London,
the Present
The room in which they met had a history as rich and as ancient as House of
Windsor , and at least as colorful. Treaties had been signed here, destinies
dispersed, empires had been won and lost. Here kings and the makers of kings
had spoken a word, or given a gesture, and all of history had been changed. The
magnificent and the unthinkable were the common day events to which this room
had been witness over the centuries, for those who strode across its marble
threshold were no ordinary humans.
They were not, in fact, human at all.
During the Edwardian era the thick stone walls had been been paneled with
mahagony, and the curved beams and arched structure gave the interior the feeling
of a church. Some said there were bodies buried behind those walls. Very likely
they were right.
The ceiling was frescoed with scenes from a glorious past: the astonishing
grandeur of a Coliseum no longer in ruins, a temple upon an azure isle where gods
walked freely among men; sylvan glades where nude forms sunned themseslves
beside clear still streams. As with the nature of frescoes, the plaster had crumbled
and the colors were faded, and in many places it was impossible to tell that many of
the figures featured in each scene were wolves, subtly fashioned to resemble the
human form.
The floor was tiled with an intricate inlaid pattern of black marble which had taken
a dozen master craftsmen five years to cut and install in the fifteenth century. To the
untrained eye the pattern, black upon black, was unremarkable. But to those for
whose eyes it was designed, each tile told a story, and all paths led to the center,
where the secret was revealed.
There was but one framed oil painting in the room, and it occupied a position of
such prominence on the west wall, opposite the entry, that anyone who passed
through the door was obliged to pause, and pay obeisance to it. It would in fact be
impossible not to do so, as the painting itself was such a startling, absorbing
depiction that unprepared observers had been known to halt in mid-sentence and
stand breathless before it for moments at a time, wrenched by the sorrow it
portrayed, stunned by the power of the moment in history it had captured. The title of
the painting was “The Covenant”.
On the wall adjacent to the painting, yet occupying a place of no less importance,
was the only other art object in the room. It was a silver crucifix, not particularly well
crafted nor elaborately adorned, mounted on black velvet and framed behind glass.
It was at this object the man gazed when he spoke.
“And so,” he said quietly, “It has begun.”
The one who stood beside him pushed the button on a small device in his hand,
and the somber face of the BBC announcer receded into the plasma void from which
it had come as the two mahogany panels glided together to conceal the television
screen and become, once again, part of the wall.
“So it would appear,” he said.
And that was all.
The room held four fireplaces, and each one blazed brightly this night. A
chandelier of Belgian crystal tossed dancing beads of light over an enormous
polished round table in the center of the room. A spray of African orchids in the
center of the table was three feet in diameter and imbued every corner of the
cavernous space with the spicy wild scent of the jungle. No one noticed. The room
was slowly filling with a silence that sucked the heat out of the fire, and the sparkle
out of the light. It was the silence that rests in cold dark places where no one dares
to look, the silence of things never spoken and barely imagined, the silence of the
dead.
Said one of those gathered to his companion. “You’ve been in touch with the
Federal Reserve?”
A faint, sad smile was returned. “Sir,” he replied . “I am the Federal Reserve.”
Also present were a director of films whose face was known in every developed
country in the world, a rock star whose personal wealth included two satellite
communications networks and several European banks, a Nobel Prize winning
scientist, a former Time Magazine “Man of the Year”. There were others whose
faces, at least in the world of humans, were less recognizable: corporate giants,
scientists, writers, inventors, thinkers. They had flown to this place from all over the
globe, these men who could commandeer an aircraft or affect the opening of the
Tokyo market or shut down satellite communications across three continents with a
nod, they had come to this place swirling their cloaks of power around them like
charged ion clouds– and here, in this room, they were helpless.
A thousand years ago they had gathered in caves and catacombs , fugitives even
from their own kind, their faces hidden by cowls and hoods. A thousand years
before that they had followed a warrior called Alexander, and had conquered the
world. And a thousand years before that they had hunted as wolves in the great
forests of the earth, and their prey had been Man.
