The Lucifer Messiah (23 page)

His gestures imbued with an awkward panache, more like an amateur magician than a sage, the ancient being unfurled his stringy arm like a flag. His gleaming fingernails pointed toward a small door at the edge of the altar-room.

Without another word, Sean moved toward the door. His gaze never left Argus, those red eyes blinking one after the other, until he had turned the rusty knob and entered the room that had once been the dressing chamber for the church's priests.

It was dark. His eyes needed a moment to adjust. A brass candelabrum rested on a table at the far end, where a figure sat huddled against the wall. An empty chest of drawers stood silently beside him.

“Vince?” Sean began, in a half-whisper.

At first there was no answer. He was about to try again when the man lifted up his head and looked directly at him. His gaze was cold.

“You're one of them, aren't you?” Vince asked, but it was more like a statement than a question.

“One what?”

“Don't play around with me Sean, not after the crap I've seen lately.”

Sean nodded. He stepped fully into the room, closing the door behind him. The scorched hinges creaked as they swung shut.

“I'm sorry Vince.”

He wasn't sure what else to say, apologies seemed to be his forte lately.

“Sorry? You're sorry? That don't even come close.”

“I never meant for you to get pulled into all this,” Sean interrupted, moving closer. Vince remained slumped against the far wall. “You may not believe that, but it's true. If the Morrigan hadn't interfered, I never would have gone to your apartment that night. You never would have known I was here.”

Vince dropped his head. He didn't seem to care. Sean kept talking anyway. He needed to keep talking.

“It was all going to be so perfect. Maggie would just disappear. You'd hear about it, of course, but by then there'd have been nothing you could do. You'd never have known how, or with whom. And you'd never have heard from me again.”

“Monkey-wrench got tossed into your plans, though, huh?” the ex-cop muttered, without looking up.

“Nicely put. Truth be told, I didn't just show up the other night, I've actually been in New York for several months
now. I've been watching you and Maggie both. Quietly. Following you; to the liquor store in the morning, to the bar in the afternoon, back home at night. Watching you squander your pension money. Laughing at you, honestly.”

The insult piqued Vince's attention. Insults usually did. Sean remembered that much from the old days.

“No way. Even drunk I could smell a tail a mile away. Just ask these friends of yours who tried to follow me.”

“First off, these are not my friends,” Sean replied, smiling. “And second, you never saw me because I never wanted you to see me. But I saw you, every single day.”

“Yeah?”

Sean made eye contact with his old friend. He found himself enjoying their repartee, it had been a long while since anyone could argue with him the way Vince always had.

“Don't believe me? Try this. You used to buy your morning paper each day from a lanky Italian guy named Joe, then a few months ago there was a new kid on his corner, a Puerto Rican you called
buddy,
there on Thirty-Ninth and Eleventh. Every day he said the same thing.”

Sean swallowed, and gathered his breath. When he spoke again, it was in a markedly different voice, a voice all too familiar to Vince.

“Gracias, Meester Vince, good day now”

Vince shook his head. How could he know that? How could that be the same voice, the exact same voice?

“When you were inside the Rock of Cashel pub, you noticed a new fella there, an old Irish guy sitting in the corner. You asked Tommy his name; he told you it was
Whitey Pete. You offered to buy him a beer about three weeks ago, but he just shook his head and walked away.”

Vince was getting agitated. He got up from the ash-stained floor.

“How the hell do you know that?”

Sean continued, undeterred.

“Or how about the bum outside the bank where you cashed your check on the third Thursday of every month?”

Sean stepped back then, into the thick of the shadows beyond the reach of the candlelight. Vince could hear him clear his throat again.

A voice that was not Sean's again echoed from the dark.

“Hey sonny, couldyou spare a dime fer an old fogy?
”

When he looked, a tiny old man with a flea-bitten beard poked his head out from the dim into which Sean had retreated only a moment before. Hunched over, but smiling his crooked teeth, he only paused for an instant before slipping back into the gloom.

“You see? It was me. They were all me,” Sean's voice said from the dark into which the old man had vanished. A few seconds later, Sean once more stepped out of the void.

“I don't expect you to believe that, of course. I never would have, if I were you. But I really don't care,” he said, clearing his throat one last time.

“This doesn't make any sense,” Vince was standing beside the table now. His legs were quivering, but he was trying hard not to show it.

“Doesn't it? You have no idea how much sense it makes, old friend. I spent thirty years trying to forget
about you, and about Maggie, living a hundred different lives, in a hundred different places. But you know what? It was never the same. It was never me. It was always someone else's life, someone else's love. The only time it was ever real was here. Home sweet home.”

“What are you trying to tell me? You want your old life back, after all these years?” Vince replied.

“Not my life. That was never worth much of anything in the first place. No, Vince. I came back for
your life.”

Sean's smile was gone now. His look was deadly serious. Vince's whole body felt faint. It was all he could do to keep standing up. He couldn't even wipe the sweat from his brow.

“I have to admit, I was a little hesitant. Even me. Once I got back here, and I saw what you were doing with it, though, I didn't feel so bad anymore. I mean, hell, if you're just going to piss it away, why shouldn't I take it?”

“You're all nuts. All of you. Frankie was right. I really thought that guy was out of his head, but he wasn't, was he?
Crazy, Vince,
that's what he told me. Guys in robes, dancing in circles around candles like savages or witches or something. A man who looked like a woman, turning into a
thing
with the head of a snake and the body of a wolf, eating a human alive. Then laughing out loud as it became Sam Calabrese? A thing called Morrigan!”

