He Who Walks in Shadow (21 page)

The worst was over, and the pile of bones began to drop away. But as I was making my way, haste overtook me. I lost my balance and tumbled to the stone floor. A crack rang through the corridor. It was not a broken bone—either my own or one of the many others. It was almost worse; my lantern was shattered.

Nassim cursed in a language I didn’t understand, but I joined him in the sentiment.

“You two stay close,” Nassim said. “And be careful. The darkness is thick here already.”

And he was right. With only two lanterns, it seemed that the shadows had become living beings that might swallow us whole. As we walked, it only worsened. I was beginning to suspect we might wander forever when Nassim came to a dead stop. Before I could ask why, he turned to us and put a finger to his lips. He leaned forward and whispered in my ear.

“I smell freshly turned earth.”

He turned off his lantern. Then he gestured for us to do likewise. In Guillaume’s eyes, I saw the same fear that was surely reflected in my own. That narrow beam of light was a life-preserver for my sanity. To imagine it shuttered was almost too much to bear. Nassim gestured again, and Guillaume hit the switch.

I have been in the dark places of the world before, and I have heard tales of men plunged into a Stygian night just as black as that which descended down upon us. But I had never experienced it myself. Never experienced the utter madness of the abyss. Not until then. I nearly screamed when I felt a hand on my own, and I prayed to the God above that it was Nassim.

He pulled us gently ahead, and I could feel rather than see Guillaume moving beside me. We tried to stay silent, even as we stumbled awkwardly forward. It was obvious, of course, that he wanted to make sure our lanterns didn’t give us away to whoever was ahead. Still, I hated every moment of it. So when his light flashed on once again, it was like a thunderclap.

We were standing in a vaulted chamber. A dozen open holes were before us, the dirt having been recently turned. Tools, shovels, other equipment lay around the room, abandoned.

“It appears your speculations were correct,” Nassim said. “Someone was digging for lost treasure.”

Guillaume reached down and picked up a shovel. “And whoever it was left quickly. Wait, look at this?”

He held up an object that glimmered in the light of Nassim’s lantern. It was a shell-casing. The light from my lantern glinted off a dozen more spread around the room. And then patches of earth, darker than the rest.

“Looks like whoever it was didn’t go down without a fight.”

“The Germans?”

“Actually, we were just about to ask you the same thing.”

A half-dozen or more lanterns illuminated at once, and even before the blinding flash had cleared I had drawn my pistol, with Nassim and Guillaume doing the same. The sight of our weapons only made the grin on Zann’s face grow wider. He gestured to the men who stood beside him, every one of whom was holding a sub-machine gun.

“I think, Herr Professor Weston, that you are outnumbered and out-gunned.”

I pointed my pistol in his direction. “It only takes one, Dr. Zann.”

“Yes, yes,” he said, with a wave of his hand as if to dismiss it. “I suppose that is correct.” Zann sauntered around the room, and we might well have been at an evening soiree, albeit one with guns trained on every participant. “But you would die, of course. And then what? What of your quest? Who would save the world, my dear Carter, if you were no longer around?”

“I suppose that means we are at a standstill.”

Even that was a stretch. The Germans with Zann—military men dressed in suits that didn’t fit them and did little to hide their true intent—were better trained and better armed. They would cut us down in a moment.

“It’s a pity, really,” said Zann. “All your knowledge, all your experience. Wiped away, and for what? Just think what we could accomplish together.”

It was an exultation I had heard from him time and again. I found it no more convincing here, beneath the streets of Paris, than I had beneath the streets of Berlin.

“Does that mean you aren’t surrendering?”

He barked out a laugh. “No, not quite. Just think, Carter,” and his voice took on a feverish tone, a desperation that did not befit him nor his position. “Together we could find the staff. And the stone. We could bring this threat to our world to heel. We could both have what we want.”

“So I take it that means you haven’t found it then?”

“No, not yet. But we will. Do you think you can say the same? Look at yourself, Carter. You, a student, and your Negro. What were you planning on doing? Where were you going to dig? What if the members of the cult had still been here? My companions and I are civilized men. You are fortunate we found you first. But that’s always been your way, hasn’t it, Dr. Weston? Throwing yourself headlong into things? Without a thought or a plan? Without any idea what you will do when the moment of crisis comes.”

