The Trilogy of the Void: The Complete Boxed Set

by Peter Meredith

  "Sean was right." Will went on to explain about Amy Harris and the fact that his wife was being held hostage. As he spoke, his chest began to throb where the bullet had struck it and unknowingly he rubbed the spot.

  "Oh my." The bishop sat back looking tired. "More of this?"

  "Mr. Jern, this Amy Harris probably won't give your wife to you," Father Vogel said. "You have to know that once you turn over these...papers you have nothing left to bargain with and if she's anything like how Father Alba described her mother, then she isn't the type to worry too much about killing the both of you."

  "I know." Will rubbed his chest some more now that his unspoken fear had been put into words. "But what choice do I have? She'll know if I call the police."

  "Maybe the Church can help. We have resources," Bishop Keenan nodded knowingly as he said it.

  Will hesitated, wondering exactly what that meant, but then shook his head as if clearing it from a dream. "I can't risk it. I don't know the extent of her abilities."

  The bishop sat back giving his exorcist a long look, he then turned to Will. "Mr. Jern, I can't stop you from going to help your wife, nor would I ever want to. That being said, you aren't leaving with these incantations. Just as you made the decision to leave the sword behind..."

  Will's sudden laugh stopped the old man's words. "Your Excellency, you don't know who you're dealing with. Even if it was just me you had to worry about, it's doubtful you could stop me from taking those papers and going to Maine. Police or no police. But you're also dealing with Talitha, and she'll leave behind a trail of bodies from here to Bangor if she has to."

  "I thought you said your exorcism worked," the bishop replied, his hand going involuntarily to his cross that hung about his neck. "Is the demon Ba'al Fie-ere still in her?"

  "No, the demon is gone; back to the Void. It's just Talitha you'd have to deal with...only she thinks she's cursed and that her soul is doomed either way. And after the last eight years, especially the last few days, I think she might be right. But there has been only one thing in all this time that has brought her joy, and that is my coming baby. Right now, this baby might be the only thing she has to live for and I have a feeling that if you were to get between her and Lisa..." Will left the sentence unfinished. For the most part, Will was bluffing about this, yet still he had felt uneasy a couple of times when around his sister that morning. There was an unnamed quality about her that had him a little nervous.

  The two clergymen glanced at each other in uncertainty, while Father Alba lifted his chin from his chest. "Give him the incantations, please. We should not be the cause of the suffering of innocents."

  Bishop Keenan looked unsure of himself. "Are we talking about a moot point anyway? If the sword can do what the two of you say, then the incantations can't be any worse. Or can they?"

  Father Vogel frowned looking down at the papers. "They could be... anything is possible. Perhaps we should bring your sister in to decipher the writings."

  This was agreed to and ten minutes later Talitha sat hunched by the window, pouring over the vellum. Next to her was an ordinary pad of paper and in her right hand she held a pen with which she had already written out a string of notes. She turned the first page sideways and a second later, she had it upside down.

  "Can you read that language?" Father Vogel asked from just behind her. Though he was a precise, intelligent man, he was also like a curious boy, hoping to see the secret to a magic trick revealed.

  "Yes...and no...and kind of," Talitha answered cryptically. "There's actually a mash of three languages being used and one of them I've never seen before..." She paused, frowning at the text. "But that's not such a big deal. There are thousands of demonic languages, yet they're all somewhat similar, especially written out."

  She squinted back down at the papers, turning them as before. Minutes slipped by as she continued to scribble away and the three clergymen and Will only sat around in silence. Waiting.

  "Ah!" she exclaimed.

  "Have you translated the text?" Bishop Keenan asked in a rush. He had fidgeted more than the rest, clearly unaccustomed to waiting.

  "No, I just discovered that the texts are enciphered!" Talitha beamed at them in excitement. Will shook his head in mock sadness at her enthusiasm.

  "A code? Great!" The bishop sat back again in exasperation.

  "Don't worry your Excellency. Amy Harris could never come up with a code that Talitha couldn't break," Will stated positively, however he did glance at the time 11:40 a.m. He knew that these things could take time.

