Inquisitor

by John Barrowman

  Was he being watched? Was someone on to his game? How was that possible?

  The pad beeped. Callum punched the code again. Yellow. And. Red. Something was wrong. Concentrate. One last chance and he’d be locked out. Then, no matter the deal he’d negotiated, he’d have to cut his losses and run. He cracked his knuckles and rubbed the rough beard on his cheeks. He’d done this before. He knew the drill. Another thirty seconds, then get it right.

  Relax, dude. Breathe.

  The musician’s song was plodding and slow, a sombre soundtrack to the day’s bright August sunshine. Callum had never seen the busker in that spot before, and he’d been watching every day since setting up his cover as a volunteer at the museum. Every day he paid attention to the ebb and flow of the crowds, the peak tourist times for the museum, gaining the curator’s trust, calculating when the time was right for their move.

  His move.

  He was alone now.

  His breath caught in his throat as he swallowed his sorrow. His stomach rolled, reminding him he hadn’t eaten all day. What else was new? His tall athletic frame had grown thinner since the accident, his jeans hanging loose on his hips. He popped a mint into his mouth, burped.

  Should he run before things got any more complicated? Then what? Admit he’d failed? Go back to being ‘Wee Cally’ as if he were a character in a Roald Dahl story or the PG Wodehouse novels his gran adored? No. Not after everything that had happened in the last week. Callum cracked his knuckles, punched the code for the third and he hoped final time.

  Glasgow

  5.

  Pick Up the Pieces

  Later that same morning, Rémy Dupree Rush was staring out the tall windows of a Georgian mansion thinking about time travel. He later wondered if the idea had come to him because he was facing the past: Glasgow’s Necropolis with its grey stone mausoleums, decorative Roman arches, Corinthian columns, and pencil monuments filling the view from the second-floor bedroom that had become his most recent home. Or maybe the idea had come to him because he’d spent the last two days pouring over his mother’s journal again, convinced he was missing something that might change the awful trajectory of his life.

  The day he’d sat numb and speechless at the Formica kitchen table in Chicago all those months ago was scarred in his memory. The day he had learned he was a Conjuror: a descendant of an African tribe with powers to alter reality with their songs and music. And not just any Conjuror. The only one left in the world.

  He remembered the blood coating his mom’s teeth after Tia Rosa’s slap to her cheek to stop his mom from sharing her secrets. But his mom had carried on anyway, her eyes blazing with a teary determination. As Rémy stared out of the tall windows, her voice was as clear in his mind as if she were sitting next to him.

  ‘I’m tired, Rémy. Tired of the noise in my head and the evil clutching my heart. It’s time you get prepared for what’s to come.’

  The images etched on an ancient Roman frieze in the catacombs below the Tiber during his escape from the catacombs: that’s what she had been referring to. The secret she’d kept from him. His destiny carved in stone – literally. The frieze had depicted the coronation of the King of the Underworld, and that King had looked a hell of a lot like him.

  He’d spent the past few days scouring the pages of the journal, trying to find the rest of the words to the frieze inscription.

  Ecce unus est…

  These were the only legible words on the relief.

  Behold! One is…

  But ‘One is’ what? One is coming? One is going? One is caught in the Matrix? What?

  Rémy sighed, rubbing the top of his shaved head. Of course, all this thinking about time travel might just have been inspired by bone-aching boredom. If he had to play one more frickin’ game of poker or cribbage while under house arrest, he’d lose more than his shirt. Something drastic had to be done, if he was to put an end to this and make the Camarilla pay for murdering his family.

  He went in search of Em.

  6.

  Frieze Frame

  Em Calder sat cross-legged in the sunroom at the back of the sandstone mansion with all the windows open out to the wildly overgrown garden, a late afternoon breeze rustling the pages of the sketchbook on her lap. Rémy watched her for a minute or two from the French doors off the dining room as she used the heel of her hand to add texture to a section of her drawing.

  When he sat next to her on the wicker couch, he saw she was working on a sketch of him. Quickly, her cheeks pink, she closed the book. His gloom lifted a little. He liked Em. Maybe more than liked her.

