“But normal is not the operative word here,” I croaked.
“And because it isn’t,” Marilyn elaborated, “we might end up undoing some aspects of your—ah—rather unique metabolism.”
“Hey,” I said, “if it puts me back on a normal diet, I’m all for it.”
“Well, there is that. But I’m more concerned that we might switch off whatever energy pattern that’s slammed shut Death’s Door and is currently keeping it triple-bolted, padlocked, and barred. You’re on the mend—but becoming human at this stage of the process could still be fatal.”
I thought about that.
I thought about the fact that I had cheated death more than once.
That living on borrowed time always involved heavy interest penalties down the road.
That living as a monster was only defensible when you’d tried every other alternative.
And maybe not even then.
“I’ll take that chance,” I said finally. “Take your best shot: make me normal.”
“What about Father Pat?” Angela asked.
“We probably should ask him, first,” Lynne agreed.
“Mr. Cséjthe has made his choice,” Marilyn answered. “It is his life. We must respect his wishes.”
The others nodded and, once again, all extended their hands, palms down.
“How come everybody seems to know my real name?” I murmured.
“Lynne, take his feet and ground him.”
I wasn’t sure what she was doing down there but the numbness in my lower extremities began to work its way toward my head.
“Father Pat?” I mumbled. “Any chance he’s available to grant absolution?”
“Are you Catholic?” I couldn’t tell who was speaking now as tendrils of Novocain had started to tickle the underside of my brain.
“Nooo . . .” The Novocain had already established a beachhead in my lips and tongue. “Jus like ta keep my basssesss coverrredd.”
“Well, neither is Father Pat. But I’m sure he—”
Whatever else was said, I was beyond hearing it.
* * *
Everywhere I look I see a crucifix.
Preacher Hebler would approve. Not only have my personal chambers been stripped of every luxury of the flesh, the walls and doors have been adorned with a hundred and more crosses—the Christian symbols of torment and death. The priests and magistrate tell me that they will serve as a constant reminder of the God whose laws I have violated in every way imaginable. That they are there to turn each waking minute to reflection and penitence. That although there can be no hope of forgiveness in this world or the next, perhaps some good may be achieved by surrounding me with the sigils of the only willing sacrifice of blood, the only holy use for which the elixir of life is sanctioned.
But that is mere sanctimonious posturing: I know why my walls have sprouted a veritable forest of Christ-trees. The so-called Holy Father of the Romans has blessed each and they hope that these sacred objects will reinforce the earthen strength of timber and stone to hold me in this place. The peasants pray that I will be bound here beyond my sorcerous powers to squeeze through the slitted windows and fly upon the midnight vapors to seek more prey.
They need not fear.
Not myself, at least.
Even should timber crack and stone crumble, I am held here by a dark power more terrible than they can yet understand. They believe that they are safe now that I am “bound.” But it is not their strength alone that prevailed against us. And it will not serve them against Cachtice’s Power.
I shall make the motions and the mumblings of atonement. Who knows, perhaps I am not so damned as they think. Are the children worthy of the same degree of guilt as the adult who parents them?
I shall repent of my dark artistries . . . but, before I do, I shall make this one last spell.
A conjuring of the blood.
I shall bind the truth in my own blood that it may speak for me yet.
I shall send that binding through the blood, blood unto blood.
Someday, the issue of my blood shall reclaim my name. I do not believe it shall be through my children, Pál, Anna, Ursula, or Katelin. The Witch’s reach is long and my grandchildren—Ferenc, Anna, Maria, Erzso, and Janos—may not exceed Her awful grasp.
In exchange for my silence, She promised to not touch my family unto the forth generation. She has even named them though they are as yet many years unborn: Ferenc, Nicholas, Pál, Antal, Michael, Tamas, Elisabeth Christine, Anna Teresia, Maria Magdolna, Orsolya, Juliana, Klara, Ilona, Zsigmond, Kata, Gregory, and the two Lazlos.
