Comes a Horseman

by Robert Liparulo

  She stepped into the bathroom but did not bother to shut the door.

  53

  After Karen died, Brady had thought the world was a dark place. He’d had no idea just how dark it could be.

  They traveled awhile in silence. Images of the past six hours played in his mind like a horror movie trailer, whose fast flashes of fangs and blood and falling bodies were designed to rattle your senses. The attack on him and Zach; the assault on Alicia; the insanity of the truth-serum session with Malik, who had most certainly been a Satanist; Alicia’s narrow escape from death; Apollo’s forty-nine-story plunge; Malik’s encore. Brady didn’t know whether to try to sort it all out or to let it all go and not think of anything for now.

  They had left the Marriott quickly, and not only to avoid hotel security and NYPD. Neither of them was convinced that Malik or the assassin who’d attacked his home were lone killers. If others showed up because of the commotion or simply to check on Malik’s handiwork, they would try to pick up their trail. Brady was thankful he had been triply cautious getting Zach to the Oakleys’.

  But leaving the hotel garage was another matter. They had taken his Toyota Highlander, since there was a chance whoever was after them did not yet know he had driven to New York. Still, someone could have easily spotted them and followed. So now he made frequent turns, occasionally doubling back and entering a parking garage just to immediately exit it—all the while winding farther away from Manhattan and the bloody mess they’d left.

  They passed through Queens and Brooklyn, then over the Verrazano Narrows to Staten Island, and headed southwest on Richmond Parkway toward New Jersey.

  When she had finished redressing her wound with supplies from Apollo’s bag, Alicia pulled out her laptop and began typing furiously. He knew it was her way of handling stress, to get it out of her head and into a word processor. In his peripheral vision, he saw light from street lamps sweep over her face, as regular as a heartbeat. Except for their similar height and slight frame, Karen and Alicia were polar opposites. His wife had been dark and mysterious; Alicia was blonde and pale, with expressions that made her appear as easy to read as a fast-food menu (Brady knew better). Karen often thought long and hard before gently explaining why she felt differently from Brady about a subject; Alicia never hesitated to air her disagreements. When something concerned her, Karen reached for her Bible; Alicia reached for her gun.

  And yet, Brady felt something stir in his heart at the thought of Alicia sitting beside him, sharing this dark adventure. He realized that what he felt could be a profound gratefulness that she had not died tonight, as she could have—twice. He remembered the rush of protectiveness he’d felt when she told him of Malik’s attack on her. This feeling was different. It was warm and comforting. Nothing approaching the emotions Karen had kindled within him, but it was the first time he’d felt anything like it since her death. It startled him. And gave him hope.

  Her keyboard had fallen silent. He glanced over. She was slumped against the door, her eyes closed. He reached over and lowered the laptop screen.

  “I’m awake,” she said without stirring. Twenty seconds passed, then: “Barely.”

  “Need a Red Bull?” He’d seen her down three of the energy drinks in one long night of investigative fact-finding. He could use a couple himself.

  “More like a Red Roof Inn. I’m beat, Brady.”

  “Say no more.”

  They needed time to think, to come up with a plan, to rest. He had heard that the best soldiers never passed up the opportunity to eat or sleep. They were both essential to peak performance, and in battle you never knew when you’d get another chance. And one thing that was painfully clear was that he and Alicia were soldiers in a battle for their lives.

  He pulled into the first motel they came to, a Comfort Inn just outside Baltimore. They were three hours and three states away from the Marriott room where crime scene investigators would find their fingerprints and DNA.

  WITHOUT HAVING to ask, Brady knew she shared his desire to not be alone. This wasn’t going to be one of those times when stress and the specter of death drove two people into each other’s arms and beds, but he wanted to keep his eye on her, to be near her, and to know she was breathing the same air as he drifted off to sleep. He did not know if it was Alicia, specifically, he wanted to be near, or simply a comrade in arms. He suspected it was Alicia.

  It would be the first time since Karen died that he had shared a room with another adult. He asked for two separate beds.

