In the House of the Wicked rc-5

by Thomas E. Sniegoski

  The injured Grigori, clutching their bleeding wounds, returned to their master’s side. Armaros glared at him, but returned to the child, who appeared to be in shock, cowering on the bed. He stroked her hair, whispering something that Stearns could not quite hear, but her back straightened and her eyes suddenly stared straight ahead as the cameras came to life, ready to capture the message she was about to herald.

  Stearns saw that it was actually about to happen, and double-checked the attachments that would bring him the power he so desperately craved.

  And then his eyes went to the man held within a sphere of magickal power, hanging above the studio floor, his body wracked with pain that should have rendered him lifeless, but somehow he remained conscious, staring with eyes absent of hope.

  “Hear the words of the Lord,” Angelina Hayward proclaimed as the angels of the Grigori leaned toward her, filling her ears with their message.

  The child grew suddenly statue tense and her eyes began to glow as if an inner light had come alive. She opened her mouth and light streamed out, but there was also a sound the likes of which Algernon Stearns had never before heard.

  It was the saddest of songs.

  A lament of the past, but also of the future.

  And as the first notes of the song began-the first words of a divine message whose meaning meant only death, the first strains of power began to flow into the child and into the machines beneath the bed.

  And Algernon Stearns truly understood the meaning of the word God.

  If only for an instant.

  Steven Mulvehill had been raised Roman Catholic.

  As a child, and even into his late teens, he had attended Mass every Sunday, had gone to Sunday school, had received all the blessed sacraments, and had even been married in the Catholic Church.

  But he’d never really thought of himself as a believer. He went through all the motions but could never truly commit to the idea of a guiding force in the universe, especially since he was a homicide cop, especially after all the badness he had seen.

  How could there be any supernatural guidance with the kinds of things he saw going on every hour of the day, and not even just in his city, but all over the world?

  It all seemed so terrible…so cruel.

  So the older he got, the less he went through the motions, and the further he drifted away from the faith he had practiced since childhood.

  Then he met Remy Chandler and he learned that there actually was a powerful force out there in the universe, a Creator of all things; that there really were such things as angels and devils, Heaven and Hell. And one would think that after all those years of wondering-questioning a faith that had been part of his life since he was old enough to walk-that would have meant something special to him.

  It’s true. It’s all true.

  Yet all it did was make him afraid.

  Steven had been enticed by the world that Remy Chandler had hinted at, but he’d managed to keep it at arm’s length. He didn’t want to know because he wasn’t sure he could handle the truth.

  And the verdict was in: He couldn’t. It was too much for his little human mind to wrap itself around.

  Now he couldn’t even bring himself to talk to his friend or go out into a world that he now knew was vastly different and far more dangerous than he could ever hope to realize.

  It terrified him, and that fear made him angry.

  It made him angry that he had not yet gone back to work, that he had sustained injuries in his confrontation with something not of this world, something from a world that Remy Chandler, up until then, had kept him safe from, something that had almost killed him.

  Something that had pulled back the curtain and forced him to look at a world that he did not want to know about.

  And now he hid, locked inside his apartment, venturing outside only to buy the bare essentials-cigarettes, whiskey, microwave dinners-dreading when he would run out of something and have to venture into the world again.

  Mulvehill was disgusted with himself, but it did not make the fear go away.

  He guessed he was looking for some sort of answer, something that would tell him that everything was going to be all right, which explained why he found himself sitting in front of the television set in the middle of the afternoon, waiting to hear a little girl speak a message that she was supposedly getting from the Big Guy Upstairs.

  There had been some sort of technical difficulties and the newscasters were wasting time until things were up and running again. He’d heard all about the little girl and how she’d been in a coma for years, until a few weeks ago when she unexpectedly awoke and started talking about how God was going to speak through her.

  He remembered the Steven Mulvehill of a few months back, and how he would have scoffed at something like this, but after seeing what he’d seen-experiencing what he had-maybe God really did have something to say to the world.

  And maybe it would be enough to give him the courage to leave the house again and get on with his life.

  He’d gone to the kitchen to get some more ice for his second whiskey of the afternoon when he heard one of the newscasters say that they were returning to little Angelina. Mulvehill plucked three cubes from the tray in the freezer and hurried back to the living room.

  Sitting down on his sofa, he reached for the bottle of Seagram’s and was just about to pour two fingers into the glass when his eyes touched on the screen.

  The little girl’s face filled the television, and he was nearly brought to tears by the beauty of her. He couldn’t have pulled his eyes from her even if he had wanted to; it was almost as if she had gone inside his head, the message she was about to speak spoken only to him.

  One after another, the Grigori drew their weapons.

  The receiver was ready, open to broadcast her message- their message — to the waiting faithful.

  Armaros gazed around the studio one final time, taking in the last sights he would see before his tortured existence was finally brought to a close.

  The sorcerer stood ready, a look of euphoria on his face as he awaited the flow of death energy. And the pained expression of the Seraphim, Remy Chandler, imprisoned within a sphere of magick-he could see the terror in the angel’s eyes.

