Something on the ground at the statue’s feet caught Merrin’s attention, and he moved the light downward. The sight made his stomach churn with queasiness. A dozen crow bodies, dismembered and pecked for meat, lay scattered on the floor. Blood, feathers, and loops of bowel were everywhere. Their eyes had been gouged out, leaving little holes in the heads about the size left by the hyena who had punched through James’s head. The puddle of light cast by the lantern flickered—Merrin’s hand was shaking. He forced himself to calm down. Lots of animals were cannibals. Chickens, for heaven’s sake, ate their own kind. And crows never flew at night. Merrin was in no danger of attack.
Cautiously, he moved between the archangel statues toward the dais. The crows on the statue shifted and croaked but showed no inclination to leave their perches. Still, Merrin could feel a hundred pairs of sharp avian eyes on him as he set the lantern on the altar and unrolled Bession’s drawing. The enormous crucifix still hung upside down, and it seemed as if the upcast eyes of Jesus were fixed on Merrin’s paper.
Merrin examined the drawing, then looked up to compare it with the church. It didn’t look quite right somehow. But there it was on the paper—the four statues, the upside-down crucifix, the demon temple on top of—
Upside down. The crucifix was upside down. But the break on the base was fresh, meaning the crucifix was originally meant to be right side up. With a cold certainty, Merrin turned the drawing around so the second temple was beneath the church.
His earlier nervousness vanished beneath a thrill of discovery. He stashed the drawing in his backpack and used the lantern to examine the altar carefully. Mosaics gleamed in the soft light. Angels, some with eight or ten wings instead of the usual two, brandished swords, spears, maces, staves, and even knives. Most Byzantine mosaics portrayed angels as beautiful and serene, but these angels were royally pissed off. Some of them looked straight at Merrin, and he thought of Sarah’s kisses with guilt.
Was that where it had started with Urbain Grandier in that French convent three centuries ago? A pair of kisses stolen from the prioress, followed by obsession and hysteria? Maybe Merrin should confess to Francis when this was over, just to be safe. Maybe he should—
He firmed his jaw. Confession was stupid. God knew what he did, what had been done to him, and God clearly didn’t give a shit. Why confess when no one cared?
A cold draft wafted across Merrin’s face. He set the lantern back down and pulled out his lighter again. Flicking it on, he passed it back and forth in front of the altar until he found the spot where the flame wavered and danced like a miniature elemental fire. Merrin’s questing fingers found a seam near the top of the altar. He put the lighter away, then set the lantern on the floor so it cast light on the altar. From his backpack he took a crowbar. The archaeologist in him screamed blasphemy, but he inserted the tool into the seam and heaved.
Eight
Village of Derati, British East Africa
Whoever leans on a rotting body lacks no flies.
—Kenyan proverb
LOKIRIA GAVE ANOTHER agonized cry. Squatting beneath her, Bititi held out her arms, ready to receive the baby. Felashaday and the other assistant continued to hold her up. Lokiria was tiring, and her weight dragged more and more on Felashaday’s aching arms and shoulder.
“Push now,” the midwife ordered. “Push hard!”
Lokiria gritted her teeth and obeyed.
“Here it comes,” Bititi said, a note of relief in her voice. “I can see the baby’s head. You will be a mother soon. Push, now! Push! Here it comes!”
The infant slithered free—and Bititi screamed. She dropped the baby onto the mat between Lokiria’s ankles and screamed again. The afterbirth came down in a steaming lump. Lokiria began to sob. Confused, Felashaday helped her to lie down.
“Where’s my baby?” Lokiria cried. “Where’s my child?”
Bititi had backed away. Her eyes were wide and she was panting. Felashaday glanced down. Her hand flew to her mouth and she stifled a scream of her own. The infant was clearly dead, and its body writhed white with maggots. More maggots spattered Lokiria’s loins. The afterbirth crawled with them. The terrible sweet smell of rotten meat filled the hut. Lokiria sat up and saw what was wrong. She screamed as well.
The palm fronds covering the opening to the hut burst aside as Sebituana shoved his way inside. Sebituana’s eyes fell immediately upon the decayed body of his son. His face went ashen, then stony with rage.
