Exorcist

by Steven Piziks

  He switched his gaze from the rubbing to Semelier’s face. The older man was still seated. “Why do you think this object is inside a Byzantine church in Africa?”

  “Major Dennis Granville in Nairobi is in charge of the dig,” Semelier answered with an enigmatic smile. “He’s been…persuaded to let you join. And he expects your arrival within the month.”

  “You’re assuming I’ll say yes,” barked Merrin, aware that only the scotch was preventing him from getting pissed off.

  “You already have,” Semelier said.

  Semelier’s words reached through the alcohol and touched Merrin’s temper. His face hardened, and he folded his arms in stubborn refusal. He wasn’t going to let this little pissant dictate his life. The Church had done that often enough. Semelier’s eyes flickered uncertainly when he caught Merrin’s expression. The baby finally stopped crying.

  “Just who the hell do you think you are, anyway?” Merrin snapped.

  “Your benefactor.” He thumped his cane once on the floor as if to bring the conversation back under control. “You know how to use the trains here in Egypt, I assume?”

  Merrin nodded. “I do, but I’m not—”

  “Good. At dawn tomorrow, you will take the train to Suez. At the port, you will find a ship named the Slow Dreamer. The captain has instructions to take you on board. The Dreamer will take you to Djibouti.”

  “I said I’m not—”

  “Just south of the city is a small airfield. There you will find an airplane and a pilot waiting for you. He will fly you to Nairobi, where you will meet with Major Granville, who is most eager to meet you. He will direct you to the dig.”

  “I’m not going to—” Merrin began, then stopped as the implications of Semelier’s words sank in. “Wait a minute. You’ve been calling it a dig. Are you saying the church is—”

  “—buried?” Semelier finished. “Yes. Didn’t I mention that? Though I imagine a fair amount of it has been uncovered by now. Major Granville has requisitioned a great many shovels and pickaxes.”

  “Shovels?” Merrin’s eyes went wide. “Pickaxes? Dear God, he might as well use a steam shovel! What about sieves and brushes? Has he requisitioned them, at least?”

  “I don’t believe he has.”

  “Christ! Who’s overseeing the excavation at the moment?”

  “I am not sure. The head archaeologist has…left the project, you see, and the native workers have been instructed to continue digging in his absence. They’re quite efficient, though at the moment they have no archaeologist to direct them. Only a foreman and a site manager.”

  Merrin’s blood ran alternately cold and hot. Heavy tools were used only sparingly in such work, and the thought of a bunch of untrained natives swinging pickaxes around potentially valuable artifacts…

  The scotch oozed around in his stomach, and he felt nauseated. No matter how he might feel about Semelier, priceless knowledge was possibly being destroyed at this very moment. Swiftly he rolled up the vellum and slid it back into its case. “What was the name of that ship in Suez?”

  Semelier repeated the instructions while Merrin gathered up the case and the envelope. His eye fell on the puppet, still lying on the table in a stiff tangle of arms and legs. A fly crawled around the thing’s mouth. Merrin shoved it across the table to Semelier, then turned and wordlessly walked away. When he reached the door, he turned back. “Who exactly do you represent, Mr….” His voice trailed off.

  Semelier was gone.

  Two

  Nairobi, British East Africa

  Two guests cannot be entertained satisfactorily at the same time.

  —Kenyan proverb

  FATHER WILLIAM FRANCIS snapped the curtain aside and found a camel. It was staring placidly through the window and chewing something that made it slobber green-brown goo. The priest jumped back with a startled gasp. The camel made a rude noise and poked its nose through the lower half of the window into the room. Saliva plopped onto the dark wooden floor.

  Behind Father Francis, Major Dennis Granville roared with laughter. “I think he’s looking for a baptism, Father.”

  “I think he’s offering to baptize me,” Will said, and backed away. Not knowing what else to do, he added, “Shoo!”

  Granville laughed again. “You’ll have to do better than that, Father.”

  Will glared at the camel. The camel gave him a look that dared him to come closer. Will remained stubbornly out of reach. Camels, he knew all too well, were as unpredictable as they were smelly. They bit, spat, kicked, and trod on your feet. And that was when they were in a good mood.

