Dust to Dust

by Heather Graham

  What the hell was going on? Scott wondered. He felt as if he had stumbled into a secret society and the members didn’t intend to let him in.

  “Excuse me,” he said, and returned to his own room to dress. When he came back out, Rainier was sitting on the sofa in the parlor, reading the paper. Melanie was nowhere in sight, but presumably had gone to get dressed herself.

  “What do you think of this?” Rainier asked, rising and passing the paper to him.

  It was in Italian. Scott read very slowly, using context to figure out the words he didn’t know.

  “There was an earthquake in the Naples region,” he said carefully.

  “Right. Read further.”

  There was a captioned picture below the major headline, a photo of a priest, stern-faced and stoic, his hand raised in blessing over a man on the ground. The man appeared to be bleeding profusely. So much blood.

  Rainier had apparently decided not to make him suffer and said, “The man on the ground went crazy after the quake. He stabbed several people. Someone managed to get him down, using his own knife against him. He told the police on the scene that he didn’t do it—even though a crowd saw him. The priest took it upon himself to perform an exorcism, because the man was begging that his soul be saved before he died. There’s a huge to-do over it. The Church must approve all exorcisms, and they don’t often do so these days.”

  “So he was possessed—that’s what you think, right?” Scott asked.

  “He was a factory worker, a family man. He’d never lifted a hand against anyone before.”

  “He…died?”

  “Yes.”

  Rainier looked intently at him then, studying him for a moment. “There was something down there. Didn’t you feel it?”

  “Something? As in…?” Scott asked.

  He wanted to deny the whisper he had heard. He didn’t want to believe it had come from his own mind, from a place in his soul that was far more savage than he’d ever imagined himself to be—and he certainly didn’t want to believe that there was really a demon who could slip into a man’s body and take over his mind.

  “Bael,” Rainier said flatly.

  Scott shook his head. “Wait a minute. You think the same demon was busy in Los Angeles and Naples and here?”

  Rainier reflected for a moment, then answered slowly and carefully. “I believe that Sister Maria Elizabeta’s church was built to stand guard over the demon Bael, to prevent his reentry into this world. But time passes, demons become little more than gruesome fairy tales. Perhaps he’s always found the occasional chance to slip out as a black mist. Or perhaps he has managed to accrue his own minions and they’ve slipped out to act in his name. According to certain beliefs, demons can attack when someone is either full of sin—or believes they are.”

  “If you’re right, then why are we here, when he’s already out and doing his damage in the world?”

  “Damage, yes. The true horror he could possibly evoke? Not yet. I think our part in this is to stop Bael from escaping in full force.”

  “And you think he’s under the church?”

  “You and I—and Lucien—all dreamed of the catacombs, right?” Rainier asked.

  “But—that was the sister, calling to us.”

  “She called to us in the dream, but she was only part of the dream. The dream might be like Melanie’s sudden artistic ability—a warning.”

  Melanie came out, dressed in a summery halter dress that flowed around her as she walked, emphasizing her curves. Her hair was still damp, and she had applied a bit of eye makeup. In short, she was stunning. No one would guess she’d been crawling through a catacomb earlier that day, searching for a demon.

  “Shall we take a walk?” she suggested.

  “A walk?” Rainier said.

  “Why not? We shouldn’t just sit here brooding, waiting. We need to buy flashlights for tomorrow, anyway—but for now, let’s just take a stroll.”

  “All right,” Scott said.

  They probably looked like any group of tourists out to see the sights of Rome, Scott thought as they stepped outside. At this time of day, many of the tourist spots would be closing, but some stayed open longer because it was the summer. They passed the American Embassy, and then Rainier paused, staring at the church across the street, which held the entrance to the Capuchin crypt.

  “They’re still open,” Rainier said.

  “We’ve all been there before—even Scott,” Melanie said.

  Ignoring her, Rainier made his way across the traffic, causing several drivers to honk their horns.

