“I appreciate the vote of confidence.”
Sebastian didn’t seem to hear me. “Hate is not an easy emotion for me, Mr. Tyler. I don’t hate the police. We both have jobs, and I accepted the risks of mine, just as they did theirs. Like them, if I have to draw a weapon in my line of work, something’s gone wrong. And despite my anger, I can’t hate you, Mr. Tyler. I understand you too well.”
Sebastian turned to face me, and I saw a rosary in his hands. My throat tightened.
“You hold me guilty of too much. Can you hold that I am evil after you’ve been touched by it yourself?” The firelight carved dancing shadows on his dusky face. The light reflected in his eyes made him look a little mad.
I wanted to tell him exactly what I thought he was guilty of. All I needed to think of were dead-eyed junkies dying of AIDS, or reed-thin teenagers selling what was left of their bodies so they could buy a rock. Something in his eyes kept my mouth shut. The sight of the rosary held my attention.
“If I wasn’t a father to my Cecilia, it was because I was kept from her the second five years of her life. And afterward, what could I do after Rosa died?” His eyes welled up and he crossed himself. I had to turn away. It was becoming as difficult to watch Sebastian as it was to see my own eyes in a mirror. If I needed any confirmation as to what was happening to me, the uncomfortable proximity of Sebastian’s faith was it.
“I didn’t know how to be a father. She was lost to me before she was taken.”
Sebastian had walked in front of me, but he was staring into the fire. “I have seen those tapes you made. I have seen them too many times. I have seen the—the—being who was once my daughter.” Sebastian turned to look at me. “Do you understand?”
I nodded.
“You made those tapes. Do you understand the evil I am talking about. The true evil here?”
“I think so.”
“I do not hate easily. But this Childe, him I hate. He has mortgaged my daughter’s soul. So she is not only lost to me, but to our Savior as well.” Sebastian kissed the rosary and put it in his pocket. I felt better without the beads in view. I felt that I could speak again—
“What about my daughter, Sebastian?”
“I need you to lead me to my daughter, and Childe. I need your mind focused, and I need to keep track of you.” He stared into the fire and said, “I do not hate easily. But I have hatred for the creatures responsible.”
Sebastian’s profile, rose-colored in the firelight, appeared as if it were carved out of the shadows around him. “Lately I’ve had to ask myself, Mr. Tyler, if you are part of the evil that took my daughter.”
“What?” My voice was a near-whisper, but the shock in it must have carried to Sebastian. He turned his head to look at me. Half his face ruddy-lit by the dancing flames, the other half a featureless black shadow. But both his eyes locked on my own, and I could see a fire in them that wasn’t wholly reflected from the fireplace.
“Are you a part of this evil?”
“No,” I said it confidently, but there was a squirming doubt in my gut.
“Perhaps.” I saw him fingering the rosary in his pocket. “Only perhaps. If you were to succumb to the evil, though, I would be less a man if I allowed that to harm your daughter....”
There was something in the eye contact, I could tell. The same thing that had drawn Bowie out when I questioned him, the sense that my own words could have some physical effect behind my opponent’s eyes. This, however, was different. What was behind Sebastian’s eyes was armored by something impenetrable. The light I saw was the reflection of something deep and solid within the man, which could not be moved.
Whatever it was, it was strengthened whenever he fingered the rosary in his pocket. Sebastian shook his head and walked back toward the window. For a long time he stared outside. Finally he said, “Your daughter is lucky, she has her soul.”
“What do you want from me?”
“You are going to lead me to Childe, so I can wipe this abomination from the face of the Earth.”
“I’ve been looking—”
“There is no more search. You have what you need. I’ve listened to your notes. You’ve known this evil, and you knew enough once to track the evil to its heart. I do not believe your ignorance.”
He turned around to face me. He was silhouetted by the reflection of the fireplace in the windows behind him. It looked as if he were walking out of the fire. “I don’t know what stays your hand: fear, or something else. But by our Lord, your hand will move. You have no choice.”