Throughout the centuries they had been variously hailed as heroes and pursued
as outlaws , and from father to son, they had taken the vow of secrecy and had
protected the legacy of their sacred trust. None of them had ever expected to see
this day. And yet, in retrospect, each could see that it had always been inevitable.
In a moment one of them, the eldest, went to the big table and took his place there.
The others followed, one by one. Some lingered to take a final, regretful sip of
hundred year old brandy before depositing their snifters on one of the heavy silver
trays designated for that purpose. No food or drink was ever brought to this table.
Only ideas.
When they were all gathered, the older one spoke. “There would appear to be,” he
observed, “no way to avoid the crisis that will soon be upon us. I suggest we turn our
attention to managing it.”
Someone replied sharply, “That would seem to be the problem of the pack leader.”
“ Who, had he done his job in the first place, could have prevented the current
situation entirely,” retorted another.
“Perhaps,” put forth another, thoughtfully, “perhaps not. I suspect there is more
here than meets the eye. Perhaps a conference is in order. A summit, if you will.”
There was a smattering of humorless laughter, a few outraged exclamations,
some sharp edged scowls.
When the hubhub died one voice spoke up. “You forget, sir , that half the pack
denies we still exist, and the other half would have us executed on sight. And if I’m
not mistaken, our illustrious leader belongs to that second half.”
“ You are, in fact, mistaken.”
The voice came from the doorway, the door that none of them had heard open.
They, whose preternatural hearing could discern a footfall upon a stair half a mile
away, whose sense of smell could trace a smear of earth upon a shoe sole to its
point of origin and who could further distinguish the worker of the leather and the
tanner of the hide from all others in the world , they whose security system was
unparalleled by any other in existence, had not known of his approach. And yet the
door was flung open and he was there, filling the doorway with his presence and
with the smells of the London night– deisel fuel and mist, curry and white flowers
and fetid puddles of traffic soiled rainwater, the stench of a hundred thousand
humans, rich wool and silk and the pure raw power that was his. He stood there in
their place, in this sacred room where none had breached before, and he swept
them with a gaze as cold as ice.
As one they tensed, some might have started to rise. And he said, “You have the
advantage of me in numbers. But I assure you I would destroy a dozen of you before
the last one reached my throat. And that would be a great pity. Because,
gentlemen....” He stepped inside the door and began to pluck off his gloves. “I am
your brother.”
No one spoke, and no one moved as he came inside the room. He paused before
the great painting, and they watched his face change as he looked upon it. “I have
always wondered,”he said softly, “what became of this. It is as magnificent as I have
heard.”
Then he turned to the table, and fastened his eyes upon each one seated there. He
had a gaze that could burst small vessels in the brain, that could cause blood to leak
from the ears and nose and eyes, and had been known to do so. He had a power
that could stir the molecules in a room and turn air to dust and wine to vinegar, and
cause flowers to wither and dry on the stem. Each one felt the brush of his gaze in
turn, a frisson like shattered ice in the veins, the scrape of crushed glass across
delicate nerve tissue. But not one gazed flinched from his, nor averted itself in fear.
And when he reached the eldest, that one held his gaze for the longest, and the
message was of respect, not challenge. At length, he stood up, and relinquished
his chair. The gesture was acknowledged with a slight nod of the newcomer’s head.
He strode into the room without removing his overcoat, and, taking the seat that
was offered him, he tossed his gloves upon the table. He held the silence for a
moment, his expression somber. When at last he spoke, every eye was upon him,
and every intention was alligned with his.
“Gentlemen,” he said, “for centuries we have kept the peace. I refuse to let it end
like this. This madness will be stopped, but I can’t do it alone. Talk to me. What
has happened here? You know the answers. How did it come to this? How did it
begin?”
copyright 2006 by Donna Ball, Inc
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