by Eric Griffin
Julius tried to shut out the noise of the fire alarm; it played on his nerves a hundredfold more than injury or thought of Final Death. In a gesture of habit, he tried to brush his dreadlocks away from his face and noticed for the first time that they were gone, burned or melted away by the fumes of the Greek fire.
The sound of shattering glass drew his attention from the two ghouls he was holding at bay. The final glass partition, a tall cubicle of sorts near the center of the gallery, toppled over and smashed into thousands of tiny black shards. The ghoul with the long, jagged spikes protruding from his body, the largest of the three who’d overturned the barrels, stalked through the wreckage. The others, showing their first attitude other than the desire to rend and kill, deferred to him. They parted before him, allowing him to wade unhindered through the sea of foam, glass, smoke, and body parts.
In the other direction, Benison drove his sword three-fourths of the way through the neck of the last ghoul that stood against him. The creature toppled with a majestic slowness so much like that of the glass cubicle that Julius expected him to shatter into pieces as well. But the ghoul rather landed with a dull thud. Behind the position he’d held stood an undulating black curtain, a fluid wall of shadow. Battle ghouls on one side, the full force of the Lasombra shadow on the other.
The prince, for the first instant since his wife had burned before his eyes, turned to face Julius. His stare was no longer blank, but his eyes were glassy, and the whites so bloodshot they seemed they might burst. “Come, my archon,” said Benison, in a tone more respectful than he’d ever assumed toward Julius before. “We must withdraw into the woods.”
With that, the prince turned and stepped into the shadow, disappearing from sight.
The woods’ Julius, uncomprehending, stared after him. Had Benison taken complete leave of his senses after all? There was always that chance with a Malkavian. The woods. And then the prince had disappeared into the Lasombra shadow.
Julius was perplexed by both Benison’s words and deeds. Nor was the Brujah enthusiastic about the prospect of charging into the blackness that had been trying to ensnare him all night—but the ghouls were closing in again, emboldened by their spiked leader, who seemed to Julius more than a ghoul, Tzimisce perhaps. The archon knew well enough that the best chance he had (if he had any chance) was to stay with Benison.
So Julius turned his back on the ghouls and strode forcefully into the shadow—where he was caught and held fast.
Tuesday, 22 June 1999, 1:21 AM
Outside the High Museum of Art
Atlanta, Georgia
Marcus poked half-heartedly at the inert form of the vampire that had crashed through the fourth-floor window and landed on the street with such a resounding whomp ten or fifteen minutes earlier. He could smell the vitae leaking from the broken body. It would be an easy thing to haul up the carcass—it looked to be a particularly scrawny vampire—and drain the last of its blood. But Marcus was in no mood to indulge himself.
There was a battle going on within those walls. Hearing the crash of broken glass, watching the body sail through the air and then come to such an abrupt, bone-smashing stop, had gotten his blood up. He’d been primed for the order to join the attack, to break bones, to rend flesh—the order that had never come.
Instead, he and Delona stood out in the street like damned watchdogs. There weren’t even any mortals to kill or chase off. The roadblocks had worked too well.
“Get away from that!” Marcus growled at Delona.
He’d already chased her away from the body once. Not that there was any reason for her not to help herself to that vampire’s blood—only that Marcus didn’t feel like drinking it, and so he didn’t feel like watching her drink it either. Besides, he was starting to like this business of ordering her around, and the way she flinched at everything he said, like she was afraid he might do to her what he’d done to Delora.
But despite those tiny pleasures, he’d had enough of waiting in the street.
“Come on,” he ordered her.
There were plenty of patrols around the museum. One less wouldn’t hurt anything. Besides, Marcus suspected there would be plenty of vitae to scavenge inside. And, if he was lucky, maybe some people to kill.
Tuesday, 22 June 1999, 1:29 AM
Fourth floor, the High Museum of Art
Atlanta, Georgia
Damn Benison and his whole clan!