  "It's a cipher actually. And before you ask, there is a difference between a cipher and a code. I just hope it's only a triple-alphabetic substitution cipher. If she used a Caesar shift, this will take a while."

  "What's a..." the bishop began, but Will stopped him with a headshake. Given half a chance, Talitha would talk non-stop for hours on a subject such as this and he didn't have the time.

  A few minutes later: "Oops." Talitha scribbled at something, scratching over a line of text and rewriting it again. A little bit after that: "What? How did I miss..." She frowned at the paper and rechecked her work. "Darn it!" She exclaimed and then with a sour look she stacked up the papers and handed than back to a flummoxed looking Will. "I can't decipher these. Sorry, but somehow the writing on the pages shifts from language to language. It's magic of some sort. Without a spell, or perhaps a counter-spell, these are useless."

  "Magic writing?" Will held them up to the light but the words didn't shift or move as he expected. "Are you sure?"

  She nodded. "Yes, there's no doubting it."

  The bishop put out his hand to look at the incantations as well. He stared hard for a minute. "Whoa! One of these little squiggles changed. This one right there, it didn't look like that a moment ago. I didn't see it change, I just looked away and when I looked back..." The bishop held his head down for a moment, looking at the polished floor of the hospital room, thinking hard. "I believe we need to burn these...I know what you're going to say Mr. Jern, but if they're so important to warrant this sort of protection, they can't fall back into the witch's hands."

  "Your Excellency, it would make little difference," Father Vogel said. "From everything we've heard, the mother, Henny Harris discovered the secret to opening a gate into the Void by using only a simple Ouija board. It was probably quite time consuming, but effective nonetheless. My personal opinion is that we allow Mr. Jern to take the incantations with him in his attempt to rescue his wife. I think we can trust him."

  "Your Excellency," Father Alba whispered. His face had slowly turned as white as his bandages and his voice was that of a man far older that he actually was. "I trust Will Jern to do the right thing."

  "And what of his sister? Do you trust her?"

  The blind priest's head slumped to his chest as if in defeat and he sat there like that for so long that Will was on the verge of giving him a shake to see if he had passed out, when he spoke, "My head says no, she can't be trusted, but my heart says yes. There is love in her still and deep down she is good."

  Bishop Keenan stood and stretched, his back popping. He was surprisingly tall. At six-foot-two, he was able to look Will in the eye and did so for close on a minute before he spoke, "Take the incantations. Do not fail to return without them, and the sword too, bring that back as well. I'll pray for you and your family." Will took the stack of vellum, solemnly.

  "I will, your Excellency. And thank you for your prayers."

  "I want you to take Father Vogel with you," the bishop turned to the trim priest with iron-grey goatee. "Do you have any qualms about going?"

  "Not in the least. I think it..." he broke off as he noticed the look of fear that the siblings shared. "What is it?"

  "Priests don't last too long around Ba'al Zubel," Will answered. "Perhaps you should have a look at the basement of the factory before you decide to come along."

  Chapter 6

  Talitha

  A half hour later, when they entered t
he room beneath the partially destroyed factory, the balance between life and death was equal between the bodies that breathed and those that never would again. But Will didn't stay for long, he cast his eyes about quickly, looking slightly dumbfounded as he did. A second later, his head gave a little wiggle that Talitha recognized as an effect of a minor vision. Will had been searching for the incantation that the gypsy had used to bring Ba'al forth from the Void and now he saw that Eric Milner had it stuffed in his right front pocket. Talitha could have told him this, she had known where it was hidden the second they walked in.

  "I need to talk to you outside," Will growled at the cop. Milner's mouth came open but he didn't say a word.

  When the two left, the dead held sway, they commanded the room and for some reason, the four corpses seemed larger than they had been—as if in death, they had grown more important to her. At first they held her attention, captivating her with the inhuman way their bodies splayed out in odd positions. She wanted to arrange them better, to make them more real looking, but she was afraid.

