Thursday, 21 October 1999, 2:17 AM
An isolated burrow
New York City, New York
Calebros bent low to squeeze beneath the low-hanging shelf of rock. It wasn’t enough. Muttering curses, he got down onto his knees. Still not enough. He sprawled, not at all gracefully, on his belly and chest and began to slide forward inches at a time. The tight squeeze would have been no problem this way if he’d been able to lie truly flat, but the dramatic kink in his spine jutted upward and grated against the stone. Calebros shifted his weight and wriggled. Only with great difficulty did he make it through.
How many more of these blasted crevices and hairpins must I negotiate? he wondered.
“Stop…right there!” said a nervous voice, not far away.
“Jeremiah,” Calebros said soothingly. His grossly dilated eyes could barely make out the other Nosferatu now that his voice had drawn attention.
“Stop!” Jeremiah said again.
“Might I at least stand?” Calebros asked reasonably. “After all, it was you who sent for me.” Jeremiah seemed unsure, but he didn’t object, so Calebros climbed painfully to his knees. The ceiling was too low to stand upright. Calebros inspected Jeremiah in the darkness. The Kindred who had so confidently and capably shadowed the Prophet of Gehenna was cowering in the farthest, tightest, darkest corner of this dead-end tunnel. He clutched his knees to his chin with one arm. The other was wrapped over the top of his head, as if holding it on.
“The Final Nights are at hand,” Jeremiah said.
“I see.” Calebros had heard this before from Jeremiah, if not so frantically. It was the same tired prophecy, the same rote words. Yet Calebros had felt the twinge of terror when he’d first read the reports of Xaviar’s claim that he’d battled an Antediluvian. But what the Gangrel justicar had seen was no Antediluvian—just an insane Toreador wielding powers long hidden from the world. Just! Calebros chided himself. It had just destroyed a small army of Gangrel, and the powers loosed upon the world had been loosed by the Nosferatu, by he and Rolph.
“He knows,” Jeremiah insisted, as if someone had contradicted him. “He knows, but he would not tell me! But I saw.” He closed his eyes tightly; whatever he saw was too much to bear, and he wished to see it no longer. “I felt. He descended into the darkness, yet the darkness did not overcome him. He faced the dragon. I could feel…” Jeremiah was wracked by uncontrollable sobs. Bloody tears ran down his cheeks. He squeezed his knees and head more closely to his body.
My God. Calebros watched in horror as one of his most intelligent, if rash, clanmates unraveled before him. No, the unraveling was already done, he corrected himself.
“He saw, but he would not tell me,” Jeremiah whimpered. “He sent me away.” More sobs.
“Come back with me, Jeremiah. To the warren. You’ll be safe there.”
Jeremiah’s eyes sprang open at that. His feet scrabbled against the floor as he tried to push himself farther back into the corner, but he could go no farther. “Nowhere is safe!” he screamed, then fell back into the piteous whimpering. “Least of all there, least of all…”
Calebros didn’t like the thought of leaving him there. There was safety in numbers; that was why the warren was so vital to their existence. The Nosferatu were masters of the dark places only in comparison to other Kindred. There were still unknown dangers… Nictuku, he thought. Jeremiah had once studied under Augustin. Superstitions! Calebros told himself, angry that he’d even entertained the thought, angry that Jeremiah had pushed his thoughts in that direction and disrupted the routine of the warren.
“I’ll send Pug to check on you,” Calebros said, bending down to creep back out of the cubbyhole. “Don’t hurt him, do you hear me?”
If Jeremiah heard, he gave no indication. But Calebros supposed Pug could take of himself. I used to think Jeremiah could take of himself.
Calebros slithered on his chest and belly away from that place. He had seen and heard enough.
Thursday, 28 October 1999, 2:30 AM
Highway 95
Outside Las Vegas, Nevada
“This oughta be far enough,” Kragen said. Buttface said nothing.
The cargo area of the van was walled off from the cab and sealed so the cargo couldn’t hear what the driver and passenger were talking about. But Kragen didn’t really see that it mattered.
