Tales from the Vatican Vaults: 28 extraordinary stories by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Garry Kilworth, Mary Gentle, KJ Parker, Storm Constantine and many more

by David V. Barrett

  ‘Sir, I never met this woman before in my life.’

  ‘Liar,’ I croaked.

  ‘Liar!’ Mama roared. ‘The proof of our congress stands before you, her breeding plain for anyone with eyes to see. Is that why you sold me down in Charleston, because you knew you wouldn’t be able to pass her off as somebody else’s by-blow?’

  ‘What is the meaning of this?’ Admiral Cockburn demanded.

  ‘I should think that would be obvious,’ Major L’Enfant said. I started. In my shock I’d forgotten he was there.

  ‘This man, he wrong this woman,’ Major L’Enfant continued. ‘He abandon her with child.’

  ‘Sold me!’ Mama corrected. ‘He drugged me and sold me while I was with child. We could’ve died.’

  ‘This is a crime, no?’ Major L’Enfant asked. ‘Your commander, did he not write Monsieur Sérurier that all crimes against the ladies had need to be punished with much of severity?’

  I stared at the sly old coot much the same way he’d stared at those scuttling branches. The funny-talking major might be our salvation after all. Last night, I was nigh consumed by the need to avenge a house that wasn’t even mine. The wrongs Mama suffered were terrible beyond my understanding. It stood to reason her desire for vengeance burned even hotter. If the admiral played along, if he offered her a hope of justice, we might be able to spirit her away before anybody got hurt.

  ‘And you are?’ Admiral Cockburn growled.

  The major swept off his tricorn in a grand Frenchy bow. ‘Major Peter L’Enfant, late of the army of the great General Washington, but still a citizen and proud of his honour. So, Excellency, how deal you with this crime?’

  ‘Crime? There’s been no crime,’ Barnes said. ‘This woman is deranged. Look at the blood on her face. She suffered a head wound. That’s it. She needs a surgeon.’

  ‘They’re tears, Benjamin,’ Mama replied, ‘same as the ones I cried for you.’

  Something in the sing-song of her tone called to mind her chants. Little ice ants picked their way down my spine. I shook them off. Mama wouldn’t do anything untoward here, not in the presence of so many soldiers. She might prize her voudou, but she had a healthy respect for guns.

  ‘Or a madhouse,’ Barnes went on. ‘Look at their clothes. The woman is plainly a slave. No doubt she escaped her keeper . . .’

  ‘I am freeborn,’ Mama screamed. ‘And you know it. You took the papers out of my hands and threw them into the fire!’

  Beneath her cry the air seemed to whistle like water on the boil. I told myself it was the noise of the fire or a breeze blowing through the trees. Not that I could see it; the leaves of the poplar on the corner were still. The only movement was a little twitch of mist hugging the roots of the tree. That couldn’t be right.

  Admiral Cockburn’s mouth flattened. He muttered, ‘I don’t have time for this.’

  ‘You,’ he barked at a soldier with more braid on his coat than the others, ‘place that man under guard, and escort these good people back to camp. I’ll sort it out later.’

  ‘Later?’ Mama squawked. Her hair shook in eight different directions at once. I could’ve sworn I heard it hiss. ‘You have to go. Now. I gave my word. Our letter of passage is useless if you don’t.’

  Admiral Cockburn leaned over his pommel. ‘Madam, command yourself. I don’t doubt you were wronged. As you said, the evidence stands before us. However, the evidence is also some thirteen or fourteen years old. Surely you can wait a few more hours to obtain amends.’

  ‘The Devil with amends. You can’t make amends. That’s not why I’m here. Haven’t you listened to a word I said? That storm was a sign from God Himself. Go back to your own country. We don’t want you here. He’ – she jabbed her finger at the sky – ‘don’t want you here.’

  The admiral’s eyes narrowed. ‘Then He has a demmed peculiar way of showing it. Only yesterday a few thousand regular troops of His Majesty’s Army routed the largest American force to take the field since the Battle of Yorktown. Today your pitiful excuse for a capital is under our complete control. A fleet of the Royal Navy’s finest ships patrols your coast, carrying a force of a hundred thousand men – a hundred thousand trained troops eager to set the rest of your towns alight. Your militia is scattered and hiding like the good-for-nothing rabble they are. We are your masters. I can go where I want, stay as long as I want, and do whatever I demmed well please. You should be on your knees thanking God I don’t line you up and shoot you all as traitors to King and country.’