  “It is for the good of them all,” Armaros proclaimed, positioning the tarnished blade above his heart.

  “Don’t do it!” Remy managed, but it was too late for Armaros and his followers to be persuaded otherwise.

  Now the Grigori would deliver their message. The Lord God is watching and He is very disappointed in what humans have become. But with their sacrifice, the human race still had a chance to reach its full potential.

  “Brothers,” Armaros said, addressing the others of his host. They, too, held their blades, poised to strike, ready to end their lives in a flash of brilliance-a flash that would touch those who were watching and listening.

  A flash that would end the Grigori’s lives and the lives of those waiting to hear Heaven’s message.

  “The curtain falls.”

  And with those words, the Grigori plunged the knives into their chests, piercing their hearts.

  Their final message, their final cries flowing into the child, and from her…

  Out into the world.

  Rita Dollans moved her wheelchair closer to the television screen so that she could see. Her body had been racked with rheumatoid arthritis for years and she had great difficulty getting the chair precisely where she wanted it, but she managed.

  And now she eagerly waited to hear what the Lord had to say.

  Denise Kelleher cradled her crying infant in her arms, rocking him ever so gently. She wanted to hear the message, and as she bent forward to pick up the remote from the coffee table, as the little girl’s face filled the screen, and the child prepared to speak…

  Her baby went quiet.

  Almost as if he wanted to hear the message, too.

  Dillon Ratner looked at his watch as he sat in the waiting room of the
Toyota dealership. He’d been there for well over two hours. He’d brought a book and had read several chapters, but was now tired of reading and tired of waiting.

  He was about to get up and check on the progress of his Camry when he noticed how quiet it had become in the dealership, everyone around him transfixed to the image of a little girl on the sixty-inch flat screen that hung on the wall.

  Curious, he reached up, pulling the headphones that were attached to his iPhone from his ears.

  And was assailed by the message.

  The message had started to crawl into Peter Vestmore’s mind. He hadn’t any intention of even listening to the sickly-looking kid, wanting instead to check on an eBay bid he’d made for an original The Good, the Bad and the Ugly movie poster, but there was something in the little girl’s eyes, something in the strange, foreign words that she was speaking.

  Something that made him start to scream and the blood begin to gush from his nose, now that he had looked.

  Unable to look away.

  And the message of the dying Grigori poured out over the ether, transmitted through the child and into a digital signal picked up by Algernon Stearns’ cameras, broadcast to a waiting world.

  The message reached out to those who were watching and listening, grabbing them in a steely grip, as it started to fill their brains with the sad lament of the Grigori’s passing.

  And all who saw and heard this mournful dirge were touched as they had never been touched before.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Even trapped within the sphere of magickal energy, Remy could feel what was happening.

  He could feel the Grigori dying, their life energies leaking out of their bodies, their psychic communication-their terrorist act against an unsuspecting public-flowing from their dying minds and into the child-shaped golem and out across the ether.

  It was the most horrible thing that he had ever seen, and he had seen much on this world since he’d decided to walk it.

  The child had begun to speak…

  The machines beneath her bed had started to hum ominously, gauges and dials illuminated as the first inklings of death energy began to flow.

  The sorcerer gasped at his first taste, face twisted in ecstasy as the trickle of accumulated life force was delivered. His exoskeleton sparked and glowed with unearthly power, the hum of the great machines growing louder and louder, like a hive of angry bees.

  Remy again attempted to summon what strength that he could, pushing against his magickal confines in the hopes that he might free himself to do something- anything — to prevent this travesty.

  The magick struck him down once more, like the crack of a million whips on his nervous system. The pain was everywhere, and he dropped back to the floor of the energy sphere that held him aloft.

  He lay on his stomach, too weak to rise, waiting, when he noticed something.

  It was the flicker of lights that caught his attention.

  Remy watched the figures in the control booth start to scramble. He perked up, watching, waiting for what could be an opportunity.

  The lights went dim again, the hum and pulse of the machinery beneath the child’s bed sounding a bit strained as its flow of power began to be tested.

  It’s the power, Remy thought, pushing himself up into a sitting position. Something was straining the electricity to the building-to the studio.

  The look on Stearns’ face was priceless: ecstasy replaced with shocked surprise, blending into absolute rage. If Remy hadn’t felt like a hundred miles of bad road, he would have laughed.

  “What’s happening?” Stearns screamed over the labored hum of the infernal machines. He looked to the control room. The PA crackled that the entire building was experiencing some weird power fluctuations and that they were looking to fixing it.

  “Fix it now!” Stearns shrieked, as the lights grew dim and the robotic cameras ceased to function.

  And when the cameras stopped, so did the deadly Grigori transmission and so did death.

  The room went completely dark and stayed that way, a sudden silence like a death pall falling over the room. Something was happening, more than just a power failure, and Remy hadn’t a clue as to what it was. And from the looks of it, neither did Stearns.

