by J M Bannon
Sweat stains soaked through his formal Necronist garb. Even with the collar loosened and a few buttons undone, he could feel the heat of panic pouring from his body. Fumbling for the keys he was crushed by a sense of urgency, knowing he must act quickly if he were to save Lilith. Hume could not afford to feel grief, he needed to get back to the lab where her lifeless body lay and put his plan in place.
He had been working through the process in his mind for years, but he observed the covenant and never spoke of it to his Brothers. Now he would wield the divine power to save his daughter; he knew every second that passed could be the one where she would not return. If it were even possible, this had never been done before. Has she been gone too long?
Entering the strong room, he immediately located the storage chest he needed, unlatched the two locks and rummaged through the contents. He found the small box quickly, opened it and there it was, the ampule. The life of one. One unnamed, unrecorded soul that Saint Yves had sneaked into the Cenaculum Mortale Rejuvination and planned to use in his rejuvenation after his conflict in London. Hume had secretly removed this ampule and replaced it with the recorded vial that the Ex Quo Collectio had allowed for the treatment. Hume never asked why Saint Yves broke the covenant. To possess an unrecorded ampule was a violation. He decided to leave it another one of the unspoken secrets he shared with Saint Yves.
Staring briefly at the glowing green ampule between his thumb and forefinger, he placed it inside his coat pocket and turned to his library of notes. The room was lined with shelves and cubbie holes containing notebooks and scrolls. He found his personal notebooks recording the design of the Cenaculum Mortale Rejuvination chamber in the Guild Hall. Hume needed to evaluate the formulas for the ichor and the settings for the antechamber. He paused on his way out and looked back at the rear of the strong room. Next to the chest where he stored the ampule, was an identical trunk. As critical as the situation was, he needed to know. Was it still there?
He returned to the back of the room went to his knee and shuffled through his keys to identify the one to unlock the trunk. With luck the first key he tried worked. He released the clasps then opening the chest lid, his heart sunk. It was gone. The prototype, he called the soul magnet, a metaphysically driven mechanical device that mimicked the Pwen Hanaan ceremony of the Voodooists; his crude automation of the savage ritual. Gone.
Hume had more pressing matters, but he would deal with that next and he would deal with the culprit in the harshest manner. He envisioned giving the thief a first-hand experience with its workings.
Arno slammed the lid shut, grabbed his notebook and left, not locking any of the doors. He gave his desk a quick look out of habit then turned to the exit. There stood Henri Allard.
"Seer Allard, you gave me a start."
"Sir, you look troubled, can I be of help?"
"No, I have pressing matters to attend to."
"Guild Master, I wish to speak to you. I too have something pressing," said Allard.
Hume's mind cleared for a moment and he recognized that Allard was also in a disturbed state. He couldn't let on what he was up to, "Henri what is it, I have urgent business."
"I would like to access the notes on your early endeavors for an idea I have. I am inspired and don't want to lose the spark; I was hoping to review the early soul attraction system you developed." Allard blurted out.
Hume's skin went cold as his mind connected the dots. He felt angry and ashamed that he had not been around to see Allard's treachery. "Seer Allard, you are to proceed directly to your quarters and remain there until I return whereupon we will discuss what you have stolen."
Allard's hands came out of his pockets, he held his malla beads and began an incantation. While not an Adept he had mastered skills over the mind. Does this fool think he can control my mind?
Hume had implanted a hypno-mystic trigger in each of his followers as part of their induction to the Wyrding. Part spell, part hypnotic conditioning. He stepped forward and quickly pressed his thumb against Henri's forehead and recited, “somnus ab oculis meis ut praedicaretis.” He ordered his servant to sleep and Allard dropped to the floor senseless.
He would properly punish Allard after he dealt with Lilith, and if the delay caused by Henri's actions resulted in his inability to revive his daughter, he would do far worse to the Seer than exposure to the soul magnet.
21
Friday the 29th of March
6:50 p.m. The Necronist Laboratory under Monastère de la Prairie vallonnée
"Get out!"
