Private Demons

by Robert Masello

  “Pull out, slowly,” Lucien said, moving his face away from the rear window. “And drive to the Connaught now.”

  “No more following?” Hun sounded vaguely disappointed at such a lackluster conclusion to the chase.

  “No more following.”

  Hun grunted, then merged the car into the passing traffic.

  When Lucien glanced, one last time, through the rear window, he saw Terry, still sitting on the cycle, blowing a plume of smoke into the air.

  At the hotel, there were three messages waiting for him in his room—one from Hallie, one from Epstein, and a third from someone he couldn’t identify—a man named Edward Pike. The Pike message was marked “Urgent.”

  He called it first, and after identifying himself, the man said, “Thank you so much for calling. I’m the personal secretary to Lord Sykes, and it’s at his request I contacted you. Lord Sykes has just learned that you were in London, and he was hoping that you’d be able to meet with him before you leave.”

  Lucien was nonplussed.

  “Would that be possible?” Pike went on.

  “Yes . . . I suppose so.”

  “What luck. Lord Sykes has instructed me to suggest tomorrow afternoon, say around four, at his club?”

  Lucien took the pen from the bedside table to make a note. “Four will be fine.”

  “Good. And the club is very near your hotel. You should have no trouble finding it, but if you like, we’ll send a car for you.”

  “No, thank you. I have my own.”

  “Of course. Four o’clock tomorrow then, at the club. The Commonwealth. Lord Sykes asked me to say he looked forward to meeting you there.”

  CHAPTER

  13

  When Father Brendan returned to the clinic, he found everything in an uproar. Dr. Krit, who had been on duty the night before, was missing altogether, and Kevin Molloy, the seaman with the terrible bums, was telling a horrendous story of the Devil, who, he claimed, had taken the shape of a giant serpent and devoured Krit. The hospital room had indeed been in total disarray, even though Molloy had been found sleeping soundly, with his wrist restraints still fastened securely to the bed frame.

  So what had happened in that little room at the end of the hall? And where was Dr. Krit?

  Father Brendan went into the tiny chapel that had been fashioned from an operating room; the clinic had been built with two operating rooms, but had never had enough supplies, or trained personnel, to need more than one. So this one had been converted. The sinks had been covered over with a wooden board, on which the sacred vessels had been placed, and a crucifix, like the one that was hanging in Molloy’s room, had been mounted on the wall.

  Instead of pews, there were a dozen folding chairs. Father Brendan, a big man with a perpetual five o’clock shadow, slumped down on one, and let out a sigh of exhaustion.

  All in all, it had been a week of unprecedented wonders . . . and trouble.

  Several days earlier, he had received word from his superiors—and he had reason to believe that they themselves had heard from Rome—asking him to investigate rumors of a miracle that had been performed in a jungle convent, close to the border of Cambodia. Something about a nun named Sister Celeste, who had exhibited the holy marks of the stigmata . . . and a little boy who insisted he had been bewitched and held captive by a giant snake. It was the strangest coincidence of all, thought Father Brendan, that he should hear, in the space of a few days, two such similar stories, of giant serpents.

  If, of course, it was entirely a coincidence.

  He’d taken the clinic’s ambulance, a gift from his old parish in the United States, and driven alone the four hours it took to reach the jungle convent. And he’d no sooner arrived there than he’d felt, with a familiar sadness, the futility of his mission.

  A small complex of gray stone structures, surrounding a bare patch of earth at the end of a rutted, red-dirt path, this convent was just like dozens of other such outposts he had seen, tending to the sick, propagating the faith in the world’s most remote, and wretched, spots. For twenty years now, Father Brendan had been a missionary, and grim places like these had become the only kind of home he knew.

  The only difference with this one was the collection of villagers, a couple of dozen in all, kneeling silently in the dust and dirt around the central well. Many of them were visibly sick, or maimed. But about them, there clung an almost palpable sense of expectancy, of purpose . . . and of belief.

