Nephilim

by Barrowman, John; Barrowman, Carole;

  He yanked open the doors of the church and ran for his life.

  Again.

  19.

  THE CIRCUS CAME TO TOWN

  The majestic peryton dipped gracefully into the rocky hollow beneath the stone bridge, keeping Matt, Em and Rémy shrouded in its animated haze.

  With the screams of parents still echoing around the castle, the village children squealed as if the circus had come to town, bringing a bouncy house with it. Where they should have fallen on the wicked rocks far below the bridge, they were playing on a bed of soft multi-coloured balls with which Em had filled the gully, falling and laughing over each other, their squeals of delight in stark contrast to the anguished howls of their parents moments earlier.

  ‘Put me down on the bridge,’ said Rémy. ‘I can take care of the Piper.’

  ‘Sure?’ said Matt. ‘This is new territory for you. I can handle him without any trouble.’

  ‘Just do it.’ Rémy’s nerves were frayed enough, given the circumstances. Did Matt really have to question his abilities too?

  Em leaned forward and whispered into the peryton’s ear. The beast swooped up and circled above the Pied Piper, who played on as if it was still on the page of whatever story Gibson had been illustrating or reading when he died.

  Rémy swung his leg round and dropped from the considerable height on to the bridge. His knees buckled as he slammed against the stones, but then he found his balance fast and faced the Piper.

  ‘Let’s see what you’re made of, fool,’ he said.

  Rémy slipped his harmonica from his pocket and began to play. Starting slow, with an achingly sombre blues riff, he let the soft, slurred notes quieten his mind, shutting out the chaos around him and the mythical beast above. The Piper rocked on to its toes and played faster, its mouth stretching into a crazed grin.

  ‘Dude, you ain’t gonna win this one.’

  After three more long notes, Rémy tilted his head, cupped his harmonica tighter, and blew into an Irish jig that matched the trilling sounds of the Piper’s piccolo.

  The Piper cocked its head as Rémy’s notes crashed into it. Its lips puckered, its head flipped side to side like a robot with its circuits scrambled. Rémy played a loud bending note of the first verse. The Piper’s jingling, pointed feet disappeared. Rémy played the chorus. The Piper’s body stretched higher and higher above the bridge until it came close to slamming into the hooves of the peryton. Rémy repeated the chorus until he no longer saw the bridge, the Piper or the peryton: just his music weaving like silver ribbons among the green lines of the animation. He was Neo seeing the Matrix, or the Sandman shaping forms. He was Rémy Dupree Rush, a Conjuror.

  He hit a high C. The Piper swelled to three times his girth and then exploded, leaving Rémy in gobs of paint and stinking of rotten eggs.

  20.

  ALL THE HAPPY ZOMBIES

  Rémy stepped out of the shower and dried off quickly. The tower bathroom was the size of a telephone box. Em had her own en-suite, but Rémy and Matt shared this one. He shivered as he pulled on fresh jeans and a T-shirt. He could still smell the turpentine on his skin.

  ‘Still a bit gamey in there?’ said Matt through the shower-room door. ‘Happens to the best of us.’

  ‘You could have warned me the animation would explode,’ Rémy retorted.

  Matt’s laughter rang in his words. ‘Yeah, but where’s the fun in that?’

  Em cut in. ‘Thought you’d want to know we inspirited everyone, then led all the happy zombies home.’

  ‘Any of the kids hurt?’

  ‘Nah,’ said Matt. ‘A few cuts and scrapes.’

  ‘We did manage to get through to Vaughn via back channels,’ said Em. ‘He’ll notify Gibson’s family. He just asked us to take the body to Orion’s undertaker in Edinburgh.’

  ‘Do you need help?’ asked Rémy, sitting on the edge of the toilet and pulling on his unlaced boots.

  ‘All done,’ said Matt. ‘Fading with a dead body’s definitely weird, but we managed. We didn’t need any of your musical accompaniment for this one.’

  Rémy didn’t add anything, his anger at Matt stewing beneath his skin.

  ‘Rémy,’ said Em. ‘Thanks for your help this morning. Sorry again about the gross splatter.’