The two acolytes looked at the Guild Master in shock.
"Get out, I said. Can't you see I am working?" he said forcing calm into his tone. He stood over the shrouded body he had just unwrapped when two acolytes came into the lab. They were on their rounds patrolling the facility.
After they left, he locked the door. Slow down, he thought to himself. If I can't even remember to lock a door how will I assure I do not foul up this complex process.
Hume bolted the door then returned to preparing Lilith's body. It was difficult for him to undress it and see the wounds on her. There was a gash in her side and he could tell there were also broken bones. He struggled to get her across the grate and into the rejuvenation chamber. Her limp body slid in and sunk to the bottom of the tank.
He pulled Saint Yves’ mystery ampule from his pocket. The unmarked ampule clipped into the reaction chamber between the metal contacts, here the process would conduct the energy into the fluid. Although based on the Rejuvenation Chamber in the basement of the Guild House, the Monastery's Reanimation Chambers were different. First, they did not have the showmanship of the Cenaculum Mortale Rejuvination with its Egyptian motif, stone facade and alabaster tub for rejuvenation. When the primary user is the Emperor of France, you go beyond the utilitarian steel and glass chambers used here for research. Two other features differed beyond just the cosmetics. Here in the lab, the working equipment was visible, whereas the Chamber at the Guild Hall hid the machinery that drove the process. The last and most important difference in the process of rejuvenation was at the Guild Hall the life energy of another was suffused slowly into the subject to supplement and fortify their own energy. In his Reanimation Chamber, Hume had augmented the charging circuit to deliver a varied charge and to give the subject a sudden burst of life energy. This feature along with an uncatalogued source of life energy was what Hume needed to return his daughter to life.
He could see her slumped body laying against the glass. Lifeless.
Got to move, every second she slips further away. His daughter was dead there was no doubt of that, but he had a theory that with the right mix of ichor, and charging the lingering spirit could be pulled back and then rejuvenated. First, the ichor needed to be adjusted. He engaged the steam lines that ran the charging and recirculation pumps. The same steam that powered the pumps passed through a heat exchanger to adjust the temperature of the ichor. Hume lifted the top of the ichor kettle and added eldritch elements to the soup. It provided no visible change to the black liquid, but he knew the arcane density was now altered to where it would bind more efficiently with the life energy and transport it to the subject. Here, he was an artist. He dipped his finger in the ichor then rubbed it on the back of his hand using his metaphysical power to sense its potency. It was ready.
At the main control panel, he nursed the dynamo to life and charged the reanimation capacitors. Here again, he needed to rely on his artistry and genius. He knew the numbers and timing for bringing a meat puppet to life using bovine life force, but this was more subtle and sophisticated. The human life in the ampule needed to reanimate, he worried that it would not be enough. It occurred to him to use animal spirit to augment the contents of the ampule. He went to the cabinet where the animus was stored and withdrew an ampule. His spirits rose as he thought of a way to utilise the system to create a duel infusion chamber,”Cross connect the reanimation systems," he said out loud with the first tingle of something going his wa
y.
Here the lab had redundancies and multiple systems, so the Order could experiment. He could cross-link two chambers and the ichor volume would double. This would allow him to create a slower, low current introduction of the animal spirit then hit Lilith with a shock of the supercharged human life-force. He increased the capacitor charging and while that ramped up he opened valves to a second system to cross connect them. Hume then placed the ampule of animal spirit into the infusion chamber. He was hustling from one task to the next; a normal reanimation had several acolytes assisting, he was only one man now trying to force two reanimation systems to operate together.
He upped his ichor recipe to deal with the increased volume then threw the switch to induce the animus to act as a carrier for the human spirit. The Guild Master was an Adept, not a natural like Saint-Yves, but he grasped the savage magic they had learnt in the jungle those many years past and was at his best when controlling the flow of the eldritch energy, through his mechanized processes. The time was right, he could sense the convergence of science and magic under his control, and not operating as a weak father who just lost his daughter, but a Guild Master, the leader of the White Wyrding and the arbiter of life and death. He threw the switch driving all the capacitors through the cell containing his daughter, blasting the chamber with electrical current to drive the spirit into her human form.
