CHAPTER 59

_____________________________________________________

A figure moved on a rooftop, several hundred yards from the building that was now a beacon of fire, smoke, and destruction. Cloaked in shadow, light glinted from the lenses of a pair of binoculars. At first, the reflections on the lenses were the warm orange glow of the gas fire that was raging. After a time, the winking blue lights of emergency vehicles sparkled on the polished glass. The figure was hulkingly, inhumanly, huge. Its true nature was disguised beneath a concrete colored cloak.

The binoculars disappeared beneath the folds of the cloak and the green glow of a satellite phone’s screen flared in the darkness.

The figure brought the phone to its head, reaching inside the hood to press the device to its ear.

‘Yes?' The voice on the other end of the line was like the sound of a corpse being dragged across sandy ground. The voice of Troy.

‘It’s me,’ the shadow said.

‘Of course. Forgive me, I’ve been distracted. Everything went as planned, I trust?’

The figure shifted awkwardly and said, ‘Not exactly.’

‘What?’, there was instant anger there.

‘Yes… It started well.’

‘Don’t tell me, please don’t tell me that we don’t have either of them.’

The shadow didn’t answer this time. It just waited, and let the silence be the reply.

The other end of the line gurgled with a stream of German curses. The shadow waited until the expletives ceased. Then, after a little heavy breathing, the voice seemed to gather itself and it said, ‘Tell me what happened.'

The shadow said, ‘It all went as planned initially. The Golem did as you’d asked, he used the dart gun that I delivered and Homer was subdued.’

‘How many darts?’ the voice asked.

‘One… I think,’ said the shadow.

‘Then he still had one left,’ the voice was thoughtful as it spoke. ‘I’m sorry, continue.’

‘It was all fine,’ said the shadow. ‘Until, that is, the priest arrived.’

‘O’Connor?’ said the voice, its pitch rising with incredulity. ‘What could he do?’

‘No…’ said the shadow. ‘A different priest.’

The voice on the line went flat. It said, ‘Have you seen him before?’

‘No.’

‘Describe him.’

‘Big, for a man, and young. Very big shoulders. A beard. He was sort of like the woman, Ardia. He killed or disabled about a dozen normal humans in a few heart beats. Strong, maybe as strong as me or Atlas. I wouldn’t like to face him myself.’

‘Stryker,’ the voice whispered, barely audible.

‘Who?’

‘Nobody. Not nobody. Another one of my children, one of your brothers. One who was stolen from me. I'll tell you about him another time. If he came, then I understand. You did well to stay out of the way. I take it they've all escaped?'

‘Yes.’

‘And the Golem is dead? I could use the corpse.’

‘No, he escaped.’

‘Really? He will never cease to amaze me.’

There was nothing between them again for a time. After waiting, the shadow said, ‘Will that be all?’

‘There’s one more thing,’ the gravelly voice spoke again.

The head of the shadowy figure turned to the sky and its shoulders heaved with a sigh. It said, ‘Yes?’

‘We believe Zeus may have an agent active in Prague.’

The shadow froze, stock still. It said, ‘How do you know this?’

The voice said, ‘We detected a text-based conversation. We couldn't decode the content but it was using Zeus's encryptions.'

The shadow’s head nodded slowly. It said, ‘I see.’

The voice said, ‘I don't need to tell you what a disaster it would be if Zeus was to become aware of Homer. He would reach out to him, straight away. For all we know, Homer would join him. Then he'd be lost to us forever.'

There was a silence between them then for a time. The shadow spoke before it could grow into an incriminating silence. He said, ‘I haven’t seen anyone.’

The voice said, ‘That’s not beyond the realms of belief. Zeus’s… agents are very good. Especially the new ones. Just keep an eye out. It won’t matter much longer, I think your time in Prague will be finished very shortly. Goodbye.’

Without waiting for the shadow to reply, the line was disconnected.

