by Stephen Ayer
The air grew thicker and heavier. A certain humid dampness fell over the ancient witch and she found herself clawing through old cobwebs with distaste. The atmosphere grew dank, as if she were in a swamp. The walls closed in the further down she went, and the stone adopted a fleshy quality without being flesh.
Rivulets and strands of clear fluid streamed down the stone arches. The support beams that kept the ceiling up more and more began to look like giant ribs, curved and shiny, yet as hard as any building material.
Then she heard the chants of her followers. With each frenzied ululation, the walls heaved and the air sucked in. Her ranks were composed of renegade witches and warlocks, new bright eyed recruits and a sorting of occultists who had no idea of the gravity of what they practiced.
Aphon had drawn in a similar assortment of occultists, the main difference being that many were possessed by his favored servants from his infernal court. The rest were drug addicts, serial killers and rapists, a depraved multitude whom he promised not salvation from their vices, but a never ending supply to enact them.
The two came into the crypt proper and saw their servants at last. In a square room, dotted with stone sarcophagi every few feet, huddled their followers. Among the shadows slinked muscular hounds, more of the dark than flesh, their ears perked up at Agatha’s approach. The witch smiled at their recognition and pet one across its furry, pitch head.
Ah how I missed my children of Fenrir...
She was there, a thousand years past, when a great Danish jarl and his warband put down the mythic Sirian. She cared little for rabid Fenrir, but in his sons and daughters she saw potential. Their father’s ferocity with none of his madness... none of his immortality either, alas.
Past the stalking wolves sat and chanted Agatha’s followers. All were clothed in robes, the average occultists separated by the real spell weavers by virtue of having plainer, less ornate robes.
That, and those capable of real magic tended to stand amongst the pretenders. Each and every witch and warlock under her command was a force in their own right. Closest to her sat Otto Kortig, admiring and cleaning his staff forged out of black volcanic rock.
At ninety-nine years of age he looked fifty, a side effect of stealing his master’s life force. The act of which sent him away from the witch city of Calanar and into the real world, setting him on the forbidden path of necromancy. Shocks of dark green light coruscated around his fingers and flew out in glowing water droplets when they touched his staff.
The Black Star around her neck pulsed and swirled with pale greenish light, those chaotic gods of the Outer Dark sensing a true servant nearby. They didn’t take me... they won’t take it. And neither will he. Her heart jumped when the old warlock had a burst of laughter and then went back to whispering to his staff. I only have to keep him around just a little longer. Like you, Aphon.
She smiled when she saw a more trusted servant in the gathering. Josette Durant. The woman stood out in her gaudy burgundy and sapphire raiment. She set about lighting torches among the assembly. Platinum blonde hair clashed against vivid form fitted clothes, draped and spooled around her shoulders like a second scarf.
Agatha’s joy dimmed when her eyes picked up on what her soul sensed. Shadows writhed underneath the young witch’s skin, while her brilliant, crystalline eyes lacked the essential glint of life. Careful, girl. Take too much of the demon’s gift and he’ll take all of you. Josette’s decadence with manna only reinforced her belief that most of her lessers were not ready for true power. I can see it now. Endless writhings in piles of silks, blaring every record at once, spending eternity drunk on new sensations. Agatha snickered as Josette came back around, as Aphon’s degenerates drooled over her nubile form. The old duke saved me from the abyss, but not from the vanity of witches.
Her eyes roved over to Aphon’s own arcanists, bedecked in drab blues, grays and olive tones, they took every effort to be inconspicuous. They gave her nods as she met their gaze. The witch caught looks of their true forms for a moment each time they their faces dipped down. In those fleeting glimpses she caught eyes that were like seething pools of oil, eyes that pulsed like burning coals and a very few like Aphon, jaundiced and sickly demonic yellows, like a crop of diseased stars. Sometimes their skin was flesh toned, other times a more ruddy or a more gray complexion dominated, every variation of wrongness only serving to unnerve the witch more.