  Melanie looked at Scott. “Taurus—the bull. Barging onward. We need to keep an eye on him.”

  Scott caught her hand, watching the cars, and when the street was as clear as it was going to get, they ran together across the street and followed Rainier up the steps.

  There was no set charge for entry, but a donation was required. As Scott paid for the three of them, Rainier got into a discussion with a man near the entry. Scott had been raised Catholic; he knew by the man’s garb that he was a priest and not one of the Capuchin brothers.

  “What’s he doing?” Scott asked Melanie, taking her hand and strolling inside to the first altar. He knew the place and found it fascinating, with its juxtaposition of mortality and immortality. Two skeletons in their Capuchin robes were standing in the chapel, while the wall decorations were created from skulls and hips.

  “I’m not sure. I believe he knows the Father,” Melanie said. “Should we keep going or…?”

  “No, we should wait. We need to stay together,” Scott said.

  He watched as Rainier followed the priest to the nearby gift shop, where he selected a number of rosaries and waited while the priest gave them his blessing.

  “Is he that religious?” Scott whispered.

  “So it seems,” Melanie said.

  “Grazie, grazie,” Rainier told the priest.

  Scott wasn’t sure what the priest said in return, but his expression as he spoke was grave. The priest touched Rainier’s chest, making the sign of the cross. The two men parted, and Rainier walked over to join them.

  “Wear these at all times,” Rainier said, slipping a rosary around each of their necks.

  “I thought we were fighting a non-denominational demon,” Scott said dryly.

  “Then you weren’t really listening to Sister Maria Elizabeta,” Rainier said. “Goodness does not have to do with any one religion, and faith is simply the face we put on what we believe ourselves. Melanie and I are both Catholic, and when I spoke to Lucien earlier, he said that you’re from New Orleans, where…it’s the predominant religion, so…”

  “What if I’m lapsed?” Scott asked.

  “What is lapsed? Faith can return at any time. Besides, it can’t hurt, and these carry my friend Father O’Hara’s blessing,” Rainier said.

  “O’Hara?” Scott said. With a name like O’Hara, the priest probably spoke English as his first language.

  “Men of the cloth go where they are sent,” Rainier pointed out. “And Father O’Hara was taught about Bael, whom he knows as Balor, when he was in the seminary. He recalls the legend in which Balor was captured by a saint long ago and imprisoned beneath the earth. If he were ever to escape his prison completely, the earth would crumble, the mountains fall, and men, like rats in a cage, would destroy their fellow men and then themselves.”

  “If that’s true,” Scott said, “if we go digging around in the catacombs, don’t we stand a chance of releasing him?”

  “I think he is already halfway out,” Rainier said. “We have to imprison him again, or kill him if we can.”

  Melanie stared at the bones of the long-gone Capuchins and shivered suddenly. “I’m going back to the hotel,” she said quickly. Rainier turned to follow her, but Scott looked around first and saw that the priest had gone to stand just outside the door to the church.

  Night had fallen, but Father O’Hara was standing against the wall beneath an overhang, lighti
ng a cigarette.

  “Go on, catch up with Melanie,” Scott told Rainier. “I think I’ll look around a little more.”

  Rainier nodded. In his way, he seemed as protective of Melanie as Scott felt—even though he knew full well that she was capable of taking care of herself and was in fact worried about his abilities.

  He waited until Rainier was out of sight and then hurried to join the priest.

  “Excuse me, Father O’Hara?” he said.

  The man started. He looked at his cigarette and grimaced. “I’m sorry. You know me?”

  “You were talking to my friend earlier. Rainier Montenegro,” he said.

  “Yes, yes.”

  “You two were talking about Bael. Balor.”

  The priest arched his brows. “Are you a believer, son?”

  “I believe that—that there are things in this world beyond our customary comprehension. Actually, Father, I wanted to ask you if you know about something called the Alliance?”

