by Chuck Hogan
He pulled the Lumen from Nora’s bag and set it upon the nicked desk. Eph took a deep breath and tried to clear his mind, then opened the first pages. The book felt very ordinary in his hands, nothing like the magical object from his dream. He turned the pages slowly, remaining calm when nothing happened at first, no lightning bolts of inspiration or revelation. The silver threading in the illuminated pages looked dull to his eye underneath the fluorescent ceiling fixtures, the text flat and lifeless. He tried the symbols, touching the page with his fingertips.
Still nothing. How could this be? Perhaps he was just too nervous, too amped up. Nora appeared at his door, Mr. Quinlan behind her. He shaded his eyes with his hands to block them out—trying to block everything out, most important, his own doubts. He closed the book and closed his eyes, trying to force himself to relax. Let the others think what they wanted to think. He went inward. He went to thoughts of Zack. Of freeing his son from the clutches of the Master. To ending this darkness on Earth. To the higher angels flying around inside his head.
He opened his eyes and sat up. He opened the book with confidence. He took his time looking at the text. Studying the same illustrations he had looked at one hundred times before. It wasn’t just a dream, he told himself. He believed this. But, at the same time, nothing was happening. Something was wrong, something was off. The Lumen was holding on to all of its secrets.
“Maybe if you try to sleep,” suggested Nora. “Enter it through your subconscious.”
Eph smiled, appreciating her encouragement, having expected derision. The others wanted him to succeed. They needed him to succeed. He could not let them down.
Eph looked to Mr. Quinlan, hoping the Born had some suggestion or insight.
It will come.
These words made Eph doubt himself more than ever. Mr. Quinlan had no idea, other than faith, faith in Eph, while Eph’s own faith was fading. What have I done? he thought. What will we do now?
“We’ll leave you alone,” said Nora, backing away, closing the door.
Eph shook off his despair. He sat back in the chair and rested his hands upon the book and closed his eyes, waiting for something to happen.
He drifted, at times, but kept waking up, having no luck directing his dreams. Nothing came to him. He tried reading the text two more times before giving up, slamming the book shut, and dreading the walk back out to the others.
Heads turned, Fet and Nora read his expression and his posture, their expectations dashed. Eph had no words. He knew that they understood his distress and frustration, but that didn’t make failure any more acceptable.
Gus came in, shaking rain off his jacket. He passed Creem sitting on the floor near Mr. Quinlan and the nuclear device.
“I got us two rides,” said Gus. “A big army Jeep, enclosed, and an Explorer.” He looked at Mr. Quinlan. “We can get the silver grille onto the Jeep, if you want to help me. They run, but no guarantees. We’ll have to siphon more fuel along the way, or else find a working gas station.” He looked to Fet.
Fet held up his device. “All I know is this is a weatherproof fuse that you can set by hand. Either immediate or delay mode. Just turn this switch.”
“How long is the delay?” asked Gus.
“Not sure. At this point, we’ll have to take what we can get. The wire connections look like they will match up.” Fet shrugged, indicating that he had done as much as he could do. “All we need now is a destination.”
Eph said, “I must be doing something wrong. Or something we forgot, or . . . something I just don’t know.”
Fet said, “We’ve burned up most of the daylight. When night falls they’re going to start coming for us. We have to move on from here, regardless.”
Eph nodded fast, gripping the book. “I don’t know. I don’t know what to tell you.”
Gus said, “We’re done. That’s what you’re telling us.”
Nora said to Eph, “You didn’t get anything from the book? Not even—”
Eph shook his head.
“What about the vision? You said it’s an island.”
“One of dozens of islands. Over twelve in the Bronx alone, eight or so in Manhattan, half a dozen in Staten Island . . . Like at the mouth of a giant lake.” Eph searched his tired mind. “That’s all I know.”
Nora said, “We can maybe find some military maps. Somewhere around here.”
Gus laughed. “I’m crazy for going along with this, for trusting a crazy coward traitor. For not killing you and saving me this misery.”
