Kristin Read online

  Scared, bitch? it cackled.

  She pulled herself up above one of the decorative windows and braced her bleeding, shoeless feet against its tiny roof, wedging herself in position. Her knees trembled against her chin and she started to hum, comfortingly to herself as the mighty bells below her tolled solemnly for the clerical hierarchy her black shadow had made murder one another in cold blood.

  The Beast laughed long and hard inside her head, and she shifted her weight towards the edge, just enough to silence it. So much bloodletting, so much pain. Such confusion, such distortion of character. Such gratification — pleasure akin to her newfound sexual pleasure. It had been wrong, inhuman, but she’d been too tired to fight, simply doing what her impious counterpart told her to do. But no more.

  Kristin made a decision. She would need to be very quick. She dislodged her feet, closed her eyes, and thought briefly of a man she seemed to remember.

  Kristin! it screamed. Kristin, ahhh, sweet Kristin, beautiful girl, we are a good partnership, wouldst thou not agree? ... ‘A good partnership? Bastard! You instruct me to maim, murder, make me spread your disease of the human spirit. You’re nothing but a parasite, and you must be stopped.

  ‘There has to be a limit to the degree of injury my mortal body can withstand and I don’t believe I would survive such a fall. I’m going to jump from this great height and this time you’ll perish with me.’ ... Kristin ... listen to me! ... ‘And just for one moment in time, just before I hit that long, red roof, I’ll know your fear.’

  She pushed back against the dome, stood giddily and looked down. Saint Peter’s Square swirled, rotated into a diagonal, then vertical plane and she fell back, nauseous, weak. ‘ ... Who is he?’ she groaned ... Who is who, sweet Kristin? ... ‘The man in my head?’ ... Him? His name is Thomas. He waits for thee, beautiful Kristin, that is why thou must not do this ... ‘What does he mean to me?’ ... If thou givest thy word thou wilt not leap, I shall tell thee. She knew she could never jump. ‘I give you my word.’ ... Thou lovest this man. Thou hast given thyself to him.

  Its words were meaningless to her. She couldn’t remember any love, given or received. She couldn’t recall the moment of indescribable pleasure that had created the most powerful thing in all time.

  Far below she could see a woman pointing up at her. She was screaming hysterically, prostrating herself.

  Why dost thou hesitate? Go see the whore, go meet thy supplicant, thy disciple! it urged, snatching control back from her.

  She stepped from the dome but didn’t fall. Instead she entered the torturously painful spinning tunnel of light with dread as she’d done so many times before ceasing, momentarily, to exist in tangible form.

  At the end of the kaleidoscope Saint Peter’s Square drew close; she could see the emotional face of the worshipper clearly now.

  Molecular reformation came at a price even greater than disassembly and her transient being screamed as organs, bone and muscle were reborn and meshed once more. When the process was complete she found herself twenty feet from the woman, who darted forwards and threw herself at Kristin’s feet.

  ‘Dea mia, mia salvatrice, tiene il mio destino le mani!’ she cried.

  ‘Come si chiame?’ the Beast asked.

  ‘Flavia.’ She kissed her soiled feet over and over again as the Beast translated the foreign tongue.

  ‘Thou shalt be well rewarded, Flavia, for thine shalt be a world of perversity, cruelty and death, a world without compassion, without love.’

  Others joined Flavia in her acclamation. But there were also cries of dissent and condemnation.

  ‘SEI TIRANNO!’

  ‘STREGA!’

  ‘My family have already been subject to these things,’ Flavia said, averting her eyes as she slipped her fingers beneath the thick coat shielding her from the impossibly cold Roman weather. ‘Perversity, when my husband Claudio first felt the immoral physical need of our beautiful daughter, Antonietta. Cruelty, when he was compelled to act upon his unnatural impulse. And death, when she stuck a knife through his heart and then slit her own throat. I’m so glad I could sense you would be here this day ... rot in hell you fucking bitch!’

  She pressed a button triggering enough Semtex to destroy a small building, and both women were blown to pieces.

  Twenty-seven

  The Beast hung in stasis, neither dead nor alive, as if a greater force was trying to decide where it belonged, where to send it.

