Exorcist

by Steven Piziks

  “You’re here,” Merrin replied. “The cardinal isn’t.”

  “Right. Anyway, I want you to know that I’m not planning on taking over in any real sense. I’ll be the official head, meaning I’ll sign paperwork and make reports to Major Granville and the cardinal, but I won’t touch anything you don’t want me to. I won’t even breathe around the dig without your permission.”

  They reached the edge of town and continued down a rutted, dusty road that wound among low hills covered with scrubby vegetation. Herds of goats tended by young boys browsed among the leaves and bushes. Overhead, the sun continued to burn with heavy, golden heat. Jefferies drove in silence. Merrin turned in his seat to look at Francis. “And what about the rest of it?”

  “Rest of what?” Francis asked, confused.

  “My position and title.” He leaned further toward Francis. “In case I wasn’t clear earlier, I. Am. Not. A. Priest.”

  “You’re on temporary sabbatical,” Father Francis pointed out with infuriating calm. He seemed to have gotten over his earlier awe of him, Merrin noticed, disgruntled. “You haven’t officially left the Church. That means you’re still a priest.”

  “You sound like a Jesuit,” Merrin said.

  “Maryknoll, actually.”

  “I’m done with being a priest, Francis.”

  “Then why haven’t you resigned?”

  The question hung between them, suspended on harsh beams of sunlight, and Merrin’s mind chewed on it like a bulldog. Because the War closed a dozen doors on me and I don’t want to close another one if I don’t have to. Because not quite resigning makes the Church wait on my terms. Because I don’t want to see “I told you so” looks on anyone’s faces if I opt for reinstatement.

  “Because,” was all he said.

  “Have you broken any of your priestly vows?” Francis persisted.

  Merrin thought about Sarah. “Other than not going to confession in a while, no.”

  “Have you submitted your resignation to an archbishop? Have you petitioned the Holy Father to let you join the laity?”

  “No, but—”

  “Then in the eyes of God and the Church, you’re still a priest.”

  “This isn’t an argument you can win with ecclesiastic hand waving and Maryknoll logic, Francis,” Merrin snapped. “God and the Church—” He cut himself off.

  “God and the Church what?” Francis asked.

  —abandoned me. “Nothing. I’m not a priest, Francis, and I’d appreciate it if you’d stop telling people that I am.”

  “That’s the way to tell him, mate!” Jefferies chimed in. “What’s the fun in being a priest, anyway? You can’t shag anyone—or even wank it. ’Course, that ain’t stopped a fair number of priests, has it?” He roared at his own joke. Francis fell silent, for which Merrin was grateful.

  The Rover wound its way out of the hills and toward a rocky plain. The waters of Lake Rudolf glittered at the horizon, and Merrin caught the metallic scent of brackish water. Rocky desert dotted with stubborn bushes stretched in all other directions.

  Jefferies guided the Rover down toward a pair of brown hills with a shallow ravine between them. As they grew closer, Merrin spotted the dig site. It sat on a flat spot between the upper rises of the two hills. Like all the other digs Merrin had supervised, the place sported a grid marked with low stakes and white string. A clump of nearby tents provided office space, and dark-skinned workers bustled about with baskets, trowels, brushes, and other tools.

  Merrin’s eye, however, was drawn to the structure. It stuck out of the ground at the eastern end of the dig and, as Jefferies had said, did indeed appear to be the corner of a roof. He saw an eave and what seemed to be the upper portion of a wall. A dome made a bulge beyond the eave.

  Jefferies halted the Rover near the site and climbed out, with Merrin and Francis following. Merrin’s heart was pounding, and his fingers itched to touch the ancient wall, learn its secrets, uncover its past. Francis appeared to be even more eager, rushing past Merrin and shooting half a dozen paces ahead. Merrin loudly and pointedly cleared his throat. Francis stopped and cast a guilty look over his shoulder. A blush crawled over his face, and he gave a tentative, sheepish grin.

  “Sorry!” he said. “I get the fever too, you know. Your dig. You first.”

  Merrin relented and trotted forward to join him. “Let’s have a look, then. Jefferies, get some of the men to unload the new supplies. Then I’ll need you and Chuma to show me around.”

