The Pilgrims of the Damned, Chapter 1. Available for release on 23rd September 2005.

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Stuart Murphy woke up in much the same way he had done every morning for the last year, full of misery and anger. Life had not gone the way he’d wanted it to, most of which seemed to be completely out of his control.

He hadn’t asked to grow up in a dysfunctional home. He hadn’t asked for his wife of ten years to run off with their two children. He hadn’t asked for her to file divorce proceedings from across the country as she hid with her parents, citing his increasingly aggressive and cruel tendencies. He hadn’t asked for the stage four cancer diagnosis a month later. He hadn’t asked for those damn vampire blood pills to stop working a year later. He hadn’t asked for the company he worked for to be involved in some kind of attack on Assembly personnel.

The last one he was still confused about. It had been six months since Templar International had lost its Assembly accreditation, meaning the security company was no longer used by the vampires. The business was, in all effect, persona non grata, and a big chunk of their worldwide clients vanished overnight.

Stuart had run the Boston branch and, along with a dozen of his most trusted employees, had started to move their clients over to a new company. One that would be ready to go once he was better. He’d grown tired of waiting, though, and had set a plan in motion to ensure that where modern medicine failed, he would not.

Within five minutes of waking up, he had heard his phone buzz with a notification. He picked it up from the kitchen counter in his almost empty four-bedroom house and read the message. It was from one of his friends, Liam White, someone he’d served with. They’d continued to work together when they left their CIA Special Forces unit, where, before all the bureaucracy had kicked in, they were given the freedom to do what needed to be done. The message read, Ready to go.

Stuart smiled. He’d been waiting for this day for two years. Ever since he first heard rumours about it, he knew it was for him. He knew. Stuart replied, It’s a go. Meet me at the church. Two hours.

With a happiness he hadn’t known in a long time, Stuart finished off his morning coffee, had a toasted bagel, showered, and dressed in a navy blue three-piece suit, with tan leather shoes. He removed the black velvet pouch from his chest of drawers, tipping the contents onto his hand. It was a silver pendant in the shape of a teardrop with a blood-red jewel set in the middle. He’d been told it was a talisman. An item of great power, and that when the time came, he should wear it always. Now was the time.

The pendant was hung on a thin silver chain, and Stuart slipped it over his neck, placing the cold metal against the skin of his chest.

He looked at himself in the mirror, at the stubble covering his head, sunken eyes, at the loss of weight, the loss of muscle, the cane he had to use. He missed his beard, his long hair; he missed being able to go to the gym, to go to the gun range. Not long now.

Stuart had errands to run in his neighbourhood first. Something he’d needed to do for a long time, and now was the right time. He wasn’t coming back to this house. He had wanted to make a life here, it had been his perfect home, but now it was just a reminder of all he’d lost. All that had been taken from him.

He removed two of the vampire blood medicine tablets from the container in his pocket and popped them both in his mouth, swallowing them with a glass of water, immediately feeling the surge of warmth rushing through him. In the beginning, they’d stopped the cancer from growing, and in some lucky people, they actually reversed the effects. In others, the effect of the pills quickly lessened, only slowing the cancer’s growth and having even less of an effect over time. But they still made him feel good, sharp, alive. He knew it was short lived, maybe four or five hours at best, but that was all he needed.

The errand only took a few minutes, and he was soon in his black Mercedes GLA, driving into Boston. He parked the car outside of the Church of the Holy Trinity near Boston Common, and sat there looking up at the red brick building, adorned with a golden cross high upon its steeple. Stuart didn’t know much about the church, or much about religion in general, but he knew his wife had come here for many years.

Opening his car door, he swung his legs out, grabbing the dark wooden cane as he stepped out into the spring morning in Boston. It was busy out with people going about their day. He wondered idly how many of them knew how far down the food chain they were. Vampires were well-known, of course; they lived and worked alongside humans, and while some humans hated and distrusted them, Stuart was not one of them. He found vampires fascinating, dangerous but fascinating. Vampires had spent a great deal of time and money showing the world that they were no threat to humanity, but Stuart knew otherwise. He’d seen what vampires could really do. But to him, it was just another part of the mystique, something to admire, not be afraid of.

He crossed the street slowly, the metal band on the bottom of his cane clicking on the tarmac as he walked along the sidewalk, and up the ramp to the church door. A young woman who was just leaving held the door open for him, and smiled kindly when he thanked her.

