There were other odors, too. Some of them were museum smells. Too many visitors who brought the aromatic olio of their lives with them. Lots of kids with indifferent hygiene. Snacks. Dust and varnish. Cleaning products and air freshener. The earthy smells of wood, metal, and stone.
And two other things. One I couldn’t identify and one I definitely could.
The strange smell was strong but not close and it was out of place. It was the kind of smell I’d expect to encounter on the docks, in a bad seafood restaurant or an aquarium where they don’t change the filters often enough. Fish. A rotting, decaying stink. And yet…it wasn’t a dead scent. That sounds like a contradiction, but that’s what I smelled. Decay and vitality wrapped together in the same scent.
I’d only ever smelled something like this once before. It was on a case where I’d been asked to help save a kid from the monster in his closet. Yeah. Real kid, real closet, real monster. When I’d gone into the darkness of that closet I stepped into another place, and the fish stink was incredibly strong, and very much alive.
This was like that.
“Shit,” I said to myself.
The other thing I smelled was blood on the air. There was a lot of it and it wasn’t from the dead security guard. Someone else was bleeding, and I caught the faintest thump of a heart. Fading, though. Fading, going shallow, and then going silent.
Shit.
I ran.
I was pretty sure I knew what I’d find, and I hate when I’m right.
A woman in a functional staff uniform sat on the top step of a stairway that led to the basement. Cleaning rags were tucked into her pockets. She wore sensible shoes and her salt-and-pepper hair was up in a bun. Black, maybe fifty. A low-pay worker. Somebody’s mother, maybe. Or a wife. A person in any case. Someone had used a knife on her, too. It was cold in the museum and steam rose from the red mouths of five stab wounds clustered around her heart. Her eyes were open, though, and I swear I caught the last, fleeting glimpse of a departing awareness. It was as if she looked at me and pleaded for help that I simply could not give. I could smell her death. There was nothing I could do but watch her die.
That, and maybe catch up with whoever killed her.
I knelt beside her. A wisp of hair had come loose from her bun and I smoothed it back. Then, for reasons I will never be able to understand or explain, I bent and kissed her on the forehead.
Saying goodnight? Or making a promise? You tell me, I’m no philosopher.
There was a sound downstairs. A lock clicking and a door opening. Then a woman’s voice said, “Hurry up.”
A young woman’s voice. Violin?
I rose from where I’d knelt and began moving down the stairs. I didn’t really understand what was happening. This wasn’t playing out the way Acantha said it would. If Violin was supposed to be one of the good guys, that wasn’t going to save her. Not if there was blood on her hands and on her knife.
No.
It wasn’t going to save her at all.
With each step down to the basement I became less of a man and more of what I truly am.
-16-
Hiro Tsukino
Monastery of St. George of Koziba
Wadi Qelt, West Bank
Palestinian Territories
One Year Ago
“Are you sure you’re up for this?” asked Rink.
Hiro Tsukino took a while before he answered. The simple truth was that he wasn’t sure if he was up for it or not. In the two years since Tristan da Cunha he had become a shell of the man he’d been. Booze no longer even took the edge off of things. The pills helped, but that was a dead end run because every day he seemed to need more of them. It was only when Boris dragged him out of a crack house did Hiro even start to get clean. The beating Boris gave him was probably unnecessary, but the memory of it kept Hiro from escaping the expensive rehab center Priest put him in.
The new drugs, the nonaddictive ones Priest acquired for him, helped the most. They let him sleep and if he dreamed, he didn’t remember anything. No great burning eyes. No tentacles. None of that. The only lingering memory was the strange cry whose echoes had chased him up out of that shaft.
Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!
Now, nearly two years later, it was the only part of that experience that refused to submerge into unreality. Everything else had become part of a fabric of delusion and hallucination that Hiro no longer accepted as part of his actual memories. Even though they felt like something he’d experienced, his therapists—Priest’s therapists—comforted him into the belief that they were really ghosts from his days smoking meth. It was the damage from the crack that made him misremember them as older memories, or as memories at all.
