by Hunter Shea
Dedication
So many people to thank for this one. First and foremost, huge thanks to Don D’Auria for rescuing me from the slush pile and being the best editor a writer can ask for, and Louise Fury, agent extraordinaire. Go Team Fury! This book morphed into a lot of different forms before it became what it is now and some very special folks along the way kept it moving along. My undying appreciation to Patricia Thomas (MIL) for giving me the tools to start it, Michael Chella for the awesome artwork that helped my vision of the story, Tim Stanton for agreeing to be a man of the cloth (fictional, of course), Jack Campisi, my brother from another mother and fellow Monster Man, and my sister Carolyn Wolstencroft for being my early reader and editor.
This book is for Shane Leuis, the nicest and nuttiest guy you’ll ever meet. We’ve both seen the edge of hell together, and lived to laugh about it.
“And He said, ‘What hast thou done? The voice of thy brother’s blood crieth unto me from the ground.’”
—Book of Genesis 4:9
“And there was a war in heaven. Michael and his angels fought against the dragon.”
—Book of Revelation 12:7
“Sheena is a punk rocker.”
—The Ramones
Ante
Chapter One
Hot sand blew into the stranger’s face as he crested the dusty hill. He refused to blink, refused to admit even the slightest defeat to the power of nature and the one who birthed it. He spat on the lone tuft of grass that clung to the hilltop, laughed as it turned a bilious brown, wilting back into the dry earth.
He was surprised to find a small orchard of fig trees lay nestled in the valley below, a lush land fed by the runoff from the surrounding hummocks. At the outer edge of the orchard sat a clay home, baked hard in the sun, big enough to house three, maybe four people. The leaves of the fig trees chittered in the breeze, mocking him. He’d see to that.
Using his gnarled, wooden staff, he descended the hill in a matter of minutes, his bare feet finding a solid grip with each step. The sun was strong and burned the back of his neck. He pulled his woolen hood over his head, pausing a moment to take in the orchard from eye level.
Five rows of a dozen trees each were spaced out evenly across the valley. Thousands of ripe green figs hung from the branches. They looked, to him at least, like swollen scrotums. He reached up to pluck one, grimaced as it discolored in the palm of his hand, turning a mushy black and melting between his fingers.
The tree followed suit, the figs dying and falling in a rain dance of heavy plops, bursting as they hit the ground. Leaves shriveled up, became brittle, while the branches sagged as if saddled with the weight of the moon.
Crack!
The trunk split in half, the bisected tree collapsing in opposite directions.
The verdant soil around the tree transformed to a cancerous black, spider veins stretching to its neighbors, the scene of rapid decay and death replayed again and again until the orchard was a killing field, bereft of life, the soul of the land corrupted beyond measure.
This made the stranger smile.
Two men erupted from the house, hands on their heads, wailing in shock, anger, fear. Their life’s work had been destroyed in a matter of minutes, struck down by an unseen plague. A woman holding a child to her breast emerged. She looked across the demolished field and cried. The baby fidgeted in her arms as if it too could sense that something had gone terribly wrong.
One of the men met the stranger’s gaze, pointed.
“You did this?” he cried. It was more a question than an accusation, for the moment. The strange man in his former orchard was the one thing that did not belong. If he was not the cause, and how could one man do this, then perhaps he was witness to the death of his beloved fig trees.
To the man’s amazement, the stranger bowed and said, “Yes, I did.”
Fire flashed in both men’s eyes and they disappeared into the house. The woman turned away from him, shielding the baby from his view. The men emerged brandishing long swords. They held them high above their heads, charging at him.
He waited for them to come to him, to wear themselves out running across the barren field. They swore curses as they rushed headlong, prepared to maim this stranger who had taken their life from them through some power they did not and could not understand. But they did understand retribution, the swifter the better.
The stranger waited until they were several steps away before raising his walking stick above his head. It caught both swords as they swooped down to cleave him from shoulder to hip. With a flick of his wrist, both swords were torn from their hands, buried in the unyielding wood of his staff. He tossed it aside, grabbing for their throats.
He closed his eyes, in the throes of an orgasmic rapture as he felt their windpipes crush between his fingers. They swatted at his thick forearms to no avail. He squeezed tighter, cutting off their supply of oxygen, demolishing the inner workings of their respiratory systems. They wouldn’t be needing them much longer.
Their throats collapsed one after the other with an audible rending of cartilage and muscle. He released them, looking on in amusement as they dropped to the ground, their eyes distended, tongues swollen and lolling from open mouths.
The woman sobbed, falling to her knees. He came to her in slow, steady strides, confident that she would not run from him. She looked up as his shadow loomed over her.
“What kind of monster are you?” she asked, defiance in her eyes. Her baby had grown silent, tucked within her robes.
He retrieved his staff and leaned on it, regarding her with cold curiosity.
“I’m the best kind of monster,” he said. Drool pooled at the corners of his mouth, oozing into his filthy beard.
He made fast work of the woman and the baby, using his staff to bludgeon them until they were unrecognizable mounds of fresh, exposed meat. Flies gathered in droves as he sat in the shade of the tiny house and admired his performance.
