BlackWind Page 13

  “How could something live that long inside the body?”

  “Will you let me tell the tale, lad?”

  Sean clamped his lips shut.

  “Dunne and his team discussed it for a long time, all the while watching whatever was under the leathery skin squirming around. I've read Lutz's notes, and she said the sound it made as it moved was like a field mouse scurrying under a dry cornhusk. Finally, Dunne made the decision to do an autopsy.”

  “Wouldn't that have been against the antiquity laws?” Sean injected.

  “What did Dunne care if it was? He had a discovery unlike any other. Knowing him as I do, I'm sure all he saw was the glory, the law be damned!”

  “So they cut it open,” Sean said, disgusted.

  “Aye, and discovered something even more bizarre. The creature's blood was as black as tar. And, although the body was perfectly preserved on the outside, the inside was something else again. All the internal organs were shriveled and dried up.”

  “How could they know the blood was black, then?”

  “Lad,” O'Shea said with exasperation, “stop interrupting and let me finish! Just take my word for it that the blood was black as a moonless night and let it go at that, will ya?”

  Sean bit his tongue. Though he had hundreds of questions, he realized he had to bide his time. He nodded his agreement and forced himself to sit back and relax.

  “Good lad,” O'Shea mumbled. “So they did the Y incision, but when they folded back the skin on the creature's chest, Dunne and Bryan nearly went through the roof. What they found was an eel-like abomination with green flesh covered in hard scales. It was about a foot in length, and the tip of its tail was forked and covered with sharp spines. The thing had red eyes, elliptical in shape like a viper's, and fangs that dripped a noxious, highly acidic fluid, which burned a hole through the wooden examination table. They could not believe anything like that could exist inside another living creature without destroying it.” O'Shea watched his son's face. “All right—ask.”

  “How did it get inside the creature?”

  “Well, now, that's the question they've been trying to answer since that day. No one knows how it got there. They know it's a form of parasite that feeds off the blood in the kidneys of the host body. They also know it can go into an extended state of hibernation.” O'Shea shuddered and looked at his hands. “And that it wasn't alone in the creature's body.”

  Sean drew in a harsh breath. “There were more?”

  “The thing they pulled out of the creature was the ‘queen’ of a whole nest, or what Dunne called ‘a hive,’ for there were dozens of the worm-like things in a honeycombed sac attached to one of the creature's kidneys. Most of them were no larger than your little fingernail.”

  “W...were they dead?”

  O'Shea looked him in the eye. “Five of those malevolent little beasties were still squirming. Dunne harvested them and put them in a jar with a piece of the creature's kidney. The trouble was, it wasn't the meat the parasites needed.”

  “The organs were dried up,” Sean said with a frown. “That means they were feeding on what—the queen?”

  “As I said—a very intuitive young man,” O'Shea stated, obviously pleased. “Two of the worms died before Dunne realized what you just did. Once he did, he sliced his finger, dropped some of his blood into the containers, and the parasites perked right up like a Fleet Street hooker with a new tattoo on her tit.” He chuckled. “You understand my meaning.”

  Sean grinned at the analogy. “I do.”

  O'Shea's face turned somber. He shifted in his chair to get more comfortable. “Dunne and his assistants began experimenting with the parasites. They put a laboratory mouse into a beaker with one of the things, but the mouse wouldn't go near it, and it wouldn't go near the mouse. Next they sacrificed one of the parasites, shoving it down a mouse's throat. Nothing happened, so they realized the mouse's stomach acid did the thing in. Next, they killed one of the mice, gutted it, and put it in a beaker. This time, the thing swarmed over the mouse and began to feed on the rodent's blood.”

  “Where was the mother creature, the queen?”

  “Placed in a beaker of its own. Dunne drew blood from each of his team members and began feeding it. When new workers are hired on at Fuilghaoth, it is the next thing they want to see after the creature itself. If seeing the Reaper ain't enough to put the fear of God in you, seeing that creature coiled up in the vat, glaring back at you, sure as hell is!”

  “It's still alive?” Sean gasped.

