Crashing Paradise Read online

  The artificial songbird’s eyes flashed briefly before it took flight, the mechanism’s magical power source giving it the appearance of life. Conan Doyle followed its path, walking toward the steps that would take him down from the great wall encircling Dubrovnik into the city streets.

  They’re ready for me, Conan Doyle mused. As I am for them.

  It had taken Velimir close to a month to put together this conference at Conan Doyle’s request, and he did not want to keep those who had answered the invitation waiting.

  At the foot of the stairs stood an aged and hunched figure, wearing the dark brown, hooded garment of his religious order. Velimir leaned on a cane carved from the gnarled branch of some ancient tree. Conan Doyle knew that his lover, Ceridwen, could have told him the name of the tree from which it had come in any number of ancient tongues.

  He missed his Princess of Faerie, longed to hold her lithe and powerful body tightly in his arms. In her, Conan Doyle found the strength to go on—the strength to fight—even when things looked hopeless.

  She made it all worth fighting for.

  “I wasn’t about to walk up there to get you,” Velimir Dragoslava said, his accent thick, a friendly smile upon his lined face as he pulled back his hood. The mechanical bird fluttered down and perched on the old man’s shoulder, trilling happily.

  “I wouldn’t expect you to, my friend,” Conan Doyle said, reaching the bottom. “I was just gathering my thoughts before the conference.”

  Velimir nodded, reaching up to take the mechanical bird from his shoulder. “Do you like her?”

  “Very impressive.” Conan Doyle gently stroked the head of the delicate machine. Then the old man placed it in a leather pouch that he wore tied to his waist. “For a moment, I believed it was real.”

  “The next best thing,” the wizened monk said. “An actual bird’s life energies provide the source of power, giving it the semblance of life.”

  The two started to walk across the Placa, the city’s main promenade. Conan Doyle had not been to Dubrovnik in years, but he had heard much about the civil war that had raged in Croatia less than twenty years before. Bombs had fallen upon the ancient, beautiful city—a place so lovely that it might well have been the capital of some Faerie nation—but there seemed no trace of those ugly days of war. The Placa and, indeed, all of the alleys and streets of the old city that meandered within those ancient, white walls, were clean and neat. The people smiled and chatted happily, and the storefronts gleamed with fresh paint and new windows.

  Velimir did have some trouble with the cobblestone streets, however. The cane was useful, but the old monk was unsteady on his feet, and his cane might catch upon the odd, uneven stone. Conan Doyle held his arm as they walked slowly past the exquisitely elaborate Onofrio Fountain on their way to the fourteenth-century Franciscan monastery that would play host to this evening’s congregation. On Conan Doyle’s behalf, Velimir had summoned representatives from numerous realms, including some of this world’s most powerful magical beings—and many from worlds beyond.

  “I have been thinking, Arthur, that someday, in the not-too-distant future, I may create a similar device—fashioned after a man—to contain my own life energies. Such a mechanism would enable me to perform my function as mediator many years after this rotting carcass has fed the worms,” Velimir said.

  Conan Doyle glanced at his old friend, his suspicions about the advancements in the man’s hobby suddenly sharpened.

  “Perhaps, then, I could be of service to you, and to the world in its approaching time of need,” the monk added.

  The implication of the old man’s statement was startling.

  Just how close had Velimir come to perfecting his mechanized creatures? He wished they could continue the conversation, but there were more pressing matters to attend to.

  The church bell tolled six o’clock. Visiting hours were over, and a steady flow of tourists streamed from the monastery as Conan Doyle steered his friend through the foot traffic to enter the ancient structure. A security guard standing just inside the door took note of their arrival but largely ignored them as he continued to usher visitors from the building.

  Conan Doyle had been here only once before. He could recall with great clarity the conference that had been called after the mysterious disappearance of Sweetblood the Mage.

