He woke with a start, his hand slapping down on the lamp switch beside the bed, his eyes flashing around the room as he forced himself to ignore the pain of going from dark to light too fast. Rubbing his watering eyes, he sat up, looking around more slowly, everything was in its place, and all was silent, not a hint of the mocking, cruel laughter that had disturbed his sleep. Just a bad dream, he sighed mentally, or to be more precise, just another bad dream, it was growing tiresome, not getting a full night's sleep, and worse, it was starting to affect him during the day, he was becoming tired, cranky, and his Camerlengo was beginning to hint less than subtly that perhaps he needed to talk about whatever was bothering him.
He threw back the covers, getting up and wrapping his robe around himself, leaving the bedroom for the sitting room, moving the fireguard and poking the fire back to life. Kneeling in front of it, he let the flames warm him, and contemplated 'talking about it'; how could he tell Strauss, how could he tell anyone that he had started dreaming of demons in St Peter's square, of hearing evil laughter as they sought to release something truly horrific on the Earth.
He almost jumped right out of his skin as there was a light tap at the door.
"Come," he called without looking away from the flames.
"Is everything ok, your Holiness? It is very late."
He smiled faintly, looking back over his shoulder at Chartrand, who hovered in the doorway.
"I would have said horrifically early, personally. I couldn't sleep."
"Would you like for me to send for your physician? Perhaps he can give you something to help you sleep. You have been…tired…of late."
"Are you and my Camerlengo ganging up on me now?" he asked, amused as Chartrand blushed and stammered a denial.
"Never mind, I don't need my doctor, and I don't want anything to help me sleep, its fine," he said, shuddering faintly at the thought of being drugged asleep, of having one of those dreams and not being able to wake from it.
Rising from his spot before the fire, he wandered over to the window, looking down into the silent, deserted St Peter's square, certainly no demons, he thought self-deprecatingly, starting to turn away from the glass. A flare of light made him look again, and he froze to see two stately winged figures dressed in white in the square, their heads together, and worried looks on their faces.
Gabriel, Raphael, something whispered in his mind, and he stumbled back from the glass as he was hit with an almost physical wave of aching familiarity; it was too much, and he crumpled limply to the floor.
Chartrand cried out in shock as the Holy Father collapsed, hurrying to his side, hesitating for just a moment to look out and see what could have startled him so down in the square, but there was nothing there, it was as silent and unmoving as it should be at this hour. Dismissing it, he turned and knelt beside the unconscious pontiff, easing him onto his back and checking his pulse. It was strong and steady, and there was no hint of distress in his peaceful expression, but Chartrand was taking no chances, he looked at the other two guards who stood in the doorway, worried expressions on their faces.
"One of you call in and get his physician sent up here, now, the other, go and fetch the Camerlengo, he needs to know that the Holy Father has collapsed," he ordered.
/x/
Daylight was filtering in through the window when Pope Michael woke to the somewhat unwelcome sight of the Papal apartment's medical suite. Sitting up, he went to throw the covers back, hesitating at the sound of his doctor's voice.
"All due respect, your Holiness, but if you so much as think about getting up before I tell you that you can, I will tie you to the bed. You're exhausted; you must rest before you really make yourself ill."
"I feel fine, I am fine," he protested.
"You are not fine, you have been tired, irritable, and last night you fainted. You have a heavy workload in the next few weeks, a lot of travelling; you need to mind your health."
Patrick bit down on the sharp retort he had almost made, determined not to prove the doctor right, but the man's raised eyebrow indicated that he hadn't fooled him for a second.
"Fine, so I've been having a little trouble sleeping, and I've been a little tense, it happens. You of all people know I've had sleeping issues on and off for years, they always pass."
"Yes, but they also always have a trigger, and you're usually a lot more forthcoming about what is causing your insomnia."
"I've been having nightmares," Patrick admitted grudgingly.
"Would you like to talk about them?"
"No, I most definitely wouldn't," he said flatly.
"Alright, I'll give you a couple of days worth of sleeping pills, we'll see if we can knock your sleeping patterns back on track that way."
"No, no drugs."
"Holy Father, you have to get some sleep."
"No."
"As you wish, your Holiness," the doctor sighed.
"So are you going to let me get up now? I have a lot to get done today."
"Absolutely not, you need to try to get some more sleep, even if it's just a few hours. Let your Camerlengo handle things for now."
He sighed and dropped back against the pillows, giving in; perhaps the demons wouldn't creep into his dreams in the daylight.
/x/
Strauss went up to the papal apartments just before midday, finding the doctor before seeking the Pope.
"Doctor, I have some papers that require his Holiness' signature, may I disturb him?"
"You won't be disturbing him, he slept for a while, but he's awake now, I just let him loose, he's dressing now."
