Canticum Tenebris (Wrath of the Old Gods Book 2)

by John Triptych

“Something is happening there as well,” Kasem said. “There’s a complete blockade at the border and we have several brigades of front line troops nervously waiting for a possible attack. That’s as far as I know. You’re in the Mossad, surely you know more than I do about it.”

  “Egypt has gone silent since this whole thing began and nobody knows what’s going on over there. The few scouts that we sent over the border never came back. My guess is that one of the ancient gods is on loose down there,” David said.

  “So you want to take your chances there or across the sea? I’ve heard strange rumors about the Mediterranean. No one wants to go by boat anymore.”

  David opened the car door before shaking his friend’s hand. “Whatever happens, good luck. Shalom.”

  “Shalom, my friend,” Kasem said. “If we ever meet again, let it be under happier circumstances.”

  As David opened the front door to the apartment, he saw Tzipi was sitting in the sofa and looking at him intently. He slowly closed the door behind him and went over to the kitchen and took out a drinking glass from the cupboard.

  Tzipi stood up and put her hands on her thighs. “Where have you been? I’ve been looking for you for almost two hours! The baby is sleeping in the room but as soon as I was done with her, you were nowhere to be found.”

  David filled the glass with water from the refrigerator and took a sip. “I was out.”

  “Out where?”

  “I met up with a few friends,” David said as he placed the half empty glass in the sink.

  “David, I don’t like this,” she said softly. “Uncle Ariel did a big favor for us when he got them to allow you to come home. I should be at the front with my unit, but I’m here with you, but then you go off somewhere so I know you are up to something.”

  David leaned forward as he placed his hands on the kitchen counter. “I’m not up to anything. I just needed some air that’s all. Two days being stuck here, in this apartment, and all I could hear is the baby crying so I needed some time to myself.”

  Tzipi’s mouth trembled as she looked away. “I know you’re lying. You may be with the Mossad but I can always tell when you lie. Please don’t throw away this second chance, David. You have a family that needs you.”

  David sighed. There was no way of hiding it from her. “If anything happens to me,” he said softly. “Make sure you take care of Leyla’s baby. She’s ours now.”

  Tzipi’s hands were balled into fists as she moved quickly and stood beside him. There were tears in her eyes. “What are you saying? What are you planning to do?”

  He stood in front of her and placed his hands on her shoulders. “I have to do something. I cannot, in good conscience, allow what that rabbi is doing to this country. He is condemning us all to spend an eternity in Gehenna.”

  She started to cry. “David, what’s happened to you? I can’t believe this. Why would you even be doing this? Why you?”

  “Because I’m the one who can get close to him,” he said. He loved her and wanted to be with her forever but he knew that his plan needed a sacrifice. “There’s nobody else who is willing to try. Somebody has to do it.”

  “What are you going to do? Kill him? David, you’ll be throwing your life away, and you will destroy this family! Is that what you want?”

  “Of course not, but it has to be done. I am doing this for you and for everybody in this country. I love Israel, and I will not see her soul corrupted.”

  “Why does it have to be done? Don’t you know that if you do this, our lives will be over as well? How can we ever live a normal life as a family if you’re gone?”

  David bit his lip as he looked her in the eyes. “Don’t you get it yet? The gods have come back. No one on this planet will ever live a normal life ever again. Now it’s all about choices. Do we survive as a nation while turning away from God and everything we have ever believed in? Or do we follow our traditions and do what’s right?”

  Tzipi looked away as she brushed the tears from her cheeks. “All that’s happening. I … I just can’t bear it! Why are you putting me in this situation?”

