by Ninie Hammon
The day after the book signing, three dozen black roses were delivered to her house. That’s when she learned his name. Yesheb Al Tobbanoft. From that moment forward, his unrelenting attention became the canvas on which every day was painted. Over the course of the next eight months, he sent her flowers, presents, cards and letters—she refused delivery on all of them. Then he began to show up wherever she was. How did he know she was taking Ty to the museum, that she was going to the dentist or to the grocery store? She finally went to court and got a restraining order from a reluctant, unbelieving judge. That didn’t make Yesheb leave her alone, it only moved his attentions back a few yards. When she saw him on the sidewalk in front of her house or inside the fence, standing in the trees watching, she called the police. Time and time again. But he was never there when the police arrived and she quickly became the little boy who cried wolf.
After he showed up at the intersection in Orlando, where she had sneaked away to take Ty to Disneyland, she employed a private detective who documented his family’s fabulous wealth—and the tragic deaths that befell one family member after another until Yesheb was the only man standing. After Good Friday, she’d lived in constant terror. No one knew better than she the timetable for the Beast to collect his bride. If he failed to seduce her by the full moon in July, he would lose forever his right to rule Babylon.
And Gabriella suspected that never in his life had Yesheb Al Tobbanoft failed to get exactly what he wanted.
* * * *
Yesheb holds the heavy damask drapes back from the window and stares with unseeing eyes into a world colored the cheerless shade of gray peculiar to the south of England in the springtime. The sullen masses of clouds harried by a chill wind have worn thin, but aren’t threadbare enough to allow a single shard of sunlight to slice down out of the evening sky.
Though no mist or fog or drizzle is actually visible in the air, it is nonetheless wet. So is every surface in the stone courtyard and the perfectly manicured rose gardens—the blood-red blooms rust-colored in the gray light—that stretch out beneath the high window on the north side of the manor house. Yesheb can just make out the blanket of flowers on the floor of the bluebell wood beyond the stone fence in the rolling hills of Hertfordshire where his sisters played when they were children.
Perhaps an hour of daylight remains before the wet air scrubs away all color and washes darkness down the day, and Yesheb wonders as he has wondered countless times over the years why his Iranian father chose to purchase a sprawling estate here in the unrelenting drear.
He smiles a joyless smile. Ah, but Anwar Al Tobbanoft did not choose. Perhaps he thought he did, in his ignorance, but his father was mistaken. Anwar Al Tobbanoft was chosen. It was his honor, and the privilege of his submissive cow of a wife, to bring royalty into the world, and the revelation of Yesheb’s regal lineage had occurred here in England.
Yesheb drops the curtain and turns back to the ornate desk. He hobbles on his walking cast the few steps to the big leather chair. As he settles his long frame into it, his mind snaps back to his obsession with the force of a stretched-too-tight rubber band.
The Bride. Where is she?
His herd of private investigators have scurried around with insectile frenzy searching for her, but have not turned up so much as a hint of her whereabouts. They searched her house but found nothing that suggested her destination. They accessed the contacts list in her computer and were systematically investigating every person named in it. They were checking out every school she ever attended, every classmate, roommate, bunkmate, old friend, old flame and every neighbor every place she ever lived.
They were investigating the old man just as thoroughly, though his history is longer, not as well documented and harder to track.
Zara’s sniveling little literary agent—clearly the progeny of a rat bred with a pit viper—had been drawn to Yesheb’s power and sucked up to him unashamedly. The man gave Yesheb’s investigators every speck of information he had about Zara, which quickly made it clear Phelps hardly knew her at all.
The agent collects her mail and gives it to Yesheb’s men. Nothing. The investigators watch for activity on her ISP address. Nothing. She and the old man left their cell phones behind and there is no way to trace a burner—a pre-paid cheapie phone. There has been no activity on her credit cards and her ATM card, but they learned she had withdrawn more than $75,000 in cash from the bank that day in New York two weeks ago. Unless the three of them have forged passports—and why would they?—they have not fled the country. Still, you could go a long way on $75,000.
