Poor Prendergast. That you ever thought to defeat me. Could you not see that I am the agent of an immortal power? In such incarnations as this, I travel through the centuries. I feed on the marrow of time. I was here before the oceans turned black with life, and when the deserts are white with death I will remain. The petty hindrances you have put in my way have only served to amuse me. But that’s all over now.

He raises the SWORD higher. And then …

Then, with bright eyes and an eager grin, GORGE steps to the altar. With a swift movement, he pulls the purple blanket away to reveal …

ANNIE’S BABY, lying naked on the altar!

ANNIE shrieks behind her gag, struggling on the wall.

JACOBUS raises the SWORD above his head, ready to drive it into the infant’s breast.

But DR. PRENDERGAST only smiles with grim calm.

DR. PRENDERGAST

Not so fast, Jacobus …

X

BLACK
ANNIE II:
THIS
TIME,
IT’S
PERSONAL

1

His eyes! His eyes were full of fear. And, though we had seen him in London only two weeks before, he seemed since then to have aged as many decades. A man in his middle sixties, he peered at us through the half open door of Belham Grange with all the tremulous hostility, the white-eyed apprehension, of some ancient anchorite disturbed at his grimmest meditations.

No shit, thought Richard Storm, as the withered, hostile, white-eyed face of Sir Michael peered out at them.

We had already dismissed our cab. We could hear the car’s engine fading behind us on the Grange’s long drive. The winter afternoon was closing around us, the windswept clouds of a lowering sky pressed down on us from above. The house itself, the whole great stone edifice, loomed menacingly before us as with an adsum to our conjuro te.

Well, all right, the house didn’t loom exactly. It was a neat, pretty old mansion, a long stone structure with lots of windows, light and airy. And there were no “horrid ravens peering blackly from the gutters and gables of the place” either. But Storm did feel a “thrill of dread” sure enough at the sight of Sir Michael’s “ravaged features”—his pale, sunken cheeks, his watchful eyes glaring out through the crack in the door. He felt a thrill of dread and a whirling, dreamy, febrile sense of swimming distances and unreality. He had a faint headache too, which had been bothering him all morning.

Sophia stepped from beside him to kiss her father’s sagging cheek.

Storm took a last glance over his shoulder. Back up the empty drive, “where it stretched into the distance overhung by gloomy rows of copper beech.” The clouds barreling in over the hills were thunderheads, great and threatening. The February wind was wet and chill, and the day was darkening to a false twilight.