  He wrapped his arms around her shoulders and hugged her tightly. He had a feeling he would never see her again. “When we first met, you knew I wasn’t that religious. And neither were you. All we cared about was graduating from university, remember? I joined our intelligence organization because I believed in fighting for this country, but I really didn’t know what it meant to be a Jew. But after all that’s happened, it’s opened my eyes. We have survived as a people for thousands of years because we believed in what was right and we never strayed from that belief. It’s what kept us as a people no matter what part of the world we were in, no matter how many times they tried to kill us. We have a covenant with God, and we need to preserve that covenant or else everything we worked for, everything we fought and died for, will mean nothing. Elijah Ba’al, that man, he is turning us away from God. As a Jew, as an Israeli, it’s my duty to prevent our people from losing that covenant.”

  She buried her head on his chest and her tears stained his collared shirt. “I … I can’t deal with this! I can’t accept this, you’re going to die and I’ll be alone!”

  David placed his chin gently beside her cheek. “We’ve talked about this before, remember? We told each other what would happen if I went on a mission and I never came back, right? It’s no different than before.”

  She pushed herself away from him. “But there is a difference! You were told by your superiors where to go. Now what you’re planning to do is something entirely on your own! People will think you’re crazy!”

  “This will be my most important mission,” David said. “I’ll have a hand in directly saving my country and our people.”

  Tzipi’s sadness was turning into frustration. “What if I say no to all of this? I can turn you in.”

  “Then you’ll still lose me,” David said. “And we’ll all be in hell afterwards. So help me.”

  “Help you? How? I don’t even know if this is the right course to take.”

  “Do you trust me?”

  “David…”

  “Do you trust me?”

  She looked down at the kitchen floor before meeting his eyes once more. “Yes, and I love you.”

  “Then trust me now that I’m doing the right thing. I wouldn’t be doing this if it wasn’t important. Our existence as a people depends on it.”

  Tzipi thought about it for a minute. Then she realized that he was right, even though a part of her still couldn’t accept it. “Are you even sure this is going to work?”

  “If we can get the right people to help us, then I would say there’s a good chance that it will work.”

  21. Dialectics

  Manhattan

  Detective Valerie Mendoza and Dr. Paul Dane walked up the stone steps leading to the main entrance of the American Museum of Natural History together. Although the front of the museum looked normal enough, the building had been gutted from the inside when a gigantic larva manifested itself in the basement level, and then grown to gargantuan proportions as it had burst through several floors. It had taken months of clearing the debris using heavy construction equipment and numerous safety checks by city engineers to make sure the remaining parts of the building complex would not collapse in on itself.

  “Have you been here since that incident?” Paul said to her as they both passed through the front barricades. There was a squad of heavily-armed Marines guarding the entrance and they went through after they showed their newly-issued DOD identity cards.

  “Not really,” Valerie said as she put the Glock back in her hip holster after it was examined by the soldiers. “That whole experience gave me nightmares for days so instead I just concentrated on work.”

  The moment Paul and Valerie walked into the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Hall, they saw that the adjoining passage in front that was supposed to lead them into the central part of the museum no longer existed, instead there was a gaping hole as whole sect
ions of the floor had collapsed and they could see the basement level down below. A massive tarp was placed over the roof where the gigantic worm had burst through to prevent rainwater from seeping in. The whole scene looked like as if a massive bomb had exploded and demolished the place.

  A short black man approached them from the adjacent hall that was still intact. He was bald and wearing a dark blue NYPD windbreaker with his badge dangling on a chain necklace. “Professor Dane? Detective Mendoza? Hi, I’m Detective Lemond Bell, Crime Scene Unit,” he said as he shook both their hands. “If you’ll follow me, I have a few things to show you.”

  Valerie smiled as she shook Bell’s hand. “How are you, Lemond? It’s been a long time.”

  Lemond returned her smile. “Very, very busy, Val. But it’s good to see you again. I heard about your heroics when you were here, and I gotta say we need more of that. But let’s start moving because I’ve got a lot to show you.”

  “Lead the way,” Valerie said as the three of them began walking through the side halls of the building.

