It certainly wasn’t now. No fortune was worth this.
Jackson felt his cellphone vibrate in his jacket pocket. He slipped it out and saw the screen glowing with an incoming call. Donovan’s number. He fingered the answer button thoughtfully for a moment, then shook his head and shut the phone off. This was something that could not wait and he did not want to let Donovan have the chance to talk him out of it. Donovan was his boss, but Jenna was his life.
He slipped his key into the door and pushed it open.
The apartment, like most in New York, was compact. He walked down a short corridor, flanked by a bathroom and the bedroom, and then out into the living room.
‘Jenna?’
A small hand-written note was waiting for him on a coffee table in the middle of the room. He picked it up as he felt a breeze coming in from the nearby windows, heavy curtains drawn across them. Jenna had gone across the block to a friend’s place. Would be back in half an hour. Jackson shook his head and smiled. The fact that she could have left the note four hours ago obviously hadn’t crossed her mind when she’d set off for Harriet’s.
The breeze wafted cold air across him again and he looked up to see the curtains billowing in the breeze from the open window.
‘For Christ’s sake, Jenna, how many more times?’
Jackson tossed the note down and walked across to the window. Jenna had left them open a hundred times, preferring the fresh air, which was fine in summer but in the middle of November it was goddamned freezing.
Jackson reached up to pull the curtains aside, and even as he did so a tiny part of his brain registered that although the window was open, he could not hear the traffic down on the block seventy feet below.
His arms whipped the curtains aside and went numb as they did so. The window was firmly closed, sealed shut. Double-glazed panes blocked almost all noise but sirens from the city outside. His heart fluttered in his chest as he felt his guts sinking inside of him.
‘Jesus,’ he whispered. ‘Please, no.’
The hairs on Jackson’s neck stood on end as he felt the temperature in the apartment plummet, his breath condensing before him on the air. In the reflection of the room in the window before him, he saw the lights flicker and fade like distant lightning.
Jackson reached down for the pistol at his shoulder-holster but he knew that it was useless. There was only one possible way to save himself and that was to get out of the apartment. His legs quivered beneath him and he felt his stomach loosen.
In his reflection he saw the lampshade hanging from the ceiling begin swinging gently as though something had brushed past it toward him. The cold became bitter and sharp as though it was biting into his skin, and with a sudden and complete certainty he knew that the wraith was not just in the room with him, but was directly behind him.
As terror constricted his breathing and threatened to paralyze his limbs, Jackson whispered a final prayer and then whirled.
He dashed forwards and hurdled the coffee table in a single bound, charging for the entrance hall and the front door. He was halfway there when something plowed into his chest as though he had been hit by a car.
Jackson’s lungs convulsed as he was hurled backwards, his chin slamming into his breastbone as the impact threw him across the back of the couch to land hard on the floor. He rolled and hit the wall beneath the window, cracking the back of his head hard enough that stars danced in pulses of light before his eyes.
He staggered to his feet with his back to the window and raised his hands, looking uselessly across the apartment.
‘Please, I didn’t mean to do it!’ The room remained silent but bitterly cold. His eyes searched desperately left and right, seeking a glimpse of his tormentor. ‘I came here to put it right!’
His breath puffed in thick clouds before him as he hyperventilated, his heart pounding in his chest. Suddenly, the clouds of condensing vapor swirled before him and for a brief but horrific instant a terrifying visage glared back at him, a face both human and yet twisted with demonic rage, as though it had crawled from the darkest bowels of Hell itself.
Jackson let out a howl of terror and tried to run past the fearsome image. Something immensely powerful thumped into his guts and lifted him off the ground, his terrified scream cut short as the blow blasted the air from his lungs.
Jackson flew backwards and smashed through the glazed windows, shards of glass slicing through his body like scalpels as his head cracked against the window frame and shattered under the impact as he plowed through the window and out into the chill night air.
His body arced outward into the void amid a cloud of sparkling particles of glass and plummeted seventy feet down toward the brightly lit street below, before hitting the asphalt hard enough to shatter every single bone in his body and burst his skull like an exploding melon.
Cars tires screeched and several pedestrians screamed as the traffic crawled to a halt either side of the ruined corpse.
46
‘I don’t know how this is going to help, Karina.’
Karina Thorne reached up and grabbed a solid iron door knocker, slamming it three times on the tremendous, ancient wooden doors. To Ethan, everything about the cathedral seemed to dominate the street before it. The doors themselves were probably forty feet high, ornately decorated, and the cathedral’s facade and twin spires climbed high into the morning sky. Standing with Jarvis, Lopez and Karina, he felt entirely dwarfed by the building.
Karina looked across at Lopez. ‘We need help, Nicola. We can’t fight this thing on our own. It’s not of this world.’
‘Sure,’ Ethan agreed, ‘but the people that run these places don’t have any answers either.’
‘Monsignor Thomas is not your average priest,’ Karina assured him.
The huge doors clicked loudly, and Ethan heard what sounded like a heavy iron bolt being dragged through its mounts, before a smaller door was heaved open by a young man inside.
‘Miss Lopez,’ said a young man, ‘Monsignor Thomas is expecting you.’
Ethan followed Jarvis, Karina and Lopez inside as the man hefted the door closed behind them, the wood hitting the jamb with a dull thud that echoed around the cavernous interior of the cathedral.
Normally filled with tourists, the nave was empty this early in the morning. Chandeliers hung from lines that ran up into the enormous vaulted stone ceiling high above their heads, illuminating in a gentle glow the endless ranks of pews and the towering fluted columns that supported the roof.
Giant stained-glass windows set high into the walls glowed blue with the light from the sky outside, and the sheer audacity of the architecture and the complexity of the artwork forged into the stone walls took Ethan’s breath away. He wasn’t by any means a religious person, but the scale of what men could achieve in the pursuit of worship astounded him nonetheless.
‘Built by men of power,’ Jarvis said as they walked, ‘when ordinary people were starving all around them. Such are churches. Building libraries would have served the people better.’