  When a magic user, especially one as powerful as Lorenzo Sanguedolce, went missing, everyone within the supernatural community took note. During that last congregation, those summoned had been more concerned with filling the sudden power vacuum left by the archmage’s vanishing than in discovering where he had gone. Conan Doyle hoped that this conference would be more productive.

  Velimir led him deeper into the building, toward an elaborate reading room whose walls were covered in bookcases.

  Upon those shelves sat ancient, leather-bound manuscripts.

  Conan Doyle recalled that this part of the monastery had been destroyed by fire after an earthquake in the late seventeenth century, and painstakingly refurbished by a friar of the same secret Franciscan order as Velimir.

  The holy man did excellent work.

  The old monk pulled away from Conan Doyle’s supportive grasp. Moving through the library, he eyed every corner of the large room, making certain that all of the day’s visitors had vacated the premises. The mage followed the old man as he went to the rear of the room and stopped in front of a section of bookcase. The venerable monk reached out, removed a particularly fat volume, and set it down upon a nearby table. From the same leather pouch where he had stored his mechanical bird, Velimir produced a long, golden key, and inserted it into the lock located behind the ancient text.

  He turned the key sharply to the left and stepped back as a section of bookcase slowly swung open to reveal a stone staircase descending beneath the monastery.

  Gesturing with his cane, Velimir motioned for Conan Doyle to precede him. The stairway was lit with lanterns that burned with an eerie, pulsing incandescence. The last time he had been here, flaming torches had lit the way.

  The section of wall swung closed behind them with the sound of stone grinding against stone. Velimir followed Conan Doyle down, the tip of his wooden cane striking each stone step as he carefully descended.

  The staircase ended in an antechamber. Twin wooden doors, weathered with age, led into a much larger chamber beyond, where Conan Doyle would be addressing those who had gathered at his behest.

  Silently, the two men entered the chamber. The old man went to a wooden chest resting on a high table in the corner and, using the same golden key, opened it. He reached into the box, withdrawing a mask and placing it on his face.

  The mask was of two halves—two visages. One half depicted the common man—the unaware—the other half almost animal in its depiction of the unnatural. This half represented those touched by the paranormal and forever changed by it, as well as those who were not human and had never been so.

  Behind the mask, Velimir Dragoslava no longer existed.

  Now there was only the Mediator of the Franciscan Order of Conciliation. The Order had begun during the early fourteenth century and had been the first of the Church’s orders to recognize the existence of the supernatural not as a threat, but as a force to be studied and accepted as part of God’s grand design. The Mediator existed in both the human world and the supernatural world and acted as an arbiter over matters of concern to both.

  “Are you ready, Arthur Conan Doyle?” the Mediator asked, his voice sounding completely different from Velimir’s.

  “I am.”

  The Mediator walked to the double wooden doors, no longer needing the help of a cane, and threw them wide, striding down a stretch of wooden planking and onto a circular dais in the center of a timeworn amphitheater.

  Conan Doyle waited patiently in the doorway, his mind reviewing all that he wished to say.

  “Brothers and sisters of the weird, I am the Mediator,” the masked figure announced as he slowly turned
on the circular platform, addressing all those who were present. “I have summoned you here at the request of one of your own, to listen to his pleas for solidarity in this time when a terrible shadow falls upon us all.”

  The Mediator paused.

  “Will you hear his words?”

  From where he was standing, Conan Doyle could not see the number of those who had answered his call, but he heard their answer to the Mediator, their voices joined as one as they agreed to listen.

  “Come forward, Arthur Conan Doyle, and address this conference where all are equals.”

  Adjusting the fit of his tweed jacket, Conan Doyle marched down the walkway. The Mediator stepped to one side, allowing him to stand in the center of the stage. At first he said nothing, gazing about the room, studying the faces of those who sat on the wooden benches surrounding the dais, committing those in attendance to memory, as well as marking the absence of those who hadn’t bother to attend.

