"Smith, Guy N - Sabat 04 - The Druid Connection" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith Guy N)

'It might not be a straightforward exorcism.'

'What d'you mean?'

'You haven't told me about Bishop Avenson,' Sabat inclined his head towards the oil-painting which hung to his left. 'Whatever's going on it goes back as far as 1742, maybe a lot further. Avenson was found all burned up, just like Owen. And your last exorcist was discovered with an obsession for bonfires. We're not up against just an ordinary spirit. Whatever it is, it's dangerous and I don't risk my life, maybe worse, for nothing.'

Boyce started visibly. Damn this Sabat fellow, he'd been researching the history of St Monica's. The prying type.

'I didn't think Avenson's fate could possibly have anything to do with what happened in 1982, nearly two hundred and fifty years later.'

'Nothing can be overlooked. I'd say there's a direct link. Tell me, Bishop, this guy Cleehopes, what had he been burning on the bonfire?'

'Just grass and weeds. We had a mowing contractor in to tidy up the churchyard about a fortnight ago and he'd left a pile of cuttings. Cleehopes apparently set fire to them.'

'Nothing else?'

'Not as far as I know. The police sifted through the ashes but they never told me they'd found anything.'

'Well, I'll check with Groome anyway. Now, the fee, Bishop. I work for five hundred a week plus expenses.'

'Daylight robbery,' Boyce's thick lips tightened, the end of his cigar glowing red.

'Not when you take the risks I take. However, if you think I'm too expensive . . .

The bishop pulled a drawer open, took out the diocesan expenses cheque book. His orders had come from a higher authority, from Westminster itself where he had been informed that Sabat had worked for the Church before. It was neither Bishop Boyce's own money nor his place to argue. Hastily he scribbled out a cheque, tore the perforation and slid the oblong of yellow paper across the desk. T just hope you get it all settled up in a week, Sabat.'

'So do I,' Sabat smiled humourlessly beneath his heavy moustache. 'I'll need accommodation, too.'

'You can have the use of the curate's house,' the bishop's eyes hooded. 'And I'll be glad if you'll be as unobtrusive as possible. The newspapers have gone to town on this business and this kind of publicity doesn't do the Church any good.'

'You won't even know I'm around,' Sabat smiled again and turned on his heel.

After the door had closed behind his visitor, Bishop Boyce drew heavily on his cigar. Sabat made him uneasy; the tall dark man wasn't like other men, more like a hunting beast of prey and you just hoped it wasn't you he was after. Because if he was he'd run you down for sure.

There was a frown on Sabat's face as he made his way through the palace to where his silver Daimler stood sedately. He didn't like Boyce and that wasn't just because the man was a .hypocritical bishop. He had the kind of intuition that Sabat had learned not to ignore in the past, inbuilt alarm systems in his own body sounding a warning. He would not ignore them.

It was that painting hanging in Boyce's study that he could not get off his mind. Bishop Avenson - a portrait of evil. God, the likeness was uncanny, enough to have every nerve in Mark Sabat's body tensing like steel cables at full stretch. The features, the expression, so reminiscent of his own brother Quentin, the most evil man this century!

Sabat slid behind the wheel of the Daimler and sat there staring across the palace gardens, unseeing except in his own mind. Even now he thought he could hear Quentin's voice somewhere in the recesses of his own brain. 'I'm not dead, Mark Sabat. Still I live on, for I am you!'

Mark Sabat felt the clamminess of cold sweat, his shirt clinging to his body, and in his mind he saw a wooded mountainside, a wide clearing which even the birds and beasts of the wild shunned. For it was here that his own brother Quentin had chosen his final refuge, a bastion of evil in the mountains. He had been known throughout the continents of the world as 'Satan's henchman'; pursued by the combined forces of the law who secretly hoped that they would not catch up with him, relentlessly hunted by Mark Sabat. And it was in this very clearing that the final confrontation had taken place.

Sabat shuddered, recalled how his own extraordinary powers of exorcism had been overshadowed by those of the most evil man known to mankind. Exhumed corpses lay beside the three open graves, further proof of what Quentin was about to do, a master of voodoo, a houngan in exile attempting to raise his own followers from the dead, an invincible army of zombies to do his bidding.

Sabat smelled again the cloying putrefaction of open graves, experienced once more his own utter despair when he had fallen into one, looked up and seen his brother preparing to pulverise him with a woodcutter's axe; the stench of burned cordite, the -38 which Sabat always carried bucking in his hand, Quentin falling, writhing his death throes on top of him, the final shot blasting that awful skull, stringing blood and brains on the damp walls of the grave like an old man's mucus.

It should have ended there and then with Sabat clambering out of that oblong hole, walking dazedly back down the mountainside, his mission accomplished. But it hadn't. Somehow Quentin's own soul had merged with his own, good and evil in continual conflict inside a living entity, a man possessed fighting within himself for survival. And still fighting.

And that was how it remained. Sabat, one-time priest, latterly an SAS agent, until his indiscretion with a Colonel's blonde wife who wore black boots and liked to watch her lovers cringe before her, had resulted in his recent return to civilian life and now found himself the victim of a dual role. At certain times the evil in him was too strong to resist and Quentin Sabat lived again. On other occasions the forces of evil were thwarted by Mark Sabat's own ruthlessness, his own desire for revenge for what they had done to him.