An old man’s voice said, “Good evening, Father. It’s rare to see such a one as you so late in this place.”
“Who are you?” Clement said angrily, his breath steaming from his mouth. He did not notice that no breath steamed from without the cowl.
“A fellow traveller on the Lord’s path,” the figure said. He lifted his mittened hands to the cowl and pulled it back. An old man’s face, softly framed by a thick beard of grey and black was revealed. “Might I sit with you awhile, Father?” the old monk asked, gesturing to the bench.
“No, no. Go away. You’re interfering.” Clement was nervous and confused. What was a monk doing in Central Park?
The old man shook his head. “That’s hardly what I’d call Christian charity, Father Clement. Or perhaps you’re waiting for an altar boy to come and do some special praying in your lap?”
Clement stood up in anger. “How dare you—” And then he realised the old man had called him by name. And then he realised …
The old man smiled broadly. His beard parted and his carnivore fangs glinted in the lamp light. Lord Diego had kept his appointment.
The moment was frozen as Clement stared at the fangs and the familiar eyes and recognised the face from forty years ago. The Pit was once again reaching out for him, calling him. He must resist. Clement ripped his crucifix from beneath his coat and held it menacingly in Diego’s face. “Get back in the name of God.”
Diego smiled again and stared at the crucifix.
“What an elegant artefact, Father Clement,” he said. “But not, I’m afraid, as elegant as mine.” Diego lifted the crucifix hanging from his own neck and held it up in front of Clement’s face,
“Observe the workmanship,” Diego continued. “The artistry of the craftsman’s skill. It was a gift to me when I was in the service of Father Lavalette, in Martinique, more than two hundred years ago. Surely you remember him, Father Clement? I was his financial advisor.”
Father Lavalette was the Jesuit whose failed investments had brought ruin to the Society. Clement’s mind reeled with Diego’s revelation.
“Sacrilege,” Clement sputtered, his eyes riveted by the sight of the unholy monster before him holding an image of God. Yet the creature was unmarked! It was impossible. Clement himself had seen vampires burned horribly by the touch of a Holy article; scalded by the spray of Holy Water. Diego was playing a Devil’s trick upon him.
“Sacrilege!” he shouted again and thrust his crucifix into the face of Diego.
Diego did not move. The crucifix smashed against his face, tearing away a portion of the false beard which hid his fangs. Diego brought his hand up and clenched it around Clement’s wrist. He squeezed. Bones painfully grated against each other in Clement’s forearm.
“Are you sure you’re holding it close enough, Priest? Why not closer?” Diego lifted Clement’s hand away as though he were playing a child’s game. He forced the priest to place the crucifix in the middle of Diego’s forehead. Clement’s arm moved in the vampire’s grip as if it were a puppet’s. Tears from the pain of the crushed bones streamed down his face, freezing in the chilling wind.
“What’s this, Priest?” Diego said in mock surprise. “The flesh is unmarked by this most holy of artifacts?” He moved Clement’s hand again. His forehead was unblemished. “How about here? Or here? Or here?”
Clement was jerked like a rag doll as Diego forced his arm from one position to another. He pressed the crucifix against each cheek, against his neck. Finally, with a savage twist that caused a snapping sound in Clement’s shoulder, he forced the Priest to hold the crucifix against his groin. Clement could feel Diego’s erection pushing against the image of Jesus. The Jesuit wrenched his hand and dropped the defiled crucifix onto the pathway. Diego laughed and released him.
“It appears that your God does not wish to harm me, Father Clement. What a strange turn of events. I think I would like to thank him.”
Clement held his burning wrist to his chest. Why had God deserted him in this moment? How could that spawn of the Devil handle such a Holy object?
Diego reached down and retrieved the cross.
“In fact,” he said, “I would like to kiss him.”
Diego held the image of Jesus to his lips and sucked upon it. His tongue rolled around the edges of the tiny form.