  They parked in the rear, away from the main thoroughfare, and hauled their luggage into the room.

  Immediately Alicia set up her computer gear on a chipped Formica table.

  “Malik gave us some good intel,” she explained. “I want to run it through NCIC. See what hits.”

  “Now?”

  “Just a little bit,” she said. “Half hour.”

  The sky was lightening and beginning to show through the sheers covering the room’s single window. He pulled the heavier drapes closed and went to discover how hot he could make the water in the shower. When he emerged twenty minutes later, the computer was dark and Alicia was lying fully clothed on top of her bed’s covers, fast asleep.

  WHEN BRADY awoke, his eyelids had gained ten pounds; they pushed painfully against his eyes and required every muscle in his face to stay open. His head and his hand competed for his attention, each throbbing with pain. A thick band of bright sunlight stole through an inch-wide gap between the drapes. Brady rose to remedy this breach.

  Alicia had pushed the covers off her bed and slipped between the sheets. A lavender collar, bent up like a dog’s ear and touching her chin, revealed that she had not bothered to remove her street clothes. She was on her back, her head thrown back, mouth open—the sleep of the truly exhausted.

  The bedtime prayer he had uttered every night as a boy came to mind.

  If I should die before I wake . . .

  What a thing to teach a child. He’d never liked that prayer.

  The temperature in the room was stifling. He found that the air conditioner mounted through the wall under the window blew only hot air, regardless of its settings.

  Alicia had left a bottle of ibuprofen on the bathroom counter. He popped four and went back to bed without looking at the clock.

  THE HORROR of the previous night found Brady in his dreams.

  “No! Can’t you hear him? Can’t you see it?”

  “Yes, Master! I have the blood! I saved it for you!”

  Brady rolled over, swiping at the sheets that gripped him like a hand. He sat bolt upright. His eyes strained against the sunlight streaming through the open curtains. Still, the nightmare assailed him.

  “Alicia . . .”

  “Where’s Apollo? What have you done to him?”

  Alicia was sitting at the room’s small table. She saw that he was awake, and her hand shot to the recorder she had used during Malik’s Amytal interview. The chaotic echoes of that event abruptly stopped.

  “Sorry,” she said.

  Brady rubbed his face. His eyelids had returned to their normal weight, and his headache was gone. His hand pained him just enough to keep the injury in mind. “What time is it?”

  She glanced at her watch. “One fifteen. I’ve been up for hours.”

  He groaned, threw his legs off the side of the bed, and sat. He stepped into his pants, tugging them up as he stood. He turned and caught Alicia watching him. She made no attempt to conceal her scrutiny. He played it cool. His shirt was on the back of her chair. He padded over, took the shirt, and slipped it on.

  He put his hand on her shoulder. Her muscles were tight as cables. He began massaging her trapezoids. Karen had taught him to curb his impulse to brutally knead at the muscles and instead to gently coax tension out of them.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  “Last night,” she said, nodding at the recorder. “I can’t believe that’s me.”

  Her head began rotating slowly on her
neck. Her muscles were responding to Brady’s fingers.

  “Do yourself a favor,” he said. “Erase that recording.”

  “I know the things I saw were hallucinations, but I can’t shake the notion that there was something more to them.”

  He waited for her to continue. His attention moved to her deltoids, over the rotator cuffs.

  She let seconds drift by, then said, “It’s like I was peering into an invisible world, one that’s always around us, but we can’t see it.”

  “The spiritual world?”

  “Yeah . . . something like that. Karma or . . . I don’t know. I just think Malik was evil, and evil things—demons or bad energy or whatever—had been drawn to him, had congregated around him. I think I caught a glimpse of them.”

  Brady moved his fingers to the sides and back of her neck, careful to avoid the nick from Malik’s garrote.