“You have a good day, now,” Stuart said, wondering what she would think in a few hours when the news came through.

He stepped into the church and looked up at the sanctuary at the far end of the nave. There was an altar table atop it, upon which sat several candles, and a foot-tall golden cross. A large wooden Jesus on a crucifix was on the wall behind it. Next to it was the pulpit, where Father Noah O’Brien stood and preached sermons to his adoring congregation.

There were several people sitting in the church pews, some praying, heads bowed, and some just sitting there quietly, looking up at the stained glass windows that sat on either side of the nave.

Stuart walked down the nave, ignoring the people, and over to the door on the left-hand side of the room. He pushed the door open, revealing a small kitchen and lounge area. There were windows on one side that overlooked the green garden behind the church, and let in a large amount of light.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” the man inside said. He sat on a wooden chair at a glass-and-wood round table, between the kitchen area and the twin sofas in the lounge. He placed the cup of coffee that was close to his lips back onto the table, before smiling disarmingly. “This is a private area.”

“I know, Father O’Brien,” Stuart said, taking a seat on a chair opposite the priest, his cane resting against the table. “But I feel like this is something we need to discuss.”

“We?” Father O’Brien asked with confusion. “I’m pretty sure we’ve never met.”

“We have, actually,” Stuart said. “I got married here. To my wife, Alice. Do you remember Alice Murphy, Father O’Brien?”

The priest nodded slowly, still unsure where this conversation was going. “Why are you here, Stuart?” Father O’Brien was a large man. He was the same six-two as Stuart, but he had a significant advantage of body mass. In his youth, Father O’Brien had been a boxer, and a good one, having won several competitions while in the military. He’d maintained those skills over the years in a local gym, although he didn’t do more than spar these days. At nearly sixty-five, Father O’Brien looked a good ten years younger, with a full head of short dark hair, and piercing blue eyes.

“Father, I want to tell you a tale,” Stuart said.

“You want to confess your sins?” Father O’Brien asked in all seriousness.

“Yes,” Stuart said, brightening up. “That’s exactly what I want to do.”

“We should go to the confessional,” Father O’Brien said, standing.

Stuart removed the Beretta M9 from the holster against his back and placed it on the table.

Father O’Brien eyed it with no fear. He’d seen guns before; he’d used guns before. He looked from the weapon back to Stuart. “Are you threatening me, Stuart?”

Stuart shook his head. “I just want you to understand my state of mind. I want you to sit down and listen to me speak.”

Father O’Brien obviously saw no need to antagonise the man opposite him and sat back down. “So, what do you want to confess to me, my child?”

Stuart nodded and made the sign of the cross. “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It’s been…” He paused as he did the maths in his head. “Thirty-three years since my last confession. Don’t worry, I’m not going to confess it all. We’d be here all week, and I have a schedule to keep.”

“Then please continue,” Father O’Brien said, still keeping an eye on the gun.

“Father, I can’t claim to have been a good man,” Stuart said. “I joined the Marines, joined the Special Forces, Force Reconnaissance, did some good work. Joined the CIA when I was thirty-five, did ten years, did some dirty work. Left to work for Templar International. And left a lot of bodies in my wake. But that’s not why I’m here. I’m here because two years ago my wife took my children from me. Flew them to California to her parents. You want to know what the kicker is? Her daddy works for the FBI, or worked, either way, I can’t very well just fly out there and force them home. I considered it at the time. Before I got sick. And then sicker, and sicker, and then better, and then the vampire tablets stopped working, and I got sicker again.”

There was a pause for a moment. “I’m sorry,” Father O’Brien said eventually. “You have had a terrible time.”

“You’re right, I have,” Stuart continued. “But that’s not why I’m here. Well, it is, but we’ll get to that. You see, after a year of hoping I was going to get better, of doing all of the right things, of trying to maintain a positive outlook, despite the fact a judge said I wasn’t allowed within two hundred feet of my wife and children. You know, I haven’t even spoken to them on the phone. They don’t want to talk to me. Apparently, I scared them by being aggressive.Fucking youth of today have no idea what life really is, Father. Life is aggression, for fuck’s sake. Sorry for swearing.”

“It’s fine,” Father O’Brien told him, fully aware that it didn’t sound like Stuart was sorry at all.

