you dare hurt him again.’
The trembling Filipina dropped her gaze.
Sara Robbins walked into the trees, and then started to jog away. That was stupid, she said to herself. What were you doing? Your brother wasn’t called Scott and you don’t have children. What’s the matter with you?
When she got to Museum Mile, she hailed a cab and sat back in the seat, her breathing ragged. She knew herself too well to be under any illusions. She had never had the slightest desire to have children, but now Matt Wells was about to become a father again. That was getting to her. She had no idea whether the child was a boy or a girl, but for some reason that she couldn’t fathom, she was interested.
This was changing her, and that wasn’t good. Something that she couldn’t control was happening to her, something that was making her see the world differently.
The Soul Collector had to find her former lover urgently.
It was as if he had unknowingly infected himself with a disease that would change him irrevocably. Whenever he descended to the underground chamber hosting the Antichurch of Lucifer Triumphant in exile-what those who believed in the false faith would have called a cathedral crypt-the Master almost forgot his name.
Given how many identities he possessed, he shouldn’t have been surprised. Of them, only his birth name of Heinz Rothmann was important to him, but even it was less desirable than the title he had assumed. The Master of the Antichurch was not only the guarantor of eternal death to his followers. He also still had control of the fortune that he had obtained as the businessman Jack Thomson, distributed over the years in numerous offshore banks. He was also still the sole owner of the conditioning drugs and techniques developed by his unjustly killed sister and lover, and there was no shortage of government agencies around the world that would pay with the lifeblood of their citizens for those. Not only that, he still had a large number of subjects who had been through coffining and could be activated as ruthless killers with a single phone call.
But for the Master, all of that had become a secondary reality, one seen through a glass lightly. Now he preferred the darkness that the Antichurch brought, the darkness and the knowledge that life was an illusion and that only death had any substance. The great poets had always known the power of death and its inescapable triumph. That was why the Mesopotamian tradition had the hero Gilgamesh descend to the underworld, the house of dust, to see firsthand how ineluctable the death gods were. The great poets, Homer, Virgil, even the deluded Christians Dante and Milton, had sent their protagonists to the underworld-assuming, as was obvious, that Satan was the hero of Paradise Lost. And even the false messiah Christ was said to have harrowed hell before his supposed resurrection. Lucifer and his realm were triumphant for eternity. To think that when the Master had revived the Antichurch in Maine, his motivation was that Americans would respond more readily to a religious cult than the antireligious ideology of Nazism. Now he knew that the Antichurch had more potential for destruction than any political system. After all, the established religions in the West had been sucking innocents into their maws for centuries.
The man with the scarred cheeks looked at the manuscripts he had laid out on the table in the underground chamber. Maybe he should see it as a crypt after all-the word meant ‘hidden,’ and there was nothing more hidden than the original Antigospel, written by its founders’ own hands. But it wouldn’t be a crypt for long. Soon the Antichurch and its primary lessons, that death governed all things and that human beings were naturally violent, would be known across the world.
But something was missing. The Master corrected himself-not something, but someone. He needed a senior disciple, a helper he could depend on. People capable of what the Antigospel required were very rare-even fully coffined subjects could not be relied upon in the most testing circumstances. He had encountered one with true potential, though: the Englishman, Matt Wells. The Master now understood that blaming Wells for killing his sister was a mistake. By that act, the crime writer, who had immersed himself deep in death’s philosophies and experienced the persecution of merciless killers, was the ally he needed. The problem was, Wells was nowhere to be found.
But that would soon change, he was certain. The murders in the northern cities would see to that. Matt Wells would become one of the nameless, as had the Master. And then the will of Lucifer would sweep across the land like the flames of hell itself.
Eleven
I was checking reports of the Hitler’s Hitman murders on the internet, when I heard Karen groan.
‘What is it, my love?’ I asked, going over to the sofa.
‘I don’t know, Matt. Help me up.’
I got her into a sitting position.
‘I have to go to the bathroom.’
After she was on her feet, I took her arm.
‘No, I’m all right,’ she said, gently pulling free. She stopped before she reached the door. ‘Oh, Matt.’
I was over there immediately.
‘I think…’ She moved a hand to her nether regions. ‘No, it’s all right. I thought my waters had broken.’
I took a couple of deep breaths and watched her walk on slowly. Then I called the midwife, who cheerfully told us to hang in there. I could cheerfully have throttled her, but Karen just laughed when she reappeared in the cream nightgown that she’d obtained through Julie Simms.
‘Let’s listen to more of that nice music,’ she said.
I put the second Monteverdi disk on and went over to join her on the sofa. We held hands until the music stopped. Karen asked me to put the first one on again, saying that Orfeo would always remind her of this time.
Later in the evening, after I’d made us toasted sandwiches, she dropped into an uneasy sleep. I turned the TV on, but it was too late for any fresh news. I leaned my back against the sofa and followed Karen into the land of dreams.
Not for long. Her stifled scream woke me.
‘Ah!’ she gasped. ‘The contractions are starting, Matt.’ Her face constricted and I felt nauseous. The sight of the woman I loved in pain was hard to bear.
I called the medical center and was told to calm down and wait until the contractions became more regular. All I could do was hold Karen’s hand and occasionally mop her brow with a damp towel. I lost track of time and my mind seemed to go into some kind of primitive passive mode to cope with the waiting and the uncertainty. I couldn’t remember much about my daughter’s birth.
Eventually I managed to get the midwife to send a car over. When we arrived at the medical center, it was quiet, being that it was now five in the morning. The rooms that had been set up as a temporary delivery and neonatal ward were empty and cold. I asked for the heating to be turned up.
The midwife was a jovial Latina woman. ‘Don’t you worry, Mr. Wells,’ she said. ‘We’ll take good care of your wife.’
‘Partner,’ I corrected. ‘Wife-to-be.’ When she took off her tunic to change into surgical scrubs, I saw she was wearing a green army shirt. I wondered how many midwives the U.S. military had on its books.
‘Whatever,’ she said, with a smile that displayed gleaming teeth. ‘We don’t discriminate. My name’s Angela, by the way. You can call me Angel.’ At least she wasn’t hung up on formality like the psychologists.
We sat on either side of Karen’s bed. She was mostly in control, but the layer of sweat on her forehead was a giveaway. Angel kept an eye on the monitors and from time to time ran her hands over Karen’s belly and below. The hours passed. The obstetrician, a Japanese-American called Kitano, looked in around 8:00 a.m. He was in uniform and bore the insignia of a lieutenant colonel. I’d got pretty good at recognizing people’s ranks since we’d been in the camp.
‘Everything good, Sergeant?’ he asked.
‘Yes, sir,’ Angel confirmed. ‘Contractions are every two minutes, nil dilation so far.’
‘Very well. You know where to find me.’
‘Yes, sir,’ Angel acknowledged. ‘Reading medical journals in the colonel’s office, sir,’ she added, after he’d gone.
That didn’t reassure me. Kitano had been brought in from an army hospital in Chicago and I could have done
