He pushed through the swing door at the rear of the church. Carter McBride was laid out on a pew at the front, draped in a blanket. Someone had lit one of the altar candles.
A dainty red star flickered a metre over the body.
All Horst’s anguish returned in a deluge that threatened to extinguish his sanity. He bit his trembling lower lip.
If God the Holy Trinity exists, said the waster sect Satanists, then, ipso facto, the Dark One is also real. For Jesus was tempted by Satan, both have touched the Earth, both will return.
Now Horst Elwes looked at the speck of red light and felt the dry weight of aeons press in on his mind again. To have the existence of supernatural divinity proven like this was a hideous travesty. Men were supposed to come to faith, not have it forced upon them.
He dropped to one knee as if pushed down by a giant irresistible hand. “O my Lord, forgive me. Forgive me my weakness. I beg Thee.”
The star slid through the air towards him. It didn’t seem to cast any light on the pews or floor.
“What are you? What have you come here for? The boy’s soul? Did Quinn Dexter summon you for that? How I pity you. That boy was pure in mind no matter what they did to him, no matter what they made him say. Our Lord would not reject him because of your acolytes’ inhumanity. Carter will be welcomed into heaven by Gabriel himself.”
The star stopped two metres short of Horst.
“Out,” Horst said. He stood, the strength of recklessness infusing his limbs. “Get ye gone from this place. You have failed. Doubly you have failed.” His face split in a slow grin, a drop of spittle running down his beard. “This old sinner has taken heart again from your presence. And this place you desecrate is holy ground. Now out!” He thrust a rigid forefinger at the gloaming-soaked jungle beyond the door. “Out!”
Footsteps thudded on the steps outside the church, the swing door banged open. “Father!” Jay yelled at the top of her voice.
Small, thin arms hugged his waist with a strength a full-grown man would be hard put to match. He instinctively cradled her, hands smoothing her knotted white-blonde hair.
“Oh, Father,” she sobbed. “It was horrible, they killed Sango. They shot him. He’s dead. Sango’s dead.”
“Who did? Who shot him?”
“Quinn. The Ivets.” Her face tilted up to look at him. The skin was blotchy from crying. “She made me hide. They were very close.”
“You’ve seen Quinn Dexter?”
“Yes. He shot Sango. I hate him!”
“When was this?”
“Just now.”
“Here? In the village?”
“No. We were on the track to the homesteads, about half a kilometre.”
“Who was with you?”
Jay sniffled, screwing a fist into her eye. “I don’t know her name. She was a black lady. She just came out of the jungle in a funny suit. She said I must be careful because the Ivets were very near. I was frightened. We hid from them behind some bushes. And then Sango came down the track.” Her chin began to tremble. “He’s dead, Father.”
“Where is this woman now?”
“Gone. She walked back to the village with me, then left.”
More puzzled than worried, Horst tried to calm his whirling thoughts.
“What was funny about her suit?”
“It was like a piece of jungle, you couldn’t see her.”
“A marshal?” he said under his breath. That didn’t make any sense at all.
Then he abruptly realized something missing from her story. He took hold of her shoulders, staring down at her intently. “Was Mr Manani riding Sango when Quinn shot him?”
“Yes.”
“Is he dead?”
“No. He was shouting cos he was hurt. Then the Ivets carried him away.”
“Oh, dear Lord. Was that where the woman was going, back to help Mr Manani?”
Jay’s face radiated misery. “Don’t think so. She didn’t say anything, she just vanished as soon as we reached the fields around the village.”
Horst turned to the demon sprite. But it had gone. He started to hustle Jay out of the church. “You are to go straight home to your mother, and I mean straight home. Tell her what you told me, and tell her to get the other villagers organized. They must be warned that the Ivets are near.”
Jay nodded, her eyes round and immensely serious.
Horst glanced about the clearing. Night had almost fallen, the trees seemed much nearer, much larger in the dark. He shivered.
“What are you going to do, Father?”
“Just have a look, that’s all. Now go on with you.” He gave her a gentle push in the direction of Ruth’s cabin. “Home.”
She scampered off between the rows of cabins, long, slender legs flying in a shaky gait that looked as though she was perpetually about to lose her balance. Then Horst was all by himself. He gave the jungle a grim glance, and set off towards the gap in the trees where the track to the savannah homesteads started.
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Quinn looked down at Powel Manani. The naked supervisor had regained consciousness again now they had finished lashing his badly crushed legs to the mayope’s trunk. His head hung a few centimetres from the ground; cheeks puffed out from all the fluid that was building up in the facial tissue. They had spread his arms wide, tying his hands to small stakes in the ground. The inverted cross.
Powel Manani moaned dazedly.
Quinn held out his hands for silence. “The Night grows strong. Welcome to our world, Powel.”
“Dickhead,” Powel grunted.