"I'm here; did you want me, Camerlengo Strauss?"
"Yes Holiness, I have some papers here that need your signature."
"Come, we'll go to my study then. Thank you, doctor," he nodded to the doctor, before leading Strauss to the study.
"Sit, please," he said to Strauss, taking the file from him and circling the desk to his own chair.
Strauss waited until the Pope was seated before taking the indicated seat, and watched in silence as he read through and signed the papers he had brought, he looked around, realizing that nothing in this room had changed since the last time he had entered this study, when the previous Pope had still been alive.
"I always loved this room just the way it was, I saw no need to change it when my father died," Patrick said, answering his unvoiced curiosity quietly.
Strauss nodded silently, there wasn't much he could say to that, he did sometimes tend to forget that they had been father and son.
He finished signing the papers, and closed the folder, but didn't hand it back to Strauss; he sat and looked at him thoughtfully.
"Can I trust you with a confidence, Camerlengo Strauss?"
"In a confessional sense your Holiness?"
"No, nothing like that, I…I think that perhaps I would like to talk about what has been disturbing my sleep, but if I do, I need it to remain between us."
"You can trust me with anything you wish to."
Patrick nodded, but didn't speak immediately, instead he rose from his seat, gesturing for Strauss to stay seated, and walked over to the window, standing so that he could look down into the square without being seen by any of the people who stood down there.
"What would you say if I told you I have been dreaming of demons?"
"Demons?" Strauss asked, startled.
"Every night for the last eight days, I have dreamed of demons in St Peter's square in the dead of night. Usually the same ones each night, as far as I could tell anyway, but there were others a couple of times. I'm not sure what they're doing, or why, but I, the me in the dream, feels that whatever they're doing, it will bring about immeasurable evil, and every time, I wake to cruel, malicious, taunting laughter."
"That is…certainly strange," Strauss said hesitantly.
"It gets stranger; last night before I thoroughly embarrassed myself by passing out in front of my Swiss Guard, I could swear I saw two Angels standing in the square, looking worried, but the oddest thing about it is the sense of overwhelming certainty that I knew them, that I knew their names."
"What did they look like?" Strauss asked.
Noticing an odd note in Strauss' voice, Patrick turned back to face him again.
"You think I'm losing my mind, don't you?" he asked softly.
"No, no I don't think you are, or perhaps we both are. After the incident with the anti-matter, while you were in the infirmary here, I had a very odd dream about you. I put it down to my subconscious prodding me to stop fighting against the Cardinals desire to elect you to the papacy, I could have asked you, but I didn't feel comfortable calling to your mind something that was possibly still very distressing to you."
"Distressing to me; what was the dream?"
"I dreamed that I entered a church that I have never seen before, almost tripping over a small, redheaded child who was bouncing around looking at the statues and the friezes, his mother called out to him, 'Patrick Niall McKenna…'"
"Come here and stop hopping around like a hoodlum," Patrick said softly, his eyes distant, sad.
"Yes," Strauss said, stunned.
"I heard that at least once a day when I was a child, I was an energetic little thing. That day I gave her the puppy eyes and told her I wanted to look," he said quietly, his eyes still far away, a faint, melancholy smile touching his lips.
"Yes. His, your,mother agreed, as long as you behaved yourself and returned when it grew crowded. I followed you down the left side of the church, watching you studying the friezes; one seemed to pull your attention more than the others, you stepped into the alcove to look at it closer."
"They said afterwards that being in that alcove saved my life, shielded me from the blast, I don't even know what the painting was of, or why it drew me to want a closer look than the others."
"It was the Archangel St Michael, his name was above, and in my dream, the alcove was not all that shielded you. As you stepped inside, an Angel appeared behind you, and sheltered you with his wings as the chaos struck, he lifted you in his arms and looked right at me, the only one who had seen me in the dream, and he told me you were stronger than I imagined you were, and as he turned to face me, the child you became the adult you, and the burning church became the room of tears in the chapel, he laid you on the floor, and vanished."
Patrick stood in silence for a long moment, lost in thought, before returning to his seat across the desk from Strauss.
"The two I saw in the square, one was fair haired, and the other dark, I couldn't see much more in the way of detail, aside from the face, as I said, they looked worried."
"Your protector was dark haired."
Patrick nodded vaguely, staring into the unlit fireplace blankly.
"Are you all right, Holy Father?" Strauss asked uncertainly.
"Yes, yes, I'm fine," he said, not entirely convincingly.
"I am sure we will be able to figure out why you have been having these dreams, what they mean."
"Perhaps, but not right now, hmm, we leave tomorrow for our visit," he said, forcing his attention to focus back on his Camerlengo, trying to ignore the questions that were popping up in his mind. Was he really being watched over, why him out of all of the other people who had been in that church that awful day, what did they expect from him.