I stood up and Sebastian looked at me with his hard, fiery eyes and said, “If you are part of the evil that consumed my daughter, I will destroy you.” He turned back to the window. “Bishop will lead you to the gatehouse and give you a few hours to think.”
19
Bishop locked me in a set of rooms that originally were part of the servant’s quarters. These had long since been converted to a set of small apartments on the upper floor of the gatehouse. One of the first things I noted after the door closed behind me was the fact that the iron scrollwork outside the windows was a bit more functional than it looked.
I’d been cornered again.
What had Sebastian done with Gail?
I collapsed on a couch in the living-room area, and felt a renewed ache in my wrist. Not my hand, which was as insensible as ever, but in the area of my wrist that seemed to separate the damaged flesh from the rest of me. The pain was deep into the bone, and made me stand up before I had completely seated myself.
Even without the pocket cutting into it, the ache persisted.
I tried to shake my hand loose of the pocket, but it didn’t come free. I had to peel the fabric of my coat away with my right hand as I pulled my hand away. In addition to my hand, I had liberated a smell. A faint overripe smell, some sweet fruit which had just gone a little mushy.
I wrinkled my nose and looked down to my hand. It had changed color. The ugly black at the base of my thumb had spread to the meat of my palm extending into a vague imprint of the Oldsmobile’s steering wheel. The back was crossed by a purple-black diagonal stripe where the seams of my jacket pocket had bit. A webwork of coppery-green streaked the white skin. My whole hand had swollen, asymmetrically in some places.
I touched the black area by my thumb. The skin gave with a soft mushy sound and the color seeped a little into the surrounding area—like ink bleeding under my skin. I took my finger away, and a dimple stayed in the blackness, where I had pressed. The smell had grown much stronger in the interim.
“Oh, fuck.”
I pushed up my sleeve, and saw the line where the dead flesh—in my gut I now knew it was dead—met my own.
When I joined the force, I had some basic first-aid training. I wasn’t a medic, but I could recognize a few basic things; burns, fractures, shock—and when my nose is rubbed in it, I could recognize gangrene.
At the edge of the dead tissue, where the ache in my wrist began, there was a definite line of discoloration. It was reassuring to see the diseased flesh stop at that line.
I walked into the apartment’s kitchen and washed my hand off. It was a futile gesture. The smell came from inside the flesh, and when the rot reached the surface of my skin, nothing would stop it. I scrubbed maniacally, my left hand cold, limp, and mushy. I must have washed for five minutes before I came to my senses. Mercifully the mushy fruit smell had receded beneath the lemon scent of the dish soap I was using.
My hand was dead, period. It had to be amputated before the gangrene spread.
“Dad, are you all right—”
I spun around, suds from the dish soap splattering the linoleum of the kitchenette. Gail stood in the middle of the living room, on the other side of the only furniture, a couch and a glass-topped coffee table.
She stared at me. I stood there, gaping a few moments, suds dripping from my dead hand.
“Dad?”
“Where did you come from?” I finally asked. “You startled me.” I
reached across the sink and grabbed a dishtowel, more to hide my hand than to dry it. It wasn’t something Gail needed to see.
She bit her lip as she looked at me. My memory was still playing traitorous games with my mind. When I looked at her, I kept wanting to see a thirteen-year-old who made pottery horses and dragons. Gail wasn’t supposed to be an adult. She wasn’t supposed to be taller than Kate.
In answer to my question, she gave a halfhearted wave toward an open doorway on the other side of the apartment. Beyond, I saw the corner of a bed. She stood there looking at me for a long time, then she shook her head and whispered, “No. I refuse—” Her voice choked off the words.
“Gail, don’t—”
She looked at me and moisture was streaming down her cheeks. “My God, Dad. What’s going on here? You’re the one who disappeared, and you give me that damn look, as if I was some criminal—and, and, and....” She collapsed on to the couch, putting her face in her hands.
