The Kingdom (Berkeley Blackfriars Book 1)

by J. R. Mabry

  They crossed the street, and Dylan stepped over trash gathered against the gutter. Their approach seemed to startle an apparently homeless man picking through a public trash receptacle, hoping to add empties to his collection piled high in a shopping cart. He stared at them with barely restrained ferocity, perhaps daunted by the sight of an enormous black jaguar.

  Dylan wondered for a moment about the objective reality of such people. Were those who populated his journeys aspects of himself? Where they manifestations of universal archetypes? Were they real souls—or portions of souls—that had somehow “gotten lost” and were awaiting a shaman such as himself to intercede on their behalf and reintegrate them?

  No matter how long he studied the occult arts, including his own specialty, he never came close to having his questions answered. For no matter how much he knew, the information only brought with it more questions. Religion was a bottomless pit of mystery, and better men than he had gone crazy trying to plumb its depths.

  A train whistle cut the air in the distance, and straining, Dylan could hear its passage. He headed toward the sound instinctively, and before long, another sound arose.

  It was faint at first, but as Dylan and Jaguar walked the rain-soaked streets in perpetual twilight, it gradually became clearer.

  It was music, Dylan realized, and it made him smile. As the volume steadily increased, it became clear that it was not, after all, the kind of music Dylan liked. It wasn’t the folk or blues or roots rock of his idols, but that didn’t matter. His grin widened when he recognized the genre, pop-punk, the kind made famous by Sleater-Kinney and Green Day—the kind of music Mikael loved and played.

  Loves, Dylan corrected himself. Plays. He’s not dead. God help me; he’s not dead.

  The music got louder and louder until he could make out some of the lyrics—something about a trashy girlfriend in the afterlife. The music was a joyous, major-key stomper that contrasted nicely with the macabre words. Soon it became clear that the music was coming from a squat, cinder block structure advertising a caning shop on one side. Shiny bronze numbers announced the address—924—but no other signage testified to the nature of the business.

  It didn’t need to, however, because 924 Gilman had a legendary status in Berkeley’s musical heritage. It was ground zero for the East Bay punk scene, and still attracted capacity crowds every weekend.

  There was no one manning the entrance as they approached. No one asked them for payment, or for tickets, or questioned the wisdom of allowing an apparently wild Jaguar to enter the place. They just walked in.

  There was more light inside than out, so it was easy to see. Dylan had been inside the club a couple of times to watch Mikael and his various bands play, but he had never seen it so sparsely populated.

  The air was smoky, which was odd since Berkeley had been a smoke-free city for some time now. Dylan reminded himself that this version of 924 Gilman existed more in the Otherworld than in conventional reality, and maybe smoking was still allowed there. He dismissed the thought as a distraction and began a systematic surveillance of the place.

  The walls were black, adorned with concert posters and silver graffiti. A different band seemed to be playing now, and their energy could only be described as soporific. They seemed to be going through the motions, the beat slow and their performance dissociated, more akin to Pink Floyd than Black Flag.

  Nobody seemed to mind, however. Several people stood around, swaying slightly, staring at their shoes or sitting cross-legged on the floor. “Not a high-energy crowd, here, Jaggy.” Dylan pursed his lips with worry and kept looking. No sign of Mikael. Just then he heard a crash behind them, and with a concerned glance at Jaguar, they both sprang toward the back door.

  Dylan pushed it open recklessly, and it hit the wall as it sprang open. On the sidewalk, Dylan stood still and listened. He heard a scuffle to his right behind the building and, waving Jaguar to him, he ran toward the rear of the building.

  A large parking lot sprawled out behind the club and the cane shop, surrounded by a high chain-link fence, topped by razor wire. And there, on the other side of the fence, a skinny scarecrow of a man with big, mussy black hair was getting the shit beat out of him.

  “Mikael!” Dylan shouted, but Mikael didn’t look up. One of the thugs, a large man with a shaved head, stood behind him, holding his arms as another skinhead pummeled his abdomen with his fists. Mikael cried out as a third punk swung a two-by-four at his head. Dylan heard it crack as it connected and watched in horror as the man behind Mikael let go and the skinny youth plummeted to the ground, hitting his head as he did so.