She and the others—the boy, the old man and the dog—have vanished in a puff of smoke.
Yesheb picks up off the desk one of his father’s most prized possessions. The jeweled, enameled Easter egg, the Royal Danish Egg, is one of the eight missing Faberge eggs. Its value is incalculable. He turns it over in his hand, looks at it without really seeing it. Then, in a sudden flash of rage, he hurls it across the room to smash against the bookcase and growls a string of profanities under his breath.
They will find her. No one can hide forever from a manhunt as thorough as the one he has launched. She will surface, do something stupid and he will snatch her up like a frog grabs a fly. He has time, he tells himself firmly, trying to calm his frayed nerves. He still has twelve days until the next full moon. And another full moon after that one. He will find her, sacrifice her son, mate with her and plant the seed of his own son in her womb. They will rule together. And he will make her pay for running from him. Oh, my yes. He will make her pay as his father made his mother pay.
Even as a boy, Yesheb knew his father believed his mother had been unfaithful and he couldn’t figure out why his father hadn’t killed his wife and her newborn baby on the spot. Why had he let them live?
When he grew older he understood: Anwar Al Tobbanoft kept them alive to make them pay!
Other boys were borne away into slumber to the tune of lullabies; Yesheb went to sleep every night to the sound of his mother’s screams. His father beat her regularly, broke her nose so many times it was as flat as a prize fighter’s, shattered countless other bones over the years, knocked out most of her teeth and blinded her left eye. No one outside the household ever knew, of course. Anwar Al Tobbanoft was an important, respected and rich man. He was also a Muslim man, not in belief but for convenience. And it was certainly convenient that he could cover his wife’s battered body from head to toe whenever she went out in public with a full burka—the kind that featured only a mesh slit for the eyes.
When Yesheb was about twelve, he found out that shortly after he was born his father had commissioned DNA testing on the blonde, blue-eyed baby boy and discovered that Yesheb had, indeed, come from his seed. So why had his father continued to punish his mother for a crime he knew she did not commit? And why did he visit unspeakable cruelties on his only son as well? It took years for Yesheb to understand it wasn’t about making anybody pay. It never had been. It was about the screams, the delicious delight of screams.
Yesheb shivers in anticipation of the sound of Zara’s screams and feels power surge through him. There is power in fear and even greater power in domination. But the greatest power of all lies in living while others die at your hands. Power feeds on the screeching cries of their anguish, grows in the fertile soil of death like entangling, choking vines.
Yesheb killed for the first time when he was eight years old. It was the day he first heard The Voice. When the growling whisper spoke words into his ear that first time, he had not been frightened. It was almost like he had expected to hear it, like he had been waiting for it, holding his breath in anticipation of it his whole life.
Yesheb. Make an altar and offer a sacrifice to me—your sister’s puppy.
“Who are you?” Yesheb had asked out loud. Though he knew. Yesheb had always known. What he learned that he did not know, however, was that The Voice tolerated nothing less than instant, complete, mindless obedience. He learned that lesson
as all children learn best—by suffering the consequences of their misdeeds. The Voice rewarded Yesheb’s question with agony, detonated a bomb of searing pain inside his head so excruciating he instantly dropped to his knees gasping. He writhed in delirious agony for seven days and seven nights. The finest medical care money could buy offered no relief. Doctors could find no cause for pain so torturous that the boy was literally blinded by it and could only barely hear above the buzz of a million locusts in his ears. The pain left him as abruptly as it had come. He awoke in a hospital. To the astonishment of the medical personnel hovering over him, he sat up, ripped the IV tubes out of his arms and demanded to go home.
Even weak from seven days of lying motionless, he got out of his bed as soon as the rest of the family slept and slipped into his little sister Pasha’s room. The German Shepherd puppy she had gotten for her seventh birthday slept in a pillowed bed at the foot of hers. Yesheb picked it up silently. The dog licked his hand and Yesheb felt an ache in his heart for the helpless beast but he did not hesitate or falter.
