Ararat

by Christopher Golden

  Father Cornelius put his fingers in a mug full of water he’d already blessed and spattered a bit of it onto Adam’s face. Adam inhaled sharply, grin widening, and snapped his head around to stare at Meryam.

  “I should really tell you,” he said.

  The voice that came from his lips was not his. It was like his … enough like his that most of them probably would not have known the difference. But it had a ragged edge, a taunting quality that did not belong to him.

  “… hasten to our call for help,” Father Cornelius prayed, raising his voice as if in response. “Snatch from ruination and from the clutches of the noonday devil this human being made in your image and likeness. Strike terror, Lord, into the beast now laying waste your vineyard. Fill your servants with courage to fight manfully against that reprobate dragon—”

  He continued, splashing holy water onto Adam’s face and body again. For the first time, that painful, rictus grin faltered. Adam’s nostrils flared and he sneered at the priest. When Kim murmured an “amen,” some punctuation for the priest’s prayers, he gave a soft laugh.

  It isn’t real, Meryam told herself. This is some kind of game, something Adam devised for the camera.

  Meryam’s chest ached. Her right hand fluttered up to cover her mouth and she felt as if a barbed hook had been set deep in her gut and begun to tug hard, down inside her. In that moment she would have prayed to any god, given anything to be able to believe that it was all some prank, some hoax that Adam had not even shared with her.

  Her eyes burned with tears she seemed unable to shed. Calliope had no problem weeping, but Meryam could not.

  “Let your mighty hand cast him out of your servant, Adam,” Father Cornelius went on.

  Meryam forced herself to breathe, inhaling deeply the unnatural warmth of the passage, the scent of tea and smoke haunting her. Beyond the priest, the demon’s charred horns still gleamed with reflected light.

  On the floor, Adam began to shake. His grin twitched and his skull juddered against the ancient timber. A single fly buzzed past Meryam’s head and at first it meant nothing to her, just an insect, until it landed on Adam’s cheek and she heard Feyiz swear in Kurmanji beside her.

  “Someone want to tell me where the fuck the fly came from?” Walker asked quietly.

  For the first time, she heard fear in the voice of that stubborn, stalwart, brilliant man. Real fear, not simple trepidation. And it terrified her. Where had the fly come from, indeed, up on the side of this mountain in the middle of a blizzard?

  The fly crawled across the bridge of Adam’s nose, wings twitching. Calliope whimpered and began to lower her camera.

  “Keep shooting,” Meryam snapped at her, and she brought the camera back up.

  Adam laughed as Father Cornelius continued his prayers. Adam’s head turned again and he stared at Meryam with boiling contempt.

  “I should tell you,” the demon said. “I’m going to tell you, now, so I can watch your face when you hear it from this mouth.”

  Meryam stepped forward. The heat and the thickness of the air seemed to try to hold her back but she waded through it. Hakan stepped in her way, almost as if he did not hate her, almost as if he wished to protect her, but she thrust him aside and dropped to her knees and stared into the eyes of the thing behind her lover’s eyes.

  “He fucked her. Is that your big surprise? I don’t need you to tell me.”

  The grin pulled so wide that she saw Adam’s lower lip split, and then her tears came at last.

  “So you know?” the demon whispered. “No. You suspected but you didn’t know. Not until now. The pain in your eyes is glorious.”

  “You pulled the strings,” Meryam whispered. “You made it happen.”

  The demon smirked. “Of course I did. But I promise you, he made it easy.”

  Meryam froze. She felt hands on her and shrugged them off, thinking they belonged to Hakan. Instead she heard Feyiz’s soft voice in her ear, and when he touched her again she allowed him to pull her away, out of the priest’s way. She glanced up and saw Walker’s sympathy, saw Kim’s fear, but she would not look at the camera again. Would not look at Calliope.

  “Keep shooting,” she said, just in case the woman lost her nerve again. Calliope might want to look away, but Meryam would not allow it. For Adam’s sake, it would all be on film. After she was dead, he would be famous. He would be wealthy. He would always remember that she loved him.

  Of course, she’d be famous, too. But she’d be dead.