Eph noticed Mr. Quinlan doing his usual silent thing. Standing there with arms folded, patiently waiting for something to happen. Eph wanted to go to him, to tell the Born that his faith in Eph was misplaced.
Fet intervened before Eph could. “Look,” he said. “After all we’ve been through—all that we’re going through—there’s nothing I can tell you that you don’t know yourself. I just want you to remember the old man for a second. He died for that thing in your hands, remember. He sacrificed himself so that we would have it. I’m not saying this to put any more pressure on you here. I’m saying it to take the pressure away. The pressure’s gone, as far as I can see. We’re at the end. We’ve got no more. You’re it. We’re with you, thumbs up or thumbs down. I know you’re thinking about your boy; I know it eats at you. But just think about the old man for a moment. Reach down deep. And if there is anything there, you’ll find it—you’ll find it now.”
Eph tried to imagine Professor Setrakian there with him right now, wearing his tweed suit, leaning on the oversized wolf’s-head walking stick that hid his silver blade. The vampire scholar and killer. Eph opened the book. He recalled the one time Setrakian got to touch and read these pages he had sought for decades, just after the auction. Eph turned to the illustration Setrakian had shown them, a two-page spread showing a complex mandala in silver, black, and red. Over the illustration, on tracing paper, Setrakian had laid the outline of a six-limbed archangel.
The Occido Lumen was a book about vampires—not, Eph realized, a book for vampires. Silver-faced and -edged in order to keep it out of the hands of the dread strigoi. Painstakingly designed to be vampire-proof.
Eph thought back to his vision . . . finding the book upon the outdoor bed . . .
It had been daylight . . .
Eph walked to the door. He opened it and stepped out into the parking lot, looking up at the swirling dark clouds beginning to efface the pale orb of the sun.
The others followed him outside into the gloaming, except for Mr. Quinlan, Creem, and Gus, who remained at the door.
Eph ignored them, turning his gaze to the book in his hands. Sunlight. Even if vampires could somehow circumvent the silver protections of the Lumen, they could never read it by natural light, due to the virus-killing properties of the ultraviolet C range.
He opened the book, tipping its pages toward the fading sun like a face basking in the last of the day’s warmth. The text took on new life, jumping off the ancient paper. Eph flipped to the first of the illustrations, the inlaid silver strands sparkling, the image bright with new life.
He quickly searched the text. Words appeared behind words, as though written in invisible ink. Watermarks changed the very nature of the illustrations, and detailed designs emerged behind otherwise bare pages of straightforward text. A new layer of ink reacted to the ultraviolet light . . .
The two-page mandala, viewed in direct sunlight, evinced the archangel image in a delicate hand, appearing quite silver against the aged paper.
The Latin text did not quite translate itself as magically as it had in his dream, but its meaning became clear. Most elucidating was a diagram revealed in the shape of a biohazard symbol, with points inside the flower arranged like points on a map.
On another page, certain letters were highlighted, which, when put together, formed a peculiar yet familiar word:
A H S U D A G U–W A H.
Eph read quickly, the insights leaping into his brain through his eyes. The pale sunlight faded quic
kly at the end, and so did the book’s enhancements. So much more to read and to learn. But for now, Eph had seen enough. His hands continued to tremble. The Lumen had shown him the way.
Eph walked back inside past Fet and Nora. He felt neither relief nor exhilaration, still vibrating like a tuning fork.
Eph looked at Mr. Quinlan, who saw it in his face.
Sunlight. Of course.
The others knew something had happened. Except for Gus, who remained skeptical.
“Well?” said Nora.
Eph said, “I’m ready now.”
“Ready for what?” said Fet. “Ready to go?”
Eph looked at Nora. “I need a map.”
She ran off into the offices. They heard desk drawers slamming.
Eph just stood there, like a man recovering from an electric shock. “It was the sunlight,” he explained. “Reading the Lumen in natural sunlight. It was like the pages opened up for me. I saw it all . . . or would have, if I’d had more time. The original Native American name for this place was ‘Burned Earth.’ But their word for ‘burned’ is the same as ‘black.’ ”
Oscura. Dark.
