“I… don’t know,” Scott wheezed, forcefully swallowing the large lump that had formed in his throat.
“I heard all of this banging and then all of a sudden you closed the door, and there were… voices.” His voice trailed off with that last word.
“They were all around me, grabbing at me, trying to … to…”
“To what?”
“I don’t know, to suck me into the darkness.”
“Who was up there with you?”
“No one. There were just these… arms that came out of the corner of the room, grabbing me, pulling me towards the center of the darkness. And they were so cold. And the voices, right before I fell through the whole I was able to understand what they were saying.”
“What was that?”
“They were saying ‘master,’ over and over again, a hundred different voices all whispering it at the same time.”
“What do you suppose that means?”
“I don’t know, but I think they were calling to their master, and whoever, whatever their master is, I sure as shit don’t want to be up there when he gets there.”
Harry stared down at him for a moment, a somewhat bemused look scratching across his wrinkled face.
“What’s that?” he finally said, pointing down at the book Scott still had tucked beneath his arm.
“It’s all yours,” Scott sighed, handing the leather bound tome to Harry for his inspection.
He took it within his leathery hands, slowly peeling back the cover and opening it to the first page. A tuft of black smoke billowed in a small cloud above the book as the whole thing suddenly turned to ashes in his hands, falling between his fingers like grains of sand to the floor. It sifted into the carpet on the wisps of cold air that gusted down from the hole above.
Scott and Harry just stared at each other, and then at the darkened stain on the carpet.
“Do you know what that was?” Harry asked without looking up from the soot.
“No, what?”
“That was the Book of the Damned, but like no other copy that I’ve ever seen. Hell, you can buy it off the shelf at most bookstores in paperback, but that one was old, far older than any other copy I’ve ever come across.”
“I’ve never heard of it,” Scott said, wincing, as he rose to his feet, warily staring back up into the darkened square above his head.
“It’s a bible of sorts for certain sects of Satanists. It was written in the early seventies by a man named Ashvan Montevega, and, rumor has it that it was written somewhere around here. He was said to have taken court with the devil himself, receiving, as a gift, a handwritten copy of the book. I forget which publishing house he sold it to, but to make it more palatable for the masses, they had no choice but to make countless revisions. This guy in this little bookstore downtown where I found my copy told me that there were six original volumes, all hand pressed. He had never seen any, but he had heard the stories of the leather bound, gold embossed tomes, and, I believe, that is what we were looking at.”
“I don’t know. That book looked much older than thirty years.”
“If that’s right, and those rumors are true, then that must be one of the original copies penned by Satan himself.”
Scott just looked at him.
“So, what bearing does that have here?”
“Those who take the book as gospel believe that after being cast down from heaven, the angel Lucifer’s punishment was to walk the earth in human form until the day of the final reckoning, whereupon a great and final battle would ensue. The final winner of which would take control not only of the heavens but of the earth as well. But in order to lure the angels from the heavens for the final battle, Lucifer must first collect and damn enough souls to bleed the heavens dry. And these souls stalk the night at their master’s bidding until that ultimate conflict when they will fight long past their deaths.”
“So you think that is the reason for the two hundred souls?”
“Stands to reason. Why else would the Vatican give the story enough credence to devote an entire sect to trying to stop it?”
“Sounds insane,” Scott mumbled, looking back over his shoulder as he walked out of the bedroom, careful not to walk directly beneath the open hole in the ceiling.
“Any more insane than what we’ve seen over the last couple of days?”
Clambering down the steps towards the entryway, Scott stopped on the landing and looked back up to Harry as he began his descent down the stairs.
“So…” he began with a pause. “What are we supposed to do?”
“I believe we have to stop it.”
“And how do we do that?”
“We have to find your friend Matt, or whatever he has become, and make sure that he is not allowed to claim his two hundred lives.”
“Kill him?”
“Unless you think pleading will work.”
“How do you propose we do that? He’s not even human any more for God’s sake.”
“Whatever he is, if his body is still flesh, then we can still kill him.”
Scott sighed loudly, his furrowed brow lowering over his troubled eyes. He stared into the living room where there had once been rust colored carpet and a small antique wooden coffee table. In his mind he could see Matt and himself as eight year- olds playing with their Star Wars figures on that table.
A tear crept to the corner of his eye.
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THE BLOODSPAWN
Michael McBride
© 2004 Michael McBride. All rights reserved.
PART TWELVE
SECTION 12
Chapters 16 & 17
XVI
Tuesday, November 15th
9 p.m.
They had locked up Matt’s family’s old house and had driven across the neighborhood to Shane Corso’s mother’s house. The roads had grown increasingly treacherous as the fluffy snow was piling atop a thick layer of ice, and it was only a matter of time before not even the snowplows and sand trucks would be able to get back into this area to try to clear the roads. Why they hadn’t already remained a mystery, but he had learned a long time ago that when dealing with the city, nothing made sense.
Shane’s mother, Annette Corso, had answered the door in a long red bathrobe, her graying hair bound atop her head in large soup can sized curlers. She wore some sort of plastic or vinyl bonnet over them, just the first few rollers atop her forehead being visible. White slippers with purple designs adorned her bare feet. While at first she had been hesitant to talk, it only took a few moments for her to open up and that became a whole new problem as Scott remembered even from way back then, that once she started going it was nearly impossible to get her to