  “As you can see, this side of the museum didn’t collapse, so we set up a command and gathering point over at the Ross Hall of Meteorites at the farthest end of the building compound facing Columbus Avenue,” Bell said as they all turned right and began to pass through the Grand Gallery near the side entrance. “It took us months to sift through the rubble but once the Feds got involved, things started to move a little bit faster.”

  “We sort of just got back on the team,” Paul said. “How long has the DOD been here with you guys?”

  “We’ve been working together for three weeks now,” Bell said. “The NYPD Forensics Investigation Unit is still leading the operation but we’re getting a lot of government support like providing us with generators, so there’s electrical power in some parts of the building as well as computers so we can link up to their FBI database. Things really got into high gear just a week ago when we found video recordings of the basement.”

  Paul’s eyebrows arched. “Were you able to find out what really happened?”

  Bell just grinned as he pointed towards the entrance to the Hall of Meteorites. “You’ll see.”

  The hall itself was circular, with black painted walls to simulate outer space. A large asteroid had been left in an upraised platform in the center of the room. A number of standing floodlights had been placed strategically around the hall in order to illuminate it. Dozens of folding tables had been placed beside the meteorite displays along the walls; a number of lab-smocked technicians with surgical gloves and forensics tools were busy pouring over the items that were identified as evidence.

  As the three of them slowly walked around the examining tables, Bell pointed at the set of computers that had been set up beside the central asteroid display. A half dozen men and women wearing business suits were working furiously through numerous consoles. Both Paul and Valerie noticed that one of the men was Special Agent Lawrence Johnson of the FBI. As soon as the three of them started walking up the elevated platform, Johnson noticed them and he stood up and walked over.

  “Welcome, Professor Dane and Detective Mendoza,” Johnson said as they quickly shook hands. “As you can see, this is a joint operation and we’re working with the police department to make sure that no stone gets left overturned.”

  Valerie nodded. “I’m impressed. Still DOD, but the whole set up seems different. So far the only military people I’ve seen are the ones guarding the entrance. Inside is all pretty much FBI and NYPD.”

  Johnson grinned sheepishly as he rubbed the back of his head. “Secretary Arctor wanted to make sure that the military will be at the disposal of Professor Dane and will not be in command this time. I’ll be your official FBI liaison, by the way.”

  “If y’all would excuse me,” Bell said as he started to walk down the platform. “I need to head over to the basement level, we’re about to clear the remaining rubble down there so I want to be the first to have a look at it.”

  Valerie waived as he left. “See you later, Lemond.”

  “So far so good,” Paul said to the FBI agent. “Detective Bell said you might have something for us?”

  “Yes,” Johnson said as he gestured at one of the FBI technicians manning a computer console before pointing at the monitor of his own workstation. “If you’ll take a look at this. It’s a video feed that we were able to salvage from the surveillance cameras in the basement area at the time of the incident. When the team that came in was able to restore emergency power to the museum, the video recording devices were also able to come online. We were able to access the tapes only after we dug through the rubble.”

  The monitor soon showed a recorded video of the late Dr. Edwin Worlich walking into the basement area of the museum. Within a few minutes, he was setting up a standing camera before opening up the sealed crate that housed the artifact. The video feed flickered for a bit as the next scene showed Dr. Worlich carefully examining the petrified tree trunk that was recovered from Hatteras Island. Captain Laura Niven was seen walking around in the background as she seemed to be making sure that the area was secure.

  “That was when I left them to go check upstairs,” Valerie said softly.

  As Dr. Worlich continued to examine the tree trunk, the edges of the video feed began to get blurry and even flickered to the point where the video was nearly obscured by static.

  “Now I can barely see anything,” Paul said.

  “There was plenty of static interference in the video at this point but we managed to clean it up a little,” Johnson said as he used the computer mouse to adjust the controls for the video feed. “It ought to be clearer now.”

  Although there was still some static lines in the recording, the scene became somewhat clearer as they all could see that the camera on the tripod beside Dr. Worlich had begun to wobble, as if being shaken by some unseen force. Less than a minute later, it looked like something invisible had tipped the tripod over and sent his camera crashing down on the floor.