My issue beyond that may be hidden even from Her as the fate of my own, illegitimate daughter is hidden from me.
Strange that I should remember her now, as I have not thought of her since I wed Ferenc. So many years ago! She was taken from my fourteen-year-old breast, the issue of a summer dalliance with a beautiful peasant boy. A year later I was the mistress of Cachtice and wife to the Black Hero of Hungary. Though legitimately born and of noble pedigree, our children may not be so pure as that nameless, lost daughter of my childhood. Perhaps the witch does not ken her existence and it shall be her anonymous legacy that delivers my message.
I cannot see what my dark Mistress sees. But I make this spell and bind the truth through my blood to be passed from one generation unto the next.
Until those bindings shall be loosed for Truth’s sake . . .
* * *
I ascended into consciousness more abruptly this time, not as a bubble but as a drowning swimmer, choking on the flood of water . . .
. . . of blood that filled my throat and flowed over my lips, dribbling down my chin.
“Careful,” said a voice, “you’re giving him too much. Give him a chance to swallow.”
I turned my face away, sputtered, and spat the thick, viscous liquid out while a bit more dribbled down my cheek and jaw. I coughed and felt my heart leap within my chest.
I reached up to wipe my face and found my arm moved with a strength I had forgotten I could possess.
“How are you feeling, Mr. Cséjthe?” asked the familiar voice.
I opened my eyes and looked at the strange, discomforting visage that was somehow familiar.
“I know you from somewhere . . .” I whispered.
He nodded. “St. Mark’s, the other night. You were looking for a whore.” He laughed at what must have been the expression on my face. “The Whore of Babylon,” he elaborated. “Or maybe you were looking for Elizabeth Báthory.”
“Who are you?”
He smiled a death’s-head grin and I finally realized what wasn’t quite right about his complexion from our first meeting. The light, here, was different than the chapel at St. Mark’s but his pallor remained ashen, a luminescent gray.
“Call me Father Pat; everyone else does.”
“Maybe I should call you the ‘late’ Father Pat.” Among other things I was discovering that my near-death experiences weren’t improving my manners.
He chuckled, seemingly unoffended, and nodded. “We have much in common, Chris. We have both been tourists in that undiscover’d country—”
“—from whose bourne no traveler returns? Well, the border seems to have been left open for some time now and nobody’s checking passports.”
The bowl was pushed toward my face and I looked up. “Jeepers creepers: Lurch in a fright wig!”
While the giant leaning over me actually did bear a passing resemblance to Ted Cassidy (not Carel Struyken or John DeSantis), his face was as preternaturally pale as the shaggy white hair that framed it. The features were strong, as if a sculptor had intended to create an eagle or a hawk in white onyx and then changed his mind and tried for a rough approximation of a human being. The massive brow kept the eyes in shadow, the nose jutted and curved like an insolent beak, and the mouth was a slitted cleft in impassive stone.
Father Pat cleared his throat. “This is Brother Michael.”
Massive white hands clutched th
e golden bowl with its bloody repast. They offered the bowl again.
“Um, not really thirsty, big guy. Maybe you should pop that back in the fridge.”
“Please,” said Father Pat. “You need it. And you shouldn’t waste the gift of life: it will go bad soon.”
“Won’t we all. Where did it come from?”
“It is a love offering from the congregation.”
“The congregation? It’s human blood?” I don’t know why I was surprised; by all rights I should never be surprised by anything ever again.
“Some of my congregants are human, yes. And it was given freely and specifically for you.”
“I—I can’t accept this,” I said, staring down into its crimson depths. Saliva started to flood my mouth.
“You would refuse more than the gift of life, freely given,” he said, his voice beyond serious and suddenly edging into—what? Ponderously prescient? “You would be handicapping your role in the battle that is to come.”
“Battle?”