  The priest’s breath caught for a fraction of a second, before he took a drag of his cigarette to camouflage his hesitation. “Your friends are part of the Alliance,” he said carefully.

  “How does one join?” Scott asked.

  “One doesn’t.”

  “Look, I’m supposed to be hunting down a demon alongside two people who won’t let me be a part of their little organization. Am I a fool? What am I supposed to believe in here?” Scott asked, surprised at the passion in his own voice.

  Father O’Hara looked at him. “Belief is each man’s destiny. We all have free—”

  “Will. I know,” Scott finished for him, realizing that the man wasn’t going to give him any help.

  And then he did. He reached into his pocket and drew out a card. “You can find me if you need me. I even have a cell phone. The Church has entered the brave new world.”

  “I’m asking you for help now,” Scott said.

  “No, you’re asking me about your friends, and it isn’t my place to talk about them,” Father O’Hara said. “But when you truly need me, you may call on me.”

  Scott smiled. He liked Father O’Hara. “All right. Thank you.”

  He left Father O’Hara with a wave and started back toward the hotel. He didn’t see Melanie and Rainier, but there were plenty of little shops, cafes and bars where they might have stopped along the way.

  He looked up at the sky as he walked. The moon would be full in the next night or so, he realized.

  He stopped walking, aware that he had wandered off the main road. He had gone down an alley, though he didn’t remember changing direction. He had been distracted by the moon.

  Or maybe he had followed it.

  He was at the rear of a building. At one time, he thought, it had been a church, though it seemed vacant now, with broken windows and only half a spire remaining. The odd thing was that the walls seemed to be alive with constantly changing shadows.

  He wasn’t alarmed at first, just curious. Then he heard the chattering, like the whisper of the wind at first, then growing louder, like the call of a flock of strange birds. He searched the sky again, only dimly aware of the light and traffic of the nearby street.

  All at once the shadows seemed to swoop down around him, and suddenly he wasn’t certain what they were at all. They were huge, black-winged…Bats? He heard the sound of high-pitched evil laughter behind him, and he spun around.

  A girl was standing there. She had a strange smile on her lips, and her eyes were alight. She was wearing an old-fashioned dress, a torn and tattered garment, and her hair was tangled, part of it tied on top of her hair with a ribbon.

  More laughter, this time deep, but with the same malicious tone. He turned again. Behind him stood a man. He wore a top hat and Victorian frock coat, as if he’d stepped off the screen of a Jack the Ripper movie.

  The swooping and chittering continued. The black-winged shadows seemed to be everywhere.

  Suddenly silence fell, and a crowd stepped out of the shadows, though there should have been no room for them there. They wore various forms of dress, as if they had just come from a bizarre costume party at which “tattered” and even “decayed” had been on the must list.

  “Bona sera,” the girl said, and she laughed at him again. “Oh, ducky,” she added, her accent decidedly British, “you do look quite delicious.”

  And then she moved.

  10

  “I still don’t think I understand, much less accept, what’s supposedly going on here,” Melanie told Rainier. “There have been natural disasters throughout history. The ‘big one’ is expected somewhere along the San Andreas fault any time now. There are active volcanoes all over the world, and hurricanes and tidal waves have always plagued low-lying areas.”

  “Natural disasters have always occurred, yes,” Rainier agreed. “And they always will. But the thing is, prophecies have always held power over the human mind. And there’s no prophecy more common than the one about the end of the world. It’s just that we have a habit of thinking that the end will come as a huge cataclysm, not something that occurs slowly. The planets will align and boom—a solar flare will shoot down to earth, bursting it with a single firestorm. I believe in what we’re doing, though I don’t know what is coming. But I think there’s a seepage of evil from the bowels of the earth, and I’m pretty sure that’s just the beginning.”

  A step. She took a single step toward him first.

  She ran her tongue around her lips in a lascivious gesture, and saliva dripped from teeth she must have had filed to sharp, jagged points.

  What the hell kind of gang was this?