  The priest’s voice lulled her. She could only stand and stare. The lights flickered and the wind gusted for the first time in long minutes, forever hours, but the wind itself felt warm. The fly buzzed around Adam’s face and alighted on his lower lip. It crawled onto the teeth that were revealed by that terrible grin.

  “I adjure you, ancient serpent, by the judge of the living and the dead, by your Creator, by Him who has the power to consign you to Hell, to depart now in fear. Yield not to my own person but to the minister of Christ. For it is the power of Christ that compels you, who brought you low by His cross…”

  Adam continued to shake, slammed his head against the timbers again and again. The fly took wing again as he laughed, and then the insect landed upon the gleaming curve of his widened eye. He did not even blink.

  Mr. Avci began to pray in his own language, to his own god. From far off to the right, in the shadows of the mouth of the passage there, Wyn Douglas sobbed loudly and began to shout denials, insisting that none of this could be happening.

  Meryam’s skin stayed warm. Ice formed at the base of her brain. Her vision began to darken. How long since she’d eaten or slept? She wondered as she lost feeling in her hands and feet.

  How long till morning?

  Detached from herself, she spoke his name. Then she screamed it, as if she were watching his grip loosen from the edge of a cliff, as if she were watching him fall into an abyss. And wasn’t she, really? Meryam knew the answer, and screamed his name again.

  Laughing, his whole body shaking, Adam began to utter the filthiest profanity. He lolled his head again, stared at her as he raised it and smashed it down on the timber floor, as if he wanted to watch her eyes while he split open his own skull. Meryam thought she might still be screaming, but she couldn’t be sure.

  Walker and Hakan dropped to their knees. Father Cornelius might have shouted for them to do so. They grabbed Adam’s shoulders and pinned him down, and Walker held his head in place so he could not smash it against the wood again. Blood seeped through Adam’s hair and down the back of his neck, under the collar of his shirt.

  When Meryam exhaled again, her breath turned to mist. She felt the warmth still, but the air had gone frigid. Something shifted beyond the priest and his helpers and she looked and saw that the horned, crushed skull of the demon had tilted to one side, as if the caved-in face, the charred and shattered eye sockets, had turned to gaze at her as well.

  “Depart, then, transgressor. Depart, seducer, full of lies and cunning, foe of virtue, persecutor of the innocent. Give place, abominable creature, give way to—”

  The lights went out. Someone shrieked. Seconds passed that Meryam could only count in the gallop of her heart, and then the lights flickered on again.

  Adam’s eyes were closed. His chest rose and fell in a sigh. His color had improved, although the beads of sweat remained. He hitched another breath and his eyes fluttered open for a moment, then closed again. Meryam was sure he had looked at her. That Adam had seen her, not the other thing.

  Behind the camera, Calliope whispered a “thank you” to whatever power she’d prayed to.

  “Did it work?” Kim said. “Is that … Father, did it work? Is it gone?”

  Father Cornelius dipped his fingers into the cup of holy water and drew the sign of the Christian cross on Adam’s forehead. Meryam felt a ripple of distaste, but beneath that ripple ran a river of hope.

  Adam only sighed again at the priest’s touch.

  “Co
rnelius,” Walker said grimly. “Damn it, is it gone?”

  “I believe so.”

  Hakan muttered his disapproval but Feyiz hissed him into silence and turned to the priest. “You did it.”

  Father Cornelius did not look at him. Instead, he turned toward Meryam and for a moment she could only see the way Adam’s head had lolled to one side, and the crumbling, burned skull of the demon that had done the same. Then she saw the gentle sadness in the priest’s eyes.

  “I did nothing,” he said. “I hadn’t even finished. I don’t know if my prayers did anything at all. I may not be strong enough.”

  Kim backed away from them. “But you said it was gone.”

  “I think it is,” the priest replied, the pain of apology in his eyes. “But I didn’t drive it … and I don’t know where it went.”

  * * *

  Dr. Dwyer gasped as his eyes fluttered open, less startled to be woken in the night than by the fact that he’d managed to nod off in the first place. The last time he’d glanced at the clock in the infirmary it had been nearly two a.m. and his skin had been crawling with anxiety. Father Cornelius had admitted that they intended to attempt an exorcism and it had felt both unreal and terrifying. He had lain on a cot, warmer and safer than the rest of the staff, he felt sure, but he hadn’t felt warm or safe. Somehow he’d fallen asleep.

