on the eyes of his victims. The coins were probably what caused the media frenzy. They were very expensive, but that wasn’t what caught the world’s attention. They were ancient Shekels from the city of Tyre: the same type of coinage that was paid to Judas for his betrayal of Jesus.
I didn’t remember the story because of the media coverage though. I remembered it because I was The Ferryman.
Chapter 5
My birth name was not actually Jacob Cain. I was born Martin Mendez to a woman of questionable morality. That’s a nice way of saying she was a whore. Her name was Maria, to add a bit of irony to the tale. I never knew my father, but I learned enough in later years to piece together the story of my creation.
As near as I could tell, my father was a demon sent to Earth with the sole intention of creating me. Why he chose poor Maria Mendez, a beautiful but ill-fortuned young lass, to carry the demon seed is beyond me. Maybe she was pre-ordained. Perhaps her bloodline had been sifted and strained throughout the ages by the Hand of Fate or God or the Devil or whoever was in charge of such things, all so that the unique chemistry that would enable a woman to withstand a demon birth could be isolated and refined into a single human vessel that would one day become poor Maria, and she would finally be able to fulfill her destiny and carry me to term. Or maybe he just thought she was hot.
Whatever the case, he impregnated her. My conception was my first encounter with the crime of rape. Against all odds, she survived the horror of that crime and what could only be called a nightmare labor. I was unnatural. An abomination. A crime against nature, yet somehow I survived.
It was a miracle she carried me to term in the first place: As the product of rape, I could hardly have faulted the woman for scraping me out with a clothes hanger. But again, irony intervened. Poor Maria was a very religious woman who believed that abortion was wrong regardless of the circumstances. So she carried me to term, went through hell to birth me, and then somehow managed to live through the whole ordeal. She was hardy stock.
It was only after I was born that she realized how wrong a creature I was. She sensed it, I supposed, the first time she held me in her arms. I looked just like any other newborn: splotchy and bloated and probably a little bit gooey; but inside I was evil incarnate. There was still my human side, but he was simply a newborn baby at the time. He had no will or sense of purpose. My demon half, on the other hand, was fully formed at birth. He was ageless and wicked and full of hate. The kid never stood a chance.
Poor Maria must have sensed the evil inside, because she kidnapped me from the hospital nursery and attempted to flee to th
e roof. I assume her intention was to leap to her death with me in her arms, thus ending my reign of terror before I could do anything about it, and saving herself the guilt of having killed her newborn son. But once again fate intervened. There were several cops at the hospital, as is often the case, and they snapped to attention when the mad woman came screaming down the hallway with a child in her arms, a phalanx of alarmed nurses in tow. The cops followed her to the roof, tried to convince her to hand me over, and, when that failed and it was clear what her intentions were, shot her in the chest.
Although I wasn’t the one to pull the trigger, I was the reason she died. To this day, I still count her as my first victim. The last thing she saw on this earth was her newborn baby smiling at her as she died.
********
Time passed, and I became a prisoner of, well, myself. Today, it is impossible to distinguish between my two natures, but back then they were two separate and distinct entities. The human child grew up tucked away in a corner of his mind, forced to play unwilling puppet to the murderous demon. He saw the demon's victims with his own eyes, felt their blood flow through his own fingers. The demon had complete control, and the child languished as a forgotten prisoner.
By this time, the child understood that he was utterly alone. He had been adopted by a young couple named Lynch, who had a young son of their own. The father was a public defender. The mother a homemaker. The boy was, well, he was six, so he was just a boy. They were also all Satanists. Not the fetishistic, drug-induced orgy type of Satanism that teenagers use as an excuse to play dress-up and have kinky sex, but the hardcore, magic-wielding followers of Lucifer. So Martin Mendez became Martin Lynch, and he was raised to be the good little soldier of Satan that he was always meant to be.
But the human inside remained. He was, by the age of thirteen, undoubtedly insane. But who could blame him? Alone and unable to live in the outside world, even though he could sense it all around him, he had no outlet. He might have killed himself if he could, but his hands were not his own. They would not do his bidding. He was powerless. In many ways, he was the ultimate victim.
He was also, much to the demon’s chagrin, unfailingly Good. He could not be corrupted and he would not submit. Day after day, he lived through the demon’s torment and kept struggling to break free of the prison of his own mind. The demon laughed, because he enjoyed the child’s torment, but he also could not break him.
As punishment for the child’s refusal to submit to his will, the demon’s crimes escalated, becoming more vicious and cruel. The Ferryman was a direct response to the boy’s insolence. The more he struggled, the worse the demon’s crimes became. Whole families were slaughtered simply to break the boy’s spirit, but he would not submit. I often wondered how the world would react if they ever found out that The Ferryman—their real-life boogeyman—had been a thirteen year old boy.
In fact, against all odds, the boy got stronger. Eventually, it became a distraction for the demon. But still the boy persisted, until he became a true and dangerous threat. It was at this point that the demon realized he’d had it backwards. The demon had always mocked the boy for not being able to destroy him, but it worked both ways. They needed each other just as much as they hated each other. They had become two forces inextricably linked yet inevitably separate. Like two neutron stars orbiting each other to their inevitable demise.