  Mama started to pant. Dark bloody tears ran down her cheeks. The hissing grew louder. My bad feelings were getting worse, tensing all my muscles to flee when I knew I couldn’t leave.

  Barnes thrashed in the grip of the redcoats holding him. ‘Let me go,’ he hollered. ‘You’ve got it all wrong. The woman’s a lunatic. You don’t know what she’s capable of. She tried to kill me, and I never raised a hand to her.’

  ‘Your slave catchers dragged me from our bed and clapped me in irons! They branded me.’ She yanked her dress off her shoulder, baring the scar. ‘Me, your left-hand wife, freeborn and big with your child!’

  I covered my mouth to keep from being sick. The bile of every spiteful thing I’d ever said about French John rose up to choke me. French John conducted himself with honour. He’d found sanctuary for Mama and me, though he owed us nothing. We were nobody to him – or the major, and look at all he tried to do. My blood father was no better than a tick. Coward. Liar. He didn’t just deny his wrongs; he tried to blame them on the person he’d harmed. The Commandments tell us to honour our father and mother, but he was no parent to me. Never had been. He was naught but a stranger with eyes akin to mine.

  Major L’Enfant drew himself to his full height. ‘You, English, are with power mad. You abuse the weak and call yourself strong. If General Washington were here, you would not have taken this city so easily!’

  ‘No, sir,’ Admiral Cockburn replied. ‘If General Washington had been President, we should never have thought of coming here at all.’ He turned to the soldiers. ‘The fire wants more fuel. Surely we haven’t burnt the contents of the office so soon.’

  ‘You want Washington. I’ll give you Washington,’ Mama shrieked. She grabbed the button pinned to the front of her dress and started screaming a mangle of French, Latin and words from a language I didn’t understand.

  ‘Oh, God, no! Stop her! Stop her! She’ll kill us all!’ Barnes shouted. He stomped on the boot of the man to his right. The one to his left punched him in the kidney. The three of them fell to the ground, grappling and kicking up gravel. ‘Listen to me! She’s a witch! You must stop her.’

  The redcoats guarding the blaze cocked their rifles and whipped them into firing position. Arms outstretched, I threw myself in front of Mama.

  ‘Don’t shoot! She’s praying. Praying,’ I sobbed. I swung around to Admiral Cockburn. ‘It’s the Pater Noster – the Lord’s Prayer, in French. Tell them, Major. Say it! Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy Name. Thy kingdom come.’

  ‘Thy will be done,’ Major L’Enfant chanted with me, raising his voice as if he understood what I was really asking. ‘On earth as it is in heaven . . .’

  Only Mama wasn’t asking for her daily bread or forgiveness of trespasses. ‘I require of you dead that you come to me!’

  No! I shrieked inside my head as my mouth continued to babble the prayer. But her spirits didn’t answer to me. A terrible presence rose in answer to her call. Last night’s bewitchment made me one with God’s creation. This was an outer force like a rising gale, a storm surge higher than the Hudson Palisades. My skin burned with a cold that gushed out of nowhere. I shivered like the palsied. She was crossing the line that must not be crossed, taking the advantage that must not be taken.

  Barnes grabbed a pistol off one of the redcoats. He opened the man’s skull with the butt, and kicked the other soldier in the groin. A third knocked him on his back. But he tackled him low and got a cracked head for his pa
ins. He collapsed over the sailor’s legs. Barnes’s hands and the pistol remained free. He raised the gun. Between the barrel and me was dust, smoke and mist – the impossible mist slithering over the roots of nearby trees, twitching over an overlooked leaf and testing the air out of a dozen tiny kerbside holes.

  ‘Deliver us from evil!’ I screamed. ‘Deliver us from evil! Deliver us from evil!’

  Fangs bared, Major L’Enfant’s dog hurled himself at the gun. Too late. Too late. The pistol fired. Reeling, I clutched my chest. My hands came away clean. I glanced at Mama. She was still chanting. She lifted her face to the heavens and threw back her arms. In the dust behind her two giant black snakes sidled close.

  Major L’Enfant remained upright and unbloodied. The admiral appeared unharmed. The dog sat on his haunches not far from the sailor, baying as if to raise the dead Mama conjured. Barnes moaned in the dirt. His left hand clutched his right wrist. Bright red blood seeped through his fingers.

