The Cross vf-2

by Scott G. Mariani

  ‘Interesting,’ Alex said to herself.

  She read on. The killer, a drifter who had first been sighted apparently living rough near the village a few days before, had been arrested and locked up in a maximum security prison awaiting trial. The media had gone wild in the wake of the ‘St Elowen Massacre’ and predictably it had been the vampire angle that generated the most sensation: VAMPIRE IN CORNWALL; DRACULA SWORD MANIAC; FEAST OF BLOOD were just some of the typically asinine headlines the humans had come up with.

  Mundhra’s initial feeling had been that the attacker might be a Federation-registered vampire running amok. These things occasionally happened, as Alex knew only too well — though seldom so publicly — and one of the daily duties of VIA field agents was to check each and every possible report of rogue vampire activity. More often than not, the case turned out to be a hoax, a false alarm or just another stupid psychopathic human inflicting atrocities against his own kind. When it wasn’t, agents like Alex were called to step in.

  She spent a few minutes online, checking out the development of the St Elowen Massacre news story over the days since Mundhra’s final report. The killer called himself ‘Ash’, refusing to give any other name. Detectives were still trying to establish his real identity, starving the howling media hounds of any really juicy tidbits of information about his past or background — and the fact that he couldn’t be fingerprinted, due to apparently having mutilated his own fingertips at some stage with a razor blade, didn’t help matters either. He was around thirty years of age, and it seemed he’d lived off the grid long enough for any official trace of him to have disappeared. His sharpened teeth were the subject of a lot of appalled fascination; it appeared he’d done the job himself with a file. A set of pointy gnashers doth not a vampire make, Alex thought to herself. The murder weapon itself had been a cheap reproduction of a Scottish basket-hilted broadsword, crudely inscribed with weird markings that the tabloids were proclaiming ‘satanic’.

  The latest on Ash was that he’d murdered and partially dismembered three of his prison inmates, apparently in order to drink and anoint himself with their blood. Seemed like old habits died hard. Ash was now in solitary confinement and several heads had rolled within the prison service administration for having placed such a crazed murderer in a shared cell. The press were either morbidly lapping it up or screaming for justice system reforms, depending on which paper you read.

  Alex searched out some related articles. Shortly before his prison cell stunt, the self-styled ‘vampire’ had been taken under heavily-armed police escort to the first court hearing prior to the start of his trial. There were pictures of him being marched from a prison van to the back of the court, amid the usual angry scenes: a tall, muscular figure, hooded to hide his face from the photographers swarming to get a shot of him.

  And right there was a dead giveaway that Mundhra would’ve spotted, if he’d been around long enough to get the chance.

  ‘Daylight,’ Alex said to herself. No fizz, no pop, no inexplicable spontaneous human combustion when they marched the killer out into the morning sun. At that point he’d been well past the twelve hours’ worth of protection that Solazal could have offered. Not easy to smuggle any of the stuff into a high-security prison, and anything he’d had on him at the time of arrest would have been confiscated and analysed.

  ‘You’re no vampire, Mr Ash-whoever-you-are,’ she muttered. It was just as she’d suspected. Nutjobs like this guy were strictly a human problem, not hers. She reached for a stamp. Bang. Case closed. ‘Bye, bye, Ash. Enjoy your stay in prison. Watch it in the showers.’

  The next file in the heap was one that had come straight to her. When she opened it, she saw the reason why.

  ‘Oh, Baxter,’ she groaned. ‘What have you done now?’

  It wasn’t so long ago that Alex had been tasked by Harry Rumble to go and have a gentle chat with the movie star and secret vampire, Baxter Burnett, about the latest hot role he’d been gunning for: the part of Jake Gyllenhaal’s wayward, feckless younger brother in the upcoming Universal production Firestorm. The part was perfect for Baxter, and it was set to propel him into the A-list. VIA had just one issue with it: in all the years since his first breakout hit, Down and Dirty, Baxter had very noticeably not aged a day; now here he was, playing yet another fresh-faced thirty-year-old. CGI effects couldn’t account for his eternally youthful appearance. The movie magazines and the nerds online were beginning to talk about it. It was the kind of attention that VIA didn’t want.