  “Right,” Jefferies said, and left.

  Merrin led Francis toward the structure. A trench had been dug beside the wall, putting the eave at head level for anyone standing at the bottom. A small team of native workers dressed in khaki shirts were digging around the perimeter with trowels and small shovels, but none of them were very sweaty, and Merrin suspected that with both their manager and their foreman away from the site, the workers had done more resting than digging. He was also glad to see that they were at least dumping the dirt into wooden wheelbarrows so it could be sifted later for bits of pottery, bones, broken tools, and other missed relics.

  About twenty-five or thirty feet of the wall had been uncovered from side to side, and the trench just barely reached the corner of the building. Deciding to plunge right in, Merrin jumped down into the trench, pulled a wide brush from his pocket, and began removing the fine layer of dust that had settled on the wall since its excavation. The wall was built of stone blocks, perfectly shaped and mortared.

  “It reminds me of Roman architecture,” Francis said from the top of the trench. “But more exotic.”

  “Is this your first assignment, Father?” Merrin asked without looking up.

  “Yes. Before this, I was studying at the Archives in the Holy See.”

  “The Vatican itself. Impressive.” A dirty cloud surrounded Merrin. “But not exactly training for missionary work.”

  Francis shifted uncomfortably, then asked, “What do you think of the building?”

  Merrin continued brushing dust. The wall beneath was white. “I would guess fourth or fifth century,” he said. “And it’s definitely Byzantine, not Roman. Look at those designs on the cornice at the corner. They look like stylized trees with people standing among the bushes beneath them. Byzantine.”

  “I’ll take your word for it,” Francis said. “The Byzantine era is a bit outside my area of expertise.”

  The admission somehow mollified Merrin, and he thawed. A little. “You may as well come down, Father. I can’t talk when you’re up there.”

  Francis dropped into the trench, lightly and without hesitation. It was cooler down here out of the sunlight. Sand and gravel crunched under his boots. “This is going to be a big job,” he said. “You must feel like a mosquito in a nudist colony.”

  Merrin blinked at him. “What?”

  “So much to do, you don’t know where to start.”

  There was a moment of silence. Then both men burst out laughing. Merrin felt himself thaw further yet. After the laughing stopped, Merrin took off his hat, wiped his sweaty forehead on his sleeve, and gestured at the stonework.

  “The craftsmanship is amazing,” he said. “Each block perfectly carved and smoothed. You can’t even see the chisel marks.”

  “It’s beautiful,” Francis agreed, though he began to sound puzzled. “Forgive my ignorance, but should the stones look so new?”

  “What?”

  “The stones.” Francis pointed. “They’re shiny where you’ve brushed the dust away. Like they’re brand-new.”

  “That’s not…not possible.” Merrin brushed some more, working his way toward the corner. Francis was right—the stones were slick and shiny under their layer of dust. “These stones are centuries old. They should be severely weathered. It’s almost as if…as if…”

  “As if what?” Francis said.

  Merrin ignored him. “Chuma!” he shouted. “Chuma! I need a bigger brush!”

  Chuma’s big form appeared at the top of the tr
ench. “Yes, Mr. Merrin!”

  A moment later, the foreman handed one down to Merrin, who set to cleaning dust and dirt from the corner of the buried church. Again Francis asked what was wrong, but Merrin didn’t seem to hear. More of the edge came to light under Merrin’s swift, sure strokes, and the corner showed up sharp and precise. After a long moment, Merrin leaned back against the wall of the trench behind him, a stunned look on his face.

  “Impossible,” he breathed.

  Above, Chuma said something in Turkana that Will didn’t catch. He looked up and saw the same look of stunned amazement on the foreman’s face.

  “I still don’t understand,” Francis said, clearly starting to get a little angry about it.

  Merrin seemed to shake off the trance he was in. “Look closer at the blocks, Francis. What do you see?”

  He looked. “I see a wonderful example of fine-cut masonry, probably done in the fourth or fifth century, like you said. Beautifully preserved, too.”

  “It seems almost new, doesn’t it?” Merrin said. “Virtually no erosion.”