  Cursing him for a fool, another pair of soldiers hauled him to his feet. They pried his fingers away from his wrist to check his wound. Fresh blood sprayed the dirt of the street.

  The southern sky erupted in fire and soot. The Crack of Doom burst our ears. The ground heaved beneath our feet. The admiral’s horse shrilled in fear, dancing and fighting his bit. The rest of the British, the major and I toppled like nine-pins. Mama alone stood straight and tall, tethered to the earth by the snakes gripping her arms.

  Blood oozed from my right ear. I shouldn’t have been able to hear a thing, but I heard as well as felt the thunder of marching feet. An army was trooping down Pennsylvania Avenue from the direction of the White House.

  Heart pounding in time, throat choked with fear and dust, I turned. Through a fog of dirt, a lean colossus of a man in a blue coat, buff vest and trousers – the same blue and buff as the major’s coat – strode towards us. He commanded: ‘Halt!’

  Even the dirt obeyed.

  ‘Mon général, Major L’Enfant gasped. He leapt to his feet and saluted.

  Only it wasn’t his general. The man approaching through the dust and mist was French John. If the face, the figure and the blue coat weren’t enough to identify him, there was Jupiter trotting up behind him. A film of grey ash lay over French John’s queued hair like powder on a wig. More ash lay across his broad shoulders, and if you squinted hard it almost looked like epaulettes. But that didn’t make him a general.

  ‘Who the hell are you?’ Admiral Cockburn barked as he pulled his horse’s head up short.

  ‘George Washington, commander in chief of the Continental Army and first president of these United States.’

  My breath caught. That wasn’t French John’s voice. I couldn’t hear a trace of French accent or a hint of the teasing lilt he used to charm the Madisons’ guests. This voice boomed, deep and rough, as if it had spent a lifetime shouting orders. It sounded too big for a single throat. His face was different, too. The features hadn’t changed, exactly, but they were twisted into wholly different expressions. French John never held his jaw like that, nor narrowed his eyes to granite slits.

  I’d heard of people possessed by the Devil, unfortunates stricken with fits and plagued with madness whose only relief was the prayers of the blessed. This was nothing like that. There was no hint of madness in this man’s unforgiving gaze, no quivering in his limbs. Empty-handed, he was more dangerous than any soldier there.

  Admiral Cockburn snorted. ‘Of course you are. Why bother to ask? What do you want? Make it quick. Diverting as my time here has been, I’m needed elsewhere.’ He tilted his head in the direction of Greenleaf Point, where a wall of black smoke put the smudge pots of the Navy Yard and the ropewalks to shame.

  French John continued in that same unnatural voice. ‘By what right do you, George Cockburn, take it upon yourself to violate the Treaty of Paris by which your king acknowledged these United States to be free, sovereign and independent, and relinquished all claims to the Government, property and territorial rights of the same and every part thereof?’

  The horse’s eyes went wild. It whinnied in fright and tried to toss its head, but it couldn’t break the admiral’s grip on the reins.

  ‘By right of war,’ he said.

  ‘There is no right in this war. Only dishonour and death. Sound retreat, Cockburn. Decamp. Return to England where you belong, or the overreaching pride of kings will once more be ground to dust on this American soil.’

  By now all the soldiers in the print shop had run into the street. There were more than I realised, but not one of them knew what to do. Their glances flickered from us to Admiral Cockburn to French John to the houses to the tops of the trees and the smoke rising from Greenleaf Point.

  Barnes’s guards were as bad as the rest. Seeing his chance, he shifted his weight to the balls of his feet. When they leaned forward, he eased back. I opened my mouth. I wasn’t fast enough. A big soldier came up behind him and struck him senseless with the butt of his rifle.

  I flinched. I felt no love for the man, but the strike was so quick. So casual. And no one thought anything of it. Even the kindly major paid it no mind, as if such things were to be expected.

  Then the big soldier turned his rifle on us. The others seemed to take it as some kind of order. Those with guns to hand raised their weapons to fire. The unarmed raced to a store of rifles leaning against one of the trees further down the street. Grabbing their guns, they bit into their cartridges, tipped the powder into the barrels, loaded the shots and wads, and rammed them down in a matter of seconds.