She averted her gaze of the duke’s band of hangers-on and stared ahead, breathing deeply of the cherished silence, the calm before the ceremony.
Aphon stopped at her side and looked among the crowd and the highlighted altar in the middle. “In this profession I’m unused to such... order.”
“My house is a well-oiled machine, demon.” Agatha stepped forward and moved past her acolytes, leaving a chill breeze in her wake. She took her vial and uncorked the top and let it spill into the multi-layered grooves set in the altar. Hissing sounds and surreal light rose from the pulpit, highlighting her refined, oval face to regal effect.
Aphon moved to the right side of the room, among his followers. He raised his hands high in the air and spoke in hallowed and forbidden tongues. The torches in the crypt dimmed, pools of shadow spread like spilled oil and whispered words of conquest and heresy to those assembled.
Otto Kortig stumped his staff down in his corner to a shockwave of whispers, washing over the kneeling masses like a great wind of the profane and heretical. Slight silver tinged emerald light flickered in his dead eyes, glowing as he channeled his power to Agatha’s alter.
Her concoction ran from the altar and streamed through byzantine grooves sculpted into the stone floor. The alchemical tide swept under the cultists without wetting them, flowing across the entire chamber and then up the walls, filling up cracks and sinking into towering, gaunt statues older than the manor itself.
Streams of whispers rushed from the statue’s mouths, their words echoing the crowd’s chants, amplifying their power.
Josette Durant played her part and shot her arms high in the air along with those under her command. Under her influence, all the streams of Agatha’s concoction in the room began to thrum with strange pearlescent light, as if the moon itself had been distilled into a maze of irrigation canals.
The ritual began.
Chapter 23: Uninvited Guests
“You stole the car!?”
Frank remained stoic. “Rentals create paper trails. Not good.”
“That’s why we have forged papers you fool...”
Frank turned to him with scorn in his eyes. “Yeah tell me where your docs are right now. Tell me. I’m gonna guess they’re all torn to shit from your rooftop rendezvous.”
Peter sighed and rested his forehead within his palm. “Well... at least you didn’t take it while someone was inside... did you?”
Frank stared ahead on the road. “.... No. It was empty.” The angel stared at him to divine the truth of the matter but couldn’t settle on it. There was no sign of blood or struggle on the seats, which gave him hope. But Frank wasn’t always messy, a trait that unsettled him about vampires in general.
They could be unnervingly neat when they wanted to.
***
In little over an hour the two had crossed from Liguria to Lombardy, the sea breeze and dusky violets of Genoa’s sky but a faint remembrance in the wide and dark fields in outskirts of Pavia. Farmhouses were pockets of warmth and home against the black sky, its cold stars never more distant than tonight.
Peter rested his chin on his hand, watching all the dimly lit greenery flutter by while Frank drove on in silence. The vampire’s eyes betrayed no hint of fatigue. Peter’s worries about his mission had intensified since his time on the boat, sapping his energy and focus. Strange... I’ve always had something to do while I’m here. His feet fidgeted and he glanced at the various glowing lights within the cabin, thinking of when he would wrap his fingers around the demon’s neck. Why the unease? Was it something on the boat? He tried to keep
his thoughts away from the idea that he had lost his step. Idleness begets idle thoughts. Focus. The demon. And then home. Demon. Home.
Without realizing it, darkness fell over Peter’s tired eyes... and he was home once more.
“Wake the fuck up, we’re here.”
Peter lunged forward as if he had been yanked out of an ice bath, the dim glow of the car’s control console throwing a haze of pale blues across his jacket. He looked across the cabin slowly, adjusting to how light his head felt upon his neck. “That was a good dream.” he said quietly, his throat dry and his heart still aching for vistas of golden gates, hills so verdant it was an insult to describe them green.
Frank sat square within his seat, his hand rested on the steering wheel as he puffed on his cigarette. Smoke coiled through the interior like a fallen veil of gray, backlit by a symphony of artificial blue. “Oh so the angel sleeps after all.” He took another puff and smiled. “Damn... Nazionali is good. Reminds me of cigs back in the day. Burns a little fast though.”
