Faustus '47: Ch. 2 - Darkness

Faustus '47: Ch. 2 - Darkness

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Chapter 2: Darkness

  The night’s darkness descended on them as they slowly crept into the cemetery, and soon Caldwell was squinting and swearing under his breath as the Scot ahead of him kept disappearing. The clinging rain-mist that had descended was not helping either. Knee-high grass clung wetly to his legs as he hunched forward, one foot slowly in front of the other, and every so often he found himself suddenly lurching into a gravestone or cast-iron railing around a small family plot. Wicker would turn back and hiss, and Caldwell would slowly fumble onwards in the new direction, trying to home in on the hiss and instead just discovering more gravestones with his kneecaps. The darkness was absolute.

  Caldwell felt the grass underfoot changing, becoming shorter, and suddenly he was on what felt like a gravel patch. The grating of the stones overfoot sounded like a gunshot to his straining ears, and Wicker was at his side moments later, gripping his upper arm.

  “Careful now. We’re almost in the old Breton district.” Wicker breathed the words into Caldwell’s ear, the sound barely audible over the soft patter of the rain. “It should be over the little rise ahead.”

  Caldwell murmured agreement, and wondered how the Scot could see a little rise ahead.

  True to his word, after another handful of minutes of slowly shuffling up what felt like an incline, Wicker stopped Caldwell and pulled him down to his knees, and the two crept forward on hands and knees from there. Caldwell kept the Sten slung around his neck, praying that the muzzle or action would not foul on something in the grass they snaked through. The ground was cold and sharp beneath his hands and knees, and his woollen trouser legs were soon soaked through. Pebbles and stray shards of gravel dug into his palms as well, making him grit his teeth at the sharp pains that sporadically flashed up his arms.

  After almost colliding head first with another gravestone, the first hint of light ahead crept into Caldwell’s sight. Buttery yellow flickered and twisted through the grass ahead of him, and upon reaching the crest of the rise, he found himself looking down on the Breton district of the Sains Grieu cemetery. Wicker was already there, flat on the wet ground, and pulled Caldwell down beside him to study the scene below.

  The Breton district, based on the old records that Caldwell had been able to scrounge up in Ireland, dated back to the time of the Crusades - if not earlier. A long list of noble - and a shorter list of less noble - knights and lords had been buried here in those years, and the centuries since had seen the district expand with more tombs, mouldering mausoleums, and burrowing crypts as others had been laid to rest in the same area. Statues of weeping angels, broken-armed men, and a host of other funeral themes loomed into the night sky here, and only the faint light of the distant lanterns made their outlines visible. Darkness loomed thick and heavy where the light failed to fall, and created a veritable maze between their position and the light ahead.

  It was the list of less noble dead that had drawn them here, after the informant message had arrived those weeks ago. The Paranormal Division had been canvassing the French countryside for years now, seeking out old tombs and burial places - but Sains Grieu was different. Sir Jacques Montbard was allegedly buried there - the same man who had, according to the rumours, sold his soul to the djinns of Persia during the Crusade, and returned a changed man. The story had been legend and myth for centuries, recorded as a footnote in the serious histories of the Crusades - until Caldwell and the other researchers in Dublin made the link between the stories told of Montbard, and those coming out of Occupied Europe. What the stories recounted of Montbard and his deeds in France had sounded like pure fiction - until 1942 changed everything.

  Someone else had made the connection too, though, which was what brought Caldwell and Wicker to this place. More lights were going up in the distance, achieving little more than multiplying the number of shadows and pools of darkness that lay ahead of them, and after a signal from Wicker they both set off down the other side of the rise. The grass here was shorter and thinner, and crawling along on their bellies took them into the shadowy alleys between the tombs in no time. Here, over moss-caked gravel and through standing puddles of water, they wend their way steadily closer, until eventually they found themselves at the perimeter of the light. Drawing up close behind a gravestone, Caldwell took a moment to check the muzzle and action of his weapon, fumbling through the motions with cold, stiff fingers, before turning his attention to the sight ahead.

