Ultimate Supernatural Horror Box Set

TWENTY-TWO

HURRICANE WATCH

THE NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE HAS ISSUED A HURRICANE WATCH FOR SANTA BARBARA, VENTURA, LOS ANGELES, ORANGE AND SAN DIEGO COUNTIES. BRING IN LOOSE OUTDOOR OBJECTS, FILL UP YOUR CAR WITH GAS AND STAY TUNED FOR FURTHER DEVELOPMENTS.

(The Weather Channel)

‡

Manhattan

They sat in the front room of the rectory. Neither Father Brenner nor Mr. Kesev of the Shin Bet wanted a drink, but Dan didn’t let that stop him. Monsignor Riccio had come by to offer his condolences. He seemed to know Kesev—apparently they’d met on the street a while back.

The Monsignor didn’t say, “This is what you get for recklessly going public with the Virgin,” but Dan guessed he was thinking it. He was gracious, however, and wished sincerely for the speedy capture of the killers, then he left. Father Brenner had sat up with him awhile, then he went back to his room to watch TV.

TV…all the world was watching TV. The streets, even the ones outside the church—relocked until the blood could be cleaned from the floor—were empty. Everyone was inside watching the wave of destruction as it wiped out of places worship across the globe. If there was panic, it wasn’t in the street, it was quiet and private. Dan figured more prayers were being said across the globe right now than at any other time in history. And no doubt fewer atheists and agnostics now than at any other time in history a well.

Yet he felt strangely aloof from it all.

“What do you think it means?” he asked Kesev. “The destruction of all these churches and temples, I mean.”

“He is coming.”

“Who? The Antichrist?”

Kesev looked at him. “There is no such person. It is a fiction concocted by crazy men. The Master is coming.”

“You mean Jesus?”

Kesev nodded.

“But why now?”

Kesev shrugged. “Because He has decided it is time.”

No straight answers from this one. If Kesev was right, it was the End of Days. Dan found he didn’t care. He did care that his glass was empty. He rose to pour himself a third Dewar’s.

“Sure you won’t have one?”

“No, and I do wish you would not drink too much.”

Dan stopped in mid-pour. Kesev was right. This wouldn’t do him any good. Wouldn’t ease the pain, even a little. The wound was too wide, too deep, too fresh.

“This is my last. But what’s it to you? What do you care about me or how much I drink?”

“I’m sorry for you and for that poor dead woman. But I’m concerned for my own sake as well. You see...for many years I have been the Mother’s guardian.”

“ ‘The Mother,’ “ Dan said softly. “The Virgin. How Carrie loved her.” Then the rest of Kesev’s words sank in. “Guardian? We had a fake scroll supposedly written by the Virgin’s guardian back in the first century.”

The memory of Carrie’s girlish excitement over that scroll punched a new ache through his chest.

Carrie, Carrie...why couldn’t you have just let them take her?

“Yours was a forgery, a copy of another, but the words were true, as you discovered.”

“Any idea who wrote it?”

“I did.”

Dan stared at him. “You must know your first century, Mr. Kesev. That was a pretty convincing scroll. Where’d you learn all that?”

Kesev shrugged. “From life.”

“You mean from the guardians before you, passing it down. Who are these guardians anyway? Members of some sect?”

“No. Only one guardian.”

This conversation was getting strange.

“You mean just one at a time...one guardian from each successive generation, right?”

Kesev shook his head. “No. Just one guardian. Ever. From the beginning. Me.”

“But that would make you a couple of thousand...”

Kesev nodded slowly, but he wasn’t smiling.

“No...no, that would be—”

“Impossible?”

Dan was about to say yes when it occurred to him: Was anything impossible anymore?

And then he heard the rectory’s side door open. He stood and started across the room. Now who was it?

‡

Paraiso

“So this is what all the excitement is about.”

Arthur Crenshaw stared down at the mummified body where it rested before him on the glass coffee table.

Paraiso was empty except for him and Charlie and Emilio. Decker and Molinari had returned to their respective homes directly from the airport. Arthur had sent all the help—domestic as well as nursing—home for the night. The fewer who knew about his “borrowing” of the relic, the better. Beyond the floor-to-ceiling windows of the great room lay the unrelieved gloom of the night and the ocean. No starlight broke through the restless mantle of cloud that stretched above the Pacific like a shroud. The only sounds were Charlie’s labored breathing and the swoosh of the wind against the glass.