  Dylan tore at the fence, but it was no good. He jammed his toes into the diamonds of the fence and clambered to get up, but halfway up lost his footing and landed hard on his knee. “SHeee-it!” he swore, holding his knee with both hands. “Jaggy, don’t just fucking sit there, do something!!”

  The Jaguar looked at him dispassionately for a long moment, and then, almost leisurely, he swiped at the fence with his claws, opening a wide swath in it. The portion of the fence fell forward, and with all the eloquence of a queen, the great cat stepped through and padded toward the thugs.

  With one claw, he swiped at the kid with the two-by-four and removed a large section of skin from his face. The youth grabbed at his flayed cheek and, screaming, dropped to his knees, writhing in agony. Sinking his teeth into the skinhead who had held Mikael, Jaguar shook the young man like a rag doll. Dylan could almost hear his bones rattle and watched in wonder as the great cat flung him into a heap several yards away. The last kid seemed frozen in his tracks when Jaguar roared. Seeming to snap back to reality, he turned tail and ran as fast as he could.

  Dylan stepped through the fence and knelt beside Mikael. The back of his head was bloody, but he seemed to be breathing. Dylan looked up at Jaguar, who sat on his haunches and licked his paws patiently. “Can you do anything for him?”

  The cat just looked at him.

  Dylan cradled Mikael’s head in his lap and pulled his wild hair away from his face. “Hold on, there, Mikey-boy, you’re going to be all right.” He rocked back and forth slowly as he thought. Ruminating out loud, he addressed Jaguar. “Ah can’t really take him back like this, can Ah? Ah mean, he’s gotta be conscious, or Ah got nothin’ to carry.”

  Jaguar said nothing but only swished his tail. “We’re gonna have to wait until he wakes up, then, and Susan can’t drum all night. Ah’m gonna have to come back fer him later, give him time to rest, recover, come to. Yeah, that’s it…” he said it loudly as if trying to convince himself of the right thing to do.

  “Jaggy, I want you to stay right here and guard him. Can you do that?”

  The cat just looked at him, his tail swishing back and forth like the end of a whip. “Goddammit, Jaguar, answer me!”

  “I will stay here. I will guard him. Come back tomorrow.”

  Dylan scratched at his head. “Really, tomorrow?”

  “Come back tomorrow.”

  Dylan stood and straightened out his cassock, flicking the dust off the black fabric. “All right. But don’t you go nowhere.” He knelt again and touched Mikael on the shoulder. “You, either.”

  61

  KAT JABBED at the magazine with her scissors, cutting out faces of people far, far happier than she felt at that moment. Sitting cross-legged on the floor of the chapel, she tore out whole pages showing fields of wildflowers and other beautiful places that she could not visit because she was fucking quarantined in this fucking house.

  Just as she was attacking the picture of a dumpy little girl dressed as Harry Potter (fucking magickians, she thought) her fingers slipped and she cut her knee.

  “Goddammit!” she said, wiping the blood away with her thumb and putting it in her mouth. She took a scrap of a magazine and held it to the wound until it stuck and picked up the magazine and the scissors again.

  This time, she found a picture of a radiant African-American woman in a dark blue jogging suit. She clippe
d her out and, snatching up a glue stick, pasted the woman into the beard of the huge patchwork icon of Jesus. She considered its placement, admiring the effect.

  Why am I doing this? A little voice nagged at her. “Because I’m sooo fucking bored,” she said out loud and, flipping a page, found a photo of a kangaroo. She wondered about the theological implications of adding animals to the icon and decided to ask Susan about it later. In the meantime, she kept turning pages. A little girl astride a tricycle…perfect. She reminded Kat of the little girl Dylan was going to baptize tomorrow. She clipped the photo out, tricycle and all.

  She wasn’t sure how she felt about that baptism thing. It seemed unfair to make the little girl a part of a religion without her really knowing what she was being inducted into. Not just unfair, it seemed wrong. But one thing she had learned since she had been, well, captive here was that she wasn’t always in possession of all the puzzle pieces. She decided to make a list of things to discuss with Susan. She pulled out a pen and wrote baptism and animal Jesus, hoping she could figure out what the heck that referred to later.

