by David Risen
She looked out the windshield again.
“When we get there, don’t brush up against anyone, don’t breathe loudly, and absolutely don’t talk. We can communicate the same way we did in your artificial dream.”
“I’m telepathic, now?”
She rolled her eyes.
“No, I am.”
Without another word, she opened the passenger door and climbed out.
Nick gaped back at her, dumbfounded.
She turned and scowled over her thick, boxy glasses.
“Are you coming?”
Nick followed Sister Amiss through the black, drizzly night with the streets only partially illuminated by streetlamps. He tromped through the wet foliage on the side of the road, and up the wooden porch before the thick, arched doors.
Nick reached for the door handle, and Sister Amiss grabbed his hand. He gave her a look of alarm and opened his mouth to protest. She pressed her white gloved index finger over her burgundy-painted lips. Then she pointed down at her shoes.
Your boots will be too noisy. Take them off.
He gave her a look of exclamation.
She bent down and stripped the black flats off her feet.
Nick didn’t know why he had such a compulsion, but he found himself checking out her feet.
She gave him an irritated look.
Please try to control yourself, and take off your boots.
Nick rolled his eyes, bent, unlaced, and pulled his hiking boots from his feet.
Sister Amiss placed her hand flat on the grainy surface of the heavy door almost as though she were listening in on the corridor beyond. She nodded, and she gently squeezed the tarnished thumb latch, opened the door, and slipped inside.
Nick brushed by the door and stepped in behind her.
Before he could close the door, she took his boots from his hands and stuffed them along with her brown flats under the back pew.
Nick turned to close the door, but she grasped his shirtsleeve and pulled him behind the pew.
Nick turned and glared at her, but halfway around, he spotted an old priest staring directly at him with frightened interest by the podium before the altar.
Don’t move.
Nick froze.
“Is someone here?” the old priest said.
Nick felt exposed. He wanted to sink behind the pew.
He felt Sister Amiss’s fingers curl around his upper arm like a mother trying to rein in an unruly child.
The priest stared directly at Nick, and then he eyed each of the corners of the fusty, old chapel. He walked forward slowly looking down each of the pews.
Nick held his breath.
Sister Amiss’s grip strengthened around his arm.
Finally, the old priest huffed and shook his head of white hair, starting toward the front door grumbling about the creaky and rickety old building.
He walked past Nick and exited through the front door.
He’s gone, she thought. Hurry.
She brushed by him and started up the isle toward the altar. Nick followed tentatively.
At the altar, she turned left and led him through a vaulted archway into a space that might have been used to educate schoolchildren a century before.
Where is she? Rider thought.
Sister Amiss glanced at him.
Ever heard of the Underground Railroad?
Nick squinted a question at her.
She rolled back the red rug with her toe revealing the outline of an old trap door.
How the hell did she know that?
She ignored him and pried the door open. A prehistoric wooden staircase lay below within a narrow passage lit only by candlelight. The stone walls in the stairwell looked as though someone in some distant bygone era threw them together in a rush. Strange, uneven chunks of jagged stone sandwiched between layers of mortar that seemed comprised of lime and bits of seashells that pooched out between the rocks in grainy, spikey chunks.
Nick grimaced at Sister Amiss.
She nodded toward the stairwell.
I’ll go first. You follow do exactly what I do.
Nick frowned.
I get the feeling that you’ve been here before.
She shook her head.
Then she gingerly placed her hand on the left wall and planted her left foot on the first step against the wall. She shifted her weight onto the step.
She looked back at him.
Step close to the wall to avoid any creaking. These women don’t believe in coincidences or strange noises that have no cause.
She turned back, planted her right foot on the second step near the right wall, and shifted her weight.
This is going to take for-fucking-ever, he thought.
After she was five steps down, Nick followed repeating her movements.
By the time he reached the bottom, he felt as though half an hour had passed.
Sister Amiss stepped off the bottom step – dancing around the red-carpet mat before yet another heavy, arched door. Nick watched her with mild amusement as she skirted around it staring at it as though some kind of poisonous snake lay coiled in the center of it ready to strike.
What’s your malfunction, now?
She sneered at him and then kicked the carpet back revealing a double-encircled pentagram with unfamiliar symbols that resembled hieroglyphs on the insides of the circle painted on the stone floor in white.
What the hell is that?
She looked up at him.
That is a spell of protection designed to vex anyone who attempts to enter with odious intentions.
Nick looked back at the pentagram painted on the floor and shook his head.
Who are these people?
She nodded.
You’ll find out soon enough.
He frowned.
So what is it supposed to do?
She looked down at the pentacle.
Think of it as a sticky rattrap.
He bunched his lips.
This is crap.
Nick stepped off the stairs and into the circle. He reached up to open the door when it hit him.
