Ararat

by Christopher Golden

  Father Cornelius put a hand on his shoulder. “What is it?”

  Walker trudged on, staring at his feet without seeing them. His mind returned to the ark, to the moment he had first encountered Helen Marshall.

  “The archaeology team found them on some of the cadavers in the ark,” he said, as much to himself as the others. “Why not all of them?”

  “Maybe they had the same disagreement we’re having now,” Father Cornelius suggested.

  “When we first got there,” Walker continued, “I talked to Professor Marshall. She and her team were working on several sets of remains, but one of the passengers had died trying to claw her way out of the ark, through a door that had been jammed shut against the side of the mountain. She’d lost her mind, obviously, but she was trying anything she could to get out of the ship … to get away.”

  He glanced over at the priest. “There was no charm on that cadaver.”

  “I remember it,” Mr. Avci said, behind them.

  “Are you saying the demon drove her mad because she wasn’t wearing one?” Kim asked.

  “Maybe,” Walker replied, boots crunching on snow. The cold slithered inside his clothes. He’d gone numb inside and out. “But what if it wasn’t just madness? What if she was trying to escape the others on board the ark, the ones who were wearing the charms, because she’d figured out that they’d made the wrong decision? That instead they were making it easier for the demon to possess them?”

  “But why would that be?” Kim asked. “It makes no sense.”

  Father Cornelius stumbled on the snow. Walker caught him, helped him right himself. He saw just how pale the priest had become, just how much the climb had taken out of him. Ahead, Adam and Meryam did not even seem to notice. They marched downward, slowly but relentlessly, never turning around to check on the welfare of their charges. Walker hated them a little bit for that.

  “What if…” the priest said. “What if they trapped its spirit? Somehow they killed it and they boxed it up in that coffin and encased that in bitumen. They thought they’d imprisoned the demon’s essence, but instead it…”

  “It seeped,” Kim said. “They’d have felt it, the evil getting under their skin, the same way we did. If it infused itself into the bitumen, then when they put those charms on, all they were doing was giving it more intimate access, keeping it with them.…”

  Her words trailed off, and the four them stopped dead on the trail, turning to face one another, giving each other a bit of protection from the wind and the whipping snow. Mr. Avci still had his gun in his hand, but Walker noticed that he held it as if he’d almost forgotten it was there. He looked up at Kim.

  “We’re saying they knew the same legend Olivieri told us about?” he said. A gust of wind bumping him forward, so they were all even closer. He could see the exhaustion in their eyes, and the dreadful realization.

  Father Cornelius swayed, squeezing his eyes closed as if he might collapse. He put a hand on Mr. Avci’s shoulder to hold himself up.

  “What if Olivieri isn’t the one who told us about that legend?” the priest asked. His eyes opened and he gazed into the gray nothing in the space between them. “What if it was never his suggestion to begin with?”

  “Shit,” Kim whispered. “Shit, shit, shit.” Her fingers were at work, digging into the folds of her clothing in search of her charm.

  As Kim hurled the charm off into the driving snow, Walker turned to shout down the trail. “Adam! Meryam!” They’d only gotten another twenty yards or so along the path, but they were ghosts in the white veil now. “The charms … you’ve got to take them…”

  He hissed icy air in through his teeth and stood up straight, spine rigid.

  “Walker?” Father Cornelius asked, reaching for his arm.

  The evil slid into him so easily, as if it had blazed a trail before and now possession had become effortless. Walker screamed, but only inside. On the outside, he felt the grin that tore the edges of his mouth and he heard the laugh that came from his own throat.

  Mr. Avci pointed a gun at his temple, too close to miss, and Walker felt gratitude and transcendence. Inside, he waited for the bullet. Outside, he heard Kim shout and saw her lunge and knock Avci’s gun hand aside. The gunshot echoed off the mountain, the sound bouncing around inside the maelstrom.

  Walker could taste the blood seeping from the torn edges of his mouth, but he could not control his hands as he reached out and grabbed Father Cornelius’s skull in his hands. The demon relished that moment, and Walker felt its pleasure.

