INQUISITOR
John & Carole E. Barrowman
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About this Book
About the Author
Table of Contents
www.headofzeus.com
About Inquisitor
Rémy Dupree Rush and his friends Matt and Em Calder are battling to save the world as we know it. All have superpowers – Rémy can alter reality with music and Matt and Em can bring art to life – but will their powers be enough?
With the world loosening at the seams, Rémy discovers that only he can halt the rise of the darkness and save humanity. But is Rémy up to the challenge?
Contents
Welcome Page
About Inquisitor
Dedication
Epigraph
Black Orpheus invite
Chapter 1. In the Beginning
Rome: 623 BC
Chapter 2. Family Ties
Friday: Rome, Present Day
Chapter 3. Sympathy for the Devil
Chapter 4. Roman Fever
Glasgow
Chapter 5. Pick Up the Pieces
Chapter 6. Frieze Frame
Rome
Chapter 7. Memento Mori
Chapter 8. Raise a Glass
Glasgow
Chapter 9. American Pie
Rome
Chapter 10. Weep Not
Chapter 11. Touch has a Memory
Chapter 12. Summer Daze
Rome: 1610
Chapter 13. Metamorphosis
Chapter 14. Burning Gold
Rome: Present Day
Chapter 15. A Pocket Full of Pebbles
Chapter 16. Desperado
Chapter 17. Let’s Make a Deal
Chapter 18. A Friend of the Devil
Chapter 19. Something to Believe In
Chapter 20. The Real Deal
Chapter 21. Somebody to Love
Chapter 22. Possession
Chapter 23. Out of Time
Chapter 24. Everything’s True but Everything Lies
Chapter 25. What’s Your Name?
Chapter 26. Closed for Repair
Chapter 27. Wanted for Questioning
Chapter 28. Still Life with Banker
Chapter 29. Take the Cannoli
Chapter 30. Stealth Mode
Chapter 31. A Long Day’s Journey Into Night
Chapter 32. Heaven is a Place on Earth
Chapter 33. Revelations
Chapter 34. Naked and Numb
Chapter 35. Bad Moon Rising
London Saturday
Chapter 36. Flower of Scotland
Chapter 37. Time’s Not on Our Side
Chapter 38. Blow Out
Scotland
Chapter 39. Life’s Pleasures
Chapter 40. Out Cold
Chapter 41. Sync and Swim
Chapter 42. The Dock of the Bay
Chapter 43. Wonderwall
Chapter 44. Smoke on the Water
Chapter 45. Hungry Like the Wolf
Chapter 46. Fire and Brimstone
London
Chapter 47. Tea for Three
Chapter 48. Mind your Manets
Scotland
Chapter 49. Taking the High Road
Chapter 50. Taking the Low Road
Chapter 51. Protect and Serve
Chapter 52. Eyes on the Past
Glasgow
Chapter 53. White Wedding
Chapter 54. Trouble from Your Kind
Chapter 55. Under Construction
Chapter 56. Picasso Baby
London
Chapter 57. Downtown Train
Chapter 58. Sound and Vision
Sunday: America
Chapter 59. The Mother We Share
Chapter 60. Nuru’s Story
Chapter 61. Annie’s Lament
Louisiana
Chapter 62. Wade in the Water
Chapter 63. Sorrow Songs
Chapter 64. Mississippi River Blues
Chapter 65. Lavender and Grass
Louisiana
Chapter 66. Gator Aid
Chapter 67. A Song in the Night
London
Chapter 68. Watching Airplanes
Chapter 69. From a Window
Chapter 70. Freebird
Chapter 71. Leaving on a Jet Plane
Chapter 72. Wind Beneath My Wings
Rome
Chapter 73. Little Red Corvette
Chapter 74. Body Language
Chapter 75. Under Pressure
Chapter 76. Cheap Trick
Chapter 77. Puppet Show
Chapter 78. The Main Attraction
Chapter 79. Howl
Chapter 80. Ride Like the Wind
Chapter 81. One Note Song
Chapter 82. Eidetic
Chapter 83. Rewind
Chapter 84. The Tree of Life
Chapter 85. Waiting
Chapter 86. Behold, They Rise
Chapter 87. Down in Flames
Chapter 88. We Three
Chapter 89. Art and Life
Chapter 90. Altered States
Chapter 91. Soul Deep
Chapter 92. A Song for the Dead
Chapter 93. Family Affair
Chapter 94. In My Time of Dying
Chapter 95. Midnight Confessions
London
Chapter 96. To the Missing
Chapter 97. Clootie Dumpling
America Two Months Later
Chapter 98. Ten Mississippi
Glossary
Acknowledgements
About John & Carole E. Barrowman
The Orion Chronicles
The Hollow Earth Trilogy
An Invitation from the Publisher
Copyright
To our readers,
imagine big things.
‘The tree of knowledge is not the tree of life.’
Lord Byron
‘Sing, Heavenly Muse…’
John Milton
You are invited
to a
gala concert performance of
‘Black Orpheus’
St Peter’s Square, Rome
Sunday
Invitation Only
1.