“Stop it!” Clement screamed at the top of his lungs. “Stop in God’s name!” The tears that flowed now were from outrage, not from the forgotten pain.
Diego, abruptly, stopped. He held out the crucifix to Clement. Saliva dripped obscenely from the small silver figure frozen in agony upon the cross.
“Would you like it back, Father Clement?”
Father Clement swung out his hand and smashed the crucifix from Diego’s hand. It flew off into the dark, snow-sprinkled grass beside the bench.
“Ah,” said Diego. “That is the first wise move you have made in years. Congratulations. You have rejected your silly superstition.”
“You denied it,” Clement said.
“Think of all the times those things have defiled poor yber who didn’t know any better. But I know better, Father Clement. I don’t accept the superstitious beliefs of your church, and those superstitions become incapable of hurting me. I know that you don’t believe in them either.”
Clement’s eyes burned deeply into Diego.
“Lies,” he spat.
“Ah, Clemencito.” Diego reached out a hand and brushed Clement’s cheek. Clement pulled away as if burned. “You have aged terribly but the spirit I so admired is still there. I’m glad. I have missed you as a familiar.”
Clement spun around to the dark shadows in the distance, where the scholastics hid.
“He is lying!” he screamed. “Kill him! Kill him now!”
Clement’s voice was swallowed by the wind and the roar of New York.
“Your scholastics aren’t there, Clemencito. If we end this meeting civilly, they will be released, unharmed. If not, they’ll receive the same as your friend, Benedict.”
“You said we would be allowed to bring others. You said there would be no interference.” Clement was truly shaken at the breach of the truce Diego had called for the meeting.
“I am afraid I lied, Priest. But I’m not worried about going to hell. You, on the other hand, should worry about going to non-existence. I remember that you were worried about that a great deal when you first came to me, so many years ago. The meaninglessness of death disturbed you, incredibly so. But I offered you a way. I offered you true life eternal. Yet on the night you were to have joined me, you left. You joined the army of the black pope in a quest for some imaginary afterlife. And now look at you. You’re old. You’re bent. Even if I took you now, you would spend eternity as an old man. Father Tithonus. Do you know what you have given up?”
Clement looked up into the night. He had tried to forget those early, questing days; the times when his soul ached with the unanswered questions all must sometime face. He was confused. He was rash. And he had heard the stories of the strange philosopher near the ruins of Madrid who, it was said, offered answers. Clement had been astounded by those answers. He had brought himself to the brink of accepting them himself. And in the end, Eduardo Diego y Rey had helped Clement find peace. For Diego had shown him that the Devil did exist. And where there was a Devil, there must also be a God. Clement had fled the night he was to be inducted as a familiar in Diego’s domain. Ever since, he had battled against Diego’s kind. He had never expected to meet with him again. The memories confused him. The night was cold and the God he trusted had seemed to lose His strength over evil.
Diego waited patiently. After four hundred years, he knew what men thought. He knew what Clement agonised over: what if he were wrong?
“The girl, Clement,” Diego began. “The girl does not believe either. That is why she wants to join with the Americans. She thinks science can conquer her condition. She is deranged. She threatens you.”
Clement was not that confused.
“She threatens you too, vampire.”
“So let us combine for the moment to destroy the common threat.”
“Why should the Society help its sworn enemy?”
“Because you can’t do it by yourself. No matter what means you choose. Heathrow was a disaster, Priest. Civilians killed. Soldiers with crossbows. Incredible. The colonel who was in charge of the bloodbath was found in his office the next day. Killed himself. Sounded like the work of someone I might know.”
“No games, vampire. We both know why we fight.”
“The woman must be eliminated.”
“Yes.”
“Our people are at cross-purposes. At Heathrow your soldiers forced my emissaries to leave in defeat. In Toronto, our assassin helped her to escape. We must co-operate.”
“How?”
“The Conclave know where she has gone to hide. We cannot get at her. You can.”
“Where is she?”
“Will you destroy her?”