  “As alive as you and me, lad.”

  Sean ran a hand through his thick hair. “Did he name those things inside the Reaper?” he asked, his voice raspy.

  “Aye. He learned the thing inside is called a ‘revenant worm’ and that it had a physic bond to its host.”

  “A symbiotic relationship?”

  “Precisely. You are a bright boy, you are.”

  “So they needed to know what effect these things had on the creature. They began to experiment.”

  “That they did, but it wasn't until Bryan had the idea to surgically implant the parasite into one of the mice that they learned what the relationship between hose and parasite was.”

  “What happened to the mouse?”

  “It changed,” O'Shea said, holding Sean's avid gaze.

  “Into what?”

  “Into a creature twice the size of the one it had been before the surgical intrusion. Twice the size, with four times the speed, and a hundred times the strength. It was able to knock over its container and scamper away before they could catch it. And not only was it faster, stronger, and bigger, it was also smarter. Sometime during the night, it managed to release the other lab mice. The next morning, they were nowhere to be seen.”

  “Oh, my God...”

  “Dunne knew he'd happened on something more important than just the discovery of that beast. And he wondered what putting one of those parasites inside a human would do. At that moment, hell opened on Earth—Fuilghaoth was born.”

  “He experimented on humans?”

  O'Shea shrugged. “Not at first, mind you. For a year or two, he and a team of like-minded scientists he'd gathered from all over the world experimented with animals. By then, Dunne had bought land and built the compound near Derry Bryne. You won't find that town on any map of Ireland, I'll tell you right now, but it's there and right smack in the middle is the Fuilghaoth compound.” He cocked his head to one side. “Do you know what that means in Gaelic, lad? Fuilghaoth?”

  Sean shook his head.

  “It is Gaelic for ‘blood wind.'” He looked at his watch and frowned. “That's enough for one sitting. I've given you more than enough to think about.” He stood. “I'll come back tomorrow and we'll talk more. There's a whole lot you need to know.”

  Sean stood also. Although he wanted to plead with the man to stay, to go on with the tale, he instinctively knew it would do no good. Brian O'Shea would tell his tale in his own time and in his own manner. “Thank you for coming to see me,” he said, putting out his hand. “What you've told me is incredible.”

  “Lad,” O'Shea sighed, taking Sean's hand, “you've only been shown the tip of an iceberg deadlier than the one what sunk the Titanic. When you hear the whole of it, you may curse the day you met me.”

  CHAPTER 13

  She had seen him now for three nights in a row.

  Like a will-'o-the-wisp, he had suddenly appeared just after moonrise on Sunday, on the brow of the hill where the cromlechs stood sentinel to the Goddess Aine. His arms akimbo, his legs apart, he stared at her. With his face blurred by distance and the milky mist floating in from the bogs, she wished—not for the first time—that she had a telescope. In her heart, she gave him a name, though her brain told her he could not be the one she so longed to see.

  This man's build was not the same as her lover's. This sentinel, as she thought of him, was taller, heavier in stature, with long dark hair that cascaded over his shoulders and fell to th
e middle of his back. He seemed powerful, even dangerous, and he moved with a stride that seemed to shake the earth.

  She lifted her hand to the window, pressing her palm to the glass and—as he had done on the two nights previously—he lifted his hand, too. She could almost feel the warmth of his hand against hers.

  “Who are you?” She smiled sadly when he cocked his head to one side as though he were trying to understand her words.

  A sound in the hallway made her turn to look at the door. When she glanced back around, he was no longer on the hill, seeming to have vanished in the fog.

  Bronwyn sighed deeply and rested her forehead on the cool glass. Her fingers arched against the glass in a hopeless gesture. Her breath caught on a wretched sob. Tears coursed down her cheeks as she sank to the floor, her cheek scraping along the rough stonewall.

  “Sean,” she whimpered, wrapping her arms around her. “Oh, Sean, I miss you so!”

  From the distance, the howl came, reverberating through the fieldstone walls. It was a lonely sound, a pitiful cry, and it brought her head up. She looked out the window, not surprised to see him on the hill once more. He seemed to be reaching out to her and she drew in a shocked breath.