“It’s always worked before,” I said.

Zann grinned. It was like a wolf showing his fangs.

“But it seems your luck is changing, doesn’t it? It wasn’t with you that day in Siberia. And it is not with you now.”

He reached behind him, and one of the soldiers handed him a book. But not any book.
The
book.

“I suppose I should make it a habit of never letting this leave my sight,” he said, “lest someone take it from me.”

He stepped forward, flipping through page after page. I considered shooting him dead then. If nothing else, it would conclude his part in this sad story. But I knew to do so would end only in tragedy. Another would simply take the book, and no one would be there to stop him from doing whatever foul deeds it desired of him.

“Since you left me so unceremoniously before,” he began, rubbing his hand across the back of his head, “and with a nasty bump I might add.” He gestured toward Guillaume. “Was that your doing, young man?” Guillaume said nothing. “Pity, too. You were quite the student. In any event, I have been studying your old book, and I have learned quite a few things, things that I suppose I knew before and yet still did not quite understand. And one of those things is the power of sacrifice.”

My face dropped, and Zann seized upon the expression. “Oh, yes,” he said. “I know you are quite experienced in that area.”

He gestured at the same soldier who had bought him the tome. But this time the young man returned with something very different.

She cried out as he dragged her into the chamber, even though her hands were bound and her mouth gagged. She had been weeping, as I suppose anyone would. For the briefest of moments, my heart sank into my stomach; I had thought it was Rachel. But no, she was someone else’s daughter.

“My God, Zann…”

The darkness seemed to ebb and flow like the roiling sea.

“There is more than one god, Dr. Weston. You know that. Not all of them care for your sense of morality, but there is one thing they do have in common. They all demand sacrifice, and there can be no sacrifice, no power, without the shedding of blood.”

We should have acted then. We should have done something. But we were frozen in place, as if the wisps of black smoke that had begun to coil around us were iron chains.

Zann opened the book, and the
Incendium Maleficarum
seemed to whisper to us all. In one hand he held the devil tome; in another, a knife. Words poured from his lips—German of course, for the book always took the language of its master—and the knife glowed with a pale luster.

Lanterns dimmed. I felt weak and sick, and bile rose in my throat. It was as if the blade was draining the energy from the room—including, and perhaps most importantly, the life-force of us all.

The blade went to the girl’s throat. Her eyes went wide. Zann wasted no time. Metal sliced through flesh. Blood arched from an artery, painting the ancient soil and polished granite of the catacomb floor, and the acrid smell and taste of copper filled our nostrils and our throats. It was over as quickly as it began. Zann’s man released her, and she slumped to the dirt, her life pooling in an expanding crimson circle.

“You should have taken my offer, Dr. Weston. There is no limit to what we could have done together. But it does not matter, not in the end. You see, Carter, I don’t need you anymore. The book answers to its master, and that master is me.”

Zann held out his hand, and we could sense the energy pulsating through the room. I felt suddenly empty inside—thin and hollow. But not simply empty.
Emptied.
Like I’d been carved out and poured onto the floor.

The feeling rolled over us like a wave, and then we could see the cause of it. The air shimmered with an alien force. Zann flicked his wrist and a column of hot, putrid air roared by my face. Nassim stumbled backwards as if struck. I started to reach out to him, but when I saw his face, God help me, I recoiled. His eyes rolled into the back of his head. His ebony skin burned away, flaking off his skull like burning paper. It was a blessing when he fell to the ground, dead.

Zann’s cackle shook rocks from the ceiling, and I knew that whatever good had once been left inside of him was gone, whatever soul he had, lost. There was no bringing him back now. Not that it mattered. We would die in that tomb. Whether struck down by bullets or his power, the end game was the same.

“Such a pity. No one will ever find you, Dr. Weston. No one will ever care. You will die, and I will rise.”

Zann held out his hand. My vision blurred. My chest tightened, and I felt as if his fingers were coiled around my heart. What happened next came in the blink of an eye.