  The wonder was they didn’t fire. Major L’Enfant and I had fallen away from Mama. Bared to the redcoats’ view, she shuddered and spasmed. Her eyes had rolled back in her head. All I could see was the whites. Those snakes of hers were the only thing holding her upright. The cold I’d felt earlier sank to my bones.

  Admiral Cockburn sniggered. ‘This little show of yours would be more convincing if it had more actors. Where are the rest of your players, hiding in an alley?’

  French John answered, ‘They are here.’

  Something was here. I knew as soon as he said it. Like the cold, the presence had never left. It crouched amid the wisps of mist, so many of them now, waiting for the moment to strike. It terrified me more than the soldiers, though I couldn’t have told you why.

  ‘An invisible army, how very original,’ Admiral Cockburn said as if it were anything but. ‘The two of you should betake yourselves to the London stage. You’re wasted in this swamp.’

  ‘I have the keys of death and of Hell,’ Mama and French John intoned in a single voice. The words fitted together so precisely, you couldn’t tell where man ended and woman began. The sound filled the crossing, ringing off brick and glass, wood and stone like nothing mortal.

  The hairs lifted on my neck. The eyes of the burly soldier who clubbed Barnes went wide.

  Major L’Enfant’s dog loosed a wail that was closer to a scream than a howl. From inside the houses and within fenced yards, the dogs of the neighbourhood took up the cry. Louder and louder it grew. I covered my ears, but it did no good.

  The ghastly union of Mama and French John tolled louder than the dogs. ‘He that hath an ear let him hear what the Spirit saith.’

  With a choked whimper of fear, the big soldier aimed his gun at Mama.

  ‘No!’ I cried, lunging at him. Major L’Enfant yanked me back.

  Admiral Cockburn shouted, ‘Stand down! Stand down, you fool!’

  The soldier squeezed the trigger.

  A thread of fog whipped the gun from his hand. The bullet struck the tree behind the admiral, spraying bark and splinters on the rump of his keening horse.

  The big soldier tugged on his gun, which still hung fixed in the air. ‘What happened?’ someone asked. ‘What’s wrong?’ another said.

  The soldier began, ‘It’s the damned . . .’

  A gust of wind sailed a broad, spade-shaped leaf straight into his mouth. He dropped to his knees, hands to his throat, h
acking as his face flushed and darkened.

  One of his fellows pounded his back as more leaves began to rise from flowerpots and behind boxwood hedges. A freshening breeze rattled the twigs caught in shutter slats like a serpent’s tail. A green spade slapped the cheek of the soldier nearest the rifle tree. Others sprang at shako hats or launched themselves at rifles. They whirled and swarmed, propelled by little cyclones of mist.

  ‘These things saith the First and the Last. Those who were dead are now alive.’ Together Mama and French John roared louder than the dogs, the soldiers, the fire and the rising wind.

  The mist was rising to meet the wind. Puffs of fog fanned upwards from tiny front lawns, from between the bricks in the sidewalk and gouges in the road. They hovered at the height of a man, shaping themselves into sheer, gape-jawed faces and grasping, stick-like fingers. They were no more solid than a puff of breath on a cold day. Yet they had form and movement. Oh, how they moved – soaring and swooping, wringing themselves like wet cloth, then spinning free with the force of a lash.

  The soldiers’ hats went flying. Guns sailed out of reach. Bayonets popped from scabbards, tumbling drunkenly in midair. Ghostly hands yanked at the crossed straps of the soldiers’ kit. They popped buttons and ripped into cartridge bags.

  In the streets leading to the crossroads, downed tree limbs swept through the dirt like so many brooms. The dogs continued to yowl. Somewhere in the noise, I thought I heard praying. It could’ve been anyone or all of us. But I knew in my heart it was too late.

  ‘As I have received of the Spirit, I shall give them power over nations, and as the vessel of a potter, their attackers shall be broken.’

  The heavy branches jigged around us, caught in a whirlwind of dirt and leaves. The smoke of the crossroads fire whirled in the opposite direction. The flames snuffed out, revealing a jumble of half-burnt furniture and smoking ash. The loss of the fire increased the spirits’ power. Immaterial fingers raised welts on living flesh. They lifted soldiers off their feet, spun them ’round and flipped them over their heads. Other phantoms flew to the nearby roofs and smashed their chimneys to the ground.