[Original Short Story] The Renaissance of Jacob Smith
The Renaissance of Jacob Smith
by Craig Gabrysch
Previously, Hillbilly Hell
The purplish-grey tentacles grabbed hold of Jacob Smith’s leg and began pulling him closer to the mass of swirling, gnashing teeth at the portal opening. Acrid fluid burned through the leg of his trouser and shaft of his boot. The chant of CHOGTHATHA CHOGTHA CHOGTHA reverberated in his ears and vibrated his sinuses, as a steady back beat began: pound pound pound.
Jacob, eyes wide, sat upright in bed. The sheets and his long johns were both drenched through with cool sweat. His eyes tracked around the unadorned stone walls across from him, looking for whatever had invaded his dreams.
He breathed deep. He was back in the monastery, miles and miles away from the graveyard of Kadath Plantation. The pounding at the door started again, bang bang bang, barely keeping pace with his heart.
“Jacob, open up,” someone said through the door.
“Hold your damn horses,” Jacob yelled back. “Let me get some clothes on.”
He tossed the thin covers and sheets off and got out of bed. He shivered as his bare feet touched the flagstone floor. Damn, it was cold for spring. He grabbed his trousers and shirt from the back of the room’s only chair and dressed. Clothed, he padded across the room and opened the door.
Christopher Freeman stood, leaning against the door’s frame, arms crossed.
Jacob let the door swing open and walked back to the chair to pull on his boots.
“We kept some vittles on the table.”
Jacob wondered if he’d been screaming in the waking world. He’d had complaints from some of the other passengers on the steamer trip from Tennessee.
“Thanks.” Jacob began tugging on the first of his old boots.
“How was it coming back?”
“Lonesome,” Jacob said, pulling on the next boot. He sighed and stayed seated in his chair.
“Yep,” Christopher said, entering the room. He leaned back against the wall and recrossed his arms. “Know that feeling. It’s painful to lose a comrade.” He leveled his gaze at Jacob.
“Yup.” Jacob returned Christopher’s look. After a moment, Jacob stood and walked over to the empty water basin. He poured some fresh water in and splashed his face. He toweled off and looked back over his shoulder at the other man. “What’d they fix for breakfast?”
“Sausage and grits.”
Jacob went over to where his holster and sword-belt hung from a wall peg . He pulled both down and began to strap them on.
“Coffee?”
“Hatsuto made sure they left a cup.”
“Good man,” Jacob said, cinching his belts tight. Christopher walked out into the hallway and Jacob followed. “When did Mr. Bennett arrive?” he asked Christopher as he shut the door to his cell.
“Few days ago,” Christopher replied. They walked down the hallway to a set of spiral stairs at the end.
“Had a service yet?”
“Not yet. Didn’t seem right without you here.”
“Why? Ain’t like I knew him all that well.”
“Guess you didn’t,” Christopher said, scratching at his beard. “But you were with him when he fell. Figured you got some words to say.” Christopher led the way down the stairs.
“I reckon so.” Jacob followed after Christopher. “How many of the others are here?” They entered the corridor which led to the dining hall.
“We got Hatsuto and the colonel.”
“And the book’s safe?”
“Put in the vault as soon as you delivered it.”
“Good.”
Ahead, the dining hall’s double doors stood open. Monks sat quietly breaking their fast. Jacob and Christopher walked in and headed for the back corner reserved for the Templars. The colonel and Hatsuto were both already there, their plates cleaned of any food morsel. They sipped tea and spoke to each other in low voices. As Jacob and Christopher approached, the other two men stopped talking and stood.
“Jacob, sir, it’s good to have you back,” Col. Winnie said, offering his bear paw of a hand.
“It’s good to be here, sir,” Jacob replied, taking his hand. He turned to the Japanese man, Hatsuto, and bowed. Hatsuto bowed in turn and offered his hand. They shook. All four sat at the table. The three others focused their attention on Jacob.
“Did Henry go down fighting?” the colonel asked.
Jacob hesitated a moment. “Yes sir.”
“Good. The thought of him falling from his horse and breaking his neck, or some other variety of needless death, wouldn’t have sat well with him. Henry was a proud man.”
“He got me out alive.”
“And that damnable Necronomicon is safely in the vault as well.”
“What are we going to do with it? Return it to Miskatonic University?”
“No,” Col. Winnie said, patting the table for emphasis, “a replica will be made and sent in its place. Mark my words, men, I’ll not again risk having that tome fall into the wrong hands.”
There was a round of nods around the table.
“You men eat your breakfast,” Col. Winnie said, standing. “Jacob, when you’re finished eating, go see the abbot, then come down to my office. I’d like to discuss our next move.”
“Our next move, sir?” Jacob asked, looking up at the colonel.
