by Declan Finn
Alex shrugged. “I got commando priest here. What could happen?”
Pearson rolled his eyes and waved me on.
I could tell they were either going to be great friends or kill each other. It was a coin toss.
I stepped out into the hall and went to the only closed door. I knocked on it. I made certain to frame my next statement in the full knowledge that she had heard the gunshots downstairs, and part of the fracas. Since she was a minor (I think), and I was a cop, I turned on the voice recorder app on my cell phone before I knocked.
“Denise? This is Detective Nolan. All clear out here.”
I heard a few clicks of a lock. Denise cracked the door to make certain it was me. She opened it a little wider to see behind me. When she saw I was alone, she threw open the door and hugged me. She broke down into tears and deeply saddened me with tales of her abuse over the past three years—psychological, emotional, physical, sexual, the whole gamut of major and minor meanness. The confession of suffering and grief she had been put through just came pouring out.
I stood there and took it, returning the hug and saying nothing. When she said, “He wanted to wait to kill my baby when she was ready to be born. He wanted her cut to pieces when she was still alive.” I made certain not to show my anger. She didn’t need anger at that point.
I didn’t time how long we were there like that, but it was a good chunk of time. She needed to tell someone about everything, and I wasn’t going to stop her.
“—and then all of this weird shit kept happening after he ripped open the walls and put them back together again. Things kept moving when my back was turned. There’s always banging in the house when I’m alone. And I swear the shadows keep moving.”
My blood turned cold, and my body tensed. I looked around and felt the sudden urge to get Denise out of the house while we still could.
Not a bad idea. “Denise, do you have a neighbor’s house you could go to? We’re going to have to talk to your dad for a while. You may not want to be around for that?”
Denise smiled. “Are you going to torture him?”
I smiled at her in understanding. “Not quite. No.”
Her smiled fell. “Oh. Okay. Sure. I can get somewhere.”
I nodded. “Before that, can you tell me where some of the sealed-off walls are?”
Once Denise was safely off and running, I went back to the master bedroom. Pearson busily prayed over Gerald Downey. Downey constantly snapped at Pearson with his teeth. Pearson backhanded him once without even breaking stride in the Rite.
Combat exorcists, able to multitask. I waved to get Alex’s attention, and he came out, closing the door behind him.
“Geez, Tommy, where the heck have you been? I’ve been in crack houses that were less scary than that room.”
“Don’t worry. I got something just as scary.”
Alex sighed. “Of course you do. I—” He cut himself off as he looked at the wall next to him. I had drawn a big X in the wall with a folding knife I carry. “Was this here when we carried The Omen in there up the stairs?”
I shook my head. “It’s in the walls.”
Alex looked at me like I had lost my mind. He should know better by now. “Is that an Amityville Horror quote?”
I arched a brow at him. “The only horror I know of in Amityville is a convent of Dominican nuns that live out on Long Island. Come on, we have work to do. First, we have to find a hammer.”
Alex rolled his eyes. “Here we go again.”
We spent the better part of an hour breaking walls in Downey’s house. We found sticks wrapped in ribbons, nails, little ivory dolls no bigger than my little finger, ribbons wrapped in bows, hair wrapped in string, etc. We ended up with a Xerox box full of miscellaneous crap. We took it outside, and Alex pulled out a package of red dust and poured it on the hoodoo.
He smiled at me and said, “Thermite,” before dropping a lit match on it.
The thermite burns at twenty-five hundred degrees. It’s enough to burn a hole through a car’s hood, and the engine block beneath it.
This pile burned for a minute. It set the surrounding grass on fire.
When the thermite burned away, the hoodoo pile was unscathed.
We both stared at the pile and blinked at it. I looked to Alex and said, “Should I even ask why you carry that on vacation?”
Alex gave me side-eye. “For the same reason I carry metal saint cards. You’re back in town. I carry this stuff like I would carry my badge and gun. There’s a reason I kept my suitcase in my back seat. My trunk is so full of thermite, I better not get rear-ended. I might burn a hole in the highway.” He nodded to the pile. “The real question is what we do with this garbage if it doesn’t want to burn?”