Fantasies. Nothing more.
Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!
That meaningless cry, though…it persisted.
To keep the shrinks from locking him away again, Hiro lied and told them he heard no inhuman voices shrieking in his head. As addicts and the insane often do, Hiro had become a very convincing liar.
Now he stood on a bridge that spanned a gorge that everyone around here, including the monks at the monastery, believed was the Valley of the Shadow. The actual one mentioned in Psalm 23.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil.
But Hiro did fear this place. As he feared the evil things he had seen.
If ‘evil’ could even begin to describe that eye. He knew for sure it was not God’s eye looking at him, and until two years ago Hiro did not believe in the Devil. Or God. Or anything. Although he had been raised nominally Shinto he never held a splinter of faith.
Until that eye.
Until that fucking eye.
It’s just the drugs, he told himself.
Except that another voice answered that claim. Answered and mocked it.
Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!
Tristan da Cunha was many thousands of miles away from where he now stood. A world and two years away, half buried behind drug-warped memories.
“Hiro—?” asked Rink, her voice filled with concern. He turned and looked at her. She looked so different from the elfin girl he’d met more than five years ago. Her face was lined with care and stress and there were shadows in her eyes. She, too, had seen things she shouldn’t have. Not the eye, but other things.
You’re a fucking bastard, Priest, thought Hiro. You’re going to kill us all.
Tekeli-li!
He placed his hands against the stones that lined the precarious edge of the pilgrim road and leaned out to look down into the valley. The monastery was built in the sixth century, erected near a cave where some believed the prophet Elijah was fed by ravens. The Greek Orthodox monks who lived here kept the place open to tourists, which paid the bills. He wondered how big a check Priest had written to allow the team exclusive access to this place. The monks had agreed to wait in their cells for a full day, and the roads were blocked, ostensibly for repairs.
“Hiro,” said Rink, taking a few steps toward him, “if you can’t do this—”
“I’m fine,” he said.
“Boris and Keppler can—”
“I said I’m fine,” he snapped. But when he saw the hurt in her eyes, he sighed and softened it. “Really, Rink, I’m good. Just getting my bearings, you know?”
He wore his full rappelling rig, and the bulky Russian soldier stood a dozen yards away, arms folded, face filled with dislike and disdain. He certainly didn’t think Hiro was ready for this. Neither did Keppler, who was at the far end of the bridge, fretting and fidgeting.
“Are you ready?” asked a voice, and Hiro turned to see Priest walking briskly toward him. The scientist continued to age rapidly and now looked sixty, though despite his rail-thin body and white hair he had unnatural vigor. Hiro never even saw him yawn let alone take a moment to rest. Strange fires burned in Priest’s eyes and Hiro had begun to fear that look. Those fires reminded him far too much of another fiery eye.
Far too much.
<
br /> “I guess so,” said Hiro.
The wide wet smile on Priest’s face twitched and a vertical line etched itself between his brows. “Either you’re ready or you’re not. Which is it?”
Hiro cleared his throat and pretended to check his gear. “Yeah, I’m good to go.”
Priest nodded. He bent and looked down just as Hiro had done. “This place is incredible. The monastery is named for Gorgias of Koziba, the first monk who lived here. They canonized him, though I forget why. Doesn’t matter. Who the fuck cares about someone who believed in the wrong god in the ass-end of the world, yes? All that matters are the scrolls.”
“Why are they hidden in the cliff wall?” asked Hiro.
“This place was destroyed by the Persians in 614 A.D. They slaughtered the fourteen monks who lived here. I just saw their skulls. The monks showed me, they have them in niches in the walls. Fascinating, you can almost hear their screams. Anyway, Crusaders rebuilt the monastery in 1179, and then in 1878 a Greek monk named Kalinikos settled here and began a restoration that he finished in 1901. During World War II this place was targeted by Hitler’s Thule Society—which, for the record, was not dissolved after 1930 as the history books insist. Nope, they just went into hiding, trying to find all sorts of occult objects and secrets to help win the war.”
