The Gathering Dark

by Christopher Golden

  “My policy regarding the man you call the mage is costing lives, is that what you’re telling me, Father?”

  The priest stared at him. “Yes. It is.”

  The Bishop faltered, dropped his gaze, and Father Jack could see the old man’s throat moving as he swallowed. At length the Bishop glanced up at him again.

  “You know who he is, this man? What he is? What he’s responsible for?”

  Father Jack would not look away. “I know he may well be the only reason the darkness has not already swallowed the world.”

  A kind of bark issued from the old man’s throat that might have been laughter. “If the darkness does ‘swallow the world,’ as you put it, he’ll be the man to blame.”

  The priest took off his glasses once more and rubbed at his tired eyes. “With all due respect—”

  “To hell with your respect,” the Bishop snapped, hatred and revulsion in his voice. Not for the priest, Father Jack knew that, but for the mage, and for the truth the old man was being forced to face. His stubbornness had already cost so many lives.

  “Fine,” Bishop Gagnon said. “You make sense of those pages, Jack. When the situation in Hidalgo is dealt with, you have my permission to approach the mage. For all the good it will do you. Perhaps meeting him in person will help you realize that this ‘man’ is not the noble warrior you think him to be.

  “Peter Octavian is a monster.”

  2

  Blood red roses.

  Peter Octavian took a step back from his canvas and narrowed his eyes as he studied the painting upon which he had toiled for the past three days; a single tree in the gardens of Constantinople, nightingales roosting in its branches. And beneath it, a tangle of wild rose bushes that seemed set to strangle the trunk of that lone tree.

  He frowned deeply as he stared at those roses. Blood red, yes, but that was wrong. The color was all wrong but at first he could not decide how to fix it. Peter closed his eyes, his mind skipping back across centuries to another springtime, to a city under siege, and he could still see those roses as clearly as if he had walked among them yesterday. He could hear the nightingales sing and feel the breeze, and beneath the overriding odor of ox dung, he could still catch the lingering scent of those roses.

  His eyes opened and Octavian stared at the painting again. With a slow nod, he moved toward the easel, palette in his left hand. He dipped his brush into a small glob of black paint. The roses had bloomed early that spring of 1453 in the weeks before Constantinople fell to the Turks, but they had been dark roses whose petals were a lush crimson. Blood red roses, yes, but blood that had begun to dry; blood that stained.

  Peter daubed black paint onto the red, mixing the two, and then used the very tip of the brush to detail the edges of each petal, as though every one of the roses was slowly opening to reveal a darker heart within.

  “Yes,” he whispered to himself as he stepped back to regard the painting once more.

  At last satisfied, he set down the palette and brush and stretched, muscles in his neck and shoulders and back popping loudly in the silence of his apartment. It was the second day of May, and though he could still taste the memory of winter in the air, it was warm enough today that the windows all along the front of the apartment were wide open.

  Peter lived on the basement floor of a row house on West Fourth Street in Greenwich Village, half a block from a lesbian bar called The Fat Cat and just around the corner from the legendary White Horse Tavern. It was not much to speak of—a single bedroom, a living room, a narrow galley kitchen, and a bathroom—but it was perfect for his needs, particularly since the living room was rather large and doubled as his studio.

  He also liked the neighborhood a great deal. West Fourth Street was comparatively quiet and the locals tended either to be friendly or to keep to themselves. The row house belonged to Jarrod and Suze Balent, both of whom were musicians who made their living playing in the orchestra for various Broadway shows, he the cello and she the violin. They were good for a cup of coffee and a chat now and again, but weren’t around enough to become a nuisance. Best of all, they seemed to sense when he wanted company and when he did not.

  Peter took a last look at his newly completed painting and he smiled again. His heart was light, as it always was when he finished a new canvas, when he had successfully prised from his mind a bit of the past that haunted him. Barefoot, he padded across the wooden floor in jeans that were slightly too long, the edge of the denim fraying in the back beneath his heel. Not that he was overly concerned, given that both the jeans and the button-down shirt he wore were spattered and smeared with a dark rainbow of color.