“Certainly, son,” Col. Winnie said, putting a reassuring hand on Jacob’s shoulder. “We must rally the troops.”
The older man excused himself and left the room, heading back through the double doors to the corridor. None of the monks watched him go, their gazes remained fixed on their plates.
“Rally the troops?” Christopher asked. “For what?”
“What is ‘rally the troops’?” Hatsuto asked, a bushy eyebrow raised.
“Means to bring all your soldiers together,” Jacob said as a monk brought over a plate each for Christopher and him.
“Ah,” Hatsuto said, taking a sip from his mug of tea. He made a face. He still hadn’t gotten used to black tea, but they could rarely find green anywhere in Chicago.
“Why do you think he said that?” Christopher asked before he started digging into his food.
“Reckon DuBose, the man we took the Necronomicon back from, wasn’t acting alone? Maybe there’s other rebels like him that are stockpiling artifacts?” Jacob asked, digging into his own plate. He was starving.
“Maybe,” Christopher said around a mouthful of food. “Wouldn’t put it past ‘em, what with the way they tried to hold on.”
“If a man picks up arms and fights another man,” Hatsuto said, setting his mug down, “do not expect him to stop fighting when beaten one time.”
“But we whooped ‘em good,” Jacob said. “Sherman marched right through there.”
“The Union whooped ‘em,” Christopher said. “We ain’t got nothing to do with it. May have been a boy in blue before, but you ain’t now.”
“Fine,” Jacob said. “The Union did it. Figured they wouldn’t have much fight left in ‘em, that’s all.”
“I think Hatsuto’s right. South thinks the North is telling ‘em how to live still. That’s what the rebellion was always about, the South thinking they was fine to buy and sell my people and them not wanting no lip from the other side. Sherman marching to the sea ain’t likely to have made ‘em anymore willing to take to it. I think we’re gonna see more like that DuBose.”
“Reckon so?”
“Yep. Bet my poke on it.”
“Likely right.” Jacob forked a link of sausage and bit into it. “What do you think Col. Winnie wants to talk to me for?”
Both of the Templars looked at each other and shrugged.
“Beats me.”
“I do not know his intentions, either,” Hatsuto said.
Jacob went back to eating.
Jacob breathed deep and knocked cautiously on the door to the abbot’s small office. It was nestled in one of the top corners of the monastery. Abbot Jean Marie Ouellet was the head of the Jesuit order in these parts. The Templars, for their part, weren’t necessarily part of the Catholic Church, but they did receive most of their funding from them. They operated out of this monastery, and the abbot was considered their caretaker of sorts. Like Congress does with the military, the Church controlled their purse strings. And, just like in the normal military, the chain of command could get foggy.
“Entrez.”
Jacob pushed the door open. The room was spacious in comparison to the monastic cells Jacob was accustomed to. The walls on all sides were hidden behind wooden bookshelves stacked with leather-bound tomes. Fur rugs covered the flagstone floor, making it feel more like a hunting cabin than an office.
Abbot Jean Marie Ouellet sat behind his desk. He was a birdlike man, all frailty and sharp edges. Even his little bald head looked like an egg to Jacob, with its skin stretching tight over his fragile skull.
“Jacob,” the abbot said, looking up at him through bifocal lenses, “thank you for coming. Allow me to complete this letter, and I will be right with you. Please sit.”
In front of the desk were two wooden chairs. Jacob took the one on the left and crossed his legs, idly looking about to the rhythmic accompaniment of the abbot’s scratching quill.
“I am concluding my letter to M. Bennett’s sister. It is customary to write such letters in the military, is it not?”
Jacob had written plenty of letters like Ouellet’s during the war, though not as a commanding officer. Always as war buddies to a girl the man knew or loved, or thought he knew and loved. Sometimes to sisters, too. They gave a brief respite to some, but Jacob had never been glad to perform the duty. But that was duty’s definition, wasn’t it? Something you did despite its joylessness.
“Thought that was the colonel’s responsibility?”
“Oh, it is. My letter will accompany his. I feel it is my duty.”
Jacob nodded absently and looked at the titles on the shelves. History texts mostly, but with treatises on mathematics, philosophy, and naturalism scattered throughout the collection.
“It is a sad day when one must send such letters, do you not agree? I wrote of your involvement, and your returning of M. Bennett’s body to our care. It is good that he will be buried on sacred soil.”
“Yes sir, it is.”
“I would, if you feel comfortable, Jacob, like to ask about what happened in Tennessee.”
“Yes sir,” Jacob said.
The abbot put aside his quill and closed his inkwell’s lid. He folded his hands on his desk and looked at Jacob.
Jacob looked back.
“The colonel wrote his report based on what you told him of the events. What did you see at Kadath Estates?” the abbot asked, his lips pressed together in a distinct line.
“A bunch of folks trying to cause the Apocalypse.”