I looked at the pile, blessed it with the sign of the cross, and even pulled out another packet of holy oil. I sprinkled all of it on the pile of ribbons and sticks and ivory, said another blessing just to be sure, and looked to Alex. “One more time.”
Alex nodded and pulled out another pack of thermite. This time, it all burned.
Between Denise’s crying, the demonic Easter egg hunt throughout the house, and breaking most of the walls and floorboards, we had killed the better part of three hours. I pulled the cotton balls out of my nose to sniff the air. It was clean.
“We’re good to go. I think Downey’s been purified.”
We made it into the house, and found Father Pearson coming down from upstairs.
“So, von Sydow,” Alex started, “how did everything go with Downey?”
Pearson smiled weakly. He brushed past us to head for the couch. He fell into the couch and sagged, exhausted. “He’s clear of possession. I made him say the name of Jesus Christ.” He bowed his head at The Name. “Usually, it’s not something they can do when possessed.”
Alex frowned and walked over to an armchair across from Pearson. “You made him say it? Or you had him say it?”
Pearson arched his brows. “Oh, I made him say it. Part of what makes a combat exorcist different from the usual routine is that we deal with hostile hosts who need to be exorcised but don’t want to be. People like your Mister Curran. Or Mister Downey. It’s more of a brute force approach. The effects would almost certainly be considered cruel and unusual punishment. Injections with holy water, liberal use of holy oil and salt. He’s practically wearing a collection of saint cards. And I had to punch him a few times when he got out of line.”
Alex arched a brow. “That doesn’t sound that bad.”
Pearson scoffed at Alex’s casual statement. “Oh, really? I’m essentially driving out a parasite from the man’s soul. You ever see what happens when you brute force a leech? It isn’t pretty. There’s risk for psychological damage on top of whatever self-inflicted spiritual damage he’s done to himself. There’s a reason there aren’t many people who are up for this job. Now, do you want more of my CV, or would you like to know what I learned?”
I cocked my head, surprised. “He actually talked to you?”
Pearson waved the question away. “He was out of it and didn’t really know what he was saying or who he was saying it to. From what little I figured out from my conversations with Downey—and I should specify it was not the demon, but Downey—we are definitely dealing with several other possessed.
Alex groaned. “No flipping way.” He reached into his pocket, pulled out a cigarette and lit up. “How in the he—”
Pearson held up his hand to cut off Alex’s next complaint. “It must be deliberate. There’s no way that this many demons came to possess this many people in the same place and time without something deliberately orchestrating it.”
I raised my hand. The scar that looked like a railroad spike had driven through it always caught the attention of the room. “But they came to the monastery. Several people came to the monastery. The sign-in sheet said they were there for exorcisms. You figure they did it to themselves and had second thoughts?”
Pearson nodded as he reached forward f
or his cold coffee. “Somebody did.” He took a sip, then paused. “Okay, at least one person did. Perhaps he or she ratted out the others. The possessed generally have to come to the church to have anything happen. Or family refers them to an exorcist.”
Alex laughed. “Quick! To the diocese, Batman!”
Pearson and I looked at Alex. “Why are you laughing?” I asked.
He blinked. “I thought I was being funny. Why? Are we actually going to talk to the Bishop?”
I nodded. “We’ll have to. But first things first.”
It took another hour to talk to the local police so Downey could be dragged away for attempted murder of a Church investigator (technically, me) and a cop (Alex), and a priest. Alex spun the narrative and naturally left out all the details of demons and possession.
Denise’s mother would be home to pick up those pieces. I left my card behind with my cell phone number, just in case she wanted help reassembling the living room. And perhaps plastering the walls.
I was not surprised that I never got a call back.
