by Declan Finn
I raised the grappling hook over my head and brought it down into the cliff like it was a hammer. It drove the hook all the way into the dirt and left its mark.
I kept levitating, this time into the face of a guard. The Serpent guard blinked in shock as I landed in front of him. I punched into his face with the armored fist, grabbed his head, and hurled him over my shoulder off the cliff. His screams blended perfectly into the crashing waves below.
The next Serpent guard I saw hadn’t seen me through the mists, but I found him. I made it to him within two bounds, coming down on him from above, making certain to stomp on his head with the full weight of the golem armor.
A quick scan showed me that two guards were all there were. I headed back to pick up the others. Mist made it hard to see where we were going, but I led the way. My armor helmet display pierced the mists and allowed me to guide everyone to the rear of the house.
Once we got to the backyard, Baracus led the way. He had visited the house before and had made a point of surveying the building. Apparently, it wasn’t a response to something Matchett had done, but something Baracus did with every employer. As he put it, “I only needed one murder attempt by a client who refused to pay me to make that a habit.”
We went in through the kitchen. There was no staff. There were no butlers or cooks. There were no maids. Most importantly, there were no guards. The house itself was in total disarray. Books were strewn about everywhere. Few surfaces were dust-free. Layers of dust were not the exception, but the rule.
Alex looked at me and smirked. “Remember the old Chiclet factory? The particulate bomb?”
I winced. Growing up in New York, there was a part of Queens near the 59th Street Bridge—commonly known in popular fiction for killing off one of Spider-Man’s girlfriends—called Long Island City. It was a heavily industrial area. In November of 1976, there was an explosion that had blown out all of the windows, wounded 55 people and killed one. The entire explosion had been set off by a layer of dust over the factory floor and a single spark.
I nodded. “I’d be afraid to fire off my gun in here.”
Alex paused in front of me, then turned around. “Give me a second.” He ducked back into the kitchen. After a few seconds, he came back out. “Just setting something up ahead of time.”
We followed Baracus through the dark, dusty house. I was tempted to try out one of the lights, but I didn’t want to risk alerting the guards outside. We would have enough problems without that. I rarely had to interrogate a supernatural without them thinking they had the upper hand. When he was an enemy, the only way we had gotten Baracus to tell us what we needed was when he wanted to buy time for reinforcements to arrive. It was hard to imagine how Matchett would think he had the upper hand with four of us in the room, while he had one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel.
The master bedroom was larger than my living room. It may have been bigger than the entire first floor of my house. Again, the first thing I thought of was Agatha Christie and the luxuriant homes of her murder victims. One had been murdered in a bedroom with so much furniture it had been stacked to the ceiling so it could come down in a crash to wake the house.
George Matchett’s room was much like that.
The four-poster bed had curtains around it. The curtains were tied to the posts at the corners, so we saw Matchett clearly enough.
Packard sauntered in and sat on top of the cedar chest at the foot of his bed. I stood next to him. My armor was still up, and I was reluctant to put it down. While the glamour had hidden the sights and smells of Dunwich U from my senses, my armor had prevented me from smelling the campus after the illusion fell. I wasn’t interested in finding out what fresh Hell scent this room had for me.
Pearson and Baracus took up positions on either side of Matchett.
The old man’s eyes opened, and he smiled at us. “About time you made it here.”
18 The Last Statement of George Matchett
George Matchett looked like he hadn’t aged well. While people had made jokes about Pope Benedict XVI looking like Star Wars’ Emperor Palpatine (and from certain angles, I could see it), the former Pope looked better than Matchett at the same age. Matchett had had his hair replaced with younger hair plugs and dyed black. He was busy dying but that hadn’t stopped him from dyeing. His thick, fleshy lips looked swollen, as though he had lost a fight.
Matchett’s skin was the worst part. He had been a big, beefy man at one point. But he had lost all of his body fat. His skin now sagged, like a clown coat on a concentration camp survivor. Even if it hadn’t, the skin looked like it was scarred and pitted. I had never seen leprosy, but if I had to guess, it would look like this.
