"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.