  There were seven of them.

  Four were regular footmen, clad in bulky field-grey trench coats and with the lantern light gleaming off their rain-streaked coal-scuttle helmets. They had rifles slung across their backs, and were hauling more lantern stands into position from a stack of crates further away. Drops of rain glistened on their equipment and on the damp patches on their coats, but they worked in silence, without complaint.

  The other three were as different as could be. The first was a field chaplain, with a purple sash around his neck that reached down almost to his knees. A peaked cap gave him no protection from the rain, and the medals on his chest glittered wetly. He stood with head bowed, as if in prayer - Caldwell thought he could see his lips moving, but the distance was too great to be certain.

  The second was one of what the reports were calling necromancers. His uniform was black from head to toe, and a leather coat hung around his shoulders like bat wings. He too wore a peaked cap, but where the death’s head of the SS would usually leer there was instead an eye symbol in silvery metal, lined with purple. The same purple eye was visible on the collars of the four footmen, and had become the unique identifier of the Paranormal Division in 1942 already. By now, five years later, it usually evoked feelings of bowel-churning terror wherever it surfaced.

  An articulated, cable-clad gauntlet covered the left hand and much of the left arm of the necromancer, and a faint blue glow emanated from the shoulder area where it was strapped onto the man. Caldwell squinted and tried to see what powered the device, but the telltale cables which usually linked them to a generator of some kind, were conspicuously absent for this unit.

  Wicker nudged Caldwell, and pointed at the third figure.

  “Is that our contact?” The Scot’s eyes were large in his darkened face, and Caldwell could only give a grim-faced nod in return.

  The third figure was Codename Merida, and she was already soaking wet. Clad in only a thin white shift, and with her hands bound together in front of her, the Special Operations Executive agent knelt on the ground between the necromancer and the chaplain. A livid bruise covered one side of her face, where it was visible under her wet, dark hair, and a fabric strip had been used to gag her quite thoroughly.

  In the centre of attention, ringed by the lantern rigs, stood a waist-high stone casket partially overgrown with vines. A stone statue of a knight, depicted in Crusader grab and almost black with lichen, stood with arms and sword raised behind it, warding off a sun that had already fled hours before. The lanterns around it limned the statue in orange and yellow, and its outline blurred and shifted in the thin veils of rain that swept down.

  The rain tapered off just as the last lanterns got hauled into position, and when their lights were finally lit, the four footmen began to spool out reels of copper wire, connecting each lantern rig to the other via some complex pattern. Caldwell followed their movement like a hawk, drawing a mental image of the copper outline as it took shape, and when they were halfway done he could already see what the final design would be: a giant septagram, each arm tipped by a lantern rig, and with a large ovoid eye shape in the middle, centred around the casket. The reason for the oil lanterns, and the lack of generator lines on the necromancer’s gauntlet, suddenly fell into place in the professor’s mind: they were crafting the Eye of Ankara, a ritual that was notoriously troubled by the presence of mechanical machines.

  Whatever they wanted to do here, was going to be a highly sensitive ritual.

  A plan began to unfold in Caldwell’s mind as he studied the setup, and when the footmen were briefly on the other side of the clearing, he rolled sideways and ended up next to Wicker. The Scot was a puddle of darkness and mud, invisible except for the whites of his eyes. Caldwell realised that the man’s Enfield was aimed unerringly at the necromancer, and hastily clapped his one hand over the rifle’s rear sight.

  “Don’t shoot until I give the signal.” It was Caldwell’s turn to hiss, and it took a long moment before Wicker’s eyes shifted from the Germans and met the professor’s. Caldwell saw blackness there, blacker than the night that surrounded them, and the cobwebbed voices in his head seemed to titter with glee. “They are going to use Merida as some part of this ceremony, but before that there is going to be a lot of talking and ritual. I need you on the other side of the clearing, behind that angel with the missing head. Wait for my signal there.”   Caldwell pointed to where he wanted Wicker to move, and after a brief moment the Scot grunted and lowered his rifle. He scuttled sideways behind another gravestone, drawing his rifle close to his body, and was gone from sight a moment later. Caldwell blinked and squinted hard into the darkness, but there was no sight the man had ever been there.

