At the Outpost of Fate

CHAPTER 14 — SERVANTS OF THE SKULL

Almost as soon as they were seated, Molly felt an overwhelming urge to flee the room. Their host was the source of her anxiety. When she looked at him, she saw what she imagined her adopted father — truly the only man she ever thought of as a father — would one day become. Gaunt, ascetic, world-weary really, Edward Winterbourne looked like a man who was exhausted from the long journey of life and yet, having glimpsed the world beyond and recognizing that there was no great reward in the hereafter, clung desperately to his miserable mortal existence.

She stood as soon as the introductions were made. "Mr. Winterbourne, with your permission I'll put some water on for tea."

"Tea at this hour?" Winterbourne chuckled. "You Yanks really are an uncivilized lot. No, lass, for this conversation, something stronger is called for. There's a bottle in the breadbox and glasses in the cupboard."

Molly hastened into the adjoining hallway and through trial and error found the kitchen, but the flat was small enough that their low voices were still audible.

"So," Winterbourne sighed. "The prophecy of the Child of Skulls. You must already know something of it or you wouldn't have come a calling."

"Second-hand accounts only," Hobbs said. "I know that in the 1880's a psychic medium saw the birth of a child that would eventually usher in a time of great suffering. The vision was so terrifying, it killed her."

There was a long silence, long enough for Molly to arrange a bottle of single-malt whiskey and four old-fashioned glasses on a serving tray, before Winterbourne answered.

"It's funny the things that stay with you. It's been nearly fifty years, but I still remember everything about that night. To begin with, it didn't quite happen exactly as you were told. It wasn't the medium — Madame Adair — that uttered the prophecy. That was Nightjar's doing."

"Nightjar?" Hurricane's tone was faintly incredulous. "Is that someone's name? Sounds like something you'd—"

"Brian!" Hobbs cut him off before he could complete the thought. "It's a kind of bird."

Winterbourne laughed. "You were thinking it sounds like a sort of chamber pot, weren't you? I thought the same thing myself, when I first met him. Jerusalem Nightjar. A remarkable, astonishing man."

"Was he a member of the Trevayne Society?"

"No, not Nightjar. His motivations were… well, personal. You know how they say that men have their demons? Well, in Nightjar's case, that was the literal truth. He was driven to uncover the mysteries of the supernatural. More often than not, the mysteries were rather mundane, charlatans and hysterical old women, but once or twice…" He trailed off and the silence lingered as Molly entered the room with the tray.

"I was just back from the Far East — I was a military intelligence officer — when the Trevayne Society came for me. I was naive enough to think it was an honor." The last few words were filled with acid and his gaze focused on Christy.

"Trevayne was interested in Nightjar's investigations?" prompted Hobbs.

Winterbourne nodded. "Back then they were afraid of the things that go bump in the night."

"But not anymore?" intoned Hurley.

"Times change," murmured Christy. "And we have other more immediate concerns."

"Yes. Well, in any case, Trevayne assigned me to be Nightjar's minder. I accompanied him on dozens of investigations into claims of otherworldly activity. That's how I came to be with Nightjar on the evening of the twenty-first of June, 1883—"

"What?" The vehemence of Hobbs reaction, so out of character for him, startled Molly and she hastily set the tray down to avoid spilling it. "What date did you say?"

"Padre?" This note of concern came from Hurricane, who had not sat with the others, but was rather stationed near the door, ever vigilant. "Everything all right?"

Hobbs was quick to regain his composure. "I'm sorry. Please continue, Mr. Winterbourne."

Their host stared at Hobbs for an uncomfortable interval, then leaned forward and poured a copious amount of whiskey into a glass. He gulped it down in a single swallow and then began telling his tale.

The narrative was haunting, transporting the listeners into the past. Molly knew that if she closed her eyes, she would see the mysterious Jerusalem Nightjar, speaking as if from the spirit realm and not an old man recounting imperfect memories.

"This is the night that was promised; the Nativity…The village is nearby… There are mountains in the distance…The hour is upon us! The child is born!…a world, filled with death. Skulls of the dead, everywhere… Death…such a time of dying as the world has never known…They are coming for him…

"They have been waiting."