  Rémy waited until he heard Matt and Em’s footsteps disappear up to the top of the tower before he opened the door. At least Em had apologized, which was more than could be said for her brother. Plus she had sent him home on the peryton, while she and Matt had remained in the castle parking lot.

  Instead of returning to his room, Rémy slouched down the tower stairs and into the church. He stopped in the scullery to shove his paint-covered clothes into the washing machine before heading to the kitchen, where he microwaved a mug of chicken broth and carried it into the nave.

  Everything that had happened to him in the past few months was still so unreal. The Camarilla’s attempt to kill him had failed, but their forces were legion and they were not about to give up. His conjuring powers were necessary to stop the rise of their prophesied Second Kingdom, a hell on earth with humanity enslaved.

  It seemed an age ago instead of only months since he’d fled Chicago after the brutal death of his mother and his beloved Tía Rosa. ‘Find the Moor,’ his mother had whispered with her dying breath. And he had. Or rather, the Moor had found him. But even with Orion’s help, too many of his mother’s secrets remained. Too much still needed to be learned. Rémy sometimes wondered if the Camarilla’s Second Kingdom wasn’t already here.

  He kneeled over a grate on the stone floor and pried it open. He leaned into the space, lifted out a lockbox, and carried it to the table where he unlocked it with the key his mom had given him right before she died. He settled at the table tucked in the shadows of one of the small chapels, and studied everything that she had left him.

  Annie Dupree Rush’s journal was no longer bulging with loose pages, as it had been when Rémy had found it. Her sketches, torn images from gallery catalogues, leaves of sheet music and random pages of text copied from documents and manuscripts concerning her research on the Second Kingdom had all been catalogued and preserved in Orion’s database. He traced his fingers over his mom’s scribbled loopy handwriting in her journal.

  Watchers: primordial. Rebel angels? Demons? Both? Their offspring?

  The journal had also been digitized, but Rémy refused to work from the copy. His mom’s voice sang from every page. He wasn’t ready to hear silence.

  From the scullery, the washing machine rocked against the stone floor, the radiators hissed, and the paintings bellowed at Rémy in dissonant notes and pitchy chords. But he could hear something else too: a bass line throbbing beneath the rest. Residual from Gibson’s death, perhaps.

  Untangling his headphones from his pocket, he clicked his playlist of static from his old iPod. The white noise might counteract the cacophony that was setting his mind on edge and interfering with his concentration. The droning continued to disturb him. He looked over at the altar again. Nothing … and yet there was something competing for his attention.

  Rémy untied the lace fastening the journal and opened to the page he’d been working on earlier in the day. His mother had traced one of the earliest historical mentions of the Second Kingdom to the Book of Songs, a manuscript written by a favourite at the court of the Roman Emperor Hadrian. Rémy gulped the rest of his soup as he studied the page, thinking about his mother’s love of ancient history, a passion that had consumed her almost as much as her love of music and … and of him.

  Frustrated, sad and tired, he pushed the journal to one side and gazed at the whiteboard showing his family tree. A locket portrait of Rémy’s ancestor, Alfonso Blue, an overseer of the Dupree plantation in Louisiana, was held with a magnet at the top of the tree, and a wedding photograph of his parents – the father he never knew and the mother he wished he’d known better – at the vast Dupree mansion, was at the centre. A more recent photograph of his mother sitting at he
r roll-top desk, its legs carved to look like sugarcane leaves and its rows of rectangular cubbies bulging with her correspondence, was pinned beneath.

  Something about the second picture of his mother snagged Rémy’s curiosity. But it was impossible to concentrate on account of the noise. It was coming from outside, he realized, and was a higher pitch than before, less like a droning human and more like a wailing cat.

  Quickly, Rémy tucked the journal back inside the lockbox, returned it to the space beneath the floor and dropped the grate. He pulled out his headphones and stepped out into the cool Highland air. The crying was not loud enough to draw anyone else’s attention, but he knew it was calling for his. The mark of the Conjuror beneath his hairline at the back of his neck started pulsing, a trembling that made him shiver.

  The sound was coming from the cemetery on the cap of the hill behind the church.

