The February Special Guest Story is by Brian Hodge

Please feel free to visit Brian at: http://www.brianhodge.net/

THE LAST TESTAMENT

by Brian Hodge

I

From out of the darkest days of Eastern Europe's Balkans War, there came sporadic reports of a lone man in priestly black robes who walked the charnel fields and the streets of ruined villages, showing no fear of bullets, bombs, or butchers. Death surrounded him, witnesses would claim, yet he seemed impervious to it. Serbs and Croats, Christians and Muslims … all soon came to hold him in awe, in particular those who had not long before tried to kill him for ministering to their enemies, only to find that their rifles would not shoot true.

I promise you this: There is no killer so godless that he fails to recognize a kind of miracle in another's immunity to the tools of war.

The Father, as he simply became known, was at the center of an ever-expanding reputation for healing the wounded, and with those whose shattered bodies were too far gone even for his powers over flesh and blood, for easing their suffering as they departed life — often with a kiss. More than once he was seen in two places at the same time, and at least once to levitate. Of the fact that none had ever seen him eat so much as a single bite of food, little was made, except as another possible sign of divinity.

I harbored suspicions about the Father long before they were confirmed by that first blurry picture that the media ran of him; not his identity, precisely, but at the very least his nature.

What could he possibly be up to now, I wondered at the time.

Years later, when some desperate cardinals of the splintering Church of Rome sought him out and brought him to the papal throne, the method of his madness became clearer.

And soon after that, when I was brought to stand before a tribunal of an Inquisition given renewed life by the ferocity of this dying age, a tribunal watched over by none other than Pope Innocent XIV, I wondered if there weren't some grand design behind this, too.

Why now, when for the last five-and-a-half centuries we had managed to avoid each other?

Vlad the Father.

My son.

II

I have forgotten the number of names I've gone by over the greatest part of a millennium; have forgotten most of the names, as well, but never the one I was born with: Hugh de Burgundy.

Like my father before me, I was tall for my time, and strong of build, but exotically dark than most of our fellow Frenchmen, perhaps the bloodline of some rogue Arab having seeped into our own a few generations before. Like my father before me, I was born to wield the sword and the lance, and when it came time to drape over our chain mail hauberks a tunic sewn with a large red cross and purge the Holy Land for Christendom, that our weapons cut down men who could've been distant brothers did not sway us from our duties to God and France.

I cannot speak for my father, who died in Palestine before I ever reached the Crusades to fight beside him. But I know I fought to purge that possible Saracen from my own body.

I left steeped in the code of chivalry: to respect God-given life; to cherish women, children, and the weak, and protect them from harm; to honor an enemy's right to seek sanctuary in a church and sheathe my weapons on holy ground. But strange things happen to men in war. To survive you must learn to love the kill for its own sake. To love the kill you must forget all rules except one: Spill blood, first and often. This terrible metamorphosis can make a baser creature of any man who believes himself above it.

Have you ever been unable to lift your arm at the end of a day, having spent its sunlight cleaving the heads from prisoners? Have you ever knelt in the blood and entrails of an entire city's populace after slitting open their bellies in search of swallowed gold and jewels? I have. I deny nothing, claiming only that the young Hugh who proudly rode east from Burgundy would not have committed these acts. But I have.

And have you ever awakened from some terrible dream, only to find that your circumstances are even worse? Seen your black guilt reflected in the eyes of a burning child?

In the dead of night I deserted my army, wandering for days through deserts and hills until I found living Muslims I could beg for forgiveness. By the law of retaliation they should've killed me. But they were a strangely tolerant people. It would take a few generations before the Islamic world learned the kind of savagery we taught them. For my personal penance they had other plans.

I had journeyed east wearing the cross of Christ.

I let those I'd come to slaughter nail me to one, instead.

III

"You have been brought before this tribunal on a charge of consorting with malign entities of unspecified natures; that six evenings ago you did willfully and with full knowledge of intent engage these powers to seduce a young woman and gratify yourself out of her insensibility."

They wore somber faces and robes. How they love their robes. They always have. If not for my accuser's reading of the charges from the screen of a laptop computer, this strange moment could've been taking place in the Middle Ages, when their pontiff really was the mortal man they must now have believed him to be.

"How do you plead?"

I looked from face to face, lingering on the gaunt visage of the most bloodthirsty pope ever to occupy Saint Peter's throne — or anti-pope, according to some. The losers in the schism that had rent the Church had elected their own, but they'd all been driven from Rome. This one watched silently from a separate gallery and I had no doubt that he knew precisely who I was.

