by John Everson
The thing was…she had no hands. And only one foot.
After seeing first the mummified grimace of her face and shriveled chest, Austin’s gaze broadened, and he realized that her arms had been severed at the elbows…and her left leg at the knee. He grimaced as he took in the ragged blackened flesh that hung free over the white nub of a bone on the arm nearest him. She hadn’t been born without limbs, clearly. From the look of the shards of flesh, her arms and leg had been torn off.
Sister of Suffering
Stretched in Sin
June 21, 1893
He didn’t like the implication there. His mind instantly drew an image of a naked woman on a wooden rack, arms and legs chained to giant gears, as a cruel hooded torturer drew the chains tighter and tighter while she screamed, her body stretching like human taffy until…
He shook away the thought and turned away from the corpse. Austin looked around the room, and saw more items hung from the walls. Iron masks. Curved knives. Long handled pincers and medical instruments. There were also garments and leather things – straps or codpieces or…he wasn’t truly sure what.
This was a chapel of torture. And it suddenly occurred to him that it might not be the best place to be discovered in.
He looked around for an exit and saw a doorway in the back to the left of the Sister of Suffering. He tried not to look at her again when he passed by, but the leathery folds of her desiccated face flashed before his eyes from memory anyway.
The doorway led him to a small antechamber, and then another room, this one smaller and darker than the chapel. He heard the murmur of a voice somewhere near. Austin stopped to listen and recognized again the familiar cadence of the Lord’s Prayer.
He pivoted slowly, trying to place where the sound was coming from, as his eyes adjusted to the dark of the room. And then he saw that there was another door in the back of this room. He walked through it. There, chained to a stone wall, was a nude man kneeling in the corner, head bent and facing the wall. His voice continued to pray the familiar syllables of the Lord’s Prayer. There was an air vent over the man’s head. That’s how the words had traveled so easily to Austin’s cell.
He didn’t want to break the train of the man’s prayer. But after a moment, Austin cleared his throat to gently signal that there was somebody else in the room. The prayer stopped, and the jangle of chains rippled through the room as the man turned.
“Who are you?” the man asked. His face was wide and wrinkled, his eyelids heavy and drooping over a deep-set gaze. His hair was silver and thick; tufts stuck out mad-professor style from around his ears. “You’re not one of them.”
Austin shook his head. “No,” he said. “I was a prisoner, like you. But I managed to get away.”
“You’re not away if you’re here,” the man said. “You’re in the deepest hole of a prison. This is where they put people just before they sacrifice them to Satan. You’ve escaped to Death Row, my friend.”
“Well, it sounds like I better get you out of here then too,” Austin said.
“I’d be happy if you did,” the man said. “But don’t risk your chance. You should go back down that hallway and get as far away from this room as possible. Hurry before they come.”
Austin ignored the advice. “Do they keep a key for your chains down here somewhere?”
He searched the dark wall for a key ring. Nobody would want to carry that around with them all the time; they’d probably keep it near the prisoner, but far enough away that he couldn’t reach it.
“On the other side of the doorway, maybe?” the man answered.
Austin nodded and stepped through the threshold, scanning every surface of the walls. Then he grinned and reached out to his left where a dark metal ring hung from a bolt in the wall. There was a rusted key at the end of the ring.
He grabbed it and rushed back to the dark room. He traced the chain up from the man’s wrists to an eyebolt in the wall. It was a similar situation to the way they’d locked him up earlier tonight. A large padlock gathered and connected the chains to the hook. He slipped the key into the lock and twisted. When it didn’t open immediately, he jiggled it again and then gave a firm tug. That did it. The lock snapped open, and he pulled it free of the bolt, releasing the chains.
“You are a man of miracles.”
“No, I’m just a guy named Austin,” he said.
The older man stood and extended his palm. “My name is Father Perry Vernon,” he said. “Please excuse my lack of uniform.”
Austin’s eyebrows rose. “You’re a priest?”
The man nodded. “They stripped me of everything I had.”
“I could say the same,” Austin said. “They killed my wife and stole my baby. But I’m going to get her back if it’s the last thing I do.”
“Then we’d better get out of here quickly,” the priest said. “If they catch us here, this will be the last thing you do.”
The priest held out his hands. “Can you help me with these quickly?”
Austin pulled the chain through two metal rings attached to leather bracelets strapped to the man’s wrists. He quickly unbuckled the wristbands and dropped the chain to the ground. Father Vernon rubbed his wrists and grimaced. “I’ve got a case of pins and needles that feel like fire,” he complained.
“Are you okay?” Austin asked.
“Better than I was five minutes ago,” the priest answered. “C’mon, I know a way out.”
The priest took the lead and Austin followed. They threaded through the museum of mummified remains, and then took a passage that Austin had not been in before. It wound around in the darkness until it emptied into a brighter hallway. There were candles burning in the walls here, and Father Vernon held up his hand. He put a finger to his lips and peered down the corridor before nodding. Then he motioned for Austin to follow and ran quietly down the hall. He stopped at a wooden door halfway down the passage and turned the knob. The door opened with a faint squeak, and Father Vernon stepped inside.