Molly shivered involuntarily.

"Was there actually a child born that night?" Hobbs asked when Winterbourne finished. "Was it all meant to be taken literally?"

"Nightjar believed so. He spent the rest of his life trying to discover the identity of the child." Winterbourne studied the bottom of his empty glass as if looking for answers in the residue. "I'm not convinced of it though."

"What do you mean?"

"Do you know how many people died in the Great War? Or from the influenza?" Winterbourne shook his head disparagingly. "There's an American Congregationalist sect that believes the end of the world began in 1914 and I'm not so sure they're wrong. The prophecy, if prophecy indeed it was, may have been nothing more than the awareness that our own inhumanity was leading us to self-annihilation."

Hobbs shook his head as if to shake off the seeds of doubt Winterbourne's comment had cast. "What did Nightjar learn?"

"Eh? As far as I know, very little. When we spoke of it later, he recalled that the village he saw in the vision looked it might be somewhere in the Middle East or North Africa. Mud huts in a desert, he said. Could have been almost anywhere from Morocco to India."

"India?" Molly was quick to make the connection. "The column."

Hobbs' brow furrowed, but then he nodded. "As I said before, it cannot be a coincidence."

Winterbourne did not fail to notice the impact of his comment. "You know something?"

"The Trevayne Society has made a discovery that bears a remarkable resemblance to the Iron Pillar of Delhi," said Christy. "A discovery that seems to have a bearing on the matter of the prophecy."

"Interesting." Winterbourne steepled his fingers under his chin. "I spent two years in India. You know, the notion of Hell and demons that torment the souls of the wicked came to us by way of the Hindu religion. They call it Naraka, the place where the souls of sinners are tormented before being reincarnated."

Molly glanced at her father. "Is that true?"

"I prefer to think that ubiquitous beliefs reinforce our faith, rather than undermine it." Hobbs seemed unusually defensive. "In ancient times, God gave his revelation to the world in many different ways, but a constant theme running throughout is the punishment of the wicked in the Underworld. Thankfully, that is not the fate that awaits the righteous who partake of the body and blood of Christ."

"I intended no effrontery," said Winterbourne. "But even the Church teaches that there will someday be a war between Heaven and Hell, a war that will be fought here on Earth. Nightjar believed the child in his vision was meant to be the general of Hell's armies. We fought a demon or two in our time and I couldn't tell you for certain whether they were Christian demons or Muslim, Zoroastrian, Hindu or what have you."

"True enough." The priest offered a tight smile. "And our concern is not with the religious persuasion of the demons, but rather with a particular man who believes that he is the Child of Skulls. His first act was to steal the Staff—"

A loud bang, like the sound of a door slamming somewhere out on the street, cut him off in mid-sentence. Hobbs jumped to his feet and Hurricane whirled to face the door, both pistols drawn in a flash. Molly saw a confused look register on Christy's face, but Winterbourne had his pistol out almost as quickly as Hurley. Then everything went crazy.

The attackers didn't come in through the front door. Instead, there was a sound of smashing glass behind the couch as the drapes seemed to come to life. Molly sprang from couch, just as two vaguely human shapes, shrouded in the curtains, tumbled over the couch. Sir Reginald did not react as quickly and was instantly entangled in the swirl of fabric, limbs and shards of glass. More figures swarmed in through the breach, too many to count in the chaos of the moment, moving as swiftly and relentlessly as a horde of insects. She snatched up the whiskey bottle, hefting it like a club and faced the onslaught.

Hurricane's pistols thundered again and again, the report deafening in the small enclosure. Three of the intruders were blasted off their feet by the fifty-caliber rounds and gore splattered the wall behind them, but they did not stay down. Though the wounds were surely fatal, the invaders seemed to be in the grip of a supernatural fury, what ancient warriors would have called the berserkergang. Instead of nursing their wounds or taking cover from Hurricane's thundering guns, six of them rushed him all at once. The rest — another half-dozen at the very least — squared off against the others.