In the Beginning
When humans were divine and gods adored them, when time was not measured in hours, days, months or years, an angel fell from favour and was banished to Chaos. This fallen creature wandered in exile, watching the world through crevices in the darkness.
Soon the First Watcher was not alone. Others fell. They too were destined to watch the world in fleeting moments from their banishment.
Then the First Watcher discovered a rift that took him from darkness back to the light. Taking human form, he rose to power, seeking out three elements necessary to bring other Watchers into the light, to rule with him in a glorious Second Kingdom.
A golden lyre.
A sacred chord.
And a powerful Conjuror, whose magic would bring these elements together.
His enemies were prepared for him and his human legions, the Camarilla, and cast the First Watcher from his place of power. But they were unaware that he had left a seductive mark on the world, ready for the time when he might rise again.
That time had come.
Rome
623 BC
2.
Family Ties
‘Luca, it’s time,’ his mother said, waking him from sleep as the summer-solstice sky showered stars on the marshland outside the Servian Wall.
Dressed in unfamiliar robes, Luca found himself in a chariot, driving towards a moat of flames that circled the centre of the m
arsh. Another chariot raced beside him, its wheels a blur. He caught a glimpse of a girl, her wide eyes catching the firelight and her cloak spreading behind her like golden wings.
The chariots stopped together. Luca’s mother lifted him down and set him on the marshy ground.
‘Walk from here,’ she instructed, on her knees next to him. ‘Go to your father.’
She anointed Luca’s forehead with oil, then nudged him towards the flames. He moved uncertainly, the smells of charred myrtle and ripe citrus making him lightheaded. He could hear the whole city’s prayers echoing behind him like the weeping of a thousand crows. The girl in the golden cloak stood beside her own chariot, skin like copper and eyes fierce as a hawk.
‘Come,’ Sebina said.
Luca knew then that he would follow her anywhere. He took her outstretched hand and walked with her into the furnace. He felt nothing but a brush of warm air.
In the heart of the fire, a great silver tree stretched out of the marshy soil, its limbs like arms and its trunk pocked with hundreds of piercing yellow eyes. The eyes closed one by one, until only one pair remained. Unblinking. Focused on him and Sebina.
The eyes became part of a creature with wings of fire, its body covered in scales and swollen in the middle like the throat of a toad. Its head was human, mostly. The part that wasn’t looked unfinished, like unformed clay. It spoke.
‘Come to me, children. I will sanctify your powers. You will make me great again.’
Wordlessly Luca and Sebina walked into its embrace.
Friday
Rome, Present Day
3.
Sympathy for the Devil
The First Watcher had endured an eternity bound in a painting like a specimen in an apothecary jar. He stretched his gnarled fingers out of the canvas into the conditioned air of the sacred chamber. As each crooked finger broke through, his flesh snapped and sizzled like electricity before a wire burns out. He knew nothing about electricity, but he understood a great deal about burning: the reek of flesh when it seared to bone, the stench of everlasting terror.
The First Watcher had answered to a host of ancient sacred names: Afriti, Moloch, Scaramallion, Lucifer – and Inquisitor. His current favourite. It was a name that suggested sovereignty, arrogance, malevolence: all qualities the First Watcher admired and had rewarded in humans. He liked that the name suggested his dark personal relationship with the divine.
An alarm clanged double time.
The Inquisitor’s fingers retracted in a whiff of foul air.
*
An acolyte of the Order of the Camarilla, dressed in a white hooded cassock with long bell sleeves, rushed into the secure vault, breathless and sweating. She stopped to let the heavy steel doors seal shut with a whoosh of air. A computer monitored the vault’s humidity, temperature, and the painting’s pulse. It was this third line of vitals, like sharp mountain peaks on the screen, which had caught the acolyte’s attention. With a shaky swipe, she stopped the deafening alarm.
The First Watcher was awake.
The vault was a rectangular space the size of a shipping container. Surgically clean, it was dimly lit with only a ribbon of emergency lights on the floor. On the smaller southern wall, an arched grotto had been moulded into the steel walls, holding the painting in an ornate gold frame. The painting, a double portrait, showed a roll-top desk strewn with artefacts: a compass, a violin, a metronome and a stack of scrolls. The desk stood between the Inquisitor, cloaked in velvet and ermine and seated on a throne-like chair, and his disciple, Don Grigori. The surface where Don Grigori had once stood was flat and dull, the paint flaking away.
The edge of the canvas was glowing as if it had been outlined in neon yellow paint. With head bowed, voice trembling, the acolyte stepped close to the painting.
‘Your Eminence?’ she whispered. ‘Your Eminence, can you hear me?’
The figure of the Cardinal was fluttering on the canvas.
‘Your Eminence?’
A cloud of bluebottle flies coughed from the Inquisitor’s painted smile. The question was faint, but distinct.
‘Are you a believer?’
‘I am,’ replied the acolyte, kneeling before the painting.
The painting was pulsing now as if a human heart beat beneath the canvas. The Inquisitor’s head stretched out into the vault, flesh dripping from his skull. His eyes dangled like onyx pendants from their sockets and loose skin hung from his thick jowls like lumps of suet. Thin strands of light kept his entirety harnessed to the canvas like a thousand fiery reins holding back a chariot. The grotesque face twitched.
