The Bergamese Sect (45 page)

‘
You’re all the same,’ he spat. ‘You control us, abuse us, deceive us and when it suits you, you expect us to be patriots. Well, you can go fuck yourselves!’

Castro could feel beads of sweat forming on his brow. A pain shooting through the deepest, most dormant parts of his brain. It was making his face twist violently.

‘
What happened to you, Mr Castro?’ Walsh asked.

Castro continued to grimace, his eyes closed, his neck arching. ‘You’ve taken my life away. Destroyed everything I have,’ he said in a gruff, strained voice.

A moment went by, holding only the rustle of plastic and the purr of vehicles.

‘
David,’ Walsh said calmly, ‘I don’t know how to convince you. But I can assure you; this has nothing to do with the government. What possible reason could we have for doing this to you?’

‘
You want me to give you the list?’ Castro groaned. He buried his head away again.

‘
Do you really believe those things?’

Castro paused. Slowly, he took his hands away from his head and sighed. He stared across the room into space. ‘No,’ he uttered quietly.

Walsh took a few steps toward the man and crouched in front of him. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘all I can offer you is the truth. Not because I have it, but because I’m going after it. I need you, David, and I think you need me.’

Castro slowly turned to look Walsh wearily in the face. Was this man like all the others? Did he make promises he couldn’t keep? A man would come, hand him a clue, offer him reprieve, and then walk away. But it always made things worse, more complicated, more distant. Never clearer. Like climbing a hill whose summit always turned out to be beyond the next rise.

‘
Can you
really
tell me what happened?’ Castro whispered.

‘
I don’t know,’ Walsh answered. He was looking Castro squarely in the eyes. ‘I’m still searching for the truth myself.’

Castro sniffed, pulled two fingers hard across his eyes, gouging out the salty water.

‘
What did they do to you, Mr Castro?’ Walsh asked.

‘
I don’t know if they
did
anything.’

‘
But something
did
happen to you?’

‘
Yes,’ Castro said weakly. ‘Something terrible.’

Walsh turned and put his back against the wall beside Castro, pushed his legs out before him. ‘Tell me,’ he said.

―
§ ―

It was like one of those smells that jogs the memory. When a whiff of perfume is caught somewhere just fleetingly, suddenly conjuring up something that happened years ago. Something small, insignificant. A recollection the mind didn’t even know was buried in its depths. But now staggering in its detail.

It was like that at first. A sort of fuzzy point in the memory that over time came into focus. The consciousness couldn’t give it form or substance. It was just there, lingering, awaiting the command to materialise. But when it came, it was obvious, part of normality, and yet fearful. Terrible.

He’d felt incomplete for months. Stifled, paranoid even. But at first, the despondency didn’t connect with that expectant haze. Distracted, depressed, unable to communicate, it was as if something monumental were coming for him. As if he were waiting for a revelation to tear down the sky, rent open the heavens and call forth the final apocalypse.

And when it had finally come, the terror of it was unbearable.

It was a sultry night, the curtain lapping in a breeze that tousled his damp hair, sent cold fingers across his hot brow. His skin crept like a thousand hairy caterpillars in a crazed swarm. The tingling grew into tiny bites like sharp shards of glass hurtling through his flesh. He yearned to be free of the writhing, of the choking claustrophobia that hugged him like a snake squeezing the breath from its prey. Tired. Always tired.

The more he rationalised the feelings, the tighter they grew. Like arachnophobia or fear of flying. Unrelenting.

With an uneasy grip, the slumber took him, erasing his senses. Darkness. Darker than he thought the night could get. And Silence. Quieter than the deepest, driest dungeon of the earth. Dim and soundless like the cold vacuum between the stars. But anticipation hovered at the edge of sleep, as if he knew the thing was coming to hound him in the night.

His eyes snapped open. The blackness was thick like quivering mist around him. For a moment, he imagined he was dead. No, not dead! Interred alive. Blind and paralysed in a casket filled with demons, deep beneath the cold earth. The panic throbbed in him like a heart twitching, squirting its last pitiful blood.

