Faustus Resurrectus (17 page)

“Do we get to go home?” McQuail slurred. “Are we all finished?”

The girl smiled, and the tiniest inkling of discomfort trickled along Tullmo’s spine. “Yeah,” she said, strapping a rag over his eyes. “You’re all finished.”

The Jogger clamped manacles on their ankles and wrists, hooked them all together and led them from their cells. “Go on, now,” the black man chided.

Tullmo went first, shuffling ahead of the others along an endless path of uneven, puddled concrete and noxious jets of steam. People passed them going in the same direction, making the way smellier and occasionally tight. Claustrophobia swirled eddies in the blindfold’s darkness. He distracted himself by wondering again why they’d been held and where. Everyone they’d had contact with had spoken English, although usually poorly and sometimes incoherently. All of the magazines had been American, although strangely none more recent than fifteen years, eight months and four days earlier.

“This way,” the girl’s voice directed him.

A hand pushed the top of his head down and he was told to step over what felt like a raised doorway. Tullmo stumbled once, and heard the others as well. Wherever they’d been brought he felt heat; dozens of candles burned nearby. He could smell them, and feel burning wax grease the inside of his nostrils with each breath. The sensation nauseated him and he swallowed vomit. Its scotchy flavor triggered something, and suddenly he saw the connection between the Macallan and the fifteen years, eight months and four days. Adrenaline surged through him. “Get out! Everyone!” He swung his manacled arms wildly. “We’re not being freed! We’re being—”

Something enormous slammed into the back of his head, and he staggered to his knees. Dazed, he was unable to offer any resistance as he was shackled facedown to what felt like a large wooden “X.”

“Him first,” a familiar voice said from behind.

Rough fingers yanked his blindfold off. They’d come to an enormous chamber of stone walls and pillars out of a medieval cathedral. Rich fabrics draped the walls, weighing down the claustrophobic atmosphere with dark colors and sinister designs. Dozens and dozens of tall white candles, their waxy smoke cloying the steam-pipe humidity, lit the space. They began in two straight lines from beyond the furthest pillar and curved in a spiral, ending in a circular drawing on the floor. The circle was drawn in red paint on the gray cement floor and divided into twelve sections, each inscribed with a different symbol. Tullmo, whose wife read her horoscope every morning, recognized them as the signs of the zodiac. Next to each symbol was a black velvet-wrapped bundle, every one a different size and shape. On sawhorses in the center of the circle lay a nine-foot cross made of dark, glistening wood; a half-melted purple candle burned at each end of the two beams. At the junction of the two beams sat a leather-bound book.

To his right, Bruised Plum and the fat blonde girl adjusted instruments. Bruised Plum wielded a guitar while the blonde girl tooled with a drum machine and rickety keyboard.
Music?
To his left stood three wooden “X”s identical to the one on which he was bound. Lopter, McQuail and Czerki were also strapped facedown, arms and legs spread wide. Tullmo watched as they struggled to see what was going on around the room; they, too, had recognized the voice.

Neil Valdes stood before him.

“Fifteen years, eight months and four days; it’s how long you were in jail.” Tullmo blinked as his eyes adjusted. “We gave you the scotch when you came to see us last March.”

Valdes nodded, and his people removed the blindfolds from the other three men. He took out a cigarette. “You remembered.”

“Neil?” Lopter chuckled drunkenly. “Is it really you?”

“What the fuck is going on?” Czerki sneered. His eyes were bleary, unfocused. “Fuckin’ wacko.”

“Neil, I’m sorry!” McQuail whimpered, spit flying in tiny white dots. “Honest to God, I’m sorry, for everything we did to you!
They
said we had to sacrifice you!”

“‘Sacrifice.’” Valdes circled them, examining each in turn, taking in their expressions and demeanors before moving along to the next. “Interesting word choice, Doug.”

Tullmo examined him in return. He looked better than the previous March, when he’d come to the CYA offices. Confidence missing then now cast him with glacial control. Silhouetted by the candles, his sweat was melting ice. He wore a black suit with a white collared shirt. In place of a tie, an amulet hung on a chain around his neck. Strange and malevolent, its design came from the same philosophical school as those on the walls. Tullmo swallowed hard but held his upper lip stiff. “Have you gone insane, Neil?”