"Yes, Holiness."
"Thank you for listening."
"Any time."
Strauss took his file and left, pondering on what the Pope had told him, what he was dreaming of. If the dark haired Angel his Holiness had seen in the square before his collapse was the same one Strauss had seen in his dream, then would that mean that the demons he was dreaming of were real, and if so, what in the name of all that was holy were they going to do about it.
/x/
Patrick dropped into the armchair by the fireplace in his bedroom, sighing as he closed his eyes for a moment. It had been a good visit to England and Ireland, and even better, his nightmares had stopped while he was away, not even surfacing after the unfortunate blindside he had caught when he realized that the church where he had been expected to take a mass in Ireland was the same church where he had been orphaned, it's restoration and re-consecration recently completed, but he was glad to be back in Rome. His breathing deepened and his head dropped to the side as he fell asleep in the comfortable chair without ever realizing he was drifting
Patrick tensed instantly, realizing he was standing in St Peter's square in the dead of night, a light mist swirling around his feet in the low breeze that was making his white cassock flutter gently. He heard something scrape on the stones behind him, and a low, menacing chuckle sounded.
"You can't stop us you know, you will be slaughtered with the rest of the sheep, before you ever wake," a guttural voice taunted.
He spun, but there was nothing behind him besides the eddying mist.
"Too slow," the voice sneered, still behind him.
A hand clamped down painfully tightly on his shoulder, and a glance showed leathery fingers, longer than you would find on any human hand, tipped by black claws. Jerking away from the strong grip, he stumbled forward, falling and skinning his palms on the clammy ground as he caught himself. Scrambling to his feet, he realized that laughter was now coming from more than one source, and spinning around, he saw he was now ringed by cackling demons, hemmed in.
"You can't escape us, and the more you fight it, the more it will hurt," the demon who had kept behind him crooned with fake compassion, sharp claws skating lightly over the nape of his neck.
Twisting away again, whiteness slid across his field of vision for a moment, and he thought the mist was rising, but when it cleared, he found himself in his study. A hand on his hurt shoulder made him cry out and pull away, and he found himself on the floor once more, but this time familiar warmth wrapped around him a moment before strong arms pulled him into an embrace.
"Papa," he whispered, feeling tears sliding down his face.
"Hush child, you're safe now, easy, I have you," his father said gently, rocking him soothingly.
Kneeling there on the floor of the of the study, Martinelli looked up from the top of his son's head, eyes searching the shadows edging the walls until they fell on the figure he sought. Gabriel stepped forward silently, brushing his fingers over the top of Patrick's head, coaxing him into a deep sleep, still held in his father's arms.
"His sleep will have to be guarded, from tonight until he awakens fully. They cannot touch him in the daylight hours, but in sleep he is vulnerable," Gabriel said.
"I watched over his sleep when he was a child, I will watch over his sleep now."
"I rather thought you might," Gabriel said with a fond smile, watching him.
"If I might ask, what is going to happen to my son, to my Patrick, when he awakens fully?"
Gabriel hesitated for a long moment, and there was genuine sympathy in his eyes when he shook his head.
"We don't know, even God himself does not know for sure."
"It's close, isn't it?"
"Yes, I didn't bring him in here; he did that himself, even though he thinks it part of the dream. It is fortunate that this is somewhere he considers a place of security, if he had taken himself somewhere outside in an effort to escape the attack in the dreamscape, we could not have retrieved him in time, and they would have had him in both the dream and the physical world."
"I will guard him well; I will not let them kill my child."
Gabriel nodded, satisfied with the assurance, and left. Martinelli gathered his sleeping son into a more comfortable position, and sat to watch out the night.
/x/
Patrick woke feeling surprisingly rested, given the dream he had had the night before, though he supposed finding himself secure in his father's arms after escaping the demons in this dream had something to do with that. It wasn't until he made to move that he realized that several things were wrong, one, he was in the wrong room, he was still sleeping in a chair, but he had fallen asleep in his bedroom, and two, he hurt; his hands protested when he rested them against the arms of the chair to push himself up, and his shoulder screamed in agony so strong it almost made him pass out.
Looking at his palms, he saw scrapes and marks that matched his fall in the square in his dream, and for a moment, he thought he had gotten a carpet burn in his apparent bout of sleep walking, but looking closer, he realized there was dirt and small stones in the cuts. He got up carefully, keeping his left arm close to his side and as still as he could, and headed out of his study.