7 Cardinal Tape
It was three-thirty in the afternoon by the time we got to the diocesan office. It was difficult enough to update the cops on everything we had to tell them. It was even more difficult to get an appointment with the Bishop. It took forty-five minutes of aggressive driving to go from Downey’s home on the outskirts of Boston to the city center.
The archdiocese of Boston took up all of eastern Massachusetts. If you wanted to see a Bishop, you talked to Boston, pure and simple. It was annoying since we had several Bishops and even a Cardinal for New York City alone, and Massachusetts had one diocese for nearly a third of the state—and based in the most corrupt city in the state. There was a Cardinal Archbishop, who was away doing his duty for the Catholic Development Fund and not available for comment.
The diocese was housed in the Cathedral of the Holy Cross. It was the largest Roman Catholic church in New England. When it was built in 1875, it was designed to rival the local Protestant churches—a not-so-subtle dig at those who had treated the Catholics like dirt.
Like every Catholic neighborhood, you can usually find them in areas people look down on. For example, the cathedral is located in the city’s South End—or “Southie.” At the time, “Southie” had been developed for Middle-Class WASPs. When the WASPs moved to Back Bay, Irish Catholics moved in. Nowadays, the parish congregation was English-and Spanish-speaking.
The cathedral was in the Gothic Revival style, built from Roxbury puddingstone with gray limestone trim. It was 364 feet long, 90 feet wide, and 120 feet tall. It held about 2,000 worshipers at any one time. It was most famous for Cardinal Cushing’s requiem mass for President Kennedy, broadcast to the nation, and using Mozart’s Requiem, played by the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
Less well-known is its insane, stupid, maddening bureaucracy.
While on the phone, Pearson had been shuttled around from the receptionist to secretary to church secretary, to priest, to yet another priest, back to another secretary.
Then we actually arrived at the diocesan office.
And the dance began anew.
After the first twenty minutes in the waiting room, I sat down, pulled out my rosary, and started praying. I intended to ask that I could fulfill whatever purpose God wanted me to serve. I asked that I have the energy and strength to see through the end of God’s mission that day. Every mission I had been on with Pearson had been a mess. First London had been threatened with destruction. Then all of Europe had been threatened with an army of demons. And now America would be threatened with … what?
On the law of averages, I didn’t think the threat level would be downgraded. We had already realized that we had at least a squad of the possessed kicking around the area. Where they were or who they were wasn’t even the problem. The true problem was the question none of us could answer: what could anyone need nearly a dozen possessed for? One possessed psycho had been enough to start a prison riot in Rikers that threatened to overwhelm the city and over ten thousand prisoners in the jail itself. What would ten do? And was ten the upper limit that had been unleashed?
I sat while Father Pearson bargained for our entry. At the side table next to me were rainbow-colored pamphlets. The initials on the front were L.G.B.T.T.Q.Q.I.A.A.P. I knew from time spent in New York’s Greenwich Village that it stood for “lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, transsexual, queer, questioning, intersex, asexual, ally, pansexual.”
I was taken aback by the presence of any material in a Bishop’s office with the word “sexual” on the front cover, to heck with this.
I picked it up and opened it…
I stopped paying attention after the term “pedophobia” was used. And no, it wasn’t being used to mean “fear of children.” (Though I knew more people who were scared of children then they were by pedophiles—most of the people I knew were more likely to break the legs of a pedophile than be scared of them).
I palmed all of the pamphlets and stuck them in my pocket. I’d be sure to recycle them into something more interesting later on.
I went back to my rosary.
After the first six decades (which is sixty Hail Marys, and a dozen Our Fathers), I paused and switched to Psalm 17. It felt right for dealing with a bureaucracy.
Hear, LORD, my plea for justice; pay heed to my cry; Listen to my prayer from lips without guile. From you let my vindication come; your eyes see what is right. You have tested my heart, searched it in the night. You have tried me by fire, but find no malice in me. My mouth has not transgressed as others often do. As your lips have instructed me, I have kept from the way of the lawless. My steps have kept to your paths; my feet have not faltered.