"I plead myself completely satisfied," I told them. "She was a wonderful lover. Now do what you have to do and let's get this over with."

The trial? A farce, of course. Witnesses were brought against me, claiming to have seen one thing or another in the piazza where I'd met the woman. She'd been sketching at an easel at the time and innocently told me I had a familiar face, and could she sketch it? If anyone had been charmed, it was me. The trouble had likely come from my having been followed around for centuries by a pair of malicious but otherwise impotent Welsh ghosts. Quite harmless, unless someone with sensitivity spots them and mistakes them for more than they really are.

Need I say I was found guilty? One witness points out my duo of spirits, shouts, and suddenly they're seen by all. The herdlike tendencies of human nature have remained a constant for as long as I've been alive, and will dog the race until its end.

The state of the world what it is, I give you all another decade or two. I mean no disrespect. I say it with sadness and love. In many ways you're remarkable, but you always fall for leaders who manage to blind you to faults so much worse than your own.

"Having been found guilty of the charge of sexual predation by sorcerous enchantment, one week from today you shall be purified by pain and returned to your creator by a firing squad."

I asked if we couldn't get it over with sooner, but they only looked at one another as though they'd never heard such blatant self-disregard. I was only hoping to avoid a week's boredom while waiting. I'd survived and tolerated plenty of impulsive murders and formal executions in my years, then later slipped quietly away. Corpses have that advantage.

But Vlad would know that.

Which must have been what prompted that cold, hard smile from his gallery before he rose and left, turning his back on me, the condemned, in a whisper of white and gold robes.

If his minions believed themselves about to return me to my creator, however, they appeared woefully underinformed.

IV

In the early years of the Crusades, those Crusaders whose contact with Saracens went beyond slaughter were swift to learn something quite discomforting: for heathen savages, they possessed a refinement of learning far higher than that found in the west.

Out of devotion to your savior you came with hatred in your heart and a sword in your hand, they told me in the village I had found while seeking absolution. Therefore you will bear the wounds of this savior and see if they make a difference in your thinking.

They beat me with fists. They whipped me with metal-tipped lashes. On my head they forced a cap woven from thorns until the blood blinded me, and I could no longer see as they laid me atop a cross I'd fashioned myself, and drove the nails through my wrists and feet. In small details it differed from every painting of the Crucifixion I'd ever seen, which I attributed to their ignorance. It was centuries before I realized they knew far more about Roman executions than we did.

For three hours they let me hang between heaven and earth, then slashed my side with a spear tip, took me down, and carried me into a tent. They washed me, covered me with aloe and myrrh, and draped me with linen, then left me to my fevers, to live or die as Allah willed.

Delirium reigned, yet they had indeed made a difference in my thinking. I was now willing to entertain the unthinkable: If this can be survived, then what have we been fighting for?

And Allah willed life.

But neither then nor today could I fathom an Allah that would have anything to do with the creature that came to me during the second night. Perhaps it was lured from its shelter in the desert by the scent of blood and helplessness. A ragged, filthy thing, with jagged teeth and cunning eyes, it broke the soft crust of my scabs like bread and drank at leisure.

I've wondered since if it wasn't some spirit come to avenge the atrocities of the Crusades. If it recognized within my long hair and matted beard the face of barbarians from Western Europe, and decided that death would be too swift, too merciful.

Whatever its motives, it left behind a much different man than it found. Within my balms and linen I burned, radiant with scorching fever and transformation, awakening with a hunger that no garden, tree, or cookfire could satisfy.

V

From my prison cell I could hear distant rumblings from far south, the latest in Mount Vesuvius' new series of eruptions. It was what had brought me to Italy in the first place. In all my centuries, I'd never witnessed a live volcano.

There was no shortage of them around the world now. Vesuvius. Saint Helens. Ætna. The entire Pacific Ring of Fire.

As spectacles of awe, however, they had to compete with the earthquakes, tidal waves, hurricanes, electrical storms, and floodwaters, as well as the riots, border wars, and pogroms that filled the lulls whenever the earth itself was silent.

I still remember your mounting apprehension as the millennium approached, afraid it might be bringing the end of the world. Enough prophets had painted it that way to excuse your creeping hysteria. But not so, your short-sightedness, failing to distinguish between singular event and ongoing process.

The millennium changed, old to new. Nothing exploded. The world breathed a collective sigh of relief, then dropped its guard. And that's when it all began to unravel.

No God, no Allah, was necessary. Global physics was enough: a displacement of the earth's crust triggered by a lopsided build-up of miles-thick ice at the south pole, given geometrically-increasing momentum by the planet's slow wobble in orbit.

