“So, it is today, August 27th, in the year of our Lord 1972, that I find myself at the base of the Rocky Mountains, outside of the city of Colorado Springs, barely a year after my failure in Africa. I can feel his presence. As I know that he can sense ours, lingering within these hollow hills, silencing the birds in the midst of their morning song as I wander the grounds of this compound, knowing that somewhere, beneath the shadows of the foothills, he lies in wait, watching our every move. And I know, for every fiber of my being cries out, that this will be my last assignment. My death seems to be a foregone conclusion, but whether or not I am successful still seems in doubt.”
“Look at this,” Harry said, interrupting Scott’s reading as he laid an old, yellowed newspaper clipping atop the diary.
“June 19th, 1942,” was scrawled in pen across the top of the shred of torn paper. There was a picture in the center, a mass grave, the earth still piled at the lip of the hole, a mound of charred bodies piled atop one another as a group of what appeared to be soldiers leaned over the edge.
“It says they found this grave east of the Rhine in northern Germany, but unlike the other mass graves found during World War II, the bodies inside were not limited to being Jewish. Check out the uniforms on the soldiers on the side of the grave. Those aren’t allied clothes, I can tell you that much, and you can bet that in 1942, there was no way that we had any intelligence within the borders of Germany.”
“I can’t understand any of the words,” Scott said, staring at the newsprint that was written in the native tongue.
“It’s been close to half a century since I was in a classroom learning this stuff, but I think I was able to get the gist of it,” Harry said, pointing down at the page. “It says that the people found inside were not all Jewish, some of them even members of the Nazi party. And while the Nazis generally shot their victims before burying them, these showed no signs of bullet wounds, in fact, they appeared to have been burned to death in that very hole, which for some reason was never covered.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Look here,” he said, pointing to the third paragraph in the yellowed story. “It’s saying that they are looking for the faction responsible. They think that it might be an allied installment that sneaked across the border, but they aren’t entirely convinced. The Third Reich, it says, has even offered a large reward for anyone with any information on the mass killing.”
“That doesn’t make much sense.”
“Exactly. With the Nazis controlling the press, the only way they would have allowed this story to run was if they were convinced that not only did they have nothing to do with it, but that they also had no idea who, in fact, had done it. And how two hundred bodies had been found in a similar condition to those disposed of by the Nazis without anyone having any idea as to where they came from…”
“Did you say two hundred?”
“Yes, exactly two hundred.”
“That’s weird, because I’m reading over here in this diary about two hundred people who were killed in South Africa.”
“Odd,” Harry mused, opening the second file and submersing himself within the contents.
Setting the clipping aside, Scott stared back down at the pages of the diary.
“It was by Papal decree that we were ordered to Colorado, our limited intelligence pointing to a shift in the moral clime, often a sign of his coming. Manitou Springs, barely twenty miles south of our current location, had only recently become a hotbed of presumed satanic activity. Rumored to have been where writing had begun on the Satanic Bible, the Vatican had placed an operative in this area. It was he who alerted the Pope to the presence, or at least to the immanently impending arrival, of the beast.
“I can feel him in these hills, as I could feel him in Johannesburg, and I know that timing is of the essence. Now, where we are in the cycle, I am not sure, but my suspicions lead me to believe that we are close to the beginning, rather than clumsily stumbling in to the end of the cycle as we had last time.
“Whether right or wrong, to the best of our understanding, the cycle begins with the invitation, whereupon a group of followers beckons his presence with the sacrifice of the firstborn. After accepting the invitation of blood, the beast moves on to the copulation, planting his evil seed under the cover of the night. Quite often, as our best records indicate, more than one seed in sewn.
“Now, he knows as well as we, that these children, these bloodspawn, are half-human, and thus prone to the same fallacies and unpredictability as the rest of their race. Achieving their destiny is nothing resembling a foregone conclusion. They have to be surrounded by arbiters, unwitting helpers of evil nature or not, whose sole, unknowing purpose in life is to be in the right place at the right time to help the bloodspawn to fulfill their destiny. And while not as grandiose and climactic as the enslavement of the human race as written in the Bible as the coming of the antichrist, the end result is no less insidious: the stealing of two hundred souls.
“Why two hundred? We do not know. But it has always been that way since our fist discovery of the cycle during the Age of Enlightenment. There have always been two hundred corpses in the wake of his passing, but there has only been one instance where we have thwarted his efforts. Or, at least, that is what we have pieced together from the information left behind. That group, while successful in their endeavor, disappeared from the face of the earth without leaving more than the slightest trace of their existence.”
Scott raised his eyes from the book, staring out into the dark night, the blowing snow crystallizing in the corners of the window as the flakes bounced off the glass, swirling into the drifts beneath the window. Every word written in that diary sounded like something out of the Middle Ages. It all sounded like complete and utter bullshit, like a story fabricated for the sole purpose of scaring a child at bedtime. But he could feel, deep down in the very core of his being, that there was a certain truth to it. For he knew that he had seen the evil of which the author spoke; had felt its cold stare, its icy touch. And more importantly, he knew that it was somewhere out there in the night, waiting for him.
“Here’s another one,” Harry said, tossing the nearly disintegrated piece of newsprint in front of him on the table.
This one was labeled “September 19th, 1878.” It told the story of a group of settlers headed west along the Oregon Trail; none of them referred to by name. They were found in a circle of their own wagons, two hundred of them in all, slaughtered by what they assumed to be a massive and quick attack by the Apache. It was a call to arms of sort, with a reward of ten dollars for anyone who had any information about the attack. The President himself had ordered the cavalry into Idaho, commissioning them to “do what needed to be done to bring the rogue cowards who perpetrated such a monstrosity to be brought to justice one way or another.”
“Here it is again,” Scott said, sliding the article back in front of Harry. “’Two hundred of them in all’.”
“I’m sensing a pattern here.”
“Yeah, you and me both.”
Turning his attention back to the diary, he picked up where he left off.
“Perhaps we will be graced by God with luck this time, as we have stumbled into this cycle early on. Or perhaps this will end like the others, and we will never be heard from again. I pray to God nightly for the strength to endure, to do what must be done, as I know it will take more than I have to offer. I know that it will take every single ounce of my faith, of our cumulative faith, for—as we have already divined the origin of the bloodspawn—we will have to take the souls of innocents in the process.
“Not far from this very convent, in the wooded hills at the base of the mountains, a man named LeRoy Trottier has brought that evil onto this earth. The only problem is that there are four children, and as we now know to be fact, only one of them can truly be the bloodspawn. The others are nothing more than poor, vacuous shells, their innocent souls—should they even have any—nothing more than sacrificial lambs being led to the slaughter, regardless of if we do it or not. We have arranged for these children to be brought into our custody, as Mr. Trottier will undoubtedly be spending the remainder of his natural life in prison.
“Now, by seizing these children, whether we have broken the cycle, or merely become a part of it, is completely uncertain. Until that moment when we are able to separate the bloodspawn’s soul from his mortal body, there will be no way of knowing for sure. So I pray to thee right now, oh Lord, for the strength the do what must be done, and for your forgiveness for the violation of your commandments when and if we succeed.
“But know this, to whomever should carry the torch should we fail here today, that there is always the chance that the evil deed may never come to pass. As the bloodspawn is one half human, that gives the child an