  He wasn’t at all surprised that Sanguedolce was nowhere to be found. Since his reemergence into the world, Sweetblood had pursued his own ends secretively and to the detriment of others. Yet Conan Doyle was astonished to see the grotesque visage of Nigel Gull staring up at him from the back of the theater, eyes afire with an unnatural hatred. He and Gull had learned sorcery together under the tutelage of Sanguedolce himself, but his former friend had chosen darker paths than Conan Doyle, and their mutual admiration had turned ugly.

  But tonight all of their history would be put aside. There were other matters—matters of grave importance—that eclipsed their hateful feelings, and he was glad to see that Nigel had the good sense to understand this as well.

  Conan Doyle acknowledged the hideously disfigured master sorcerer with a barely perceptible nod. Gull responded by wiping a dribble of saliva away from the drooping corner of his malformed mouth. Perhaps the expression upon that horselike countenance was some kind of smile, but it was impossible to tell.

  The others in attendance met his gaze with a mixture of disinterest, fear, hate, and curiosity. Most them he knew by name—practitioners of all the mystical arts, good and evil, but some were new to him, and he made it a point to remember their faces. The unnaturals, those in attendance who were not human, clumped together on one side of the auditorium, enshrouded in a shifting black shadow of their own creation, and he paid them the same level of respect as given to all others.

  Conan Doyle stroked his graying mustache, then cleared his throat and began. “I’m sure the majority of you are fully aware of the reason why this convocation was called.” His eyes touched those of each member of his audience. “One can sense it in the air, in the ground beneath our feet. It is the soft rumbling of an approaching storm off in the distance—miles away—but still coming.”

  He paused.

  “Make no mistake about that.” He put a hand to his ear as if listening to something in the distance.

  “The storm is coming.”

  THE conference had gone exactly as he had expected.

  Even though most in attendance could sense the abnormal shifts in the ether—see the increased levels of violent, paranormal activity—the majority still did not want to believe.

  Conan Doyle paused on his way down a narrow, winding street, at last on his way to the house he had rented outside the walls of the old city, up on the high, mountainside road overlooking the harbor. He had been walking since the end of the conference, replaying the evening in his mind.

  A night bird screeched as he reached into the inside coat pocket of his tweed jacket to retrieve his traveling pipe.

  Much smaller and less cumbersome than his Meerschaum, Conan Doyle often brought the dark Briarwood along when away from home. He stuffed the wooden pipe bowl full of an English tobacco blend from a small leather pouch, then muttered a simple spell of conflagration, igniting the tobacco with the tip of his index finger. Smoking the pipe helped him to think, and even though the conference was over, there was still much to dwell upon.

  He continued on his way, pipe smoke billowing, the sweet smell of his favorite tobacco stimulating his thoughts.

  They had wanted to know what he intended to do if the threat of the Demogorgon became reality. He’d wanted to laugh, but it was too damned pathetic. There he was, the caller of the conference, and still they dallied with the possibility that he could be wrong. He had explained that he, and his agents—his Menagerie—could only do so much, that they all would have to contribute to the effort if they were going to turn away the inevitable threat. The convocation hadn’t cared for that in the least.

  Conan Doyle nibbled upon the stem of his pipe, anger flaring as it had then. In his mind’s eye he could still see their blank stares and emotionless faces. Few of them truly comprehended the magnitude of his warning. Gradually, they had all risen from their seats, ready to return to the lives they had left, as if nothing had changed.

  He had screamed at them, then, screamed that whether they stood on the side of righteousness or shadow, they must unite against the coming threat. The Demogorgon’s approach was not some wild theory. It was fact, supported by the words and actions of Sweetblood himself. Yet each of those who attended had been the object of fear themselves, once upon a time, and could not conceive of something that could destroy them all. They refused to imagine something so terrifying that even the terrors and nightmares of a hundred worlds ought to be afraid.