“The white invaders!” the elder howled. “The white invaders have done this!”
The top of the altar came free with a shriek that sounded like a human scream. Merrin managed to shove it askew far enough to shine his lantern into the black hole beneath. A stone staircase led downward.
Merrin climbed over the wall of the altar and started down the stairs. The stone was older, more roughly carved. At the bottom, the stairs ended in an antechamber the size of a large closet, though it was more a cave than a room. The walls were desert dry. Opposite the stairs was a great round rock, like a lazy Susan turned on its side. Letters were carved around the outer rim of the rock, and an arcane design in the center twisted Merrin’s eye. It felt like the entire weight of the church above was pressing down on him, and he could feel the accusatory weapons of the archangels pointing a warning.
Merrin ran his lantern over the circular stone, trying to read the language. It looked like Greek, the main language of the Byzantine Empire. Squinting in the bad light, he was barely able to make out the names of Emperor Justinian and Empress Theodora.
“So, Your Imperial Majesty,” Merrin said aloud. “You ordered this place built. But why?”
His words filled the eerie silence around him and made him feel less alone, so he continued talking, filling the dark void with the sound of his own voice.
“Fairly standard symbolism, Your Majesty,” he said, still examining the round stone. “Let’s see. The opening at the top of the steps is round, and the altar above it is a square. Down here we have a round rock sealing what I’m going to guess is a square door. The circle combined with a square is a standard symbol of protection. The question is, are you protecting yourself or whatever’s hidden down here?”
He shone the lantern at the floor to the left of the round rock. There was a groove in the floor. The rock was meant to roll aside.
“With Your Majesty’s permission,” Merrin said. He set the lantern down, laid hold of the rock, and pushed. After some initial resistance, it rolled smoothly aside and revealed a square entrance to another cave. Heart pounding behind his ribs, Merrin took up the lantern again and stepped across the threshold.
A wide, empty space echoed before him. Merrin shone his beam around and paled. It was a cave, a natural one that had been expanded—and carved. The wall carvings were more primitive than the mosaics in the church above, and they sent chills down Merrin’s spine.
Demons leered at him from every angle. Scenes of nightmare cruelty twisted their way down every wall. The demons were torturing humans—men, women, and children. Here a devil carefully clawed open a screaming woman. There a devil with barbs on its erection sodomized a young man. A child hung by its hair while a demon torturer sliced off its ears. A man and a woman, presumably the child’s parents, were forced to watch. An old woman was being strangled by her own entrails. A young woman was being sawed in two. They reminded Merrin of Bession’s drawings.
Some of the carvings showed human carnal lust. Men penetrated women in every possible orifice and from every possible position. Groups of three and four and five climbed over each other, their faces leering masks of desire. One man knelt to perform simultaneous fellatio on two other men. A group of four women used fingers, tongues, and carved penises to pleasure each other. Everywhere Merrin looked, he saw horror and pain mix with lust. It brought a sick feeling to the pit of his stomach.
Several sets of chains and shackles hung from the walls. A series of stone tables stood to one side. Merrin ran his lantern light over
them. Metal instruments gleamed, unrusted in the dry air. Serrated knives, hooks, spikes, pliers, pincers, tongs, and other objects Merrin couldn’t identify. Dark streaks stained most of them.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” he whispered. “What were you doing down here, Your Majesty? Or were you sealing in what someone else did?”
Merrin’s lantern continued to sweep the room. The light picked out a stone block in the center of the room. The block had a slight tilt to it. Merrin edged closer to get a better look. His footsteps echoed, and the stony eyes of the demons seemed to follow him. He discovered that it was worse when the demon carvings lay in darkness—the demons could see him, but he couldn’t see them.
A flicker of movement caught his eye. He spun and aimed his lantern, but it made a fizzing sound and went out, plunging the entire temple into darkness.
“Shit!” he said.
Something skittered past, and Merrin felt something brush his ankle. A rat? A snake? He bit back a scream and shook the lantern. Nothing. He had filled it with oil. What the hell was—
The light burst back to life. A monster loomed over Merrin, reaching for him with sharp claws. He yelped and almost dropped the lantern. It took him a moment to realize it was only a statue carved into the cave wall. He tried a laugh, but it came out as a high-pitched squeak.