He walked around the table, examining the body from all sides. Not very impressive. Hardly lifelike at all. You could tell it was someone old and female, but that was about all. Could this be the actual remains of the Virgin Mary? Didn’t seem possible. All right, possible, yes, but highly improbable. You’d think there’d be some sort of glow or aura about it if it was really Mary. So maybe it was just the nicely preserved remains of an early saint.

Whatever it was, could it save Charlie?

Arthur sighed. Apparently it had healed others—many others—back in New York. No reason why it shouldn’t do the same here.

But whatever it did, it had better do it quickly. Charlie was fading away before his eyes. The latest try at a new experimental therapy had failed. Charlie’s CD-4 count was lower than ever. He didn’t have much time. This relic was his last chance at a cure.

But how to go about it?

Charlie was running one of his fevers again, semi-comatose most of the time, and when he was responsive he was delirious—no idea of who he was or where he was or even that he was sick. He couldn’t pray to this object, couldn’t ask it or anyone else for help.

So that left it up to Arthur to do the praying.

Maybe Charlie and the object should be closer. And since it was such a major task to move Charlie’s set-up with its IVs and oxygen tank, Arthur figured the easiest way to get the two together was to move the body.

If Mohammed can’t come to the mountain...

He turned to Emilio. “Let’s move her over by Charlie, table and all.”

Emilio held back a moment. He’d seemed to be keeping his distance from the body. Strange...Arthur had always thought of Emilio as the least superstitious man he’d ever met. When he finally approached, they each took an end of the coffee table and, carrying it like a stretcher, moved the table and its burden around the couch and set it down next to Charlie’s hospital bed.

Arthur then said a prayer, asking the Lord to forgive Charlie for his past and to allow the healing powers in this relic—be it the remains of His earthly mother or some other holy person—to drive the infection from his son’s wasted body so that he might continue his life and have an opportunity to make up for the evil ways of his past.

As he finished the prayer with a heartfelt recital of the “Our Father,” Arthur slipped Charlie’s painfully thin, limp, clammy arm through the guard rail and guided it toward the body on the table. He pressed the back of Charlie’s hand against its dry cheek and held it there.

Arthur wasn’t sure what he’d expected, but he was hoping for more than what he got, which was nothing.

He swallowed his disappointment. He had to keep in mind that there’d been no pyrotechnics associated with the Manhattan healings, so the lack of them here didn’t mean that nothing had happened.

He held Charlie’s hand against the skin for a good fifteen minutes, all the while praying for mercy for his son, then he replaced the arm under the bedsheet.

He noticed Emilio standing off to the side, staring out at the darkness. He seemed preoccupied.

“Well,” Arthur said, “all we can do now is watch and wait.”

Emilio nodded but said nothing.

Arthur shrugged and turned on the TV. He felt as if he were in a vise. The destruction of the churches in the Far East, moving west, the storm in the Pacific, moving east. The Weather Channel said it was still headed for the southern part of the state. Paraiso would get only the fringe winds.

Good. In the morning he’d have some blood drawn on Charlie for a stat CD-4 count. If this relic had done its work, the count would be up and Charlie’s fever would break.

Please, God. Not for me...for Charlie.

He switched to CNN for the latest on the churches and wound up in the middle of a story about the theft of a religious object from a Manhattan church. Film showed close-ups of enraged faces and crowds tipping over police cars and smashing store windows.

Arthur’s stomach lurched and he glanced back at the body on the table next to Charlie’s bed. That was the only object they could be talking about. But why such coverage—on CNN of all places? He hadn’t expected this kind of commotion. He’d have to have Emilio drop it off someplace where it could be “discovered” tomorrow.

And then the screen showed the newswoman at a desk with the face of a young nun superimposed over her shoulder. Arthur leaned forward, straining his ears because what she was saying could not be true. The young nun had been murdered during the theft of the object.

Murdered!

Arthur swiveled in his seat and tried to rise to his feet but his legs wouldn’t support him.

“Emilio?” he gasped. “You didn’t...you couldn’t have...” But the look in Emilio’s eyes told him more than any words could say. “Dear God, Emilio! Dear God!”

‡

Manhattan

As Dan watched, a pale, dark-haired young woman in a long white coat stepped inside the rectory side door.

Dan dropped his drink. His knees buckled and he clutched the back of a chair to keep from falling. He opened his mouth to speak but his voice wasn’t there.

Carrie!

“I have to go to California, Dan,” she said evenly as she entered the front room.

He stumbled forward and threw his arms around her.