“Chernobyl, the failed attempt—the simulation,” said Fet. “It appeased the Ancients because ‘Chernobyl’ means ‘Black Soil.’ And I saw a Stoneheart crew excavating sites around a geologically active area of hot springs outside Reykjavik known as Black Pool.”
“But there are no coordinates in the book,” said Nora.
“Because it was beneath the water,” said Eph. “At the time Ozryel’s remains were cast away, this site was underwater. The Master didn’t emerge until hundreds of years later.”
The youngest one. The last.
A triumphant yell, and then Nora came running back with a sheaf of oversized topographical maps of the northeastern United States, with cellophane street atlas overlays.
Eph flipped the pages to New York State. The top part of the map included the southern region of Ontario, Canada.
“Lake Ontario,” he said. “To the east here.” At the mouth of the Saint Lawrence River, east of Wolfe Island, a cluster of tiny, unnamed islands was grouped together, labeled “Thousand Islands.” “It’s there. One of those. Just off the New York coast.”
“The burial site?” said Fet.
“I don’t know what its name is today. The original Native American name for the island was ‘Ahsudagu-wah.’ Roughly translated from the Onondaga language as ‘Dark Place’ or ‘Black Place.’ ”
Fet slid the road atlas out from beneath Eph’s hands, flipping back to New Jersey.
“How do we find the island?” said Nora.
Eph said, “It’s shaped roughly like the biohazard symbol, like a three-petaled flower.”
Fet quickly plotted their course through New Jersey into Pennsylvania, then north to the top of New York State. He ripped out the pages. “Interstate Eighty West to Interstate Eighty-one North. Gets us right to the Saint Lawrence River.”
“How long?” said Nora.
“Roughly three hundred miles. We can do that in five or six hours.”
“Maybe straight highway time,” said Nora. “Something tells me it won’t be as simple as that.”
“It’s going to figure out which way we’re headed and try to cut us off,” Fet said.
“We have to get going,” said Nora. “We barely have a head start as it is.” She looked to the Born. “Can you load the bomb in the—”
When her voice dropped off, the others turned in alarm. Mr. Quinlan stood next to the unwrapped device. But Creem was gone.
Gus ran to the door. “What the . . . ?” He came back to the Born. “You let him get away? I brought him into this thing—I was going to take him out.”
We don’t need him anymore. And yet he can still be of use to us.
Gus stared. “How? That rat bastard doesn’t deserve to live.”
Nora said, “What if they catch him? He knows too much.”
He knows just enough. Trust me.
“Just enough?”
To draw fear from the Master.
Eph understood now. He saw it as plain as he had the symbolism in the Lumen. “The Master will be on his way here; that’s guaranteed. We need to challenge it. To scare it. The Master pretends to be above all emotion, but I have seen it angry. It is, going back to biblical times, a vengeful creature. That hasn’t changed. When it administers its kingdom dispassionately, then it is in complete control. It is efficient and detached, all-seeing. But when it is challenged directly, it makes mistakes. It acts rashly. Remember, it became possessed of a bloodlust after laying siege to Sodom and Gomorrah. It murdered a fellow archangel in the grip of a homicidal mania. It lost control.”
“You want the Master to find him?”
“We want the Master to know we have the nuke and the means to detonate it. And that we know the location of the Black Site. We have to get it to overcommit. We have the upper hand now. It’s the Master’s turn to be desperate.”
To be afraid.
Gus stepped up to Eph then. Standing close, trying to read Eph the way Eph had read the book. Taking the measure of the man. Gus held in his hands a small carton of smoke grenades, some of the nonlethal weapons the vampires had left behind.
“So now we have to protect the guy who was going to stab us all in the back,” said Gus. “I don’t get you. And I don’t get this—any of this, but especially you being able to read the book. Why you? Of all of us.”
Eph’s response was frank and honest. “I don’t know, Gus. But I think that part of this is I’m going to find out.”
Gus wasn’t expecting such a guileless response. He saw in Eph’s eyes the look of a man who was scared, and also accepting. Of a man resigned to his fate, whichever way it went.