The room dimmed. Then there was a flash and the sound of shattering glass, and I was plunged into night. I wondered if this was what death was like. Then I heard Zann’s roar. Only then did I realize that the lights—all the lights—had burst as one.

“Carter!” I heard Guillaume cry. “Run!”

The words had not but left his mouth when the flash of gun fire and the bark of angry rifles filled the chamber. I stumbled backwards, falling on my back as a bullet nearly clipped my scalp, slamming into the wall and raining broken granite and choking dust upon me. I couldn’t see. I couldn’t hear. Where Guillaume had gone, I didn’t know. I rolled onto my stomach, firing my pistol wildly in the direction of a muzzle flash. A pained scream told me my aim was true. Using the shots that answered back as my only illumination, I crawled in the direction of the archway that marked the chamber’s exit, daring to stand and run only when I reached it. I was followed out by Zann’s mad cries.

“You’ll die down here, Carter! You’ll never find your way out of the dark!”

Of course, I knew he was right. But that was a concern for the near future, not the immediate one. I stumbled into the darkness, driven by fear and horror and the same thing that spurs all men to desperate action—a fool’s chance at survival.

I ran until I’d made so many twists and turns that I no longer believed that Zann still pursued, if he ever had at all. That’s when the darkness truly closed in on me. Thick and eternal, in those endless passages that never would see the light of the sun, not even a thousand millennia after mankind had passed from the earth. I thought of the man Nassim had told us of, the one who had gotten lost in these same catacombs, who had shambled through the night until madness and hunger and thirst took him.

I stumbled upon the mound of bones we had passed hours before. If the passage through the moldering remains of those long dead had been unpleasant before, it was a nightmare now. I crawled through the skulls and mandibles and femurs, made somehow more horrifying because I could not see them. But at least there was reason for hope. If I had come upon the bones, then perhaps I might still find a way out.

That hope was soon dashed, for there simply were no other landmarks to guide me. I clung to the wall, creeping forward, even in my desperation wondering what had become of Guillaume. Was he already dead? Or was he, like me, cursed to a slow demise in this unlit tomb? But still I struggled on. There was nothing else to be done.

It seemed that I wandered for hours, but in truth, it may have been no more than a handful of minutes. In that titanic shade, I could imagine eternity. Then there was a moment when I wondered if I had truly gone mad. In the distance, I thought I saw a shimmer, a flash of light. I ran towards it, and if it were a demon of the pit waiting to devour me, so be it.

It was no mirage. The light grew brighter, clearer. I ran as hard as my tired legs could carry me. I heard voices that seemed to call me. I fell forward, bathed in, and blinded by, light. My vision cleared, and I was staring into the barrel of a gun held by a man, tall and yet elegantly built, a thick mustache defining his face and a bowler hat sitting on his head. Another man held Guillaume, his arms bound tightly behind his back. At least he was alive. The man who held the gun looked down at me and smiled. In thickly accented and yet impeccable English, he said, “Ah my friend, it appears God has answered your prayers. You will have plenty of time to thank him in prison.”

Journal of Carter Weston

July 27, 1933

Once again, we are on the move, headed north by train to Normandy. I write today with an officer of the law seated across from me. The circumstances by which he came to be here and those surrounding our departure from Paris—like so much of this journey—are worth recording for posterity.

The gendarmes who took us into custody in the catacombs were, in fact, inspectors with the La Sûreté Nationale. As always it seems, we went from the pan to the fire.

For a long while we waited underground as they debated whether to delve deeper into the tunnels to seek what they assumed were our compatriots and collaborators. My pleas and protestations of a German infiltration fell on ears that, while not deaf, certainly were unwilling to hear. When I mentioned the infernal power that Zann possessed, well, I lost whatever credibility I might have retained.

Finally the man with the mustache, the one who was obviously in charge, walked over to where Guillaume and I sat and squatted in front of us. He removed a silver case from his pocket and cracked it open. He pulled out a cigarette, offering the two of us one as well. He shrugged his shoulders when we declined, snapping the case shut. He lit the cigarette, breathed deeply, and blew a column of smoke towards the cavern ceiling. The process seemed to go on forever.