  He said, “Lots of tribal peoples—Native Americans, aborigines of various countries—believe hallucinogenic drugs help humans commune with spirits. Timothy Leary tried to prove LSD breaks down our defenses, our conceptions of reality, and allows us to see the world as it truly is, with dimensions and beings we can’t normally discern. He held that it was not the drugs that evoked a twisted state of consciousness, but our prejudices. That’s why some people think small children are more aware of the supernatural than adults are; they haven’t yet formed the prejudices that prevent us from seeing what’s just beyond our five senses.”

  “What do you believe?”

  For a few moments, he watched his fingers work. They found her trapezoids once more.

  He said, “I believe there are dimensions and beings at work around us that we can’t see. The Bible says as much: ‘For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.’” He let her think about the passage, then added, “Whether we’re ever supposed to see them in our time on earth, I don’t know.”

  “I saw them.”

  He stopped his fingers and stepped around to look her in the eyes.

  “Malik was talking some crazy stuff before you got a faceful of scopolamine. Maybe what you saw—”

  “Was some kind of, what, posthypnotic suggestion?” She shook her head. “I don’t think so.”

  He could tell that nothing he said would change her mind. She would work on what she believed she had witnessed until it became a mental tool she could use. Eventually, she would be a stronger person or do her job better because of the trauma she suffered last night. She was very Nietzschean that way.

  “What I want to know,” he said, trying to break the tension, “is what kind of movie would Malik find scary?”

  She laughed softly, and he saw a bit of humor reach her eyes.

  “The Great Muppet Caper ?” she suggested, and they both laughed.

  On the table, next to the recorder, her laptop was opened and booted up. Beside it was a short stack of printouts. A bold headline caught his attention: “Vanishing Vikings: The Mystery of the Western Settlement.” He dropped into another chair and picked up the top page.

  “What’s this?”

  “Internet research,” she said. “Something to do while you caught up on your Zs. You said the guy who attacked you looked like a Viking, right down to his clothes and choice of weapons, so I Googled Viking and Norse and wolf-dog hybrids and a few other terms. Seems that Vikings are all the rage these days. Hundreds of thousands of Web pages dedicated to them. Everything you ever wanted to know. Too much to sift through, so I went over to LexisNexis. You know it?”

  He nodded. It was a database of articles from magazines, journals, newspapers. Very comprehensive. Having been published, the articles tended to be more thoroughly researched and better written than the average Web site. As a graduate student, he’d tapped into the database regularly.

  “That article is from the Journal of Archaeology,” she said.

  He began reading it silently.

  The abandonment of the Western Settlement of Greenland in AD 1350 is one of the great mysteries of medieval history. Ninety families—there one month, gone the next, according to the records of Ivar Bardarsson, an Icelandic clerical official. In the spring of 1350, friendly Inuits brought word to the Eastern Settlement at the southern tip of Greenland that there was no one left in Vesterbygd—as the Western Settlement was known at the time. Bardarsson joined a group of men who went to investigate. They found dinner on the tables, kettles of stew over burnt-out fires, starving livestock in pens, but no people. Were they slaughtered by local Inuit? Did the particularly harsh winter of 1349–1350 drive them . . . somewhere? No one knows for—

  “Where are you?” Alicia interrupted.

  He told her.

  “Okay, that’s enough of that one. Here . . .” She pulled the stack of paper toward her and flipped through it. She tugged out a page and handed it to him.

  “From the Journal of Speculative Archaeology.”

  “The what?”

  “It has something to do with establishing theory based on known facts; I don’t know. The writer is a professor in the Archaeology Department at the University of Ontario. Check it out. Just what I underlined.”

  This time he read out loud:

  “‘Far from the monastic cleric history books make him out to be, Ivar Bardarsson was a ruthless “missionary of torture.” He had a penchant for stoning to death pagans who refused his efforts to convert them to Christianity, even children as young as eight. So ruthless was he that in 1341 he was exiled from Norway and sent to Greenland’s Eastern Settlement, then known as Osterbygd. There, under the guise of ombudsman of the Bishop of Bergen, Bardarsson continued his practice of coerced conversion, under penalty of death.