“I say instead of just dumping him, we rip his head off and then dump him,” Kragen suggested. “And then run over him maybe.” Buttface said nothing. “Who’s gonna care? Who’s gonna know?” Kragen asked. “You ain’t gonna tell nobody, are you?”
Buttface shrugged.
“Hmph. Just what I thought,” Kragen said. “You’re scared of that uppity little snot from back East. ‘Do this…do that.’ I’d like to stuff a boat hook up his nose and pull it out his ass.” Kragen glanced over at Buttface. “No offense.”
The desert and the starry night sky stretched on forever. The tires on pavement sounded a rhythmic hum.
“I mean, he said he was done with him,” Kragen said. “‘Get rid of him,’ he says. ‘Take him out in the desert and dump him.’ Sure he wants the other Giovanni fucks to hear about what happened, but he didn’t say not to rip his fuckin’ head off, not specifically. I mean, those fuckin’ Giovanni fucks could probably talk to his ghost and find out what happened, right?”
Buttface shrugged.
“Yeah, you’re right,” Kragen said. “But we could at least run over his leg or something. You know, not his head. It ain’t nothing really. Barely feel it, not like a speed bump or nothing.”
There was silence for a tenth of a mile. “Okay, okay,” Kragen said. “We’ll just dump him, like the guy said. Geez.”
Kragen slowed the van, then pulled off the side of the road onto the packed desert sand. He and Buttface climbed out of the cab. Before he opened the sliding door in the back, he turned to Buttface and raised a finger to his own lips. “Remember, shhh.”
They yanked Benito out of the van. He still had the black plastic bag over his head and tied around his neck, and his hands bound behind him. They threw the Giovanni to the ground. Hard. And then took a few seconds to kick the daylights out of him—just in the ribs; they didn’t want to tear the bag and have him see them. But then we’d have to rip his head off, Kragen mused, but Buttface was already getting back into the van. Kragen joined his partner, and they tore off down the road.
Thursday, 28 October 1999, 11:15 PM
A subterranean grotto
New York City, New York
“…Tell me, oh wise one, which way do I go?”
There was a drawn-out silence, then, “Fuck if I know.”
Ramona looked at Calebros as if he were crazy. She looked around the murky, cluttered cave-office and said, “Hey, you got another chair around here? You’re the one wanted me to wear these stupid boots. Well, you know what? They don’t fit right, and they hurt. I don’t see you wearing no normal clothes, all wrapped up in your rags.”
Calebros sighed. “On the rare occasion that I am seen by kine,” he explained, “I do not draw attention to myself. If I were up there more often, as you are, and I could disguise my nature with a few simple garments, as you can, I would do so.”
He and Hesha, after repeated attempts, had convinced her to wear boots to hide her permanently clawed feet. It was a problem with some Gangrel. They tended to take on animalistic aspects over time—a sign of how close they were to the Beast, some said; others suggested it was merely proof that the outlanders were little more than wild beasts of the field. Calebros, as Ramona had so pointedly reminded him, had little room to quibble about physical deformities. He did not feel it was excessive, however, to demand that she uphold the Masquerade to the extent readily within her power. He’d noticed her ears too—tapered, like a wolf’s. But her hair tended to obscure them, and Calebros felt a need to choose his battles carefully if he was to convince the girl of anything.
Ramona considered his sage counsel. “Ye
ah, whatever you say.” She stared at him for several seconds. “A chair?”
Again Calebros sighed, lifting himself from his chair. He hoped the sound of his vertebrae popping evoked guilt in Ramona, but she showed no sign. He shuffled around his desk, past the candelabra—he’d grown weary of fighting the lamp and smashed it once too often; the base now protruded, upside down, from a bulging trashcan, and Calebros had resorted to more primitive technology—and to the doorway. “Umberto!” The younger Nosferatu arrived in short order. “Umberto, do kindly bring a chair for Ms. Salvador.”
Once that matter was resolved and Ramona and Calebros had both taken their seats, Ramona was still obviously displeased with her host. “I never told you my name…my whole name,” she said.