Gus wasn’t ready to drink the Kool-Aid yet, but he was ready to commit to the final leg of this journey. “I think we’re all going to find out,” he said.
Fet said, “The Master most of all.”
The Dark Place
THE THROAT WAS buried deep in the earth beneath the cold Atlantic sea. The silt around it had turned black upon contact with it and nothing would grow or live near it.
The same was true of every other site where the remains of Ozryel were interred. The angelic flesh remained incorrupt and unchanged, but its blood seeped into the earth and slowly radiated out. The blood had a will of its own, each strand moving blindly, instinctively upward, traversing the soil, hidden from the sun, seeking a host. This is the manner in which the blood worms were born. Within them they contained the remnant of the human blood, tinting their tissue, guiding them toward the scent of their potential host. But also within them they carried the will of their original flesh. The will of the arms, the wings, the throat . . .
Their thin bodies wriggled blindly for the longest distances. Many of the worms died, infertile emissaries baked by the merciless heat of the earth or stopped by a geological obstacle that proved impossible to negotiate. They all strayed from their birth sites, some even transported away along with the earth on unwitting insect or animal vectors. Eventually they found a host—and they dug in the flesh, like a dutiful parasite, burrowing deep. In the beginning, it took the pathogen weeks to supplant, to hijack, the will and the tissue of the infected victim. Even parasites and viruses learn through trial and error—and learn they did. By the fifth human host body, the Ancients began to master the art of survival and supplantation. They extended their domain through infection, and they learned to play by the new earthbound rules of this game.
And they became masters at it.
The youngest one, the last to be born, was the Master, the throat. God’s capricious verbs gave movement to the very earth and the sea and made them clash and push upward the land that formed the Master’s birth site. It was a peninsula and then, hundreds of years later, an island.
The capillary worms that emanated from the throat were separated from their site of origin and wandered away the farthest, for in this newly formed l
and, humans had not yet set foot. It was useless and painful to try to nurture or dominate a lower form of life, a wolf or a bear; their control was imperfect and limited, and their synapses were alien and short-lived. Each of these invasions proved fruitless, but the lesson learned by one parasite was instantly learned by the hive mind. Soon their numbers were reduced to only a handful, scattered far away from the birth site: blind, lost, and weak.
Under a cold autumn moon a young Iroquois brave set camp on an earth patch dozens of miles from the birth site of the throat. He was an Onondaga—a keeper of the fire—and as he lay down on the ground, he was overtaken by a single capillary worm, burying itself into his neck.
The pain awakened the man and he instantly reached for the wounded area. The worm was still not entirely burrowed in, so he was able to grab the tail end of it. He pulled with all his might, but the thing wiggled and squirmed against his efforts and finally slipped from his grip, digging into the muscular structure of his neck. The pain was unbearable, like a slow, burning stab, as it wriggled down his throat and chest and finally disappeared under his left arm as the creature blindly discovered his circulation system.
As the parasite overtook the body, a fever started, lasting for almost two weeks and dehydrating its host body. But once the supplantation was complete, the Master sought refuge in the darkened caves and the cold, soothing filth in them. It found that, for reasons beyond its comprehension, the soil in which it overtook its host body provided it with the most comfort, and so it carried around a small clump of earth wherever it went. By now the worms had invaded and taken nourishment from almost every organ in the host’s body, multiplying in his bloodstream. His skin grew taut and pale, contrasting sharply with his tribal tattoos and his ravenous eyes, veiled by the nictitating membrane, glowing brightly in the moonlight. A few weeks went by without any nourishment but finally, close to dawn, he fell upon a group of Mohawk hunters.
The Master’s control over its vehicle was still tentative, but thirst compensated for fighting precision and ability. The transference was faster the next time—multiple worms going into each victim through the wet stinger. Even when the attacks were clumsy and barely completed, they accomplished their end. Two of the hunters fought bravely, their throw-axes doing damage to the body of the possessed Onondaga warrior. But, in the end, even as that body slowly bled out into the earth, the parasites overtook the bodies of their attackers and soon the pack multiplied. Now the Master was three.