  Only then, as they listened to the fury in his voice, perhaps seeing a spark of madness caused by the beginnings of desperation, had they begun to listen. At last his apocalyptic warnings began to permeate their narrow minds. Having finally gotten their attention, he had stressed that if the earthly realm were to fall, there would be nothing to stop the other dimensions from falling as well. The Demogorgon would run roughshod over the many realms that branched away from the human world—what many other peoples called the Blight. Their lands would fall like dominoes.

  A sharp chill rode up his spine, making the hair at the back of his neck stand painfully on end. Its icy prickle sent a spasm through his body. Conan Doyle sucked upon his pipe, attempting to calm his troubled state, but saw that the tobacco had been extinguished.

  Only then did he realize how incredibly cold it had become.

  Unnaturally cold.

  He tensed, a spell of defense ready at the tip of his tongue.

  He stood beside a small café, closed for hours now. On the other side of the narrow street was a florist, also shut up tight for the night. A growing sound, like the rushing roar of the tide, seemed to come from all around him, but it wasn’t the nearby Adriatic that he was hearing.

  It was screams—the wailing cries of frightened children—calling out from their beds, clasped in the grip of terror.

  Above the sounds of the children’s cries, a raspy chuckle drifted on the freezing night air.

  “Show yourself!” Conan Doyle commanded, planting his feet, weaving a defensive spell. A rush of magical energy flowed through his body and down his arms to crackle from the tips of his fingers.

  “The door flew open, in he ran,” whispered the dry, singsong voice. “The great long Red-legged Scissor-man . . .”

  Conan Doyle started at the mention. How long had it been since last he’d heard that foul bogeyman’s name?

  The Red-legged Scissor-man had been one of the first violent, supernatural threats he had ever faced, back in the winter of 1922. He had been summoned to London’s Infant Orphan Asylum by a former medical associate who had shared his interest in the paranormal. The man had requested his aid in investigating what had appeared to be an epidemic of self-mutilations—the children were cutting off their own thumbs as they slept.

  The memory of his tour of the orphanage rushed back to him with startling clarity, as if it had happened only yesterday.

  He recalled the look of absolute terror on the suffering children’s faces, most of them in a strange, fear-induced catatonia.

  Only one little boy—Timothy—had had the strength, a
nd bravery, to speak the name of the creature that had haunted his sleepless nights, and the nights of all the other children for close to a month.

  The Red-legged Scissor-man.

  Conan Doyle watched as a lantern made from the skull of an adolescent emerged from a nearby pool of ebony shadow, clutched in the hand of a creature he had believed banished from this plane of reality over eighty years ago.

  “Snip! Snip! Snip! The scissors go,” the hideous creature sang as it languidly unspooled from the patch of darkness, swinging the lantern from side to side. “And Conrad cries, Oh! Oh! Oh!”

  The Scissor-man was tall, his body clad in a filthy waistcoat with tails, his naked lower body stained red with the dried blood of innocents. Around his long, emaciated neck he wore an elaborate necklace made with the thumbs of his young victims. In the other spidery hand, clad in a black leather glove stiff with gore, he held a pair of the largest scissors Conan Doyle had ever seen. The shears were nearly black with blood. The grotesque figure cut the air, doing a strange little dance as it continued its song.

  “Snip! Snip! Snip! They go so fast, that both his thumbs are off at last.”

  Conan Doyle raised his hand, afire with preternatural power. The bogey shied away from the purity of Conan Doyle’s magical light, jerking back so quickly that it dropped the skull lantern. It shattered in the street, extinguishing its flame. The Scissor-man’s flesh was the gray of the recently deceased, its eye sockets empty except for the squirming larvae of insects. As it recoiled from the radiating light in the mage’s hand, its waistcoat swung open to reveal an exposed rib cage, a wild-eyed crow fluttering frantically within the confines of human bone.

  “Oh, Doyle, is that anyway to treat a mate you’ve not seen in such a while?” the creature asked with a clucking chuckle, shielding its face from the burning light.