The force was so powerful that through the glass window of the chamber he could see the energy ripple through the ichor. Lilith shuddered as she was hit by the jolt of energy.
Her body convulsed, Lilith’s body twitched and jerked as the waves of energy pulsed in the ichor, he saw her eyes open and in a natural reaction to being brought back to life, her mouth opened as she gasped for air, but there was no air; only the black conductive substance.
22
Friday the 29th of March
8:32 p.m. The Necronist Laboratory under Monastère de la Prairie vallonnée
She was drowning in blackness. Not the limbo she had been banished to, the senseless disconnection from all life, now she thrashed in a thick black soup; she could see a faint light and tried to move towards it. She drew a breath and twisted in pain as all that entered her lungs was the thick fluid in which she was immersed, it tasted awful and burned in her eyes as well as her lungs. Something was so very different, a sensation, the feeling of moving in a mortal form. A mortal form in danger of drowning. As she pushed off the bottom, she broke the surface of a black fluid and gasped for air, coughing up the liquid. Her throat and lungs were on fire.
She could feel her body and raised her hand to her face wiping away the fluid, then noticed her white skin. A sense of panic set in as Angelica tried to piece together what had happened. Her last recollection of was the horrific pain inflicted upon her in the London townhouse, as the Necronists attacked her, then nothing; a long sleepless nothing, trapped in between the twilight of waking and sleeping at the edge of a night terror.
Her panic increased as she realized the situation. She was locked in some type of small tube or coffin filled with the black fluid leaving only a few inches between the surface of the fluid and the top of the tube.
The top of the tube opened, and she was lifted out onto a cold grating that scratched her naked body. It had been so long since she had felt pain or any other physical sensation.
"Lilith, you are alive, try to breathe," said the man helping her out of the tube. Looking at him, she realized it was Arno Hume, the Necronist who with Gerrard Saint Yves had visited with her in the Haitian jungle. "Arno? -Where am I?" her voice cracking.
"You are in my Laboratory, below the Dairy, just relax you will be all right," Her eyes stung trying to see him he was wiping the black goo from her eyes and mouth.
Arno Hume. He was much older now, it had been decades since she had seen him. He was weeping, overjoyed at his accomplishment, "What were you doing in Paris, Lilith? I told you that city was dangerous and you … you were …”
"I wasn't in Paris, I was in London. You are being a fool, Hume; it is I, Angelica," said Lilith with her Haitian accent.
The man fell back against the railing in shock. He tried to steady himself but slipped to the floor. Angelica looked down at her body and realized with some surprise that her spirit was now connected to the form of a young white girl. Angelica centered her breathing, her internal body sensations returning, and the sensitivity of the deep bruises and broken bones with every breath.
"You are Lilith Hume, my daughter. You were killed in an automotive accident in Paris, and I have just resurrected, you, my darling," said Arno, emphatically.
My ribs hurt, she thought, then voiced, "Where am I? I think my ribs are broken."
"I told you, my child. You are below the monastery in my laboratory, I will get you back to our home,” said Hume.
"Arno, I do not know what you're talking about, what do you mean our home?" said Angelica.
"But you recognize me, you call me by my name. You know I am your father,"
Angelica centered herself to stop the swirling of feelings and information from overwhelming her. She was the Hougan, the Voodoo Queen and needed to tap back into her power by centering her physical form.
Angelica placed her hand in the black fluid and drew out the residual life-force. Closing her eyes, she uttered her voodoo incantations pulling the life from the fluid into her. Under her command, the last traces of life-force flowed out of the fluid into this new body. She imagined it going to each and every cell, healing the wounds of the body she now possessed.
"My God, Lilith you, you are healing," declared Hume.
