The Dark Rift: The Supernatural Grail Quest Zombie Apocalypse (The Last Artifact Trilogy Book 1) (2 page)

Istanbul, Turkey.

Professor Agardi Metrovich
staggered out of the examination room and into the hall of the private Istanbul hospital. He was a large, bearded man, dressed in a tweed sports jacket with frayed cuffs. The door closed behind him as he exited, shutting out the chanting priests as they continued with their archaic ritual. Through the walls, the weary Professor could still hear the spitting curses coming from his patient, a sensation of pure evil crawling over his skin like a thousand insects.

As he had expected, he was instantly approached by Isaac Rodchenko, the victim’s father. The latter was a patient himself, a decade younger than he, and stricken with paranoid schizophrenia. Over the course of the evening the unearthly cries had driven the poor man into a state of despair.

“Professor Metrovich!” he whispered, his eyes straining with worry. “You must tell me what is happening to my child!”

The Professor could only stare back at him, his own face pale and drawn with fear. After decades of medically overseeing exorcisms, the seasoned Professor had yet to overcome the horror that the rituals consistently provoked in him. He struggled with his emotions, finding comfort in the words of an ancient text he had long ago unearthed in his research.

Fear is an illusion; a ghost without substance. It is easily dispelled.

In many cases, suspected victims were merely suffering from severe psychotic dementia, but on rare occasions such as this, events could not be explained so readily. Demonic possession was an anomaly that defied all rational thought. It was something not of this earth.

“Please, sit down, Mr. Rodchenko,” the Professor managed to say, and following his own advice, he collapsed heavily into one of the waiting armchairs. “You must give me a moment to regain my strength.”

Isaac Rodchenko sat down at once. He had a healthy complexion for his sixty odd years, along with thick salt and pepper hair and black eyebrows. He wore an elegant charcoal grey suit, and had an air of humble confidence about him, despite his distress. For a long moment Isaac waited obediently, but could contain himself no longer.

“My son has spent thirty-three years in a vegetative state,” he said, rubbing his hands together nervously. “How is it possible that he should have awakened from it now, and in this condition? I know you are keeping something from me, Professor. Have pity on a suffering father. Tell me, please!”

The old Professor held Isaac’s gaze for a moment, but then let his eyes fall.

How could I possibly tell this man what I suspect to be true?

“Professor Metrovich!” insisted Isaac. “You must tell me at once!”

Metrovich looked up, his tired eyes scanning the distressed face before him. He opened his mouth, as though to speak, but before he could do so an unearthly scream split the silence. It was followed immediately by a call from one of the priests inside.

“Professor! Come quickly!”

In one clumsy motion the Professor rose from his chair and passed into the examination room, a stench of rot and suffering engulfing him as he entered. There, in the half light, he could see two priests hunched over the possessed man, his repulsively obese body contorting in a series of slow and twisting seizures. Having already been severely deformed since birth, the effects of the possession had transformed the victim into something utterly horrific. Metrovich looked to the priests. They stood there in quiet resignation, praying silently over the hideous beast.

“We are losing him, Professor,” whispered the ancient Father Franco.

The Professor’s eyes found the electrocardiogram and saw that the old priest was not mistaken. The patient had entered into cardiac arrest. In his weakened state, there would be no way of saving him. His joints creaked woodenly as he lurched and twisted, his body becoming suddenly still before moving into a violent death rattle. When it was done, the heart monitor gave off a flat, uninterrupted tone, and crossing himself, Father Franco reached over and muted the alarm.

With the death of the victim, a deep silence had fallen over the room, a residual feeling of the supernatural hanging in the air like a pall. In all his years of overseeing exorcisms, Metrovich had never witnessed a more ghastly case as this, and judging by the expressions on the two priests, he could see that they had not done so either.

Metrovich moved towards the corpse. Ever since they had arrived earlier that evening, he had been plagued by a persistent gut feeling; it warned of something so unlikely that it seemed ludicrous that he should even be considering it.