Picture, if you will, the skin of an orange sliding intact over the inner fruit. Picture, then, that orange skin webbed with an unstable network of waterways, tectonic plates, and magnetic poles. And tiny, fragile creatures, championing science, fueled by superstition, making their homes across that vulnerable surface.

Then go look out your window.

From my own I could watch a column of smoke from Vesuvius, this far north not much more than a smudge against the sky. It ran roughly parallel to the bars.

Vlad — the ironically named Pope Innocent XIV — came to see me on the third night, for a moment standing in the doorway of my cell and staring as if to memorize every detail about me.

"Do you still find it difficult to know what you want your nature to be, Hugh?" he asked, then raised a spread hand. "Don't answer. You don't need to. I can tell: You're the same pathetic excuse for a predator you've always been. Bloodlust in your heart, apologies on your lips."

I nodded at him, his glorious robes. "You look to have an identity crisis of your own."

"Harsh times call for iron rulers, and these are some of the harshest in history. I'm simply rising to the challenge. I've ruled in war, you know that, you've witnessed it firsthand. But there's very little satisfaction in ruling corpses once the thrill of making them has waned." He unleashed his viper's smile. "It's why you're there, sitting on that bench, and I'm standing here, wearing Saint Peter's ring. I have always led. You have always followed. What you gave me in your bite only furthered an evolution that had already begun in my heart and will."

"So now you rule as a man of peace?"

"As a hypocritical man of peace. It's the kind the world best accepts. We're so much easier to emulate."

How had he done it, I wondered. He'd been elected pope out of a schism that had split the Church in two, as the world trembled beneath the cardinals' feet and coastal cities began to be claimed an inch at a time by rising seas. On one side of the great schism, adherents of open arms and universal brotherhood; on the other, hardliners more comfortable with an age of fire and brimstone.

But how had he done it? He hadn't even been an ordained priest, much less a Vatican insider. He'd simply sown the seeds of his own modern-day legend across a war-ripped landscape — the cleverest of traps, I see that now — and let them come to him in their time of need.

"It was history repeating itself," Vlad told me. "Do you know the story of Pope Celestine V? The year 1294?

I confessed I didn't.

"Why not? You were alive then. You'd lived lifetimes already. I wasn't even born for another 150 years. Then listen, and take note of what passes for diplomacy in this city.

"The Cardinals deadlocked after eighteen months of conclave," Vlad told me. "Nothing but petty squabbling, then as now, and no one who wanted the throne was willing to budge if it meant someone else got it. Finally they elected an eighty-year-old hermit who lived in caves in the mountains of southern Italy. It was a compromise of pure self-interest: They all thought he'd be easily manipulated. And he was. They brought him down from his mountain and the pathetic old fool was so bewildered and terrified he built a replica of the cell from his cave, so he could sleep. His papacy was a disaster and he abdicated after fifteen weeks and crawled back to his caves.

"More than seven centuries later these squawking red-robed old birds find themselves in the same situation after John-Paul III has died. The Church is shaking itself apart faster than the planet they still haven't managed to save, and through it all they can't even agree on who should lead them. I saw it coming years ahead, Hugh. So when the time was right I had my sycophant among them nominate the simple man of faith and healing I'd played for the world in Bosnia. And they swallowed. What a coup I would be. What a pious choice. The world would approve, because the meek were finally inheriting it, while they would crouch just out of sight, pulling my strings like puppet masters."

Only now did Vlad allow himself another smile that bared his terrible teeth. "Except I've not been quite so easy to manipulate as they'd hoped."

I had to laugh. "That must've caused some friction."

"Some. But remember — I have infallibility on my side."

"I'd imagine that's the least of their worries."

"It's a double-edged sword. My papacy has also given them a chance to realize fantasies they never dared share with anyone. Twenty, thirty years ago, as ambitious younger men, bureaucrats, how many would've even imagined they'd get a chance to wield the same power of life and death their medieval predecessors enjoyed?"

"I don't find that nearly so hard to believe as how willing most people are to let them have it again."

Vlad laughed, having finally found something worthy of it. "How can you doubt? You yourself went to war once, because a man in a robe pointed east and told you to go. You think nine hundred years changes human nature? It's no different now. Especially now. With the earth itself unsure beneath them, they clutch after whatever certainty they can find. They crave it."

"And no one has any idea who or what you really are?"

"None who matter. And they matter less every day."

We talked awhile longer. Vlad was curious about where I'd picked up the ghosts, so I explained they'd once been brothers I'd tricked into dueling to the death when I'd fought on England's side in border wars with Wales, long long ago. Such talk of death for sport piqued my curiosity. Was my death sentence, four days from now, just another amusement for him, for Rome?