  So, under orders, Alex had leaned on him. Just a little. Persuading him not to take the part had involved sticking a cocked.44 Magnum loaded with Nosferol tips in his face. At the time, she’d thought he’d got the message.

  Now it looked like she’d been wrong.

  The top page of the case file was a printout from the website of The Hollywood Reporter. ‘BURNETT SIGNS UP FOR FIRESTORM‘, proclaimed the headline.

  ‘This is the most demanding role I’ve ever taken on,’ the star was quoted as saying, next to a photo of him beaming at the camera with a blonde on each arm, ‘but I was born to play this guy. I can’t wait to work with Jake and Stephen. I’m their biggest fan. I’m just so jazzed about this!’

  And the rumoured twelve-million-dollar paycheque couldn’t have been much of a disincentive either, Alex thought. Now she understood what his email to her had been about. She sighed. ‘Baxter,’ she groaned again. ‘You’re a very silly boy.’

  It got worse. Clicking into the official Baxter Burnett website to check any latest news, Alex noticed that the star’s blog had had more than a dozen updates in the last few days.

  It was the one titled ‘FUCK VIA!’ that drew her eye.

  ‘Come and get me, dipshits,’ it said. ‘You think you’re so fucking powerful. What do you think you can do?’

  And a few lines lower down:

  ‘Ha ha! Agent Bishop, you can stick your gun up your ass. You can’t fucking touch me, and you know it.’

  The rants went on and on. Alex scanned down them to the bottom, where Baxter’s fans had posted hundreds of comments in response. ‘WTF????’ asked one bemused poster. ‘What is Baxter on about? Is he nuts?’

  ‘Baxter is not nuts,’ said another. ‘His new part in Firestorm is emotionally very intense. As a method performer of the highest integrity, what you’re seeing here is Baxter psych ing himself up for the role of his career.’

  ‘What’s VIA?’ asked another. ‘Sounds like some kinda government department? I looked it up but can’t find it. Is Baxter under investigation for something?? Worried.’

  ‘Shit,’ Alex said. ‘Not good.’ Suddenly, the rest of her case-load would have to wait. She was going to have to deal with this fast, before this idiot splashed the Federation across the whole human media.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Oxford

  A cold, thin morning drizzle was falling over the city centre as Chloe Dempsey got off the Oxford Park and Ride bus, pulled her coat collar up around her ears and set off at a brisk walk towards the museum where her father worked. In the duffel bag over her shoulder were the broken stone fragments she’d found, each piece carefully bundled up in tissue and bubble-wrap.

  As the church-like facade of the Oxford University Museum of Natural History on South Parks Road came into view, Chloe smiled to herself. One of the benefits of having taken the plunge and come to study in England was that she could zap down the motorway to see her dad as often as she wanted. She treasured the chance to catch up on the lost years every bit as much as he did. He was a little fatter now, a little greyer, possibly a little scattier, but still the same old dad she’d loved and missed. The quirk that had most exasperated her mom was the thing that most endeared him to Chloe — the way he could just lose himself in his work, passionately absorbed for hours on end. Sometimes Chloe thought that if nobody ever disturbed him, dear old Dad could sit staring at some historic relic until he died of hunger.

  The inevitable divorce had come w
hen Chloe had been fourteen. It still hurt her, the way her mother had treated him back then. The kindly, gentle New Jersey academic had never been quite ambitious enough for his wife; dusty, half-forgotten books held infinitely more appeal for Professor Emeritus Matt Dempsey than aspiring to membership of the country club.

  That was where Chloe’s mother had first met Bernie Silberman, the millionaire cosmetic dentist. Within six months she’d packed her bags, moved out of the cluttered, rambling old family home and traded the life of a professor’s wife for the glamour of Bernie’s high-society circles and the house in the Hamptons, dragging the reluctant teenage Chloe with her.