  Time for a little celebration, he thought as he went to the bathroom and began to wash up, scrubbing the paint from his fingers under hot water from the tap. He would phone Carter Strom and let him know that the final piece for the new show had been completed, and unless he had some other pressing plans, Carter would do as he always did— pick up his wife Kymberly and meet Peter at the White Horse. In the years since Peter had first begun to express himself with paint, discovering both a talent and an untapped source of income, that had become a ritual for the three of them: the artist, his agent, and the agent’s wife.

  Among Peter’s few friends, fewer still were in New York City. Carter and Kymberly were primary among them.

  Peter stepped back into the living room and glanced at the clock, pleased to discover that it was early yet, not even two o’clock in the afternoon. He had been so focused the past few days that he had barely seen the sky. Immersed as he was in the painting, he had stepped outside only to pick up the newspaper and breakfast at the deli on Twelfth Street, and even then he’d barely noticed the world around him. It was like that when he was working.

  Now that he was through with the painting, the world was flooding back in, his awareness of things other than that canvas suddenly returning. Some time away from the apartment would do him good.

  Peter had just begun to unbutton his shirt when the doorbell rang. The Balents always knocked and Carter never would drop by without calling first. Aside from the rare messenger or courier, nobody rang his doorbell. One of the things he had liked the best about this apartment when he bought it was that it had its own entrance, not even a shared foyer with the house above it. A trio of brick steps led down from the street to his sunken residence. Nobody came down those steps by accident, but at first there had been those who had come looking for him. He had used simple magick to install a ward around his door, to keep the curious away.

  Now, though, he was curious himself. His bare feet made almost no noise on the floor as he crossed the room and opened the door.

  Upon the landing at the bottom of those brick steps stood a lanky, thirtyish, redheaded man in wire-rimmed glasses whose only remarkable quality was that he wore the clothing of a Catholic priest. They might not call themselves Catholics anymore, but the uniform had not changed.

  The priest seemed taken aback, almost surprised that the door had been answered at all.

  “You look lost,” Peter told the man.

  His visitor actually took a step back when he spoke, and Peter was about to shut the door when the priest laughed softly, self-deprecatingly, and clapped one hand to his face in embarrassment. It was such an unself-conscious gesture, and there was such warmth in that laugh, that Peter found himself lingering longer in the open door than he otherwise would have.

  “I’m sorry,” the priest said, still a bit embarrassed, but smiling in spite of it. “I guess you’re just not what I was expecting.”

  “I get that a lot. What can I do for you, Father?”

  The priest raised an eyebrow. “Father? I’m surprised to hear you use the term.”

  Peter’s good humor was fading. He could feel himself preparing to step back, to close the door on the man. “Don’t they call you people that still?”

  “The faithful do, yes.”

  “Then you shouldn’t be surprised. I may not believe in you, sir, or you
r church, but there are a great many things I do believe in. Now is there something I can do for you, or did you just drop by to have a look?”

  For a long moment the priest was speechless. He shifted awkwardly there on the doorstep, scratched at the back of his neck, and then that grin returned.

  “Guess we’re getting off on the wrong foot, here. That wasn’t my intention. Mind if I take it from the top?”

  Peter didn’t know why, but there was something about the guy that made him nod his head. “Give it a shot.”

  The priest thrust out his hand. “Mr. Octavian, my name’s Jack Devlin. Technically I’m not supposed to be here, but there are some things going on that . . . well, I could use your help.”

  “Why aren’t you supposed to be here, Father Devlin?” He did not shake the priest’s proffered hand.

  “Jack,” the man replied, lowering it. “Or Father Jack.”

  “All right, Jack. Why aren’t you supposed to be here?”