"Amusing for me. But for the rest, I think it'll be a grander thing than that," he said. "You deserve more."

"Then may I at least shave?" I scratched at the heavy growth of beard. I felt like a wretch. "Allow me that much vanity."

"Always thinking so small," said Vlad. "Let it grow. It gives you character."

I thought he was about to leave when he opened the door and motioned to someone on the other side. A moment later, one of the Swiss Guard forced in a feebly struggling cardinal, one of Vlad's squawking red-robed old birds. His wrists were tied, and his eyes wide above a gag stretched taut over plump cheeks.

"You must be ravenous by now," Vlad said. "I'll have another sent over the night before your execution. Drink, as much as you can hold. When those bullets blast your chest open, I really want you to bleed."

Stunned, I gazed down at the cardinal squirming on the floor.

"Go ahead," Vlad ordered. "I have less use for them every day now. Now I have you."

VI

No longer a man. A thing. A thing that looked like a man but fed like a beast. I had come to Palestine to fight for God, and left wanting no part of any Allah who allowed such things as me to exist, even if they deserved their fate.

I became a wanderer, deciding that if I were to be damned for what I was, I would make sure I'd earned it. So I again took up the sword, for whoever would hire me. Causes meant nothing, only wages and plunder, as I returned to living by that savage credo: Spill blood, first and often. How better to keep myself well-fed than as a soldier of fortune?

When I returned home in the mid-fifteenth century, I found my family's descendants, but there was nothing left of Hugh de Burgundy, and nothing left for him, either, only a dim recounted memory of ancestors who'd journeyed off to the Crusades and were never heard from again. To stay would have brought more sadness than comfort.

I didn't have to look far for my next commission. The dukes of Burgundy, I learned, still upheld the archaic crusading traditions, and furnished knights and mercenaries to fight Muslims on a newer front: the Ottoman Turks who persisted in spilling into Romania.

So I went. Eagerly. It had been centuries since I'd seen such wanton carnage, and all at the fury, hatred, and instigation of one man, Vlad Dracula, Prince of Wallachia. I had forgotten that mortal hearts could be so cold.

Centuries of practice had evolved me into a warrior beyond reckoning. I'd seen every possible strategy of attack, by sword and spear, mace and war hammer, and by virtue of repetition only had to see the merest shift of foot or flex of arm to know how to counter. I couldn't be fooled. I couldn't be killed. I could scarcely even be touched.

Kill ten enemies in a single battle and you're worthy of respect. Kill twenty and you're a hero. Fifty, and you're a god. They fell to my blades like stalks of wheat before a sickle, and even Vlad Dracula took notice.

"You fight like no mercenary I've ever seen," he told me on a corpse-strewn field. "You fight as though you'd be here even if there was no pay in it."

I lodged in his castle. I shared his table. Surrounded by the bodies he'd had impaled and erected into a makeshift forest in his courtyard, we broke bread together and dipped it in bowls of warm blood.

It was inevitable, I can see it now, that he would eventually spot me on a field littered with Turks, glutting myself from the very source. I'd done it so often I'd grown careless. When our eyes met, as I knelt on all fours over my kill like a jealous wolf, I knew that he finally understood. That he would see me dead for the abomination that I was.

"Were you once a man?" he asked instead, while smoke gusted black and greasy from burning dead.

"Almost longer ago than I can remember," I said. "I was."

He nodded with hideous desire. "Then you must have been made by another just like you. The same as you can make me."

I found it a horrible thing to ask. No one had ever asked to be what I was. Never.

"The conquests still left before me," he said, "and all the lives I've yet to take … these can't be accomplished in one man's lifetime. Perhaps they can be in one like yours."

And after it was done — days, maybe — I found myself wandering through that reeking forest of poles and corpses, blood and flies, once again in tears, begging for forgiveness. Not from them. But from all who would be sure to follow in their wake.

I thought I was alone.

But even then he seemed to see everything.

VII

On the morning of my latest execution:

My elbows were broken by heavy mallets. Great gouges of flesh were ripped from my back by a man wielding an ugly chain flail. My thumbs were crushed in thumbscrews, while currents of electricity were jolted through my genitals and rectum.

It would all heal in time, but the pain was real enough.

When they deemed me sufficiently purified, I was dragged out before the public into a piazza adapted for executions, tied to a post, and shot with five rifles.

That's difficult for even one like me to shrug off. I suppose I looked dead enough for the moment.

I understand that I bled spectacularly.