  Now he groaned and tried to curl into a slightly more fetal position to take the pressure off of those knotted muscles, hoping to find his way back to sleep.

  Something scuffed the floor behind him.

  He froze, his face to the wall and his back to the rest of the infirmary. The pain in his back crept into his neck and he knew he needed to exhale and stretch, but instead he could only listen. Outside the infirmary, the wind made the plastic sheeting flap. Not for the first time, he imagined the whole cave inhaling and exhaling, the ark breathing.

  The doctor squeezed his eyes shut. Distant voices reached him as whispers, members of the staff camping just along the passage, where many had relocated tonight so they could be closer together, farther from the open cave mouth and the merciless storm.

  From behind him there came the rustle of clothing. He wanted to ask who it was, but a smell filled the infirmary, a rich, earthen scent with a hint of rot beneath it. Suddenly he was eight years old again, trying to be brave now that he and his brother finally had separate rooms, but scared … so scared of the skeletal hand of the ash tree whose fingerlike branches scratched at the window with every gust of wind.

  Dr. Dwyer blew out a breath and forced the memory away. For a second it had been so vivid, the fear in his heart so familiar from his childhood, that it felt as if he’d been back there, home in his bed. Some nights he’d get so frightened that he would go into his brother Teddy’s room and shake him awake. Teddy, two years his elder, would punch him in the arm and tell him not to be a pussy.

  Don’t be a pussy, he thought.

  Teddy would have been on target tonight. Dr. Dwyer exhaled again. In a sleep-fog, he’d forgotten he had patients in here tonight. They had taken Adam away, and Professor Olivieri had gone off as well, but Zeybekci and Dev Patil were still here.

  Idiot. Laughing at himself, trying to shake off the fear that still clung to him, Dr. Dwyer rolled over on the cot and saw Zeybecki rising from his own cot, on the other side of the infirmary. With only one light on, a soft glow in the corner, the young Turkish monitor almost seemed as if he might be sleepwalking. Zeybekci hung his head, sniffed once, then wiped his hands on his sweater.

  “You feeling all right?” Dr. Dwyer asked quietly, not wanting to wake Patil, whom he’d given antibiotics and a heavy dose of anti-anxiety meds that would also help him sleep. Whatever he’d inhaled when moving the cadaver had sickened Patil, but although more tests would be necessary, Dr. Dwyer didn’t think the paleopathologist had suffered any lasting damage. He’d managed to go down to the mess with Zeybekci and eat a little something. Now the man needed rest and further observation.

  Zeybekci, though, could leave anytime he felt up to it.

  “It’s still night,” Dr. Dwyer said, trying to get a look at his face, wondering if the man might be sleepwalking after all. “Dawn’s hours away. Maybe you should try to get some more sleep, stay in here till morning.”

  “His were the hands I used at first,” Zeybekci said, holding up his own hands as if seeing them for the first time. “I whispered into his head so softly, he never even knew I was here. Never knew what he’d done. But I don’t need to whisper anymore.”

  Zeybekci took two steps, then stood staring down at Patil.

  “Mr. Zeybekci?” Dr. Dwyer ventured, thinking, maybe he has to piss. That must be it. But if so, why was he just—

  Zeybekci reached down—it must have been quickly, but it seemed to happen slowly, so slowly, as if the infirmary were a fishbowl and they were moving under water. He put one hand over Patil’s face, clamped him down against the cot. With the other hand, Zeybekci thrust his fingers into Patil’s mouth, grabbed hold of his lower jaw, and ripped it off. Bones cracked and flesh tore and blood sprayed onto the cot and the floor.

  “Jesus Christ!” the doctor screamed, staggering backward.

  The words made Zeybekci flinch. He sneered, glared up at Dr. Dwyer with a sour scowl on his blood-spattered face, and then began to stab and claw at Patil’s face with the broken edge of bone jutting out from the bloody piece of his own jaw. Patil’s hands came up, trying to protect himself, and that was the worst of it. Worse even than the savagery of the attack. For a time, Patil was awake and aware, and screaming in a wordless moan that was all a man with no lower jaw could manage.