  The Mother Superior, an ample woman named Agnes, met him in the courtyard, and immediately took him to the door of Sister Celeste’s cell. She seemed immensely relieved to be placing this burden on someone else’s shoulders for a time.

  “Sister Celeste likes to be alone,” she confided, “and seldom speaks. When we first took her in, we thought she was mute. Even, possibly,” and here she lightly touched the temple of her head, “slow.” She glanced, with reverence but also a trace of what might almost have been fear, at the closed door. “Now, of course, we know better.”

  Father Brendan simply nodded; he wasn’t about to acquiesce in all this talk of miracles and stigmata marks until he’d seen some things for himself. It would not be the first time he had failed to observe, as others insisted that he must, the hand of God at work.

  He rapped lightly on the closed door, but there was no answer from within. Mother Agnes appeared to expect this, and urged him, with a hand at his elbow, to enter. He did so, and found Sister Celeste kneeling in the corner, on a straw pallet; she was turned slightly, toward the small window that opened on the courtyard.

  Father Brendan announced himself, then closed the door behind him. Mother Agnes was still standing, her lips slightly parted, in the hall. There was a wooden chair against the opposite wall—Father Brendan wondered if it had been placed there expressly for him—and he sat down. He was still stiff and sore from the long drive, and this chair, he could tell, wasn’t going to help much.

  Father Brendan had conducted interviews like this several times before, but he still found it hard to know where to start. How did you go about plumbing the depths of Divine inspiration? How did you separate the genuinely inspired from the merely unhinged? Or harder still, from the deliberate charlatans? Faith was an entirely subjective and invisible thing, and short of witnessing first-hand an actual miracle in the making, a blind man made to see, a dead man brought to life, where were the objective criteria, the empirical tests, by which to judge the mettle of a soul, or the powers invested in it? Father Brendan had yet to discover a surefire way.

  “Sister Celeste,” he said, softly, “I’m Father Brendan, and I’ve come from the clinic outside Bangkok run by the Dominican fathers. I’ve been asked to visit you.”

  Sister Celeste still said nothing, but she did, gradually, turn her face away from the window. For the first time, Brendan was able to get a good look at her—and what he saw surprised him. Her black hair was cropped short, as it was with most of the nuns, but her face was like no other that he’d seen. He had assumed she would be of European extraction, and her features, to some extent, were European. But her eyes were not—dark and Asiatic, they looked at him now from a face that bore the coloring of the local people, Cambodian or Thai. He guessed her age to be between thirty and thirty-five, but in that time, he could see that she had suffered much. It wasn’t that her face bore scars, or wounds, of any sort; it was the expression, the mute sad stare of her eyes, the gentle but set curve of her lips, that told him she had already been through a great deal in her life . . . and somehow managed, however narrowly, to survive and prevail.

  Could there actually be some truth to the rumors this time?

  She bowed her head slightly, in acknowledgment of his words. But she still didn’t speak.

  Held by those eyes, Father Brendan found himself fumbling for words. He explained what he had heard, of the child who had been lost in the ancient ruins, of the giant serpent he claimed had enchanted him, of Sister Celeste’s fearlessness in entering the temple
and killing the snake. He understood too, he said, that she had been bitten by the snake, and even so had succeeded in leading the boy out of danger. To all this, she said nothing. And yet, just looking at her, he began to believe, without her confirmation, without even a word from her lips, that it was all true. He had never felt persuaded in this way before. Finally, he said that he had been told she exhibited the marks of the stigmata. Now she turned her face away from him, and back toward the late afternoon light that filled the little window placed high in the wall.

  “May I look?” he said.

  She neither acquiesced nor refused, but sat perfectly still as Brendan slowly rose from the chair and crouched on the floor beside her.