VIII

And in my dreams, while bone reformed and flesh knitted, the dreams I never seemed to have during ordinary sleep, because I was too guarded to be bothered by such things as simple regret…

But in my death-dreams I see her again.

It's been just short of two weeks and yet I've forgotten so much about her. But in my dreams I remember what matters most.

She sketches in a piazza, and for as long as I look at her the world seems friendly and promising again. I forget ghosts, I can no longer hear volcanoes. I dismiss every suspicious eye and the fear that narrows them, and I almost feel that I can be better than the thing that I am.

Everywhere she goes she must carry with her a rare world in which grace is still possible. She looks at smoke but sees clouds. She looks past fallen trees and notices saplings. She holds the sketchpad against her knee and a fat charcoal pencil in her hand; an espresso rests beside her foot. She is the most beautiful creature who's spoken to me in longer than I can remember.

"Your face … is so familiar," she tells me. "I may draw you, yes?"

I let her. She does one sketch, then another. A third and a fourth. I rest between flips of the page, and once I close my eyes and tip back my head and feel the hair spill over my shoulders.

"I have it now!" she cries, and then glances self-consciously about. She hurries closer because she thinks better of speaking too loudly. "Your face … is so like the face on the Shroud. Is amazing, the resemblance."

I smile, telling her I've heard this before.

Aching so deep inside because I can't tell her there's a good reason for the familiarity.

IX

The bodies of political prisoners and religious penitents were rarely given burial, not when there was ample space beneath Rome, in catacombs that had been swallowing bones for centuries. There they would be laid and forgotten, and so was I.

When I awoke to the smell of dust and mold and decay, he was waiting. He turned some anonymous ivory skull in his hands.

"These weren't my original plans at all, you know. But when you came to Rome … it was impossible to resist," Vlad said. "I've felt your presence passing nearby at least a dozen times over the centuries. Close. But never so close as this time. You can't have thought you'd walk in and out of my city without meeting again."

I shook my head. Probably not.

"And you can't have failed to realize it's your face on that Shroud of theirs."

Again, I shook my head. My long-haired, bearded head, growing more recognizable by the day.

"Then you wanted this, Hugh. You wanted it. I have the power to grant it. The Shroud has been locked away at Turin for many years. But I own the keys now."

"I think you want it more than I do," I said.

"Of course. I love the Church, but I'm not above destroying it completely. Which may happen, when people realize what we've done, who they'll think we've put to death. I'll take that chance. Your first public act can be forgiving your executioners. Or, instead of peace, you can bring a sword — as I said, I don't need the cardinals anymore, now that I have you.

"Either way, I'm giving the world something the Church never managed. Something it's been promised for two thousand years. That should give my cattle enough to rally around, to survive the next few years. If they've lost faith in themselves, then perhaps the sight of you, and the news of your resurrection, will be enough to restore it."

"Your cattle? You still don't care any more for them than that?"

"Why should I? It's an old principle, played out in nature countless times. If the deer die off, the wolves starve. Beyond that, what else is there to care about?"

I tried to sit up, naked and sore and scabbed in this newest burial rag. "You really are the Devil, aren't you?"

He extended his hand. "So pleased to make your acquaintance, after all this time."

I took it, because what else could I do, too stiff to haul myself off that rough stone slab. Vlad steadied me on my feet.

"Just remember," he warned me. "You may be God incarnate. But you're still in my hands."

He led me past the more fortunate dead, to the steps that would take us back up to the daylight world of affliction and need.

Brian Hodge is the author of close to 100 short stories and novellas, and four full-length collections. Recent books include his second crime novel, Mad Dogs, and his fourth collection, Picking The Bones, out now from Cemetery Dance Publications (see below). He really really really wishes he were through with his next novel, a sprawling thing that seems to never want to end.

Brian lives in Colorado, where he ricochets between indulgences in music and sound design, photography, Krav Maga, and mountain air.

Connect with Brian through his web site (www.brianhodge.net ), on Facebook (www.facebook.com/brianhodgewriter ), or follow his blog, Warrior Poet (www.warriorpoetblog.com ).

"There may be those who write with as much authenticity, but no one has more ability to find the truth in as many forms or write it so well as a story. Brian Hodge has the capacity to put his palm over the flame and carefully observe his flesh char — then write about the experience with unflinching, exquisite prose." --Cemetery Dance Magazine

Find Brian Hodge in Cemetery Dance Magazine HERE.

“Just Outside Our Windows, Deep Inside Our Walls”
was just selected for Best Horror Of The Year, Vol. 3, edited by Ellen Datlow can be found HERE.