“Pilar Ramona Salvador,” Calebros intoned. “Formerly of Los Angeles, presumed dead by family and police… It’s my job to know these things. Now, evidently the riddle means nothing to you? Fair enough. There is something else I would like to ask you about.”
“Ask away.”
“Thank you. First, please listen.” He reached for a small tape player on his desk and turned it on. A considerable racket ensued—the noise of a helicopter—then a voice, a female voice straining to be heard, that the cockpit recorder had captured.
“There! There it is!” said Ramona’s voice.
“What! Where?” It was Hesha.
“What do you mean? Right there! Look!”
“I don’t see—”
“Are you fuckin’ blind? Look! Grass, and trees…all burned! And the rocks…like giant tombstones!”
“I don’t see!”
“Fuck!”
Calebros clicked off the tape player. “You remember, I’m sure.” Ramona nodded. She suddenly appeared very uncomfortable in her chair. “You told us about what you saw…about the horrible experience at the cave, in the meadow with Xaviar. What you were describing on the tape—that was what you were expecting to see, wasn’t it?”
Ramona shot up from her seat. “I know what you’re gonna say, and I didn’t imagine nothing,” she snarled, jabbing a finger at him. “That Leopold—if that’s really his name—him and the Eye, he was raising up these huge fuckin’ chunks of rock, and they’d fall over, or explode, like a fuckin’ volcano or something. I was fuckin’ there! I saw it. I didn’t imagine nothing.”
“I believe you,” Calebros said softly, calmly.
Ramona stood with her mouth open, her rant derailed. “You do?”
“I do. Let me tell you why.” Ramona sat, and Calebros continued. “You saw the meadow that way before, when you were with Xaviar, and you saw it that way from the helicopter. But not once you landed, correct?”
“Right.”
“When you went into the cave, with Hesha, you saw the sculpture. You both saw it.”
“Right.” Ramona’s teeth were clenched, her fingers becoming claws and digging into the chair.
It enrages her merely to talk about it, to remember, Calebros thought. Best not go into too much detail. “This was Hesha’s second trip to the cave, as well. The first time, he found Leopold—torpid, Hesha thought. He took the Eye and returned to the city.”
“Yeah, and then Leopold came after him and ripped him about five new assholes.”
“Um…yes, you could put it that way,” Calebros said. “But this is what is important: When Hesha was at the cave that first time, he didn’t see a sculpture.”
Ramona thought about that, then said, “So? It wasn’t built yet.”
Calebros reached for a folder on his desk. He brandished the notes that Jeremiah had taken during his observation of Anatole. “I have reports here that describe the statue as of early September.”
“But Hesha got his ass whupped…when, in August?” Ramona asked.
“July. July 31.”
Ramona reached for a calendar on Calebros’s desk, but tossed it back when she realized it was from 1972. “That’s still a whole month, and nobody knows where Leopold was that whole time. He could have gone back to the cave.”
Smart girl, Calebros thought. He was leading her along the same path of reconstructing events that he had followed. “Possible. The soonest he could have gotten back, if he did, would have been the first or second of August. That would have been approximately a week after your battle with the Eye.
“Now, you know Tanner. You know your other clanmates. Even injured, would they have waited around an entire week so that Leopold could come back and incorporate them into that statue? Don’t you think that someone would have been able to get out, to hunt, at the very least to find blood and bring it to the others?”
Ramona was nodding. “And Hesha didn’t find any Gangrel at the cave…”
“Exactly.” Calebros knew he had her. He wasn’t positive about what he was suggesting, he couldn’t be—but it was possible.
“So…” Ramona was still a few steps behind; she was putting the pieces together. “The statue was already there…and Hesha didn’t see it?” She seemed suddenly unsure. “That’s a big fuckin’ statue.”
Calebros nodded. “And it’s a big—”
“Meadow.” Ramona had seen where he was going as soon as he’d opened his mouth. She was a quick study, a sharp mind.