  “Good-bye, holy man,” it said through him.

  Father Cornelius clawed at him, trying to fight back.

  The priest yanked back a fist and Walker caught a glimpse of frayed twine and of the black shard that dangled from it. He gasped as he felt the sudden release, and fell to his knees as the demon left him. Left him utterly. A giddy relief swept him and he threw his head back and gazed with love at Father Cornelius, not caring about the pain at the corners of his mouth or the taste of his own blood.

  “Thank you,” he said, staring at the priest but thinking of Charlie. Thinking of the life he’d given up hope of living. “Father, thank you so—”

  The priest’s eyes glittered with orange light.

  Father Cornelius snarled as he turned on Kim. She swore and began to stagger backward, but he struck her with a blow that sent her sprawling off the trail. Mr. Avci raised his gun again, but the priest grabbed him by the wrist and twisted, snapping bone. Avci shrieked in pain and the gun fell into the snow.

  Walker drew his own gun, aimed it at the old priest’s face.

  Father Cornelius laughed. The sound came from somewhere far away, like the hideous whisper in a nightmare from which there could be no waking.

  “Go on, then,” the demon said. “Murder another one.”

  Walker gripped the gun. His chest ached as it rose and fell. The copper tang of blood in his mouth made him want to retch. He hesitated two seconds, perhaps three, but then the old priest turned and sprang away from them, darting into the snow with strength and speed no man could have.

  He pulled the trigger. The priest had already become a ghost in the storm, but Walker saw him stagger as the bullet caught his right shoulder. The wound did not slow him. Walker fired twice more, but by the time the echo from those shots faded, the figure had vanished completely, lost in the swirl of frozen white.

  Father Cornelius was gone.

  TWENTY-ONE

  An hour or so later—it was difficult for Meryam to keep track of time now—she fell to her knees in the snow. Adam tried to help her up. Failing that, he tried to comfort her, but she weakly pushed his hands away, sucking air in through her nose. She whispered tiny prayers, quiet pleas, not caring what facet of God might be listening but hoping some higher power would hear her, and take her pain away. Take her fear and regret.

  Instead, her stomach convulsed and she retched, heaving a torrent of stinking vomit into the snow. She hadn’t eaten much, but it was all there, along with plenty of stomach acid and a smattering of blood. It relieved her to know that Adam wouldn’t see that blood—people had an instinctive urge to look away from vomit. There would be no questions about that blood. It occurred to her that he might not have asked even if he’d seen it. They both knew the cancer had invaded her, that it was eating her from within, slowly killing her. The demon from the ark had not been the first poison, the first evil, to infect her.

  “Hey,” he said in her ear. Gently. Kindly.

  His hand had rested on her shoulder and she hadn’t even noticed. Now she leaned into him, shuddering as she choked back her tears. She took his hand and began to rise.

  “Meryam, you can rest,” Adam said, studying her face. “We have time.”

  She steadied herself on him and stood, holding on as a gust of wind tried to push her backward. “We don’t have time.”

  Adam held her face in his gloved hands. Nose wrinkling at the taste of bile in her mouth, she tried to smil
e at him in spite of the balaclava covering most of her features. She had come to hate the storm and the heavy clothing that erased so much of their identity.

  “We threw the charms away,” he reminded her, and then he turned toward the others, who had stopped a respectful distance away while she puked up her guts. “All of us. It’s been an hour or more and it hasn’t come after us again. More than that … I can feel it and I know you can, too.”

  She was still turning it all over in her mind, trying to make rational sense of the theory Kim and Walker had presented. The way they’d worked it out, the demon’s spirit had been trapped inside the coffin and its bitumen encasement. Its malevolence had settled into the bitumen, had driven the people on the ark insane and possessed them and forced them to murder and despair, just as it had done to the people Meryam and Adam had brought into the ark thousands of years later. Adam had suggested the possibility that it had been inert, somehow—almost hibernating—but that they had woken it by breaking the encasement around its coffin.