And when that demise finally came, the death throes were of biblical proportions. When all the forces of will and pressure and gravity combined to destroy them both, they fused together. Like a star fusing iron, the core collapsed. Just as a supernova creates silver and gold and other rare elements, the fusion of the boy and the demon created something even rarer.
Me.
I was a demon. I was also a human. Not both, but also neither one by itself. I was the intertwining of two beings: a man possessed by a demon, and a demon in turn possessed by a man. As I said, I should not have existed, yet there I was.
I still had the appetites of my demon nature, but no longer would my human conscience allow me to simply go around slaughtering whomever I happened to come across. An agreement had to be made. I became the hunter of those who hunted others. The killer of killers.
The old names ceased to mean anything. The boy and the demon were both gone, sacrificing each other and themselves in the name of evolution. I still had their memories, but it was as though they had been grafted onto the brain of a whole new being.
I became the new standard. A species of one.
I became Jacob Cain: Rogue Prince of Hell.
Chapter 6
Volkov stared at me as if reading my whole history in the blink of an eye. I turned away from him, unnerved and angry that he could have that effect on me. Maybe he was an Angel after all.
I told him I’d take the job on one condition. “I’ll do it if you tell me how you found me.”
I spent a lot of money and put a lot of work into being untraceable. All of my assets were purchased under aliases and through shell companies that I’d spent years developing and maintaining. But such practical safeguards were the least of my efforts. After all, I had the combined forces of Hell after me. Staying invisible was a necessary condition to my continued existence. I’d learned the most powerful obscuring spells and either cast them myself, or, if they were above my magical abilities, hired master magicians to do them for me.
I’d always worried that they were my one vulnerability: the use of magicians. But they were always known for their discretion. If it were discovered that a magician betrayed a client, he or she would be thrown out of the order and would be hunted down and Chastened by their fellow magicians. Chastening was a process that removed their ability to do magic and wiped away their ability to learn it again. Even the most powerful magician could be Chastened if there were enough other magicians willing to do the job. It’s like magical neutering. From what I’d been told, it was about as pleasant as neutering, so magicians had good incentive to maintain secrecy.
Even so, it didn’t mean they could be completely trusted, either.
“I found you through a man named Carl Jankowski,” Volkov said.
Jankowski. It took me a second to place the name; not because I didn’t know him, but because I knew him by a different name: just about everyone called him ‘Junk,’ a name derived from the fact that he was a junkie that would shoot anything he could find into his veins. Since he never had money, that usually meant he was shooting junk product that he managed to dig up on the streets. The nickname worked on two levels.
My undoing hadn’t been an order of magicians. It had been a fucking junkie.
“Did you pay him?”
Volkov looked at Mischa, and they both cast down their eyes like they were ashamed.
“I gave him drugs,” the old man said.
I nodded. No surprise there. “Okay, That’s all I needed. Now let’s talk money.”
Volkov was ready for that. Angel or not, he knew when it was time to conduct business. “We are willing to pay you two million dollars when the job is complete.”
“Define complete,” I said.
“When the demon is returned to Hell, and his human companion is dead, I will consider the contract fulfilled.”
“Fair enough, but a million dollars is my rate for a normal job…at least, as normal as my jobs ever really get. You’re asking me to kill one demon and one magician for a million apiece, so you’re getting my basic price to slay a prince of Hell and a magician powerful enough to Summon him. I don’t think so.”
Volkov looked at the boy for a second, but it was the boy who gave the counteroffer.
“Two million for the demon, one for the human. Final offer.”
I looked at the boy in surprise. “So who’s in charge here, you or him?”
“Ours is a partnership,” replied Mischa. “You are the one in charge, Jacob. Without you, all is lost.”
“Yeah, whatever. Help me Obi-Wan, huh?” I thought about it for a second. It was a
crap offer, but it was also in my best interest to handle Belial before he got too big for his britches.
“Two for Belial, one for his buddy?” I repeated. They both nodded. I shrugged. “Agreed.”
I shook hands with the old man and the boy. As if on cue, one of the robed bodyguards reached into his robes. I was expecting him to pull out some sort of priceless ancient artifact imbued with magical powers, or maybe some antique scroll; but no, it was just a normal manila envelope. He handed it to Volkov, who handed it to me.
“All of the details that we have are in this file. Unfortunately, we know very little.”
I opened the folder. The first couple pages were news articles from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette detailing the murder of a family of four. No mention was given of any link to The Ferryman, but that was to be expected. The cops probably thought it was a copycat killing and didn’t want to divulge too much information to the media. It had been twenty years since the last Ferryman killing, so surely they assumed it couldn’t be the same person. There were also a couple of news articles from the same paper that described the disappearance of six children from a school bus. That might explain Volkov’s interest in the case, if he was a guardian angel of children. I thought to ask him, but decided against it. That conversation could wait for another day.
The last article was a profile of a police detective who was also the father of one of the missing children. I noticed that the articles all were published within days of each other, and that some of the dates even overlapped. And all within thirty miles of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
My hometown.
If the Apocalypse was about to begin, it was as good a place as any.
********
I left the meeting with Volkov and his band of merry men. Silva was nowhere in sight. Our business was concluded, so I didn’t seek him out. Two of his guards inconspicuously fell in step behind me and escorted me to the door.