Peter looked ahead. “This is it?”
The country road had ended abruptly. Frank stared at the manor entrance, unfazed of what lay before him. “Yep. Looks like we’re a little late for the party.” The looming wrought iron gates were bent, smashed and torn out through the middle. Chunks of broken gate on the ground still glowed like an old campfire.
The stone walls to which the gate hinges were attached were streaked with blood; the headlights of their car throwing the slumped corpse of the gatekeeper into stark relief. Past the body and the shattered gates, Frank and Peter saw the path leading up to the manor was dotted with corpses in various states of injury.
Some were shorn off at the head with vertebrae sticking out. A great many seemed to be missing their throats and stomach. Most strange was that a select few were consumed with tumors and growths rupturing from their bodies, their skin charred yet filled with surreal luminescence.
“Looks like a paramilitary response.” said Frank, enjoying the car’s leather interiors and the cigarette for as long as he could. He pointed to a distended body, overcome with pinkish red tendrils and growths. “Can’t place what weapon they used for the stage 20 cancer victims though.”
“That would be magic, Frank.” mused Peter as he pulled a gun from the glove compartment.
Frank opened the door and stretched his legs. “Sounds like a witch did our job for us then.”
“One can only hope.” said Peter as he got out. “I would rather kill one, banish the demon and burn the rest.” He gestured to the mutated bodies. “We already have enough Chernobyls by Man, we needn’t have another borne out of the death of heretics.”
Frank looked at the manor at the top of the hill and saw flickering warm light behind the cracked windows as little wisps of smoke seeped their way out. He turned back slowly to the angel. “Yeah... whatever you say. Let’s get this over with.”
The outside of the manor was just as dire as the path leading up to it. Its veined marble colonnades gleamed with blood and moonlight; the pale cream stone blemished with splotches of char marks, chunks missing from its circumference.
Frank and Peter waited on both sides of the place’s ruined main doors. They had been rent and blown apart. Chunks of mahogany mixed with the cooled and smeared blood that led into the manor like a welcoming carpet. The vampire kept his wits about him as the angel brought his pistol close.
The vampire caught a trio of bodies on the stairs to his immediate left. One was melted into the steps itself, the other two were torn and bloodied as if a wild animal had dropped on them. Come on. One of you has to have a gun. He sighed when he saw nothing more than shattered staffs and bloodied wands among the dismembered hands and arms. I’ll even take a Deringer. Just one. Has to be something.
Frank became absorbed in his search for a weapon. He picked up a jagged chunk of a destroyed staff and dropped the improvised weapon not long after, the strange pulsing sensation emanating from the fractured tip giving him more of a feeling of danger than power.
At the top of the staircase he saw three cats perched on top of the balustrade, their green eyes watching... waiting. From the corner of his eye he saw another of the felines slink over a warlock’s corpse. “Witches and cats... crones love the little bastards.” he said aloud, not realizing Peter was listening.
“These are but shells, Frank, holding other and... older... things. Do not touch them.” Peter’s golden gaze settled on one of the staring beasts and it hissed in turn, scampering off into the blood soaked dark.
Frank paid his words little attention as he continued on.
The stank of spilled witchblood filled his nostrils, far more potent in scent than the low born crones he butchered in older days. These corpses almost smelled like an entirely different species from Man. It’s not coppery, it’s... he inhaled and let the air play over his tongue, ...silver. He shivered in revulsion.
Most vampire bloodlines had adapted to silver long ago, but any hint of the sacred metal was no less foul to the senses.
He was just about to pass under a doorway before a voice called out.
“Where are you going?” The sound of the angel’s voice was strange in the manor’s silence. It’s strange by itself. There was a melodic quality to it that appealed to Frank’s ear, but the underlying pureness unsettled his cursed soul.
“Gonna find me a piece.”
Peter sighed. “You’re a vampire... you don’t need ‘a piece’.”