“Where are we?” Austin asked, once inside. The place was pitch-black; he couldn’t see where the priest had gone.
“Just getting something so I can go outside,” Father Vernon whispered. “Stay quiet. People do walk these halls.”
Austin nodded, not that the priest could see him in the dark. A moment or two later, he felt a hand on his arm, and the priest led him back to the exit. He was no longer naked, but instead wearing some kind of dark robe, though he was still barefoot. And then they were softly padding down the stone hallway, darting from one passageway to the next. They went down a stone stairway at one point. Father Vernon motioned for Austin to follow him farther down the hall, but then Austin saw a room with floors covered in old linoleum through a doorway to the left. It looked like the floor of an office building from the 1960s.
And maybe it was.
“This way,” Austin whispered, and ran into the room. Everything was shadowed, but Austin could see streetlights beaming in through tall glass windows at the front of the room. He stole through a room filled with cubicles and a large wooden front desk at the entryway.
“That’s not the way I was going to take you,” the priest argued, but Austin pointed out the window.
“There’s a street right there,” Austin said. “Come on!”
He turned a simple lock on a steel-and-glass door and stepped outside.
Father Vernon followed him and looked around as Austin took a long, deep breath of air. They were in downtown Parkville, but off the main drag. The street was quiet; in the distance, he could hear the faint sounds of traffic. Behind them was a dark, nondescript office building. He couldn’t believe that in the bowels of that place, there were satanic rituals going on. And a coven that wanted to sacrifice his baby daughter.
The priest seemed to grasp his thoughts. Father Vernon put a hand on his wrist and gripped tightly. “I kno
w you want to find a way to rescue your baby. But you’re going to need help. Come with me now, and we’ll think of a way to prepare.”
Austin shook his head and ignored the image of the slit-throat girl that passed through his mind as he thought of what to do. “I know how to prepare – we need to call the police. They’re planning to kill my baby tonight. Now that I finally know where this place is, I can bring them here. They’ll throw everyone in jail and this club will never open again.”
Father Vernon stopped and grabbed Austin’s arm. “No, my son,” he said. “I know that sounds like the right thing to do. It’s a very tempting idea, but if you ever want to see your baby alive again, it would be the worst mistake you could ever make.”
“What do you mean?” Austin said. “We need reinforcements! The police have guns. And there are more of them than there are of us.”
“I know,” Father Vernon said. “But this needs to be a covert operation. If you bring the cops to the door, your baby will be gone from that building long before they get into the first room. The people who run Equinox are ready for things like that. They have escape tunnels and all of the leaders will be gone with the baby a minute after a policeman crosses that doorway with a warrant. Speaking of which…the police would need a search warrant before they would go inside, and we don’t have time for them to get that if we need to stop a ceremony that’s tonight.”
The priest nodded sadly. “I know how you’re feeling, but we need to do this ourselves. I can get us back in through a back entrance, once you’re ready. We will get her back. We just have to be careful. I promise you will hold your baby again.”
Austin frowned. He didn’t want to do anything that would risk Ceili’s life further.
Father Vernon squeezed his arm. “C’mon, let’s get out of sight before they realize we’re gone and start looking around out here.”
The priest led the way down the street. Austin kept his eyes on the sidewalk in front of them carefully, worried that at every step he was going to slice his bare foot open on a piece of broken glass. He hadn’t been wearing shoes when they’d grabbed him from his house and this was not exactly a clean, modern area of the town. The sidewalks were crooked and broken, and the parkways littered with debris, from crushed pop cans to foil gum wrappers to broken beer bottles.
But as it turned out, they didn’t end up walking far. He looked up from staring at the back of Father Vernon’s heels when the priest’s feet stopped moving. They were standing at the side entrance of a church. They’d crossed through an alley and it was as if the church simply appeared out of nowhere. The priest reached down to a small statue of the Virgin Mary in a flower bed next to the entryway and twisted one of her praying hands until it rose upward. Then he retrieved a key from a hollow that was revealed in the center of the statue.
“You can always trust the Lord’s mother to keep a secret,” Father Vernon joked, and used the key to unlock the side entrance. Before they went in, he secreted the key back in the statue, and pushed the arm back into place.
Austin followed the older man inside. They walked through an empty antechamber, and then down a short hallway to a sitting room. Father Vernon flipped a switch and two table lamps flickered on across the room. It was a cozy, if terribly dated room. The lamps stood on end tables near a couch that looked as if it had been there since 1955. The priest gestured to the couch and two burgundy recliners. “Please,” he said. “Have a seat and make yourself comfortable. Can I get you something to drink?”
Austin sat on one end of the ancient couch as Father Vernon walked across the room to a sideboard near the television. When he opened a wooden cabinet, Austin saw an array of bottles. “Whiskey, Scotch, vodka?” the priest asked.