  Gently he took her hands—small, but hard and strong—into his own. Turning the palms upward, he saw, in the center of each, a purple scar, roughly an inch or so in diameter. The scars were faint, and seemed, in a strange way, to exist under the skin rather than on top of it. Once, investigating a similar account of stigmata marks, he had found two gaping bleeding wounds in the hands of an Italian monk—and under his pillow the paring knife he had used, still wet with his blood, to inflict them on himself. Instinctively, Brendan knew that he would find no such knife, or nail, or needle here. These were marks that had either been made long before, in a way he would never know, or that arose, in an even more mysterious fashion, from within.

  “Now your feet, please.”

  Sister Celeste shifted on the pallet so that her feet came forward. There were bits of straw stuck to the tops, which Father Brendan carefully brushed away. And under the straw he found two more marks, much like the ones on her hands. Seeing them, seeing such vivid testimony to the truth, and the agony, of the real Crucifixion, Father Brendan felt a chill run down his spine. In all his years in the Church, that had never happened to him before.

  And though he knew what he would find, he went forward with the rest of the examination. He turned his back while Celeste arranged her clothing so that he could see the right side of her rib cage; there he found the fifth mark of the stigmata, the place where the Roman centurion had stuck his lance. The mark here was equally faint, but formed less of a circle than a gash. Had the Roman soldier jabbed his weapon across the flesh of Christ, rather than sticking it directly in? Father Brendan could hardly believe he was speculating on such a question, that he was examining what he regarded as a reliable simulacrum of the torment of the Lord and wondering exactly how it had been committed. He felt like an archaeologist might feel stumbling across the ruins of Atlantis, or an anthropologist who had dug up the skull and bones of the missing link. Here, in the flesh of a silent nun, deep in the jungles of Southeast Asia, he was confronting the first physical evidence he had ever seen of the most momentous, and tragic, event in the history of mankind. He was seeing, in five faint bruises on the body of a woman whose story he didn’t even know, the sorrowful confirmation of thousands of years of faith.

  That night, in Mother Agnes’s chambers, he asked her to tell him the story of Sister Celeste—who she was, where she had come from, how a woman of such clearly mixed ancestry had come to accept and wholeheartedly devote herself, with astonishing consequences, to the Catholic faith. He had put some of these questions to Celeste herself, but the nun had simply looked perplexed, even embarrassed, by his asking, and shaken her head to indicate she didn’t want to speak about this. Allowing him to observe the marks was as far as she wished to go, apparently.

  Mother Agnes admitted there were many things about Celeste that she didn’t know herself. “Her real name, for one thing.”

  “Celeste isn’t her own name?”

  “No. That’s the name I gave her.”

  “Why?”

  Agnes looked up and to the left, remembering. She had a plump face, with smooth, fair skin. “Because when we found her, all she seemed to want to do was to look at the sky. It was almost as if she felt she would never see it again . . . as if she felt she belonged there, up among the clouds and stars.” Her voice now took on a less elegiac tone. “And judging from what we do know of what had happened to her, it’s not difficult to understand.”

  Father Brendan knew the sort of story he could expect—after years in Southeast Asia, he had become accustomed to horror—but he waited silently for Mother Agnes to continue.

  “This is going back sixteen, seventeen years now,” she said. “I had only been here for six or seven months. And I was stronger, slimmer, and more agile then.” Afraid, it seemed, that he might take even this for a sign of immodesty, she quickly added, “I say that only so you’ll believe that I was able to do what I did.”

  “Whatever you tell me, I will believe.”

  Mother Agnes allowed herself a smile. “You must be everyone’s favorite confessor.”

  Father Brendan smiled back, scratching his chin with the tips of his fingers. “Not always.”

  Brushing a moth away from her face, she resumed. “One morning, a young boy, no more than twelve or thirteen, straggled into the courtyard. We found him, half-dead, by the well. He was covered with cuts and bruises, and suffering from malaria as well. He told us a horrifying story—we thought at first it was the fever—but then we gradually came to believe him. We didn’t want to, it was all so horrible, but we had to in the end.”