Stuart smiled, although there was no happiness in it. “Anyway, nearly two years ago, I got a call from a friend of mine. Liam. We grew up together, went to the military together, joined the CIA together. When I got sick, he was the first person to visit me. Told me he knew someone who might be able to help. I asked him if it was a vampire. I mean, turning me into a vampire would cure me, but no vampire worth anything is just going to turn someone they don’t know into a vampire. And I didn’t want to be saddled with some no-name, no-power pussy for my vampire master, or whatever they’re called. I told him I needed someone with actual power, I deserved that.

“Well, long story short, he said he’d look into it, but in the meantime, there was another way. A way that not even the vampires know about. Magic.”

Father O’Brien raised a disbelieving eyebrow. “Magic?”

“That was my initial thought too, at first. I thought Liam was just trying to make me feel better, give me something to hope for while this fucking disease destroyed my body. But no, it’s not fake. Actually, there’s two types of magic.”

“And what are they?” Father O’Brien asked, despite himself.

“You don’t really need to know all of the details, Father,” Stuart said. “All you need to know is all magic has to have a cost. No matter what you do, there needs to be payment for it. Harmony magic, well, that’s all a bit wishy-washy, if you ask me. They use their own energy to do something. Harmony witches tend to be gardeners, or healers, or something like that.”

“So it kills them by using their own life force?”

“No,” Stuart almost snapped; he hadn’t intended this to turn into a conversation about the types of witches. “We’re getting off track here.”

“I understand,” Father O’Brien said. “And the second type of magic?”

“Chaos,” Stuart said, with a little more glee in his voice. “This is magic where you take from things around you to feed into your magic. So you might create a fireball in your hands, but to do so, you take the life force from others—humans, animals, plants, doesn’t really matter—and you feed that into your power.”

“That sounds dangerous,” Father O’Brien said, now more than a little worried about the sanity of the man before him.

“Oh, it is,” Stuart said. “You can kill people, or you can leave the ground a barren wasteland. You could make plants wither and die. Obviously, you don’t have to do that; you could take just a small amount of energy, killing a flower, or a bug, or whatever. The more power you take, the more powerful your magic.”

“And how do you perform these spells?” Father O’Brien asked, hoping to stall for time, hoping to figure out how to get Stuart as far away from his church as possible. To use the time to call the police. “Is there a book? A…”

“Grimoire,” Stuart said, removing a leatherbound book about the size of a paperback from his inside coat pocket and placing it on the table. “This tells us how to use that power. How to shape it, how to create it.”

“So you need the book forever?”

Stuart opened the book, showing the blank pages. “No, the witch bonds with the grimoire. The information, the essence of the magic transferring into the witch. It’s an unpleasant experience, and a slow one, but eventually…” Stuart flicked through the rest of the grimoire, showing that all of the pages were blank.

“You’ve learned it all?”

“I’ve had a lot of time on my hands, Father,” Stuart said, feeling the weight of the talisman that hung around his neck. He felt the power it contained, power that helped enhance his own gifts. He once wondered if he could have learned all he had without it, but it didn’t matter. All that mattered was what he’d achieved, with or without help from the pendant. “Time, and a need to ensure that those who did me wrong aren’t allowed to get away with it.”

“And who did you wrong?”

“I know what you’re thinking,” Stuart said. “And I’m not going to go after my wife. I don’t want to hurt her, I don’t want to hurt my children, or their grandparents. They’ve moved on, and so have I. You see, I’ve been waiting for over a year to get the message I got this morning. My friend has been searching, so I’m going to Maine to find the person who can help me.”

“Maine?” Father O’Brien asked. “That’s a very dangerous place. It’s walled for a reason.”

Maine had been the scene of one of the worst outbreaks of the desolate in the modern age. The outbreak had spread out to New Brunswick, and thousands had died before the plague of monsters had been brought under control. Unfortunately, by the time the desolate had been stopped, Maine was little more than a pariah state. A walled reminder of what could happen should the monsters that dwelled in the darkness be let loose.

“I know all about what happened there,” Stuart said dismissively. “We’ve got someone who knows the way. I may be gone for some time, so I’ve been cleaning house, so to speak. Did I tell you about my neighbours?”

Father O’Brien was almost afraid to ask.

“No matter,” Stuart said as he started to tap his fingers on the table. “You see, they moved in a few years ago. They’re awful people. A couple, both in their mid-thirties maybe. The man, let’s call him Lloyd, constantly smells of weed. I used to come home from the hospital and sit in my garden hoping for some peace, and all I’d hear was Lloyd loudly talking about the amount of cocaine he had to sell. Or arguing with the lady, let’s call her Jill.