  It was a strange fear, especially since she'd seen many dead bodies in her time. Normally, they only made her sad, but now she was decidedly creeped out by them. Particularly the huge corpse of Jim and the slighter one of Luke. Always as she turned her head, they were just at the edge of her vision and sometimes they seemed to move.

  Because of this, she stuck close to the priest. Where he went, she went and she liked that he was alive, his heartbeat was reassuring to her. A steady seventy-eight beats a minute.

  "You say you shot Luke twice, where was he when that happened?" Father Vogel asked. His voice was not melodious as the bishop's had been and she would've rather kept listening to the man's heartbeat. She pointed to a spot on the floor.

  "Hmm." The sound was unpleasing to her as well, as was the spot on the floor. There was something unrecognizable on the floor; part of a human.

  He went to it and studied the ground around it from different angles. Next, the dead came under his scrutiny; he studied them, touching their limbs, moving them back and forth. With Luke he spent a good deal of time on, inspecting his wounds, opening his mouth, and peering in. After this, he undressed the body, and the smell, which had been difficult for her to ignore before, was now impossible. It was the smell of the little boys on his corpse, and also it was the smell that came from the filth-laden box beneath the church. Suddenly that image came to her, the box and the foul, decomposing mysterious creature that it held. Yet she had never seen it before. It had been the other Talitha that had seen it.

  Talitha squeezed her eyes shut and stepped blindly away from the priest, silently demanding that her mind ignore the horrific vision and instead she forced it to classify and quantify the various sounds of water dripping into the room. There were sixteen different trickles ranging in intensity from a feeble third of a liter per hour drip that landed on Terry Brabec's exposed arm, to a four liter per hour flow that came down just in front of the doorway.

  The night before two drops from that flow had struck her with equal intensity as she dashed to the still form of Jim Anderson. The first struck her left wrist right at the junction of the radius and ulna, the second landed on her right cheek. It mingled with a tear of hers, changing its composition. Was it still then a tear? She wondered.

  She forced herself not to care.

  Drip, drip. Drip, drip, the water came down all around her. Loud and soft. Some faster. Some were heavy, full drops. She saw one of these and the tear was huge. It reminded her of her little sister's tears. Somehow, Katie could hold together tears well beyond the normal surface tension would allow. This one was oval shaped, or rather it was tear shaped.

  Talitha shook her head. Realizing it was a drop of water not a tear that she had seen. It must have fallen from the partially destroyed ceiling of the factory and not from an eye. Her own eyes were meant to be dry. There wasn't a foreign body in either one of them that would elicit the need for any tears. Nor did she have allergies. A tear just then running down her cheek would be illogical.

  The wet upon her face was only from the rain.

  The priest interrupted her thinking, "After you shot Luke, did he come at you?"

  Talitha suddenly remembered something as if it were a dream. She was in the factory and it was dark. In her hand was a very large gun. It was black and when she looked down its barrel, it felt as if she held the night. Her brother had handed it to her and she remembered then thinking what a fool he was and that he would pay for his stupidity. At first, she liked the feel of the gun, but then she had changed.

  At that point, she hated and feared the gun. It was clumsy and she recalled how it didn't fit her hand, it was too big, made for someone with longer fingers, but she had compensated and shot her brother in the chest. Her aim had been true. She had accounted for every variable, yet he didn't die.

  Instead, he screamed and screamed. That was of course an impossibility. It was illogical for a man so recently shot in the chest to scream like that.

  Just then, she heard her voice answer the priest, "Yes. Luke walked toward me and so I shot him a second time."

  She had shot the thin blonde man dead center in the chest. But he didn't scream as her brother did, neither did he die. Another impossibility.

  "What happened next?" The priest took a picture of the floor of the room and the flash of the camera caused Talitha to blink. A natural reaction, certainly. She blinked again repeatedly and water, warmed evidently from the recent fire dripped upon her face. The water ran to her lip and she took it in. Her mind, the way she had constructed it, instantly classified the fluid, ninety-nine percent water, with traces of mucin, lipids, lysozyme, lipocalin, immunoglobulins, glucose, urea, sodium, and potassium.