  She glued the little girl just above Jesus’s upper lip, forming part of his mustache, roughly along the line of the coffee stain.

  I know why I’m doing this, she thought, I’m doing it to burn time because I don’t want to think about Mikael. How long had it been since he’d eaten? What had he endured in Dane’s dungeon? How did he get those scars on his back? Did he really have three nipples? She smiled as that question occurred to her. She’d looked it up and it was a sign of witchcraft—most appropriate for the order’s Wicca expert but also—as with the Pawnee if Dylan were right—a sign of nurturing and sensitivity. She wasn’t sure that it indicated any such thing in real life—how many murderers were there with three nipples, she wondered; there must be thousands—but she liked to think it was true in Mikael’s case.

  She flipped through a couple more pages and found a photo of a young punkish couple in Belfast. It reminded her of herself and Mikael, and she went to work on it, pasting it on Jesus’s chin.

  Okay, the truth is I’m doing this because I feel guilty for damaging the icon. She sighed, depressed at the thought, but it rested more easily in her breast than the others. That was the whole truth of it, and it was okay.

  What was also true was that the icon fascinated her. Not only because of how oddly it was constructed but by what it suggested, what it meant. She loved the icon, although she would be hard pressed to articulate exactly why. It touched her in some deep and ineffable place—it spoke to her.

  She threw the magazine onto the discard pile and took up another, this one a Woman’s Day, that she couldn’t imagine anyone at the friary reading. Nevertheless, she picked up the magazine-of-spurious-origin and began to leaf through it.

  Several pages in, her breath caught in her throat, and she sat up as if slapped. On the left-hand page was an ad for California avocados, and facing it on the right a golden retriever hawking flea medicine.

  She stared at them for a long time without knowing why—if kangaroos were suspect sources for Jesus’s facial features, surely dogs and oily fruit were, too.

  But she cut the pictures out just the same. Just to have them. Just to remind herself what an avocado or a dog looked like when, twenty years from now, she began to forget. She carefully placed the pictures within the pages of the book she was reading to keep them safe and flat.

  62

  THE LATE AFTERNOON sun cast a rosy glow through the kitchen window as Richard entered to find Dylan and Susan at the dinner table, munching away at two sides of the same ice cream pop. “Sorry,” he said, shielding his eyes. “I didn’t realize I was wandering into an outtake from Lady and the Tramp.”

  “That’s okay, dude,” said Dylan, licking his lips, “Just so long as we’re all agreed that Ah’m Tramp.” Susan reached around the pop and kissed her hubby on the lips. “Nuthin’ weirder than kissin’ a cold mouth, Darlin’,” he told her.

  “Where do we stand with Mikael?” Richard asked. Kat overheard the question and stood in the doorway, listening. Susan scooched over on the bench and patted the seat beside her. Kat took it.

  “Waal, he’s alive, but beat up pretty bad. Jaguar is guardin’ him, and Ah’ve been instructed to come for him tomorrow. That’s where it stands.” He looked more sad than worried. “Honestly, Ah think he’s gonna be fine. His spirit is tough, and it’s going to take more than a little out-of-the-body roughin’ up to endanger that guy. The most important thing is that we found ’im, and Ah know where to go to get ’im.”

  “I don’t understand why you can’t just bring him back now,” Kat complained, a petulant note creeping into her voice.

  “Ah can’t just carry ’im out. He has to be conscious, and he’s gotta want to come. Ah can’t explain why; that’s jus’ one of the mysteries of shamanism,” Dylan explained.

  Kat seemed satisfied with Dylan’s answer though not so much with the situation.

  Just then, Richard’s cell phone rang, the air filling with the triumphant strains of “Rise Up, O Men of God.” He checked the screen. “It’s Brian,” he said. “Kat, can you grab Terry?”

  Kat narrowed her eyes. Who was he to give her orders? She stayed in her place but reached out and clanged the dinner bell. Richard winced at the noise. “I could have done that!” He flipped open the phone and glowered at her. “Hey, Brian, whatcha got?”