  Although Kristin hadn’t attempted to end her own life as she’d threatened and had been murdered by a bloodthirsty, vengeful traitor, she’d been correct; now that she’d been torn asunder the Beast felt afraid, very afraid indeed. For the very first time no new host awaited, and extinction threatened, its spectre standing over the Beast with a dull, blunt axe.

  Pontius Pilate was the sixth procurator of the Roman province of Judaea. He wasn’t really a bad man but the Beast invaded his soul in time to ensure he did its bidding and condemned the Christ to crucifixion. The Beast had been sure, then, that it was rid of the righteous filth for all time.

  Later, the Beast lived within the body and spirit of the third Emperor of Rome, Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, or Caligula, a man of extravagance, sexual perversity, and exceptional cruelty. In the year AD 41, officers of the Praetorian Guard attacked Caligula and stabbed him thirty times with long, sharp knives and the Beast was forced to flee at very short notice. It did what it always had done in the absence of a new host of power and influence and dwelt within the souls of a succession of unfortunate ordinary people, waiting impatiently for the birth of the next great tyrant.

  That despot was a sanguineous, ransacking warlord in the Middle Eastern lands named Genghis Khan, who needlessly butchered hundreds of thousands.

  Much later, breaking with its history, the Beast simultaneously occupied the souls of two men. One was a brilliant, but insane chancellor who became a dictator of unparalleled brutality, usurping and burning much of the European region, whilst dabbling with an admirable attempt at genocide.

  But the ancient, wise Beast had foreseen the downfall of Adolf Hitler and moments before the doomed leader and his sexual partner swallowed their deadly capsules, before he put a bullet through his brain in his Führerbunker, it vacated his shell and poured the entirety of its bile into the soul of Hitler’s most hateful of accomplices, Adolf Eichmann, whose deeds as the architect of the semitic extermination programme had already cast a titanic shadow over the world.

  Eichmann was hunted down like a dog and executed many years later, having been found guilty of crimes against humanity, but by the middle period of the twentieth-century he’d lost his potency and faded into obscurity in lands foreign to him and the Beast abandoned him, resurfacing in the animus of a tyrannical dictator, Saloth Sar, or Pol Pot, who murdered one quarter of his people in a relentless drive to reset civilization to the year zero.

  Moments before Pol Pot was fed poison, the Beast coinstantaneously annexed the spirit of a deluded, religious zealot, Osama Bin Laden, who had grand designs on converting the Western World to his own faith at any cost, and that of a xenophobic megalomanic, Saddam Hussein.

  During this era, the Beast decided to punish humanity for its sexual promiscuity and for an infinitesimally brief period of time it settled within a creature lacking a mortal soul — a small, insignificant species of primate dwelling in the region known as Africa. It bestowed upon the animal a deadly disease; Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome, and encouraged it to live amongst, and infect black men.

  Throughout history, white men had treated black men no better than animals, stealing them from their native lands and enslaving them in much the same way as the Beast would enslave all of humanity. It approved thoroughly.

  The Beast expected that the careless abandon with which black men engaged in procreative activity would plunge Africa, and eventually the whole human race into turmoil. Or at least that had been its plan. But mankind recognized the virus, the threat it posed,
and began to exercise greater caution, embarking upon a worldwide programme of education, and it survived.

  Hussein, who had already committed acts of barbarity unheard of since the days of Hitler was eventually dug from his hiding place, a hole in the dry soil, by infamous warmongers, Americans. He was judged by his own people, suspended by his head, and its stem snapped.

  Several years later, Americans struck again, firing bullets into Bin Laden’s brain.

  The Beast was lost then, for a short time, before being drawn towards an innocent, sleeping female in Central Europe. She had no title and so with more than a little irony it decided to name her Kristin; Follower of God. It had envisioned almost limitless potential with the girl but now she, too, was deceased and this time the Beast hadn’t seen it coming.

  The Beast new its father would never let it go home, never let it back into heaven, never give it the chance to atone for its sins upon Earth. It had no option, it must find a way of mending the girl’s dismembered body. It must rekindle her life force or perish.