The shadowed figure held very still for a time. With its head pointed at the sky, unmoving, the figure provoked the perfect sense of contemplation. Then, as the head sunk down with a slow shake and the shoulders slumped, the picture morphed into one of terrible shame.

‘I can’t keep helping Zeus… I can’t keep serving both of them...’ it breathed to itself.

CHAPTER 60

_____________________________________________________

The woods were quiet in the night. Razmik strolled up and down by the edge of the road, his hands in his pockets, looking down the road, into the distance. He turned to look at the group gathered by the van. The superhuman woman, the two gangsters, the priest and the ape monster. And now there was Stryker as well. Homer stood a little further back than the rest of them, enjoying the presence of the trees. Razmik said, ‘You disappear when the truck comes, Homer. I’ll get the driver to open the door and you can enter while I distract him.’

‘No crates,' said Homer, with certainty.

‘No crates,' said Razmik. 'But I don't know what we're going to do when we get to Berlin.'

‘I have an idea about that,’ said Ardia, a devious grin spreading on her face.

Razmik raised an eyebrow. Ardia shook her head, keeping the secret. Razmik shrugged.

‘Homer, how are you now?’, Ardia asked him.

‘I have a headache,’ the creature said. Then he looked up hopefully, ‘Maybe coffee would help?’

‘We’ll see what we can do on the road,’ said Ardia, with a little smirk.

‘Coffee?' said O'Connor, looking from Homer to Ardia. ‘You gave him coffee?'

‘It’s alright father,’ said Homer. ‘I like it.’

O’Connor’s eyes went wide as he nodded slowly.

‘He likes it a little too much,’ said Ardia.

‘I’d like to know what was in that dart,’ O’Connor said. ‘I tried to sedate him once, to pull a tooth, but it had no effect. When he was very young he was shot with two darts by some hunter and, again, it was like nothing. I thought he was impervious to sedatives.’

‘He went out like a light,’ said Ardia. ‘Whatever it was, it was effective.’

‘I didn’t like it,’ said Homer.

‘No, I’ll bet you didn’t,’ said Ardia.

‘I think coffee would help,’ he said, making lingering eye contact with both O’Connor and Ardia as he spoke.

‘Let the boy have his drugs,’ Stryker interjected forcefully. ‘If he wants coffee then just give it to him.’

Ardia looked at Stryker with a startled expression. It was as though she’d forgotten he was there. Stryker smiled back at her, a little too intently.

‘And what will you do now?’, asked O’Connor.

‘What the fuck do you mean?’ asked Stryker.

‘Will you come with us?’ asked Ardia.

‘Of course, I'm fucking coming with you,' said Stryker. ‘We've got a lot to talk about. You, my loveliness, are the closest thing to me I've ever heard or seen of. And I've seen every kind of thing.'

Ardia said, ‘Things like Homer?’

‘Yes? said Homer, moving closer, peering intently at Stryker. ‘Things like me?'

Stryker looked between them and opened his mouth to speak. He was interrupted by Razmik calling to them, ‘Here it comes!’

The lemon glow of a big truck’s headlights began to creep around the bend of the tree-lined road. Homer faded away into the trees and was gone. The group gathered to face the oncoming vehicle.

The conversation, for now, was ended.

But the journey was just beginning.

CHAPTER 61

_____________________________________________________

The smoothly powerful sound of a car’s wheel crushing dried leaves whispered through the trees. Acres of sparse trees accepted the noise and passed it on. Bare branches reached for the sky like the gnarled fingers of dying things. The trees made it look like it was hard work to grow here. The wilting yellow grass and fading shapes of ruined buildings seemed to agree. It was hard to live here, hard to be here. It was a dead place.

The semi-nothingness of the abandoned place was reflected in a rolling blur on the polished body of the rental car as it rolled down the decaying road, nearly soundless but for that incessant whispering of the crushed leaves. The sky was a blinding gray, two shades short of white, as it appeared in the reflection.