“We will destroy all of you. Where?”
“The spirit of youth,” Diego smiled.
“Where?”
“Nacimiento.”
“The demon father has given her sanctuary?” Clement was astounded. “And you would dare to go against what he decrees?”
“Clemencito, your god, my Conclave, it’s all superstition. The Father is not a demon. That crucifix does not embody god. When you pray, you are the only being who listens. I know you thought that once. Use your mind again and be free of the trappings of the old beliefs.”
Clement backed away.
“Yours is the voice of the Devil,” he said, his voice hollow in the snow and the night. “And even if it isn’t, you are still Hell-spawned because of what you did to Father Benedict. Bad enough that it was done on the service of Hell. But it is twice cursed if it was done in the name of nothing. Of meaninglessness. We shall destroy the woman. And since the Conclave cowers in the presence of the demon father, we shall destroy Nacimiento. And then, vampire, I personally will destroy you. You may defile as many crucifixes as you choose. It doesn’t matter, I carry my God within me where you can’t touch him. I will see you thrown into the Pit. Vampire! Monster! Demon!”
Clement spat on the ground before Diego and ran down the pathway leading out of the park.
Diego stood motionless, reflective.
After a minute he pulled at the false beard he wore and removed it. His fangs were shockingly visible against his lower lips. He took off his mitts and his claws flickered at the tips of his long, bony fingers. New York was the one city in the world where no one would dare question his appearance, if indeed they noticed it at all.
He chose the best-lit route to where the limousine waited for him. One late-night jogger almost stumbled when he saw Diego’s face in the lamplight. Diego was tempted, but let the jogger live. The meeting had gone exactly as planned. He had shocked Clement at the outset in the worst possible way that Clement could be shocked. In that condition, befuddled with confusing memories about the past, the Jesuit had leapt at the proposal Diego had offered him. He had accepted it uncritically. Diego could be sure that Clement would follow through with his threats to destroy with a fanatic’s zeal, and a fanatic’s lack of thought.
It was all so predictable. Just as Diego had known that young Clement, so long ago would balk at joining the yber and run instead to the Church. Adrienne’s assassin was the only human in decades upon decades who had offered Diego any challenge. It was unfortunate that he had seemed to throw in his lot with the girl. She was predictable too. Diego would have enjoyed facing Helman on his own.
He had certainly enjoyed facing Helman’s nephews on their own. So much so that he had even made an exception to his own long-standing rule about Communion for children. He was glad that there were still a few things left for him to look forward to. He wondered if he might have a chance to actually talk with the Father. To see how he did it. How could one live nine hundred years without killing oneself? Diego had been yber for just over four hundred years, and already the boredom sometimes threatened to make him stay out to watch the sun come up. He desperately hoped that things would be different when the Final Plan was completed.
As he approached the limousine, he decided to arrange to have the four captive scholastics eviscerated and shipped back to the Jesuits in boxes. He would have them eviscerated alive because he knew the Jesuits’ doctors could determine such things from an autopsy.
It would keep Clement in the proper state of mind.
Chapter Eight
WHEN ‘THE PEOPLE’ had moved into Nacimiento in the late sixties, the townspeople had been considerably upset. The formless fear that had grown with the hearts and minds of the conservative and middle-aged as they had watched the counterculture creep through America like dry rot, had finally been given a focus. Murders had taken place in Los Angeles. Words like ‘cult’ and ‘Manson’ were being thrust about like I-told-you-so’s for five years of free love and marijuana. ‘The people’ who had bought the Rand estate were peculiar enough to be called ‘hippies’ by the locals. They expected the worst. But as the years passed, nothing much happened. ‘The people’ went their way, wearing their white robes, but paying their taxes; the town went its way. Neither had anything to fear from the other. In fact, the only thing the Father feared as he stood looking out at the moonlit hills from the observation tower of the main building, was that all the required forces would not be properly assembled in time.
He had had more dreams.