  The priest’s expression had become deadly serious. “My boss, Bishop Michel Gagnon, says that you’re a monster. That you’d be unwilling to help us. But he authorized my paying you a visit if I could at first restructure a spell from a partially destroyed French text that we need to stop the spread of a demon infestation in a small town on the Tex-Mex border. I was unable to do that, but I think that you can. Or that you may know how to stop them without even having to figure out the text.”

  Peter narrowed his eyes. His right hand strayed to his cheek and he idly scraped dried paint from his skin. Sunny as it was, his bare feet were still a little cold with the door open and the breeze that swirled down into the apartment.

  “Tex-Mex?” he asked doubtfully. “Isn’t that a style of cooking?”

  “It’s shorthand for—”

  “I know what it’s shorthand for,” Peter replied, at last rewarding Father Jack with a smile of his own. “It just seems a bit slangy for a priest.”

  “Maybe I’m not the sort of priest you’re used to,” Father Jack suggested.

  Peter nodded slowly. “Maybe you’re not at that.” He stepped back and held the door wide to allow the man into his home. “Come in, then. But no promises, Jack. I don’t know if I can help, or even if I’ll want to. But I’ll listen.”

  “Good enough,” said the priest as he crossed the threshold.

  Peter closed the door behind him and gestured toward the sofa set beneath the high windows. “Have a seat while I put on a pot of tea. You drink tea?”

  Father Jack was glancing around the room, taking in every canvas, every splatter of paint, every overgrown plant. “I’ve been known to,” he replied as he set himself down on the sofa. “Thank you.”

  “No trouble at all.”

  In the little galley kitchen Peter filled a battered tea kettle with tap water, set it on the burner, and turned on the stove. His day had taken an unanticipated turn, but in his long, long life he had learned that any day, any hour, any minute might turn out to be laden with the unexpected. And as such things went, the bespectacled, redheaded priest seemed harmless enough.

  Leaving the kettle to boil, he returned to the living room to find that Father Jack had risen from the sofa and was standing with his arms crossed, gravely studying the half-dozen paintings Peter had done for the new show.

  “See anything you like?”

  The priest glanced over at him and then back at the paintings. “I like them all. You’re quite an artist, Mr. Octavian. I’d no idea. There isn’t anything about you being a painter in—”

  Father Jack paused and blinked several times, obviously uncertain how to continue.

  “In the file the Church of the Resurrection has on me?” Peter suggested helpfully. “Honestly, Jack, do you think it surprises me? Even if your people weren’t keeping tabs, there have been enough books written about my past and the Venice Jihad, not to mention Salzburg and then New Orleans, that you wouldn’t even need to do your own homework.”

  The priest pursed his lips tightly, almost prissily for a moment as though Peter had offended him. “Actually, I prefer to do my own homework.”

  “An admirable trait,” Peter replied carefully. “But when I opened the door, you said I wasn’t what you expected. So something tells me you weren’t as prepared for this conversation as you’d like to have been.”

  “True.”

  “Why?”

  Father Jack’s gaze ticked toward the paintings again and then back to Peter. A truck went by out on the street and its rumble shook the walls of the apartment, the squeal of its brakes rattling the windows.

  “I didn’t expect an ordinary man.”

  Peter laughed. He strode to an antique high-backed chair he had picked up the year before off the sidewalk two blocks away and slid into it. The chair was set strategically among several of the potted plants that needed little sun. Nearby there was a ziggurat-shaped water fountain that plugged into the wall and provided an undercurrent of noise, the bubbling of a tiny brook over stones. In the midst of his living space, it was a place of manufactured peace for Peter, among things that lived and breathed and spoke of the earth.

  Now, though, on the edge of that chair, he shot a hard look at his visitor, and when he spoke, his tone was decidedly different from that which he had used throughout their limited conversation thus far.

  “You mistake me, then, sir. For I am far from an ordinary man.”

  Father Jack glanced around as though wishing he had never left the presumed safety of the sofa, that soft and forgiving island amid what now appeared to be dangerous waters.