Death and desolation had been his constant companion; all for one moment of rage. It had happened so long ago that he couldn’t even remember how it had started, not that he even cared anymore. The heat and the afterglow of the kill lulled him into a languid stupor.
He was startled for the first time in memory when the woman’s lips, separated from her face when he had fustigated it with gleeful abandon, began talking to him from amid the quivering pile of spoiled meat, organs and bones.
“You are a wonder to behold,” the lips mouthed without tongue, teeth or throat. “I cherish you above all others. You are not cursed, but blessed.”
The stranger staggered to his feet and gripped his staff, prepared to pummel the mouth into shreds.
“I like your instincts,” it said. “Kill first, ignore the need for questions later.”
He raised the staff above his head, and paused.
“What sort of demon be you?” he shouted.
“The best kind.” The lips shook up and down with laughter. The stranger’s arm shuddered with palsy and the staff slipped from his hand.
“Your talents are wasted, wandering this insipid land, bringing pox to everything you touch. Oh, I have such delights in store for you. Come with me. I have much to show you.”
The lips closed, sliding lifelessly down a shattered arm, resting in the bowl of a shard of broken skull.
The stranger’s legs bent with a will not of his own until he was kneeling. His breath hitched in his chest as a shadow rose up from the foul earth where the fig trees once stood. It grew and grew until it was the size of the surrounding hills, a black cloud of pure malevolence. He trembled before it, bowing his head.
“Call me Master,” the shadow bellowed in his head.
“Master!” he bayed, as much to placate the shadow as to alleviate
the pressure building in his head. The pain was excruciating. He screamed again. “Master!”
With that, the pain and pressure ceased. The shadow retreated back into the earth. The land was once again silent and dead. Even the merciless wind had departed.
The stranger looked about, wary. He retrieved his staff and got to his feet.
He was permitted two steps before the ground opened up beneath him. He plunged into darkness in a free fall that seemed to stretch on forever.
And as he fell, for the first time in decades, he felt peace.
Incipere
Chapter Two
Cardinal Gianncarlo walked briskly to Pope Pius XIII’s office, his black robe billowing behind him. The sound of his quick and heavy footsteps echoed across the vast, marbled hallway. The day was bright and filled with promise, in stark contrast to the roiling cloud that had descended upon his fluttering heart.
The cardinal was normally a stern man, authoritarian to those beneath him, unflappable in his sense of duty to the Lord. His parents, Italian citizens who had made the mistake of openly sympathizing with the Jewish plight during World War II, had been murdered before his very eyes. At the age of seven, he had been placed in a Nazi death camp, managing to survive two years in brutal captivity until the Allied forces freed them all. He vowed to live the rest of his life in service to God and had done so with unequaled integrity and passion, earning the confidence of the leader of his blessed church.
The e-mail from the lone priest of a small Vermont parish had turned his skin the color of spoiled milk when he had been urged by his secretary to open it just minutes ago. With a knot of dread cramping his stomach, he sped off to the pontiff’s study. Time was of the essence. Time and—
He reached the library that doubled as the pontiff’s main office and study, and with unsteady hands rapped loudly on the massive oak door. Like the architectural design of the entire Vatican Palace, the door was a study in elegant simplicity. The voice of Pope Pius XIII beckoned him to enter.
“Sorry to disturb you, but something urgent just came in that I think you should see,” Cardinal Gianncarlo said with a slight stammer.
The pope looked at the cardinal and knew. The exact details of the message were still a mystery to him, but the outcome, of that he was sure. The cardinal thought he detected a slight flickering of the light, the fire that had made him one of the most dynamic popes in centuries, behind his old friend’s eyes.
Pope Pius XIII unfolded the printout with trembling, liver-spotted fingers and read the extensive message. When he was finished, he looked up at his old friend. Deep lines of great sadness etched across his brow.
“So, the inevitable has come back to hound us,” the pope said.
“As much as it pains me to say, yes.”
With a heavy sigh, the pope slumped back in his chair.
“How long has it been since the last appearance? Twenty, thirty years?”
“Nothing since Jonestown. Well over two decades of praying the evil was finally gone forever,” the cardinal answered.
“What has no life can never die, my friend. I had hoped to have passed on to our Father’s arms before this office was faced with such a situation, but we both well know life is never quite what we plan it to be. I’m an old man now. Do I have the strength to go through this again?”
The pope shrugged, the weight of time and responsibility bearing down on his brittle, sagging shoulders. He had served the office of pope for over thirty years, no small feat. He recalled his days as a young man, fresh from the seminary in his first parish in Bergamo, Italy. That young man would never have even dreamed to be what he would one day become. And no one could have guessed the true secrets that lay in store for his discovery when he ascended to the papacy.
“Would you like me to get Father Michael?”
Cardinal Gianncarlo had to resist the urge to pull him close, offering comfort for a man who had dedicated his life to bringing peace and comfort to millions. They were different men the last time, when the beast within Jim Jones was sent to hell, but not before so much had been lost; terrible choices forced to be made, too many lives lost. It had changed them, added years and unbearable pain to their souls.