“Oh, no, honey.” I sat down next to her, putting my good arm around her shoulders. “I never thought that, I just worry about you—”
Gail sat upright and glared at me with her tear-streaked face. “You worry? What about me? I’m not allowed to worry about you? You disappeared, Mom dies, and you let me go on thinking the same thing—” Her words caught and she looked away from me, the anger bleeding from her voice. “That the same thing might have happened to you.”
I hugged her. In that embrace I felt a profound sense of loss, perhaps as deep as the loss Sebastian felt. I was here, with Gail, but I had already started down a path that she couldn’t follow.
“That isn’t going to happen,” I said weakly.
“Is there any particular reason I should believe that?” Gail asked. “I have a right to know what’s going on here—what happened to Mom.”
“I don’t want to get you involved in this.”
Gail shrugged out from under my arm and stood up. “You’re incredible, Dad. Mom’s dead. I spent a week with a cop. I’m here because I wanted to see you. Dad, I’m involved whether you want me to be or not.”
“You don’t know what you’re saying.”
Gail turned around and yelled at me, “Whose fault is that?”
We stared at each other, and, stressed as I felt, I found my gaze searching out her eyes. I wanted to force her away from the subject.
When I realized what I was doing, I turned away. My gaze landed on my reflection in the glass top of the coffee table. The vision brought only a slight twinge; my face was cloaked in shadow, and my eyes were invisible. “I don’t want you hurt.”
“It’s a little late for that.”
The words stung worse than the sunlight. They had a similar effect, leaving me numb and dead inside. “I never wanted Kate to—”
Her voice softened. “I never said that.” She sat down on the arm of the couch, facing me. “But you’ve already tried to protect me from what you do. Anytime I ask you details, you close up. It’s time you stop it.” Gail sighed. “You can’t protect me from my own life.”
I turned away, nodding. “It would have been better if you didn’t have me for a father—”
Gail sighed.
“What?” I asked.
“Nothing. You just always end an argument by blaming yourself. I never could stand that.”
Perhaps, but it didn’t mean what I said was any less true. Yet Gail was right as well. She had a right to know. But what could I tell her before she decided I was crazy?
“Have you talked to Sebastian about any of this?” “I asked him what was going on.”
I nodded. “What did he tell you?”
“He’s crazy. Did you know that?”
I turned back to face her; this time I did look into her eyes. Her eyes were so much like I had remembered my own. “What did he tell you?”
“He told me stories about Gothic paranoia, spirits of evil, and the threat to my immortal soul. He showed me a video.” Her voice changed tenor. “He is crazy. Isn’t he?”
“What did he say threatened your immortal soul?”
Gail grimaced and began turning away, but her eyes kept locked on mine. “You, Dad. He said you might threaten me.” She reached into her collar and pulled out a rosary she was wearing around her neck.
Strangely, I felt no effect from this rosary—nothing like the one Sebastian had been handling.
“He gave me this thing to protect myself.”
I looked at the cross and asked, “What video did he show you?”
Gail described it in hushed tones that sparked my own memory.
The wide expanse of a dam, the circle of figures....
Ten people in the semicircle, facing away from me, toward the structure set in the hillside. The building is stone, its one doorway a shadowed black hole. It looks like a mausoleum.
A woman is led from the mausoleum by a figure cowled in black robes. I feel an awful certainty that the cowled figure is Childe, even though I see none of his features, or much of anything beyond the robe.
The woman, however, I recognize. Her white dress contrasts against the surrounding night and her Mediterranean features. She is Cecilia, Sebastian’s daughter.
Something catches in my throat as she opens her arms to the surrounding horde, as if to embrace them.
Childe’s people descend upon her—a chaos of motion. I see claws and fangs appear from nowhere. The attackers’ bodies distort, backs arch unnaturally, limbs extend. During the frenzy the creatures tearing into Cecilia are no longer human. Cecilia is invisible behind the demonic mass. Only glimpses of her white dress are visible.