‘Are we ready?’ his voice boomed, shedding flakes of thick paint on to the white concrete floor.
‘We are close,’ said the acolyte, ‘but…’
‘But what?’ A second wave of fat flies spewed from the canvas.
‘It is Luca. His commitment to our cause is weakening.’ The acolyte paused and swallowed. ‘His loyalty is unpredictable.’
The flies swarmed in spirals like a hundred tornadoes rising to the ceiling, choking the air vents.
‘I will handle my son.’ The Inquisitor’s face swelled before settling again, his tongue bleeding ochre onto the floor. ‘What of the Conjuror? Is he finally ours?’
‘Soon. The Conjuror and the lyre will be in our possession soon.’
The Inquisitor’s gnarled hand shot out from the canvas, dragging the acolyte up to meet his slack, doughy face. ‘No more failures. It is time to bring me back.’
She squirmed, panting, from the terrible grip. From inside one of her bell sleeves, she pulled out a sketch pad and began to draw, sketching and shading, her fingers a blur of light scoring across the page. She felt euphoric, like she was floating outside of herself, her cheeks flushed pink and her heart fluttering in her chest. She had been prepared for this moment since childhood. Like her father and grandfather before her, she was a blessed child of the Camarilla, her future inescapably linked to the Inquisitor’s wellbeing, to his eventual metamorphosis. He was the source of her family’s vast wealth and entrenched power. He was everything.
At first it looked as if the Inquisitor was being tugged unwillingly into reality, his wraith-like body still attached to the canvas. But suddenly the vault seemed to inhale, the walls sucking in on themselves; then exhaled again, its walls regaining their original shape, leaving the acolyte on the ground gasping for air. High on the ceiling, one by one, the fat flies ruptured, covering the chamber in foul buttery bile.
*
The Inquisitor had been bound for centuries. His flesh was weak, his muscles trembling. His time away had not strengthened his body the way he had hoped. He studied his hand with displeasure, its tissue-paper skin mottled with brown age spots, its veins like thin yarn running up his arm, its bones visible. His legs, too, were snaked with thin black veins that popped and bled through his skin when he tried to straighten his body and stand. His legs could not support his weight, feeble though he was, and he crumpled to the ground.
‘Come, Eminence,’ the acolyte whispered, lifting him. ‘Let me help you.’
Swinging his arm over her shoulders for support, the Inquisitor shuffled towards the door of the vault. He tightened his grip, soaking up the acolyte’s bewitching brew of terror and anticipation. She choked, turning as white as her robe.
‘There now,’ the Inquisitor murmured, absorbing all that she was and all she would become. ‘Better. Much, much better.’
4.
Roman Fever
On the other side of Rome, head down and a leather messenger bag bouncing against his hip, Callum Muir dodged clusters of tourists swarming the Piazza di Spagna. He couldn’t risk his face being caught in the frame of one of the hundreds of photos being taken in front of the white steps Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck had made famous decades ago. He needed to stay off the radar for a few more hours.
Callum Archibald Mathieson Muir didn’t want to be the thirty-fifth Earl of Dundonal. He wanted to challenge the destiny his
birth dictated, to piss off his dad and the old-school expectations of what a Dundonal heir could be and should do. And so, a week before sitting his final exams at Edinburgh University, he had fled to Rome. In a city where – according to a Muriel Spark story he’d once read – artists were treated like gods, at last he could be the creative he’d always wanted to be. He didn’t regret the decision, but survival without his substantial trust fund had required him to revive certain special… talents he’d developed during his years of classical education at posh Scottish boarding schools.
He’d also fallen in love.
In front of the crowded Barcaccia fountain, a young couple taking a selfie backed into Callum. He quickly ducked from their apologies, and cut to their left before bounding up the front steps of the three-storey town house next to the Spanish Steps that along with the Trinità dei Monti church anchored the historic neighbourhood.
He stood in front of the Keats-Shelley Museum’s security pad, wiping his clammy hands on his trousers before punching the buttons. The panel pulsed yellow then flashed red.
Wrong code. Shit. The light flickered. Yellow. Wait. Wait. Thirty seconds before he could try again. He exhaled, calming his wired nerves. The meeting to seal the deal was only an hour away. He needed to get in and out of the museum fast.
He scanned the square. Expensive boutiques, designer shops, pricey flats and luxury hotels shared the public space with travellers living from their backpacks, musicians and artists busking their talents for a meal, budget newlyweds snogging on the steps, and crowds of tourists on discount tours, their colourful flags waving in the late afternoon breeze. A mobile phone store and a Starbucks nestled near the massive church that loomed over the square. Rome: rich and poor hand in hand, the ancient seducing the modern.
He noticed a busker bent over a guitar in the shade of a gelato cart on the far side of the fountain. She wasn’t very good, picking Lou Monte’s ‘Roman Guitar’ on her sticker-covered instrument, but she knew how to entertain, and a small crowd was gathering appreciatively, dropping coins inside the open case at her feet. The busker looked up, caught Callum’s gaze, and smiled, sending a chill up his spine.