  She started to walk toward him. He thought about what Lucien had told him about the gang in L.A., about the man going insane in Naples. Had this entire group gone in some way insane together, a form of murderous mass hysteria?

  “Stay away from me,” he warned the girl quietly.

  To his amazement, she let out another cackle, and then she seemed to…fly at him. He had no trouble lifting an arm and batting her away to crash hard against the building.

  But he wasn’t prepared for the sudden onslaught that followed.

  What seemed to be dozens of crazed costume-freaks suddenly came at him, grasping him, tearing at him. He fought them off, using skills he’d never learned but that came to him as if he’d been born with them. Another young woman planted firm arms around him while he back-kicked a man who had leaped on his shoulders. She stared down at him, insanely laughing, then she licked her lips and snaked her tongue over his cheek in a manner far more reptilian than human.

  It felt like sandpaper. Horrible. Repulsive.

  She drew back suddenly, hissing like the snake he’d just compared her to, staring at his chest, though he didn’t know why.

  It didn’t matter; it was his chance.

  He strained, bursting free from her grasp and hurling her away. Despite his strength, he was afraid that he could lose the battle because of the sheer number of his attackers, but then, suddenly, he wasn’t fighting alone.

  Rainier and Melanie were there with him. He moved like a whirlwind then. When the mob wasn’t atop him, his strength was easily enough to keep them at bay. One swing of either arm sent an attacker flying. It was only when they clung to him like flies on a corpse that he struggled. They seemed determined to tear at his flesh, and ridding himself of them once they had taken hold was like divesting himself of glue. One of the young women grabbed at him, screaming in agony as her hand brushed his chest, yet not letting go.

  “Don’t let them—bite you, Scott. Keep them away!” Melanie cried as she tore away an old hag who was trying desperately to sink her teeth into his arm. Melanie didn’t seem to care that the woman was old; she threw her so high that she fell onto the broken spire of the ruined church, which pierced her clean through.

  Jack the Ripper let out a bellow of rage and came at him. Scott shot out his fist, catching the man in the face. He flew backwards and was impaled by a bent piece of wrought iron
that had once protected a church window. He stared at Scott, then collapsed like a rag doll.

  “Scott!”

  He didn’t have time to reflect on the fact that he had just killed a man—albeit a man clearly trying to kill him—because Rainier’s voice warned him of another attacker, this one about to leap at him from the shadows. Scott ducked as the man’s own impetus sent him flying past, then lashed out with a kickboxing move, sending the man crashing against a tree in the shadows near the wall.

  Suddenly Scott heard that strange chattering again, saw the shadows rising above the ruined church and the alley, above the trees that had clung so tenaciously to life here.

  Melanie grasped his arm and dragged him back toward the busy street. “Come on, let’s go!” she commanded.

  “Wait!” he demanded. “What the hell was that?”

  “Let’s go!” she cried again.

  They quickly reached the street, Rainier right behind them. But as soon as they reached the sidewalk, Scott stopped. “Melanie, we have to report this. I was attacked. I killed a man, and—”

  “We can’t report it,” Rainier said. “Oh, hell, Melanie, explain it to him.”

  “We can’t let ourselves get caught up in an investigation. If we were to go to jail…” she said, then stared at him, her huge blue eyes entreating. He saw that strange flicker of gold in them, and for a moment he was uncomfortable. He couldn’t help caring about her, was certainly obsessed with her. But she scared him, as well. The way she had fought, the fact that she had killed a woman and didn’t seem to care…her secrets…And it wasn’t just that at that moment he was a little bit afraid of her, he realized. He was also afraid for her. And that made him truly afraid for himself, because he didn’t want to lose her.

  “Look, Melanie, the police will find the bodies, and they’ll investigate. Something happened back there. We could wind up in serious trouble if we don’t go to the cops and tell them that we were attacked.”

  “There’s a bar just down the street with quiet booths and a mainly Italian-speaking clientele,” Rainier said. “I think we all need a drink.”