Turning, he reached out, groping for the reassuring touch of flesh, but finding only slumbering coldness. A lifeless corpse. It squirmed at his touch. His hand darted around, searching for the body that should be cradled in his arms, should be glowing with the heat of life.

But she was sliding from him, frozen and stiff like a fallen tree in the harshest winter dawn. Leaving him alone to an eternity of grief.

No! Take me!

His throat was open; a shrill cry of anguish shot out. From the dark came an answer, a voice speaking through the haze, hideously fierce. It rebuked him, mocked him.

It promised her a swift and frenzied defilement.

Not that!

The entity revelled in his torment. Then, he sensed its attention drawn away, probing beyond his terror for other victims. Germinating a loathsome threat.

Minds ripe for corruption, defenceless innocents, they rested unaware of the shadow racing to taste them.

He struggled but was immobilized, forced to lie in blackness and witness the horror.

No! Not the little ones!

Hideous sounds erupted around him. Deep like the groans of animals, piercing like the hurtful shrieks of birds.

And the light came exploding, so brilliant it flowed like molasses through the fingers, almost tore the eyes from their sockets. Searing heat that wrenched muscle from bone. His eyes closed as he sank into the blazing nightmare, descending quickly toward oblivion.

Toward the still morning.

After that, it came again most nights, exhausting in its insistence. It made the weary day heavy like a hangover. And each time it came, he saw further into the horror, into the atom of a memory he sensed had created it. Slowly, like autumn leaves burnishing on the branch, a realisation came to him. His subconscious was reaching out to the surface of his thoughts, crying out in warning, demanding attention for an experience obscured by fear. The nightmare was recounting something real. Trying to let him remember.

And then he
did
remember.

A road. Stretching out into the distance like a fault line, straight and stark in the yellow dirt. Empty. Lonely.

He tore through the baking heat of the wide desert plain, buffeting the crispy tufts of grass as he passed. Ahead, clouds spilt over the rim of distant mountains, gathering, conspiring to bring rain to the parched earth. A storm was brewing, pushing the swollen air ahead of it, so that a torrid wind began to blow through the window. The tempest was fast-moving, heading toward him. Soon, the cloud was an enormous blanket of black smoke pressing down on the hills, blocking out the hot sun. A solid wall heavy with moisture.

A flutter of unease wafted through him. And somehow, he knew he was witnessing a prelude. But to what, he couldn’t perceive.

Low on the horizon, an eerie kind of orange light skulked beneath the clouds. Ominous. Electrified. Tongues of lightning arced across the sky, reflecting on the shimmering blacktop.

Suddenly, a jolting, a spluttering. The car coasted for a minute, its dying groan mingling with thunder rolling loudly over the landscape. It crunched onto the stony shoulder.

He tried the engine, but it was lifeless.

Stepping out into the hot gale, watching the tumultuous sky edge closer, he stood alone awaiting the deluge.

Across the plain, a light was shining. It was moving fast toward him, as if trying to outrun the storm. It grew brighter. And brighter. So bright, it seemed it would envelop the entire desert. He squinted as he watched its unrelenting approach, feeling a sudden, inexplicable apprehension.

There was an unearthly noise, a muffled thumping. It seemed to come from the earth beneath his feet. Tiny tornadoes of swirling dust sprang into the air around him, as the noise rumbled deeper, angrier. The hot wind whipped sand over him.

A bee-sting stabbed at his arm. He felt a pain move through him, but only briefly. The world seemed to stop, just for a fraction of a second, like a radio popping with a stray pulse of radiation.

And then the light was gone, and with it the unearthly noise. He stood now in a calm breeze as water streamed from his soaking hair, down to his gaping mouth. Turning, he saw the colossal greyness receding over the horizon, the lightning licking the hazy distance where the road narrowed to a point.

That was where the nightmare had begun. Among the wisps of steam that rose like ghosts from the road as the sun returned. Within the warm breeze that quickly drew the moisture from his face.

The memory had come swiftly, filling the emptiness in his soul with an unholy dread.

He lay in a stifling pit whose furthest recesses held that same darkness from the bowels of the earth. Restrained, he writhed as Hell itself enveloped him. Mumblings, unintelligible and unnerving. The whispering of other tormented creatures. Voices cajoling him, speaking hideous words. And above him, an incandescent talisman burning in diabolic red.