  From just outside the window came a shout and the solid thwack of a stout stick striking heavy fur. The camel shot Will a reproachful look, pulled out of the window, and strolled unhurriedly away. A young man with dark skin and eyes pursued it, yelling over his shoulder, “I am sorry, Father!”

  Only in Africa.

  Shaking his head, Will approached the window again and, avoiding the little puddle of camel saliva, peered outside. A white stone path connected the front yard with the red earth street. A line of camels paraded with awkward solemnity past, joined most recently by their stray compatriot. Beyond them stretched a hilly green plain dotted with scrubby trees. Two flagpoles in front of the house sported banners that flapped lazily in the warm breeze—the British flag and the British coat of arms. The latter indicated this was a government building. A small convoy of British military vehicles passed the camels. Beasts and lorries each ignored the other. The priest sighed; unfortunately, the same thing couldn’t always be said about the English and their African colonial subjects.

  Coming up the street in the opposite direction was a man dressed in dusty brown field kit and carrying a round leather case. He had brown hair, a broad build, and a tight, unhappy posture. Handsome enough, though that wasn’t supposed to matter. Will, however, had enough experience as a priest to know that good looks opened more doors. God might look at your heart, he mused wryly, but people looked at your face.

  “Here he comes,” Will said.

  Granville stopped chuckling and approached the window for a look. “Looks ordinary enough.”

  “He’s not,” Will replied, offended. “He has one of the finest archaeological minds, or did. Before the War.” Everyone always said it that way—“the War,” pronounced with the capital W made clear. “The War wasn’t kind to him.”

  “It wasn’t kind to any of us, Father,” the major said dismissively. “We scar over and carry on.”

  “With God’s help,” Will added.

  Granville snorted, then paced back to the wall, on which hung a local map of Kenya. Overhead, a ceiling fan lazily stirred the humid air. Granville’s office was paneled in dark wood, with pale woven mats on the floor. A series of glass-fronted cases displayed dozens of butterflies, all neatly pinned and labeled, their colorful wings spread like dead rainbows on white mounting boards. On the floor sat a cage made of mosquito netting stretched over a wooden frame. The bottom of the cage was covered with grass, leaves, and flowers. Several live butterflies clung to the mesh, their colorful wings opening and closing with slow patience.

  Granville reached behind his desk and came up with what looked like a large briefcase. With a grunt he set it on a stand and opened it. Buckled inside with leather straps were traveling flasks of gin, vermouth, scotch, and whiskey. Metal and glass clinked. Still at the window, Will watched Lankester Merrin wander down the white path and take a careful seat on the front steps of the government building. He opened the leather case, unrolled some sort of scroll, and studied it. Will found himself saying a small prayer for him.

  Once Granville finished pouring his drink, he set it aside and opened a drawer. From it he took a glass jar, a paper bag of cotton balls, and a bottle marked Ether. He turned to the butterfly cage, opened it, and used a tiny mesh net to scoop out one of the larger insects. It had bright blue wings.

  “Corporal!” he boomed. “Send in Lankester Merrin!”
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br />   Merrin sat on the front steps of the government building. He started to pray that the wait wouldn’t be long, then stopped himself. The wait would be however long it was, and his prayers would make no difference.

  Merrin hated waiting, hated inactivity, and the trip south from Cairo had been a weeklong exercise in both. It hadn’t helped that a Muslim had captained the Dreamer, meaning no alcohol was allowed on the ship. No drink to fog Merrin’s mind and no work to occupy it. It was during those times that the dreams came. Merrin hadn’t had a decent night’s sleep since he’d left Cairo.

  Now he was here in Nairobi, bone tired, covered with road dust, and staring down at Semelier’s rubbing. The lion’s eyes stared back at him with sly, malicious glee. A fly crawled across its face, and abruptly Merrin couldn’t stand to look at it anymore. It belonged in a museum, in any case. He rerolled it and thrust it back into the case.