  “I hardly meant—”

  “I know what you meant,” Octavian said curtly. “You’ve read about me in books and your Bishop calls me a monster and you know I have a certain facility with magick and so you expect some kind of smoke and mirrors for your entertainment and a man who is perhaps more imposing physically than the unwashed painter in grimy clothes in a Spartan little basement apartment. Do I have that much right?”

  Father Jack slipped his glasses off and clutched them in his hand, then raised his head high, as though a man without spectacles was somehow gifted with greater dignity than one who wore them.

  “Are you aware that your speech becomes more formal when you’re angry?” the priest asked.

  Peter smiled, not now the friendly, lopsided grin he had worn before but something far colder.

  “Oh, I’m not angry, Father. You haven’t seen me angry.” He held his hands out, palms upward, and sketched slightly at the air with his fingers. “And you haven’t seen a single bit of magick. Not even a card trick. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t real.”

  The priest took a deep breath but kept his gaze locked with Peter’s. “You’re not telling me anything I don’t know, Mr. Octavian. I’m sorry if I’ve offended you. If you’d like, I’ll go now.”

  Peter slid back in his chair and crossed his hands on his lap. “Sit down, Jack.”

  After only a moment’s hesitation, the priest complied.

  “You know, I’m not the only one whose speech gets a little uptight when tempers flare.”

  Father Jack’s hand was shaking when he raised it and slid his fingers through his neatly trimmed hair. Slowly, carefully, he put his glasses on once again and regarded Peter with an admirable display of calm.

  “So tell me what I don’t know about you. That is, if you’d care to.”

  Peter considered that a moment. Then he sat forward again, fingers steepled under his chin, the bubbling of his little ziggurat waterfall whispering in his ears, calming him.

  “First, why don’t I tell you what you do know? Or what you think you know. And you can tell me where I’m wrong.”

  “That really isn’t—”

  “No. I insist.”

  Father Jack nodded, sitting stiffly on the edge of the sofa cushion. When the tea kettle began to whistle, he actually flinched, then huffed out a short, embarrassed breath.

  Peter rose. “Let me get that.”

  I
n the galley kitchen he took a pair of brittle old china teacups and poured hot water from the kettle into each. He knew they were more appropriate for aged English women, but he was fond of them just as he was of the antique chair in the living room. There was texture to old things, impermanent things, that he appreciated now in a way he had not always.

  Moments later he returned with a tray upon which sat the teacups, a variety of tea bags, milk, and sugar. He set the tray down on the end table beside the sofa and stood while he dipped a bag of Earl Grey into his own cup and then stirred sugar into it.

  “Allison Vigeant’s book about the Venice Jihad says I was born in 1424,” Peter began, not looking at the priest as he poured just a drop of milk into his tea. “She made that up, Allison. Or someone did.”

  Now he did glance up and he saw that he had Father Jack’s undivided attention. The man did not seem even to be breathing. Peter raised his cup toward the priest.

  “Drink your tea.”

  Father Jack laughed but it was a hollow sound, for effect only. He did, however, reach over and pick up a tea bag and begin preparing his own tea. Peter turned and went back to his antique chair among the plants and the mist of the ziggurat waterfall. He sipped the tea and found it exactly right. Over the rim of the cup he regarded the priest.

  “I don’t know what year I was born, but that’s near enough I suppose. My father was Constantine the Eleventh Palaeologus, the last emperor of Byzantium, but I was illegitimate, a bastard, and therefore not exactly royalty myself.”

  “You . . . you were a soldier,” Father Jack said, tea held halfway to his lips.

  Peter frowned at him. Out on the street someone honked a car horn and the priest started, spilling several drops of tea on his lap. He barely noticed.

  “We were all soldiers in those days.” He closed his eyes. “I can see it all still, you understand. The blood and the rain storms and the men digging in the mud that spring when the Turks hammered at the walls of the city harder than ever before and tried to tunnel beneath them. That was our job for a time . . .”