  The sudden split had plunged Matt Dempsey into a bout of depression that had cost him his job and, if he’d carried on drinking the way he had been in those days, almost his life. It was his passion for history, the thing that had driven his ex-wife so crazy, that had saved him. When Chloe was sixteen, her father had cleaned himself up and taken the radical step of emigrating to England and settling in Oxford. With his academic record he’d had no problem in getting a job as curator at the prestigious Pitt Rivers Museum, the home of one of Britain’s most extensive and valuable collections of antiquities from across the world.

  Chloe had detested living with her mom and Bernie, and it would have been easy for her to slip into a disaffected teen rebel rut — not that either of them would have noticed. Instead, she’d poured her angst and frustration into her school work, excelling in academic subjects but especially at sports. When she’d announced that she’d gained a place at the University of Bedfordshire in England to take a degree in Sports Studies, her mother — whose life now orbited solely around her teeth, her tan, her wardrobe and her golfing buddies — had barely batted a Botoxed eyelid.

  Entering the Natural History Museum, Chloe took the familiar path across the ground floor to the Pitt Rivers entrance on the far wall. Walking into the small, cluttered, somewhat musty museum was like stepping back into the past. Chloe skirted around the display cabinets filled with ancient model ships and the giant carved totem pole and headed towards the workshops and staff section. Her father could usually be found at his desk, utterly absorbed in some old artifact. Today it was a sheaf of yellowed documents in a forgotten language Chloe wasn’t even going to try to identify. As ever, the small office was a crazy clutter, papers everywhere, bookshelves threatening to split from the sheer weight of the volumes stuffed into and piled on top of them, more books piled on chairs, on the floor.

  ‘Hi, Dad.’

  ‘It’s great to see you again.’ Matt Dempsey rose up quickly to hug her, then started clearing a space for her to sit down. ‘When did you get back from Romania?’

  ‘Just last night.’

  ‘I was about to make a coffee. Want one?’

  ‘From your third-century BC percolator? Love one.’

  ‘How’s the course?’ he asked as he fiddled with the battered machine.

  ‘Loving it. Did I tell you — I’m starting training for next year’s national inter-college pentathlon championships?’

  ‘Ah, the noble pentathlon, sport of the mythological Jason, lauded by Aristotle. The magnificent discus of Perseus. The venerable art of wrestling.’ Matt paused. ‘Though that sounds a little rough, I have to say. Are you sure—’

  She laughed. ‘Things have moved on a little since Ancient Greece, Dad. They dropped the wrestling, discus and javelin centuries ago. Nowadays we do cross-country running, swimming, horse-riding, fencing and shooting.’

  Matt’s face fell. ‘They let you handle firearms?’

  ‘Just an air pistol.’

  ‘Honey, why did it have to be guns? Guns never did any good in this world. History tells us that.’

  Chloe sighed. ‘If you saw it, you’d see it’s just a competition target pistol. Nothing too dangerous, I promise. Unless you happen to be a flimsy paper target. Then you’re in real trouble, especially when I’m on the other end. I’ll show it to you sometime.’

  ‘I just don’t want you getting hurt.’

  ‘Don’t sweat it, Dad.’

  He handed her a coffee. ‘Anyway. Sounds like you’re having a great time. No regrets, then.’

  ‘About coming over here to study? Not a shred of a regret. And I get to come here and see you, don’t I?’

  Matt smiled. ‘Have you heard from your mother recently?’

  ‘Not since the last facelift.’

  He grimaced. ‘Heavens. How many is that now?’

  ‘Put it this way, I think Bernie started making secret calls to his accountant. She keeps on like this, she’ll bankrupt the sonofabitch. Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.’ Chloe started unzipping her bag. ‘Listen, Dad, I actually came over here specially to bring you something I found in Romania. Here it is. It’s kind of in pieces, but I think you’ll find it interesting.’

  Her father was already carefully unwrapping the fragments. He cleared a space on the desk, angled a bright lamp and examined them closely as Chloe quickly described how she’d stumbled over them at the foot of the mountain. ‘What they are,’ she said, ‘I have no idea.’

  Matt started arranging the stone pieces into different patterns on his desk. ‘Well, they obviously all belong to the same object. Fascinating. It’s old, that’s for sure. Very old.’