“Yet you halted it, did you not, by taking this DuBose’s life?”
“Yes sir. I did.”
“Are you fine with your decision? The colonel said you shot him without second thought.”
“Yes sir, I did. I shot him in the back, too, if that makes a difference.”
“Un peu,” the abbot said, making the gesture for a little bit with his right hand. “Do you feel guilt?”
“I took a man’s life, Abbot. I’d never lie and say it was noble, shooting him the way I did, but I stopped him from doing the same all over the north.”
“Perhaps all over the world. Any, how do you Americans say, second guessing?”
Jacob thought about it. He hadn’t really considered it yet, so he figured he might as well just for the hell of it. He looked off to the side at all those books of history and their chronicles of a world which might have ceased existence if DuBose had finished his ritual.
“Were I forced to relive it,” Jacob said, looking the Abbot in the eye, “I’d do it again. DuBose belonged in a sanitarium or in the ground, and I didn’t see no sanitarium around.”
Jacob walked down the final flight of stairs to the floor of the monastery’s cellar that served as headquarters for the Knights Templar in America. The Order covered as much of North America as they could from this small space, with Col. Winfred Hitchcock sending the knights to the four corners of the continent whenever there was something in need of being taken care of. The colonel, Col. Winnie to his men, served as their spiritual guide, as well as their commander, bringing the total of the Knights Templar membership to nine. Well, eight, since Henry Bennett had died in Tennessee.
Jacob had only met a few of the other Templars: The colonel, Christopher Freeman, Hatsuto Watanabe, Henry Bennett, and Five Feathers. The other four were on distant missions, and generally stayed gone. Blake Hardy, a crazy mountain man from the sound of him, stayed in the Pacific Northwest hunting werewolves, werecats, windigos, sasquatch, and the like. Pedro Hernandez stayed in the Southwest, killing chupacabras, vampires, and such. Finally, there was an Irishman in New York named Conner and another Templar, Jean, in Quebec.
Jacob walked down the dank, close-walled corridor to the colonel’s office. Water dripped somewhere in the labyrinth of dank halls. Damp and mildew filled Jacob’s nose and coated his skin. Gaslights burned on the walls, a recent addition, but they didn’t do much to ward off the sense of being entombed. Jacob stopped at the door to the office and knocked.
“Enter,” Col. Winnie bellowed from the other side.
Jacob puffed out his chest a little and opened the door. Maps made of vellum and books older than Jacob’s dead grandfather fought for the tiny space offered by the shelves and table tops. Towering over it all like a spectacle-wearing grizzly was Col. Winnie. He was stuffed into the scant space he’d set aside for his desk. He glanced up from the stack of letters spread in front of him.
“Jacob,” he said, waving at a chair which a stack of books had won from the maps, “take a seat. I was just going over a letter from Mr. Hernandez.” Jacob looked warily at the plain chair, weighing whether it was worth trying to find places for all the amassed words just so he could sit. He looked back at Col. Winnie, who seemed engrossed.
“My Spanish is far from impeccable, so this could take a moment,” Col. Winnie said without looking up from the letter. Jacob began moving the books from chair to shelves. He sat down when he was finished. “How went the interview with the abbot?”
“Fine. Asked me about DuBose.”
“What about that man?”
“Whether I regretted shooting him or not.”
“Do you?” the colonel asked, looking up from his letter for the briefest of moments.
“No sir.”
Col. Winnie pursed his lips and considered Jacob for a moment more before going back to his reading. More time passed.
“Care for a drink?” Col. Winnie asked after a while, pulling open a side drawer and reaching in for a bottle of bourbon whiskey. He set the spirits on the desktop in front of Jacob.
“Just crept past noon, sir.”
“Asked if you cared for a drink, son, not the time of day.”
“Reckon I’ll have one, then.”
Winnie stuck his hand back in the drawer and grabbed two glasses. He set them next to the bottle. Jacob poured them each three fingers and took a sip of his. It was good. Smoky. The younger man took another sip. Winnie kept reading.
Ten minutes passed. Col. Winnie sighed and took off his spectacles. His chair creaked as he leaned back. The colonel began to chew on the ear piece of his spectacles. He looked from his untouched glass of bourbon to Jacob. The young Templar was already beginning to show signs of the whiskey’s affection. Jacob poured himself another glass.
Col. Winnie sighed again and looked at a bookshelf in the corner. It reached to the low ceiling and was so crammed full of books and tomes that any false pull may set off an avalanche.
“See those books on that shelf, son?”
Jacob turned and looked back at the shelf. “Yup.”
“There is one on the second from the top shelf. Its spine is unmarked. Bring it here, please.”
“Yes sir,” Jacob said, downing the last of his whiskey before standing. He walked shakily over to the bookshelf, knocking over a stack in the process, and pulled the book Col. Winnie had indicated. Luckily, no bookslide started.