He nodded and his eyes seemed focused on something outside the frame of time and space. “The forces of Darkness are preparing to roll across the lands of the living. Unless she is stopped, the Whore of Babylon will put on her red dress, drenched in the blood of the innocent, and open the Fifth Seal. The end time plagues will be loosed upon the earth and will hasten the Day of Final Judgment for all of Mankind.”
An electric shiver worked its way down my spine but I suppressed it with a medicinal dose of annoyance and said: “Why is my drinking some blood so all-fired important in the grand scheme of the Apocalypse?”
Father Pat appeared to consider for a moment and then said, “There was another man who questioned the necessity of certain sacrifices. He said: ‘If possible, let this cup pass from’?”
“Whoa! Whoa, whoa whoa!” I pushed the covers back and swung my legs over the side of the cot. “I may not be a believer anymore—maybe more of a secular unhumanist—but you’re seriously edging into blasphemy, here!” A hand grenade of pain went off in my middle and I sagged back against my pillow.
“I am not anybody’s Great Undead Hope,” I said, a little more carefully. “I am not a leader, a Loa, a messiah, or a general! I am just a guy trying to make sense out of a universe that keeps changing the rules.”
“We all are,” Father Pat said agreeably. “But fate and circumstance call us to greatness out of need, not because we’re ready and willing to answer the call.”
“Yeah? Well: ring, ring . . . what’s that? . . . nobody answering? Guess we’d better keep working our way through the phone book.”
“Perhaps if you understood—” he began.
“Let me tell you what I understand . . .” The stress of the past few days, the repressed grief for the lives lost, my most recent trip to the edge of death and back were combining to fuel a desperate rage. “When I was a kid in Sunday school they told me I had to pay for my sins. Okay, that seems fair. What doesn’t seem fair is when I keep getting the bill for somebody else’s crap! Well, check returned, insufficient funds: I am closing out all my accounts! You want someone to do battle with the Powers of Darkness? Go recruit the WWF! Hell, I can’t even wear spandex without getting a rash!”
A scream split the momentary silence as I drew breath. A second later the tent flap was pulled aside and a face that was half-human, half-wolf appeared in the opening. “Father Pat!” it growled. “Come quickly! It’s happening again!”
Pat jumped up. “Michael, bring the Roman Ritual and the holy water! Hurry!” He ducked through the flaps and was gone in a human heartbeat.
The giant hunchback stooped over me and gently, but firmly, pressed the bowl into my hands. His face was like carved stone, not quite human yet gently reassuring in its stony calmness and resolve. He turned and shuffled like someone unaccustomed to walking, bowing deeply for his humped shoulders to clear the tent’s human-sized opening. Then he was gone, as well.
Chapter Nineteen
I slept badly and awoke often. It was, however, a slight improvement over the alternative of not ever waking again.
During my fevered tossings and turnings I heard snatches of conversations ranging from the conditions of my chakras to the theological imperatives of free will. During the rarer times I was sufficiently conscious and cognizant, I was also ravenous: I essentially chugged the contents of three different bowls. Slept and drank again. Twice more.
I also picked up bits and pieces of my host’s story during his visits and my occasional moments of lucidity.
He called himself Pat but that wasn’t his real name. He apparently couldn’t remember his real name any more than he could remember his former life. The specifics of his existence went back a couple of years and dead-ended in the Holy Land, where he had begun a new life and a new calling.
And, in a fit of rare humor, chosen a new name.
It wasn’t short for Patrick.
It was shorthand, he said, to remind himself that there were no “pat” answers. And that, since waking up in a shallow grave in the Sinai wilderness, he had to physically pat himself, from time to time, for the reassurance that his existence was more than the flickering dream of a brain guttering out in its final, electro-chemical shutdown.
And then there was the matter of the giant hunchback, Brother Michael.
It was too good a synchronicity to pass up, he said: Pat and Mike. It seemed the perfect frosting on the cake of their peculiar partnership. Why not?