Hobbs struck a fighting stance and for a half-second was perfectly still. Then he started moving faster than the eye could follow, slipping through the grasp of his attackers, deflecting their blows and redirecting their momentum of their charge so that they crashed into the walls or each other.

Two of them went for Winterbourne. He unloaded his revolved into them, but the bullets that tore clean through their bodies didn't slow them down at all. They slammed into him, propelling him back into his chair and then chair and all tipped over backward.

Molly found herself facing a lone attacker; improbably, a plump middle-aged woman, wearing a frumpy frock that was torn and streaked with blood. The woman's expression was blank — she might have washing dishes or some other mundane household chore — but she moved like lightning. Molly swung the bottle, but the woman tackled her before the swing was complete and together they crashed into the bookshelf. Molly swung again and this time the bottle connected with the side of woman's skull. The sturdy glass withstood three such blows before shattering in Molly's grasp; each time the woman's head snapped sideways and each time she shrugged it off and continued trying to throttle her victim. Only when Molly stabbed the broken neck of the bottle deep into the woman's eye did the assault end. The shard of glass severed some vital connection in her assailant's brain and the frumpy woman collapsed on top of her.

For a moment, as she struggled out from under the dead weight, the intruders ignored Molly. She counted eight of them still on their feet, bloodied but far from beaten. Most of those had piled onto Hurricane, clinging to his extremities and denying him the ability to move. She had seen ants in the jungle do the same thing to scorpions that were ten times their size. Four of the attackers, including the woman she had battled, were on the floor and she didn't need her medical training to recognize that they would never get up again.

From the moment they had come crashing in, Molly had known that these people had nothing at all to do with the Fraternis Maltae, nor was there any question about whether this assault was a coincidence. These were the same people that had attacked them at the museum, the people she had thought of as "zombies." These were the travelers whose flight had been intercepted and who had been hypnotized by the man who believed himself to be the Child of Skulls. They were, Molly realized, innocent victims in the skull man's game, deprived of volition and turned into mindless automatons.

As a doctor, her duty to them was to treat their affliction — her father had shown that it was possible to break through the hypnotic spell — but instead she had killed one of them. She had sworn an oath the do no harm and then she had turned around and stabbed a broken bottle into an innocent woman's skull.

With a roar, Hurricane stripped his assailants off and wrapped his massive arms around the squirming bodies. One or two managed to get an arm free and beat at his face, but the crushing embrace quickly starved them of both oxygen and the will to fight. One of the pair that had come through first, still half-tangled in the drapery, left off beating the already unconscious Christy and leaped to their rescue, but Hobbs spun one of his attackers into the man's path.

"Hurricane! We can't win here. Not without killing them all. We must flee."

Through the haze of violence and rage that surrounded him, the big man somehow heard his friend's exhortation. With a mighty heave, he pitched the mass of bodies back through the gaping window. Then, just as quickly, he snatched Christy and Winterbourne out of the ruins and slung them onto his shoulders. "Molly girl! The door!"

Molly was already moving, galvanized into action, not by Hurricane's shout, but rather by what her father had said; the only way to avoid killing these poor souls was to flee. She threw open the front door, half expecting to find the rest of the people from the plane waiting there, but thankfully the way was clear. Hurley muscled past her, clearing the way like a charging bull, while Hobbs took her hand and led her along at a brisk jog.

But the fight was far from over.

Hurricane kept moving, down the porch steps, past the squirming heap of bodies piled in front of the shattered window and into the street. The car that had brought them was parked across the way but there was no sign of the driver from the Trevayne Society. Molly was immediately suspicious and she suspected Hurley was as well, but if their foes had set a trap for them, they would have to deal with it directly.

By the time she and Hobbs reached the street, the surviving intruders were up and moving again. The injuries they had sustained could not help but slow them down, but they were immune to pain or exhaustion; nothing would stop them from carrying out the orders of their master.

Then things got worse.