  ‘I think we should go back to Rome,’ he said.

  Em made a disbelieving noise, tucking the sketchbook under her leg. ‘Why? We’ve direct orders from Vaughn and Jeannie to stay here until after their Council meeting. We can’t risk another fight with that Nephilim.’ She gently touched Rémy’s head near a row of stitches from a nasty cut. ‘You’ve not fully healed from the last one.’

  Rémy took her hand, her warmth infusing him with confidence. ‘I need to find out more about that altar frieze. I need to know what it means.’

  Em didn’t pull away. Instead, she opened her sketchbook with her free hand, flipping to a drawing she’d made. ‘Take a look at this instead,’ she said.

  The frieze depicted two stola-draped goddesses standing on either side of the altar. One goddess held a set of pipes in her hands and the other clutched a lyre. Skulls frozen mid-scream, twisted tormented bodies, and flayed souls of the damned made up the high back of the throne in front of the altar while the seat itself appeared to be a cushion of wings, its legs constructed from broken bodies. Em had smudged that part of her sketch, but Rémy had it seared in his imagination. Because he was the one sitting on the throne of souls, and the Nephilim was crowning him with a laurel wreath.

  ‘I don’t want to study the frieze itself,’ he said. ‘I want to see its creation. I want to go back, Em.’ He looked meaningfully at her. ‘In time. To find out what it means.’

  Em jumped up from the couch. ‘That is not a good idea. My brother almost died the last time we time-travelled. You’ve seen Matt’s eyes? They’re like a kaleidoscope shifting at warp speed. What if next time his… I don’t know… his entire head just explodes?’

  ‘I don’t think that’s likely,’ said Rémy as he followed her out into the garden. Despite its neglect, the tangled green space was flourishing with rose bushes in every shade of red and pink imaginable.

  ‘Not taking that chance.’ Em headed to the back of the garden and the shade of an oak tree where someone had hung a tyre swing.

  ‘It’s not your chance to take,’ said Rémy, leaning against the tree as Em climbed on to the swing. ‘Matt’s as frustrated as I am with leaving so much unfinished, and you know Caravaggio will do anything Matt wants him to do.’

  ‘Then why are you even talking to me?’ Em swung higher, the tyre grazing Rémy’s hip.

  He grabbed the rope and pulled the tyre to a stop. ‘Because I trust you more than your brother and I want… I think…’

  ‘You think he won’t do what you ask without me?’

  Her proximity and the intense expression in her eyes spiked Rémy’s pulse. Her unruly short hair caught the sun through the tree branches, its purple streaks looking like satin ribbons. What he really wanted to say to her was that he knew she would have his back, maybe more than her brother. But more than that, he wanted to say he was falling in love with her. And he was terrified that if he let her out of his sight before the lyre was found and the Inquisitor destroyed, he’d lose her like he’d lost his dad, his mom, and his aunt.

  Instead he let the tyre go. ‘You got me. I’m talking to you because Matt will do just about anything you ask him to do.’

  Em smiled and jumped from the swing. ‘You got that right.’

  Rome

  7.

  Memento Mori

  On Callum’s last try, the massive wooden door unlocked with a click. He steppe
d inside the small foyer, locked the door behind him and climbed the narrow marble stairs two at a time. At the top of the stairs, the landing was suffused with light from a high round window where centuries ago an attic might have been, its space long since demolished. To his left was a tiny gift shop and the museum office; to the right the entrance to the main room, a library panelled in dark mahogany with floor-to-ceiling shelves packed with leather-bound books and literary artefacts from the generation of English Romantic poets and writers who’d once lived in the house. Many of the most valuable artefacts were secured behind glass.

  Flipping through a set of keys, Callum unlocked the double doors into the library. He inhaled the sharp smells of old books and lemon polish that permeated the fustiness of the windowless room. Once a sitting room where Percy Bysshe Shelley, his young wife and writer Mary Shelley, Lord Byron, John Keats, their friends and lovers worked and played (and in Keats’ case died), its haunting aura quickened his pulse.