Matchett looked to Baracus. “Have you betrayed me at last, mercenary?” he asked, his voice weak and thick with a German accent.
Baracus gave him an evil smile. “You should have told me all you wanted. Your secrecy has allowed me a free hand to act against you.”
Matchett gave a wet, hacking cough. I half-expected blood. “Perhaps. But it doesn’t matter.” His shoulders twitched, and I could tell that he tried to shrug.
I leaned forward, pressing my hands on the trunk next to Packard. “Tell us what you did, Matchett.”
Pearson stepped forward. His hands were clasped in front of him, and I could almost see him ready to give last rites. “We could consider it a confession, if you want.”
Matchett gave a laugh that was barely distinguishable from the cough. “A confession? You have to be sorry to confess. And I’m not.” He gave a smile that showed perfectly formed, fake teeth, stained with years of coffee and tobacco and whatever else he’d put in his mouth. “I regret nothing.”
“Then what are you doing today?” I asked. Lightning cracked outside as God gave me a soundtrack to interrogate to.
Matchett looked decidedly unimpressed. “I am fulfilling my last payment to my master.”
Packard growled and leaned forward. He had out one of the saint cards, rolling it in his fingers from one to the other. He managed to make it look like a rubber hose. Given what Matchett had been into, it might have had the same effect. “By doing what?”
“Paying my debts,” he rumbled. “I was recruited by the Nazis when I was only ten years old, you know. They would ask me what or who had been hidden in and around the camps, or the ghettos.”
Alex held up a finger, confused. “But you were Jewish.”
Matchett coughed a laugh. “Bah. In name only. We were good secular Jews. We knew the state only had our best interests at heart.” He gave a little smile. “When I could tell the guards and the SS what they needed, they would give me sweets.” His eyes drifted and became glassy as he became caught up in 1940s nostalgia. “It had been the best time of my life. I had everything. My parents scolded me. Told me I was betraying everything they were. But my masters told me, and I knew better.”
I tried to wrap my brain around a man who said it was the best time of his life just because the Nazis had indulged their young spy with all the treats they could come up with. He was a ninety-year-old man with the mentality of a spoiled child.
I couldn’t even process it. Thankfully, I didn’t need to understand his evil, just listen until he gave us what we could use.
Matchett’s face became sterner for a moment, but his eyes hadn’t focused on any one person. “But near the end of the war, I needed a new name. A new number. A number that did not mark me as one of them. So I made The Deal.” Matchett’s nostalgia grew into a dreamy smile, and he got caught up in his storytelling. “A deal for power. For fame. For all the money I could want or need.”
Great. The prosperity gospel according to Satan. Here I thought Joel Osteen was bad enough.
Packard flicked the card back into his palm. He sighed, annoyed that he had to humor a 90-year-old Nazi out of some bad B-movie. “Big task,” he stated flatly. “Can’t imagine it had been easy on your end.”
Matchett’s eyes flicked to Packard and then d
rifted past him, over the shoulder. “Oh, it had been easy. Europe was a people broken. It was easy to push the agenda. Where had God been during the war? The Soviets had laid the groundwork in Investia, explaining how Pius XII had collaborated with the Nazis. They knew that secularism was the paving-stone road that would lead them to victory.”
I was so tempted to snark that it was why John Paul II had helped destroy them, so their hostility had only led to their own destruction. But that would have interrupted the flow. So I settled for letting the plain, blank mask of clay hide my smile and mute my chuckle.