  An interesting mix, but altogether illogical and certainly not rain. Even the pH values were off.

  "The demon looked at me from the Void." This statement was the antecedent for more of the strange fluid that wasn't rain to fall upon her cheeks.

  Scientifically, she tried to tell herself that there was no Void. Such a thing was impossible to measure, to know. How big was it? What were its dimensions in kilometres? Or was it most practical to measure it in millimetres? Where was the Void? What was its longitude?

  "And what was that like?" The priest took notes in a black and white composition notebook as he asked. The scritching pen was loud. She tuned it out.

  In the dream, it hurt to be looked upon by the demon.

  It was indescribable and thus she didn't bother with the attempt, she turned away ignoring the question, ignoring the feeling of that warm rain upon her face. Instead, she listened to the water drip. It was musical. There was a beat and it had rhythm, but it wasn't a symphony. It was all percussion, still it was nice.

  Music was illogical—but happily illogical. Music held no use. It had no practical value. What was its function? How did it run concurrent with human emotion? It was essentially inexplicable in evolutionary terms. In fact, it defied evolution and made a mockery of it. It was wonderful. She managed a smile as she lost herself in the thousands of sounds that played upon her ears, all the while ignoring the words of the priest.

  He spoke to her in sentences, but those tiny drips raining from the blackened ceiling above were a thousand times magnified in her head. Illogical. Illogical. Warm rain upon her face was all illogical.

  "Talitha, are you ok?" Will's voice was loud, like the voice of God. She had been standing facing a wall that in all her dreams had no memory. This one wall in that horrible room was blameless. The night before it had stood mute and empty, never once framing an image of the demon or that of Will raging in pain or of Jim Anderson dead. This was the good wall. She could face this wall and see only it...nothing.

  "Can I leave?" she asked her brother as more of the warm rain found its way down her cheeks. "Can I wait outside?"

  "Sure Tal. You don't have..."

  There was a sudden roar of a lion filling her ears. Anything else her brother might
have said was drowned out in the fury of that sound. The priest was in the process of undressing Jim Anderson, inspecting his many wounds, looking into his eyes. Her first impulse was to dash the priest's head against a wall, instead she walked stiff legged out of the room. Talitha held her decorum together until she was safely out of view of that room that held so much death and then she raced for the stairs. Leaping piles of debris or dodging around the avalanches caused by the fire. She was up the stairs and standing in the rain in seconds.

  Her breath came in huge gusts, like billows.

  It was forced, she was letting her emotions dictate, not her mind and her emotions wanted her to act...like a girl. Or perhaps like a human. For so long she had fought that impulse, to be human. Always on guard, she had kept herself resolute to the point of being less animated than a machine. The blame for this had always been the demon, the other Talitha that haunted her, possessing her, who had used her feelings only to bring about more pain.

  But that excuse was gone. Like a miracle, the demon had been sent back to the Void and now Talitha was free to cry if she wished. She could rage and scream, or laugh. The entire range of human emotion could be hers, except for love. That simple thing she would deny herself, not as a punishment, but rather as a gift to herself. Love frightened her badly.

  In the Void, love was the ultimate instrument of torture. It was the sharpest knife. The cruelest whip. When the acid hand of love plied the lash, it shredded the flesh more deeply and brought pain to its greatest height.

  For this reason, she would cast away love...if she could. If not she'd run from it and hope that it never would find her again.

  Out into the rain she bolted, not knowing or caring where she was going, letting the elements run down her face. Ahead she recognized the church, St Thomas and she dashed off to her left, not wanting to recall the confusion of memories that swept over her. They came nonetheless; there she was standing in the steeple letting Jim stare at her, pretending she didn't notice. There they were having dinner together, gorging themselves silly on pizza all the while feeling his love for her radiate off of him. There she was pulling Father Alba and Luke along on the leashes that she had formed from the priest's stole.