Jacob looked down at the plain, leather-bound book in his hands. He turned it over so he could see the back. There was no marking on the other side either. It was thin and old, but well cared for.
“What’s this?”
“The Annals of the Knights Templar.”
“All the way back?”
“Just from our reinstatement by Pope Pius in 1780. When our founder left from Europe to come to this monastery, he brought a copy. Our histories diverged from that point, you understand.”
“Mind if I look at it? Still don’t know much about the order. Just, you know, the vision I had and what y’all have told me.”
“It is your right.”
Jacob opened the book at the beginning. It was filled with plain, cream-colored, unlined paper. There was no dedication on the first page, just a simple date at the top left, “4 March, 1780,” like a journal, followed by a long stream of florid script which swam and danced in Jacob’s vision. Jacob tried to read the first few words, but they wouldn’t connect.
“God,” he said under his breath, “I’m drunk already.” He shut the book carefully and took it to Col. Winnie.
“Feeling alright? You look a bit flustered, son,” the colonel said around the earpiece of his spectacles as he took the book from Jacob. Col. Winnie thumbed through it till he stopped on the first blank page he reached.
“Yup. Well, no, not feeling so right. Whiskey of yours kicks like a mule.” He looked down at the colonel’s untouched glass, and back to his. He picked up his empty glass and smelled the remnants.
There was bourbon and notes of something else, something slightly acrid. His eyes widened. Jacob sat down, barely catching the edge of the chair, his gaze still fixed on the bottom of the empty glass. He looked at Winnie again.
“Feeling alright?” the colonel asked again, leaning forward with his fingers expectantly steepled at his chin.
“You . . .” Jacob said, his tongue feeling like a bud of cotton. “Didn’t . . .” The words wouldn’t come. He closed his eyes and tried to force them out. If he could just get the damned thought out, he’d be fine. Jacob opened his eyes and attempted to speak again, but there was still nothing. Winnie blinked slowly.
The room abruptly slanted to the left. Jacob grabbed hold of his own thighs in an attempt to stay seated. The young Templar struggled to stay upright, fighting the floor’s incessant tugging. He raised an accusatory finger at Winnie as his vision again lurched to the left.
“You’ve plenty of fight, son,” Col. Winnie said, putting his spectacles back on. He took his pen from the desktop and began filling it from an inkwell. He began to write in the book.
Jacob stood, but his legs couldn’t resist the spin of the room. He tried to maintain his footing in broken stamps and stomps, but the pull from his left was too much. Jacob tried to draw his pistol, but his arms were lead and unresponsive. He staggered backwards into the chair, knocking it over. He fell to the floor in a sitting position.
“Stay down,” Col. Winnie said from behind his desk. Jacob heard the distant groan of the chair as the giant man stood and came around to hover above him. The younger man looked up at the older. Winnie still had that grim, tight-lipped look. “Only gonna make this harder on yourself if you try to get back up.”
Jacob looked at the desk. He reached for the corner and tried to stand at the same time. He made it to his feet, but unable to get any purchase on the desk, toppled forward. He collided with the oak desk and slid to the ground. Jacob’s vision faded.
“Told you to stay down, son.”
“He’s coming to,” Christopher said. At least Jacob thought it was Christopher. His vision was still blurred. Jacob shook his head from side to side, trying to shake himself out of the fog. He was naked, almost completely submerged in some sort of liquid.
“Let him have a bit more then,” said the colonel. “Only need him out for a bit longer.”
“You sure, sir?”
“Course I’m sure.”
A figure moved in the darkness. It pushed a balled up rag over Jacob’s mouth. He held his breath. He tried to struggle, to thrash at his captors, but his arms felt weak as a foal. They grew weaker as he finally broke and inhaled from the rag.
“Shhhh,” whispered Christopher as Jacob drifted back into the darkness. Jacob heard stone grind on stone. A dull thud followed.
Jacob awoke again. Well, at least he reckoned he did. He floated in a vacuous world of nothing. He groped outward with his hands, trying to get a grip on the dimensions of his confinement. He touched something solid. Trying a different tack, Jacob felt at his own body, but he struck something soft, but firm and unyielding when he moved his arms more than a half-inch or so.
“Hey,” he hollered, trying to kick and thrash, his voice echoing in the bleakness.
Questions rolled through his mind. Why had his comrades done this? Why had the colonel poisoned him? Where was he? Was this because he’d let Henry Bennett die? Was it because he’d killed DuBose? Was this some sort of punishment?
He tried to keep his breathing steady. Jacob didn’t know how much air there was.