  Many of Keats’ manuscripts had been separated from their original folios when Keats died. His friends, fraught with grief, broke them up and distributed them among themselves as memento mori. It was to one of the cases near the separated manuscripts that Callum went right away. Easing a leather folder from his messenger bag, he untied it and spread a single illustrated sheet on the glass lid.

  The ink woodcut was probably his best work since university, where he’d forged everything from letters home to parents to fake IDs, graduating to birth certificates and letters of recommendation from professors. Pietra had helped him see how he was wasting his talents. He took a deep breath.

  The last time he’d seen Pietra had been in a seedy morgue, hours after a drunk scooter driver had hit her in heavy traffic on the Via della Conciliazione, killing her instantly and fleeing the scene. Finishing their treasure hunt had become his own memento mori.

  Don’t think of Pietra, he told himself.

  He took one last look at the document’s faded watermark: a strange family crest, a coat of arms with a flying stag at its centre that had given him the most difficulty. The copy didn’t need to be perfect, it just needed to be good enough to delay detection of the theft. It would have to do. Time was up.

  With the smallest key on the set, Callum unlocked the glass top on the wooden case. An alarm beeped softly under the lid, counting down the forty-five seconds for Callum to do what he had to do and get the case locked again. Reaching underneath the heavy lid, he carefully slid out the rare single sheet folio.

  8.

  Raise a Glass

  Pietra had discovered the value of the illustration when they first settled in their flat in Rome. Unlike Callum, she had aced her exams at Edinburgh and been accepted to a post-doc lit and art programme at Sapienza, the University of Rome. She was researching the Rossetti family – Christina, the English poet, and her brother, Gabriel Dante, the Pre-Raphaelite artist – when she came across a reference to Lord Byron’s ‘Tree of Life’. Was it a lost poem perhaps? Priceless, if so. The answer to all their financial problems – but only if they could find it.

  The day Pietra discovered a solid lead, they’d celebrated with a bottle of not-their-usual-cheap-piss Chianti.

  ‘John Polidori was Byron’s doctor and friend,’ she told Callum breathlessly between kisses. ‘In 1814 Byron needed to get out of England because of a series of sex scandals, and he allowed Polidori to tag along with him to Italy.’

  ‘Like us,’ said Callum, raising his glass.

  ‘Like us,’ Pietra agreed, ‘only with servants, gold carriages, and much better vino.’

  Callum shoved the pillow behind his head, staring up at the wooden beams on the sloped attic ceiling of their garret rooms. ‘And who wis he when he was at hame?’ Callum said, mimicking his gran’s favourite phrase in his broadest Scottish accent.

  Pietra rested her notepad on her chest and looked over at him. ‘I do love when you talk dirty, mio amore.’

  He set down his glass and crawled to her, nuzzling her neck, whispering, ‘It’s a braw bricht moonlicht nicht.’

  She laughed, shoving him away. ‘Let me finish.’

  ‘OK. What does this Polidori guy have to do with Byron’s lost poem?’

  ‘That’s the best part,’ said Pietra. ‘I don’t think Byron’s “Tree of Life” is a poem.’

  Callum loved how passionate she’d become about this search, her intensity and focus overshadowing their continued dive into poverty and multiple bills that were past due. She refused to ask her well-connected Roman family for help, and he had no family he wanted to ask. His gran, maybe, but she’d tell his mum. No doubt about that.

  Pietra gathered her long black hair into a loose ponytail. ‘John Polidori killed himself shortly after he wrote an especially awful epic poem called “The Fall of the Angels.”’ She grabbed a book from the table. ‘Look at this.’

  ‘What am I looking at?’

  ‘This illustration is the cover for the poem.’

  ‘It looks like a tree from a Robert Crumb drawing.’ Callum looked more closely. ‘Are those people inside its trunk? Makes it look like the tree’s shitting them out.’

  ‘I think that’s what it’s meant to look like. Like they’re being defecated from the world. And those images at the end of the branches look like ancient temples. But that’s not the strangest thing about it.’ Pietra tapped the caption.

  Callum read it aloud. ‘The Tree of Life marks the way to the Second Kingdom and its untold riches.’