  The rest—what Walker believed about the demon influencing Olivieri, convincing them to wear the charms—that much seemed irrefutable. Back inside the ark, the demon had grown strong enough to influence or possess whoever it wanted. Now, this far from the place where its remains had been turned to cinders, it could still exert its evil, but it could only possess someone who remained connected to it through contact with one of those bitumen shards.

  Meryam glanced at Walker and Kim, and poor Mr. Avci cradling his broken hand against his body. Mr. Avci didn’t need her sympathy. He was still alive. They all were—him and Walker and the brilliant, lovely Kim Seong, and even Adam—the four of them were going to make it. Meryam might still be walking, but she was just as dead as the people they’d left bleeding in the snow. The others were going to live. They were the survivors, not her. And she hated them for it.

  “Maybe you’re right,” she said, noticing for the first time that the blizzard had calmed. The snow still fell and the wind still blew, but not with the same level of rage. “I’d like to think it can’t get inside us now, but even if that’s true, Father Cornelius is still out there. So are Hakan and Calliope, if they’re alive. So we’re not safe. Not yet.”

  Adam gave a curt nod. He didn’t want to hear it—she knew that. Adam wanted her to let him pretend the danger had passed, but Meryam could not give him that. No matter how much she loved him.

  “Let’s go,” Adam said.

  He slid an arm around her and helped her along the trail. Meryam would have liked to do it on her own, but they both knew she could not. Her strength had ebbed so low that she barely knew where she was going at this point, and throwing up had weakened her further. So she leaned against him, and nothing mattered but the touch of his body against her and her living long enough to make sure he got out of this. That was the engine that drove her, the fire that burned inside—making sure Adam made it home alive.

  “I love you,” she rasped, but the wind kicked up and her voice betrayed her.

  “Hmm?” he asked, frowning as he glanced at her. “What’d you say?”

  Meryam coughed and wiped her glove across her mouth, shaking her head to indicate that she’d said nothing important. That they should just keep moving.

  The snow kept on, the wind rising and falling but never returning to its former fury. Meryam trudged onward, her vision blurring and her head bobbing as if she were on the verge of nodding off while she walked. Black spots danced in front of her eyes and edged in at the corners of her eyes and she knew her body wanted to stop. To fall.

  Walker and Avci had their guns out. Several times, Adam paused and forced them to rest a minute, and Meryam saw those guns and wondered what good these foolish men thought they would do. Bullets might rend flesh, but the demon had no flesh of its own. She supposed she did understand the logic. If they encountered Hakan or Calliope or the priest, possessed, the guns would stop them. Bullets wouldn’t kill the demon but they would free those it possessed. And if those guns managed to kill everyone still wearing a bitumen charm, then perhaps these so-called survivors really would have escaped.

  But Meryam felt haunted. The demon’s touch had carved a place at the base of her skull and it huddled there, even now, like a runaway hiding in the shadows of an alley. In her secret heart, the place where she kept only the most precious and the most horrible bits of herself, she thought it might be a good thing she was dying. It might be for the best.

  She lost track of time. It blurred like her vision, came and went like the wind, but after a while she blinked and realized they had stopped for another rest. Drawing a deep breath, she looked around and saw Walker holding Kim in a tender embrace.

  “Adam?” she said, oddly numb. Most of her pain seemed to be gone.

  His face appeared beside her and Meryam realized they were seated, side by side, on a large rock.

  “I’m here,” he said. “You still with me?”

  Cheerful. But beneath the cheerfulness, she saw his grief. He knew she was dying. Of course he had known for a while, but now it was real. Even more real than the fear that had driven them down the mountain.

  Meryam forced herself to perk up, reached down into a reserve of will that she had never known she had, until now—when she needed it.

  “I’m still with you,” she said. “And we’re going to live. We’re going to make it.”

  Adam smiled, and she saw that the snow had abated enough that it had become beautiful. The sky had turned gray instead of white and she knew they were well into the afternoon. Then she saw lumps beneath the snow on the ground, noticed the rock formations and recognized the shape of the clearing they were in, and she realized where they were.