The tenebrous blanket of shadow smothered Julius’s every attempt at movement. He might as well have been trying to lift the weight of an entire ocean. He called on the power of his blood, but he had already spent much of his strength in surviving this long. If anything, the shadow tightened about him as he struggled; it snaked down his mouth, tickled the back of his throat, held him suspended like a fly in amber. Perhaps he would become a fossil to grace the halls of the museum. More likely, he would be nothing more than a pile of ash by morning.
This is Benison s fault! Julius tried to use his anger to fuel his body where blood was not enough. He arranged all this just to get me! Sacrificed his city, his wife—all just to get me!
The idea was absurd. In the back of his mind, Julius knew that, but caught as he was by the Lasombra shadow, with the Tzimisce battle ghouls no doubt bearing down upon him, he grasped for any sliver of conviction that might engender enough rage within him to overcome his fatigue. His deep-seeded mistrust of the Malkavian ruler of Atlanta, who until a short while ago Julius had planned to dispatch himself and who had shouted murderous threats at him, was an easy mark—and Julius felt his color begin to rise.
But the shadow held firm.
He felt a hand on his shoulder, reaching around his neck. The ghouls were on him, were pulling him by the head, but still the shadow would not relinquish its claim to him. Enormous pressure threatened to rip his head from his shoulders. Julius added his own strength to the hands that pulled him—at least if he were free of the shadow he could go down fighting—and at last he budged.
Julius tightened his grip on his sword. He couldn’t afford to leave it in the wall of shadow. His captors, if they were smart—which, with the ghouls, was a considerable if—would pull only his head free of the shadow, then lop it off. If he could get his sword-arm free, he’d stand a chance, however slim.
The darkness wavered for a brief moment, then his face was beyond it, his head locked in the iron grip of—
“Benison!”
The prince was pulling him free, an inch at a time, despite the greedy determination of the shadow. Somehow the Malkavian had made it through on his own. Now Julius too was out, and on the side opposite the ghouls—but only for a moment did the shadow divide them.
As Julius came free, the darkness parted, and the ghouls charged through.
The first swing of Julius’s sword took off the hand and face of one. His next blow disemboweled a second.
“Archon, this is no time to dally!” called Benison from behind him.
Julius turned to see the prince slip out an emergency exit, and for the first time since the great bronze doors had toppled over and the Greek fire had poured down the steps—minutes that seemed like hours—hope took hold within Julius.
He slashed at the closest ghoul, then sprinted past one last damaged statue—a grotesque rendering of the slain Abel, now fully missing an arm that had been mostly intact earlier—and to the door. Julius threw open the emergency exit, slammed it behind himself, and was greeted by a world of madness.
Tuesday, 22 June 1999, 1:32 AM
Fourth floor, the High Museum of Art
Atlanta, Georgia
Marcus opened the door to the gallery just a crack and peered through. He still hoped he would get to kill someone, but he was having second thoughts about coming in without orders. He’d hurried up the winding, circular ramp that ringed the main lobby of the museum—or, rather, he’d jumped up, bypassing the first two and a half stories, and then hurried the rest of the way.
“What do you see?” Delona nag
ged him from behind.
Marcus backhanded her harder than he’d meant to, and she flew backward over the railing and fell down the cylindrical well to the lobby floor, four stories below.
“Uh-oh.”
But Marcus couldn’t be bothered just presently. Besides, Delona was a tough little booger. She’d recover. Eventually.
Marcus eased open the door. All the activity seemed to be at the other end of the gallery, as far as he could tell. Smoke hung thick in the large, sprawling room, and some strange foam stood almost a foot deep, like there’d been a huge shaving-cream fight. A fire alarm added to the confusion. At the far end of the gallery, Bolon stood with maybe a dozen of the battle ghouls.
