by Lincoln Cole
“Fine,” Niccolo said, finally. “We will go with you to deal with the bishop. But, after it is done, you will take us to the airport.”
“Okay,” Arthur said. “But, just so we all get this clear; until we reach the airport, you do exactly what I say, when I say it. Got it?”
“Got it,” Niccolo said.
Arthur turned to Jackson. “You?”
“Got it.” Though he looked hesitant, Jackson nodded.
“Good,” Arthur said. “Let’s go.”
Chapter 17
Arthur’s adrenaline pumped through his veins as they drove up the long gravel driveway to Bishop Glasser’s estate. This was it: the moment he would finally get to ask the person who’d betrayed his family why he’d done it.
Almost immediately, however, he realized that he’d come too late. The estate stood silent and empty. The bishop gone already.
“It feels more ominous now,” Niccolo said from the seat behind him. “Even the trees …”
Arthur glanced through the windows at the forest around them. He hadn’t come here before, but he could understand what the priest meant. The trees that ran up along the side of the road looked thin, spindly, and dead. The entire place felt wrong.
“It seems empty,” Jackson said, as he pulled the car to a stop.
“We got here too late,” Arthur said.
Part of him—and if honest, a fairly large part—regretted his decision to rescue the two priests. Logically, though, he realized that they had nothing to do with it. No doubt the bishop had left last night.
He should have come right away. As soon as he’d rescued Aram’s family and before the bishop could flee. Instead, he had spent the time taking care of Carl and Martin and then Niccolo and Jackson.
He grew furious with himself for it. He would still check the building to make sure, but it would prove too late.
“Wait here,” Arthur said.
“What if someone comes out after us?” Niccolo asked, in shock.
“Then, scream,” Arthur said.
Arthur picked up the pistol from the seat, the one the man had planned to use to kill Jackson. He handed it to Niccolo, and then climbed out of the car.
“If I don’t get back in five minutes, drive straight to the airport. Wear normal clothes and try to blend in and don’t talk to anyone until you get on a plane and away from here.”
He didn’t give Niccolo time to respond before he closed the door and drew his revolver. He made his way up to the front door, listening for any sounds of movement. Though doubtful that he would find anyone inside, there remained a chance that some evidence would have gotten left behind about where the bishop had gone.
The door stood unlocked, and he eased it open. It swung open silently, with only a soft swoosh of air. Upon walking into the house, Arthur’s heart raced. The place had an effect on him, like an energy, and it elicited outright terror. He couldn’t pinpoint why, but it crept through his skin.
Something terrible had happened here.
It only took him a few minutes to sweep the entire building and verify that it stood empty. The bishop had gone, though it looked as if he had left nearly everything behind. Sacrificed and abandoned. The remains of dozens of letters and notebooks littered the fireplace, but they looked too far gone to salvage.
He just had to hope that the bishop had missed something.
Arthur went back out to the waiting priests. “All clear,” he said, putting away his revolver. “Help me search the place.”
Neither of them objected; although, they didn’t seem thrilled at the idea either. They both looked terrified and out of sorts, but he felt unsure how to make them feel any better.
“Let’s check the house,” he said. “Bishop Glasser fled, and we need to know where.”
“What do you mean?” Jackson said. “He’s gone? He would need Vatican permission to leave.”
“I feel pretty sure he’s beyond asking for permission,” Arthur said. “He’s on the run but is not the kind of person to live without means. Look for any sign of somewhere he might go to hide from the Church. Family, friends, anything.”
They split off and set about combing the house, looking for any sign of where the bishop might have headed. Arthur took the upstairs and went through the man’s offices, and the other two worked downstairs and combed through the rest of the house.
They searched for over two hours; first, going through all the obvious documents that hadn’t gotten burned, and then working their way around the room and looking for any secret compartments or false bottoms to the drawers on the man’s desk.
Arthur found a safe nestled behind a painting, though once he had cracked it open, he grew depressed to find that it held nothing of value. The bishop had emptied the safe already.
His luck turned for the better, however, when he found a secret compartment nestled into one of the walls. Inside, he found a stack of letters addressed to the bishop, and also a switch. The letters were from a woman named Desiree Portman. He tucked them into his pocket for later. He flipped the switch, and the wall shifted, revealing a secret passage leading into a fully enclosed room.
It looked like a torture chamber.
Dried blood decorated the walls and floor, and a table sat at the center with straps for wrists and ankles. Various sharp and blunt instruments lay on the tables, giving it the impression of a workshop. The floor slanted inward to a drain, and an opening overhead held a fan that pushed air into the room. The walls, made of brick and concrete, gave the room a heavy and enclosed air. One of the walls had a chain and neck brace hanging from it.
On one of the tables, Arthur found an industrial electric food dryer, the kind he’d seen people use to make beef jerky or dried fruits and vegetables. It was turned on, and inside, he found the harvested organs of maybe ten people.
Some of them would have belonged to Carl and Martin.