“Just carved stone,” Merrin said. “Nice work, Your Majesty.”
He stepped forward and peered at the statue, as if to prove he hadn’t been in the least afraid, though no one else was around. The figure showed a naked man with the stylized head of a snarling lion, or perhaps a dog. Four wings spread to a span of eight or nine feet. The statue’s penis was a curled serpent. A recess had been carved into the statue’s abdomen. Merrin stared at it. In the back of the cavity, another figure had been carved into the rock. It was an exact copy of the idol from Semelier’s rubbing. Merrin put his hand into the recess and felt the chilly stone. It was as if the niche had been carved so the idol would be pressed into the cavity facing inward, like a key going into a lock. But where was the idol itself? Semelier wasn’t going to be happy if it was missing.
“Did you order it brought back to Byzantium, Your Majesty?” Merrin asked aloud. It felt good to hear a human voice, even if it was just his own. “Perhaps Bession stole the stupid thing, eh?”
Merrin pulled back a bit from the statue, and his eye fell on the tilted stone block in the center of the room again. Letters had been carved into the floor, forming a counterclockwise spiral that circled inward toward the block, which appeared to be an altar. Merrin’s sense of direction told him it lay directly beneath the four statues in the church above. The altar down here, however, was festooned with the remains of devices for restraint—chains, shackles, and rotted leather cuffs. A pit gaped at the lower end, and the stone surface was heavily grooved.
Looming above the altar were three carved stone images. One was a man with perfectly chiseled muscles and a heavy penis. Another was a woman with large, high breasts and ample hips. Both figures sported fangs and bat wings. The third figure stood between the other two, its arms around their waists. It was also male, heavily muscled, with an enormous erection. It looked like the Devil card from Sarah’s tarot deck. Merrin’s groin tightened, despite his aversion to the scene.
“This is another temple, isn’t it, Your Majesty?” Merrin said, trying to get his mind off his stirring genitals. “Older than the one above. The people of your empire found this one, added to it, and then much later built the church above.” He squatted so the lantern light illuminated the spiral of words. “I recognize this, Your Majesty. It’s pure Byzantine magic. You chant the words as you walk the spiral inward, and when you reach the center, the spell is cast. What was it supposed to do?”
He stood and shone the lantern on the stone block again. “Those are bloodstains. Your Majesty’s people made sacrifices here. Human sacrifices. Did you know about it and make them stop? Or did you…discourage it?” Merrin examined the grooves more closely. “I see how it works. The channels let the blood drip down into that pit, which feed the demon or the god or whatever it was. Almost like a scene out of the Inquisition. Of course, you missed all that. You had other problems.”
A tickle on his hand made him look down. A fly was crawling over his fingers. He turned his hand over and saw three more. A strange sound hissed near his feet, and he felt something brush his ankle again. Both ankles. He brought the light down.
The floor crawled with flies. Billions of them, covering every flat surface. The hissing sound was their bodies sliding over each other. They coated the ground ankle-deep in a glittering, moving carpet. Merrin had time to gasp before buzzing exploded all around him.
Sarah moved through the clinic, attending to various small tasks without straying more than a few yards from Joseph’s bed. Outside, Trenton Jefferies watched her through the clinic window, checking the outline of her body, her rounded ass, her gorgeous tits. The darkness hugged him close, protecting him from view like a friendly blanket. The night air was dry and chilly, devoid of scent. Maybe she’d bend over, or lift her dress to scratch someplace private.
A fly crawled down his face, weaving a pathway among the boils, but Jefferies didn’t even notice. He was breathing hard, in danger of fogging the glass. His dick was rock hard, and it made a tent in his pants. He knew from experience that if he touched it, he’d explode, so he left it alone for now. How many white puddles had he left under Sarah’s window? Jefferies had lost count. Stupid cunt probably hadn’t even noticed. Her snide comments and little jabs were all designed to make him feel stupid and little, but he was all man, sweetheart. He could jerk it three times a day if he wanted to, and make it last with a woman all night.