  Twenty-eight

  The back of Kristin’s skull clattered to a standstill close to the base of one of the two hundred and forty-eight marble columns framing the ellipsoid splendour of Piazza San Pietro. The remainder of her mortal body lay strewn over an area of several hundred feet. Her dismembered torso, a naked chunk of flesh and bone stripped of all femininity and empty of organ had settled on the lower steps of the red granite Egyptian obelisk. Her footless leg floated in the water of Maderno’s ornamental baroque fountain, and the hallowed, white steps of the basilica were littered with seeping scraps of her internal organs. The remains of her assassin had vanished entirely.

  Many in the piazza lay dead. Others staggered, blood streaming from their ears. Some prayed. There were wails of despair and tears of joy as the temperature began to rise.

  But then Kristin’s bloody torso rolled over.

  Gradually, from all over the square, pieces of her disintegrated corpse mobilized, sliding in unison towards the skull. Limbs, fingers and toes, the mangle of vital organs stopped short of the skull, arranging themselves into physiological order. They closed in, began to connect. Intestines re-entered the torso, curling concisely into the correct shape. Veins, muscles, skin and bone repaired at astonishing speed, leaving little more then superficial scarring. An opening appeared in the torso just to the left of centre and her inert heart slipped in, the surgically precise incision sealing behind it.

  The fragments of Kristin’s brain knitted together and the organ regained a natural hue. It levitated an inch or so and entered the clamshell of the rear and front of the skull, which then closed softly, bonding with a ridge of fresh bone. Strands of perfect, silky, raven hair sprouted from the remade flesh of her scalp, beneath her arms, between her legs.

  Moments later two brilliant black jewels appeared from nowhere and pushed their way gently into the eye sockets, the lids closing over them.

  Time passed. The temperature dropped again.

  Kristin gasped, drew oxygen into her lungs and reopened her eyes to the world.

  Inside her head, the Beast screamed insanely. Hurt them! Punish them! Strike at their heart of their faith!

  She drew herself to her feet unstably, like a child standing for the first time, ripped the clothing from a dead woman and re-entered the tunnel, her destination clearly defined.

  Her substance reformed on the roof terrace of a large building adjacent to the basilica. The area of peace and reflection had trellises on both sides of its walkway and above, on which nasturtium and honeysuckle had climbed in abundance, but now hung, shrivelled and lifeless.

  Kristin shuffled slowly along the terrace, her inner evil magnetized by something that ate away at its core. Then she gagged; the cause of its revulsion lay directly below her naked feet. It was humane, righteous, vile! She descended through the concrete and steel of the structure, alighting on the immaculate, cold, marble floor of a small chapel.

  The place of worship was narrow and dark, illuminated on the right hand side by a single, elongated stained glass window. At the far end of the chapel an old man dressed in white robe and cap was bent forward in silent prayer before the small altar, his bony knees cushioned by a gold- trimmed, emerald green hassock. He didn’t appear to be aware of her. But when she took one pace forwards he lifted his head sharply and a shadow crushed his soul.

  ‘Pontefice!’ the Beast belched.

  He turned slowly. ‘ ... Tu!’

  ‘Pray, atrocious Christian pig, pray.’

  ‘ ... I can pray no more, my body aches.’

  ‘ And I ache for reclamation of thy soul. Pray! Let me hear thy pitiful pleas for salvation.’

  Pope Alexander IX turned and continued.

  ‘I come to you, Jesus, as my deliverer. You know all my problems, the things that bind me, that torment me, that defile and harass me. I now loose myself from every dark spirit, from every evil influence, from every Satanic bondage, from every spirit in me that is not the spirit of God, and I command all such spirits to leave me now, in the name Jesus Christ.

  ‘I now confess that my body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, redeemed, cleansed and sanctified by the blood of Jesus. Therefore, Satan has no place in me, and no power over me, through the blood of Jesus.’

  ‘Has God listened to thee, Pontifice?’

  ‘God always listens to those who need to be heard.’

  ‘He will not listen to me.’

  ‘Do you ever wonder why?’ he asked, turning to face her. ‘After everything you’ve done?’

  ‘Dost thou think I should pray, Pontifice, beg my father for forgiveness?’