  Then his hands fell away and his body went limp. Blood pulsed and sluiced to the floor, soaking through his clothes and sheets. Moments from death.

  Zeybekci looked up at the doctor again, shuddered with obvious pleasure, and took a step toward him.

  The hot stink of urine filled the doctor’s nostrils. Only when he felt its heat drooling along his legs, soaking his pants from within, did he know it was his own piss.

  It broke the little boy in him. There was no big brother Teddy to protect him now.

  Screaming, he ran from the infirmary, skidding in the puddle of his piss. Zeybekci lunged for him, and missed. The doctor slammed into the doorframe, then stumbled into the passage and into the embrace of the icy wind gusting through the ark.

  “Jesus … holy shit,” he rasped.

  Off to the right, he heard the voices of some of the staffers. Shaking, numb with the horror of what he’d seen, he stumbled in that direction, picking up speed as he went. Zeybekci lunged into the passage and crashed through some of the plastic sheeting, and the doctor began to scream for help.

  A thick sheet of slashed plastic blocked the passage ahead. When he pushed through that hanging plastic, the voices seemed farther away. A bright bulb on the wall to his left made him cringe and blink, and then someone grabbed his arm and he lashed out, shoving the man away.

  “Doc! Hey, calm down!”

  Hands grabbed him again, by both wrists, a strong grip that made him snap his head up and meet the other man’s gaze. One of the American grad students, young and good-looking, something Italian for a name. Bellucci. No, Belbusti. Steve.

  “It’s in Zeybekci,” Dr. Dwyer said. “Let’s move. We need weapons. Something to protect ourselves.”

  Others poked their heads out of stalls farther along the passage, men and women who were tired and afraid but who felt safe together. There were tents and clusters and right there in the passage, four people knelt on the floor with a space heater and had been caught in the middle of a card game—anything to while away the storm.

  “Get up!” Dr. Dwyer shouted at them. A voice down inside him reminded him they couldn’t understand, but didn’t they see his fear? Did they think him just another member of the expedition whose sanity had become momentarily unmoored?

  “Damn it, listen! He’s coming! We’ve got to—”

 
; “Doc, hey!” Belbusti said, gesturing to the others. “We’re not stupid. Demon or no demon, we’ve got weapons.”

  Belbusti unclipped an ice ax he’d had hanging at his hip and brandished it for Dr. Dwyer to see. The silver metal shaft glinted in the harsh light, and the darker steel head had wicked teeth … terrible teeth. Dwyer nodded, taking some comfort in that awful instrument, and together they both turned toward the strips of heavy plastic that blocked the passage here. The doctor frowned. Where was Zeybekci?

  “He was right behind me,” Dr. Dwyer said. “He’s the one who killed Helen and the others. He just murdered—”

  “Maybe he went toward the cave mouth,” Belbusti said. “We should warn the others on level one.”

  Climbing ax raised, brow knitted in fearless determination, Belbusti shoved the plastic slats aside and started forward. He’d taken half a step when Zeybekci came through as if he’d simply manifested out of the shadows on the other side. Zeybekci had one hand on Belbusti’s throat when the American swung the climbing ax, grunting but still grim with purpose, still fearless. The kind of brave that Dr. Dwyer had never witnessed in his life.

  Zeybekci ripped the climbing ax from his hand as if he were snatching a switch from a bullying child. The one burning light flickered and went dark for just a moment, but in that moment Dr. Dwyer saw that Zeybekci’s eyes burned with a sickly orange glint, the rotting light from inside the guts of a jack-o’-lantern.

  “Please, God,” Dr. Dwyer whimpered. “Please.”

  Zeybekci hacked the point of the climbing ax at Belbusti’s face, puncturing his left eye and squelching six inches deep into the American’s brain. Belbusti collapsed, the point of the climbing ax making a slick sucking noise as it slid from the dead man’s eye.

  Dr. Dwyer was already moving. Running. He saw the faces up ahead, all turned toward him, their eyes wide with terror. People were reaching for weapons. Others were screaming. One had already begun to run deeper into the ark, away from the horror and the cluster of people whose company she’d assumed would keep her safe.

  The doctor could have told her there was nowhere inside the ark that would be safe now. But then he felt a solid blow at the back of his skull, heard the bone give way.