Nephilim

by Barrowman, John; Barrowman, Carole;

  Em screamed. Caravaggio grabbed her as a wave of flaming rats dropped into the space behind them. They all flailed madly to get away, but the space was too tight and Matt was stuck at their feet. The raptor screeching they’d heard in the tunnel sounded like laughter. Deep and hollow, but laughter nonetheless.

  ‘I hate rats!’ Matt roared as the flames died out, and the rats twitched and scratched and bit at him and each other in the gutter at the bottom of the space. There was little he could do except bat them into the blackness. ‘The nephilim is playing with us.’

  ‘I know where we are,’ said Caravaggio suddenly. ‘Listen to me. We need to fade immediately before worse things come.’

  The laughter grew louder.

  ‘How do we fade without any art to fade into?’ said Em in desperation.

  ‘I think we’re inside a carving,’ said Caravaggio. ‘A frieze. This is bad. This is—’

  A blood-curdling screech pierced the void.

  ‘Fade,’ screamed the artist. ‘NOW!’

  FIFTH MOVEMENT

  ‘Cleave the tree down, and destroy it;

  before its roots will strangle the earth.’

  Book of Songs

  75.

  DOUBT AND PAIN

  Rémy’s consciousness returned in a rush of cold air. He shivered and his ears popped. He tried to stand, but couldn’t. His hands and fingers tingled where he clutched the ancient pipes, and pain radiated from his right elbow and shoulder as if he’d banged his funny bone.

  The young man in the camel coat was staring down at him.

  ‘I can’t feel my legs,’ Rémy gasped.

  ‘It’s a consequence of binding,’ said a woman’s voice. ‘The feeling will return soon.’

  Rémy tried to absorb his new surroundings. A vast tree stump stood rooted in the centre of the chamber. It looked as if the top of the tree had been ripped off in anger, yet its roots were alive. Healthy green vines reached across the space and beneath the foundation walls of the room. Shards of wood like pointed teeth stuck out from all sides of the trunk. The head of a half-man, half-ram, a Faunus, with grotesque, twisted features and huge ram’s horns, its fur bloody and matted, sat on the stump. The tree’s vines were slithering in and out of the vessels hanging from the creature’s head, as if the tree was keeping it alive and it was giving life to the tree. Three bronze cauldrons balanced precariously round it, bubbling with a thick silvery liquid.

  Rémy crammed Minnerva’s pipes into his pocket and pressed his hands on the cracked mosaic tile floor, pulling himself away from the horror. The frame of The Flaying Of Marsyas shifted on the wall behind his head.

  ‘Here,’ said the woman, offering him a sip of water from a clay bowl.

  Rémy turned away.

  ‘It’s only water.’ She took a sip to demonstrate.

  Rémy cautiously accepted and then gulped the cool liquid. He guessed the woman was in her forties, with Caribbean blood in her veins. Her smile lit up her tawny freckled face, making her look much younger. But Rémy had seen smiles like hers his whole childhood. Something dark and tragic lay beneath, and the grief and longing in her voice filled him with sadness.

  He took a series of slow deep breaths and scanned the room. The bottom half of the room was wide white brick, and tapestries with richly embroidered figures covered the top half. A faux covering of oak beams held up a crumbling tiled ceiling.

  ‘What is this place?’

  The woman made a dismissive gesture. ‘If things go according to plan, you won’t be here much longer. You’ve served your purpose, for now.’

  The young man in the camel coat seemed tense and impatient, balling his hands into fists at his sides, staring at a glowing light coming from somewhere behind Rémy. It looked as if someone had turned on a television in the darkness.

  ‘Who the hell are you?’ Rémy tried.

  ‘I’m Orianna and that’s my son,’ said the woman. ‘The being you know as Luca Ferrante will be here soon. We must leave before that happens.’

  Rémy tried to get to his feet, but his legs remained paralyzed.

  ‘The Calders,’ Rémy said. ‘They don’t need to be involved any more. I don’t want anyone else to get hurt because of me … because of who I am.’

  ‘I’m afraid it’s much too late for such selflessness.’ Orianna flicked her short dark hair behind her ears, revealing a Camarilla tattoo on the inside of her wrist. ‘Do you have the canvas with the Devil’s Interval?’

  ‘It’s in a safe place,’ said Rémy warily.

  ‘Keep it that way.’