  Impatience pulled at him. If Major Granville was so eager to have Merrin on this dig, why was the man keeping him waiting? Merrin drummed his fingers on his knees and tapped his feet in a restless rhythm. His heavy boots made a marching sound on the white path that led up to government building steps, and abruptly Merrin was surrounded by the sound of jackboots stomping across cobblestones. He stopped tapping.

  A company of British troops marched past him up the road leading into town. Their sergeant major yelled orders above the sounds of their steady footsteps. Sweat darkened their brown uniforms and glistened on their faces beneath the heavy golden sun.

  “Look lively, you mangy lot!” shouted the sergeant major. “Double time now! Left, right, left, right!”

  The soldiers sped up. One soldier, caught off guard by the order, faltered and threw the man behind him out of step. Both stumbled, then recovered.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing, Private?” screamed the sergeant without breaking stride. “Hast du denn Urlaub? Einen Feiertag? Gehen wir in der Stadt vielleicht einkaufen?”

  A hot wind blew up the street and dust motes pelted Merrin’s face and neck. Except that it felt like cold, misty rain. The sergeant continued to yell in German as the soldiers’ black boots marched steadily down the stony street between tall, narrow houses. Merrin rocked back and forth on the steps, caught between memory and reality.

  A hand came down on his shoulder. Merrin started violently and twisted like a cat. A Nazi soldier stood behind him. Then the world shifted, and the Nazi snapped into the form of a young British corporal. Major Granville’s corporal.

  “Mr. Merrin,” the man said. “The major will see you, sir.”

  Merrin forced himself to breathe. “Thank you.”

  The corporal ushered Merrin into Major Granville’s office. The major sat behind his desk like a baron in a fortress. Merrin tucked the leather case under his arm and felt his stomach grow tight with tension. “Baron” was the perfect word. Granville ran this district of Kenya like a fiefdom, dividing up coffee farms and tea groves among his countrymen like a lord handing down inheritances, with no regard that the natives had owned them first.

  Despite the fact that it had lost millions of pounds in the early days, England had never lost interest in colonizing Africa. In 1890, it reached a final agreement with Germany, giving the Kaiser control over what would one day become Tanzania while England took over a section farther northwest and renamed it Kenya. The natives who already occupied the territories in question were not consulted. Territorial lines were drawn without regard to local custom, and in more than one case, entire villages were split in half.

  The Imperial British East Africa Company tried to run the new colony and failed miserably, losing millions and forcing the British government to take over in 1895. To bring the natives under control, the new governor pitted rival groups against each other, setting the drought-and famine-ridden Masai against their wealthier neighbors in a classic divide-and-conquer tactic. Families and villages were shattered by tribal warfare, and the colonial government eagerly snapped up the pieces.

  None of this had been accepted easily by the native tribes. Not a year went by that some group or other didn’t try to shake off British shackles. But the British were better armed and better organized and they always smashed rebellions flat. Merrin, however, was already wondering how much longer this could go on. The tribes were starting to see through the divide-and-conquer trick, and the wind whispered rumors of dark-skinned Africans setting aside tribal differences to fight the hated white-skinned British.

  The hated white-skinned British, in this particular case, was Major Granville. From the native perspective, he lived in luxury, with steady electricity, fine clothes, and fine food. His men collected stiff taxes and high rents. When people couldn’t pay, Granville conscripted them into the British army as servants and cooks. He seized land and crops, leaving the former owners starving and destitute. And when they came to him to beg for food, he slammed them into service contracts that stole their freedom. It made Merrin’s blood boil to see it. Merrin, however, had learned the hard way that resistance against such people was fruitless, even dangerous. It was easier to hide in the world of scholarship and archaeology.

  Beside the major stood a younger man wearing a Roman collar. The other priest had a slender build and a narrow face topped by thick brown hair. Merrin didn’t recognize him. What was going on here?

  “Father Merrin,” the strange priest said, offering a hand. “I’m Father Will Francis.”

  Merrin felt a little nonplused, but gave a warm handshake that left dry dust on the other man’s palm. “Nice to meet you.”

  “And this is Major Granville, of course.”

  Merrin gave a curt nod. “Major.”

