The Multitude, стр. 16
He’d found this place three years earlier when moving in the opposite direction, away from his brother, Albus, and the circle of debauched followers who clung to the man like a dirty cloak.
This crude temple had been referred to as a church by a group of pilgrims loitering on its steps that day. They claimed to be the designers of the steep-roofed structure and the large, wooden cross hanging above the entryway. But upon further questioning, he learned they’d gotten the plans from legendary Saint Gabriella in Sanctimonia. She’d taught them all she knew about the one true God, as well.
Quintus had been impressed by the humble devotion exhibited by those pilgrims and by the logic of their beliefs, for the most part, not counting their fantastic claims about a girl who never aged. But mostly, he’d been drawn in by the ethereal calm that came over him when he entered this church and sat on one of its wooden benches.
Today, he didn’t find calm. Or any of the pilgrims. Instead, grubby moneylenders had already set up their stations at the base of the stairs, sitting on wooden crates before small tables, eagerly waiting for the most vulnerable borrowers—those who had such urgent needs they’d come at the earliest opportunity and pay the highest rates.
These thieves or their kind had removed the cross and scrawled crass messages on the church’s adobe walls. The cost of money. The price of wine. The rates charged by local whores.
And the pilgrims? He’d heard the tale. They’d been caught in the wide net of a pogrom. Some had been enslaved. Others crucified.
Quintus shuddered. Why return to this desecrated site? What did he hope to find?
“Ho there! Have you come in need of coin?” A cloaked lender hurried out from behind his table, approaching close enough for Quintus to smell his sour breath.
“I’ve come to remember what was lost,” Quintus said.
Yet how to recall such a thing? Virtus had never been a benevolent kingdom in his lifetime. Nor had he heard it to be one at any point in its long, violent history. Overwhelming sadness almost made him sob. He turned his back.
The lender persisted, grabbing Quintus’s sleeve. “You’ve no money at hand? Perhaps you left your purse at home? Come, we’ll set down your name and strike a deal for later.”
His name? He’d lost it in the clouds of gloom now choking him from throat to heart.
Who am I?
The clouds parted. I am Quintus, Quintus, Quintus…no…
I am—
Dut-dut-dut DAH!
The opening of Beethoven’s Fifth buckled his knees.
Brewster shot up in bed and groped for his bearings in the mental shadows between dreams and reality. Static electricity must have triggered the doorbell. Or wind. Either way, he remembered his name now.
He was Brewster DeLay, a businessman and part-time writer living in Northbrook, Illinois, a place where smart phones, Twitter, Facebook, and Roku ruled the land. He hadn’t been summoned from the front to journey across a desert nation where angry mobs crucified pilgrims.
He didn’t live in a world where everyone spoke Latin.
He’d first had these nighttime episodes as a boy, but his dad, a professor of language studies, explained them away at the time. You’ve heard my lesson rehearsals, and they’ve gotten stuck in your head, the old man had said.
What would he say now, some twenty years later?
He’d say, you are Brewster, Brewster, Brewster—
Dut-dut-dut DAH!
The blasted musical chime sent him sliding back down beneath the covers. The list of midnight visitors a man hoped to find on his doorstep was short.
A supercharged storm must have pressed its angry thumb on his doorbell. Gusts still buffeted the house, humming through every crack in the frame. Thunder rumbled in the distance and flashes illuminated the window shade, but halfheartedly now and at decreasing intervals. After pausing to punk him, nature had moved on.
But what if somebody real rang the doorbell twice?
Brewster manned up and got out of bed. He padded on bare feet into the hallway and peered over the railing into the foyer. He couldn’t see anyone through the little panel of glass near the top of the front door.
He shifted his attention to the living room and stared straight out the picture window behind the couch. A streetlamp at the edge of the driveway cast enough light to provide a shadowy portrait of his lawn, the cul-de-sac, and the neighbors’ lawns across the street. At first, no doorbell-ringing soldiers of the night marred his view, but as he started turning toward his bedroom, he caught a hint of motion.
Someone approached from a few houses down—coming not going, and therefore not guilty of ringing his doorbell, but out there all the same. A woman just visible in the dim lighting ambled across a neighbor’s lawn, stepped over the curb onto the pavement of the cul-de-sac, and looked up at his house.
Brewster shrugged off a baffling stab of foreboding. An unexpected stranger could seem creepy in the dead of night, but come on. The recurrence of the Virtus dream must have set his nerves on edge.
Virtus, Latin for power. What an odd name for a nation, even in one’s dream. What was his subconscious trying to tell him? Probably that he longed for those pre-recession days when a man didn’t fear losing his job, doorbells didn’t ring on their own, and mysterious women didn’t come calling in the dead of night. And yet, that last item wasn’t necessarily undesirable.
He headed into the bedroom, stripped off his pajamas, and hurried into jeans and a shirt. Then he grabbed a pair of sandals from a shoe rack and rushed back to the hallway.
By the time he returned to the railing and