Getting back to his bedroom, he managed to work his way out of his cassock without moving his shoulder too much and making himself pass out. Once he was down to just his trousers, he moved over to the mirror to check his shoulder, to see if he could figure out what was wrong with it. His left shoulder drooped slightly forward, and he could see a distinct displacement on the collar bone on the left side, but that wasn't what scared him, that distinction went to the perfectly defined bruise in the shape of an inhuman hand, right where the demon in his dream had squeezed his shoulder, right where the clavicle was quite clearly broken.
"God, what's happening to me?" he whispered, sinking down on the edge of the bed in shock.
He wasn't sure how long he had been sitting there when he realized that someone had been knocking on his door for some time, but it didn't matter that he couldn't work up the will to call out to them, because the door opened, and his guards hurried in, checking out the room warily before focusing on where he sat.
"Dear God," one of them breathed, taking in the dreadful bruise and the bloody, scuffed palms.
"Call the doctor, and get Commandant Richter up here," he said sharply to the others, before kneeling in front of the Pope.
"Holy Father, who did this to you?" he asked, his tone considerable gentler.
Patrick didn't even glance at him, his eyes stayed fixed on his hands as he sat in silence.
"What is going on?" Richter asked, entering the room.
"Not again," he breathed, catching sight of the Holy Father, he couldn't believe that he had been attacked inside the Apostolic palace for a second time.
"We haven't been able to find out who did it, his Holiness isn't talking, at all," one of the guards responded.
"Is the doctor coming?"
"Yes."
The doctor hurried in a moment later, taking in his patient's condition at a glance.
"He's going into shock, help me get him to the medical section, and stay away from that left arm," he said to the two aides who had accompanied him, completely ignoring everyone else in the room.
They got him to his feet, walking him out of the room, leaving the Swiss Guard to try to figure out how someone had gotten to the Pope with someone standing outside the doors all night.
/x/
Patrick felt considerably less disconnected from everything after the doctor had treated the shock, but he still remained silent as he was run through x-ray before his arm was immobilized in a sling, letting the doctor get to work on cleaning and dressing his hands.
"Are you ready to tell me how this happened yet, your Holiness? I can tell that the injuries to your hands at least happened outside somewhere, not indoors, and that bruise on your shoulder is a clear handprint."
Patrick shook his head mutely, and the doctor sighed quietly.
"Can you at least tell me what fractured your clavicle; was it the same pressure that bruised you?"
"I don't know."
He knew he was frustrating the doctor by being uncommunicative, but he didn't feel comfortable talking to him about how this had happened, when he didn't understand it himself, and he really wasn't sure when in the encounter the bone had broken.
"All right, have it your way. I'm going to give you pain killers and anti-inflammatories for your shoulder, I'm hoping we can avoid the need for surgery, so we'll keep it supported in the sling, and monitor it with x-rays to make sure it mends properly."
"Very well."
"All right, I'll get someone to come and help you dress."
"Very well," Patrick agreed again.
Once he was dressed, Patrick withdrew back to his study, starting to go through the things his secretary had left for him, and waiting for the inevitable arrival of his Camerlengo. He wasn't disappointed; he had only been there half an hour when there was a familiar knock at the door.
"Come in," he called.
"Holiness, I heard you had been attacked," Strauss said in concern, stepping into the room.
"Yes, and no, sit please."
Strauss took the indicated seat, and Patrick leaned back in his chair, absently fidgeting with the strap of his sling.
"Do you remember what we discussed, before we left for England?"
"Of course, Holiness, I was pleased that the dreams seemed to have stopped when we were travelling."
"Well, last night they came back with a vengeance. My injuries occurred in the dream, and when I woke, they were real."
"Do you mean that you injured yourself due to the dream, or someone injured you in the dream and you manifested the wounds physically?"
"Both, possibly; I definitely appear to have sleepwalked from my bedroom to my study, I could have fallen then, but the cuts on my hands were made outside, and there is no way I could have made the bruise on my injured shoulder myself."
"That is certainly alarming."
"Yes, it is. I fear…I fear that should I be killed in one of these dreams, and that is definitely what they seemed to intend last night, then I will die physically too."
"There has to be something we can do to safeguard you."
"Short of having someone standing over me all night to wake me at the first hint of a nightmare, and that is not a suggestion Camerlengo, then I can't see what. You know, when I wrote my will, I didn't exactly think that this was the kind of circumstance where it might be enacted, I was thinking more, assassination, or accident, not death by dream demon."
"Don't say that Holy Father, please."
"No use hiding from it," he shrugged with his uninjured shoulder.
"No use being too accepting either. I for one would rather you didn't die on us."
"I'm certainly not aiming to do so; I'm just not sure what we can do. Spiritual manifestations of demons in humans is one thing, but this does not feel like something exorcism can deal with."
"That is not a comforting thought, Holiness."
"I wasn't aware that it was meant to be, Camerlengo."
They both fell silent then, there didn't seem to be much that could be said to that.
tbc