How long he stayed that way, just thinking and breathing, Jacob couldn’t say. With no sun or pocket watch, there was no point of reference to measure time. The same thoughts of reasons for his imprisonment rolled and rolled through his mind, till his thoughts seemed trivial. Eventually, because eventual was all he could think to call it, his trivial thoughts became nothingness. They simply ceased. His mind quieted. And then he was . . .
. . . standing naked in a roughly hewed stone corridor. Air so hot it might as well have been from a steam engine rushed past Jacob, almost knocking him to the ground. He covered his nakedness with his hands as he looked around. Amber light emanated from strange lichen covering every surface and hanging from the ceiling in great clumps. Light came from ahead. Jacob looked behind him, but the tunnel wound around a corner and went out of sight. Confused, Jacob stumbled ahead, following after the beacon . . .
“Hello?” Jacob called as he walked forward, gravel and sharp bits of stone digging into the soles of his bare feet. He followed the curve of the cave.
“Christopher? Hatsuto?” No response but his echo. Jacob kept walking.
The tunnel straightened out after thirty or forty paces. Jacob saw a great, white light emanating at the end. He looked behind him. He shielded his eyes and looked back into the light.
“Anyone?” Jacob walked on, stepping into the light. It was as bright and warm as a summer day.
“We made you,” said the voice. Jacob opened his eyes and looked around. He was strapped to a table of some sort in an impossibly white room.
“Hello?” Jacob asked.
“We made you.”
The walls shimmered the same way windows do in a rainstorm. Out of the base of the walls around him came a legion of small beings, only a foot or so high. Hundreds of them, pooled together in a great crowd of dark eyes and featureless faces. They pressed near where Jacob lay on the table. They stopped and looked up at him. Jacob craned his head to each side and looked back down at them.
“You will defend?” asked all the creatures together.
“Defend? Defend what?”
“Everything.”
“Against what?”
“That which would undo all we have wrought.”
Jacob, his neck strained, relaxed and let his head thump against the table.
“Yes,” he said to the ceiling, “I’ll defend.”
“This is the Truth, Jacob Smith. We are the Sophia of which your ancestors spoke.” Jacob looked back down at the featureless creatures. Each now held aloft a ball of distorted otherness which bent the light around it. “This is the logos of which your ancestors spoke. It is the Truth. Accept it.”
Jacob blinked. When he opened his eyes he was fully clothed and girded in his helm and chain tunic. He stood in the center aisle of an empty chapel, the comfortable weight of his revolver and sword hanging from either hip. In front of him stood a giant of a knight clad from head to foot in green-tinted plate mail.
The armor of the giant was inscribed with scrollwork and pictures of events and great battles depicted in a medieval style. His helmet was one of the old flat-topped pot helms which fully enclosed the wearer’s head and only had a thin opening to see through. The knight’s hands rested on the pommel of an enormous great sword, larger than any blade Jacob could ever lift.
Jacob looked away from the knight and around at the empty chapel. Light shone in through a myriad of stained glass windows, each of them a single instance in the long history of the Knights Templar. He recognized the images from some of the books he’d looked through in Col. Winnie’s study.
“Where am I?” Jacob asked quietly. His words did not echo in the silent chamber.
“The Chapel of St. George, the heart of my order,” said the knight, his voice louder than a battery of cannons. “Who are you?”
“I am Jacob Smith.”
“Why have you come here? To join the Pauperes commilitones Christi Templique Solomonici?”
Jacob hoped he didn’t have to fight this knight. One swing from the sword he carried would cut through an anvil, let alone Jacob. “You mean the Knights Templar?”
“Aye.”
“Then, I reckon so,” Jacob replied as he repositioned his feet to a fighting stance.
“Prepare yourself, mortal.” Jacob drew his sword as the giant raised his own blade and began advancing with a lumbering gait. He covered the space in a few long strides, swinging his great sword in a horizontal arch at Jacob’s neck.
Jacob ducked the clumsy swing, but the knight caught him in the face with a backhanded slap from his right gauntlet. Jacob flew through the air, over and into the wooden pews. He tried to tuck and roll with the impact, but his landing space was too confined. He landed hard on his left shoulder, his collarbone snapping with a profound crack.
Fire shot up his arm as he slid three feet down the smooth seat, his legs splayed behind him. He gripped his sword tight and scrambled out of the pew.
“Goddamn,” Jacob said, trying to move his left arm. All he got for his trouble was agony. The knight reached down and effortlessly cleared the pew with a brush of his right hand, throwing the wooden pew off and to the left.
Jacob scooted backward towards the side aisle, his left arm hanging useless by his side. Gritting his teeth against the pain, he sheathed his sword and drew his revolver.
“Face me,” the knight bellowed from the center aisle. Jacob stopped on the other side of the pews beneath a stained glass window emblazoned with a medieval depiction of two knights riding the same horse.
“Think I’m stupid?” He drew his pistol, cocked it single-handed, and aimed at the knight’s head.