The car came to halt in front of one of the buildings, the red pulse of the brake lights a shocking reminder of how little color there was here. The old brick building was tall but seemingly lacked the spirit to loom over the car. Instead, it seemed to possess a reclining posture, accepting the fact that it was slowly crumbling back into the earth.

Ardia pushed the passenger door open and stepped up and out of the car. The breeze ran chilling fingers along the skin of her neck. Not cold, but chilling. The place echoed with something from the past. A shadow of the sinister.

Father Stryker emerged from the driver’s door and looked at Ardia over the roof of the car. He said, ‘Whatever else you can say about this place, you have to admit that Razmik knows how to keep us out of the limelight.’

‘Yeah,’ said Ardia, shuddering slightly. ‘How he found this place is another question entirely.’

Neither of them spoke for a second. They looked around at the tortured trees and dying ruins. Stryker's eyes absorbed it, then they hardened slightly and he said, ‘Are you going to tell him, or am I?'

She didn’t need to ask him who he was referring to. She said, ‘I think I better do it. I think he’s more likely to take it better from me.’

‘Much better?’

Ardia sighed, ‘That’s hard to tell.’

They said no more. The slap of the car doors slamming shut exploded through the trees like a bomb blast. They turned and walked towards the doors of the building. The doors looked lost on the face of the building. They were newly painted metal, a mellow forest green. Their cleanness and uniformity were everything that the rough brick walls surrounding them were not.

Ardia raised a hand to knock on the door, but it swung inwards before she could strike it. The weather-worn face of Father O’Connor greeted her. In a strange way, his features seemed to match the surroundings outside. His lined visage also seemed to speak to some terrible past.

‘Success or failure?’ he asked, his voice inflected high with forced optimism.

Ardia bobbled her head from side to side, the universal gesture for a bit of both. She looked past him, into the empty room, and said, ‘Are Razmik and Abe not back yet?'

Then, with greater urgency, she said, ‘And where's Homer?'

Her answer came in the hollow noise of air rushing around a plummeting form. With a muffled, and yet still rocking, thump, Homer landed on the dying grass behind her. Ardia glanced past him to the bare branches of the trees and shook her head. How could something so massive conceal itself up there, of all places?

Homer remained in his crouching position and inspected them. Ardia could feel the gaze piercing her and tried to keep her posture neutral. Homer said, ‘Well?’

Arida could find no better expression than to utter a quiet groan, not altogether unlike the tortured squeak of an almost seized door slowly closing.

Homer swung his head to look at Stryker. Stryker showed Homer empty palms and said, ‘I’m afraid it ain’t much better than I expected, Big Fella. I did try to warn you. It’s too public.’

Homer bared his teeth, ‘There is a way. I have to go there.’

Ardia opened her mouth to speak but O’Connor interjected, stepping forward and resting a hand on her shoulder. He said, ‘Why don’t we talk inside? It might be quiet out here, but there’s no need to have a… discussion… out here.’

Ardia bit her lip and nodded.

‘Right is right,’ said Stryker. ‘Come on, Big Fella, we’ll chew it over inside.’

Homer continued to stare at them for another few seconds. For a creature that was so massive, so powerful, Ardia marveled that his posturing did not feel threatening. He really only gave the impression of a petulant child, assessing them. His eyes remained insistent. When he finally shifted his weight and began to walk towards them, the others also turned and entered the room beyond the metal doors.

The room beyond was constructed from stud timber and sheets of cladding. It was clear to Ardia, whose knowledge of construction did not nearly match her knowledge of destruction, that this room had been constructed inside the shell of the ruined building. Leading off this space at the far end were two more doors, one to a bathroom, the other to a room containing two bunks and little else. Razmik had been evasive when questioned about the place, about how he had been aware of it and how he knew it would be a safe refuge. She would ask him more insistently when she saw him next. She would also, hopefully, have spent some time in one of the luxurious Berlin hotels by then as well. Homer may need to hide out here, but there was certainly nothing stopping her from indulging in such decadences as hot showers and cotton sheets.