“And that doesn’t even begin to include the number of times they had music blaring at all hours of the day and night. People had asked him to quiet down, and he’d told them all to fuck off. Told me to fuck off. When I was healthy, I would have fucked that little nobody up, buried him in the woods so no one ever found him. They were both little more than degenerate criminals. A waste of oxygen.”

“Unruly neighbours are always a problem,” Father O’Brien said, looking down at the gun again.

“Oh, I didn’t shoot them,” Stuart said with a dry chuckle. “That’s insane. Do you know how many people in my neighbourhood would have heard that? I’d never have made it to the car before the police showed up.”

Father O’Brien allowed himself a smile. “So what did you do?”

“I took Jill’s life force and used it to burn Lloyd from the inside out,” Stuart said matter-of-factly. “First time I’d ever done that, and I’ve got to tell you, it was a rush.”

“You killed two people?” Father O’Brien asked, shocked at what Stuart had said.

Stuart waved away the accusation as if it were nothing. “Of course. There was just a little screaming from Lloyd, because Jill was out cold already; she was high as a kite. Oh, well. You want to know something funny? If my wife hadn’t come here every week, and if she hadn’t started talking to someone who works for you, Father, about our lives—if they hadn’t told her that maybe she should consider leaving me, which I thought went against the Catholic ethos—then I never would have been alone when Liam brought me the grimoire and talisman that now sits around my neck. I never would have practiced every day until I could barely read the words anymore. I never would have just murdered two people in their own home and smiled as they died. Your church gave me the opportunity to do better.”

“You can’t possibly think that,” Father O’Brien said with horror. “You were an abusive husband and father; your wife fled because of that abuse. We didn’t put you on a path to murder people. You did that.”

“Huh,” Stuart said, thinking to himself. “Maybe you’re right. Let’s go see what your congregation says about it.”

Stuart popped two more pills, sighed, grabbed the gun, and was up and out of the door, grabbing the key from the hook beside it, moving quicker than a man in his condition would have usually.

Father O’Brien ran after the younger man, taking the cane with him in case he had to incapacitate the clearly mentally unwell Stuart. A man whose wife and children had been afraid of him, a man who had refused to seek help for his own problems, and had used alcohol and drugs as a way to deal with them.

Stuart stood at the front of the nave, looking out over the four people who were staring back at him with confusion. He’d put the gun back in its holster against his back, his hands held out to the sides, showing the tattoos on the palms. He lowered them and turned to Father O’Brien. “Come join us,” he said, waving the Father over. “Now, people of the congregation. I want you all to know that I truly believe that we are in dangerous times.”

“Stuart,” O’Brien said sternly. “Stop it.”

Stuart walked between the pews until he reached the door. He locked the door with the key he’d stolen from the break room. He walked back down the pews until he was halfway and stared at the priest. “Thanks for the talk.” The skin on Stuart’s hands cracked and started to glow as several of the congregation who were closest to him tried to climb over the pews in an effort to get to the door. Stuart waved a hand at them, balling the hand into a fist, and they screamed out in pain, falling back onto the pews.

Several of the congregation started to cough and wheeze, their bodies pulled apart, the energy flowing through to Stuart.

“Stop it!” Father O’Brien shouted. He ran at Stuart, the cane raised high, but Stuart caught it with one hand, slamming his other into the priest’s chest, sending him reeling, and leaving a burned handprint on the cassock.

“You should have minded your own business,” Stuart said as he went back to funnelling the life energy he’d stolen directly into the priest, setting him on fire from the inside out.

The priest fell to his knees, and a look of comprehension filled his face for a moment before his entire body shimmered with the heat and light inside of him. After what had only been a few seconds, his body burst into flames. Stuart spun around as fire leapt from his hands, setting everything aflame.

When done, the nave and all that surrounded it was an inferno. “Say hi to your boss,” Stuart said, picking up his walking stick and slowly moving to the exit. He unlocked the door, tossing the key back into the flames, and walked down the steps, across the road, and to a waiting parked black BMW M3. Stuart opened the door and got into the passenger seat, feeling his energy draining out of him. Magic took a lot of stamina to perform, and he hadn’t all that much to begin with.

“You ready?” Liam asked in his South Carolina accent, with a beaming smile. “The team is all at the border.”

Stuart looked over at the church as the windows began to shatter from the heat. There was no saving the building. “Let’s get this done, then.”