Angelica looked down at her side and watched the gash close up. She just stared at her pale, white skin. "Arno, I do not know what you have done to me. "
"Lilith, I have brought you back from the dead. You stupid girl, I told you to stay here on the farm, but you defied me and went to Paris against my wishes. I forgive you, of course, I know you are in shock and don't remember but you were run over by a truck in the streets of Paris."
Angelica was furious with him and the rage had no limit, it flooded over her. "No, Hume you are the idiot. Your compatriots murdered me in London and you have brought me back from beyond."
Angelica stood up in her new body, it was starting to make sense now, this was not the body she was born into. She was born to a house slave and concubine to her father, a wealthy Portuguese slaver and plantation owner in Haiti. Hume's Necronists had interrupted her plans for revenge against her brothers and then, nothing. Just the cold blackness.
Her musings were interrupted by a coughing fit, the black ichor in her lungs needed to come out. It turned to retching as the fluid choked her. Angelica resisted the vomiting and relaxed opening her throat, then willed the fluid out. The black fluid followed her command and flowed out; a sheen of fluid covered her body, coalescing in a pool on the floor.
"What have I done?" asked Hume. Angelica saw his confusion turning to terror. Crouching down she took his chin in her hand and turned his face so she could look him in the eye. "Arno, you should be proud, you have achieved the goal of your Brotherhood and raised the dead. You have resurrected me, this body, the body of the daughter you found so precious is now the vessel of Mamma Moya, Queen Angelica, the successor of all Voodoo Hougans!” as Angelica spoke she became louder, her tone maniacal, "Oh Arno, If you only knew the liberation. How this ordeal has given me clarity, power, certainty, and now with the ability to finish what I had started." All the time she spoke the black fluid flowed and pulsed in the tanks, resonating with her words.
"But, my Lilith, how can this be?" sobbed the Guild Master.
Hume and Angelica were polarizing. The woman becoming more powerful, clear-headed and confident, while the man who had resurrected her was crumbling into a feeble, mumbling mess.
Angelica looked beyond, beyond Hume, the room, this world. Her vision pierced the veil of the material world and penetrated beyond into the aether, watching Lilith's life- force receding further and f
urther from the mortal realm. Lilith's spirit form looked back meeting Angelica's eyes. The Voodoo Queen understood, "Worry not, your daughter now travels as she always wished. Your attempts to tie her to this plane and keep her cloistered in the countryside did not protect her. Today is a day to be celebrated Father, because while you lost one daughter you have brought another into this world," As Angelica spoke she willed the ichor to her. The fluid flowed to her command and drew up around her body, more of the Eldritch soup flowed out of the resurrection chamber to her feet and flowed up around her as the fluid took the shape of a fitted gown. It changed from black to the most brilliant white, finally taking on exquisite detail in the fabric, silk with intricate embroidered skirt panels and layered lace on the bodice. "Thank you, Arno. I know the pain you feel, I am a parent too, and I must also go to the aid of my child,"
The body of Lilith Hume, possessed by the Voodoo Queen Angelica calmly walked away and out of the laboratory. As she left, she gave the room a parting glance and saw Hume crumpled on the floor with a bewildered look. She said nothing, just walking off into the cavern to find her escape.
23
Friday the 29th of March
8:40 p.m. The Ready Room of the Peregrine
Just off of the bridge, was the Captain's ready room where Captain Falk would meet with her crew to gather the daily reports. Inside it looked like a company boardroom in the City of London. Rose was standing as was the Guild Master. Beside her Dolly sat at the table, and in front of him lay the Henry rifle he had bought at Prichard’s. She was checking her equipment she usually brought when investigating. Attached to her belt was the Rod of Raziel, her tool wrap, tincture box, and other gadgets to assist with paranormal investigation. Around her neck she wore a lace choker with an amulet to protect against mind control, her scrying goggles sat atop her head and her crimson warding jacket was slung over the chair next to Dolly. While stylish and modern, its true purpose was not protection from the elements of weather, rather its lining was sewn from the threads and pieces of the shrouds of Saints to keep away the chill of evil. She glanced down at Dolly who held up the apotropaic amulet he had on his watch fob.