  21.

  PERSECUTED AND BANISHED

  Rémy headed for the graveyard in the moonlight, jogging his way up the hill through the pine trees and the brambles until he reached the first row of headstones. He read them. They were from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries from the looks of it. He used the toe of his boot to scrape off the moss and read the first inscription:

  PERSECUTED AND BANISHED

  SUFFERED BUT SURVIVED

  1694–1715

  Suffered but survived. Story of his life. His whole family’s, come to think of it. The words made him think about his mom and her grave. He didn’t even know where her body had ended up.

  The hill grew steeper the closer Rémy got to the monument at the heart of the cemetery: a sandstone statue of a Highland soldier leaning slightly forward on a walking stick with a peryton at its head. The soldier was in Highland dress with a sweeping wrap tossed over his shoulder. Part of his sporran had come away, and his right foot was broken off at the ankle. The soldier was standing on a three-tiered circular pedestal, giving him a spectacular view of the Scottish countryside. Rémy climbed on to the second tier before pausing for breath.

  He looked out across the tapestry of the countryside, noting the church of Orion and its tower snuggled under the lip of the hill, the spotlights on the ruins of St Mungo’s Castle and the soft glow of porch lights from the village off in the distance. Most of the village windows were dark, its inhabitants none the worse for the terror earlier in the day. The air was fragrant with fresh mint and damp cut grass. This time in early fall, from the balcony outside his mom’s bedroom, the air smelled of KFC, exhaust fumes, cigarettes and smoke from neighbourhood grills. His mom would have liked it here.

  A wave of homesickness hit Rémy so hard that he lost his balance and steadied himself on the monument. The moment his palms pressed on the carved marble, the wailing sound blasted inside his head, dizzying his thoughts further. He closed his eyes, trying to force the sound to take shape, to slow down, to let him see what was so urgent, but the fragments were gone before he could make sense of them. All that lingered in his head was a chord progression from the beginning of a song that Rémy couldn’t quite place. He hummed the chords – but got nothing.

  The Conjuror’s mark burned insistently, firing pain up his neck. The entire monument was keening. He took two steps away and slipped his harmonica from his back pocket. Conjuring might summon the twins, but he decided he didn’t care. Whatever was calling to him from within this monument was worth disturbing their sleep.

  Wiping his harmonica on his thigh, he held it to his lips, his hands cupped loosely around it, his fingers pointed slightly in the air. He blew a long warm-up note into the mouthpiece. Played double notes, using his tongue to layer the sound as he built to a crescendo that he held for a long note, sweat dripping into his eyes, his fingers a blur in the music.

  Before him the front of the pedestal came crumbling down.

  22.

  IMPOSSIBLE TO RESIST

  Stone dust danced a furious jig in the moonlight, settling over Rémy and the statue of the Highlander like a flurry of snow. The monument looked as if a jackhammer had crushed the front of it, leaving an opening that invited Rémy to step inside.

  For a moment, Rémy was too breathless to move. He dropped to the ground until his vision cleared and his hands felt firmly attached to his wrists again. He rolled his neck, stretching his muscles, conscious of the mark pulsing on his neck. When he felt in control again, he crawled into the hole.

  The wailing sounded softer here, like a child crying. There was a narrow wooden door in the grip of serious cobwebs and thick black dust shone in a ribbon of moonlight. He rubbed the grime between his fingers. Charcoal. Interesting. The kind Em used to animate. It looked like a blowtorch had melted the door’s massive brass lock into a formless mass. Conjuring a key wouldn’t do any good. The door’s hinges also looked as if they’d been melted.

  The droning cried on, touching his skin, electrifying him. He had to know what lay inside this place. He’d faced worse enough already, he reasoned with himself. He had held his murdered mother like a child in his arms as she breathed her last. That was the worst thing of all.

  Rémy crawled back outside for a moment, sprinting and sliding down the other side of the hill to a woodpile where he and Matt had been breaking up dead trees for the church’s wood burner. Before grabbing the axe, he looked across at the church tower. Candlelight flickered from Em’s room at the top. She was still awake. Matt’s window was dark, but given Matt’s issues with his eyes, that didn’t necessarily mean he was asleep.