Quinn flicked on a pocket-sized thermal inducer, and pressed it against Powel’s broken shin. He groaned, and jerked about feebly.
“Why did you do it, Powel? Why did you drown Leslie and Tony? Why did you kill Kay? Why did you send Vorix after Douglas?”
“And the others,” Powel wheezed. “Don’t forget them.”
Quinn stiffened. “Others?”
“You’re all that’s left, Quinn. And tomorrow there won’t even be you.”
The thermal inducer was applied to his leg again.
“Why?” Quinn asked.
“Carter McBride. Why do you think? You’re fucking animals, all of you. Just animals. No human could do that to another. He was ten years old!”
Quinn frowned, turning off the thermal inducer. “What happened to Carter McBride?”
“This! You dickhead. You strung him up, you and your Light
Brother bastards. You split him in half!”
“Quinn?” Jackson Gael asked uncertainly.
Quinn gestured him quiet with a wave. “We never touched Carter. How could we? We were out at the Skibbow homestead.”
Powel pulled at the vines holding his hands. “And Gwyn Lawes, and Roger Chadwick, and the Hoffmans? What about them? You got alibis for them, too?”
“Ah, well now I have to admit, you have a point there. But how did you know we followed the Light Brother?”
“Elwes, he told us.”
“Yes, I should have realized a priest would know what was going down. Not that it matters now.” He took his fission blade from his dungarees pocket.
“Quinn,” Jackson said hotly. “This is weird, man. Who snuffed out Carter if we didn’t?”
Quinn held the blade up in front of his face, regarding it in a virtual trance. “What happened after Carter was found?”
“What do you mean?” Jackson yelled. “What are you talking about? Shit, Quinn, snap out of it, man. We’re gonna die if we don’t move.”
“That’s right. We’re gonna die. We’ve been set up.” The blade came alive, radiating a spectral yellow light that gave his face a phosphene hue. He smiled.
Jackson Gael felt a deadly frost settle around his heart. He hadn’t realized how insane Quinn was before this; nutty, sure, a psycho streak thrown in. But this—God’s Brother, Quinn was actually enjoying himself, he believed he was the Night’s disciple.
The other Ivets were giving each other very edgy glances.
Quinn didn’t notice. He leaned closer to Powel Manani. The supervisor sagged, giving up the struggle.
“We are the princes of the Night,” Quinn intoned.
“We are the princes of the Night,” the Ivets chanted with numb obedience.
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The Ly-cilph moved its identity focus between Quinn Dexter and Powel Manani, extending its perception field around all the people in the cramped jungle clearing. It couldn’t quite read individual thoughts, not yet, the complexity of human synaptic discharges would take some time to unravel and catalogue, but their brains’ emotional content was plain enough.
The emotional polarity between Quinn Dexter and Powel Manani was enormous; one triumphant and elated, life loving; the other defeated and withdrawn, willing death to come quickly. It mirrored their religious traits, the diametric opposition.
Right out on the fringe of awareness, the Ly-cilph could detect a minute transmission of energy from Powel Manani into Quinn Dexter. It came from the basic energistic force which pervaded every living cell. This kind of transference was extraordinarily rare in corporeal entities. And Quinn Dexter seemed to be aware of it at some fundamental level, he possessed an energistic sense far superior to that of the priest. To Quinn Dexter the black mass sacrifices were a lot more than an empty ritual of worship, they generated a weighty expectation in his mind, confirming his belief. The Ly-cilph watched the sensation growing inside him, and waited with every perceptive faculty extended eagerly to record the phenomenon.
“When the false lord leads his legions away into oblivion, we will be here,” Quinn said.
“We will be here,” the Ivets repeated.
“When You bring light into the darkness, we will be here.”
“We will be here.”
“When time ends, and space collapses into itself, we will be here.”
“We will be here.”
Quinn reached out with the fission blade. He pushed the tip into Powel Manani’s groin, just above the root of his penis. Skin sizzled as the blade sank in, pubic hair singed and shrivelled. Powel clenched his teeth, neck muscles bulging out like ropes as he struggled against the scream. Quinn began to saw the blade down through the supervisor’s abdomen.
“This is our sacrament to You, Lord,” Quinn said. “We have freed our serpents, we are the beast we were made. We are real. Accept this life as a token of our love and devotion.” The knife reached Powel’s navel, ribbons of blood were pouring out of the wound. Quinn watched the scarlet liquid mat the man’s thick body hair, experiencing a fierce delight.
“Give us Your strength, Lord, help us defeat Your enemies.” The dark joy of the serpent beast had never been so good before; he felt intoxicated.
Every cell in his body vibrated with euphoria. “Show us, Lord!” he cried.
“Speak to us!”