  “Hey,” came Brian’s voice. Richard could hear cars passing. “I’ve only got fifteen minutes on this break, and I’m five minutes in and I gotta use the loo.”

  “So, shoot,” Richard said, turning on the speakerphone option and placing the phone on the table. Terry came in through the back door, a toothbrush sticking out of his mouth.

  “Two things. First, the demon we’re dealing with here is Articiphus, a Middle Eastern blood demon specializing in bilocation and soul transference.”

  “That makes a lot of sense,” Dylan nodded.

  “What makes him a blood demon?” Kat asked.

  “Well, different demons thrive on different substances,” Brian’s voice came through, strong but tinny. “Some feed on souls, some on sweat, some, like succubi, on semen. Blood demons—”

  “Eat blood,” Kat looked aghast. “I get it.”

  “What else you got, Brian?” Richard asked. “Please, God, tell me you’ve figured out how this damned ring works.”

  “Well, yes and no. What I’ve been able to glean so far is that it isn’t activated just by putting it on. It also isn’t activated by touching it to something else.”

  “Then how does it work?”

  “You have to put it on and then touch it to something else. Here’s the problem though—whatever it does, it doesn’t just do it to the thing you touch, it also does it to you.”

  “Talk about a rebound effect,” Richard said, concerned. “So what, exactly, does it do?”

  “That’s what I don’t know,” Brian said. “I’ve got a lead on a Sumerian manuscript in the National Library in Alexandria. I’ve got a call in to a friend at the American consulate there, and he’s promised to email me a scan as soon as he can access it. He should be able to help translate it as well. Meanwhile, I’m following up a couple of other leads, too.”

  “Good,” said Richard, “because according to Larch, tonight at midnight is the next ritual, and unless anyone else has any bright ideas on how to stop them, we may have to use Dane’s ring against him, so long as we can do it without violating any of our vows. And we can’t know if we can do that until we know what the fuck this thing does.”

  “Don’t worry, Dicky, I’m not going anywhere until I crack this thing.”

  “Good to hear it, Bri. Thanks.” Richard straightened up and pulled at his chin, thinking. “Okay, if it does the same thing to the wearer as it does to the target, how did Dane survive it?”

  “My guess,” said Brian’s tinny voice, “is that he’s been bluffing. The demonic folk are so terrified of the ring that they’
ll obey right out of the gate. I’ll bet that all Dane had to do was to put it on and flash it around.”

  “If that’s the case,” Richard mused, “We can bluff, too.”

  “I gotta go; break’s up.”

  “Go, then, and thanks.”

  “Sure thing.”

  Richard looked at Terry and back at the floor, thinking. Terry looked at Kat, and she nodded. He looked back at Richard. “Uh, Dicky, we’ve got something to show youze guys.” Without explanation, Terry turned and went back to the cottage. In a moment, he was back, holding the mirror.

  “It’s our mirror,” Dylan said. “From the guest room. So?”

  “Everybody follow me,” Terry said and led them into the chapel. Once there, he drew the curtains, and an instant gloom settled over the room. He placed the mirror on the altar, and Susan gasped. There, clear to all, was the violet circle of light.

  “I think I know what that is, but I want to hear you say it,” Richard said, looking at Terry with wonder.

  “It’s our friend the angel,” Terry said. “When Kat’s brother’s body died, the angel’s spirit should have just dissipated. But, luckily, there was a mirror nearby, and his soul got caught.”

  The purplish light radiated steadily, casting the room in a faint rosy hue. “Which means he’s not gone,” Richard stated, hesitantly.

  “He’s not gone, but he can’t really go anywhere, either. Not without a body. And I’m not sure how long he can stay trapped there without, you know…”

  “Dissipating,” Kat finished.

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay, guys,” Richard said, taking a deep breath. He had been wrestling with something, unsure whether to bring it up. Unsure even whether he should think about it, let alone speak it aloud. Oddly, it was as if he were at a distance, watching as his mouth moved, “I’m going to suggest something, and you’re going to think I’m crazy. But short of hiring another band of neighborhood thugs, I don’t see another way out of this.”