  “What did he tell you?”

  “He told us . . . that he had been buried alive, and that there were hundreds of others, just like him, out in the fields. He kept pointing back, into the jungle, toward the Cambodian border.”

  Father Brendan nodded. It was no more dreadful than many other stories he had heard . . . and knew to be true. “So you went there?”

  “Yes. We gave the boy some quinine, and did what we could for him, but we also knew we’d never find the killing field—you know, I had never even heard that term before—without the boy to guide us. So we built a stretcher and gathered half a dozen of the Thai villagers, the ones we were able to convince that God was watching over us, and we trekked toward the border. In those days, the Khmer Rouge had pushed it even closer to us than it is today.”

  Father Brendan sat quietly, stroking his chin, while Agnes went on with her account. It felt, in a way, as if he were in fact hearing a confession.

  Agnes, apparently, had talked to the boy as they made their way through the jungle, and learned from him that he had been part of a mass evacuation from the city of Phnom Penh, that he and thousands of others had been marched for days into the hills and paddy fields of rural Cambodia, and that many people had died along the way. “He said that the Khmer Rouge soldiers had a sort of motto. ‘To keep you is no gain—to kill you is no loss.’ They said it whenever someone became too ill, or exhausted, to go on. Usually, they just pushed the person to the side of the trail and shot him. Sometimes, to save bullets, they used the butts of their guns to beat the person to death.”

  Brendan had heard the motto before.

  Agnes said that the boy, even in his weakened state, had proved to be an able guide. He directed them to an open field, only several hundred yards across, set between two low rises of hills. The ground had already been prepared for the Khmer Rouge by some long-forgotten bombing raid; it was pockmarked with deep craters and ridges of blasted rock and soil. Half the work had already been done.

  According to the boy, the evacuees had been divided into two groups, and sent to opposite sides of the field. In his group, most of the people, whoever happened to be in front, were forced at gunpoint into the largest bomb crater. Then they were told to lie down, on top of each other if necessary. The Khmer Rouge soldiers positioned themselves around the perimeter of the hole, and after satisfying themselves that the hole had been filled to capacity, sprayed the people lying there with gunfire. The boy, covered by other bodies, received only a flesh wound to his leg. But he knew enough not to move. Those who did, who screamed in terror or writhed in agony, got another burst of fire. When all the noise and movement in the hole had subsided, the soldiers distributed some rusted shovels, a
nd wicker baskets, and ordered everyone left alive to start filling the hole. The boy said he could feel the dirt and rubble sticking to the blood that covered him from the bodies above. But he still kept silent.

  “Celeste, when we found her,” said Agnes, “was in the other hole. She too must have been protected by the bodies above her. Once the soldiers, and the rest of their prisoners, had gone, she’d managed to claw her way to the surface . . . just as the boy had done. The burials, fortunately, had been very cursory.”

  Even with all the atrocities he had already heard of, and in some cases become a reluctant witness to, Father Brendan never failed to marvel—because, in the literal sense, there was something to marvel at in the ingenuity, barbarity, and sheer inhumanity of such acts—each time a fresh one was revealed to him. Who could commit such crimes? How could the world accommodate such monsters? In his darkest hours, Father Brendan sometimes wondered if the world had not in fact been abandoned by God—as even some theologians claimed—and left as a wasteland for the powers of evil to amuse themselves with. At times, these powers seemed to hold what amounted to absolute dominion.

  “Was Celeste the only one you found alive there?”

  “No. We uncovered what we could of the burial pits—the stench, as you can imagine, was already unbearable—and found three or four others who were still alive.” She paused, as if depleted by what she had already had to relate. “But none of them survived. Not even the boy who had brought us there. They all died before nightfall. All of them. All except Celeste.” Now her eyes returned to Father Brendan. “Perhaps that should have told us something. Perhaps that was the first sign. But at that terrible time, in that terrible place, I couldn’t have seen a sign if it were standing right in front of me.”