Nephilim

by Barrowman, John; Barrowman, Carole;

  ‘The bridge!’ she screamed to the other pursuing adults. ‘We need to stop them before they climb this path to the bridge!’

  The castle’s stone bridge was striped in shadows from the morning sun. It was wide enough for two adults to cross at the same time while hiking up the rocky pass and into the ruins, but children were not allowed on the bridge without adult supervision. The gully beneath it had once been part of the moat for the castle, and was deep and lined with jagged rocks.

  ‘The turnstile is closed,’ gasped Mitch, Tommy Scanlon’s dad, jogging up next to Collyn. ‘Maybe the barrier will stop them from getting on to the path. It’ll slow them down until we think of something, at least.’

  ‘What in God’s name is happening to them?’ Collyn cried, grabbing Mitch’s coat sleeves. ‘They look drugged, but all my Mabel ate this mornin’ was jammy toast and cereal.’

  ‘Our Tommy left the extra football practice,’ said Mitch, shaking his head in disbelief. ‘He never leaves football practice.’

  ‘Jesus,’ moaned Collyn. ‘Look at their feet. They’re a’ skint.’

  The small car park was filled with stunned parents calling to their kids to stop. But the children, bloody feet and all, stomped on. Someone had brought out a long hose and was squeezing the handle. The water simply fanned away and over the children as if a massive umbrella was shielding them.

  One by one, the children marched up the hillside to the turnstile at the castle entrance. Those who were too small to climb over it, like Ben, crawled underneath. The pace slowed as a hundred tiny bare feet trudged up the steep hill, but they never stopped moving.

  ‘We have to think of something,’ pleaded Mitch, staring into the gully.

  Collyn gazed, transfixed, at the entrance to the castle ruins where the phantasm was fully manifesting itself. Like a figure from a Dali painting, a surreal, elongated thing was stepping out of the light, through the arched entrance and on to the bridge. With every weightless step, the bells jingled on its cuffs and jangled on the curled toes of his boots. The figure was androgynous, with rubbery limbs completely out of proportion with its torso. It was dressed in purple tunic and gold leggings. It had no face, no eyes and no nose. Only its red lips had any solid presence, blowing into a piccolo, as its foot in its curled boot tap, tap, tapped rhythmically on the arched stone.

  ‘What in the name of… What is that?’ stuttered Mitch, mopping his brow with the back of his hand.

  Collyn found her voice. ‘It’s a piper,’ she said. ‘A Pied Piper.’

  15.

  SHELF LIFE

  ‘If this phantom is from a death animation,’ said Rémy, staring up at the glowing cloud seeping through the ceiling of the church, ‘won’t it just disappear on its own after Gibson’s been dead for a while?’

  ‘It will,’ said Matt as they headed outside again, ‘but the problem is, there’s no predicting the shelf life. Could be an hour. Could be a day. Might be weeks.’

  ‘And it might have done a lot of damage by then,’ added Em.

  ‘So what do you – we – do?’

  ‘It would help if we knew what Gibson was working on before he died,’ Em said. ‘But since it would take ages to figure that out, I guess we follow the spectre and see where it’s ended up.’

  ‘From what I could see, it looked as if it was gathering itself in the castle ruins,’ said Matt, ‘which means it’s likely been spotted.’

  Em took out her sketchpad. ‘I’ll draw us something to get us to the castle more quickly.’

  Rémy watched as her fingertips etched lines of light and colour across the page. The way the twins brought their art to life awed him every time he saw it.

  Suddenly, the church door began to throb, as if something or someone was trapped inside and struggling to escape. Then, just when it looked as if it was imploding, a ball of silver light enveloped the entrance to the church.

  ‘Em, are you kidding me?’ Matt breathed.

  ‘Now that’s lit!’ said Rémy as he backed away.

  ‘I’m trying to minimize our carbon footprint,’ said Em, rubbing her hand along the candelabra of antlers on the white peryton in front of them. The beast snorted and bowed its massive head and muscular front legs at Em’s touch.

  ‘There’s room for all of us,’ said Matt, scrambling on to the creature’s broad back and helping Em on behind him.