  Rémy felt confused. What did that mean? Didn’t these two want it?

  Orianna’s son ran back into the main chamber, signalling something. He was rolling an unframed canvas in his hands. Orianna slipped a sketchpad from her black leather trousers.

  ‘Your way out is behind that tapestry,’ she said, pointing to the opposite wall.

  ‘But I can’t fade!’ Rémy protested.

  ‘You just did.’

  Orianna’s son tossed Rémy’s harmonica into his lap. Walking to the tree, Orianna reached beneath the ram’s head and lifted out an ancient manuscript tied with a gold band.

  The room exploded with light. Rémy was tossed into the air as the wooden beams cracked and splintered. A current of energy roared into the small space, knocking him hard against a tapestried wall, sending the harmonica skittering across the tiles. A vine shot across the floor and wrapped up the harmonica before slithering beneath the foundations.

  76.

  BEHOLD THE ONE

  A large portion of the chamber collapsed with an ear-splitting shriek. Rémy howled at the battering of sound. He heard the lamentations of a million voices, the torture of a thousand troubled souls. He heard terror and cruelty and panic and fear. His eardrums popped. Blood trickled down his neck. He covered his ears with his hands, humming softly as he tried to build a barrier in his mind against the onslaught.

  The screeching was getting louder and closer. The light pulsed, flooding the room. Rémy glimpsed fire at its core, a swirling shape shifting from flames to wings, the wings sprouting bird-like claws and tiny grotesque human heads. The mark of the Conjuror at the back of his neck began to throb, sending powerful shocks of adrenaline into every organ and a powerful force of energy into Rémy’s legs. He scrambled to his feet and ran to the tapestry, tearing it from its golden hooks, desperate to get away before the nephilim fully manifested.

  What was on the wall behind the tapestry stunned his mind and his body. Above an altar, bordered on each side with statues of Roman goddesses wrapped in gowns and holding musical instruments – a set of pipes, a lyre – a vibrant marble frieze of a coronation revealed itself.

  Rémy could make no sense of what he was seeing.

  At the centre of the two-dimensional relief stood a throne: its back made of flailing limbs and monstrous heads with screaming mouths, its seat depicting a crush of broken wings, its legs bursting with the bodies of terrified men and women. And on the throne … on the throne…

  Rémy saw himself.

  The nephilim stood behind the throne, his enormous wings open behind him. He was anointing the ruler – Rémy – with a crown of laurels. The resemblance was uncanny, down to the precise mark of the Conjuror on Rémy’s neck.

  Before Rémy could process what he was seeing, a harpy swooped out of the fiery vortex behind him and attacked, gouging the flesh on his arm. Rémy sang out in pain. The note charged like a silver arrow at the harpy, which dropped dead at his feet.

  Rémy stared up at the etching above the frieze, struggling to memorize the faded Latin inscription.

  Ecce unus est…

  Harpies circled overhead, absorbing power from the unearthly fire, shifting and growing to the size of hawks, their human features even more distorted. As they poured into the chamber, the nephilim on the frieze began to pulse with light.

  The tapestry hung slack in Rémy’s arms. He swirled it around himself, wrapping it aro
und his body, figuring the heavy embroidered fabric would offer him some protection.

  The swarm engulfed him. He sang, hitting a series of high notes that pierced the harpies with silver blades, but they kept coming, biting with their razor teeth and stabbing their sharpened claws into his shoulders, tearing all the way to his skin. They were only tearing at his flesh, nothing more. Biting to wound him, to stop him, not to kill him. Rémy punched out more notes. His voice croaked. He dropped a pitch.

  There was a whoosh from behind, a sear of heat above his head. A voice, dimmed by his broken eardrums, but familiar. So familiar.

  ‘Rémy!’

  He lowered the tapestry. Em was fading into the room from the frieze. He pulled her into his arms before her feet touched the ground.

  ‘Am I glad to see you,’ he said hoarsely.

  Matt and Caravaggio exploded into the room too, shooting fire extinguishers at the whirling, burning mass behind them. Their efforts weren’t destroying the nephilim, but they were at least halting his shape-shifting power. Em stared at the frieze behind her.

  ‘You shouldn’t have followed me,’ Rémy said.

  Em tore her gaze from the frieze. ‘That wasn’t your choice to make.’