  “Your cable couldn’t have come at a better time, sir. Glad to see you’ve arrived safely. Drink?” Granville held up a glass, and Merrin noticed there was a large blue butterfly in a jar on the man’s desk. A wet cotton ball lay in the bottom of the jar, and Merrin caught a faint whiff of ether. The smell put him off the idea of a drink. The butterfly inside beat its wings against the glass like a panicked fairy.

  “No, thank you, Major.”

  “As you like,” Granville said, and handed the glass to Francis, who accepted it with a startled look. The motion was reflected in the glass of the butterfly cases, and Merrin automatically looked to them. Granville noticed.

  “Beautiful, aren’t they?” he said.

  “Very,” Merrin replied. “I didn’t know you were a lepidopterist.”

  Granville raised gray eyebrows. “You know the correct term. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised.” He raised his glass at the collection. The butterflies sat perfectly motionless behind their panes of glass, in stark contrast to their struggling brother. “I’ve picked up a few new ones in my tour here.”

  Merrin leaned closer to examine one specimen. Bright orange wings, wide black stripes. The label below it read: CALLIORATIS MILLARI: SOUTH AFRICA. Merrin caught his breath.

  “A South African tiger moth,” he said. “They haven’t been seen in South Africa for over twenty-five years.”

  “I know,” the major said, looking pleased. “I captured one of the last living specimens. Extraordinary, isn’t it?”

  “Truly,” Merrin murmured, though it came out as a growl. The blue butterfly’s movements grew weaker.

  “It’s a hobby from my school days.” Granville took a long sip of whiskey. “It does wonders for the nerves. You should try it sometime.”

  “I have a hobby,” Merrin said.

  “Archaeology?” Francis said. He was holding his glass by the rim as if he thought it might explode. “That’s hardly a hobby for someone like you.”

  “For someone like me,” Merrin replied, “that’s all it can be. What can you tell me about this dig?”

  Granville nodded. “The location is a remote area of the Turkana region called Derati. A garrison of my men discovered the structure while on maneuvers there several months ago. When the powers that be realized its importance, a dig was organized.�
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  “What powers that be?” Merrin asked, though deep down he already knew the answer.

  “Rome,” Father Francis put in. “The building is clearly a church, and the Vatican wants it dealt with properly.”

  “Even though it’s a church where no church should be,” Merrin said.

  “Especially because it’s a church where no church should be,” Francis asserted.

  “So who is funding the dig?” Merrin asked.

  “It’s a joint venture,” Granville replied, “between the Vatican and the Crown.”

  “Really?” Merrin said, eyebrows raised. “I didn’t know the British government had that kind of relationship with the Vatican.”

  “We don’t—officially,” Granville said. “Officially all the money comes from the Vatican by way of Cardinal Jenkins here in Nairobi. The Crown, however, has made a great many supplies available to the dig. Unofficially.”

  “So tell me, do you have any theories on who might have built this church?” Francis said a little too eagerly. He reminded Merrin of a puppy trying to behave itself in the presence of an older, more dignified dog.

  “Not until I see it,” he said. “But surely the Vatican has a record of its creation.”

  Francis shook his head. “I’m afraid not. We’re as much in the dark about it as you are.”

  “How do you know it’s a Christian church and not some other structure?” Merrin suggested. “A pre-Christian temple, for example?”

  “Enough of it has been exposed to tell us otherwise,” Francis said. He was still holding the whiskey glass. “It’s clearly Christian Byzantine. No question.”

  “It still shouldn’t be there,” Merrin mused aloud, becoming more intrigued despite his attempts to remain aloof. “Christian missionaries didn’t arrive in this part of Africa until fairly recently, and there has been no major Catholic presence until this past decade. The Church—capital C—certainly hasn’t been around long enough to leave an archaeological record.”

  The butterfly dropped to the bottom of the jar and went completely still. Granville tapped the lid, but it didn’t respond. “Our thinking exactly. I was very glad to receive the wire saying you were volunteering to take over the dig. We were at a bit of a loss—qualified archaeologists aren’t easy to come by in this part of the world. Cardinal Jenkins wanted the dig to continue, and it has, but without proper supervision.”