THIRTEEN

New York

Another New Year's Eve.

Outside St. Ann's Cemetery in Bayside, Mr. Veilleur watched the red glow of the cab's rear lights fade into the darkness, then he turned and walked toward the cemetery wall. The cab was to return for him in an hour. He'd given the driver half of a hundred-dollar bill as tip and told him the other half would be his when he returned. He'd be back.

He found a large granite stone jutting from the earth near the wall. He eased himself down on it. The December cold of the frozen earth began to seep into his buttocks.

"I've come to sit with you awhile," he said, speaking to the wall.

No reply came from the unmarked, uneasy grave that lay just over the wall.

Veilleur couldn't get into the cemetery at this hour, especially on New Year's Eve, so he settled for a seat just outside. Magda would not miss him tonight. She did not even know it was a holiday. He pulled out a thermos filled with hot coffee and brandy, and poured some into the cap. He sipped and felt the chill melt away.

"This is the fifth anniversary of your interment here. But I do not come to celebrate, simply to mark the occasion. To sit watch over you. Somebody should."

He sipped some more of the brandied coffee and thought about the future. The near future, for he knew his future was severely limited.

The Enemy was steadily growing more powerful. Veilleur sensed the psychic storm clouds gathering, thunderheads of evil piling up on all horizons, closing in. And the nexus point of many of the forces seemed to be here, just over the cemetery wall, in that unmarked grave. Something was going to happen here. Soon.

"What part do you play in all of mis?" he asked the grave's restless occupant.

There was no reply. But Veilleur knew he'd find out soon. Too soon.

He sipped his coffee and continued his solitary vigil.

North Carolina

Another New Year's Eve.

Will sat alone in his drafty living room watching Dick Clark host yet another New Year's Rockin' Eve show. God, how he hated this night.

Five years ago… five years ago this very night he had committed The Atrocity, the act that had drawn an indelible line between himself and the rest of humanity.

This year would be worse than usual because of the phone call.

So long since he'd heard it. For years he'd managed to avoid it. And then Lisl's party. He shouldn't have gone, but he'd thought he could get away with it. He'd tempted fate.

And he'd heard it. All the way across the room, he'd heard that poor boy's voice.

Will got up and turned off the TV. If he looked at Dick Clark's grinning face much longer he was afraid he'd toss a chair through the screen. All those people milling around in Times Square, ready to jump around like idiots to celebrate the start of a new year.

A new year. Right. For him it was the start of another year in hiding. Day one of year six.

But this new year would be different. This year he'd find the strength to/ go back, to try to resume his former life. And the best way to do that was to start the year off in prayer.

He pulled his old breviary from his rear pocket—the book he'd been hiding from Lisl since September—and got an early start on tomorrow's daily office.

But tonight the prayers seemed even more meaningless than they had since he'd gone back to them. Usually he could count on the rhythm of the familiar phrases to provide temporary relief from the memories of the horrors of the past. But not tonight. The faces, voices, sights, sounds—they splattered him like raindrops, falling fitfully at first, then increasing to a steady trickle, finally swelling to a rush that flooded the room. He fought the current but it was too strong tonight. Despite his best efforts it swept him into the past.

PART II

THEN

FOURTEEN

Queens, New York

Things started going wrong toward the end of winter that year. It began in March, with spring only a couple of weeks away.

People hadn't called him Will then. His friends and folks called him Bill. The rest of the world called him Father.

Father Ryan. The Reverend William Ryan, S. J.

"I've got you now," Nicky said from the other side of the chessboard.

Bill stretched inside his navy blue sweatsuit and reminded himself for the thousandth time to stop thinking of him as Nicky. He wasn't a little boy anymore. He was a grown man now—a Ph.D., no less. And he had a last name, too. Justin and Florence Quinn had adopted him in 1970 and he carried their name proudly. People called him Dr. Quinn, or Nicholas, or Dr. Nick. No one called him Nicky.

Nicky… Bill was proud of him, as proud as he'd have been if Nick were his own son. His SATs had earned him a free ride through Columbia where he earned a B.S. in physics in three years. Then he'd breezed through the graduate program, blowing the faculty away with his doctoral thesis on particle theory. Nick was brilliant and he knew it. He'd always known it. But along the way to gaining maturity he'd lost his old smugness about it. His skin had cleared up—mostly—and his long unruly hair now covered the misshapen areas of his skull. And he was wearing contacts.

That had proved the hardest to adjust to: Nicky without glasses.

"Checkmate?" Bill said. "So soon? Really?"

"Really, Bill. Really."

Another sign of Nick's adult status: He no longer felt he had to call him Father Bill.

Bill studied the board. Nick had spotted Bill both his bishops and both his rooks, and still Bill was losing. In fact he could see no way to get his king free of the web Nick had woven around the piece. He'd lost.

Bill knocked over his king.

"I don't know why you continue to play me. I can't be any sort of challenge for you."

"It's not the challenge," Nick said. "It's the company. It's the conversation. Believe me, it's not the chess."

Nick was still a bit of a social misfit, Bill knew. Especially with women. And until he found himself a woman—or one found him—their traditional Saturday night chess games here in Bill's office at St. F.'s would probably go on indefinitely.

"But I seem to become worse at the game instead of better," Bill said.

Nick shook his head. "Not worse. Just predictable. You fall into the same kind of trap every time."

Bill didn't like the idea of being predictable. He knew his main flaw in chess was lack of patience. He tended toward impulsive, seat-of-the-pants gambits. But that was his nature.

"I'm going to start reading up on chess, Nick. Better yet, I'm going to invest in a chess program for the computer. That old Apple II you gave me will be your undoing. It'll teach me to wipe up the board with you."

Nick did not appear terribly shaken by the threat.

"Speaking of computers, have you been tapping into those data bases and bulletin boards like I showed you?"

Bill nodded. "I think I'm becoming addicted to them."

"You wouldn't be the first. By the way, I recently downloaded this new article about cloning. It reminded me of that brouhaha back in the sixties over that friend of yours—"

"Jim," Bill said with a sudden ache in his chest. "Jim Stevens."

"Right. James Stevens. Supposedly the clone of Roderick Hanley. The Stevens case, as they called it, was mentioned in the article. Current wisdom, as stated in the article, says that it was technically impossible to clone a human being back in the forties. But I don't know. From what I've picked up over the years, Roderick Hanley was a real wild card. If anybody could pull off something like that, it was him. What do you think?"