Years later, he read that crack units of Nazi SS officers had been given puppies to raise and train, and on the day they graduated, they were ordered to slit the dogs’ throats. Any officer who failed to respond instantly to the command was dismissed from the unit.
Yesheb would have passed the test. He sneaked into the kitchen for the sharpest knife he could find and then out the back door to do as The Voice had commanded.
He never questioned The Voice again.
Sometimes, there are other voices in his head. Some speak Arabic, others speak English, French or Italian. One is a sultry woman’s voice; another is a child. The voices tell him things he could not possibly know, warn him of impending danger, soothe him sometimes and inflame his anger at other times. Those voices often tell him what to do, but the ultimate authority always rests with The Voice.
The Voice revealed Yesheb’s true identity two years after the boy killed his sister’s puppy. He was a day student at Haileybury, the prestigious British boarding school peopled by the children of the rich and famous from around the world. Located on Hertford Heath twenty miles north of central London, the school boasted a quad touted as the largest academic quadrangle in the world, and that spring the Kipling House, one of the boys’ dormitories, used soapstone to construct a scale model of Stonehenge in the center of it.
Although Yesheb’s striking good looks, his maturity and his air of authority had made him an instant leader when his father enrolled him, the boy disdained leadership, made no friends and kept to himself. After the other students fell victim to his caustic tongue, hair-trigger temper and vicious, mean streak, they cut a wide path around him. Left him alone, though none of the insipid fools realized he was never alone. The Voice and the minions of The Voice were always with him.
As Yesheb watched construction of the scale model of rocks one day after class, his mind was inexorably drawn to thoughts of destruction and desecration and it occurred to him that it would be entertaining to defile the stones like the graffiti-slathered walls in London’s tube stations and bus shelters.
His fellow students were intent on their work and paid no attention to his feigned interest as he sauntered around behind the largest carved stone. He sat down in the grass beside it and ran his hand over the smooth, almost greasy surface of the soapstone. As soon as he was certain no one was watching, he withdrew a felt-tip marker from his pocket and scrawled YESHEB AL TOBBANOFT on the base of the rock, down low where the tall grass would cover over his handiwork from the casual observer. Then he stood and stared up at the stone, wondering how long it would take his classmates to discover that he’d made their precious work of art as ordinary and mundane as a bridge abutment where some brainless lover had scrawled ShaMika Loves LaRon 4-Ever.
As he smiled at his desecration, The Voice displayed its power, came to Yesheb in a mighty vision and revealed to the still tender boy his identity, his royal place among the powers of the universe.
Yesheb’s ears began to ring with a thousand tiny bells and The Voice spoke rumbling, powerful words inside his head in a language the boy had never heard before and Yesheb has never heard since. The world all around him grew too bright and he had to squint to keep his eyes from watering. Then a searing light focused on the rock in front of him and left everything else in pale shadow. The light grew brighter and brighter until Yesheb could barely stand to look at it. Then, out of the light, burning gold letters began to appear one at a time on the stone, as if a giant invisible pen were inscribing each one. Yesheb stood transfixed as words began to appear slowly, one letter at a time, until the stone stood like a mighty doorpost with a name inscribed in burning gold letters upon it.
THE BEAST OF BABYLON.
Yesheb had no idea who or what The Beast of Babylon might be, but stared at the flaming letters in awe and wonder. Then the most amazing thing of all happened. The small, black marker-inscribed letters of Yesheb’s name lifted off the bottom of the rock one at a time, floated up into the air and grew larger and larger until they were the size of the flaming letters written by the invisible pen. Then each letter from his name was inserted into the words on the stone. When his black letter covered a flaming letter, it blocked out the light—like placing a lid over a candle—there was a sizzling sound and smoke rose up all around it.
The Y of YESHEB became the Y in BABYLON. The E in YESHEB became the E of BEAST. And so it went, one letter after another until all the letters of Yesheb’s name had been used and all the flaming letters had been capped in black. There on the stone, with smoke rising up around each letter, were the words THE BEAST OF BABYLON—spelled with the letters of Yesheb’s name. The Beast of Babylon and Yesheb Al Tobbanoft were one and the same. Yesheb had learned his true identity.