He took hold of the urine soaked gown that covered the victim’s lower torso, but froze instantly in the act. He thought he had felt a slight tremor running through the corpse, and in that instant, a wave of fear rippled through him. He looked more closely. The cadaver was visibly trembling. His eyes darted to the ECG. It was still showing a flat-line.

This is impossible. The body is dead.

Metrovich looked back in time to see the ghastly corpse jerk to life.

“Ahreimanius!”
it hissed menacingly, the upper body lurching violently toward him.

All watched in horror as the restraining straps gave way, the thrashing corpse coming dangerously close to the Professor before collapsing back onto the bed. A final quake ran through the body.

Struggling to keep himself composed, the Professor reached forward to resume his task, drawing slowly aside the gown that covered the lower half of its torso. What he saw filled him with horror and disgust. Behind him Father Franco gagged and coughed.

Plainly visible in front of them, grotesque and utterly malformed, were a pair of lacerated genitals, disproportionately large, and belonging to both the male and female sexes. It was at that moment that a shaft of light split the darkness, and Isaac’s swaying silhouette appeared in the doorway. He stared blankly at the scene before him.

“You did not tell us that your son was a hermaphrodite, Mr. Rodchenko,” said Metrovich softly, his eyes still glued to the victim.

Isaac seemed to wince at the statement.

“Is he dead?”

The Professor turned to face the grieving father, but said nothing, his expression containing a mixture of compassion and confusion. With this latest development, twenty years of skepticism had been suddenly stripped from his mind. The evidence was now irrefutable; the coincidences far too numerous to discount. Through the death of this unfortunate victim, an ancient and obscure prophecy had somehow been made manifest. The impossible had somehow transpired.

“I know this is difficult for you, Mr. Rodchenko,” said Metrovich slowly. “Can you remember where your son was conceived?”

The Professor’s words struck Isaac like a dull blow. He was too drugged to sense any pain, but the question probed one of the primary causes of his illness. His wife had died while giving birth to their misshapen son, and he had never recovered from the loss of her. Over the years he had progressively lost his mind. He fell to his knees, rocking himself to and fro.

“My wife and I were on a religious pilgrimage in the mountains of northern Spain,” he muttered, his eyes squinting ever so slightly as he remembered. “We were on a small lake. We had found a little island…”

Metrovich tore his gaze from Isaac and turned to face Father Franco. The old priest looked back at him, his eyes alight with foreboding.

“God help us all,” he said solemnly.

Outside a rumbling chorus of thunder sounded. The storm that had long been approaching had finally arrived.

Florence, Italy.

The thirty-two year old
Dr. Natasha Rossi sat amid the clutter of her small restoration shop. Before her on a battered workbench lay the ninth century tabernacle she had been working on. It was almost finished. Directly behind it, a large monitor displayed a three-dimensional, infrared scan of the piece. Her computer had just finished rendering it, and she was using it to spot tiny deposits that had been missed during the restoration process. Playing in the background, as usual, was one of her many self-help audiobooks.

…for this reason, traumas in our past relationships can be part of the reason why we keep attracting selfish jerks into our lives. We feel compelled to fix the things that went wrong the last time, and this can happen over and over again until we finally become aware of the cycle…

Natasha applied solvent to a tiny deposit of paraffin lodged in the tabernacle’s base, nodding in agreement the whole while. As she listened, she thought bitterly about her disastrous love life, and the seven months she had just wasted on her ex-boyfriend. She had recently discovered that he was married, and she found herself wondering how she could be so adept at finding the tiniest flaws in artifacts when she was so blind to the most blatant flaws in men. Or maybe she was aware of their flaws, and simply thought that their imperfections were something that could be removed if she was meticulous enough, like stripping dirt from an old tabernacle.

“He really was a jerk…” she whispered, blowing a lock of hair out of her eyes as she worked.

It was a dark chestnut colour and fell thick and curly over her shoulders.