  “Sean?” she asked, coming to her feet. She slapped at the locked window. “Sean!”

  He threw back his head and bellowed. A shiver of surprise and expectation ran through her. She grabbed the handle, knowing she could not open the portal, but trying anyway. She pulled on the offending metal, straining to break it, to pull it free of its housing.

  “Sean!” she cried and watched as the sentinel started down the hill.

  Her heart raced faster with every foot of ground he covered in his mad dash to her. She pounded at the tempered glass with her fist. He was only a hundred feet away, loping pell-mell toward her with his arms pumping like pistons, his feet digging into the earth. She saw his eyes—silver-hued in the moonlight.

  “Sean?” she questioned, knowing,now, it was not her beloved she had conjured.

  One moment he was a few yards away, the next he sprung from the ground in an aerial leap no human could have made. He cleared the fourteen-foot high walls of Galrath Convent and sprinted toward the tower in which the good sisters had imprisoned her.

  Terrified, Bronwyn ran, shrieking as she lurched for the door. Behind her, something hit the wall. The entire room shook. She spun around and saw him clinging to the outside wall, three stories high, his face pressed against the glass. She screamed—a blood-curdling sound that outwardly startled the sentinel.

  Afraid to turn her back lest he break through the glass and come after her, she stared at him. He cocked his head to one side, while his silver eyes became wet with cinereous tears. The heartbreaking sound of his low groan was so pitiful, so grievously wounding, she put her hands over her ears.

  “Go away! Leave me alone!”

  The sentinel whimpered. He clawed gently at the window, long talons dragging down the glass.

  Then she heard her name on his thick black lips—"Bronnie.”

  With a gasp, she sat bolt upright in bed, heart pounding, eyes wide, as she snapped her head toward the window.

  A dream. Nothing more than a dream!

  Throwing back the cover, she rushed to the window. She flung back the curtains and stared out from her tower room into the murky mist that crept in from the sea and spiraled over the crest of the hill. There was no cromlech to Aine. No sentinel standing watch. Only the low banners of fog dancing over the ground and the moonlight pulsing through the cloud cover.

  For a long while she stood, staring, trying to conjure the shape of a man on the brow of Sleivemartin, a foothill of the Mourne Mountains. She waited—hoping, longing, needing, but receiving nothing save the ache that destroyed another small part of her lonely heart.

  She went back to bed and curled into a fetal position, her hands thrust between her thighs. She shivered with the cold seeping in through the old fieldstone walls, but made no move to lift the coverlet over her.

  It was, she thought, the wild tales other girls told after supper that had caused the dream. The girl from London had brought up the legend of the Bugul Noz.

  “He is so hideously ugly, so repulsive, that even animals fear his appearance,” Sheila had said in a wide-eyed stage whisper. “He lives in the Brittany woodlands, deep underground, and only comes out when the fog is so thick no one can see his loathsome face. He hates the way he looks and is said to be the last of his race. But...” She lowered her voice. “Because he is so lonely, so desperately in need of human companionship, he will offer you anything, do whatever you ask of him, in exchange for your company and compassion.”

  Bronwyn groaned. Though the tale was nothing more than an old talespinner's yarn, a legend from a time when faeries and banshees and the Green Man held sway over the Celtic people, the thought of any creature—mythical or otherwise—suffering so touched Bronwyn's heart.

  She cried for the Bugul Noz's loneliness. She cried for her own heartbreaking aloneness, and she cried for Sean and the solitude he, too, had been forced to endure because of her parent's narrow-minded, bigoted beliefs.

  She pressed her face into the starched stiffness of her pillow and screamed as loudly as she dared. Not because she was afraid of the bogeyman who had visited her in the dream. Not because of the hopelessness that was hers from sunup to sundown.

  It was for the years of such wretchedness she knew would be hers to bear.

  * * * *

  The ages-old Nightwind stirred, snatched from his centuries-long slumber by the Call of one more powerful than he. He listened, frowning at the intrusion. His name on the tongue of He Who Calls was a long, low wail of command as it wove its way to him once more.