He felt heavy like his arms and legs weighed much more than he could lift. His legs trembled under his own weight. He dropped to his knees. And now, he found it difficult to draw breath. He opened his mouth to call out for help and found that he couldn’t close it again.
Are you quite finished proving that this is all baseless?
Nick tried to nod but as soon as he lowered his head, he found himself unable to lift it. He felt his bones bending beneath the tremendous gravity pulling at him.
Sister Amiss knelt and produced a knife from the inside pocket of the light blazer she wore, opened it, and scraped through the inner and outer circles of the pentacle.
The weight lifted from Nick. He stood and shook it off.
What the fuck was that?
Sister Amiss closed the knife, replaced it in the pocket of her blazer, and stood.
Do you believe me now?
Nick gave her an incredulous look.
Did you see that in a movie, or something?
She flipped the carpet back over and covered the ruined pentacle.
Just try to stay out of trouble, please.
Sister Amiss placed her palm flat on the door and closed her eyes, and then she nodded to herself and pushed the door open just a crack.
She slipped through, and Nick followed. Once he passed over the threshold, he turned and pushed the door shut.
He started to turn back to face the hallway of white painted cinderblock walls, but Sister Amiss grasped his hand.
Freeze.
Nick turned his head just in time to see a procession of women wearing ceremonial hooded cloaks filing down the narrow stone passage.
The first woman wore a white cloak followed by another outfitted in a brown, then a blue cloak, a green cloak, and then a red cloak. The rest wore black.
Nick held his breath.
They appeared to be heading directly toward th
em.
Then, halfway down the corridor, the woman in white turned and opened a door on the left side of the hall, and they all marched inside with the last woman closing the door behind herself.
Nick exhaled a sigh of relief.
Sister Amiss released his hand and started down the hallway.
This area was different from the staircase lit only by candlelight.
Bare metal conduit ran along the upper third of the left wall connected to single light bulb fixtures bolted to the wall at ten-foot intervals.
She pressed her palm against the first door on the left and shook her head.
What are you doing with your hand?
Looking for something relevant inside.
Rider looked at his palm and shook his head.
So, you have x-ray vision through your hand?
She gave him a hard look. Please keep your mind quiet. I can’t hear myself think.
She moved to the first door on the right, and placed her palm flat on it just like the other doors before, and then she shook her head and moved on to the next door to the left.
She pulled him almost halfway down the hallway forcing him to watch this ridiculous display before her eyes lit up at a door on the left side of the hall.
What? he thought.
She turned and touched his forehead.
An electric jolt shot through his body causing all of his muscles to tighten into rocks.
He grunted uncontrollably.
He felt himself sinking fast as if he were either going up in an airplane or going down in a skyscraper elevator.
His vision faded to white.
The whiteout cleared slowly, and he found himself circling Dena’s head like a disembodied spirit. She wore the same clothes that he thought he ripped off her earlier in the evening, and she sat in a black, leather office chair with her legs crossed – her face contorted in a look of concern – eyebrows furled – mouth slightly open. A heavy statement hung in the air.
“I don’t understand,” Dena said.
“Our subject A, though he has no apparent supernatural abilities, is the most dangerous subject to ever pop up in Darien, Georgia. The way you chose to fake your marriage with him is pushing him back to his naturally fated trajectory which makes him one of the most dangerous subjects in the corporeal realm.”
Nick pivoted to get a look at the woman behind the youthful and musical voice.
He found a vibrant, young ginger wearing a silver hooded cloak. She didn’t look any older than eighteen, but her expressions, words, and eyes were wrong for her age. She had a regal posture like a princess and a face that should have been kindly. But her eyes were cold and hard like those of an elderly woman who’d lived a hard life.
“Subject A is very normal,” Dena argued. “He goes to work, he picks the kid up from school, feeds her, and then he goes to bed around the time I get home.”
The ginger girl sneered with her fiery hair and fair skin with freckles.
“Don’t tell me that you’ve grown so complacent that you don’t know that Subject B has contacted him.”
Dena looked shocked. She leaned back in her chair with her mouth gaping.
“Did you even read the computer files I sent you with the scanned copy of the letter she sent to him at work and a list and samples from the websites he’s been looking up from his computer at work?”
Dena sighed.
The other woman stared at her for a long moment.
“Exactly what have you been doing with your time?”
She nodded, but her eyes said something different from her gesture. She looked a little like a deer in the headlights.
Nick didn’t know for certain, but he could guess that the explanation that was about to follow was either going to be a lie or a half-truth.
“Watching,” Dena said. “I’ve been keeping track of his movements in his vehicle through OnStar....”
Ginger nodded. “Which should occupy about a half-hour of your day. You don’t come home until after dark. What are you doing with the other thirteen hours?”
Dena didn’t look angry, as she should have if her superior’s inquiry was without merit.
“I’ve been monitoring his home computer – the internet sites he visits and Google searches.”