“From there, it was easy. Rights didn’t come from God. They came from the state. If the states gave the people their rights, they could take them away. This upsets the people. When the people become upset, a few money transfers to the right people starts a war! Ha!” The dreamy smile came back. Who knew that reliving the havoc of wars and revolutions could be nostalgic? “But the real fruit has been harvested in the last few years. My lawyers have all but shut down Christmas. In a few years, no one will be able to hang Christmas lights in their front yard, lest they make atheists uncomfortable. I gave money to the right people to become priests and enter seminaries so they could filter out any with a sense of resolve.” His eyes narrowed, sly and cunning. “The socialists have it right, you know, words have all the power. Redefining having a moral code as ‘moral rigidity’ has kept more people out of the seminary than the more … heh … unnatural appetites.”
Pearson still had his hands clasped in front of him, but they had tightened. The knuckles became white with rage. The priest kept his hostility out of his voice. “You paid people to let pederasts into the priesthood and keep good men out?”
Matchett glanced at Pearson, then gave another cough and laugh at the same time. “Bah! Good men. No such thing. Goodness is just one maggot on a pile of shit yelling at another maggot. Both of them telling the other what’s right or wrong.” He frowned, a mocking scold. “And please. They are pedophiles. They merely love children? And who doesn’t love children?” He cackled, his voice becoming slightly stronger. “It’s just another lifestyle. Heh.”
Packard cocked his head. “Nice,” he pandered. “You promoted priests, and they became child molesters. But out in the secular realm, it was just another lifestyle. Impressive balancing act.”
I made a mental note to compliment Pearson and Packard for falling into an easy good cop/bad cop routine.
Matchett smiled at Packard in a vague fashion. “Of course. Lawyers can do anything. And I have legions.”
Baracus looked at us and shrugged. “This is true.”
I blinked behind my helmet. I was almost surprised that Baracus had kept his cool during the interrogation and that this had been his first words since it began. Though in retrospect, I shouldn’t have been surprised at the time. After all, Matchett and Baracus were more or less on the same side.
Packard ignored Baracus and said to Matchett, “I suppose the girlfriends weren’t that impressed.”
Matchett had a flicker of grin. “When they complained, I would add another wing to the mansion. They would go under the floorboards. Checks would go out to the right people, and the girls would have never existed. And I was Jewish. Any accusation was anti-Semitism.” He gave another horrid, hacking laugh.
Packard nodded slowly. “And you were driven out of Germany?”
He rolled his eyes. “They call it currency manipulation. I call it good investments.”
“I’m surprised you didn’t move to Israel.”
Matchett smiled. “That racist country? Never! Build a synagogue near Palestinians? How dare they! Make gardens and farms out of the desert? The desert is the culture of Islam!” he declared with a laugh. He seemed to get stronger the more he elaborated on his works, reveling in his cleverness. His eyes drifted around the room, not focusing on anyone or anything.
I had a sudden burst of panic and thought at the armor to throw up every sensory input it had in its arsenal to construct a warning map. A little circle appeared in the lower lever corner of my vision, like a sonar map. A blue dot was on my immediate left and at my 2 o’clock on the right—Alex and Pearson. At the outer edge were red dots moving around the circle. They were the guards on patrol outside.
Baracus was a purple dot on my 10 o’clock. Even the armor didn’t want to classify him as a friendly.
Matchett was a stationary red dot right in front of me.
In my main screen were several levels of augmented reality. Translucent snakes ran all along Matchett’s body. They were all latched onto him like leeches. A little label next to them classified them as minor demons, feeding on Matchett. I couldn’t tell if they were killing him or keeping him alive.
“I’m surprised you decided to come here,” Alex prompted Matchett.
Matchett tried that dying twitch again. “By then, my work had been done in Europe. I had kept God out of the EU. My brown shirts—who call themselves anti-fascists, can you believe that? My brown shirts rampage through the streets of Europe, smashing church statues and setting fire to cathedrals, all in the name of my master. I had hoped my good socialists—sorry, anti-fascists, heh—would do the same for America. But they never had the chance to take hold here they way they did in Europe.” He paused, thinking for a moment. “Though I did convince Oregon to restrict insurance. Paying doctors to kill patients but not pay for heart transplants. Ah! Der Furher would have been proud. And getting all of the right people to accept the drugs I’ve helped legalize! Wonderful.”