And, with each glimpse, over the space of half a minute, her dress darkens. The snow around the attack darkens as well, until the mass breaks off from around her. Cecilia is now only an inert form on a field of black snow.
They appear human again, and then the teenager stares at me with a face covered with night-black blood.
He smiles.
Before I turn and run for my life, I see something else as well.
Childe bends over Cecilia. In the glimpse I see only a pair of pale arms extend out of the sleeves of his robe, over the corpse.
Before I run, I see Cecilia move.
“I made that tape,” I whispered. The whole episode could have been staged to drive Sebastian insane. I wondered if it had been.
“Are those bullet holes?” Gail asked. I had leaned back, remembering, and Gail was now leaning forward, staring at my shirt. The rosary now dangled free from her neck. “Dad?”
She looked up at me, and I could see fear in her face. I could feel it welling up from wherever she had hidden it. “He’s wrong, isn’t he? On the tape those were just shadows right, you’re just looking for some nut-cult, right?” She grabbed my shirt and said, “Right?”
I shook my head and stood up. I couldn’t stand her touching me, touching what might as well be her father’s dead body. The dishtowel fell to the ground and I shoved my left hand into the pocket to my coat.
“Your hand, what happened to your hand?”
I stood, back to her, and said, “I caught a little sun.”
“No.” I heard her voice tremble. “You can’t say he’s right. You can’t!” I heard her move, and her hand pulled my shoulder around to face her. “I love you, Dad.”
She hugged me, burying her face in my shoulder. I patted her on the back. “I love you, too.”
“He wants to put a stake through her heart,” I heard her whisper into my shoulder. “His own child.”
I shook my head. “He’s not right about everything,” I told her. I felt the rosary digging into my sternum to no ill effect. “He’s not right about everything.”
“Are you ... ?”
“Shh.”
“And his daughter?”
“I don’t know about Cecilia, but it seems that way.”
“What happened to you, Dad?”
“I don’t know, honey. I’m still figuring it out myself.”
There
was a long silence as she rested her head on my shoulder. Then she backed up and said, “I have an Ace bandage in my purse. Do you think that would help?”
I knew it was pointless, but I nodded, “Sure, honey.”
She ran and fetched her purse, leaving me to wonder what she must be thinking about me. She returned with the bandage and I told her, “I think I better do this myself.”
I turned away and wrapped my hand completely, thumb and fingers together. When I was done, Gail put her hand on my shoulder and asked, “You can’t be damned for something you can’t control, can you?”
“I don’t think—”
I was interrupted by the sound of a gunshot.
Gail broke from me and said, “Dad?”
I grabbed her and dived with her into the kitchenette, flattening myself against her behind the half-wall separating the kitchen area from the living room and the front door. “What?” Gail said.
“I don’t know.”
The gunfire came from the hall outside. It climaxed with one last, much louder, gunshot. The explosive sound resonated the tile in front of me.
Something slammed against the door hard enough for the walls to shake. One of the pots hanging on the wall clattered to the counter, and fell to the floor. My grip on my daughter tightened.
There was a second or two of silence. I was about to move us from our minimal cover, when the door to the apartment exploded into the room. The force of the door swinging into the apartment scattered yard-long pieces of the doorframe. Pieces of door were immediately followed by Bishop, falling backward with such speed that I doubted his feet touched ground until he landed on the coffee table, blowing glass everywhere.
Bishop held a nine-millimeter Beretta, or something similar, in his right hand. Falling out of his left hand, as he skidded across broken glass, splintered wood, and chrome table legs, was my Desert Eagle.
Bishop was unquestionably unconscious, if not dead.
I stepped away from my slight cover, putting distance between me and the door. I held up my hand to prevent Gail from following me into the open.
Following Bishop, walking through the remains of the door, was Bowie. He turned to face me and I saw a large bullet hole in the front of his leather jacket. I stared at him for a second, speechless.
Blood & Rust Page 17