Ginger nodded more vehemently. “He uses his home computer maybe once a week, so that really can’t take up much of your time. And you’ve obviously been neglecting that task lately, because you seem to have missed the fact that he Googled the name ‘Blake Rider’ two days ago.”
Dena leaned forward.
“I’ve also been watching his work computer and taking note of the articles he’s writing.”
“But you’ve paid no attention to his searches.”
Ginger leaned toward her like a friend who was about to tell her a secret.
“What have you really been doing?”
Dena gaped back at Ginger with her mouth working.
Ginger sighed and looked down at the walnut surface of her desk.
“I know what you’ve been doing. You’ve been practicing and increasing your wealth of knowledge for your promotion to High Priestess. What you fail to understand is that everyone, including The Vatican, has been paying careful attention to your dealings with Subject A.”
Ginger pulled her middle desk drawer open and removed a manila file folder from within.
“At the rate you’re going, you’ll be lucky if you’re not bound and mind-wiped then stuffed back out in the world somewhere with no skills.”
She placed the folder on the green placemat on her desk, opened it, and pulled out a photograph – sliding it across the desk toward Dena.
“The event captured by this photograph occurred last weekend on your front lawn. The woman in the photo pretending to be a Mormon Missionary is Subject B. You would have known that if you bothered to do your homework before accepting this assignment, and you would have thought it strange if you had actually reviewed the video.”
Dena’s eyes bulged.
Ginger gave her a humorless smile.
“I also have some sound bites you should have been monitoring.”
Ginger moved the mouse connected to her computer for a moment biting her lower lip, and then she clicked something.
“I compiled these specifically for this meeting,” she said. “This first one was this afternoon from his cellphone.”
She clicked again and the speakers attached to her monitor hissed to life with the sound of white noise.
The recording picked up halfway through the mechanical ringing tone that let you know that the phone was ringing.
A mechanical click sounded as the person on the other end picked up.
“Conrad International,” a young woman’s voice said.
“Could you please connect me with Dena Carcer?” Nick’s voice said.
The sound of a keyboard clicking in the background.
“Hm. I’m afraid we don’t have anyone by that name.”
A momentary pause.
“Do you have a location in Savannah or somewhere else nearby?”
“No, I’m afraid that our closest location in the United States is in Mississippi.”
Ginger’s fiery eyebrows spiked as she clicked her mouse again. “The number he called from his cell phone was the main number for Conrad International in Brunswick, Georgia.”
They sat in silence for a moment as Dena soaked in this obviously new information.
Ginger broke the silence with her brittle voice.
“The next soundbite was fifteen minutes ago in his car. I’ll be really interested to find out exactly where he was when they had this discussion.”
She clicked her black HP mouse again.
Again, the room filled with the sound of the speakers hissing.
He heard rain outside.
“What’s Dena up to?” he heard his own voice say.
“She’s a member of a secret society. I think her job is mostly to keep you out of trouble.”
“What kind of trouble?” Nick said.
A long pause full of mechanical white noise and the pinging of rain on the roof.
“Let’s go find out, shall we?”
She pressed stop.
Dena looked as though she might cry.
“Are they here?” she inquired with disbelief.
Ginger shrugged.
“If they are, they won’t be leaving. This facility is covered in protective wards. Most likely, they slipped into the church and found nothing, but the point is that your neglect has brought the most dangerous combination of two people ever right to our doorstep.”
Dena shuddered.
Ginger sighed.
“Let me just tell you how serious this is,” she said placing her hands flat on her desk. Her silver ceremonial robe swished with the motion.
“The Grand Arch Sorceress is boarding a plane from Italy as we speak. She’s flying down here with her envoy to personally supervise the resolution.”
“How big of a mess am I in?”
Ginger shook her head.
“They don’t want to take you off the post,” she sighed as if she didn’t agree with their decision.
“They believe that if a reweaving spell didn’t work the first time, it won’t work a second time either. The reason the Grand Arch Sorceress is coming is that she’ll have to preside if we should have to call a Grand Assembly.”
Nick watched Dena’s hair turn grayer.
“A grand assembly? We haven’t done that since....”
“The Inquisition?”
Dena licked her lips.
“Exactly what kind of threat are we facing here?”
Ginger cocked her head.
“You know I can’t tell you most of what I know. They don’t tell me everything.”
Dena furled her brow, and now, Nick knew what was coming – Defensive Anger.
“This is the whole problem with the order. If I had known that this threat was so important....”
“We are the Sisters of Divinity. Since our inception in deep antiquity, our mission has been to protect all of Mortality from maleficent spirits who are able to manifest themselves either in corporeal form or in spiritual form to Mortals. Every threat we pursue is important.”
Dena gaped at her.
Ginger adjusted herself in her seat. “As for the threat level in this case, we’re looking at the end of the world if we don’t get control of it quickly.”