The knight stopped.
“What are you doing?” The knight looked both ways. “That is dishonorable.”
“Dishonorable?” Jacob asked and fired a shot. The knight’s head snapped back, the metal of the visor dented. Jacob switched positions, moving to his left to flank the giant. “You must be three times my size.” He fired another shot, this time aimed at the side of the giant’s head. The giant stumbled sideways, losing his footing.
“One punch and you broke my damn collarbone.” Jacob moved as quickly as he could through a pew towards the center aisle. He fired another round. The bullet hit the giant in the shoulder. The giant knight lost his footing and stepped forward to regain his balance. Jacob thumbed back the hammer. The gun boomed as he fired into the giant’s backside.
The armored man fell forward, sounding like a pots and pans covered bull plowing through a barn wall. His great sword fell to the stone tile of the aisle. Jacob holstered his pistol and drew his sword. He rushed the giant with a roar.
The giant rolled with surprising quickness, trying to bring an arm up in time to meet Jacob’s charge, but it wasn’t any use. Jacob already stood over him, broadsword clenched in his right hand and ready to drive it downward and through the giant’s neck.
“Yield?”
“No,” the giant said, a touch of surprise in his voice, “this is not the way it should happen.”
“Wait. What do you mean?”
“No one ever has won.”
“I ain’t supposed to win? Really?” Jacob grunted his own surprise. “How does anyone ever join the Templars?”
“It’s a sacrifice on your part, this duel. The initiate is to lay down his life for honor, and to leave behind their old life. Only after that can they be reborn into their new,” the knight said.
Jacob grunted. “Well shit.”
“May I remove my helmet? The dents make for an uncomfortable fit.”
“Fine.” The knight reached up cautiously and undid the strap beneath his helmet. He removed the helmet, revealing a gentle, topaz-hued face surrounded in long, blonde locks of hair. His eyes were golden, but human in shape and appearance.
“Thank you. I seldom have to wear the armor. One forgets how hot it can be. May I stand?”
“Your word you ain’t gonna make a move?”
“Yes, my word as an angel.” Jacob raised an eyebrow and stepped back. The angel rose to
his feet.
“Woah there. Angel? Got any proof?”
The angel sighed. He puffed out his chest, his breastplate groaning with the strain, and stretched his arms to his side. As he leaned forward, a great wrenching of metal sounded. Feathered, white wings sprouted from the rends in the armor, stretching two dozen feet in each direction. Jacob stepped back as the angel twice beat his wings in the air.
“Does my proof back my assertion?”
“Yup,” Jacob said, sheathing his sword. Wincing, he cradled his useless arm to his chest.
The angel sighed again and bent down to retrieve the helmet at his feet. He picked it up and inspected the depressions left by the bullet and looked at Jacob. “None of the others used pistols, you know.”
“Why not?”
The angel shrugged.
“So, I was supposed to lose?”
“Yes.”
“I wish someone would’ve mentioned that beforehand. Reckon this is all new.” He looked around the structure. “Nice chapel, by the way.”
“Thank you, but it’s not mine. I’m merely it’s guardian appearing in a way you wish to see. This place belongs to the Knights Templar.” This close, Jacob realized just how tall the angel really was. Jacob only rose to his chest.
“They own this place?”
“In a manner of speaking. It’s difficult to explain, but this is the ideal Chapel of St. George. The perfect one, upon which all others depend. As long as the other chapels exist, this one will as well. All the others previously built across Europe and the Holy Land by the Knights Templar were just shadows. You should have seen this place three centuries ago. The daemons almost reclaimed into the ether.”
“Demons?”
“Allow me to clarify. Daemons. They are neutral, and have no bearing on the fight for creation. They come through like stable hands and wipe out old, unused ideas and constructs.”
“Right.” Jacob pursed his lips. “How do you reckon we get this thing moving forward then?”
“I could kill you.”
“What’d that take?”
The angel made a chopping motion with his hand.
Jacob shook his head. “Not a chance.”
“I am no Jack Ketch, sir. A well-placed, clean strike should do the trick neatly.”
Jacob looked askance at the great sword laying a few feet away in the aisle. He looked back up at the giant through squinted eyes. “Your word as an angel?”
“My word,” the angel said, holding up his right hand and beating his wings once for emphasis.
“Alright, then. Guess we should keep tradition.” Jacob sighed. “How do you want to do this?”
“You can just kneel right where you are.”
“Alright,” Jacob said, getting down on one knee. He settled in with the other while the angel retrieved his sword. “One quick question.”
“Yes?” The angel asked as he spun the sword with ease.
“What’s your name?”
“Michael.”
“You’re Michael the Archangel?”
“I am.”
Jacob grunted and closed his eyes.
“A request of my own, Jacob?”