  The urgency Rémy felt was impossible to resist. He scrambled back up the hill and swung the axe into the wood panel above the lock. The wood cracked easily, but the smashed lock held firm. Rémy ran his charcoal-stained fingers over the melted metal, wondering if a long time ago an Animare had sealed this chamber.

  He swung the axe again and again until he’d torn a wide gash in the wood. Then he reached his hand through to try the lock on the other side. Something skittered over his fingers and he jerked his hand back. Rats.

  The noise moaned through the gaping hole, bringing with it a breath of putrid air. Rémy kept hacking until the lock hung like a rotten tooth from a mouth of darkness. Then he climbed through.

  23.

  AMONG THE DEAD

  A set of stone steps plummeted into darkness, an iron gate blocking the way. Rémy gave it a shove. It was rusty and swung open easily.

  Cautiously, he stepped forward, pressing his hands flat against the walls on each side. He made it down the first three steps, but four and five crumbled, knocking him to his knees so that he tumbled and smacked his head.

  He sat up against the wall, gingerly touching the side of his head. No blood, but he was going to have a nasty bump. Should have grabbed a torch from the scullery, he thought, but he wasn’t going back to grab one now.

  When they’d first arrived at Orion, Em had given Rémy a tour. She’d explained how the church had been a sanctuary for Covenanters, Scottish revolutionaries, in the sixteenth century. Rémy wondered if these steps led to an underground safe house.

  The darkness was damp, suffocating. The wailing was louder, a keening lament making his heart race and his anxiety rise. He sat on the steps and took out his harmonica again, warming up quickly with a progression of chords. Then he slipped into a bright melody, and before he slurred his last note, a camping lantern dropped out of a swirl of haze to land on his lap.

  The steps turned in a steep right angle only a few metres in front of him: a turn where he’d have hit a lot harder if he hadn’t fallen where he did. He kept descending with a turn every three or four steps until the wailing sounded as if it was seeping through the walls on both sides of him. The dampness was worse the deeper he went, webs of moss creeping through the cracks on the stone, making the steps even more treacherous.

  Finally, Rémy hit a dead end, catching himself before he crashed into it. He was a long way beneath the pedestal. Sixty-seven steps, in fact. The space was only one or two metres wider than Rémy’s outstr
etched arms, and on his toes he could touch the ceiling. The wailing and the pulsing of the mark were starting to set his teeth on edge, and he was thinking about getting help when the wailing evolved into the chord progression he’d heard earlier.

  He hummed the chords over again.

  After listening to the riff for a few minutes, Rémy mimicked it on his harmonica. Nothing happened. He played the riff again. Still nothing. But on the final note, the third time, a white light like the flame on a fuse raced down the rock wall, fizzing to a shower of sparks when it reached the ground. That’s when the entire wall shifted, opening along the white-hot seam. A gust of stinking air escaped through the opening.

  Gripping his harmonica, Rémy stepped into a burial chamber right out of a horror movie, complete with a crumbling effigy on top of a stone tomb and a wall covered with a threadbare tapestry depicting Roman gladiators battling mythical flying beasts. A row of whisky barrels layered with shards of broken pottery stood behind the tomb, and there was what looked like an animal carcass nailed on the wall.

  A heavy hand fell on to his shoulder. Rémy freaked, twisted away and dropped the lantern. Everything was plunged into darkness. For the first time that night, he felt his courage wane. His hands were shaking as he fumbled for the lantern and relit it with a soft and trembling breath on his harmonica. A rusting coat of arms was standing near the opening. Rémy snorted at the arm that had dropped when he’d stepped into the chamber. If the wailing hadn’t been crippling his brain, Rémy would have laughed. Instead, he set the lantern at his feet and stared up at where a set of rotting bagpipes hung from the wall like a hunting trophy, softly moaning at him.

  Directly beneath the bagpipes stretched the resident of the tomb’s effigy with a brass coat of arms set into its side. Rémy pulled his sleeve over his hands and rubbed the brass until the inscription was clear.