  “That was when we lost video feed from our headquarters in Brooklyn,” Paul said.

  Valerie gasped and pointed as the video feed soon showed two men entering the field of view. They were both dressed in ill-fitting suits; one was taller and seemed to be physically supporting an emaciated old man with long, silvery hair. Since the recording had no sound it looked like Dr. Worlich had noticed them as he turned around and it looked like they were having an argument of some kind. Less than a few seconds later, Captain Niven entered from the other end of the video, and she pointed her assault rifle at the two men.

  What happened next seemed unbelievable as some sort of flickering came up from behind Captain Niven, grabbed her, and then threw her across the basement as if she was nothing more than a crumpled piece of paper.

  Valerie was almost in shock. “Oh my god, what was that?”

  “I don’t know,” Paul whispered. “It was like some sort of invisible ghost or spirit.”

  The next few seconds of the video showed Dr. Worlich grab at his own throat as he fell down on his knees. Both Paul and Valerie let out a gasp as they saw their colleague die before their eyes. As the video continued, the two men had slowly made their way towards the tree trunk on the wheeled platform. The old man then pressed his hands on the trunk and they saw it shudder as if it was alive before it began to open up like a wound. The taller man seemed to hesitate at first as they saw that both he and the older man seemed to be arguing about something. Then the taller man got on his knees as the old man took something white and squirming out of the tree trunk and moved closer to his companion.

  Valerie’s mouth was open. “What is he doing? Was that the worm that burst through the museum?”

  Paul said nothing as he continued to watch, mesmerized.

  Valerie could barely hide her disgust and she shrieked when she saw the old man placing the large maggot into his companion’s mouth. The taller man looked like he was about to choke, but in the end, he got the larva down his t
hroat. Less than a few seconds later, the tall man had begun to get nauseated as he fell down on the floor, his whole body began to convulse and the look on his face was one of intense pain. Meanwhile, the old man just stood there, staring at his companion. Soon, the taller man’s features began to get bloated as his skin began to sag and he seemed to have ballooned in size. Within minutes, all that was left of him was a mound of flesh that seemed to be getting larger by the second. The final scene of the video seemed unreal as a gigantic maggot that was the size of a small car had burst through the sack of skin and began growing. Then the monitor screen flickered out.

  Both Valerie and Paul said nothing as they just stood there in shocked silence.

  Agent Johnson waited for a few minutes before he started talking. “Those two men in the video, do you know them?”

  “No, never seen them before in my life,” Paul said. Valerie just shook her head.

  “We’ve been trying to identify that old man the moment we saw the video,” Johnson said as he clicked on the mouse on his workstation again. “Here is an enhanced picture of him from the feed.”

  As a close up of old the man’s face was shown on the monitor screen, Johnson continued to observe Paul and Valerie’s reactions. So far, their body language had indicated that they were not familiar with who it was.

  Valerie turned to look at Johnson. “Have you been able to identify who he is?”

  Johnson nodded. “We believe so but we have no confirmation. My entire team has been working nonstop for the past three days in identifying him. With the internet and electrical grids down, we had to deploy as many agents on the field to follow every lead and we ended up with plenty of dead ends. But I think we may have a breakthrough.” With those words, he took out a folder from his desk and handed it to the two of them.

  Paul started flipping through the pages. It showed a dossier and pictures of an old man who looked quite similar to the one in the video feed. Valerie stood beside Paul as she read along with him.

  “We believe that his name is Seth Solomon,” Johnson said. “Approximate age at between seventy-five to eighty-five years old; we don’t have a copy of his birth certificate so we can’t be sure. He is a resident of Manhattan and owned an apartment overlooking Central Park. We raided that place just yesterday and found that it hadn’t been lived in for months. We tried looking at his financial records, but all we could find was that he was living off of a trust fund his late father had set up for him.”