I call upon you; answer me, O God. Turn your ear to me; hear my speech. Show your wonderful mercy, you who deliver with your right arm those who seek refuge from their foes. Keep me as the apple of your eye; hide me in the shadow of your wings from the wicked who despoil me. My ravenous enemies press upon me; they close their hearts, they fill their mouths with proud roaring.
My thoughts were interrupted by Father Pearson demanding, “Would you like the Pope to visit your cathedral?”
My eyes opened at that. Even the priest, who had arrived while I was lost in prayer, blanched. When Pope Pius XIII was first inaugurated, he went on a world tour. During every press conference, he would greet everyone similarly… until the Pope personally knocked the teeth out of a priest’s mouth. The cops were usually waiting in the wings to take the victim of the assault away on charges ranging from sexual abuse to embezzling, and any other crime he could find. No one was safe, from lay secretaries to Cardinals. Pius XIII had elevated street-level priests to high office and sent those in high office to jail. Some people wanted him to clean up the red tape. Instead, he cleaned house.
It was half-past four when the priest emerged from the Bishop’s rooms and said that we could enter.
Bishop Robert Ashley had been installed by Pius XIII’s predecessor. He had not endeared himself to anyone. During the press conference where the Pope shook his hand, the grip looked particularly tight, and so did Ashley’s smile. But Ashley had held onto his purple robes and the ring. He hadn’t been fired, but he hadn’t been quite the media darling he had been before the latest Pope had been elected.
Ashley looked like a less photogenic Benedict Cumberbatch. He had a broad forehead perfect for head-butting, and a weak, narrow chin I could have used for a blunt object. His eyes were a pale blue, with the black of the pupil leaking into the iris. He wore his Bishopric robes indoors, even though it wasn’t a public event.
Ashley tried to sound welcoming as he greeted us. “Hello. How can we help you folks?”
Pearson stepped forward, looking angrier than I had ever seen him. “We aren’t folks. I have been sent by Auxiliary Bishop Xavier O’Brien in Rome to investigate the slaughter of an entire monastery, and you have us cooling our heels outside while you’re in here playing silly buggers. And these two fi
ne gentlemen are from the police, here to help me. We need to know every referral you’ve made in reference to exorcism in the past month or three. For starters. Especially every last person you have ever referred to the monastery out in Marblehead.”
Ashley looked at us a moment, then laughed in our faces. “Oh, we don’t believe in demons here. We are a modern church, without any of that silly superstitious nonsense.”
I kept praying the rosary to keep my cool and not do something I might regret.
Alex, however, did not take it as placidly as I did. He leaned forward, slammed his hands on the table in a deliberate attempt to make enough noise to rattle the Bishop’s marbles lose. “Are you kidding me? You’re turning wine into blood on behalf of God, who became a person, died and came back from the dead, and you’re going to tell me that demons are the part you can’t wrap your tiny little brain around?”
Ashley waved his hands in dismissal. “Oh, we’re not changing anything from wine. That’s just in memoriam.”
At that, my eyes opened in surprise. Pearson audibly gasped. And while we were shocked to heck and back, Alex reached over the desk, grabbed Bishop Ashley by the collar, and pulled him upright, then proceeded to shake him like a rag doll. “That’s Protestant dogma, you schmuck! I’m not religious, and even I know the difference!”
Bishop Ashley flailed at Alex’s hands, and Alex upgraded his aggression from the Bishop’s collar to his hands on his throat. The grip was firm but not enough to kill the Bishop outright—not yet, anyway.
“Stop him!” Ashley begged.
Alex kept shaking the Bishop and snapped, “Tell us who you sent to the monastery, you idiot.”
“Minniva! Minniva Atwood!”
Alex stopped choking him and threw the Bishop back into his chair. Alex pointed at him like a gun. “You are going to get your secretary’s ass in here, and you are going to get us her address, or by all that’s holy, I am going to beat you black and blue.”