“Raiders of the Lost Ark,” said Hiro absently.
Priest shrugged. “Pretty much. There’s a lot of pop culture stuff about Hitler’s obsession with the supernatural, but like most things there’s a great deal of truth to it. The Thule-Gesellschaft was real enough, and they came here looking for a book that had been given to the monks to protect.”
“What kind of book is it this time?” asked Hiro, though he was fairly certain he didn’t want to know.
“Oh…something fun. Lot of pop culture about that, too. Pretty much everyone thinks it’s totally fake. Something made up for horror stories, but that’s a long way from the truth.”
“How do you know it’s real?” asked Hiro.
The grin on Priest’s face was truly manic. “I’ve seen photographs of it. I’ve seen jpegs of old pictures taken of a few of its pages.” He licked his lips as if tasting the last drop of a savory meal. “The book was in the Vatican library for over a century, but like a lot of dangerous knowledge it was removed during the war. Not because the pope was afraid Hitler would get it—though I guess he didn’t want to risk that— but because the Allies had heard about it and they sent an investigator to find it.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know his real name. There are a few references to him in some records I saw on my dad’s computer. His code name was ‘St. Germain’. He was a notorious pain in the ass, though. He wasn’t trying to obtain the book to use it—as it was meant to be used. No, that lunatic wanted to destroy it. Fucking book burning psychopath.”
Hiro, who always been opposed to any kind of censorship, thought that maybe he’d like to take a match to any book that had Priest this deeply obsessed.
“Luckily,” continued Priest, “the Catholics are big ones for not destroying anything that might have value, even books from other religions. Or maybe especially books from other religions. Know thy enemy, I guess. Whatever. They took the most dangerous books in their vaults and scattered them around the world. Most were eventually brought back to the Vatican and are locked away where even we can’t get them.” He sighed wistfully. “But this book—Al Azif—was believed lost. Only a handful of monks know that it’s here, and the Orthodox monks are no friends of the Vatican crew. They didn’t trust the Romans to keep it safe, or maybe they were afraid of anyone ever using it.”
“Why didn’t they burn it?”
Priest laughed. “That’s just it, dude, you can’t burn it. Not without knowing how. You can pour gasoline on it and drop a match and all you’ll do is burn the gas. The book won’t even get warm.”
Hiro almost said, “Bullshit,” but it died on his tongue. Most of his doubt had died down in the underground lab on Tristan da Cunha.
The scientist was caught up in his tale. “The monks were smart, though. They cut some niches in the wall below this bridge and stored the book inside. Then they sealed it up.”
“And they told you all this?” asked Hiro.
Priest shrugged.
“If they are so dedicated to preserving the book, why are they letting us take it?”
Boris, who was close enough to overhear this, laughed. It was not a nice laugh. Hiro frowned and touched Priest’s arm.
“Hey, they are letting us do this, right?”
“Mmmmm,” said Priest, “not so much ‘letting’ us as ‘not being able to give a shit’. Dumbasses thought we were here to shoot a documentary for the Discovery Channel.”
Boris laughed again. A donkey bray. “More martyr skulls for the wall.”
Hiro stared at the monastery. His touch turned into a grip and pulled Priest close. “What the fuck did you do?”
The Russian soldier stepped forward and swatted Hiro’s hand away. He was not gentle about it. “Keep your fucking hands to yourself, you fucking junkie.”
Priest jabbed Hiro in the chest with a stiff forefinger. “Remember your place, boy. Remember who pays your bills and gives you all those yummy pills.”
“You killed them?”
“Martyred is a nicer word.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“That’s what they said,” laughed Priest. “And yet the Messiah failed to show up to save them. Talk about misplaced faith.”