“Exactly.” Calebros was heartened for several reasons. Not only was Ramona following the evolution of his suspicions, but he also felt a burgeoning connection with her. Not an attachment, nothing so maudlin, but an understanding. It would not do for Ruhadze alone to win her trust, and possibly use her against Calebros some night if the opportunity presented itself. Hesha had traveled to Baltimore to pursue the meaning of Anatole’s bloody scrawl in the cave, and the Serite’s absence pricked at Calebros’s paranoia. But that concern was for another time. Ramona was here now, and whatever slight satisfaction Calebros gained from this journey of the mind they had embarked upon, he could not ignore the implications of the destination.
“Something masked the statue, the meadow,” he said.
“But how?”
Calebros did not know. Theoretically it might be possible, of course, but the magnitude of power that would be required to pull it off… There was more than the Eye at work here. That was Calebros’s belief. That was his fear.
“And why have we seen it sometimes but not others?” Ramona asked, still probing, still questioning.
Better to consider the how rather than the what, Calebros decided. That route was slightly less disconcerting; less terrifying, truth be told. “You have proved able to follow the Eye. You tracked it to the cathedral,” he pointed out. “Hesha tracked it to the cave with the aid of his gem. There seem to be ways of finding it…”
“Except for now,” Ramona said. “Not since Leopold—”
“Ripped Hesha five new assholes?” said Calebros.
“Exactly,” Ramona parroted him in return.
“Wherever Leopold and the Eye have gone,” Calebros said, “we are unable to find them. It could be that whatever shielded the cave is masking his whereabouts as well.”
Other words from Jeremiah’s reports came unbidden to Calebros’s mind: The darkness in the earth, hungering for flesh.
“Only time will tell,” Calebros said. And it may be that we are out of time.
Saturday, 30 October 1999, 5:12 AM
Crown Plaza Hotel, Midtown Manhattan
New York City, New York
Nickolai stood before the tall, quicksilver mirror, staring incredulously. The murder he had witnessed was not undesirable—in fact, he had ordered it—but the deed had not unfolded as he had anticipated.
He’d had some time to think about it—the temporal dislocation that accompanied the apportation of another individual was far from an exact science—but had arrived at no firm conclusions. The implications of what he’d seen were problematic at best, potentially lethal at worst. He would make damn sure that the worst did not come to pass. Nickolai did not plan to become a victim of his own creation. He was the last of his line; he owed it to those wh
ose banner he alone carried to survive. Yet the vagaries of undeath had time and again been thrown in his face: from the horrendous slaughter at Mexico City, to the transformed lackey he’d rediscovered and bent to his will.
One thing was certain, however. Benito Giovanni was, once and for all, dead.
Nickolai looked to the mirror. Within the circumference of the ornately rune-carved mahogany frame, quicksilver swirled and twisted. The viscous liquid began to take on a shape, and the glass surface, adhering to that shape, began to bubble and bulge. The shape was that of a man. Or what had once been a man.
Leopold stepped slowly from the mirror. His face, torso, and right leg pressed against the outer layer of glass, bowing it into the room. As the quicksilver gradually assumed his visage, the grotesque Eye was the first recognizable detail. While the rest of Leopold was still but a shadow, a hint of his true form, the Eye became real—wiry vessels, like so many gnarled tree roots in the earth, pulsed with blood along the surface of the white. Leopold followed the orb, pushing through the elastic glass until he stood, covered in blood and ichor, before Nickolai.
“You did well, Leopold. She will be very pleased.”
The Eye watched impassively. Leopold’s other eye was wide and wild. He panted like a feral dog, but slowly, each exhalation several seconds after the last, in perfect synchronicity with the pulsing of one of the Eye’s vessels. Nickolai approached him carefully. There seemed to be no antagonism from the boy, but after what the warlock had seen…
Leopold’s clothes were foul and tattered. Nickolai had long since ceased trying to replace the neonate’s garments after pus had seeped from the Eye and encased much of his body. It was all Nickolai could do each evening to chip away the congealing mess that threatened to crust over Leopold’s face and other eye. After destroying two ceremonial daggers at the task, Nickolai had resorted to a sturdier hammer and a screwdriver wielded as chisel. There was the occasional slip, of course, but Leopold seemed hardly to notice.
Clan Novel Nosferatu: Book 13 of the Clan Novel Saga Page 14