Then the nebulous creatures had come, rushing to their victim, frenzied like starved beasts. They bounded like dancing devils, shrieked like nighthawks. Their forms were repulsive. Translucent, their bodies pulsed with purple veins. Heads bulbous and smooth. Long, pallid faces that glowed a sickly brown like effluent. The eyes so big and lifeless; dead like fish eyes. So dark.

There, in the pit, they desecrated him and danced away into the blackness.

But there were faces there too, unlike the others, faces in raptures at his torment. Eyes that should have shown compassion and regret. Yet showed none.

―
§ ―

‘
I thought I’d had a seizure or something,’ Castro said softly. ‘Out there in that desert. I went to the doctor. They did some tests, a brain scan; found I was perfectly healthy. But I know something had happened. Something interfered with me as I stood watching the storm coming. The light coming. And whatever it was, it came back to haunt me six months later, when my mind allowed me to remember.’

Castro sniffed, rubbed his nose and stared at the sheets billowing in the breeze like sails.

Walsh shuffled on the hard concrete. He wished he could find some words to fill the ugly gaps, to placate Castro’s confession. But it was like awkwardly skirting round a funeral reception, not knowing what to say, how to say it, or whether any words would be welcome at all.

Walsh realised he’d made a mistake. He’d wanted to save the world from a dangerous revelation; a revelation he still couldn’t foresee, but that he’d assumed was worse than the crime it spawned. How wrong he’d been. Castro was dying, but the world was still blissful in its ignorance. Surely, he owed more to Castro than to those seven billion anonymous faces. Faces whose torment hadn’t yet come. But Castro? He deserved peace, if not retribution.

Castro took a deep breath. ‘I’m scared of these memories,’ he said, turning to Walsh, his eyes red. ‘I’m not scared that they’re real. If extra-terrestrials did this, I can cope with that. What scares me more is that these visions
aren’t
real. If they’re a creation of the mind, then there’s no hope for me.’

‘
If they are, there’s ways to exorcise them,’ Walsh said reassuringly.

Castro didn’t respond. ‘At first, I didn’t want to accept what those nightmares were telling me,’ he said. ‘I didn’t want to become the kind of person I despised. The sad, lonely nerds with bedrooms plastered with Mulder and Scully. The rednecks wasted on grandpa’s sour mash crashing their pickups into the creek and claiming they’d swerved to avoid an alien. Or the lunatic fringe, who sit waiting to be next, convinced they’re important enough to be good subjects.’

‘
They’re not all like that, David. You’re proof of that.’

‘
I know, but back then I didn’t know what I know now. I didn’t know this was real, that I wasn’t the only one. I’d convinced myself it was just hysteria, like the others had to be, fuelled by constant tales of abductions on PBS. I tried to rationalise it, tell myself it was all a creation of the mind, although now I realise that’s what scared me the most.’

Castro paused again. ‘I went to see a shrink,’ he admitted. ‘But he was useless. First, he said he could find no psychological reason for the nightmares. Then he suggested I go see an expert in this
particular affliction
, as he put it.’

A dismissive, angry burst of air shot down Castro’s nose. ‘I didn’t want to hear that; a shrink telling me maybe I’d been abducted. So, I threw myself into my work, tried to distract myself. But it didn’t work. I became withdrawn, bad-tempered. I drank a lot, stayed away from home, tried to block it out. My business began to fail. People began to shun me. And then my wife left, saying she’d give me time to overcome my obsession. I guess she thought, probably still thinks, I’ve lost my mind.’

Walsh’s head was spinning with questions. He wanted to know how this lawyer from out west had gotten here. How he’d turned up on the doorstep of the
Tagaste
building, asking questions the men within found so threatening. He wanted to know about the murder Castro had mentioned. If Walsh failed to find Sebastian, at the very least he could pin that on someone. Get some kind of satisfaction out of all of this.

But it would have to wait. He’d secured a vital link in the mystery, material evidence in the investigation. Castro could be the key to Walsh’s survival, just as Sebastian was to Castro’s. But things had moved fast and he’d not had time to consider the implications of the last few hours.