Brother Michael had found him wandering in the desert. It was the albino giant who kept him alive (if that was the operative word) and somehow got him to America. His memory was nearly as patchy of that first year out of the ground as it was devoid of all the years before. It was, he mused, like most lives in that we have no memory of a pre-birth existence and are hazy regarding our infancy and early childhood.
The only clues he had to go on were the remnants of semi-military garb that he had worn like a tattered shroud.
That and the violence of his original passing.
“Murder?” I asked.
He smiled that odd, thoughtful, slightly off-kilter smile that had caught my attention during our brief encounter near the holy water font. His resurrected body, he explained, not only bore the evidence of man-made death but suggested a prolonged period of torture, as well. Perhaps, he considered, his lack of memory was a side effect of the trauma he had suffered before his execution.
Killed by the Palestinians or the Israelis?
“Does it really matter which? Or which side I originally fought on?” he asked in turn. “There is enough wrong on both sides to push the balance scales up and down, back and forth. If I was a man of war before, then I lived by the sword and died by it, as well.”
Now he claimed to be fighting a different kind of war, a spiritual war. A war for the souls of those who had been told they had none.
Why?
He felt that there had to be some unseen but meaningful purpose that had brought him back in the flesh to walk the earth when he should have been long gone to rot and worms by now.
I had to ask the question though he clearly had addressed the issue long before: “You’re sure that you actually died?”
“Not only am I sure that I actually died,” he answered, as Brother Mike gently raised me to a sitting position, “but I question the use of the term ‘resurrection’ as it applies to me. When one speaks of a resurrection, it usually connotes a return to life—the condition of life. With all of the applicable attributes.”
The hulking, hunched giant tucked pillows behind me as gently as my mother would.
“I,” continued Father Pat, “am still dead. I do not breathe unless it is to draw air through my chest to speak. My heart does not beat. I do not sweat, sleep, or eat. And so, since awakening from what should have been my final sleep, my eternal sleep—I do not dream.”
“You’re a zombie?” I suggested.
“Have you ever met any?” he asked with that same oddly wry smile.
<
br /> “Well, actually, yes.” I think my smile must have matched his for the moment.
“They continue to decay,” he pointed out. “Their reflexes, thought processes, response times, are slow. They are poster children for entropy. The organic breakdown may be slowed in some cases but it is never entirely held in check.” He raised a gray hand and examined his own, dead-colored fingers. “I, on the other hand, seem to remain perfectly preserved. Well,” he chuckled, “not ‘perfectly.’ But I can run and jump and dance and even swim and pass myself off as a living man if you don’t look too closely.”
I nodded groggily. “A little makeup—a good foundation base—would solve that problem.”
Massive Mike offered another bowl of blood to me but I dozed off before I could manage a single sip.
* * *
That night I had a dream that was most passing strange.
I dreamt that I was awake and watching an unearthly parade. Creatures that were half human and others far removed from that evolutionary tree passed by—shuffling, slithering, flapping, crawling—wending their way in a nightmare procession past a line of flickering torches and down into a great pit. Flames flickered down below, out of sight, but the treetops that ringed the pit danced in and out of the shadows, lit and darkened moment by moment by submerged firelight.
And when the nightmare horde had gathered, an assembly of death and damnation that congregated like the personified sum of humanity’s darkest dreams, a voice rose from the pit as if from a dark general rallying his troops.
“The fourth chapter of Proverbs is particularly evocative for some of us,” he called out in ringing tones. “The prophet writes these words: ‘For they sleep not, except they have done mischief; and their sleep is taken away unless they cause some to fall. For they eat the bread of wickedness, and drink the wine of violence’.”
The congregation murmured at that and few voices bore resemblance to anything human.
“You, who crouch in darkness and shun the light, does your nocturnal nature make you evil?”
Faint growls formed a vague answer to the question.
“If so, then so must the bat be evil. And the owl . . . I’m certain that the owl appears quite evil to the field mouse.”
Dead on my Feet - The Halflife Trilogy Book II Page 30