  ‘I figured, if anyone could make sense of it, it’d be you.’

  ‘I don’t know about that. It’ll take me some time to put it all together properly. But I’d hazard a guess that this is a cross of some kind. Look at this fragment here. See how the crosspiece seems to join up with part of an outer circle? Typical of the Celtic style.’ He jumped up suddenly and went over to one of the crammed bookcases, gazed along a row of spines and plucked out a book. Chloe smiled as she watched him flicking eagerly through the pages. Hooked already, she thought.

  ‘Like this one,’ he said, turning the book round so she could see the drawing.

  Chloe nodded. ‘Beautiful.’ She pointed at the pieces on the desk, running her fingertip along the faded inscriptions. ‘What about these markings? Rebecca thought they were some kind of ancient runes.’

  ‘Ancient carvings of a sort, certainly. Strictly speaking, all known examples of so-called “Celtic” runes were in fact either Scandinavian or Germanic in origin, so whether …’ His voice trailed off and he paused with a frown, stroking the cool, smooth, creamy stone with his fingertips. ‘As for the material it’s made from — it’s like nothing I’ve ever encountered before. A type of quartz, perhaps? Moonstone, maybe. No, moonstone doesn’t have these tiny coloured flecks. It’s something else.’

  ‘Well, it’s yours now, so you can take all the time you need.’

  ‘Really? Are you sure?’

  ‘I told you,’ she smiled. ‘I brought it back for you.’

  ‘That was very thoughtful of you,’ he said, looking touched. Before he could start getting all emotional on her, Chloe knocked back the last of her coffee and stood up.

  ‘I have a lecture after lunch. Should just make it if I hit the road now.’

  ‘I’m sorry to see you leave so soon.’

  ‘The hectic life of the ambitious young student,’ she laughed.

  ‘What are you doing the day after tomorrow? I could make us dinner, that meatball thing you like. You could stay overnight and drive back in the morning. Unless you have an early lecture.’

  ‘That’d be great. I’m going to be on my own anyway. Rebecca and Lindsey are going to some crappy gig.’

  He beamed at her. ‘Then it’s a date.’

  When she was gone, Matt Dempsey went over to his desk and spent the next hour piecing the strange stone fragments together. He’d been right — the object that gradually formed on his desk was a Celtic cross, probably the oldest example he’d ever seen. Thankfully it seemed as though Chloe had managed to find all the pieces. Their broken edges were sharp and fresh, not worn smooth with the passage of time, telling him that the cross had only very recently been damaged.

  What
a terrible shame, he thought. To have survived so long, only to be broken like that. Chloe had said she’d found it at the foot of a cliff, far below the battlements of an old abandoned castle: maybe it had fallen from there. Or been dropped. Matt was fully aware that, even today, there were self-appointed treasure hunters still ransacking every corner of Europe for items of historic value. This one had evidently — and perhaps literally — slipped through their fingers.

  Matt rooted through a box of odd bits in the corner of the office until he found what he was looking for, some lengths of thin wire. With great care, he wrapped the wire around the reconstructed cross and twisted its ends together to form a cage-like casing that would hold the pieces firmly in place. Once it was reassembled, he used a digital caliper gauge to note its exact dimensions, and then spent another half hour making a careful, detailed sketch.

  The more he studied the cross, the more fascinated he became. Nothing quite like it had ever come his way before. Those markings: what could they mean? He prided himself on his knowledge of ancient languages, but this defeated him. ‘Damn,’ he muttered, scanning his bookshelves. He could think of a couple of titles that might conceivably help him puzzle this mystery out, but they were at home.

  He thought guiltily about the Etruscan vase restoration project that was going on across the hall, and of the arrangements for the party of Japanese historians who were arriving tomorrow. But his capable assistant Mrs Clark had all that under control, didn’t she? It was nothing he couldn’t leave until the morning, was it? Matt hesitated.

  It was no use. He simply had to know more. He picked up the phone and told Janet Clark he was going home early. Then, after carefully packing the wired-together cross into a box of shredded paper along with the sketch he’d made of it, he hurried off to catch the bus.