Where are all the others? Marcus wondered. He hadn’t seen other signs of fighting on the way up, and there’d been at least four times as many ghouls before. Marcus instantly forgot his reluctance at having disobeyed orders—just as Delona was now out of sight and out of mind—and trudged over to Bolon. The commander was a fellow Tzimisce and one of the few of anyone as large as Marcus. With each step, Marcus’s wide, flat feet crunched down through the foam and crushed whatever was beneath: glass, marble, bones.
As Marcus reached Bolon, he became confused. The wind was blowing—it looked like it was blowing—but he couldn’t feel it. After another second, he realized that it was just a trick of the light. Shadows were swirling and whipping around violently, and it looked almost like light coming through the leaves on a windy day. Marcus looked around, but there weren’t any trees inside.
“What are you doing here?” Bolon demanded.
Marcus looked at Bolon but was still confused by the puzzle of the rippling light and no wind. Several of the ghouls were pounding on a large metal door. They had ripped off the panic bar, but the door wouldn’t open.
Before Marcus could think of an answer for Bolon, a strange dark shadow interposed itself between them. A second or two later, the shadow was a man, a fairly tanned vampire with black hair and a dark uniform. Marcus recognized the crest of Monçada’s legionnaires above the breast pocket.
“How’d you do that?” Marcus asked, not used to seeing people materialize out of nothing.
“Commander Vallejo,” said Bolon, ignoring Marcus for the moment, which suited Marcus just fine.
The smaller, darker man looked tired. The shadows he’d stepped from seemed reluctant to relinquish him. They formed deep pools in the considerable hollows of his cheeks and beneath his eyes.
“We cannot pass the door,” said Vallejo, frustrated. “I’ve never come across anything like this—some type of seal that I can’t explain.”
Bolon nodded gravely. Marcus wasn’t sure what they were talking about, but the mention of a seal made him think of a trip he’d taken to Sea World as a boy, and of the seals that had tossed balls back and forth without ever dropping a single one. That had been a happy time for him, but he couldn’t remember it properly with all the banging on the door that was going on. Battle ghouls were like that. They didn’t have much sense.
“Huh,” Marcus grunted as he shoved aside the ghouls. He pressed against the door with all his weight, but it didn’t budge. “Stuck pretty good.” So he took three steps back and launched himself at it, using all the strength of his massive legs and the force of his considerable mass that he could muster.
The door gave way this time, almost folded in half around Marcus’s head and shoulders. He stumbled through the doorway and landed in a heap, completely unprepared for what awaited him.
Tuesday, 22 June 1999, 1:36 AM
Fourth floor, the High Museum of Art
Atlanta, Georgia
Julius ignored the pounding on the door against his back. Ghouls behind him be damned, he couldn’t understand what was before him. Every few seconds, he saw what he knew he should be seeing—metal stairs going both up and down. But for the majority of those minutes he stood with his back against the door, the scene before him was of a steep, wooded, mountain path—not of the inside of a museum in the middle of Atlanta.
The night sounds and mountain smells were even right. And there stood Benison, partway down the path—the stairs, dammit!
“This way, archon,” urged the prince. His emerald eyes shone with enthusiasm now, and instead of the suit he’d worn before, he was clothed in a Confederate uniform. “We’ll rally the company. Sherman will never take Kennesaw!”
The sudden conviction in his voice was as baffling to Julius as all the rest. The prince seemed to have recovered from the death of his wife, or perhaps he’d plunged far more deeply into madness. But that didn’t come close to explaining everything else: a mountain path, trees, outdoors where there should be indoors or at least an urban landscape.
The pounding on the door steadied Julius. He knew there were Sabbat battle ghouls on the other side—not a situation that he was pleased with, but at least it made sense. The door shouldn’t have held this long. Even with Julius holding it closed, the Sabbat should have been able to break through already. It was as if whatever madness had taken root here was determined to keep the portal closed.
Julius was not reassured when sanity reasserted itself, and the door gave way and came crashing in on top of him. It bowled him over, and very nearly knocked him down the stairs-path. An experienced warrior, he managed to hold on to his sword as well as to avoid a serious fall.