  Rémy climbed up awkwardly, wrapping his arms round Em’s waist. ‘If my mom could see me now,’ he muttered as the peryton tossed its head and broke into a gallop. ‘She freaked when I rode my bike to school.’

  16.

  NOTHING BUT NET

  The Pied Piper’s faceless head bobbed to the rhythm of his playing as his tune changed from a march to a playful jig. The aura of light surrounding him was pulsing to the faster beat, most of it in a glowing cloud of green light anchored above the castle. The car park was packed, tensions were high, and adrenaline was pumping in gallons through the crowd.

  ‘What about a net?’ yelled Billy Preston, his radio crackling on his uniformed shoulder.

  ‘Where in hell would we get a net?’ Jimmy McDonald yelled back. His five-year-old daughter, Fiona, was in the middle of the march.

  ‘Don’t be an arsehole, Jimmy, Ah’m only trying to help. It’s more than yer doing.’

  Jimmy leaped over his wife, who was on her knees in prayer, and punched the constable square in the chest. The fight might have easily erupted into a brawl if Collyn Lambert hadn’t interrupted.

  ‘The kids are on the bridge!’ she screamed.

  Alice Schaefer and Marcia Buckingham dropped to their knees next to Shona McDonald while Jimmy and Billy scrambled up off the ground, wiping blood from their noses.

  Mabel stepped first on to the bridge. Ben, Tommy, Fiona and all the other children followed. The adults held their collective breath.

  ‘It’s OK. It’s OK. Step steady, Mabel. You can do it, my love, you can do it,’ whispered Collyn, wringing her hands at the sight of her daughter’s uncertain steps.

  Mabel was almost at the middle of the bridge when her foot slipped. Gravel crumbled from the edge and rained into the gully. She slid on to her bottom. Collyn gasped, digging her nails into her palms.

  Ben toddled out to help his big sister. Slowly Mabel got up, but she was wobbling close to the edge and Ben’s hold on her was making her balance worse. She kept one hand on Ben’s shirt while she tried to steady herself on the iron chain, the only barrier between her tiny body and the treacherous drop. But Ben was crying now and Mabel put too much weight on the chain. Lost her footing.

  Both children swung out over the crevasse.

  *

  The screams from the car park hit Rémy like brain-freeze. He gasped and tightened his grip on Em, who squeezed his hand comfortingly on her waist.

  The peryton soared in a tight circle above the castle, its wings creating a draught of air that bent the treetops and created a swirl of silver fog that kept them invisible to the crowd. The rush of air made it difficult for the three of them to hear each other, even the twins’ ability to talk to each other telepathically was muted this close to the death animation.

  The peryton banked lower. Em sketched desperately with her free hand while below them, one by one, Mabel, Ben and all the other young children toppled from the bridge and into the abyss.

  17.

  NEITHER HERE NOR THERE

  Ah, such fools are madmen and martyrs, thought Caravaggio, stepping out of a dark, painted corner of The Calling of St Matthew. He took a moment to admire his own genius in the brushwork and then, leaning over the figure of the tax collector in the middle of the canvas, set a fan of playing cards face-up on his lap.

  With loud sighs, the other figures in the painting folded their cards. St Peter snorted and turned away. Jesus rolled his eyes.

  ‘Why is it that your hand always wins, Caravaggio?’ complained the tax collector.

  ‘Because, my noble friend, I cheat.’ Caravaggio bowed low to the
five figures seated round the table.

  Reaching beneath his white tunic, he freed his sketchpad from his leather waistband. He spat three times on the wedge of charcoal he’d trapped between the pages and began to sketch his way out of his painted space into the real world.

  With speed and skill, he ran the charcoal across the paper, first outlining the figures at the table before filling in details of arms and legs, a pointing finger, an open window. Without pausing, he shaded furiously until the background of the painting shimmered with waves of light and the foreground melted around him. The wall and the window dissolved in thick trails of paint, oozing like tar over the figures poised round the table, each one liquefying into the other until the painting looked as if someone had wiped oil over the canvas.