Austin’s face must have looked surprised, because the other man laughed. “What, are you shocked that a priest drinks more than Eucharistic wine? Trust me, the nights get long when you’re alone here in the rectory. Prayer and Netflix can only take you so far.” He bent down and opened a small refrigerator tucked below the level of the counter. “I have beer too,” he said. “There’s a Killian’s here, and a couple of Lagunitas.”
Austin caught a glimpse of a familiar beer label inside the refrigerator. “Would it be wrong if I asked a priest for a Lil’ Somethin’ Somethin’,” he joked.
“You can ask me anything,” Father Vernon said. “I won’t judge. That sounds like a fine choice, however.”
He pulled out two bottles, and used a bottle opener to pop the tops before handing one to Austin. He upended the bottle and closed his eyes as the hoppy wheat brew poured down the back of his throat. His eyes teared up as the ale coated and excited his taste buds. It felt as if he’d been locked away for weeks.
When he finally set the bottle down, already half emptied, on the end table next to the lamp, he realized the old priest was looking at him intently. The man had thick gray caterpillars above his eyes, and jowls that spoke of many nights in this room tilting back a glass while watching the tube. His face seemed a little flushed where it wasn’t obscured by unshaven stubble.
The silence between them grew uncomfortable, as the priest absently sipped from his bottle. His gaze didn’t falter.
“Why did they have you chained up?” Austin asked finally.
Father Vernon smiled sadly before answering.
“Let’s just say that a den of Devil worshippers are no friends of a neighborhood priest,” he offered finally. “I had heard one too many stories about Club Equinox in the confessional, and I finally decided to do something about it.”
“I thought the things said in confession are private,” Austin said. “Just between you and God.”
“Private, sure,” the priest said. He took a drink and then gave Austin a wide eye. “But that doesn’t mean that I can’t try to do something about things with the information that I have.” He winked. “I was pleased to know that at least some of my parishioners felt guilty about the sins they committed there, and I asked enough questions to slowly piece together exactly where here was. Imagine my chagrin when I realized that this bed of sin was literally right here in my backyard.”
“I’m surprised that any of these people would ever come here to confess,” Austin said.
The priest shrugged. “Not the worst offenders, to be sure. Some of the new initiates have doubts though. They watch those sexual ceremonies and get their hormones racing, and then later feel guilty for enjoying the perversion. They haven’t given over their souls completely to Club Equinox, and I’m thankful for that. I tried to plant the seeds in their minds to come back to the Lord, but at the same time I knew the only way to save them and so many others was to destroy the source of their temptation. I had to stop the rituals if I was ever to save my flock.”
The priest paused and took a sip of his beer. Then he looked at Austin pointedly and asked, “How did you end up in that place?”
“I picked up the wrong woman at a bar,” Austin said. He quickly explained his meeting with Regina and the events that came after, though he didn’t linger long on the details of his time with her in Club Equinox when he had not been a prisoner. His heart felt sick when he thought about the things he had witnessed and ignored. He was as guilty for Ceili being in danger as anyone, because he had agreed to be part of the evil that eventually stole her.
“The Devil wears the best makeup,” the priest observed. “You can’t even tell she’s wearing any, but at the end of the day, it’s all fake. All a lie.”
Austin hung his head. “I can’t believe I was such a fool. But when Regina came over, everything felt right in my world again. And then when she brought me to Equinox it was exciting. I’d never been in a place like that. I knew it was all dark and wrong…I just didn’t want to see it. I only wanted to see her.”
“And you were never seeing her anyway,” Father Vernon said. “All you saw was the mask. The glamour.”
Austin hung
his head in shame.
“Are you sorry for the things you did with her in Equinox?” the priest asked.
He nodded. “I wish I could forget them.”
“Repeat after me,” the priest said. “Bless me Father, for I have sinned….”
Austin repeated the first words of the penitential rite.
“How long has it been since you last confessed?” Vernon asked.
“I don’t know,” Austin said. “Years.”
“It’s okay, my son, you’re here now. Tell me what you would ask the Lord’s forgiveness for.”
Austin described the rituals he had aided Regina with, omitting some of the more erotic details. He began haltingly, but soon the words were racing to come out; all of the guilt and shame poured out in a torrent. When he was done, the priest put a hand on his shoulder and looked at him with wide, understanding eyes.
“The Lord knows the depths of our weakness,” he said. “What matters is that you recognize it and commit to doing better. It’s that action that brings his forgiveness. In the name of the Lord, I offer you his forgiveness and absolve you of these sins. I admonish you to go out and sin no more. For your penance, I ask you to say the Hail Mary and Our Father here with me now.”
The priest began reciting the Hail Mary out loud, and Austin joined in. It had been a couple years since he’d been in church, but the prayer fell from his lips like an old habit. He found himself saying the words in tandem with the priest without thinking.
When they were finished, Father Vernon smiled sadly and patted Austin’s shoulder. “Your soul is free, my son. Now we have to find the way to do the same thing for your daughter.”
“I don’t want her soul to be free,” Austin said. “I want all of her to be free! And there isn’t much time to find a way to get her out of there. The ceremony is tonight.”