  “‘History does not tell us when Bardarsson first learned of the Western Settlement, known as Vesterbygd, but when he did, he must have felt like a child set loose in a candy store. For unlike other settlements, which were largely Christian by this time, Vesterbygd was populated entirely by pagans. When Erik the Red left Norway to settle Greenland in 984, Christianity had already begun sweeping through his motherland. His ships bore both Christians and pagans. To maintain peace in his budding new world, Erik separated the religions. The pagans settled in Vesterbygd. Generation after generation, Vesterbygd not only held on to its pagan beliefs, it became fiercely anti-Christian. When the Norse, as a people group, converted to Christianity, the violent passion it applied to plundering and conquering the Saxons now turned to converting unbelievers. Indeed, Bardarsson’s barbaric conversion techniques were nothing more than a product of his heritage. To the pagans in Vesterbygd, Christians were seen as a bloodthirsty people.

  “‘By the time Bardarsson set sail for Vesterbygd . . .’”

  Brady stopped and looked at Alicia. “This guy’s not trying to say Bardarsson wiped out the Western Settlement, is he?”

  “It’s even stranger than that. Read on.”

  “‘By the time Bardarsson set sail for Vesterbygd, he had been planning the excursion for some two years. Word of his intentions reached Britain, where it piqued the interest of a pseudo-religious organization called Excubitor. This organization shared Vesterbygd’s disdain for Christianity. In a letter from the Archduke of—’”

  “Just what’s underlined.”

  Brady’s eyes darted ahead. “‘The group reached Vesterbygd ahead of Bardarsson. It convinced the settlement’s leaders to travel north, where the organization’s fleet would meet them in late summer. They made a pact by which Excubitor would become their benefactor and help them preserve their beliefs and culture in exchange for their pledge of fealty to . . .’”

  Brady read the words, then flashed his bafflement at Alicia. She smiled. He went back to the page.

  “‘Fealty to the coming Antichrist, who was prophesied to defeat Christianity and restore the world to Asetru.’”

  “That’s the Viking religion. I looked it up.�
��

  “But it’s not even true. The Antichrist doesn’t defeat Christianity.”

  Alicia shrugged. “Anything can be spun. He goes on to say he believes the people of the Western Settlement relocated to the wilds of the Northwest Territories, Canada, where their descendants are still waiting for the Antichrist.”

  “Does he have proof?”

  “Some . . . In the 1890s, a guy in authentic Viking garb walked into Fond du Lac, Saskatchewan, claiming to have escaped a closed community way up north. The local newspaper interviewed him and took his picture, but by the time representatives of larger papers and universities showed up, the guy had vanished. The professor cites archaeological evidence that implies the same community of people kept establishing a village and abandoning it about once every generation to move deeper into the Territories.” She shook her head. “I didn’t understand half of it.”

  Brady looked at her a long time. Finally, he said, “So what you’re saying is that the Pelletier killer came from this lost Viking settlement?”

  She threw up her hands. “I don’t know, Brady. I’m just doing research, and this stuff popped up. I think it’s pretty interesting. Is it pertinent? I don’t know. Is it a coincidence these Vikings are waiting for the Antichrist and all the Pelletier victims are linked by their interest in religion? I don’t know. But let me show you one more thing.”

  His head lolled back.

  “Just a few sentences, okay?” She found the printout she wanted. “Right here . . . ‘The Vikings of Greenland and later of Newfoundland and Labrador were fierce and accomplished hunters. Their success can be credited in no small part to their skills as breeders and trainers of hunting dogs. The first recorded crossbreeding of a gray wolf and a German shepherd can be traced to the village of Brattahlid in 1062. Within two decades, every Norse hunter in Greenland owned a wolf-dog hybrid, which was trained to bring down an animal or incapacitate it until the hunter arrived.’”

  She looked up.

  Brady said, “Wow.”

  Alicia nodded.

  Lost in thought, he stood and headed for the bathroom. “I need a shower,” he mumbled. Then he turned to her. “What are we supposed to do, find a Norse tribe that’s been lost for seven hundred years?”