  Caravaggio’s fingers flashed over the sketch like feathery quills of light until he began to separate from his art. First, his arms came through the massive canvas, outstretched like a mummy rising from its tomb. His muscular torso, shoulders and head followed fast, as if some invisible presence was expelling him from the painting. Every part of him was covered in a spectral membrane as he faded from his art into reality.

  Caravaggio held himself still in that stretched position for a moment, the caul tethering him to his creation. For one beautiful, orgasmic instant, he lingered between these two realities. This must be what divine rapture is like, he thought. Souls caught neither here nor there, in a moment neither now nor then.

  When he finally collapsed on to the cold marble floor of the Church of San Luigi dei Francesi in Rome, his bones ached and his eyes were bleeding, but he was laughing. What a rush of ideas and emotions he experienced after such a charged moment. If only he was in his studio surrounded by his paint pots and inks, what images he would create.

  His skin reeked of linseed oil and his tongue was thick with yellow pigment. He sat for a few more seconds in the side chapel and combed his fingers through his long dark curls, shaking out flakes of paint that danced like dust in the moonlight piercing a stained-glass window nearby.

  His knees cracked as he stood up. At least it wasn’t his head this time. He winced at the memory. Ten years earlier, when he’d first faded from The Calling of St Matthew, he had landed head first on the marble steps in front of the small altar. The injury had knocked all sense from him, leaving him bewildered, and with a blinding headache. He recalled staunching the bleeding above his eye with an unfamiliar monogrammed kerchief, and wobbling to his feet when he heard two loud clicks and a long whir.

  The tiny chapel had lit up as bright as the sun, and a group of people dressed the likes of which he’d never seen in his life gawked at him.

  A woman had screamed, ‘He’s going to vandalize the paintings!’ over and over again. Her words were unfamiliar, but their tone, brash and threatening, was unfortunately not.

  Two men had reached over the rope barrier in an attempt to grab him. Confused and bleeding, Caravaggio had scrambled under the rope and hidden in a cordoned-off section of the church. And when he regained his senses, he was aware of two startling factors: it was no longer 1610, and, despite the gash above his eye, he was no longer dying.

  Since that terrifying afternoon, he had returned regularly to these paintings, hoping that the broad strokes of what had happened the day he fell into the future would be clearer. But even after ten years of reading everything he could find about himself – biographies, academic papers, exhibit catalogues, even novels, which he decided often held the most truth about his life – the events surrounding his so-called death remained fragmented and fleeting. Soldiers swarming a palazzo, flames devouring a bedchamber, swarming rats on a murky river, a twisting pain in his side, and then nothing until his head had hit that marble floor.

  A skittering noise beneath the nearby pews brought his mind back to the present. Rats scavenging for food. Some things never changed, no matter how much time passed. He sat on the steps, recovering his equilibrium from his dramatic fade, and gazed at the three paintings on the walls around him. The Calling of St Matthew, The Martyrdom of St Matthew and The Inspiration of St Matthew had been commissions for Cardinal Borghese. Or was it Barbarini? Caravaggio shook his head, sending puffs of yellow into the air. He could no longer remember that detail either.

  The Calling faced The Martyrdom, in which Matthew’s killer stood naked with his arm about to strike while a cherubic angel floated in a soft cloud about the saint, offering him his hand. The commission had made his name in Rome in his own time, but Caravaggio knew from his research that he wasn’t credited as revolutionary for another two hundred years. Eighteenth-century academics described him as ‘an artist virtuous in his play of light and dark and groundbreaking in his representation of the divine in the ordinary’.

  He ran his hands through his long dark hair and smirked. He may have been in demand in the sixteenth, studied in the eighteenth and acclaimed in the twenty-first centuries, but virtuous he was not … in any time.

  18.

  THIS PLACE IS LIT

  Climbing over the low wall that separated the side chapel from the church’s historic nave, Caravaggio withdrew his dagger and used its blade to crack open the same black light box that had startled him after that first fall a decade ago. He had since noted with interest how tourists dropped coins inside to illuminate his triptych for two minutes. In the ten years since his resurrection, this box was one of his regular sources of income.