The creature that had dislodged the door and stumbled into the stairwell-wilderness was too powerful to be a ghoul. Like them, he was a veritable giant, a walking juggernaut, but he appeared at first glance more self-possessed, less deranged, as he climbed to his feet.
Apparently the mountainside surroundings caught him by surprise as well, for the juggernaut gazed around in obvious puzzlement at the trees, and the rocks, and the clear night sky. Julius took advantage of the delay. He slashed with his sword, and the behemoth’s steaming entrails spilled out onto the ground. The creature dropped to his knees, but that was all Julius saw. He turned and bounded down the trail after Prince Benison.
This new, inexplicable reality, the alternating stairwell-wilderness, Julius realized, was free from the damnable Lasombra shadow. That had been true from the moment the emergency door had slammed shut behind him, but it was another phenomenon that he didn’t understand. No mere door could hold back that tide of inky blackness, and there was not the remotest chance that the Lasombra didn’t want to pursue him and the prince. No, something else was at work here.
Julius rushed downward around a bend in the trail and came face to face with Benison, who was waiting expectantly. The Malkavian’s eyes still burned with an unnerving glee.
“Now we have them, archon! This way.”
Benison turned to the steep mountainside, where Julius saw, of all things, an old metal door right in the side of the mountain. The door was set into a wooden frame, all of which was bound by together by a rusty chain and padlock. Benison tore away the entire contraption and cast it aside, then took Julius by the arm. They stepped from the mountainside into a forest glade.
Julius craned his neck around, but the mountain was gone. A cave he could have understood. At least it would have been consistent with the madness around him. But to step from a winding mountain trail directly into a level clearing was…unfathomable.
“By the gods, what is this?” Julius exclaimed.
“Why, Archon Julius,” answered Benison almost playfully, “it’s the 37th Georgia, a regiment of Hood’s boys.”
And to Julius’s astonishment, truer words could not have been spoken, for double ranks of shabbily dressed Confederate soldiers were forming into a line of battle along the far edge of the clearing. Perhaps two hundred men bearing muskets waited, front rank kneeling before the second, ready to fire.
“This way, archon,” said Benison, again leading Julius by the arm. “We must seek a safer vantage.”
“This cannot be,” Julius muttered as he let himself be led out of the line of fire.
“God willing, General Sherman will
share your sentiment shortly. He will never wrest Kennesaw Mountain from us,” Benison reiterated.
“But the mountain’s gone….” But Julius was unable to form any reasonable argument, as the mountain never should have been there in the first place.
The Sabbat ghouls, now edging into the serendipitous clearing, appeared to share Julius’s disorientation. Their earlier relentlessness had given way to apprehension at their surroundings, the most dangerous part of which—the Confederate troops—now opened fire.
The simultaneous roar of the guns was deafening. Lead mini balls ripped through the ghouls, tearing away limbs, shattering bones. Julius could not believe what he saw.
Before he could again assert the impossibility of the scene before him, however, another roaring filled his ears. The metal stairwell had somehow rematerialized at the far end of the clearing, and a twisting flood of pure black was pouring down it and over the field. This landscape of madness no longer held the Lasombra at bay.
The rushing shadow swept over the mutilated ghouls and on toward the line of battle. A second volley from the 37th Georgia had no effect on the darkness, which now hit the hapless soldiers like a tidal wave at landfall. It brushed them aside and swallowed their death cries. Then the darkness rose to a terrible height, only to crash down upon Benison.
The Malkavian prince disappeared beneath the tide of blackness, and simultaneously the landscape wavered, as heat rising from the earth on a summer day obscures vision. But it was the landscape itself that wrinkled, then swirled into its own tidal wave of color and sound and motion. This wave of pure force, the swirling flotsam of Benison’s own dementia incarnate, smashed into the darkness, and the shadow was broken. It fled like a thousand black vipers hurled toward every point of the compass.