Powel Manani was dying. The Ly-cilph observed the swirl of energistic patterns raging throughout his body. A small discharge crackled into Quinn, where it was hungrily absorbed, raising the Ivet’s mental rapture to greater heights. The remainder of Powel’s life energy dwindled, but its dissipation wasn’t entirely entropic, a minute fraction flowed away through some kind of arcane dimensional twist. The Ly-cilph was fascinated, this ceremony was releasing an incredible wealth of knowledge; it had never attuned itself to an entity’s death so pervasively before in all its terrible length of being.
It inserted itself into the energy flow from Manani’s cells, tracing it between the neat folds of quantum reality, and finding itself emerging in a continuum it had no prior conception of: an energistic vacuum. A void as daunting to it as space was to a naked human. Retaining cohesion in such an environment was inordinately difficult, it had to contract its density to prevent flares of self-energy from streaming away like cometary volatiles. Once it had stabilized its internal structure, the Ly-cilph opened its perception field wide. It wasn’t alone.
Ill-focused swirls of information raced through this foreign void, similar in nature to the Ly-cilph’s own memory facility. They were separate entities, it was sure, though they continually mingled themselves, interpenetrating then diverging. The Ly-cilph observed the alien mentalities cluster around the boundary zone of its identity focus.
Delicate wisps of radiation stroked it, bringing a multitude of impossibly jumbled images. It assembled a standardized identity and interpretation message and broadcast it on the same radiation bands they were using. Horrifyingly, instead of responding, the aliens penetrated its boundary.
The Ly-cilph fought to retain its fundamental integrity as its thought routines were violated and subsumed by the incursive alien mentalities.
But there were too many of them to block. It started to lose control of its functions; the perception field contracted, access to the vast repository of stored knowledge began to falter, it was unable to move.
They began to alter its internal energy structure, opening a wide channel between their empty continuum and spacetime. Patterns started to surge back through the dimensional twist, strands of raw memory using the Ly-cilph as a conduit, seeking a specific physical matrix in which they could operate.
It was a monstrous usurpation, one which contravened the Ly-cilph’s most intrinsic nature. The alien mentalities were forcing it to participate in the flux of events which ordered the universe, to interfere. There was only one option left. It stored itself. Thought processes and immediate memory were loaded into the macro-data lattice. The active functions ceased to exist.
The Ly-cilph would hang in stasis between the two variant continua until it was discovered and re-animated by one of its own kind. The chance of that discovery before the universe ended was infinitesimal, but time was of no consequence to a Ly-cilph. It had done all it could.
Thirty metres away from the Ivets and Powel Manani, Horst Elwes crept through the undergrowth, drawn by the low chanting voices. The trail of broken vines and torn leaves leading away from the dead horse had been absurdly easy to follow even in the last flickers of fading sunlight. It was as though Quinn didn’t care who found them.
Night had fallen with bewildering
suddenness after Horst left the track, and the jungle had constricted ominously around him. Blackness assumed the quality of a thin liquid. He was drowning in it.
Then he heard the grating voices, the truculent incantation. The voices of frightened people.
A spark of yellow light bobbed between the trees ahead of him. He pressed himself against a big qualtook trunk, and peered round. Quinn sank the fission blade into Powel Manani’s prostrate body.
Horst gasped, and crossed himself. “Lord, receive Your son—”
The demon sprite flared like a miniature nova between Quinn and Powel, turning the jungle to a lurid crimson all around. It was pulsing in a mockery of organic life. Incandescent webs of vermilion light crawled over Quinn like icy flames.
Horst clung to the tree, beyond both terror and hope. None of the Ivets had even noticed the manifestation. Except for Quinn. Quinn was smiling with orgasmic joy.
When the rapture reached an almost unbearable peak, Quinn heard the voices. They came from inside his head, similar to the fractured whispers which dream chimeras uttered. But these grew louder, entire words rising out of the clamorous babble. He saw light arise before him, a scarlet aureole that cloaked Powel’s body. Right at the heart there was a crevice of absolute darkness.
Quinn stretched out his arms towards the empty tear in space. “My Lord! You are come!”
The multitude of voices came together. “Is the darkness what you crave, Quinn?” they asked in unison.
“Yes, oh yes.”
“We are of the dark, Quinn. Aeons we have spent here, seeking one such as you.”
“I am yours, Lord.”
“Welcome us, Quinn.”
“I do. Bring me the Night, Lord.”
Seething tendrils of spectral two-dimensional lightning burst out of Powel Manani’s corpse with an ear-puncturing screech. They reached directly for Quinn like an avaricious succubus. Jackson Gael staggered backwards yelling in shock, shielding his eyes from the blinding purple-white light. Beside him, Ann clung to a slender tree trunk as though caught in the blast of a hurricane, her hair whipping about, eyes squeezed shut. The flat lightning strands were coiling relentlessly around Quinn. His limbs danced about in spastic reflex. Mad shadows flickered across the little clearing. The stench of burning meat filled the air. Powel’s body was smouldering.