“What?” Jacob replied, eyes still closed.
“Could you not tell the other Templars you won?”
“Reckon I could keep it to myself.” Jacob sighed.
“Thank you,” Michael the Archangel said just before beheading Jacob Smith, the newest Knight Templar.
Images and experiences pressed together in Jacob’s mind, squeezing themselves into his awareness.
“Papa, I wanna ride,” Jacob saying, holding his hands up to his father.
“You sure, son?” his father asking as he reaches down to pick up Jacob before the boy can reconsider. Jacob sitting in front of his father on the horse, the saddle’s hard leather being uncomfortable, the smell of fresh grass and barnyard filling his nose. His father’s warm presence behind him as they both rode out from the Kansas homestead and into the prairie.
Jacob’s first taste of coffee, his mother scowling when he spit it out, his brother laughing at him, his little sister screwing up her face in distaste and saying, “I’ll never try that.”
Jacob decking his brother with a hard right hook, riding off the farm for the last time, going past the lonesome tree where they’d laid his mother, father, and sister to rest.
Then the war, three hundred days of rain and cold nights, three hundred more of heat, all of them full of thirst and hunger, the soft crying of the new recruits, his own depression and lonesomeness in those early days, the ache in his gut because his parents would not ever come back no matter how many Rebels he killed.
Jacob shooting the young girl in the face, the way the ball from his revolver entered below her left cheekbone and exited through the back of her skull in a bloody crater, his mustering out from the raiders afterward when the war ended.
That same girl forgiving him a lifetime later while he sat breaking fast with the other monks. The abrasion of his vocal cords as he screamed, waking up from his first vision.
Henry Bennett teaching him how to swing a sword properly. Jacob talking to Hatsuto about meditation, Bushido, and the Buddha. Talking to Christopher Freeman about the South. Hatsuto whooping him at practice, the feel of the Japanese man’s wooden kendo sword across his wrist. Jacob outshooting the Japanese man at the target range, and Jacob’s gloating afterward. Chanting in some foreign, cthonic tongue, tentacles, Jacob shooting DuBose in the back, the relief of safety, the pain of his leg.
Then somewhere. Somewhere he had certainly never been, and had never dreamed before. He was floating above it all. A spangled mash of pinwheeled stars spun far below him in the echoless, silent vacuum. It spun so quickly, Jacob imagined he could scoop it into his hands. So he did. He reached down with his right hand and plucked it from the soft, velvet-like backing and held it up to his eye.
The Templar blinked and saw he was now floating above the rambling sprawl of wooden structures that was Chicago. Jacob looked over the whole of the city. Judging by his position near the lake, the monastery would be due east. As Jacob realized this, he was already there, above the stone compound.
He looked down upon it and felt a tug, a sort of wail which filled his senses. Jacob followed the pull through the ceiling of the monastery, down past the dining hall, beyond even the basement levels, far into the earth till he reached the catacombs below the structure.
Jacob was in a giant room, far larger than the dining hall and bigger than any room Jacob had ever entered, filled with pillars and tombs. Scores of lamps and torches fought vainly against the shadows. Dozens of sarcophagi lined each side of the chamber, each carved with an individual likeness of a man laying in repose, eyes closed, hands at the hilt of a sword resting on his chest. Blurry figures swirled through the room so fast they seemed elongated and solid.
The figures centered on a single sarcophagus in the corner. Jacob watched as one blur would come in and stop, become a human being, then would leave after another blur came and joined it. At times it was Hatsuto or Christopher, and at others it would be Col. Winnie. After some watching, all three blurs came to a halt together. They arrayed themselves around the sarcophagus. Jacob was dragged in closer.
The three men reached down and, with effort, slid off the stone lid of the sarcophagus. Jacob, or his body at least, lay inside, naked and submerged in some sort of liquid with closed eyes and an empty expression. Only his face protruded into the air.
“Think he survived?” Christopher asked.
“He is strong,” Hatsuto replied.
“Hatsuto’s right,” the colonel said. “Besides, if he doesn’t make it, he was never meant to join us.”
Jacob floated in closer, looking down at his face. He looked so different from outside himself. Like a stranger he’d known his whole life. Jacob reached down to touch his own shoulder. The middle of his forehead opened and a great, sideways eye protruded, blinking rapidly and sucking in the light.
The floating Jacob drew back, gasping. Then he was there, laying in the water and staring up at the faces of the three men who had imprisoned him.
Jacob, eyes wide, sat upright in the sarcophagus. Salt water ran in rivulets from his naked chest and hair, cold air striking his skin with suddenness. He was alive, good God, he was alive!
“Woah there, son,” Col. Winnie said, putting a towel over Jacob’s shoulders. Jacob, unblinking, looked at each of the three men. “Do you know who we are?”