Sean remained unmoved by his friend's outburst. Vince nearly fell down as his emotions overcame him. He was halfway between laughing and crying. Or perhaps he was doing both.

“You're a bunch of sick, twisted
things!”
he finally shouted, collapsing to his knees.

Sean nodded, and he placed a hand on the weeping man's shoulder. He regarded his old friend for a long, quiet moment, his gaze alternating between his own hand and the bare skin of his friend's face.

Finally, he lifted his touch away, as though the contact itself was painful. Then he turned to leave.

“Goodbye Vince,” was all he said.

“You have had your time with your friend. Now, are you prepared to join with us? We haven't much time. The Morrigan has already gathered the flock. The festival commences as we speak,” Argus said as Sean stepped out of the inner chamber.

There was a grim look across his face. He did not even look at the old, old being when he addressed him.

“Go to hell, Argus.”

The words came as a shock to the creature who had thought his many ages to have rendered him immune to such a feeling.

“Excuse me?”

Sean did turn to face him then. His own eyes glowed like a leopard's. Feral. Angry.

“You heard me red-eyes. Go to hell.”

Sean pushed past him, toward the veil between the altar-chamber and the main hall of the cathedral. Argus
rose from his chair. He threw his long, skinny arms outward in disbelief.

“You fool! You can't leave us. Don't you know what the Morrigan will do! What I will do!”

“I do.”

“Turn around now, Lucifer. Don't make me harm your friend. Stay with us, or I promise you, your friend will die! He'll die a slow, horrible death.”

Sean turned back from the wall of ancient tapestries, and to Argus's terrible chagrin, the ageless Irishman was unmoved. In fact, he was smiling. With both hands outstretched, he opened the veil and called out to the gathered masses. Despite his previous rejection, half of them bowed on sight. The remainder hushed to hear him.

“All of you! Brothers. Sisters. I know that we are of the same kind, in some way at least. And I know that you seek a leader. You seek me,” he called out.

“But I tell you today. You do not need me. You do not need the Morrigan, or even Argus the all-seeing. Your lives belong to you! Go out and live them. For that is what I have come here to do. That is the lesson I have come to give you. Argus is wise, but he is not your master. You must find your path on your own, as must we all. That is your true liberation. That is where you will find the freedom you seek. Not in exchanging one ruler for another.”

He was greeted by quiet. Not reverent, worshipful quiet. Stony, deafening silence.

“Hear me! I declare this to you now, and forever. I will not take the Keeper's throne!” He turned his back on the
gathered, and he faced Argus again. The six-eyed, white-skinned figure was irate. All of his eyes blazed his anger.

“Your friend is doomed,” he seethed.

“You still don't understand, do you? Kill him. Do whatever you want. Whatever thrills your deviant little heart. The only thing you'll accomplish is to save me the trouble of doing it myself.

“Good luck,
old friend,”
Sean said, his body dissolving into a rising plume of smoke.

The words were spoken in Vince's voice.

H
E ENTERED HER APARTMENT QUIETLY.
T
HE HOUR
was late. The place was dark, and it was still. She might have been asleep, had this been any other cold November night. He half-expected to find her so as he slipped through the crack of the door, somehow heedless of the chain that only allowed it to open six inches wide.

The living room was empty. The shades were drawn shut. The radio was off. Even the bloody sheets were gone from the couch. Carefully, he crept in deeper, toward the kitchen that adjoined it. A moment after he moved from the carpet to the tile, he heard the click of a .38 from behind.

He froze.

“It's me,” he said, breathless.

Those two words, that familiar voice, it was all Maggie needed to hear. In a single frantic motion, she lowered her pistol and reached her hand out to his shoulder, spinning him around to look once more at his craggy, stubbly face.

“Vince!” she all but shouted. “Where have you been? What happened! What's going on?”

They were questions, but she threw them at him rapid-fire,
like statements in an argument. That way she didn't need to think, because she wasn't sure she'd want to hear the answers.

“It doesn't matter now. It's over,” he answered. His stoic calm made a natural contrast to her pure, raw display of emotion. In the long history of their relationship, that was their usual routine.

“What do you mean? What's over? Where is Sean?”

Her words just kept coming. But they seemed to bounce off him. He didn't actually answer any single question.

“Sean got involved with some very unpleasant people. Some very dangerous people. There wasn't anything I could do.”

She knew what that meant. He didn't have to say it. But she wanted to hear it anyway. After everything she'd seen over the past few days, or thought she'd seen, because she wasn't really sure of anything anymore, she had to be sure.

“He's … ?”

Vince nodded. He sighed as she neared. Saying the words somehow made it official. At least between them.

“Sean is gone.”

Maggie wanted to ask a thousand more questions. Why had he come back? Who had gotten to him? What had happened at the church? Those were only the start. But as Vince wrapped his big arms around her, she knew there was no point in asking even a single one.

“We can't stay here,” he whispered.

She didn't reply, but he felt her move, felt her lift her head against his chest. He knew she was listening.

“It's still dangerous here. The men who were after Sean aren't finished yet. We'd best get out of their way.”

“How long?” she asked.

“Until things cool down. A while, I think, but maybe not so long.”

“Where?”

“Does it matter?”

She knew that it didn't.