***
Nacimiento, January 20
The Rand Estate had been built in the late thirties by Charles Foster Rand. He had been one of the chief advisors and curators to the immense collections of William Randolph Hearst. A great many of the results of Rand’s expertise in art history and shrewd business dealings had ended up in Hearst’s monumental paean to obsession: San Simeon, just a few miles up the coast.
Rand had spent many years involved in ongoing and never-completed construction of the Hearst castle. Walls, ceilings and floors from ancient European structures were painstakingly disassembled and shipped to the California coast. There Rand and a host of architects would construct a concrete-walled, earthquake-proof box to hold the reconstructed rooms. The castle had grown like a cancer, continually branching out into unsuspected areas. Tenth-century rooms held a confused collection of 16th-century antiques, modern reproductions and clay vessels from before the time of Rome. After six years of working under such frustrating conditions, Rand had, in desperation, begun the construction of his own estate in Nacimiento. It was his answer to the Hearst Castle. He hadn’t had Hearst’s money to build it with, but he had something else that Hearst didn’t: taste.
Originally, the estate had sat upon more than a thousand acres of rolling hills overlooking the pacific. Through subsequent sales by subsequent owners, the holdings were now reduced to fewer than fifty acres. But the elegant main building remained.
Rand had modelled the basic layout after the spacious villas unearthed from early Grecian times. The main building was U-shaped, cupped to the west so that three sides overlooked the magnificent pool and fountain in the main courtyard and the stunning Pacific sunsets. At the bottom of the U, the main building rose in classic proportion to a height of four stories. On the eastern side, a hung-glass wall, an impressive achievement in its time, looked out over the formal gardens and sweep of land beyond. Everything was constructed in the most modern designs imaginable for the thirties. The estate was a perfect shrine to the style known as deco in its pure, cleanly spaced lines, and solidly defined spaces.
Photographs of the estate, originally taken in the fifties, appeared in almost every book that dealt with the history of western architecture. There had been no photographs taken inside the Band Estate for more than twelve years. Ever since ‘the people’ moved in: the familiars and emissaries of the Father.
Rand had died in 1959. He had been hopelessly in love with a boy under contract to a motion picture s
tudio known for its children’s films. The boy had returned Rand’s affections with youthful passion. The studio had found out. The boy’s contract was broken. He was sent away from California by his parents, back to their original home in Idaho.
The scandal had been vicious. Rand had thrown himself from the observation tower of the main building onto the marble courtyard.
A subsequent owner had attempted to cash in on the publicity surrounding the Hearst castle at San Simeon by trying to stage tours of the Rand estate. It wasn’t garish enough. That owner had sold within a year. Nacimiento returned to being little more than a service community to Highway One. The only time its two motels were full was when the San Simeon and Cambria motels were all overbooked.
It was a perfect town for someone who was over nine hundred years old and wished to be left alone by humans and yber both. But it was not ready for the awesome forces that were converging upon it.
Far down the road to the south, the solid black, unblinking eyes of the Father saw the first of them arriving. Twin headlights would soon sweep along the coastal highway. They would take the small cut-off to his home. He descended from the observation tower to prepare himself.
That which he had dreamed of had begun many days ago.
Very soon now, it would end.
Chapter Nine
THE RENTED MUSTANG hummed and more miles passed by them. They ran for their lives; the lives of those Helman loved, and in some obscure way, for the lives of all the people in the world. Helman thought that if he could tell Adrienne about his contact with Weston and the Nevada Project, if she could be made to understand why he had done it, then the two of them could find some understanding in the web of confusion in which they were ensnared. But the risks were too great. If she were as opposed to government involvement as Weston said, then the Nevada Project would lose her. And Helman would lose her. He didn’t want that. He didn’t know exactly what it was he did want, but he knew he had to have more time with her. An attraction was there. He was sure she felt it too. But both of them needed peace and an end to the running to come to terms with it. And then, perhaps, thought Helman, they would have all the time they could ever want. Forever.
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