  Light dawned on Francis’s face. “But the wind and sun up here—it should be badly weathered.”

  “And damaged,” Merrin said. “I was operating on the assumption that this structure had been buried as the result of a landslide or earthquake, but we should have seen some damage to the walls by now.”

  “It looks pristine to me,” Francis said. “Perfectly new.”

  “Exactly,” Merrin said. “Either someone in this century built a church using fifth-century building methods and materials—something I sincerely doubt—or this building was deliberately buried. Right after it was built.”

  “They came here and built something only to bury it? That doesn’t make sense.”

  “Not with this kind of structure, no. Countless cultures build things to bury—the Egyptians are the most famous example—but the Byzantine Empire never bought into the idea.”

  “Not that anyone knows of, anyway,” Chuma said from above. “Perhaps these Byzantines buried dozens of churches and this is the first one anyone has found, eh?”

  “Again, possible,” Merrin concluded, “but it doesn’t seem likely, especially since we’re so far south of the old Byzantine Empire.”

  “Maybe it’s a tomb,” Francis guessed, getting into the spirit of the discussion.

  “Well, we won’t know until we have a better look,” Merrin said, and rubbed his hands together in a brisk movement. “Chuma, prepare the men to work double shifts. I want these walls cleared, and I want to go inside.”

  The blood of the bull lay red and sticky on Jomo’s hands. He would not wash them or his machete until sunset, for the blood of the sacrifice would grant him both power and protection. He feared that he and the rest of the village would need a great deal of both. The first white man made Jomo uneasy, though he had made no attempt to convert Jomo’s people to the cult of his tortured god. The second white man was another matter entirely. Unlike the first one, the second wore the black-and-white collar, and Jomo assumed that meant he was more likely to preach.

  Jomo leaned on his blood-tipped spear and looked down at the site. Some of his own relatives were working for the whites, digging and brushing. This work made Jomo uneasy, and the strange building made him shudder. It was only blocks of stone, but it made him think of a jackal hiding in a thicket, waiting to leap out with strong teeth and ghoulish laughter.

  Chuma, who had been kneeling at the edge of the trench, abruptly straightened and boomed orders at the workers waiting nearby. They sprang into action like termites on a mound. Jomo wanted to run down and tell them to stop, to leave this place alone. But he didn’t. Instead, he stood and watched and leaned on his spear, trying to quell the unreasoning fear that grew like a cold vine around his heart.

  Four

  Archaeological survey site, British East Africa

  Regular work tires a woman but totally wrecks a man.

  —Kenyan proverb

  IT WAS LATE AFTERNOON, three days later. The native men were clearing the walls of the church all the way around, working with the sort of enthusiasm only a wage increase can bring. Appalled at how little Jefferies had been paying the workers, Merrin had ordered an immediate raise, much to Jefferies’s obvious chagrin. Merrin wondered if the man had been skimming and made a mental note to take a close look at the books when he had a chance. At the moment, however, there was simply too much to do.

  He had risen from his bed back at the hotel long before sunrise and been on-site before the sky reached full brightness, brushing, measuring, examining, exploring. It hadn’t taken long for the old rhythms to come back to him, and he found himself issuing orders to Chuma and the men with the ease and confidence of long practice. He used Father Francis as a sort of assistant, making him oversee the sifting of debris, ensuring the workers had water, taking notes, and keeping track of the dozens of other little tasks that could bog a chief archaeologist down. Merrin had to admit he took a little perverse pleasure in handing the scut work off to the young priest.

  The church was proving surprisingly easy to uncover. The soil was loose and sandy, almost falling away beneath the workmen’s small shovels and trowels. It was a miracle the building had stayed buried as long as it had. The trench now surrounded the entire structure, and in some places was a full two meters deep and two meters wide. Like all Christian cathedrals, the building was in the shape of a cross that pointed east. The long arm of the cross, called the main aisle, was exactly twenty-two and a half meters wide and thirty-three meters long. The north-south transepts—the short arms of the cross—were ten meters wide, not counting the domed nave, where the short and long arms crossed.