Father O'Connor moved towards a table against one wall and turned on the electric kettle. He immediately began the clinking operation of preparing cups of tea, his back turned to the rest of them. They had been here for perhaps 36 hours and each time any of them returned from anywhere the old Irish priest would repeat this ritual. Everything seemed to be marked by tea and she was sick of it. She would have to ensure there were no facilities like kettles available at their next stop.

Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

‘You can’t tell me I can’t go,’ Homer said, the door hardly having had time to close behind him.

Ardia ran her hands through her hair, then threw them towards the ceiling, ‘Homer, I know how desperately you want to go there. I would feel the same way in your position. But we have to face it, you're pretty different from everyone else and it's just too public.'

Homer pointed one broad finger at her, then swung it back and forth between Stryker and her. His mouth popped open and closed impotently, no noise coming out. Then he managed to say, his usually deep voice reaching a high, pleading pitch, ‘You two! You're different too!'

The gesture, the pitch, and the sentiment were all so ridiculous that she had to suppress an honest urge to laugh. Instead, she pushed it down and said, as placidly as she could, ‘Yes, Homer, but you know what I'm saying. You look different.'

Homer slumped backward, bringing his chin to his chest and crossing his arms as he sat heavily on the floor. He was now doing such an excellent impression of a tantruming child that Ardia could not reconcile this Homer with the intelligent and oddly sensitive creature she had grown to know.

‘I can stay in the shadows. On the rooftops,’ he said in a mumble, his chin still pressed to his chest and his face pointing down.

Ardia looked at Stryker and shook her hands in an urgent way. Stryker exhaled deeply and said, ‘Ah, Big Fella, we’re talking about a subway station here. It’s underground, there are no rooftops. And it’s full of electric light. There’d be nowhere for you to hide.’

When Homer lifted his face to them, this time, there was a truly awful fury roaring there. He shook, then looked at his hair covered arms. Then, in a sudden motion, he ripped a piece of the hair from his jaw and hurled it to the ground.

Ardia just stared at the tuft of hair on the ground. She looked up to Homer's eyes and the hurt and pain there left her speechless. It was at this moment that O'Connor stepped between herself and Stryker and handed each of them a mug of tea. O'Connor then said, completely ignoring Homer and his outburst, ‘I'd like to hear the details.'

Stryker remained standing, sipping from the tea. Ardia moved to one of the mismatched chairs and sat down. She did not drink from her tea.

Stryker said, ‘If we're right then the site we're lookin' for can only be gotten to from one of the stations in the heart of the city. It's a bricked up doorway down some kind of maintenance tunnel. At the end of the station platform there's a stairwell that leads up to the street, but if you go around the stairwell, on the side of the platform facing the tracks, you get to the tunnel.'

‘It’s clearly marked to be private and not for public access, but if you’re quick and careful you can get down there without being seen,’ said Ardia.

Stryker nodded, ‘The tunnel isn't lit. It's dark and it don't feel like it's used very often for anything.'

Ardia said, ‘But if you follow the Golem's instructions you can find the bricked up doorway. It's very well disguised. If you weren't looking for it, then I don't think you could find it.'

O’Connor said, ‘And how far from the public area is it?’

Ardia shrugged and looked at Stryker. She said, ‘Maybe a five-minute walk.'

Stryker nodded and said, ‘Yup. Maybe a bit less, we were going slow on the way, keeping our eyes open for it.’

Ardia's gaze strayed down to the tuft of hair that lay on the dusty floor. A little draft touched it, stirring it and prompting it to roll over itself, like a tumbleweed. Her eyes narrowed and she didn't hear Father O'Connor speak.

He said, ‘So, and stop me if I’m incorrect, you would need to enter the station at street level, descend the staircase, then pass time on the platform while waiting for the opportunity to duck off into this service tunnel. All the while with people mulling around you, bumping into you even?’

