The Lucifer Messiah (31 page)

“Maybe it was a macabre camaraderie, a bizarre attempt to comfort a dying fellow, I don't really know. I tore off my own coat and shirt so that the skin of my torso was visible, and I concentrated. I hadn't let it happen over my entire body before, only little pieces and only for short times, but I think I probably expected to die right there too, so that sort of apprehension didn't hold the same weight as it once had.

“Soon enough, as my dying friend watched, my own skin hardened, turned purple and then cracked and fell away. Just like his had, only much, much faster. When it did, what was left underneath was the same grayish-yellow ooze and vague features that he had.

“Dionysus
is what I think he muttered through his sagging mouth.
I don't know how I missed it. You're one of them. I've heard stories, but I've never seen one before.

”One what?
I asked him. In the moment the irony of
him
being shocked by
me
was lost to the circumstances.
A trickster. You are one, aren't you? You change whenever you wish, not like the rest of us poor, sad souls.

“I don't know what you mean. What rest of you?
I asked him.

“Rest of us,
he corrected me.

“I think I just stared at him, and I let my human form retake my body.

“Oh…you don't know yet, do you?
he said, almost laughing. It was one of the last things he said to me.

“Howie died a short while later. He managed to tell me one last thing, which I didn't really understand at the time.”

“What was that?” Maggie asked.

“That I should go to Russia. That I should follow the call, and find the Keeper.”

“Russia? Why?”

“He didn't have time to say. But somehow, and I can't really say why, I knew I had to go. I felt something pulling me there.

“So I deserted the Army. I spent the next several months trying to get across Eastern Europe, not an easy task in those days, maybe even harder than it is now. Several times I thought about giving up, but I knew I couldn't. If not for Howie, then for something else. He'd sent me on the path, but somehow I think I would have found it on my own eventually. The pull was too strong. I had no choice.”

“None of us did, none of us ever do. Her power is too strong,” Charybdis echoed.

“St. Petersburg was where I ended up, it's Leningrad
now, but it was still
Sankt Petersborg
in 1918. The city in those days was a magnificent place, but it was dangerous too.”

“Indeed,” Charybdis said. “Many years later, I heard a man much more eloquent than I compare Peter's city in those times to a rare gem seized inside a workman's vice. Though its facade gleamed with a sparkle hardly rivaled anywhere else under the sky, he said, the cracks within the jewel were growing, and the pressure was not soon to relent.”

“Very true,” Sean agreed. “To anyone who looked long enough, the signs of collapse were clear enough. But nobody was looking in those days. Not the deposed Romanovs or their foppish retainers, not the seething generals and their dying charges, and certainly not the peasants and their Bolshevik rousers. That, I think, may have been why we were all drawn there, and why the Morrigan chose that place for the most surreal episode of what has surely never been the world's most grounded affair.”

“Morrigan. There's that name again. Who, or
what,
is that?” Maggie demanded.

Charybdis was about to reply, but Sean stopped her with a wave. She wasn't ready for that, not yet.

“In time,” he counseled. “First I need to explain why we were all gathered there. It was for the high festival of our people.”

“Ah, the St. Petersburg feast,” Charybdis mused. “Now that was a time. Days and nights of feasting and ritual. The time truest to the roots of our tradition in centuries.”

“I can't really comment on that, since it was the only one of those grand events that I've yet been privy to, but
I do know this. For all our depravity and excess, and all of our,
peculiar
affectations, from what I can tell, the locals didn't even notice us,” Sean continued. “What an initiation, I can tell you. I still recall the sounds of the city, the chaos. Cannons from the Peter and Paul Fortress booming across the Neva. Gunfire echoing through the Hermitage pavilion, and the cries of starving men and women clamoring for help in the cold. Help that would never come.

“I was drawn to a palace south of Nevsky Prospekt, along a canal that ran near St. Isaac's. Whose abode it was I do not know, but it was fantastic, and it was ours.”

“A noble of Tatar descent, or so I was told,” Charybdis answered. “The Morrigan inhabited his form. She used his position to provide safety for us all, to seclude us from the revolution outside within his giant palace.”

“The actual festivities were held beneath the palace, and that's what I remember most,” Sean said. “When I entered, it was dark, and poorly lit. Steam was rushing from old, broken pipes. There were hundreds of figures, gathering in rows upon a wide floor. Some wore shrouds that covered most of their forms, leaving only grotesque faces of every shape and sort imaginable; as well as some not even dreamt of in the nightmares of the mad.

“Those who were not cloaked paraded about naked, although it was an uncommon nudity, for though most walked on two legs, few bore any more resemblance to ordinary folk than that. Some were formless, their skin no more than a shifting sea of pus and ooze. Others had very distinct features, some bestial, the bastard offspring of reptilian
and mammalian parents.

“Then there were others, who stood out boldly among the deviant throng, though no one paid them any more mind than the scores of stranger celebrants. These were the few who looked entirely and completely human. They were, almost without exception, both young and beautiful.

“Then someone stepped to the fore, it looked like a man at first, but I know now how silly that seems. A weirdly glittering robe was all about her, and very little of her actual body was visible beneath it.

“I think I stared at the shroud for the longest time before I even noticed anything else. The colors of it had a way of mesmerizing you when you watched it, because it seemed like it moved on its own, as though it was alive too. I remember that especially, since there was no wind at all in the place, damp and dank like a sewer or a subway tunnel during a rainstorm. And every time a fold or a flap lifted or bent, the shade of the cloth shifted. Pale blue became jade green, and then black and then red.

“Who knows how long I stood there just watching the colors change? But I know that I finally looked up, and I know that because I have never been as frightened in all my life as I was at that very moment. Never before, and never since.”

“What was it?” Maggie asked.