  “Camp One,” she said. “Have we come so far?”

  “We have,” Adam said, squeezing her hand. “But we’ve got a long way still to go.”

  A thought occurred to her. She glanced at Walker and Kim again. “Where’s—”

  “Avci had to piss,” Adam told her.

  Meryam almost managed a smile.

  Then they heard the gunshot, and Avci screamed, and they all looked over to the edge of Camp One and saw the body slump from behind a rock and sprawl on the ground, pushing snow ahead of it.

  And Father Cornelius stepped out of the storm. For a moment Meryam wavered on her feet, vision blurring again, and a muffled bit of consciousness at the back of her mind wondered if any of this were really happening. She could barely feel the cold, and the world around her had the not-quite-there texture of a nightmare. Sounds were muffled.

  The priest stepped over Avci’s bloody corpse in a single, smooth stride, and she saw his grin. He’d torn off his balaclava and his jacket. Now he strode toward Walker and Kim with a smile so wide it had ripped his cheeks almost as far back as his ears. Blood painted his jaw and throat, streaks of vivid red that stood out against the white of the falling snow.

  But his eyes were on Meryam. The grin seemed meant for her, and those eyes held a knowing gleam along with the glitter of orange fire, as if they shared a secret.

  She wanted so badly to scream. Instead, she started toward the thing that had been Father Cornelius. Adam grabbed the sleeve of her coat and dragged her backward. Meryam tried to fight him and he shoved her to the ground.

  “You can barely stand. He’ll kill you.”

  “I’m—” she started to say. Dying. I’m dying anyway. But Adam had already rushed over to stand with Kim and Walker, leaving Meryam on her own, sprawled in the snow.

  The demon in Father Cornelius crouched forward, lifted his hand, and gave her the same kind of little wave a circus clown might give a child in the audience, as if to tell her that this show was for her. Then it sprang on top of Walker, beating him with both fists as it rode him down into the snow.

  Meryam could only watch the nightmare unfold.

  * * *

  Walker felt the blows in his skull like savage music thumping his brain. He’d seen the priest and he’d hesitated. So
stupid. No hat, no coat, no balaclava, out there on the mountain more than an hour after they’d last seen him, an old man in priestly black and a white patch at his collar … zero chance he had gotten there without the demon driving him.

  Its fists came down. Father Cornelius’s fists. An old man’s paper-thin skin and blue veins and age spots and chafed knuckles. Walker felt his nose break, tasted a rush of fresh blood, and he roared and whipped himself side to side, but the thing inside the priest had strength born of hell instead of muscle.

  Hell, he thought, as a fist thumped his left temple and he felt the orbit around his left eye crack. He believed in Hell now. Which meant that somewhere up there, God existed, and Walker was beneath his notice. They were all, the people dying here on the side of Mount Ararat, not worthy of his attention.

  Another punch. The right side, breaking off an upper incisor.

  God, he decided, was an asshole.

  Grunting, he jerked his arm, turned the gun, and pulled the trigger. The shot went wide, but the grin left Father Cornelius’s face. The orange glitter in his eyes flared brightly and he snarled as he wrapped both hands around Walker’s throat, as if he’d had enough of playtime and decided the killing moment had arrived.

  Seconds. All of those blows, all of those thoughts, had taken only seconds.

  Walker’s vision darkened. The lights were going out in his head.

  Then he heard shouting—two voices, and one of them belonged to Kim Seong. The demon’s grip loosened and Walker blinked, focusing enough to see Kim and Adam struggling with Father Cornelius. Adam had an arm around the priest’s throat, wrestling him backward, trying to drag him off Walker. Kim had him by the left arm, clawing at his eyes with her free hand as she attempted to twist him away.

  She stopped clawing at his face. Her hand dropped to her side and came back up with her climbing ax. The metal gleamed wetly as she swept it down and buried it into the priest’s chest. Sputtering and wheezing, Father Cornelius reeled backward. Adam shoved him and the priest went rolling to the ground with the climbing ax still jutting from a place high on his left side.