Ardia didn’t fully listen to Stryker saying, ‘That about sums it up. There ain’t no way down there without walking right past people.’

O’Connor looked to Homer, whose head was no longer pressed to his chest but hanging limply like a chicken with a freshly wrung neck. O’Connor’s face was apologetic but firm. He said, ‘You see Homer? There is just no way.’

Ardia did look up in time to capture the expression of anguish and bitter disappointment on Homer’s face. She got up, as in a daze, and drifted across the room, staring at him.

‘What is it?’ Stryker asked.

Ardia tilted her head to the side, still staring at Homer. She said, a little dreamily, lost in thought, ‘I’m not sure, but…’

She stood in front of Homer and reached a hand out to touch his face. He withdrew, but only very slightly, from her touch before relaxing and allowing her to press her palm against his hairy cheek. O’Connor watched, eyebrows arching.

Ardia ran her hand down Homer’s face, pressing hard. She peered at him with fierce concentration. Then she looked up and around at the other two men. With a faint smile, growing stronger as she spoke, she said, ‘I think there might be a way.’

CHAPTER 62

_____________________________________________________

An excerpt from the diary of Damian Slayer

Sometimes things have to go ahead and just get a little bit better before they get a whole lot worse. It's the universe's way of really messing with you. What kind of a giggle can the world really get out of kicking a dog when it's down? It has to be more fun to let said dog get up onto his shaky paws, maybe glance around, looking for the next blow, and just when the dog has hobbled over to his bowl for a drink of water, then you get 'em. Gotta be better than kicking him while he's down. That's my working theory at least. And it held true in Berlin.

The thing that had been camping in my brain had gone away, at least for a time. It had probably been a couple of days since I could have identified anything I could remotely attribute to someone else's mind inside my own. And that's the funny thing about the whole basket of crazy phenomena that I'm just going to go ahead and call the psychic lucky dip. When things play with your mind, and by things I don't mean work-stress or money worries, you can almost never really be sure. Psychic interference isn't a physical object, like a coffee cup. It doesn't leave a ring when you remove it. It doesn't leave a clean silhouette on an otherwise dusty shelf. Nor is it like a physical attack. It leaves scars, sure. But they're not the kind of scars you can reach out and touch, or see in the mirror. So, when the pressure on my mind receded, I approached the conclusion, of course I did, that the attacks had been imagined. Maybe I was working too hard, getting too excited.

It seemed reasonable to think I had imagined it, considering I was now fairly sure that some unseen entity wasn't popping its own books on my bookshelf. Thus, it was a fairly reasonable thing to consider in my humble opinion, counting my experience in Africa or not, that it was now okay to leave the hostel and get on with my job in Berlin. My job anywhere really. That job was simple: do anything, anything, to move closer to the Prowler.

The new leads I’d acquired were mostly worth dogshit. They were old, older than a unified Berlin. There was one that seemed like it might have some merit, though.

Back at the end of World War II, which is when I'm all but certain that the facility under the city was vacated, it looks like the place was shut down. Maybe the Russians had planned to open it back up at some point and get what they could get out of it. But, I have the feeling that that never came to pass. Whatever is down there, I think it's been down there since some hurried day back in 1944 when the Nazi's cleared out (in a mighty hurry), and the Soviets sealed it off (also in a mighty hurry because they probably weren't ferociously keen on sharing it with the Americans).

There is, though, only so much you can do in what can only amount to a very big basement. You would need to get things in and out. And that, I felt, was one of my best chances of getting closer.

That was how I wound up leaving the hostel. That was also how I wound up standing in a long forgotten corner of a scrapyard outside of Berlin.

The old guy that ran the place had next to no interest in me. I met him sitting in a little portable cabin, watching a little portable TV, just inside the gate of the scrapyard. I told him I was looking for some obscure part for an old van. He sure as hell wasn’t about to come out to help me look for it. He waved me off, told me if I found what I was looking for then he’d catch me on my way out and he could make up a price for it then.