  “What is this?” Stearns demanded. He lumbered over to the Grigori, who had dropped to their knees, blood pooling beneath them. Remy could see that they were somehow still alive, but just barely.

  “What is happening?” Stearns screeched, reaching out with a gauntleted hand to grip the shoulder of Armaros. The angel was too weak to speak, tumbling onto his side as the room began to quake.

  Dust rained down from above; loose tiles dropped from the ceiling. Remy could feel a change in the air, a sudden drop in the temperature and air pressure that made his ears ache.

  “You!” Stearns screamed, pointing one of his armored fingers at him. “This has something to do with you. Doesn’t it?”

  Remy wished that he could take the credit, but he barely had the strength to stand, never mind being behind whatever this was. Stearns reached up with his other hand, manipulating the sorcerous energies that surrounded Remy, shattering the sphere and letting him drop to the floor.

  “You will stop it this instant,” Stearns warned, his metal-clad feet stomping across the floor toward him. He grabbed Remy by the front of his shirt and hauled him to his feet. “Do you realize how much is at stake?” Stearns bellowed, shaking him.

  Remy couldn’t help but smile. “Was at stake,” he corrected.

  He watched Stearns’ face twist with rage and he figured that he just might not survive what was sure to follow when the building around them shook with so much force that the sound of shattering glass could be heard drifting inside the soundproof room from outside.

  Stearns lost his balance, releasing Remy as he fell.

  Remy landed atop some broken ceiling tiles; the room continued to shimmy and shake beneath him. If they were in Los Angeles, he might have believed that the big one had finally arrived, but this was Boston.

  Stearns lurched around the studio, desperate to salvage something from the events that were unfolding. He went to the child sitting on the bed. It was as if she had been frozen in time, her body rigid, eyes fixed to where the cameras had been focused on her.

  Stearns started to disconnect himself from the machines, attempting to detach the cables that would have fed him the precious life energies as they’d flowed through the child.

  Remy managed to rise to his knees, his body now more numb than pained, fooling him into thinking that he was better off than he actually was. Holding on to the corner of a small desk, he stood, swaying from side to side as the building did the same.

  Glancing up, he saw that Stearns’ technicians were still running about, trying to fix the situation, but Remy doubted a solution was forthcoming.

  At first he thought it was a trick of his eyes, a lingering effect of Stearns’ sorcery, but he soon came to realize it was more than that. There was something wrong with the shadows in the room, puddles of darkness expanding like liquid as the building violently shook again.

  Stearns had frozen as he knelt before his damnable machine, and that was when Remy began to feel it.

  This was more than a mere temperature shift or a change in air pressure. The air had become incredibly heavy as the darkness became even thicker, darker even than darkness should be…

  And Remy found himself thinking of a world composed entirely of shadow, a world he had visited not too long ago, a world that still held a dear friend.

  A world he had every intention of returning to once he was able.

  The darkness had become all-encompassing, every existing speck of light swallowed up by the hungry dark. It was even getting difficult to breathe. An attempt to summon even the slightest hint of angelic fire, to throw some light within the studio, met with total failure as the air grew heavier.

  The silence had become almost deafening. And then the room seemed to explode,
the very structure of the place tearing itself apart as Remy was thrown into the air by the disintegrating environment.

  The atmosphere of the room felt suddenly different, and as he again attempted to get back on his feet he found that the floor of the studio had become dramatically uneven, with what appeared to be metal girders rising through the floor. It was almost as if the building had been twisted by the hands of some unspeakable force.

  Through the thick clouds of swirling dust, Remy saw the hint of light, an unearthly glow that drew him toward it. The unknown source illuminated the twisted remains of the studio, showing a place that no longer resembled the room it had been mere minutes ago. Remy wasn’t quite sure what he was bearing witness to, but it was as if another space-another room entirely-had somehow been crammed into the studio.

  The little girl’s bed had been mercilessly tossed across the room by the traumatic upheaval, and Remy found the golem child curled in a ball on the floor. He knelt down beside her, pulling her into his arms. She was crying, as a small child would, and he could not help but comfort her.

  “I don’t understand,” she kept repeating over and over, and Remy shared her confusion.

  Kneeling on the floor, he saw now that the glow was coming from beneath a set of double doors that hung strangely askew at the top of a set of broken stone steps. Stearns stood at the bottom of those steps and started to climb.

  It was when the doors came suddenly open, flying from their hinges in an explosion of light and sound, that Remy realized what he was looking at. He knew these doors and the broken stone steps that led up to them.

  A striking figure stood just inside the doorway, his body glowing in its efforts to contain the power that was now housed within it, a power that Remy had known intimately, for it had belonged to him for many millennia.

  Konrad Deacon stood in the entryway to his home, glaring at Algernon Stearns, who lay upon his armored back like a turtle unable to right himself.

  “Hello, Algernon,” Deacon said, wings of fire unfurling. “It’s been a long, long time.”