  The dome tempted Merrin. This church was a puzzle to beat all puzzles, and the answers lay inside. It was pushing archaeological standards to enter through the dome so early in the dig, but Merrin was feeling the stirrings of a new go-to-hell attitude.

  Merrin tried to get a solid grip on the top of the trench where he had been photographing sections of the outer wall and heave himself out of the trench, but he couldn’t. He slipped, went back to the bottom in a shower of sandy soil, tried again. This time a large, strong hand grabbed his wrist and helped haul him up.

  “You need a ladder,” Chuma said, brushing Merrin down once he had his feet. “Perhaps we should dig a ramp.”

  “Good idea,” Merrin said. “Where’s Jefferies? I want to go inside the—”

  A laughing scream slashed the air. Merrin jumped and tried to look in all directions at once. He saw nothing but beshrubbed, rocky hills. Another laugh echoed, closer this time, and the cold sound curdled Merrin’s blood.

  “Hyenas?” he said nervously.

  Chuma, unperturbed, nodded. “They’ve been a constant menace since we broke ground.”

  “Even during the day?”

  “Yes. Mutib—he is my cousin and a fine hunter, you know—Mutib says he has seen more and more hyenas about in the last two months. Mutib likes to tell stories—his favorite is one in which he outraced a tiger—but in this I believe him.”

  Not far away from the two men, a worker dropped the basket of soil he was carrying. The dirt spilled out and the man fell writhing to the dusty ground. Merrin and Chuma traded a startled glance, then rushed over to help. The worker’s eyes rolled back in his head and convulsions shook his body. Incoherent words tumbled in a torrent from his mouth as he twisted and flopped like a beached fish. When Merrin’s shadow fell across him, he screamed in terror. He tried to back away from the looming figure, but his muscles still sent him into twisting fits.

  “Wai ekipe nikiar!” he cried. “Ekipe wai kimiekinae!”

  “He thinks you are a devil,” Chuma said, kneeling next to the man. “He is asking you to spare him.”

  Merrin leaned down and put a hand on the man’s forehead. It was hot and dry. “I’m not a devil, friend,” he said soothingly. “It’s all right.”

  Chuma translated the words, but the worker twis
ted anyway. He tried to rise, but his body betrayed him and he fell back to the dust with a grunt of pain. Securing a stable hold on the worker, Chuma gently and firmly cradled the man’s head on his own arm. A crowd of onlookers was already assembling. Chuma spoke quiet words in Turkana, and Merrin assumed they were of reassurance. Will Francis arrived, looking worried.

  “Send for the doctor,” Merrin told him. “This man is hallucinating.”

  “I already did,” Francis replied. “She’s on-site today because of that worker who sprained his ankle this morning.”

  “What’s wrong with him?” Merrin asked.

  “The heat,” Chuma said, sending a hard look in Merrin’s direction. “We have driven the men too hard.”

  Merrin rubbed his chin. He had suspected heat sickness as well, but he had never seen it accompanied by convulsions and hallucinations. But then, he admitted to himself, he wasn’t a doctor.

  Chuma gestured to two workers and said, “Todauk kiwapakinae.” The men obeyed, picking up the stricken man and following Merrin down toward the tents pitched near the dig. A series of worktables had been set up there, shaded beneath canvas shelters. Merrin ducked into one of the tents, snagged a cup and a water bag, and emerged in time to see Chuma and the two workmen set the man down in the shade near one of the tables. Merrin filled the cup with water and passed it to Chuma, who pressed it to the man’s lips. He resisted at first, then began to drink, slurping the water down in great gulps.

  “Don’t let him take too much at once,” Merrin cautioned.

  “I know,” Chuma said, pulling the cup away. “I have dealt with heat sickness before.”

  Merrin removed his hat, wiped sweat from his forehead, and glanced around the site. Men continued to work diligently under the blazing sun, trowels, shovels, and brushes in continuous motion. Everything smelled of hot dust and dry dirt. Grit got into everything, making Merrin’s skin itch and drying out his eyes. It was a familiar feeling on a dig, though he didn’t remember the sun getting this hot before. Was it warmer than usual, or was he just getting older?

  “We should break off in the afternoons,” he suggested. “Resume in the evenings.”