“From
your
perspective?” The smile never rose above Valdes’s teeth. “I think it’s fairly obvious.”

The other three lolled in the throes of drunkenness, but Tullmo grew more frightened. “What are you trying to accomplish?”

“The larger picture doesn’t concern you.” The orange tip of his cigarette danced in the shadowy space around him as he gestured. “Your role, the role for all four of you, is at the beginning of the ritual.”

“Ritual?”

“Beginning?” Lopter glanced up, dimly aware of his situation but still cheerful. “I thought Cutie with the lipstick said we were finished. She did a good job, by the way. You ought to think about promoting her.”

“You
are
mad…” Tullmo whispered.

A flush reddened Valdes’s face and he opened his mouth to answer. Still looking at Tullmo, he spoke to Lopter. “A promotion? Maybe you’re right, Joe. A promotion is what you give someone who does outstanding work, isn’t it? Or maybe you throw them to the Justice Department when all they want to do is build the organization into something great?”

“That was over fifteen years ago. Does whatever happened justify kidnapping the four of us?”

“‘Whatever happened’? You can’t acknowledge, even now—” Valdes caught himself. “Of course it does. Kidnapping the four of you will get me what I want.”

“And what’s that? Your job back? Is that what this is geared towards, to intimidate us into rehiring you?” Tullmo searched desperately for a way to get through. “It’s beyond that, Neil. Whatever revelations you’ve had, you have to know none of us live in a vacuum. You have to understand there was, and still is, no way you can return to the life you had.”

“No?” Something flickered in Valdes’ eyes. “You’re half right. This,” he gestured around them, “isn’t about returning to my old life. Not immediately, anyway.
This
is about getting knowledge.”

“What kind of knowledge,” Tullmo flopped his hands, “requires all this to obtain?”

Valdes took another hit from his cigarette, long and slow. “
Different
knowledge.”

Like a curtain, the darkness parted. The giant emerged, his misshapen face full of anticipation. He carried a cheap metal TV tray, atop of which sat a wooden crate. Tullmo was startled by a sudden mental image of long ago, of his son carrying a present to give him on Christmas morning. In the crate were a bullwhip, a box of coarse kosher salt, knives of various lengths, and a short poker in a small hibachi grill. Glowing red coals filled the hibachi, heating the poker’s tip to match their color.

“You have no idea how…flexible reality is, none of you. No idea how many other paths there are besides the narrow, linear one on which you’ve lived your lives—the one from which you pushed me. When my life was at a dead end, I was afforded the opportunity to experience that flexibility and I embraced it. And what do you know—the more flexibly I behaved, the further I got. It took the best years of my life, dripping away in prison like water torture, and suffering for your sins, to put me on my true path.” A chuckle slashed his mouth. “Maybe I should thank you.”

“Neil, this is insane!” Tullmo protested. “You can’t
still
be mad at us?”

“I
started
with anger.” He selected the bullwhip from the box. It unrolled to his feet like a list of accusations. “I nursed it for fifteen years, eight months and four days. After I came to see you in March, after you dusted me off like a piece of dandruff on your Hugo Boss suits, I let that anger free. You took my loyalty and my hard work and you
pissed
on it. What did you think, that you could just get away with it? That you could just wash your hands of
me
? I’m
Cornelius Valdes
!” With a powerful swipe he tore the back of Tullmo’s shirt away. The gallery held its collective breath. “I started with anger, Paolo. But I’m not
finished
with it.”

“No, you’ve got it wrong, Neil.” Tullmo’s voice rose. “Please. I—I’m sorry. Please don’t hurt me. I’m sorry about everything. I’ll make it up to you! You can come back to the foundation! Neil, please don’t hurt me! I’m sorry, Neil! I’m sorry!”

“No you aren’t.” Valdes leaned in, his voice rough and guttural. “But you will be.”

He brought the whip up and lashed a thick, ragged red line into Tullmo’s pasty white skin. Tullmo screamed. The high, falsetto sound energized Valdes. A reddish tinge welled from the edges of his vision, loosening his grip on his rage and his sanity. Tullmo struggled, screaming, against his bonds but the whip cracked over and over, peeling flesh first in tiny bits then larger pieces as the skin loosened and the blood greased its separation from the back muscles. Every stroke fanned Valdes’s fury. His efforts bent him forward, like an Orthodox rabbi using his entire body to pray. He whipped Tullmo until his muscles screamed for relief. Tullmo shrieked and begged. Valdes ignored him.