I started exploring the yard. It was big as all hell. This wasn't in the city, it was about three bus connections outside the city. In a strange kind of way, the scrapyard helped me find what I was looking for. It was like a forest, when you can know the oldest parts by the thickness of the trees, and other subtle changes in the vegetation. As I moved along it wasn't hard to gauge I was moving backward along the timeline of the place. I felt a little like an archaeologist using the different strata in the soil to determine the age of something I'd dug up. At first, I met mainly modern, or reasonably modern, junked cars. As I walked deeper, they started to get older. Before long I was passing in between piles of wrecked soviet era cars. There were a ton of VEB Trabants and other hideous little machines, long past the point of redemption.

At last, amongst twisted pieces of girders that still bore the marks of bombs that had been dropped by British planes more than seventy years before, I found it. I nearly missed it, distracted as I was by what must have been the turret of a genuine Panzer tank. But I couldn't miss it completely. Not when I felt it.

That was a gift from Metis. Before I left her on that forlorn mountain in Africa, she put something in me. I could feel The Crucible, I could feel it's afterglow. I was like a Geiger counter for the fucking thing. As I walked past, marveling at the piece of WW2 memorabilia, I felt that faint heat on my skin. I turned around, and there it was.

It was a cage. Or it had been a cage. Seventy years in the elements had left their mark. It was still obvious. It stuck out, if you looked closely. Yeah, in a lot of ways it was just a cage. A crate shaped cage, and if you only looked at it once, you'd assume it was used for transporting animals on the back of a truck or maybe a train. Big animals, yes, but big deal. Look closer, though. Think about it.

Why were the bars so thick? What, the hell, would be transported in it? Anything strong enough to warrant bars so thick was probably something you made burgers out of. And I've never known cows to be transported in cages. Definitely not one at a time. If you looked closely you could see that while the overriding design had been security, the cage had also been built out of fear. Those bars were too thick. Nothing could be powerful enough to need a cage this sturdy.

I wish.

And it was warm with the glow of The Crucible. Not hot, God no, not after seventy-something years. But it was warm. It still gave off that faint warmth, like you imagine depleted uranium giving off, dirty and wrong.

I touched it, though, I had to. I wasn't here for sightseeing. I was here for information. Any information. I crawled all over it, with limited success. The surface was rusted and corroded everywhere. Identifying marks were almost completely lost. Then, on one flat surface, I found letters. Obscured, unreadable, but definitely there. I rubbed at the rust, coated my sleeves in red powders, got little iron oxide splinters under my fingernails. Eventually, I could, just about, read it.

KZ, Dachau

KZ was a Nazi abbreviation. It stood for Konzentrationslager. And I knew what that word meant too,

It meant Concentration Camp.

CHAPTER 63

___________________________________________

Even as he sat in the passenger seat of the second rental vehicle, a van, looking as relaxed as he always did, Razmik's eyes never stopped moving. Even as a child, before all the events that would come to pass, they said he had restless eyes. No detail escaped his attention. As Abraham drove the van down the deserted road that led to their hideaway, Razmik's eyes tracked everything.

He traced the pattern of tire tracks that ran into and out of the puddle ahead of them. Two coming, two going. One set was almost dried and lost, three or four hours old. The other set was newer, maybe an hour and a half old. Both sets looked exactly the same. This made sense as Ardia had phoned him perhaps two hours ago, reporting that she had returned from Berlin but needed to make a second trip.

Abraham noticed Razmik noticing. He then peered at the puddle and the muddy tracks as they bumped over it. He said, ‘What did she need to go back for?'

Razmik gave a Ramik shrug and said, ‘I don’t know. She said she would show us.’

Abraham smiled a faraway smile and said, ‘This will be good. It always is.’

They parked their van alongside the other rental and exited the vehicle. As they walked towards the steel doors, they could hear a buzz of noise from inside. Razmik paused at the door and listened. They were talking inside, excitedly. And there was a high pitched electric buzzing, something like the drone of a huge insect.