  ‘Your prayers would fall on deaf ears … ’

  ‘I should slay thee now, hang thy carcass out the light aperture for all to see!’

  ‘Kill me too, do you think ...?’

  ‘Think? I never think, just act. In any case, death would be too good for thee, and Christianity, humanity, must know that nobody is immune to my influence, especially thee.’

  ‘You will never destroy my faith.’

  ‘Thy faith! How canst thou still believe? Look how mankind has abused, violated my father’s most precious creation, threatens to annihilate it.’

  ‘Some goodness remains, some morality. You know this, you’ve seen it. I’ve seen it too.’

  Pope Alexander struggled to his feet and approached her. She smiled darkly. ‘ ... And whilst some goodness remains you cannot win.’

  ‘I have already won! I have humanity by the throat. I have raised the houses of God to the ground, forced Christianity’s top order to butcher one another ... ’

  ‘Others will continue God’s work.’

  ‘ … I have turned rivers to acid, infiltrated government, made fathers rape daughters, mothers murder sons. I have spread avarice, loathing and misery, promoted warfare. I have ... ’

  ‘You have encountered opposition.’

  ‘ ... Hesitation, reluctance. None dare oppose me.’

  ‘And yet still you cannot bring humanity to its knees.’

  ‘It is only a matter of time. Thy demise will end all hope.’

  Her eyes burned with hatred as the Beast tried to turn him against all he held dear, all he believed in. He cried out, bent over in terrible pain. Then he straightened himself and struck her with great power, sending her sprawling to the icy stone.

  She rounded on him. ‘And now I shall hurt thee, Pontifice! But not in the way thou wouldst expect. This pain will live with thee forever.’

  Vincente Leopoldo Guonçallvez sat at a heavily scarred, teak table in the family home on the slopes of the Vale Verdi Vineyard, in the Douro Valley, Portugal.

  He sipped some red wine and looked out through the imperfect, rippled glass of the window at the sea of frost-bitten vines that rolled down the hillside to the banks of the frozen river far below. Then, quite suddenly, he was overwhelmed with pain. It was the pain of his twin brother, Alexander, Pope Alexander IX, many miles away in Rome. />
  Vincente Leopoldo had always felt Alexander’s pain, had instinctively known if he was suffering, and Alexander had always felt Vincente Leopoldo’s pain. It was a phenomenon not uncommon amongst twins.

  The old man left the table, made his way, falteringly, through to the bright, south facing conservatory and picked up the phone. He started to dial. Then he heard a Satanic voice inside his head and stopped. He turned, opened the sliding doors and stepped out into the daylight, passing around the building until he reached the shed. Inside the little outhouse he fumbled in the darkness until his hands settled on the weathered, wooden handle of a garden fork.

  In a clearing between some Acacia trees near the water’s edge, two discoloured stone crosses rose from the rich soil. He stared at them for a moment then wielded the fork and dug madly at the graves of his parents. He’d removed little more then the topsoil of the burial mounds when he heard his mother’s cry.

  ‘VINCENTE LEOPOLDO, STOP! You can stop, my darling, you can stop this.’

  ‘ … Mama?’ he choked. ‘ … Mama?’

  ‘Don’t listen to the voice.’

  ‘But it’s so strong, Mama, so strong.’

  ‘You are stronger, Vincente Leopoldo.’

  ‘ ... Where is Papa? May I speak with Papa?’

  ‘Papa has moved on, passed to the other side.’

  ‘ ... Why are you still here, Mama?’

  ‘I couldn’t pass on without you. I shall wait. Wait for you and Alexander, then we shall join Papa together.’

  The madness returned. He screamed wildly, his eyes ablaze, and hacked at the soil once more.

  ‘VINCENTE LEOPOLDO!’

  The evil dictation inside his head ceased. He tossed the fork aside and lay atop her mound. ‘I do not think you will need to wait very long, Mama. The world is beset with a plague of the soul from which it would seem not to be able to recover, and we are now very old men.’

  ‘Vincente Leopoldo, listen to me. Your spirit remains unsullied, as does Alexander’s and countless others. Humanity will ... ’