“Y-y-y-yes.” The three Templars looked at each other in expectation. Jacob screwed his face up, tried to remember the order of the words he needed to say. “You’re Christopher, the colonel, and . . . Hatsuto.”
Col. Winnie clapped him on the back and the two other men exhaled in relief. “Damn good for a first try, son. Damn good. Do you know who you are?”
“Jacob Smith.”
“Even better. Let’s get him out of this thing.”
The four men sat together in the burial chamber. The three senior Templars had brought down chairs when they came to retrieve him from his initiation. Jacob was naked beneath a blanket as he sipped from a cup of broth the colonel had given him.
“Did you understand any of it?” Col. Winnie asked.
“Not really.”
“I didn’t neither,” Christopher said. “Still wonder about most of the bits.”
“Feel same?” Hatsuto asked.
“No.”
“That is good,” the Nipponese man replied.
“Sorry we had to do you like that,” Christopher said. “It’s the way it’s written is all. Supposed to show us our true selves and sever us from the past. Whatever that means.”
The four men sat in the quiet.
“I did have one question, though. Why wasn’t it more . . .”
“ . . . religious?” Col. Winnie finished.
“Yup.”
“Because we only appear to be a religious order? Because God isn’t real? Because religion is about life, and life is about religion, and the two often look the same?”
Jacob and the other two subordinate Templars just looked at Col. Winnie.
“I don’t know, son.”
Jacob looked from Col. Winnie down to his broth, then back to the colonel again. “God ain’t real?”
“I have no idea,” Col. Winnie replied, shrugging. “We’re only backed by the Church. Hatsuto’s a Buddhist. Five Feathers still follows his tribe’s ways. Freeman here’s a Southern Methodist.”
“But just the things I saw at Kadath, those creatures. They weren’t from here. And the tear DuBose made . . .”
“The things I’ve seen, you wouldn’t believe neither,” Christopher said. “That don’t make the Catholic Church and the Papacy the final word on nothing. Just makes ‘em one interpretation.”
“I wrastled with an angel, though. And demons, too? Sounds pretty much like the Church to me.”
“I fought a kami in my vision,” Hatsuto said. “Guardian warrior spirit.”
“I went against a loa named Ogun,” Christopher said. “They’re like angels and demons in voodoo. My aunt practiced.”
All four men looked at each other.
Col. Winnie sighed. “We don’t know what they are. We just know there are places . . . beyond. Some of these creatures, like the one you saw at Kadath, come from a different land. Others, like the ones you studied before, come from a place the Church already knew of. ‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’ There are ancient things, son, things we haven’t seen in our life. Hopefully, we won’t have to, either.”
“And we gotta stop ‘em? How? There’s only a handful of us.”
“Just gotta believe,” Christopher said.
“Believe? In what? Y’all just told me God ain’t real.”
Christopher leaned forward, forearms on thighs, saying, “The colonel misspoke–”
“He ain’t ‘misspoke,’ he just said there ain’t no God.”
Christopher held up a hand. “He gave you his version.” He spread both hands as if his thoughts were an offering to Jacob. “Truth is, we just don’t know. We just gotta trust that whatever sent us to the order sent us for a reason, that’s all. Whether it’s God or an angel or just something else, that’s all open for debate. Hatsuto here thinks we are cursed for our sins.”
“‘May you live in interesting times,’” Hatsuto said. “Old Chinese curse.”
Jacob grunted. He took another sip of his broth.
“So what is this place?”
“You won’t believe us,” said the colonel.
“Try me, sir.”
“The monks found a door from the cellar. This was here before any of the Templars came. It was here when the monastery was built by the French.” He paused for a moment. “The French didn’t build it, though.”
“I’ll be damned if you weren’t right.”
“But it’s real,” Christopher said, “as real as anything else we’ve told you.”
“The dimensions match up perfectly with sites in Acre, in the Holy Land, and others across Europe,” said Col. Winnie. “And the architecture is similar to the chapel you probably saw in your vision.”
“St. George’s?”
“Of course. That is the thread for us. And those little creatures, of course.”
Jacob looked around the circle at the other men. “Who built this place then?”
Christopher and Hatsuto just shrugged.
“No one,” the colonel said, leaning back in his chair, “has taken possession of that dubious honor.”
“Alright, I’ve done heard enough,” Jacob said, rising to stand on quivering legs. “I’m gonna get some sleep. Some normal sleep.” Hatsuto stood and took Jacob’s cup of broth and Christopher offered him a shoulder. Jacob wrapped the blanket around himself, shivering against the damp. “Colonel, you can fill me in on all this stuff in the morning. For now, I’m dead tired and worthless as a Confederate dollar.”
“Agreed,” Col. Winnie said, staying seated. “Get some rest, son.”
With that, Christopher and Hatsuto led Jacob from the room.