David Morrell - The Covenant Of The Flame

'Right.'

'I'm still working on English. Can you read it?'

'No.' Tess exhaled, frustrated. 'I took a few courses in high school, but I don't remember the vocabulary.'

'Below the title,' Craig said. ' Abu Muhammad 'Ali ibn Hazm al-Andalusi .' He stumbled over the words. 'I assume that's the author's name. It barely fits across the cover. Muhammad? Sounds Moslem.'

Tess nodded, wrote the title and author's name on a notepad, then opened the book. Its pages were brittle, the entire text in Spanish. Impatient, she returned her gaze to the bookshelf, in particular toward the Scofield Bible. Earlier, something about it had troubled her. It didn't look right. She cautiously replaced the Spanish book and withdrew the Bible, finding that its covers slanted inward. With a frown, she stared inside and discovered, shocked, that most of its pages had been removed. A straight line showed where a knife or scissors had been used to cut out the pages.

'Why would - ?'

That's one of many things I want to know,' Craig said.

Tess read the names of the sections at the top of the heavily underlined, remaining pages. 'He cut out everything except the preface and… " She flipped more pages. 'John's Gospel, John's Epistles, John's Book of Revelation. I don't understand.'

'You're not the only one. And this…' Craig pointed.' Whatever the damned thing is. On the bookshelf. This is the weirdest of all.'

Tess raised her eyes. She'd noticed the object when she walked toward the bookshelf, but it made so little sense that she'd postponed examining it in the hope that the other things in the room would help her interpret the grotesque image.

The object was a statue, or to be exact a bas-relief sculpture, one foot tall and wide, fashioned out of white marble. It depicted a long-haired, muscular, handsome man straddling the back of a bull, jerking the struggling animal's head up, slashing its throat with a knife.

Blood cascaded from the wound toward what appeared to be wheat growing out of the ground. At the same time, a dog lunged toward the blood while a serpent sped toward the wheat and a scorpion attacked the bull's testicles.

To the right and left of the grisly scene, torch bearers watched. The torch on the left was pointed upward, the torch on the right pointed downward. And above the torch bearer on the left, a bird -

– an owl ! hard to tell -

– stared with fixated eyes toward the slashing knife and the cascading blood.

'What does it mean?' Craig asked. 'Since I first saw it this morning, the thing's been haunting me.'

Tess had trouble speaking. Her mouth tasted bitter. Her shoulder blades felt frozen. 'It's… Horrible. Repulsive. Disgusting.'

'Yeah, just your ordinary everyday decoration around the house.'

Attached to the wall behind the statue, imitating the torches that flanked the eerie grotesque scene, were candles in holders, one facing up, the other down. A saucer had been set beneath the latter candle to catch the melting wax when it fell.

'Joseph didn't have a lot of respect for the fire code,' Craig said. 'If the landlord had known about all these candles, your friend would have found himself and his few belongings out on the street. It's a wonder he didn't burn down the building.'

'But this is crazy.'

'It sure as hell spooked me.'

'Look, there's no way I can borrow the Bible and the Spanish book, right?' Tess asked.

'Homicide would have my ass if I let you.'

'Well, can I at least take pictures?'

'You've got a camera?'

'Always. A reporter's habit.'

'Okay. But I want you to promise,' Craig said. 'You won't publish the photographs unless you're given permission from Homicide or me.'

'Agreed.'

'Then be my guest,' Craig said.

Tess removed a small 35mm Olympus from her burlap purse and took several closeup photos of the statue from different angles. Then she opened the Bible and photographed the most heavily underlined pages. Next, after putting the Bible back on the shelf in the spot where she'd found it, she photographed the entire bookshelf and finally the pallet flanked by candles.

She put away the camera. 'All set.'

There's one other promise I want you to make,' Craig said. 'If you learn anything from those photos, I want to hear about it in case it's something we haven't already discovered.'

'Word of honor.'

Craig fidgeted.

'That look on your face. You're doing it again,' Tess said. 'Holding back.'

The thing is…'

'What?'

'Are you ready for another shock?'

'You mean, there is more?'

'In the closet.' Craig opened it. 'Notice he had few clothes. A pair of clean jeans. An extra shirt. A spare – only one – cotton pullover. A few pairs of socks and underwear on the shelf. And this .' Craig reached to the right, toward the inside wall of the closet.

'Whatever it is, I don't want to see it.'

'I'm sorry, Tess. But it's important. I have to show you.'

The lieutenant pulled an object from the closet. The object was a foot-long section of wood that seemed to have been cut from a broomstick handle. A half-dozen three-foot-long pieces of rope were attached to one end.

Tess shuddered. 'A whip?'

'With dried blood on the ropes. He… I believe the term is… flagellated himself.'

The Tsavo National Park. Kenya. Africa.

The hunter waited patiently, clutching his long-distance, high-powered rifle, hunkering with practised discipline in a shelter of scrub thorn next to a cluster of baobob trees. His view of the water hole was unobstructed. At mid-day near the equator, the heat was so severe that the targets would soon lumber into view, forced to seek water. Although his wide-brimmed hat and the bushes around him provided some shelter from the glaring sun, the hunter sweated profusely, his khaki hunting shirt dark with moisture. But he didn't dare raise his canteen and drink, lest his motions reveal his position. After all, his quarry was extremely cautious, vigilant against intruders.

Still, the hunter's patience and determination had been rewarded many times before. He simply had to maintain professional conduct. Later, when his hunt was successful, he could afford the luxury of drinking.

His nerves tingled. There! To his left! He sensed more than heard the approaching rumble of huge plodding feet. Then he saw the dustcloud they raised, and finally the massive animals emerged from a stand of flowering acacia trees, warily assessing the open grassland, nervously judging the water hole.

Elephants. The hunter counted ten. Their wide ears were flared, straining to detect unfamiliar threatening sounds. With disappointment, the hunter noted that four were tuskless children and that the adults had tusks that were barely – hard to tell from this distance – four feet long. With greater disappointment, he remembered a time, twenty years ago, when the curved tusks had been six, eight, and sometimes ten-feet long. On average, the weight of each tusk had dropped from eighteen pounds to nine. As a consequence, it required much more killing to achieve the quota demanded by ivory merchants. Twenty years ago – the hunter mentally shook his head – forty thousand elephants had roamed this plain, but last year, he'd estimated that only five thousand remained, and that figure didn't include the two thousand carcasses he'd come upon during his increasingly determined expeditions. Soon the ivory trade wouldn't exist. Because the elephants themselves would no longer exist. Twelve tons of tusks, the harvest from thirteen hundred elephants, were worth three million dollars. But smaller tusks meant less weight and more killing in order to achieve the quota.