From half a block away, a pair of automobile headlights blazed to life, casting their beams straight down the center of street. There was a screech of tires as the unseen driver punched the accelerator pedal. Transfixed by the spears of illumination, Molly froze, just for an instant, but it was enough. Hobbs, still tightly gripping her hand, was unaware that she had stopped and as he continued forward he yanked her off her feet. She spilled headlong into the street, directly in the path of the onrushing car.

Hobbs nearly went down as well, but somehow managed to make catching himself look graceful. He danced back a step and scooped her up in his arms, but even he was not fast enough to recover the moment or two lost in her fall. Now it was only a question of whether the gang of attackers would reach them before or after the car ran them down.

But then, at the last instant, the headlights swung to the side and so did the front end of the car. There was another squeal of rubber on pavement, much closer and much louder, but not loud enough to hide the sound of bones crunching against metal. Bodies flew in all directions — some were propelled up the street, some were hurled into the air, up and over the top of the sedan and one went under.

Before Molly could fully grasp the enormity — the horror — of what she had just witnessed, the door of the car was thrown open. The man inside had a youthful, earnest face; but for his dark hair, she might have mistaken him for Dodge. "Get in!"

This time, both Hobbs and Hurricane did hesitate. Up until that moment, they understood every aspect of the situation, but the unexpected help from a stranger represented a complete unknown.

"Come on," urged the man. "There's more of them heading this way."

Hobbs was still searching the man's face for some sign of deception when Hurricane sprang into motion. "They've sabotaged our car," he explained to Hobbs, even as he opened the rear door of the idling car and heaved the inert forms of Winterbourne and Christy inside. "The driver's dead; neck broken."

That was enough for Hobbs. He set Molly down and steered her toward the open door. She didn't need his urging. Their young savior was alone in the car; if he did have some malign intent, she had no doubt that her father and Hurricane Hurley could deal with it. More than anything, she just wanted to get away from the scene of so much carnage. She slid in next to the driver and her father followed. She felt better immediately as the car door slammed shut.

"Go!" Hobbs ordered in his quiet but irresistible way.

The young man behind the wheel nodded and stomped down on the gas pedal. The car shuddered as one of the rear wheels rolled up and over something — Molly didn't want to think about what it might be — and picked up speed. In a matter of seconds, they were away.

Hobbs craned his head around to search for signs of pursuit.

"No need to worry," offered their rescuer. "They came in two cars. This is one of them and I cut the tires on the other. I think you're safe."

"Thanks to you." Hobbs' remark was almost sarcastic. "May I ask how you came to be involved in all of this?"

The man didn't seem at all offended by the priest's suspicious tone. "Just bad luck really. I was on my way home from the pub when those blokes pulled up. It looked like they were up to no good, so I hung back. They went for your friend waiting by the car first."

His voice became more subdued. "When he saw them, he waved his gun at them, but they didn't stop. He got a shot off, then they were on him… Nothing I could do to help him. Then they went for that flat. I guess you know what happened then."

Hobbs uttered a noncommittal grunt.

"We owe you our lives," Molly offered hastily. "Thank you."

The man returned a smile. "Just so long as you're on the side of the angels. You're Yanks, right?"

She nodded. "From New York."

"Sorry about how your holiday turned out. Should I find a constable for you?"

"I think you'd better take us to the hospital instead."

"No," Hobbs declared in a flat tone. "We can tend to our wounds on the plane. The sooner we're away, the safer we'll all be."

"You're not suggesting we take Reg and the old geezer along for the ride?" asked Hurricane from the back seat. "I suspect they might have an objection to being shanghaied off to India."

"We can put them off along the way. But right now, the safest place for them is with us."

"India?" The driver whistled. "You lot do get around."

Hobbs, perhaps realizing they had already revealed too much, quickly said, "It might be best for you to drop us off where we can get a taxi on to our final destination. And then I'd suggest you abandon this vehicle and forget about all of this."

"You'll get no argument from me." He then glanced at Molly. "Though I'm not bloody likely to forget riding to your rescue, Miss…?"

"Molly." She extended a hand to him. "And you are?"

The driver took her hand and touched it almost reverently to his lips. "Call me Ishmael."