  Sighing with impatience and bone-deep weariness, he lifted himself from the warm nest he had made from driftwood and petrified-forest branches and floated in the darkness of his lair. The smell of sulfur drifted under his nostrils and he inhaled the aroma as a connoisseur of fine wine will smell a cork. He opened his eyes and surveyed the barren cave he called home.

  The rough, thick walls dripped with noxious fumes he found comforting to the senses. No light made its way this deep into the cavern system, but no light was needed. His nocturnal vision was as sharp as ever.

  Once again, He Who Calls made bid for his attention. The awakened sleeper growled with annoyance. As he did, the air within his lair—as chill as the deepest reaches of the megaverse—became laced with a heavy blanket of fog. The mist surrounding him took on a pinkish cast from the crimson glow of his angry eyes.

  With one last snort of disgust, he levitated up to the ceiling and passed through. His corporeal body transformed to pure energy as he sped into the ebon limitedness of space. Like a shooting star, he sped through time and millennia, weaving his way to He Who Calls. Though his black heart was not in the summons, his blood began to stir.

  CHAPTER 14

  Sean hurried behind the guard the next afternoon, eager to talk to Brian O'Shea. He had not slept, and was bleary-eyed and tired, a brutal headache making him wince at loud sounds. He thought the headache might well be because he hadn't eaten much since his incarceration. His jailers had laughed at his request to have vegetarian meals, and it seemed the vegetable servings were smaller than they should be and the meat portions larger. As a result, he had lost ten pounds.

  But the headache might have come from the odious stench that had nearly suffocated him. Yet when he had asked his fellow inmates if they smelled the ghastly odor, no one seemed to know what he was talking about. They looked at him as though he had lost his mind.

  Realizing he had been alone in his perception of the being, Sean decided to say no more about the nocturnal stench.

  Opening the door for him, the guard stepped aside. Sean entered the visitor's room.

  Brian was seated at the table, a Styrofoam container in front of him. “Hello, son,” he said with a smile.

  Sean took Brian's proffered hand. He could not s
eem to think of the man as his father and wondered why.

  “It's all new to you,” Brian said with a laugh. “You'll get used to it in time.”

  Sean sniffed. “You brought food?” He spied a paper bag on the table.

  “I went by Mama Vivian's. I heard the food there was decent.”

  Sean straddled his chair and sat, reaching eagerly for the container. When he opened it, his eyes widened. Fried okra, Crowder peas with boiled okra, rutabaga, fried eggplant, and fried summer squash—all the vegetables he loved. He looked up. “Thank you,” he said, his voice breaking.

  “Eat.” Brian reaching into his pocket for a plastic fork and extended it to Sean. “Enjoy it, although for the life of me I don't see how anyone could! Give me a rare steak and a hunk of bread any day and I'm content.”

  Sean dove into the food with relish, eating as though he were starving. When he looked up and saw Brian's ugly frown, he stopped eating, the fork halfway to his mouth. “What's the matter?”

  “Gobshites have been starving you, haven't they?”

  Sean shrugged, forking the rutabaga into his mouth. “They just won't cater to someone who doesn't eat meat.”

  Brian's jaw clenched. “You've only another day or two here and you can eat what you damned well please!”

  Sean sighed as he chewed. “I miss Ma's cooking.”

  “I drove up to see her this morning.”

  Sean blinked. “They let you see her?”

  Brian arched a thick brow. “You think they could have stopped me, lad?”

  Grinning, Sean shook his head. “I guess not, if you had your mind set on it.” He ladled some peas into his mouth. “How is she?”

  “As well as can be expected. I told her I would be seeing to you from here on out.”

  Astonished, Sean lowered his fork. “Seeing to me in what way?”

  Brian put his elbows on the table and threaded his fingers together. “I told her I'd be taking you back with me to Fuilghaoth.”

  A shiver ran down Sean's spine. “Ireland?”

  “Aye, lad. To Ireland.”

  Sean swallowed. “My lady is there, Brian.”