Another long silence followed that simplest of queries, but it didn't appear that Sean was thinking as he sat quietly there, or even that he was preparing any response at all. He merely sat still, as though he couldn't speak any more.

Eventually, though, he cleared his throat, and he began talking again, not quite where he had left off some moments before.

“A reading from the Book of Nestor,”
the …
person's
voice said from the dais.

“I had no idea what that meant, but I couldn't take my eyes off of her, and the words weren't really all that important to me anyway. I do recall them, oddly enough, all these years later. I suppose that might have something to do with it being my first time. You always remember your first time, even if it really wasn't that memorable when it happened.

“Column seven of the Nineteenth Scroll.”

As Sean recited the passage from memory, Charybdis joined in with him. She knew every word by heart as well.

“Long had he dwelt there, among the ice and the clouds atop the citadel Asgard, when there came to the place of the Changeling King Loki a pilgrim of the lower race. It was in the form of a hawk that he met the visitor, a man with one eye who entered the great hall under a promise of brotherhood.”

“All of those gathered around me then began chanting, and I think I joined them, somewhat, even though I didn't really know what they were saying,” Sean continued. “Truth is, even if I'd known the words, most of what was being said would still have been incomprehensible. Even among our own kind, the true voice of many of us only barely resembles anything human. That's how it was that night. Mostly it sounded like a herd of livestock with their throats being slit all at once. That, or a thousand starving
children screaming for a morsel of food.”

“Actually, I'd say it was something like a cross between those two things. Really very hard to put your finger on, to be perfectly honest, and I've never tried to describe it to someone who hadn't experienced it personally before,” Charybdis explained.

Maggie was aghast now, unsure if their macabre words were true, only certain from Sean's demeanor that he at least believed them. That may have been chilling enough.

“Is that what frightened you so? What you spoke of a few minutes ago?”

“No.”

“Well then, what was it? What was so terrible, so much more horrible than what you've just told me? Was it a voice? A face?” Maggie questioned.

“She didn't have a face. Not one like you or … or other people have.”

“The man, or woman, on the podium?”

“Was it a man? I couldn't have said at that moment. Now I know that such a distinction is fairly meaningless among my kind, but then I had no clue.”

“A woman, then?”

“Well, this is what I'm saying. Neither one. Or maybe both. It depends on which way you'd prefer to look at it. I mean, if you're asking if it was a man as in hu-man then the answer is really quite a bit simpler.

“Not even close.”

“Then what?” she asked.

“It was the Keeper. It was the Morrigan.”

The words left a chill in the air. It lingered for a long moment. Then Maggie spoke again, trying to absorb it all.

“I don't understand. What was all of it for? All the pomp and circumstance?”

“The Molting,” Sean replied, almost in jest by his tone.

“What?”

Here Charybdis took up the lion's share of the explanation. She could see that Sean was reluctant to speak further.

“It means different things to different people, I guess. To the Morrigan it is a celebration of her own greatness. To my master Argus, I suppose it is an observance of our long history. But it was not always so. Once it was a glorious affair, a paradise of pleasure, a respite for the hunted.”

“The hunted?” Maggie interrupted.

“Yes. The one moment in time when the persecuted and the damned could revel free of their oppressors, free of the fear that followed them through every other day of their lives. Free, for a short while, anyway,” Charybdis answered.

“The damned?” Maggie asked, still not quite following.

“Indeed. Despite what the current appearance may suggest, before you stand two changelings. And near this place there are gathered hundreds more of us, revealed this night in all our glory as we could never be to the outside world.”

“Where do they,
you
come from?” she asked.

Sean shrugged. It was a question he himself had never much cared about. Charybdis nodded, however. She knew.

“Everywhere. We are born, as you were, of human parents. But we are not human, not by any ordinary
measure, anyway. For thousands of years, as long as there have been people, so have we been.”

“I've never heard of such a thing,” Maggie protested.

“And yet here we stand,” came the simple, dismissive answer from Sean.

“But how could … ?”

“How could no one know of us?” Charybdis said, anticipating her next query.

“Right.”

“The humans knew us, once. That memory lives on in their stories, their folklore. Have you ever read the tale of Daphne, the woodland girl who was pursued by Apollo and transformed into a laurel tree? Or perhaps Medusa, the beauty who offended Poseidon and grew snakes from her crown? The tales are many, and not just from the Greeks and the Romans. Tales of our kind come down from every people: the Native folk of America, the varied tribes of Africa, the Norse, the Chinese, and the Celts.”

“So what happened? Obviously, you're still here. How did you, how did all of this … ?”

“Become folklore?” Charybdis said.

Maggie nodded.

Charybdis sighed, suddenly a little sadder as she spoke. “Times changed. People changed. One superstition died and another rose up to take its place. In the dying days of the Roman Empire, the Christians saw us as devils. They massacred our covens, killed our leader and called us servants of Satan. Later, they demonized us as witches and werewolves and vampires. Where we had once been honored, we
became hunted. In the Islamic world it was much the same, we were seen as abominations, and driven underground, forced to hide our true selves in order to survive.

“And survive we have, and we shall continue. That is why we have festivals such as we have here described.

“Every year in this season, we begin the change from our human-looking outer selves, back to the true beings that lurk within us. It is a dangerous time for us, a vulnerable time, and for safety's sake many of us band together. In seclusion from the outside world, often at safe houses called Havens, we cocoon, and undergo the molting. It is then that our true forms emerge.

“Once together, we recite tales of the old ones, so that we may never forget. We induct all newfound shifters into our fold, as well. They shed their human name and take on a name from the rolls of the ancients. That is how I became known as Charybdis.”

“Then?” Maggie asked.

“As I told you, we celebrate,” Sean broke in.