Razmik turned his head to Abraham, one eyebrow raised, looking half amused and half very not amused. Abraham smiled and said, ‘Remember, Boss, it’s always good.’

They opened the door.

The scene that greeted them was one they could never have predicted.

The floor was strewn with discarded litter. There were empty paper shopping bags, from clothing stores by their appearance, bearing labels like "Maxxx" and "Enorm". These were kept company by empty packaging for two appliances, said appliances being on display before them, one each in the possession of Ardia and Father Stryker. But the major source of the chaotic mess was hair. An ocean of hair, dark curling locks of hair strewn across the floor. At the epicenter of these sprawling waves of hair were Homer and Ardia.

Homer was seated, looking more miserable than any creature had ever looked, with Ardia standing behind him. However, at first, Razmik did not recognize the figure as Homer.

Ardia looked up and smiled, ‘Well… What do we think?’

Razmik did not know Homer at first because, well, it simply wasn't Homer. The hair of his face had been completely shorn away. Most of his torso was naked as well and Ardia was at this point working on his right arm with a massively powerful looking electric shears. Without the hair, he looked remarkably… human. Not altogether a man, but not that far off. The first thing was the size. He was simply too immense for the human eye to pass over. The linemen in the NFL would look feeble alongside him. Then the proportions were just insane. His width, shoulder to shoulder and hip to hip was immense. His arms were too long. Much too long.

And the face, if you looked closely then you could see the brow was too low and prominent. His canines protruded, though he could possibly cover them with his lip if he tried. His nose was too broad, the nostrils too flared. His ears were too far back and his jaw too far forward. And yet, without the hair, if you didn’t look too closely then you would just see an ugly man. No, not ugly, that wasn't right either. For all his strangeness there was a primitive kind of nobility to that face. It was evocative of an early kind of human. As for the rest of him, if you looked past the dimensions, what was left was roll after roll of solid, hewn muscle.

Abraham's jaw fell open. He had to work it open and closed before he spoke. When he did speak, his comment was directed at the room's other inhabitant, Father O'Connor was not present. He said, ‘Stryker, are you… sewing?'

Stryker was hunched over a newly purchased sewing machine, frantically assembling what may have been the world’s largest, and crudest, pair of shoes.

‘And what’s it to ya?’ Stryker said, immediately standing up and taking his hands off the machine as if he had just realized he was holding rods of plutonium. ‘A fella can sew! Ain’t nothing wrong with it! George Clooney can sew! You calling him a fairy?’

Abraham stammered, ‘I wasn’t calling you a-’

‘Surgeons sew! Cowboys used to sew! You know in great wars tailors used to get recruited to stitch arms and legs right back on to soldiers!'

Razmik raised an eyebrow, ‘I don’t think that’s true-’

‘Genghis Kahn was a seamstress before he took over the whole fucking world!’

Abraham shook his head, ‘That’s definitely not true.’

There was silence then, save for the persistent buzzing of the shaver as it turned Homer into something more and more like a man. Stryker stood there, chest out, fists clenched. Then, with a defeated sigh, he sank back into his chair and resumed his chore. He was a ridiculously powerful figure hunched over the sewing machine. He stuck his tongue out and pinched it between his teeth, a fierce look of concentration on his face.

Razmik shook his head. Even his impassible nature was rattled. He looked at Homer and said, ‘It kind of suits you.’

Homer looked back, the illustrated dictionary’s definition of misery, and said, ‘I want to go to the subway.’

Razmik said, ‘You look… You look well, Homer.’

Stryker perked his head up for a moment and said, ‘You see the muscle on that boy! Sweet Holy Jesus, if I wasn't so absolutely and fanatically dedicated to the oh-so-fairer sex, and so certainly and definitely heterosexual, well I'd have a hard time keeping my hands off him. Looks like a comic-book superhero! Don't know how you're managing there, Ardia!'