  Seeking fresh blood, the harpies fell on Em. Rémy sang out louder and higher than he thought possible, spreading his arms, the tapestry like wings behind him.

  Caravaggio’s fire extinguisher emptied first. In seconds, the nephilim’s maelstrom regained a portion of its lost power. Rémy extended his arms even further, gripping the tapestry and pivoting as he did, protecting himself and Em from the onslaught.

  Through the dizzying haze, he saw Luca Ferrante’s majestic form rising out of the fiery chaos. The temperature soared, the tiles burned through the soles of Rémy’s boots. The harpies combusted. Rémy’s voice choked to silence. From the tree stump, the ram’s head opened its yellow eyes and uncurled its ivory horns.

  Rémy glimpsed Matt and Caravaggio sketching furiously on their open palms. Watched as they lunged across the floor and skidded beneath the cover of his outstretched, embroidered wings. Felt them all turn, and spin, and sink into nothing.

  The cold stones of Orion HQ slammed against him, extinguishing the smoke issuing from the heels of his boots.

  77.

  NOT THE ONE

  Three hours later Matt and Caravaggio rocketed out of a painting in the church, landing at Em’s feet. A familiar aluminium tube clattered from Caravaggio’s hands, rolled to the wall and fell open. Rest on the Flight into Egypt unravelled clumsily on the flagstone floor beneath the tapestry, whose embroidered figures were still glowing from the fight earlier.

  ‘Jesus,’ said Em, leaping for the painting and cradling it in her arms. ‘That’s a priceless masterwork, not a boy-band poster.’

  ‘Hmm,’ said Caravaggio as he dusted himself off. ‘Now. About that.’

  Em and Matt exchanged looks. They’d heard that tone of voice before.

  ‘I didn’t want to mention this earlier,’ said Caravaggio, ‘but I’m afraid that I have bad news.’

  ‘What are you going to tell us now?’ said Rémy, limping through the door of the kitchen with a plate of toasted cheese sandwiches. Em had fixed the wound on his head with a line of superglue, and so far it was holding well. ‘Whatever it is, tell it slow. I can’t hear a thing.’

  ‘It’s not a masterpiece at all,’ said Caravaggio loudly and clearly. ‘It’s not even my work.’

  There was a long silence.

  ‘You mean it’s a fake?’ said Matt.

  ‘A skilled copy by an Animare,’ Caravaggio corrected. ‘It fooled me for a long time, but I only fully assessed it while we were inside Signor Lawrence’s painting, and I’m sorry, as sorry as you are, especially after all we’ve been through, that it is not my work.’ He accepted the toasted cheese from Rémy. ‘Dear God, is this all you people cook?’

  Matt rubbed his eyes. ‘If I wasn’t so exhausted I’d punch you.’

  ‘And if I wasn’t so exhausted I’d let you,’ Caravaggio agreed.

  Rémy sank into a chair with two sandwiches and a can of lager, one of six that Caravaggio had animated.

  ‘So we don’t have the Devil’s Interval?’ Em checked. Her whole body felt numb. Was this what Ambuya had tried to warn them about in The Visitors? Would the mirror have somehow proved the painting was a fake? ‘This means the original painting with the Devil’s Interval is still out there?’

  Caravaggio nodded.

  ‘Jesus,’ said Matt.

  ‘I can’t think about that particular problem right now,’ said Rémy, rubbing his face. ‘It’s bad enough knowing a vengeful nephilim and the entire Camarilla are still after us.’ He bit into his sandwich. ‘Talk me through how you found me in the first place.’

  Em opened her mouth, but Rémy held up his hand.

  ‘And when I say talk,’ he said, ‘I mean use sign language or something. Like the dude in the camel coat. My ears are shot.’

  Em felt her skin drain of colour as she dropped her can of lager. It bounced on the table, spilling foam across their research. Matt lunged at the piles of papers and drawings and snatched them up for safety.

  ‘Say that again, Rémy,’ said Matt uneasily.

  Rémy looked from one sibling to the other. Em looked worse than when the harpy was tearing at her skin.

  ‘The dude in the camel coat?’ he said. ‘The one in Chicago, at the flat? Good guy, bad guy – I can’t work him out. Anyway, he signs. He’s deaf.’

  Em slumped on to the couch. ‘It’s Zach,’ she croaked.

