There was no one to greet me, but I surmised a tacit invitation to enter had been given. I pushed the door open and called out. "Nightjar!"
"Winterbourne! We're in the parlour! Be quick, man."
I followed the sound of his voice and the flicker of a lamp to the sitting room where Jerusalem Nightjar waited in the company of a sleeping woman. "Ah, there you are—"
Nightjar raised a powerful finger to his lips, warning me to lower my voice.
I nodded and gazed down at the elderly woman reclining on the divan. "I take it this is the redoubtable Madame Adair?"
"Indeed. I've placed her in a mesmeric trance."
Though I did not tell him, I believed this to be a good thing. Madame Adair was notorious both for her dubious claim of access to the spirit realm and her loquacious manner. Silencing her with hypnosis seemed a workable remedy for her shenanigans. "What do you require of me?"
He held me with his dark, earnest eyes — the left one marred by the scar that ran down his cheek. "You must be my lifeline, dear Edward. The vision that haunts her cannot be exorcised from without. I must join her in this trance and you must draw me out again when the battle has been won."
I would have been heartened by his prediction of victory were I inclined to blithely accept his stated intention. "Join her in a trance? Good heavens, Nightjar. I've seen a great many things in our adventures, but what you propose…"
He dismissed my disbelief with a wave of his hand. "Your incredulity, thankfully, will not influence the process. You need only keep watch and wake me when the time is right." He positioned a chair directly before the supine woman.
"And how, pray tell, will I know when the time is right?"
He did not answer, but merely took a seat facing Madame Adair and placed his palms on his thighs. Just that quickly, I was left alone, though bodily in the presence of two other people. I fetched a chair for myself and set to watching the strange communion.
My expectations of a tedious night keeping watch over the sleepers were quickly dispelled. No sooner had I taken a seat when Madame Adair began to stir. At first it was mere restlessness, as though she could not find a comfortable position in which to sleep, but her movements quickly intensified to violent thrashing.
"The sky is red," intoned Nightjar. "This is the night that was promised; the Nativity."
I started at the sound of his preternaturally calm voice. This was not at all what I had anticipated. "Where are you, Jerusalem?"
His brow creased in a frown. "I am unsure. The village is nearby…There are mountains in the distance…"
He abruptly gripped his legs. In the same instant, a wail like the howl of a banshee issued from the woman's lips. "The hour is upon us! The child is born!"
"The child is born this very night," Nightjar stated. "The prophecy…"
The woman suddenly stood erect and for a moment I believed she had awakened herself from the trance. I was mistaken.
My friend continued speaking. "I see a world, filled with death. Skulls of the dead, everywhere… Death…such a time of dying as the world has never known…"
Madame Adair stood before Nightjar, thrusting out with her hands as if attempting to defend herself against an unseen attacker.
"They are coming for him!"
"Coming for whom, Jerusalem?"
"The child! The child of prophecy. They have been waiting."
"No!" shrieked Madame Adair, her voice strangely accented. Her thrashing intensified to a fever pitch. "You will not have my son!"
"Demons!" Nightjar rasped. He shifted, tensing imperceptibly and I intuited that, in the landscape of his dream, he was preparing to meet the charge. "I must not allow this to happen."
The woman suddenly gripped her abdomen and fell back across the divan with blood streaming from her mouth and nose. She continued striking at the air, but for every spectral blow she parried, her spasms told of a dozen that found their mark. Droplets of crimson exploded from her nose, spattering the wall as her unseen assailant battered her mercilessly.
"Nightjar, help her!" I turned to him, thinking to implore him to come to her defense, but saw in the twitching of his muscles that the battle was already joined.
Madame Adair sat upright once more, her skin fiery red and every extremity rigid in an apoplectic fit and then she collapsed as a marionette after its strings are cut. A smell I knew all too well, the odor of death, filled the room.
"Dear God!" I ejaculated, gripping Nightjar's shoulder. "Wake up man! It's killed her. Jerusalem, wake up!"
His hand came up suddenly and batted me away. To my complete surprise, the offhanded blow sent me staggering. I fell back across my chair and crashed painfully to the floor.
I will confess now to being quite terrified at what I was beholding. While my rational mind dismissed the possibility of such a manifestation of supernatural energy, my trust in Nightjar was absolute. Moreover, I could not deny the evidence of my own senses; Madame Adair was dead, expiring before my very eyes after an assault by some unseen entity. Disentangling myself from the chair, I took a position directly in front of Nightjar, gripped his shoulders and shouted into his face. "For the love of God! Wake up!"
His eyes flew open, darting wildly about and his hands came up in a pugilist’s stance. He checked the corners of the room behind me, as if trying to ascertain his location, then fixed me with the most awful expression I can remember. "Winterbourne! Damn you. The battle was not over."
"It was killing you, Jerusalem. It killed her."
His rage struck me with the intensity of the earlier blow. "You understand nothing. She was weak; of course they killed her. I alone remained to protect the child. You have abandoned him to his fate, Winterbourne!"
I was dumbfounded. Nightjar collapsed back into his chair holding his head in his hands, but said nothing more. Humiliated, I turned to Madame Adair and commenced posing her more respectfully on the divan and laid a coverlet over her frail body.
"Forgive me, Winterbourne. You could not have known."
"Known what, Jerusalem? You told me nothing."
"An ancient prophecy," he murmured, almost drowsily. "A child was born tonight; a child who will make the world a place of skulls."
CHAPTER 1 — ANY PORT IN A STORM
The story about the miraculous reappearance of the plane ran in the evening edition of the Clarion, but because the airline spokesperson had kept the more salacious facts of the case out of public circulation, the item was relegated to a few column inches half way down page four. The article stated only that the plane, which initially had been feared lost in the storm, had arrived safely after a brief delay.
David Dalton — known to friends, co-workers and thousands of American readers of the syndicated weekly feature "The Adventures of Captain Falcon" as "Dodge" — had not yet read that item or any other headlines in the evening edition as he stepped from the Clarion Building and into the storm-swept streets, but he was certainly making good use of the tabloid; he held it open, over his head, to deflect some of the torrential rains that had already soaked through his shoes. He wasn't terribly worried about getting wet; the urge to shelter himself was mostly automatic. If he'd stopped to think about it, he would have realized how foolish it looked and simply endured Mother Nature's assault, but his mind was a million miles — or more accurately, eight thousand miles — away.
The telegram was crumpled in his pocket, but its message had been burned into his memory: URGENT I SEE YOU…AMNH TONIGHT…CONCERNS OUTPOST…A. PENDLETON.
He knew Augustus Pendleton — Professor Augustus Pendleton — by reputation only, but that was enough to pique his interest. Pendleton, an expert on pre-Columbian archaeology, was one of a select group of scientists that had been made privy to the discoveries Dodge and his associates had made at the bottom of the world — a remote ice cavern in the permanent winter wilderness of Antarctica. They had taken to calling the place "the Outpost," but that name said little about its true function; in fact, the purpose intended for the cavern by its designers, like the identity of those architects, was one of the mysteries being pursued by Pendleton and other members of the U.S. government's brain trust. The actual location of the Outpost was known only to Dodge and three other souls, but they had provided the scientists with detailed descriptions of the cavern and some of its artifacts. Dodge could not imagine what news Pendleton might have that could be so urgent as to require a late audience at the Museum of Natural History, but he was eager to find out.