  ‘Look at the name at the bottom,’ said Pietra. ‘It’s difficult to make out, but can you see?’

  ‘Byron,’ said Callum in surprise. ‘I didn’t know Byron was an artist.’

  ‘Me either,’ she said, shrugging. ‘Not a serious one anyway. But everyone sketched and doodled back then, and that’s why this drawing will be worth something to a collector.’ Her eyes gleamed. ‘And “untold riches” to us.’

  ‘How?’ Callum said uneasily, already guessing the answer.

  ‘You’re going to steal it and replace it with one of your forgeries. You’ll have to get a voluntary job at the Keats Museum where the original is, of course. The Dundonal name can come in useful for once. With your talents, we could get away with it.’

  Callum couldn’t help himself. The thrill of working again, of flexing his unique artistic muscles was too much to resist. Plus, he’d flirted with their landlord as much as he could. Soon, they’d have to pay the rent.

  He stood directly beneath the double skylights, noting the vines stretching from the bulbous trunk that looked like a prodigious bum and the pictorial glyphs etched on its main branches. ‘OK, I’ll bite,’ he said, dropping the book and scooping her into his arms. ‘Where is this Keats Museum?’

  Pietra smiled. ‘Right here,’ she said as he carried her over to the mattress, kissing her neck. ‘In Rome.’

  *

  Callum choked back the rest of the memory of that day. Slipping his forgery of Byron’s illustration inside the case, he locked it, and silenced the alarm.

  ‘No turning back now, amore,’ he said into the silence.

  Glasgow

  9.

  American Pie

  In the front room of the Georgian mansion, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio was about to skunk Matt Calder in a cribbage game that had the loser promising to cook dinner. Both men were drinking, Matt coffee and Caravaggio the previous night’s sangria. Although the Orion safe-house was sparsely furnished, it had games, a stocked fridge, a big TV and encrypted WiFi.

  Em loomed over her twin brother’s shoulder. Born three minutes apart, the twins were as alike in their pale Celtic complexions and sharp features as they were unalike in their physical stature. Em was athletic but petite, while Matt was over six feet and built like a runner.

  ‘Can’t you let him win for once, Matt,’ said Em checking the pegs on the cribbage board. ‘Your spaghetti Bolognese isn’t up to much, but Caravaggio can only cook one thing, and I’m not eating it.’

&n
bsp; Matt’s shades were up on his head, holding his long hair off his face. Tiny threads of gold flecked his kaleidoscopic irises. He regarded Caravaggio tipping on the back legs of the chair across from him.

  ‘He’s cheating, Em. You may get my spaghetti after all.’

  Caravaggio tried to look hurt, but mostly just looked less mischievous, his dark eyes widening. ‘That five of clubs caught in my sleeve. It was an honest mistake.’

  Matt snorted, tossing his losing hand into the middle of the table. He stretched his muscles and walked to the windows at the front of the house. ‘You win, Michele. I can’t take any more card games. Were you yelling for me, Em?’

  ‘I have a question for you to consider,’ Em said. ‘What if we went back to Rome with Rémy and you helped him to… “see”?’ She put the word in air quotes.

  ‘Don’t do that,’ said Matt, frowning.

  ‘Hear her out,’ protested Rémy.

  ‘What if we were really quick?’ continued Em. ‘We don’t need much time. We just need you to help Rémy figure out how his face got on to a stone frieze showing the coronation of the King of the Underworld.’

  Caravaggio’s feet dropped to the floor with a thud. ‘I’m not going back into that Nephilim’s lair,’ he said. ‘He wants to kill me, if you remember.’

  Matt scratched his head with the leg of his shades, his eyes like stained glass, a jigsaw of colours. ‘Rémy wants me to use my historical vision and replay a moment in ancient history when an altar frieze was created?’ he repeated. ‘First, we don’t know anything about where or when the frieze was created. And second, I need to be in the exact spot to replay anything.’

  ‘What if we could find out where and when?’ said Em, twirling a strand of her hair.

  ‘How?’

  ‘The library at the Abbey, back in Auchinmurn.’