  ‘Zach?’ said Rémy. ‘As in, your ex?’

  Caravaggio reached across the table and helped himself to the rest of Matt’s sandwich.

  ‘Zach can’t be with the Camarilla!’ Em burst out. ‘He wouldn’t betray us that way.’

  ‘Of course he wouldn’t,’ said Matt.

  His lie slapped Em like a cold washcloth across her face. ‘If Zach’s with the Camarilla,’ she said, using her cardigan sleeve to dry her eyes, ‘why would he give me a clue where to find Rémy?’

  ‘Maybe because I forced him to take me with him to Rome,’ said Rémy. ‘I worked out that he wanted to use me, so I offered to go for free if he left you alone. When I left you in the roof in Chicago, I knew I had to get to the source of whatever was causing your pain. I didn’t know how else to help you. He had a drawing of you as Medusa. I told him to stop hurting you and I’d go with him. And then, in Rome, I was bound in a painting. Something I never want to go through again.’

  ‘You idiot,’ said Em, hiccupping through her tears. ‘I would’ve been fine. I was inspiriting myself. Eventually the snakes would have gone.’

  ‘Good to know that now,’ said Rémy, a little irritably.

  ‘When I surrendered, this guy – Zach – kept shaking his head like this wasn’t his fault.’ Rémy paused and sipped his lager. ‘Now that I think about it, maybe he was trying to get me out of there before his mom came back from investigating the safe room.’

  Em’s confusion was scrambling her senses. She didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. She looked at Matt. ‘His mom? That can’t be true. Can it?’

  Matt ran his fingers through his snarly hair. Coloured threads and flakes of paint fell from it. ‘We were always told Zach’s mom died in childbirth,’ he said.

  ‘Clearly not,’ said Caravaggio. ‘Unless in this twenty-first century you can do what we never could. Raise the dead.’

  ‘He can,’ said Matt, pointing to Rémy.

  ‘Do you think anyone else knows about Zach?’ Em looked at Matt. ‘Vaughn? Grandpa? Anyone in Orion?’

  ‘We’ll find out soon enough,’ said Matt, a bit grimly.

  Em looked at Caravaggio. ‘Do you think the chamber with the frieze of Rémy—’

  ‘That’s not me,’ Rémy snapped.

  ‘—is under the Tiber, or did we fade through that black arch to somewhere else?’

  Caravaggio was studying his painting.
‘I recognized the frieze,’ he said. ‘It was excavated from a temple in the Roman Forum during my century. It was believed to be an illustration from the Book of Songs. But nothing else about the chamber seemed familiar.’ He looked at Rémy. ‘Am I correct in assuming you read music as well as conjure with it?’

  ‘No,’ Rémy replied sarcastically. ‘I make all this music stuff up as I go along.’

  ‘Can you play this?’ Caravaggio pointed to the sheet music in the fake canvas.

  78.

  SOUNDS LIKE TEEN SPIRIT

  Rémy slowly reached for his guitar. Caravaggio copied the score on to paper so that Rémy could read it more easily.

  ‘Do you guys really think he should play it?’ said Em. ‘What if you’re wrong and this is the Devil’s Interval? We’re in no shape to fight right now.’

  ‘It’s not the sacred chord,’ said Caravaggio. ‘The notes are different. It’s one of the reasons I realized it was a fake. But I am wondering if it might give us a clue, otherwise why go to all the trouble of changing it?’

  Rémy transcribed the notes in his head for his guitar. He scribbled a couple of tabs on the paper.

  ‘Can you play it?’ said Matt impatiently.

  Rémy stared at the measures for a few seconds more before setting aside his guitar. ‘I can play it,’ he said, ‘but it’s not really music.’

  He picked up a marker and went to the whiteboard. ‘It’s a code,’ he said. ‘My friends and I used to use one like it, to write notes about Sarah Baxter to each other in the band room.’ He looked at Matt and Caravaggio. ‘She played cello. From a certain angle you could see up her skirt.’

  Em threw a cushion at Rémy’s head.

  ‘Jeez,’ said Rémy with a grin. ‘Mind my glued-up head.’

  He copied out five bars on the whiteboard, each with five lines and four spaces. Then he copied the individual notes. He left off the clef.

  ‘Music is just a series of symbols,’ he explained. ‘When you know the cipher – or key – you can transcribe the notes as letters.’