  In the ring of lights, the necromancer barked an order at the footmen once they were done with the copper spools, and the four men retreated out of the circle to where the distant supply crates squatted in the dark. The man’s voice was low and hard, and when he ordered the chaplain to the head of the stone casket, Caldwell caught a glimpse of hard blue eyes flashing below the black cap. The recruitment and training programme that produced these men for the Paranormal Division was a great mystery to Caldwell and his colleagues, although it seemed to favour candidates that were cold, calculating, and very much in control of every encounter and event they partook in. Shrieking demagogues and bloodthirsty lunatics did not seem to pass into their ranks.

  Caldwell shifted, trying to make himself more comfortable atop the grave mound he was lying on, and gently drew the journal from his jacket pocket as the three figures in the septagram moved into position. Merida, still kneeling, was dragged to her feet by the necromancer and taken to the foot of the casket, where a loose end of one of the copper wires was quickly wrapped around her left forearm. The Crusader statue loomed over her, as cold and as silent as the hands that worked the copper wire. Caldwell waited - prayed - for her to struggle and resist, but the woman was limp and unresponsive to the hands that dealt with her. Whatever the interrogators had done to her, had taken its toll, and now she could only shiver in her wet shift.

  One of the lanterns guttered and suddenly went out, right in front of the headless angel where Caldwell had directed Wicker. The professor found himself holding his breath as one of the footmen hurried up, tinkered with the lantern to relight it, and then returned to his previous post. Caldwell thought he could see two eyes gleaming in the dark behind the statue, but it was probably his imagination. Wicker would not be seen until he wanted to be seen.

  With his journal opened before him, Caldwell slowly paged through it until he found the section containing the Ankara notes. The lantern light was fragmented and dim here, between the gravestones, and he had to squint hard to make the letters on the page focus. It was one of the rituals they had discovered second-hand from sources here in Europe, and had never managed to replicate in Dublin. It always seemed to fail at a critical moment - after they learnt to do it far away from anything mechanical and moving - and the longer Caldwell studied the scene in front of him, the more he began to suspect the reason for their failures.

  They had never tested it with a human sacrifice.

  At the casket, with Merida finally secured and the chaplain still standing with his head bowed, the necromancer positioned himself at the midpoint between the two, and began to speak in a clear, sharp voice. His German was only mildly accented - Caldwell placed him around the eastern side of Berlin within a few words - and carried through the lit clearing with ease. With Merida on his left, and the chaplain on his right, the necromancer stood looking across the casket - almost directly at where Caldwell lay, and the professor had a disconcerting moment of terror when he imagined that the German was actually looking right at him.

  The German words soon snapped over into something else, something Slavic, and Caldwell felt his eyes drawn to matching phrases on the journal pages. The paper seemed to shiver under his fingertips, vibrating in sympathy to the words being uttered, and the first outward sign of the building power was when the lanterns started to dim.

  Merida’s damp shape seemed to come to her senses at that time, and she began to struggle, but the necromancer clamped his gauntlet onto the back of her neck and kept chanting, never missing a beat. Caldwell could see the pain etched across the woman’s face even across the clearing, but between her bonds, the copper tying her into the septagram, and the gauntlet on her neck, she could go nowhere.

  The chaplain lifted his head at the same time and started chanting something in Latin, words that Caldwell could only half-hear, as a counterpoint to the chanting from the necromancer. Frantically trying to memorise the phrases, Caldwell did not even notice the copper wires starting to glow - until the lanterns suddenly popped out, and the blue glow of the septagram was the only light left in the clearing.

  That, and Merida’s shrieking as her forearm began to glow and wither.