As he stood there, looking at the room, he heard movement behind him. He turned, drawing his pistol. The two priests came into the room. Their expressions shifted to horror, though, when they surveyed everything around them.
“Dear God,” Jackson muttered.
Niccolo looked as if on the verge of throwing up. Arthur put his gun away and walked over, gently guiding the two priests out of the room.
“You don’t need to see this,” he said.
“No.” Jackson shook his arm free. “I think I do. I might have known these people, and I’m supposed to look out for them. To think … he did this right under my nose.”
“It isn’t your fault.”
“I might not have killed them, but I didn’t do anything to help them, either.”
“Why?” Niccolo asked. “Why would he do this?”
“The torture?”
“And harvesting organs.”
“It’s used in rituals,” Arthur said. “To bring demons into the world. Powerful demons. The weaker ones don’t prove as hard to bring forth, but the stronger ones usually require some sort of offering to coax up here.”
“That’s horrifying.”
Arthur nodded but didn’t respond. Instead, he took the moment to guide both priests out of the room and shut the door.
“We can deal with this later. Right now, we need to know where the bishop went. We can’t allow him to get away with this.”
“We didn’t find anything to point to where he might go,” Jackson said. “That’s why we came looking for you.”
“What about you?” Niccolo asked Arthur. “Did you find anything?”
He shook his head. “No. The bishop hid his tracks well.”
“No leads?”
“One.” Arthur held up the letters. “But it seems a flimsy one. It looks like he had a secret affair that went on for years.”
Niccolo frowned. “Then there remains a chance that she will know where he went.”
“The most recent letter has a date from over a year ago, but yes, that’s what I hope. The letters all got sent from Maine, so I’ll head th
ere next.”
“Maine?”
“Yes. I’ll track her down and see if she knows anything. With any luck, I’ll find him there and stop him.”
“What happens now?” Jackson asked. “What about us? What about the people who got possessed?”
“I will take you both to the airport and drop you off, and then I’ll come back and deal with it.”
“Deal with it?” Niccolo asked. “How do you mean?”
“I won’t kill everyone, if that’s what you mean to ask,” Arthur said. “I’m done with killing.”
“Okay,” Niccolo said. “That sounds like a suitable plan. When we get to the Vatican, I shall report everything and have help sent to—”
“No,” Jackson shook his head. “We can’t leave.”
Arthur frowned. “There are people here trying to kill both of you. It’s too dangerous for you to stay in Everett.”
“Maybe, but these are my people,” Jackson said. “My friends and parishioners. I got tasked with looking out for and protecting them, and I will not leave them here while we run back to the Vatican.”
Niccolo took a steadying breath and turned to face Arthur. “He’s right. We can’t leave.”
“What?”
“I am a trained exorcist, and these people need help.”
“It’s too dangerous.”
“Do you know how to exorcise a demon?”
Arthur frowned. He had a bit of experience and had learned a lot of the rituals, but he’d never sent one back to hell. The most he’d managed to do was piss them off. “No.”
“Then, you need me.”
Arthur looked between them for a second. “Neither of you come prepared to face something like this. It holds more danger than you could ever imagine. You aren’t trained.”
“No,” Niccolo said. “But you are.”
“I’m not a babysitter.”
“You won’t have to take care of us,” Niccolo said, holding up the pistol Arthur had given him earlier. “I’ve used one of these before.”
“Really?”
“At a shooting range, but I know what I’m doing. We can help you deal with this.”
“And we won’t take ‘no’ for an answer,” Jackson added.
Arthur sighed, rubbing his face. “Fine. I can’t force you to do anything, and I could use the help.”
“Where do we start?”
“When did you first get called out here?” Arthur asked. “First reports that something was going on.”
“A few weeks,” Niccolo said. He turned to Jackson, “That sound about right?”
“Yeah, that’s when Rose started acting weird.”
“So, if this just began a few weeks ago, then he might have just gotten started.”
“Started with what?”
“Building an army. Most of the demons here are probably lesser demons, since the stronger ones take more time and resources to call in. That’s why he harvested the organs. We need to find the demons and send them back one-by-one.”
“How do we do that?”
“No clue,” Arthur said. “Normally, when I get brought in to deal with something like this, the demons have already been identified. I just go in and … deal with it. We don’t have a way to identify targets, however.”
Niccolo hesitated, glancing over at Jackson. “Actually,” he said. “I think we do.”
◆◆◆
“What do you mean?” Jackson asked.
Niccolo turned to face the young priest. “You said earlier, at the baseball game, that you could sense something wrong with certain people in town. As if you could feel the demons inside people.”
Jackson shook his head. “That was just a feeling I had.”
“I’ve read about other people who could do something similar,” Niccolo said. “They call it channeling.”
“Channeling?”
“Essentially a gift where you can sense and interact with things normal people can’t see.”
“Why didn’t you say anything before?”
“I didn’t see any way it could be true,” Niccolo said. “With Tim, did you sense anything odd about him?”