“And it
is
true. I really did try to fix him.”

Natasha’s accent was Italian, but three years at Harvard had tempered it nicely. She ran through her positive affirmations, feeling another wave of depression coming on.

I am strong and powerful. My thoughts and actions create my destiny.

Christmas was approaching, and Natasha was dreading it. There would be all the parties and church functions she would have to attend, and she would be alone the entire time. It seemed to her that she was always alone, even if she happened to be dating someone. The only time Natasha ever felt truly sociable was when she was dancing, but even her love of the ballet had brought her disappointment of late. Natasha’s challenging little role in this years’ production of
The Nutcracker Suite
had disappeared when the show was cancelled due to poor ticket sales. Months of grueling practice had been lost in the blink of an eye.

Looking out through the panes of her shop front window, Natasha could see the little piazza outside. Its stalls were uncharacteristically quiet for a mid-December afternoon. Christmas in Florence was normally a magical time, but this year had been very different.

After a devastating terrorist attack in Los Angeles, the U.S. economy had suddenly collapsed like a deck of cards. Italy had been thrust into a severe economic depression as a result, along with the majority of the planet. It had left the streets of the Renaissance city bereft of tourists and holiday shoppers alike.

Natasha had been more fortunate than most. Seemingly unaffected by the global crisis, the Vatican had continued business as usual, proceeding with its museum renovations and inundating Natasha’s little restoration shop with dozens of artifacts needing to be catalogued and cleaned. It was a tedious job, but one that was constantly reenergized by the small chance that something new might be revealed as the layers of carbon and paraffin were stripped away.

It was this act of revealing, and her strong passion for it, that had inspired Natasha to work in artifact restoration to begin with. Having grown up surrounded by religious relics, it seemed a natural extension to the doctorate she held in theology. With her combined skills, she could not only delve into the mysteries of the spiritual world, but also into those of the material. It was the perfect marriage of knowledge and skill, and one that she had found to be very rewarding over the years.

  Natasha laid down her tools and rose from her chair, stretching herself as she did so. Across from her a sixteenth century mirror reminded her of how many hours she had been working.

“I look horrible,” she whispered, the tips of her fingers automatically arranging her bangs to cover the pale, dime-sized scar at the centre of her forehead.

It had been there for as long as she could remember; the remnant of abuses she had suffered in an orphanage as an infant. There were other burn marks on her body as well. Plastic surgery in her late teens had made the scars almost imperceptible, but they still haunted Natasha nonetheless. They were ghosts of an evil that had touched her before her earliest memories. They made her feel malformed and inadequate, despite her rational knowledge that they were practically invisible. Although everyone had always insisted that Natasha was a beauty, she had always felt a little like a fraud. She thought her soft brown eyes were far too big for her face, and that her body was far too skinny.

Continuing with her stretching, Natasha approached the windows in time to see a mass of heavy cloud swallow the sun. The bright afternoon was transforming into an ominous grey, and within moments, heavy drops of rain began to spatter the cobblestones outside. Following a particularly violent barrage of thunder and lightning, Natasha turned to find that her computer had shut down, along with all the lights in the room. Outside, the storm exploded into a deluge.

“I forgot to save that scan…” she said gloomily, and then her eyes darted to the front door.

A powerful gust of wind had just blown it open, bringing with it a spray of torrential rain. Natasha wasted no time. Priceless artifacts were getting wet. She arrived at the breach in seconds, reaching up to take hold of the outer door and slamming it down with a crash. The workshop plunged into darkness. It was only then that a distinct and irregular banging could be heard coming from the back room.

“What is that?”

A wave of fear ran through her. Natasha was not one to be easily frightened, but she could not deny the eerie feeling that accompanied the sounds she was hearing. She dispelled her fears and made her way into the darkness. The banging would have to be seen to.