Problem was, there weren’t many real women around. Jefferies didn’t count the fuzzies. The idea of stuffing it to one of them made his skin crawl. But Sarah—now there was a woman. Soft and pale and white, white, white. And broken in. He had seen the number tattooed on her arm, and he’d heard what the Nazis did to women in the camps, oh yes. Sarah would be broken in good, and that would make it wonderfully easy to slip it to her, pound her hard. And she’d be used to it. Fantastic.
An image of Sarah tied to an examination table stole into his mind. Yeah. Shackled naked, her pink nipples standing up and ready, with a big blond Nazi soldier standing at attention with a big Nazi hard-on bulging in his pants—just like Jefferies’s. The doctor in his white coat talking into a reel-to-reel tape recorder: “Now ve check ze subject’s sexual rrrresponses. Corporal Schmidt vill assist.”
Jefferies pressed his crotch against the clinic wall and stifled a groan at the friction it caused to the underside of his dick. In his head, Sarah was begging Corporal Schmidt not to follow orders, but he was already unbuttoning his fly to release a cock the size of a battering ram. Jefferies reached for his own crotch.
The front door opened and Emekwi walked silently into the clinic. Sarah had her back to the entrance and didn’t see him. Emekwi moved closer, and still Sarah didn’t realize he was there. Jefferies’s mouth opened. He was almost panting, and he forced himself to keep quiet—the window was open a crack and they might hear him. Was Emekwi going to grab Sarah from behind? Do some rear-ending? God, what a sight that would be. Some of the fuzzies had bloody big tonkers. Sarah wouldn’t be able to take it, big Nazis or not, and Jefferies would hear her cry out with the pain of getting stuffed with some African sausage.
The fly continued crawling around his face, and Jefferies felt the tickle. He waved the insect away. It buzzed around his head a few times, then landed again. This time Jefferies ignored it. He popped open the top button of his pants.
To Jefferies’s disappointment, Emekwi stopped by Joseph’s bed. Sarah apparently heard something because she spun in place, her face a mask of surprise. When she saw it was Emekwi, she calmed down and spoke. Jefferies listened hard, barely catching the words through the window’s narrow opening.
“Emekwi,” she said, but he didn’t
respond. “I’m doing everything I can for him.”
Emekwi left without saying a word.
Jefferies crept to the corner of the clinic building and peered around in time to see Emekwi drag away down the boardwalk, a broken man. Jefferies didn’t get it—these fuzzies threw more kids than a mongrel bitch dropped puppies. Why was he getting upset over just one? Well, two, if you counted the one eaten by those hyenas.
His face itched again. He pawed at it, but the itching didn’t go away. It never went away entirely, but Jefferies had flare-ups that were worse than the norm. Maybe he was due for another. The itch grew stronger, and Jefferies scratched hard. Something broke under his nails and he felt warm fluid trickle down his cheek. The itch changed to a hot, runny pain. Jefferies wiped his hand on his trousers. Bitch wouldn’t even examine him, let alone try to cure him. And now his bottle of scotch was empty. God, he needed a drink. A drink and a blow job. Fuck her. “Fucking cunt,” he said.
Jefferies wandered down the boardwalk, more or less following Emekwi back to the hotel and its attached bar. Emekwi, however, passed the darkened building and kept on walking. Jefferies waited until the grieving man’s wooden footsteps had faded, then tried the bar’s front door, expecting to find it locked. It opened under his hand.
Jefferies found the bar dark and empty. He thought about trying to strike a light, then decided to leave it for a fuck-all. He moved toward the bar at the back of the room. The fly buzzed around his head again, and he waved it away. How the hell was it seeing to follow him in the dark, anyway?
A figure loomed out of the dark ahead of him. Jefferies jumped before he realized it was only his reflection in the dim mirror behind the battered bar. He moved around behind the counter, scanning the low shelves for liquor, but they were empty. He checked underneath the bar, feeling along the splintered shelf. Also empty. No wonder Emekwi hadn’t locked the fucking place.
A scritching noise made him jerk upright. Again he came face-to-face with his own reflection in the mirror. The scritching grew louder, like tiny claws edging along a hard surface. The lighting was dim—moonlight that filtered through the open door and cracks in the shutters—but Jefferies saw the movement just before he felt it. One of his sores bulged and moved. He could feel something squirming against the meat of his face beneath the skin.
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