Of course, it was years before he understood the future laid out for The Beast of Babylon. He learned that in the pages of Zara’s book—her diary disguised as fiction, her prophesies set down in the form of fantasy.
Only Yesheb understands that it is neither fiction nor fantasy. After a millennium of searching, the identity of the Bride has been revealed. And the path they must travel to their destiny has been laid out. Follow that path and the throne of a mighty kingdom in The Endless Black Beyond will be his, ushering in a Dark Age of demonic rule on the heels of their apocalyptic victory over the forces of light.
But he must follow the path. He cannot stray from it. Everything has to happen as it has been prophesied. His world, his kingdom and his life depend upon it.
Yesheb gets to his feet and hobbles back to the window. He stares into the deepening gray shadows of evening, concentrates, wills his mind to reach out and connect with the mind of his beloved Zara. For an instant it seems he almost does, he imagines he smells something—a hint of pine or cedar—but it is gone in a heartbeat. Wherever Zara is at this moment, her mind is closed to him.
CHAPTER 6
THE AROMA OF PINE AND CEDAR FILLED EVERY BREATH AND Gabriella sucked in great lungfuls of it as she followed the winding road into the mountains. The air was a feast of crispness; it smelled so clean it must have been scrubbed with lye soap and hung out on the line to dry.
U.S. 285 had led her along the valley floor in front of Mount Princeton for eight miles to Nathrop, where HWY 162 peeled off to the right and began to wind up through Chalk Creek Canyon between Mount Princeton and Mount Antero. As the road curved along beside the creek, massive chalk cliffs reared up on the south side of Princeton, towering 1,500 feet into the cloudless sky.
“Those are called Moon Cliffs,” Gabriella told Ty, shouting so he could hear her above the wind in the open jeep. “You can read a newspaper outside from the reflected glow off them when the moon’s full.”
A full moon. Twelve days away.
The road followed the creek higher and higher up the canyon. Mount Antero reared up above the road on the left and filled the whole sky, bald and snowcapped above the tree line.
After a 45-minute gradual climb
, they rounded a curve and came upon the little town of St. Elmo. Named a National Historic Site, the resurrected ghost town rested at an elevation of 10,000 feet. It had been a mining camp in the late 1800s and its buildings were authentic period structures, wood frame, with raised wooden sidewalks that stretched for four blocks along both sides of Chalk Creek Canyon Road, which formed the town’s main, and only paved, street.
Gabriella could see houses down a handful of side streets—small adobe structures mostly, with dirt yards. She was surprised that anybody actually lived here full-time. By September, the upper reaches of Princeton and Antero were snow-clogged and many valleys like this one were impassable. Skiers didn’t come here, though. The resorts and striking Colorado slopes were on the other side of the Mount Massive Wilderness Area—an hour and a half north in Vail or three hours away in Aspen.
There were cars, pickup trucks and SUVs parked in front of businesses, along with several jeeps she suspected were rentals and other battered, mud-splattered jeeps she was certain weren’t. Some of the vehicles obviously carried tourists, easy to spot with their cameras and binoculars dangling around their necks, or holding cell phones out at arm’s length to frame and capture digital images. But the locals were easy to spot, too. Hispanic, many of them, some Native American, they chatted, two or three together here and there, dressed in not-a-fashion-statement frayed jeans, well-used Stetsons and scuffed and muddy cowboy boots.
Gabriella pulled her jeep to a stop in front of a building flanked on one side by the dry goods store and on the other by the apothecary. A hand-painted sign on the front proclaimed St. Elmo’s Mercantile, Established 1885. The proprietor, a man named Pedro Rodriguez, was the man Gabriella had driven more than a thousand miles across seventeen states to see. He held the key—literally—to her future. If what James Benninger had said in every Christmas card in the past five years was true, the owner would welcome Gabriella and her family, supply them what they needed and give them directions, maybe even a hand-drawn map to direct them to St. Elmo’s Fire, snuggled in a hanging valley on Mount Antero 11,673 feet above sea level.