“Yes. And his wife.”
“And the waitress,” Niccolo said. “At the diner. Patty, I think her name was.”
Jackson hesitated, and then nodded. “And about six more people in town.”
Niccolo turned back to Arthur, “There you have it. We have the ability to track down everyone affected by this and stop it.”
Arthur had heard about such abilities before. It remained a carefully guarded secret within the Church. He hadn’t believed it possible—and, certainly, had never had the ability to tell a possessed from a normal person without some outwardly visible clues—but if what Niccolo had told him held any truth …
That would make Jackson an incredibly valuable person.
In the short-term, though, it would make his job considerably easier.
“All right,” Arthur said. “That gives us an edge. We just need to track them down and free them one at a time.”
Chapter 18
They drove through the city of Everett slowly and in complete silence. It grew dark out, though only around two in the afternoon, and looked about to storm soon. The mood in the car felt somber.
“Where are all the people?” Jackson asked, finally, speaking aloud the question they all wondered.
Neither Niccolo nor Arthur had a good answer for him. The streets looked empty, and many places that should have appeared bustling remained completely unoccupied.
They stopped at Patty’s Diner, and it had a closed sign on the door.
“You said one of them worked here?” Arthur stepped up to the windows and peered inside. It looked empty and dark and as if it had closed in a hurry.
“Yes, Patty,” Jackson said. “I noticed her acting strange.”
“Does she usually close up like this?”
“No. I’ve never seen the place shut during the day. That is … strange.”
That didn’t give exactly the word Niccolo would have used to describe it. A threatening feeling lingered in the air, like something about the city was wrong, and it seemed they didn’t make for the only ones feeling it. The streets stood empty and quiet. Many of the townsfolk had hidden away from the oncoming storm, sure, but it came down to more than that.
“What do we do now?” Jackson asked.
Niccolo didn’t have a good answer. “Who else should we look for?” Niccolo turned his attention toward Arthur.
“I don’t know,” Arthur said. “Who do we have next on the list?”
The next two stops they made turned out complete duds as well. In one, they found the mother of an infant baby missing and the door open, but the baby lay safe inside her bedroom, sleeping. Jackson collected up the baby in shocked silence, and they took her to Amanda Lockett’s home to watch her.
He didn’t explain to her what was going on, and to Amanda’s credit, she didn’t ask. She had children of her own and didn’t seem to worry about the idea of adding one more infant into the mix.
They left from there, out of ideas of where to go next. They decided to go back to Saint Joseph’s Cathedral to regroup and think. When they got to the church, they found it ransacked and the walls covered in occult symbols written in paint.
Just seeing the symbols felt painful for Niccolo. He had studied them in his education at the Vatican, but he’d never seen them outside of symposiums. This belonged to something different, and it unsettled him deeply.
◆◆◆
The church stood empty and quiet when they arrived, but Arthur had expected that. They found neither Tim nor his son, nor anyone else, for that matter.
Pews lay smashed and expensive pottery and vases destroyed. Jackson surveyed the place stoically, but Arthur could tell seeing it in that condition hurt. Niccolo wandered around for a few minutes, looking at the occult writings on the wall, and then headed back toward the office and basement where Arthur had found him. Arthur fo
llowed, keeping a cautious distance.
Niccolo found his Rosary in the basement, but the metal had melted and fused together when it had touched the demon’s forehead. The cross seemed barely identifiable anymore, and the links had torn and frayed. Arthur watched him slide it into his pocket without a word, though he wore the look of a man who had just lost a limb.
By the time they made it back to the car, all three of them felt the full weight of how bad things had become. However many demons had come to the town, they no longer tried to disguise themselves now that the bishop had gone. They had become like junkyard dogs off their chains—willing to wreak havoc, which made them considerably more dangerous.
“Did a holiday get declared that I don’t know about?” Jackson shook his head. “This just feels … wrong.”
“Was Patty the first demon you felt?” Arthur asked.
“No,” Jackson said. “Why?”
“This doesn’t look like normal behavior for demons. They don’t usually give up their cover unless either something went wrong or they’ve reached their endgame.”
“You think this is their endgame?”
“Nope. I think the opposite. Something went wrong, most likely when the bishop fled town. Who was the first demon?”
“The first?” Jackson asked. “What do you mean?”
“When you started to feel that people acted strange in town, who triggered that feeling?”
“Rose Gallagher.”
“The woman whose house I met you at?”
“Yes. She triggered my contact with the bishop and Vatican. I worried that she might have become possessed, and then everything went downhill from there.”
“Did she feel any different?”
Jackson thought about it for a moment. “Stronger, but I found it hard to tell. Sometimes, the presence seemed stronger, but other times, barely there at all.”
“It could have masked itself,” Arthur said. “If it knew what you could do, then it probably tried to hide itself from you.”
“What do you mean?”
“I think that, most probably, it’s the only one Leopold summoned directly. She is likely the strongest one as well. She’ll help to anchor the rest of them here.”