The old pope shook his head.
“That is my duty. At my age, it will surely be my final call. Let the burden of the nightmares rest with me. I only ask that you sit and pray.”
The cardinal settled into a plush leather chair and the pope offered his hand across the large, neatly arranged desk. In silence, the two men prayed while life outside his windows carried on, ignorant to the dark shadows gathering at the earth’s edge.
Pope Pius XIII found Father Michael’s Spartan room empty. He had only been there once before, decades earlier, and all seemed exactly the same as it had then. Located in a basement of the Holy See’s Museo Pio-Clementino, it was actually a converted storage area, sandwiched between two rooms used to house stockpiles of books and scrolls collected by Popes Leo X, Clement VII and several others, all hermetically sealed in special glass chambers that prevented the ravages of age and air to wreak further havoc on the priceless documents. Windowless, it contained a battered chair, three bookshelves filled with old religious texts and a thirteen-inch, black-and-white television, presumably Father Michael’s lone portal to the world outside the Vatican.
The pope shivered at the thought of searching for Father Michael in the only other area of the vast Vatican he was known to frequent. Taking a service elevator, he rode down five levels to a seldom-used subbasement. The doors opened to reveal a darkly lit, cavernous warehouse whose sole purpose was the storage of old religious artifacts, mostly statues gathered from every corner of the globe over the past thousand years. Row upon row of cold, stone saints, crosses, gargoyles and other grotesqueries filled every corner of this level. Dusty, low-wattage lightbulbs intermittently cut the gloom. The damp, moldy air assaulted his nose and he stopped to sneeze, leaning on his cane to keep his balance.
Reluctantly stepping into the gloom, the pope had the feeling of being surrounded by the dead, remnants of man and beast frozen for all time in various stages of glory, horror, birth and agony, just as Lot’s wife had been turned into a pillar of salt by God upon gazing at the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. Worse still was knowing whom he sought amidst these long-forgotten effigies, the living relic who had caused him to question everything he believed in, yet strengthened his faith in ways that were impossible to describe. He felt weak, as if his muscles had been stricken by a powerful flu.
Pausing, Pope Pius XIII strained for any sound of the living amongst the chimeras.
It was silent as a tomb.
“Father Michael,” he rasped.
Receiving no reply, the pope walked farther into the maze of statues. He turned a corner and came face-to-face with a gargoyle, its hideous half-human, half-dragon visage partially covered by a cloak. A long neck ended in a rectangular body with birdlike claws peeking out of the bottom, seeking purchase that was no longer there. He read the small tag hanging from the gargoyle’s neck: From the Collegiate Church of Saint Waudru, Mons, Belgium, 1648.
Momentarily pondering why mankind had shown such an interest in abominable images, the pope nearly lost his breath when he looked up to see Father Michael standing not more than two feet in front of him. Somehow, the six-foot-three priest had managed to answer his call without making a sound. He stood before the pope, mute and without the slightest hint of movement. It was as if he too had been turned into one of the monstrous statues he was so fond of.
“You…you startled me, Father Michael,” Pope Pius XIII said.
Father Michael was an imposing sight, disturbingly preternatural in appearance. His large frame, broad shoulders and immense hands were those of an Olympic athlete. He stood completely erect, not a single joint or bone in the slightest semblance of repose.
It was his face, dear God, his face, that nearly made the pope gasp. That face had haunted his dreams for more than twenty-f
ive years. He feared it would follow him into death and beyond.
Father Michael was completely bald, his face a series of sharp, angular lines. Strong jaw. Sharp nose atop pencil-thin, bloodless lips. Large brow shaded two seemingly sightless, ivory eyes, utterly devoid of pupil or color. His skin had the pallor of a cadaver, fresh from the embalmer. Two large, rounded ears helped complete the image of a human phantasm made flesh. There was no sign of life in the mask that was Father Michael’s face.
It was a weakness, the pope had realized long ago, this fear that overpowered him when in Father Michael’s presence. Whether his fright was caused by the priest’s physical form or the knowledge of what his unleashing could mean to the world was unclear. Perhaps, most likely, it was both.
The pope’s innards tightened like a coil. The silence between them was almost too much to bear. Clearing his throat, the pope said, “We have need of your services. We received a communication from a parish in Vermont, in the States. I will make arrangements for your departure immediately.”
For an interminable period of seconds, Father Michael stood there, showing no indication that he had heard anything the pope had just said. Then, while closing his milk-white eyes, he bowed his head slightly.
In a voice as old as the church itself, he grumbled, “In the name of God, I am at your service, Your Excellency.”
“You’ll leave tonight. A helicopter will take you to Fiumicino Airport where a private jet has been arranged to fly you to the States. Gather whatever you may need and meet me at the Hall of Penance in one hour.” The Swiss Guards, the bodyguards of the pope as well as protectors of the Apostolic Palace, had been alerted to escort a special representative of the pope to the Vatican’s lone helipad.
Having said all that was needed, Pope Pius XIII eagerly turned his back on the priest, if that’s what he could call him, and made his way to the waiting elevator.