“Fucking murderer!” Czerki shouted.

“Not murder.” Valdes panted from his exertion. He returned to the TV tray and grabbed the poker, whose end sizzled when he yanked it from the coals. “Ritual killing.”

The blood of Lopter and Czerki and McQuail splattered everywhere as he vented his rage on each of them. Energy crackled through the air, and in flashes of lucidity among the anger Valdes understood why the book had been so adamant about conserving emotion. The force he was releasing drove him to astounding heights of cruelty. Every scream that thickened the air heralded something infinitely more terrifying but he didn’t care. This was his vengeance. This was his judgment.

As he worked, Coeus moved around the circle, taking each velvet-wrapped bundle and driving a long copper nail through it, securing it to the cross. When he finished nailing the final bundle to the cross he grunted again. Valdes paused, breathing great gulps of stench and the terror as the giant broke McQuail free and brought him to the final spot. Valdes took the dagger, now tacky with congealed gore, and slashed it across the weeping man’s throat. McQuail’s final gasp became a gurgle as air bubbled out of his exposed windpipe. Valdes dropped the lifeless body to the ground.

“See you all…soon.”

The words were barely out of his mouth when something changed in the atmosphere. Multi-hued charges began to arc out of the cross. The candle flames absorbed them and grew higher, stakes impaling the souls of the murder victims. Valdes reached across the bundles and lifted the book. He flipped past the passages he’d read until he came to the end, to the blank pages that comprised the last section. With the blood soaking into his hands and the book’s cover, Valdes watched words rise into view. These were the final incantations of the
resurrectus maledicat
, and they slowly emerged from the blank whiteness like new mountain ranges pushing through the earth’s crust. His eyes widened in triumph.

“‘These Paschal candles, pure symbols of Christian resurrection, serve our dark needs! Let them light the path from the other side! The candles draw and hold the life force here! Let them be as mother’s milk, to suckle and strengthen! We have satiated the bloodlust! We have satisfied the pacts and upheld the bargains! We care nothing for the good and shun the righteous! The Infernal have demanded and we have provided! These are the bodies! This is their blood! You
must
accede our wishes!”

Wind from the astral plane swirled like a tornado from the circle’s center. Valdes could feel something straining to break through. Holding the book in one hand, he unlooped the chain from around his neck with the other. The wind blew harder, swirling dust devils and smoke around the stone pillars. Valdes held the amulet above his head like a priest offering a host for consecration.

“Do
not
forgive us—”

He hammered his amulet into the top of the cross. A white bolt flashed and the metal sank halfway into the wood. Energy foamed the air with pops and sizzles. Astral winds blew harder; somehow the candles all remained lit. Valdes pressed the side of his amulet and a wicked little blade popped out. He regarded it, then his palm.

“—we
know
what we do!”

He slammed his hand down on the blade.

Pain burst stars behind his eyes and his knees buckled. He wrenched his hand in a counterclockwise motion, like he was opening a door. An ivory flame exploded upwards. Valdes reached his free hand up and into it. The flame became energy and flowed down his arm, through him, over the cross and into the twelve bundles. They began to glow. The wind spun counterclockwise around the room, building momentum as it narrowed around the circle. Dark magic tore the souls apart as the whirlpool plunged deep. Valdes shouted the name and suddenly the vortex reversed. A backlash of psychic energy blew him out of the circle. The wind abruptly died and the silence shocked his ears. The candles went out in rapid succession, a pair at a time, spiraling all the way to the inner circle. The red candles on the cross flared. Valdes watched until the brightness forced him to shield his eyes.

And then, it was gone.

Valdes got slowly to his feet, feeling a chill despite the stifling heat. He rubbed spots from his eyes and searched for Coeus. The giant crawled to his feet.

They both looked to the circle’s center.

The cross and the bundles had vanished. In their place lay the crumpled figure of a man. Slowly he sat up.

“The mightiest sorcerer of medieval Europe,” Valdes said. “The magician who could do anything. The necromancer whose power was so dangerous his name was relegated to fiction, an object lesson in a religious morality play.”