“Relax, everyone’s dead. I can smell it. Start kickin’ over bodies till you find the witch. Might even get the demon too.” He didn’t wait for the angel’s reply. By the time he heard him shout out, he had already blended into the shadows, following the parade of murderous scents. And one of them smells like lead.
Peter swung underneath a doorway, keeping his gun level, cursing the vampire’s lack of caution. He passed through hallways, the amount of corpses leveling off until the décor was almost pristine, untouched by the rage of slaughter. He relaxed his guard when he came through a kitchen.
Bowls of cracked eggs lay unbeaten. Pots of water had long boiled over, spilling onto the floor. The angel minded his step while his mouth salivated to the display of fresh cut steak, still red and bloody on the counter. It had been a day since he had eaten. Murder before dinner. Did the heathen plan it that way or just got lucky?
He passed through the kitchen’s revolving door and his breath froze in his throat. His eyes took it all in. The vast crystal chandelier jangled like a constellation of glass, lush rosewood chairs around the dinner table that suggested the sensual in their curved backs. The ceiling mural, a blasphemous rendering of Lucifer in all his white resplendence. His bespeckled armor glowed underneath the blood of his brothers, one hand carrying the flaming sword of Michael, the other the hollow scythe of Gabriel, wearing a nebulous crown fit for the King of Kings atop his heathen brow. Such heresy was not what seized the angel’s breath.
The witch... She sat with her back to him, her long locks like a mane of obsidian, draped over her shoulders as much as they were the chair. The angel moved as silently as he ever had, slowly raising his gun up, thankful that he had already taken the safety off. Strike fast and strike true –
“Do you mean to kill me, Seeker?
Seeker? Her voice made the angel cringe, as if a violin had gone off-note. It sounded distant, like the voice was coming from a few feet in front of her instead of her mouth.
“I’m afraid you’ll have to. I’ll not come back to Calanar a slave.”
Peter steadied himself. “Tell me where Aphon is and I’ll make it quick.” The witch’s head slowly turned to the side. He saw her silhouetted cheeks rise into a smile and shivered.
“You’re not him.” she said with a note of delight.
“Who?”
She rose from her chair and faced him. “Not you. Perhaps he’s already dead...”
His aim was on her throat, ready to mangle any spells before they began “Your death is
come, witch. Make the judgment lighter and tell me where the demon is.”
She laid her hand on his shoulder and swept a lone finger down his dark blue shirt, her finger an island of ivory against the dark cotton. “Why tell you...” she grinned and looked up to him with fervent eyes, “when I can show you.” She flicked her hand aside like she was dismissing a mere servant.
The air cracked to a sudden force, swallowed up by the sound of the angel hitting the floor. His gun sprawled along the ground until it was stopped by a foot. Peter kept his eye on it and fumbled toward the weapon. “I can make it difficult too, heretic.” he said under his breath, the weapon not budging underneath the man’s foot.
“Mind your tongue, angel, you do not know who you address.” intoned an unmistakable voice. Peter looked up to find the fine featured countenance of his nemesis, his irises a putrid yellow behind scraggly brown locks.
Aphon.
Peter smiled. “The devil’s whore and a demon in a dull eyed wastrel? You are not the first nameless pissants I have cast into ruin.”
Aphon stayed still and pointed a languid hand at Agatha. “That is Baba-Yaga.” Peter turned back to Agatha, finding luminescent beryl eyes swirling with life that should not be. He had seen that pale green light before and felt terror unbound rise within his being.
“Impossible...” muttered Peter. Her banishment was so profound the flash could be seen from Heaven to the dark valleys of Tartarus. This one is an impostor. Must be.
Agatha put a lazy hand over his forearm and smiled wider than her face would allow. “Impossible? No. And here I thought one like you would be most acquainted with miracles.”
And curses.
Agatha walked around him, as if surveying a trophy, her sapphire eyes gleaming as much as her smile. She looked to Aphon. “How is he?”