  He counted out enough coins to feed, house and clothe him for the next few days. More than ever before, he needed to blend in. Two weeks earlier, he’d sworn to Orion on his honour to remain hidden, no matter what.

  He’d kept his word. Almost.

  Dropping the money into the leather pouch tied to his belt, he took a few steps into the aisle – and stopped. Something was wrong. The air was suddenly cold.

  The colossal pipe organ heaved a breath and released a gust of air that chased the flames from all the candles and knocked the massive gold-encrusted candelabra from the main altar. Terror froze Caravaggio where he stood. The air was heavy with gunpowder and sulphur, and he dropped to his knees, a sharp pain piercing his temple. He clenched his jaw and bit his tongue and cried out, a shard of a memory filling his throat and squeezing his heart. These were the smells of a long-forgotten bedchamber.

  All around him, ancient bones snapped in every sarcophagus and buried coffin in the church. A fissure exploded from beneath the main altar and snaked down the nave and aisles, splitting open the marble floor. Skeletal hands, headless necks and broken shoulders rose through the ruptures like diabolical weeds. In seconds, the floor was littered with body parts. The stench was overpowering. Caravaggio grabbed the threadbare monogrammed kerchief he still carried and held it to his face.

  The organ heaved again, a wailing chord like a choir of angry beasts. The artist threw himself to the ground as every piece of glass in the church, from stained-glass windows to the leaded glass on the reliquary of a long- forgotten pope, exploded in a million pieces.

  Frantically, he brushed shards from his face and hands. The pain in his temple was a fork of lightning, sending agony and a piercing white-hot pain to every limb. He squeezed his eyes closed against a tornado of images: a dark shapeless being ascending from a sea of stunning colours, enfolded in black wings, heads and mouths suckling at its breasts. The organ belted out another screaming chord. Caravaggio collapsed to the floor, vomiting bile.

  The air in the side chapel ticked once, twice, three times, like a fire struggling to light. Slowly, the artist turned and stared in terror at The Martyrdom. At St Matthew squirming beneath the foot of his naked killer.

  Only it wasn’t St Matthew any more.

  Caravaggio cringed at the sight of his own face drawn in agony beneath the killer’s blade. Above his head, the cloud of pure white opened like a gaping mouth and swallowed the cherub. From the centre of the canvas flowed a white ethereal mist, with a stench of phosphorous that hit the artist like a punch to his gut. His insides twisted
in knots. The pain in his head numbed his thoughts, leaving him drenched in fear and gasping from the feeling that this blasphemy manifesting in his art was a result of his own actions.

  The organ exhaled again, a frenzied, unholy sound. Bones twitched, clicking against the marble like wind-up toys. Skulls cracked in half, their smiles splitting their jaws. The diabolical music flooded the nave. Caravaggio pressed his hands to his ears, dragging himself further into the shadows, pressing his back against the wall beneath the light box. Suddenly the organ breathed a low sigh and was silent.

  And something deep inside The Martyrdom coughed.

  Caravaggio had seen and heard enough. He felt his way unsteadily along the wall towards the grand wooden doors at the entrance, crunching on the bones of popes and cardinals and shattering them underfoot. But then he stopped, one hand on the door. He could not help himself. Like Orpheus in the Underworld, longing for one last sight of his love, Eurydice, he looked back.

  The side chapel was bathed in a silver-grey light as a thunderous cloud stretched from the centre of The Martyrdom to the heart of The Calling, connecting the paintings in a heaving mass. The cloud was trembling. Alive. Bolts of light shot to its core from each of the canvases. The bolts coiled together like lovers, forming a brilliant fireball out of which a magnificent, perfectly formed figure emerged. Head bowed in supplication, muscular arms folded in front of its genitals, long blond curls covering its face, every part of its body pulsed with power.

  Caravaggio gazed in terrified awe as the figure lifted its arms, rivulets of light dripping from its long elegant fingers. From its back, thick, black, silver-tipped wings slowly unfolded, as wide as the side chapel itself. The divine creature raised its head and stared directly at him.

  A series of images crashed through Caravaggio’s mind. A canvas wrapped in a bolt of cloth. A carriage fleeing over a hillside. A peach, ripe and rotten.