Ardia’s cheeks reddened enough to stop traffic at an intersection, but she kept her head down and continued her own task.

The bathroom door opened then and Father O’Connor emerged. He saw the two newcomers and his eyes widened. ‘You’re back! Good! I’ll make tea.’

CHAPTER 64

__________________________________________

An excerpt from the diary of Damian Slayer

Of course, things got bad again.

It started as I walked back from the train station. My visit to the scrapyard had not exactly changed my world, but it had slotted nicely into my picture of the weaving maze of events that had led me to this point.

Dachau. It made perfect sense. It fit with what I believed had followed as well. The veils of the mystery were slowly drawing open before me. At that moment, though, the veil over my entire mind was drawing closed once again.

As I walked down the deserted Berlin street I heard the whisper in my ear. ‘Where is it?' A hissing, ghostly voice. It was so intensely real that I jumped a little, whirling to see who had spoken. Of course, there was no one there.

I hurried my paces then, walking faster towards what I thought then was the safety of the hostel. Before the voice came again I became aware of it pressing on my mind. It was like a growing sensation of drunkenness, but without the pleasure. Maybe it would be better described as a growing sensation of delirium. Yes, that's much closer to the reality. I could feel the sharp edges of my mind beginning to dull. I could detect my steps becoming a little more staggered. Where I was, exactly, was a concept I was suddenly a little less certain of.

I shuffled on quickly. I kept my head pointed down, watching my feet, only glancing up intermittently to make sure I was heading in what I believed was the right direction. I'm not sure if this posture was meant to be a defensive one, or if it was just another symptom of what was happening to me.

As I glanced up to make sure my path was clear, I saw a flicker of movement overhead. I stopped and looked up at the buildings above me. There was nothing there. But had there been? Did I see a shape, a large shape, crawl across the wall of a building high above? No, not crawl. It skittered. Was that something real I had seen or some hallucination brought on by the attack on my brain. I know the more logical conclusion, considering what was happening, was that I had imagined it. But it had seemed very real.

‘Where is it?’ The hissing whispers came to both ears at once this time. I hunched my head back down into my shoulders and shivered. I started to shuffle again, more frantically and less evenly.

I moved on, growing more and more lost with every minute. Every street I went down seemed to be close to deserted. The few people I passed gave me a wide berth. I would have as well.

The voice kept coming back to me, more and more frequently. The volume and clarity of the voice seemed to swell and wane like waves, bouncing around my ears like echoes. And as I walked, completely aimless now, the voice seemed to grow bolder, angrier.

‘Where?’

‘.... is it?’

‘Where is it?’

‘Give it up, just think…’

‘Think about where it is…’

‘Think about where it is and I’ll know…’

Suddenly I felt like something was pulling my feet. Some force was guiding me. Something was nudging me left when it wanted me to go left, and right when it wanted me to go right. I realized, or came upon the sudden belief, that I wasn't wandering so aimlessly after all. Maybe I was being guided. And wherever that was, I knew that I didn't want to be there.

I started to resist. My mind was too much of a blur inside my own head for me to actually concentrate on where I was going, but I started to turn away from the pull, started to let my turns be a little more genuinely random.

The voice didn’t like that.

‘No…’

‘This way…’

‘Come this way, Damien.’

The anger in the voice grew thicker, more palpable. The words began to evolve into shouts.

‘Come this way!’

‘Where is it?’

‘TELL ME WHERE IT IS!'

‘I NEED TO KNOW WHERE THE CRUCIBLE IS!’

The Crucible. That made it real. It was a little splash of cold water on my brain that brought me back a little. Just a little. But it was enough to make me believe in the thing that was happening to me. To understand that it wasn't random.

Then, I stopped walking. I raised my head to look up and, somehow, incredibly, I was standing in front of the door to the hostel. I almost fell through the door in my relief to find refuge.

But it wasn’t really refuge at all. It was a prison. I was under siege.