For almost one hundred years, the back area of the workshop had been used as a storeroom; a place that Natasha rarely ventured into. It was cluttered with thousands of religious artifacts, and bric-a-brac of every kind, its few naked bulbs never providing enough light to dispel the fears she had held for the place since she was a child. Even still, she now found herself venturing into its depths, groping through cobwebs with nothing but a flashlight to illuminate her way.

“Hello? Is anybody there?”

A crack of thunder sounded as if in response.

Natasha bit her lip and made her way into the maze of cluttered shelves, stepping around obstacles with grace despite her fear. She swallowed slowly. She could feel the little hairs on her arms and neck standing on end. It was as if something had invaded her workshop; something paranormal; something demonic. She reminded herself how ludicrous this sounded, but she frowned in confusion nonetheless. All Natasha’s instincts were telling her to flee, yet there was something else drawing her forward despite her fear.

It was not long before Natasha found the source of the banging, and she breathed a sigh of relief. The same gust of wind that had blown open the front door had opened the back door as well. She could see it swinging to and fro in the dim light of a gas lamp outside, banging the old door frame at irregular intervals. Its rusted latch had obviously given way under the jolt of wind.

Natasha looked down suddenly and swallowed hard. There was a tattered street dog crouching in the shadows of an antique cabinet, its eyes glowing coldly in the reflected light. It stood as if ready to pounce and Natasha felt her body going limp with fear.

It must have come in when the door blew open.

Natasha knew the way of animals. She knew that if she were to escape this situation unharmed, she would have to conquer her fears and emit a feeling of tranquility. She moved to sit down as slowly as she could, but stopped herself halfway. The dog was not growling at her, but rather at something else; something behind her.

Natasha jerked her head around, the dog lunging forward as she did so, but there was nothing there. Looking back at the dog, she saw that it was pacing around nervously, the hair on its back still on end. Animals could see things that humans could not, she knew this, but what had it seen? Her mobile phone rang suddenly just then, the shrill tone of it startling the dog. With a loud bark he bolted, rushing through the back door and vanishing into the storm.

“Pronto?” she said, bringing the phone to her ear.

She was hurrying to the door now, wanting nothing but to close it. Outside a sheet of lightning lit up the sky.

“Is this Natasha Rossi?” said a crackling voice on the other end of the line.

It spoke in English, but bore a heavy Spanish accent.

“Yes.”

“Miss Rossi, this is Sergeant Alberto Martinez of the Spanish Civil Guard. I am afraid I have some very distressing news, señorita.”

“Yes, I am listening,” said Natasha, a sick feeling growing in her stomach.

She closed the door and locked it shut. Darkness engulfed her.

“I am so sorry, señorita. A private plane chartered yesterday by Professor Agardi Metrovich and Father Franco Rossi has crashed in the mountains southwest of Santander. All including the pilot have been killed. Father Franco was your legal guardian, no?”

“What have you done with him?”

“We managed to land a paramedic to see if there were any survivors, señorita, but there were none. Their plane is very high in the mountains, and it is in a very dangerous position to access due to the high winds. We have been unable to retrieve their bodies. This might not be possible until the coming spring, señorita.”

“I see,” said Natasha, lost in a daze. “Thank you, Sergeant.”

Natasha sank to the floor, the musty storeroom plunging into blackness as the light from her mobile phone went out. Father Franco had cared for her since she was a little girl, and if those at the church orphanage in Rome had been her family, Father Franco had been her father. Now he was gone, and her heart burst open with grief.

Natasha’s thoughts went to Father Franco’s lifelong friend, the Bishop Marcus Di Lauro. He lived close to the orphanage in Rome, and had been like an uncle to Natasha all her life. He and Father Franco had been inseparable since they were young students.

How can I tell him what has happened? He is too old. The shock will kill him.

Suddenly, from within the inky hollows that surrounded her, the sinister presence that Natasha had felt only moments before, returned. It seeped over her like fetid flood water.

“Oh, God,” she moaned. “Make it go away.”

But the evil remained. In her sorrow she almost welcomed it.