“Carrie!” he croaked. “You’re alive! Thank God, you’re—”

She stood stiff and unresponsive in his embrace; her skin was cold against his cheek. Her chill transmitted to him. Spicules of ice formed in his blood as she spoke again.

“No, Dan. I’m not.”

Dan released her and backed away. She was staring at him with her bright blue eyes, but they were her only lively feature; the rest of her face was slack, and her voice...hollow. Not movie-zombie dead and robotic. It had timbre and tone, but something was missing. Emotion. She was like some of the guests at Loaves and Fishes who came in stoned on downers.

An inane question popped out of his reeling mind: “How did you get here?”

“I walked.”

He noticed Kesev had risen and was standing beside him.

“Carrie...” Dan’s mind whirled, refusing to accept what he was seeing. “I...you...the doctors said you were dead.”

She reached forward and took his hand—her touch was so cold. She freed his index finger from the others and pulled the front of her lab coat open. She pressed the tip of Dan’s finger into the small round hole along the inner border of her left breast.

“He killed me, Dan.”

Dan cried out in anguish and revulsion as he tore his hand free. The room dipped and veered to the left, then the right. The Scotch, the concussion, seeing Carrie murdered, getting her back but not getting her back because she wasn’t really back...it was all too much. Unable to stand any longer, he sank to his knees before her.

“Oh, God, Carrie! What is this? What does it mean?”

“I have to go to California, Dan. Please help me get there.”

“Calif—?”

Kesev stepped forward. “Why California? Is that where the Mother is?”

Carrie turned and stared at Kesev as if seeing him for the first time. She took a step backward and something twitched in her expression. Dan tried to decipher it: Surprise? Wonder? Fear?

“You...I know who you are now.”

“The Mother?” Kesev said quickly. “She’s in California now?”

“Yes. I have to be with her.”

“Can you take us to her?”

“I need help. We have to hurry. We have to fly.”

“Yes, yes!” Kesev said excitedly. “We will leave immediately!”

Dan struggled back to his feet. “Now just a damn minute! We’re not going anywhere until I know—”

“The Mother is there!” Kesev’s eyes were bright as he leaned into Dan’s face. “The sister will lead us to her.”

“No! This is crazy! I’ll call the police. Detective Garner—”

As Dan turned to reach for the phone, Kesev grabbed his arm. His fingers cut into him like steel cables.

“She came to us, Father Fitzpatrick. Was sent to us. Not to the police. Us! That means that we are meant to go with her. It is not our place to involve the police. Do you understand what I am saying?”

Dan nodded. He was beginning to understand—at least as much as someone could understand something like this. He realized Kesev had his own agenda here. He wanted the Virgin back. If what he’d said was true, he’d been guarding the Virgin for two thousand years and wasn’t about to quit now. In the presence of Carrie’s reanimated corpse, Dan found that relatively easy to accept.

But who was Kesev?

Carrie was the other mystery. Had she been brought back from death for a purpose, or had her desire to be with the Virgin overcome death itself?

Dan could find little comfort in either alternative.

But it didn’t matter. Carrie was here, asking for his help. Dan would do everything in his power to give her that help.

“All right,” he said. “Let’s call the airlines.”

‡

Jerusalem

A deafening cry goes up as dawnlight strikes first the Dome of the Rock. Jew and Muslim, Israeli and Palestinian rally here for a common purpose: To prevent the destruction of this place so holy to both religions. Prayer rugs among the davening Orthodox, imams among rabbis . . .

And yet the light is unfazed, the process inexorable. After slowly dissolving the Dome, it moves on to the Western Wall, truly a wailing wall now as thousands of voices scream as they watch it melt into the air.

‡

Athens, Greece

The pillars of the Parthenon stand unattended as they disappear at first light . . .

‡

The Vatican, Italy

. . . but not so Saint Peter’s Basilica. The Catholic faithful jam every inch of the square as the Pope leads them in prayer from his window. But to no avail . . . the Basilica dissolves along with every other church in Rome . . .

‡

Paris, France

. . . and then Notre Dame Cathedral and La Sainte-Chapelle which share Île de la Cité . . . gone.

And the blade of dawn moves on . . .

IN THE PACIFIC

30^o N, 122^o W

As its fringe winds begin to brush the coast of southern California, the storm veers sharply north.

Captain Harry Densmore stares bleary eyed through the windshield and adjusts 705’s circular course along the eye wall. They should have been out of fuel long ago, but the needle on the gauge hasn’t budged since they entered the eye. So they keep on flying. They’ve got to keep on flying.

But what are the engines running on?