His hand suddenly shot out and caught Hiro by the throat. The grip was insanely strong. Way too strong. Hiro felt himself rising to his toes and nearly into the air. It was impossible for someone as skinny and withered as Priest to be this strong.
Impossible.
The fires in the scientist’s eyes burned hot enough to sear Hiro’s mind.
“Listen to me,” said Priest. Now there was no laughter. Now there was only power in the madman’s voice. A strange power that was in no way human. No way. It sounded old and alien. It was the voice of something else. Something Hiro would not dare name for fear of revealing it to be true. “Game time is over. You will crawl down this wall like the insect you are. You’ll cut open the vault and remove the sacred book, and then you will bring Al Azif to me before the sun sets over this valley. You will do it quickly and you will do it correctly.”
A stink filled the air and for a moment Hiro thought that it was his own bowels that had failed. But that wasn’t it. There was the stench of rotting fish and it roiled in the air around Priest. The grip was crushing the life from Hiro, choking off his air. Darkness began crowding in and with it came hallucinations. Worms of darkness writhed at the edge of his vision and a voice that sounded like his own voice whispered strange words that Hiro was sure he had heard before.
Ugly, dangerous words in a language no man was meant to speak.
Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.
Hiro heard Rink crying out in fear, pleading with Priest to stop.
Then the crushing force was gone and Hiro sagged down. Ironically it was the killer, Boris, who kept him from plunging over the edge. Priest turned away as if to hide his face. Rink seemed torn as to whether to run to see if Hiro was okay or to go to her lover. Indecision rooted her to the spot.
The moment stretched and then leveled out as Hiro gasped in lungsful of air. He shoved himself away from Boris and stood panting in the middle of the bridge.
“You’re a fucking maniac,” he gasped and spat on the ground.
Priest turned, knelt, and rubbed his fingers through the spittle. His long, red tongue snuck out from between his teeth and licked the spit from his thin, white fingers.
“No,” he said softly, “that’s not what I am.”
Hiro stumbled backward as Priest straightened, and he backed into Boris. Priest pointed to the edge.
“Do as you’re told.”
Rink was crying now. Keppler was as white as a g
host and had not advanced a single step forward during the whole encounter.
Hiro swallowed hard, fighting terror and disgust and confusion.
He took a step away from Boris, dragged in a steadying breath, and then walked to the edge. With trembling hands he checked his ropes and rappelling gear. Boris took up his position as anchor. And then Hiro stepped over the rail and went down.
Into the Valley of the Shadow.
-17-
Sam Hunter
The University of Pennsylvania Museum
3260 South Street
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
The lights were off at the bottom of the stairs, the bulb smashed, the ground littered with glass. I had to step carefully and pick my way using whatever light followed me down from upstairs. I hadn’t gone full wolf because I wanted my clothes intact. I had a spare set in the car but like an idiot I hadn’t brought them inside with me. You’d think that after all this time I’d have thought that through.
Even so, I was more wolf than man. If you think that looks funny—a werewolf in shoes and K-Mart clothes wearing a backpack, maybe it does. You wouldn’t think so if you saw me coming down those stairs, though. Pretty sure I wasn’t wearing a “let’s all have a chuckle” expression. What was the phrase Shakespeare used? He had a lean and hungry look. Sure. Like that.
The stairs ended in a landing with halls going off in different directions. Most of them were lined with office doors. One hooked around and ended at a security door. My quarry went that way. The smell of blood was mingled with the rotting fish stink and it was a lot stronger down here.
The security door stood ajar and beyond it there was only darkness. I could smell the woman Violin and the less interesting smell of the man Acantha called Harry Bolt. One was clearly an alpha scent, and the other was…
What’s a good word? Prey? Yeah, close enough. Or, maybe late night snack if this thing kept going south.
The hinges on the security door creaked with all of the clichéd noise of a bad horror flick. Another thing I should have brought—WD-40.
Limbus, Inc., Book III Page 30