My patience wore thin with this old son of a bitch and his reminiscing. He wasted our time and did it deliberately.
The snakes fed on Matchett. They gave me an idea.
I raised my hand in the sign of the cross and blessed Matchett. My golem armor had caught my mood, and my voice came out like Darth Vader as I said, “I bless you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”
The demon snakes on Matchett’s body writhed. Matchett writhed in turn, screaming in agony. Bacarus backed away, as though he feared back-splash damage from the blessing.
Matchett settled down after a moment. I checked the sonar screen on my display. The red dots on patrol outside did not move or come to his aid. We still had time.
“What are you doing today?” I snapped, the voice modulation still in place.
Matchett looked at me and snarled, his face feral. “Damn you! Go to Hell, you—”
“You first, you monstrous son of Satan.” I felt my adrenaline spike with my sudden rage. Listening to this vile serpent recite all his old vices had made my temper rise, and I hadn’t even known or noticed until that moment. “Our Father, who art in Heaven, Hallowed by They name—”
Matchett screamed and gripped the bed as he thrashed. “No! No! I’ll talk!”
“Thy Kingdom Come! Thy will be done! On Earth, as it is in Heaven!”
“Stop!” he cried again.
Even Alex knocked on my armor to get my attention. He patted the air in front of me, signaling me to take it down. I pointed at Matchett. “Start talking. When you’re done telling us everything …” I pointed at Pearson, “the priest will stop blessing you.”
Pearson took the hint and reached inside his coat for his breviary.
Matchett’s focus locked on me like a hungry squid, and he spoke as fast as his health would allow. “All I needed to do at the end was raise a demon incarnate. For that, I needed a host of the possessed to lead the rituals. I needed the right books. All of the right books. And in the end, the last thing was to choose the form of the destroyer.”
Alex looked at me like he had fallen down a rabbit hole. He whispered, “I hope to God he doesn’t say the Stay-Puft Marshmallow man.”
Matchett sighed and groaned at the same time. “The best I could do for my masters was raise … Tiamat.” He gasped for breath as the demons increased their pace, feeding on his soul. Pearson thumbed through his breviary in front of Matchett. The old bastard kept talking, but this ti
me, he gave one last smile. “And … the ritual … already … started… an hour ago.”
19 Whispers in Darkness
With that last statement, George Matchett gave a last gasp, then went limp. Pearson reached over to touch his throat. “He’s dead.”
The demon snakes stayed attached to Matchett, as though feeding on his corpse. They didn’t move. I didn’t know if they were going to stay there until removed or until his corpse rotted.
Before I could ask any follow-up questions about Matchett’s last statement, the red dots in my sonar display stopped moving. “Guys. It’s time to go. Now!”
Baracus again led the way. Pearson was right behind him. Alex was a little slower. He pulled out a cigarette and lit up before he got to the door. I brought up the rear. The red dots from outside closed in. The guards, at least, knew that Matchett was dead. He knew rambling at us would hold us here—either until the ceremony happened or until his death. If the former happened, we’d have lost. If the latter, then the guards would come straight for us.
As we raced into the outer hallway, the armor threw a flashing red icon on the right side of my display. It spelled out NATURAL GAS LEAK.
I thought back to Alex stepping back into the kitchen before we went upstairs. Then I looked at his lit cigarette. “Alex, what did you do?”
He looked back at me, lit cigarette in his mouth, and shot me a tight-lipped smile. Pearson caught the smell of gas and placed a handkerchief over his mouth. Baracus didn’t seem fazed.
As we ran into the kitchen, the front door was kicked in with a bang. So were the doors on the side. They were all going to converge on the bedroom—they couldn’t have known about us; otherwise some of them would have circled around to the back door to make certain we didn’t leave that way.
Baracus and Pearson ran for the back door. The burners on the stovetop had been left open on high. They had been billowing gas the entire time we were in the house.
