by Brian Hodge
The priest feels like giving him the raspberries. “How thoughtful. Information you’re offering now. One problem though: I don’t give a shit.”
A slow, hissing noise resembling laughter: “You will soon give more than a shit, Holy Man.”
“Stop wasting my time. There’s nothing you could possibly offer me in the way of information – other than the fact that you’re a miserable liar and I should take everything you say with a busload of salt. But that’s just me.”
The demon inside the girl is silent for a moment, the girl’s head lolling again. The voice that comes out of her then is softer, more contrite: “You have noticed the signs, the little boy in Arkansas, the apparition of Mary in the morgue, the statistics in your files, those spread-sheets that you keep in your ssssssssssssecret files, they don’t lie. Do they? The numbers don’t lie.”
Father Bill gives the demon a shrug. “Are you going to get to the point tonight or should I send out for beignets?”
“I can help you… give you inside information… what they are planning in hell, it’s all contained in the code. I can be your informant, Father. A simple bargain, a deal —”
“No deals you pathetic foul-smelling —!” Father Bill catches himself, swallowing his emotion, tamping down his anger. Is this a dream? Is he dreaming? Hallucinating? He stares at the twitching, cadaverous shell of a girl on the floor, looking past her black-button eyes, looking into her empty soul at the shapeless thing lurking there. At last the priest adds in a softer voice: “Let me get this straight, what you’re telling me is, you want to turn snitch.”
“In a manner of speaking yes.”
“You want to rat out the devil.”
A black smile creases the girl’s reanimated face. “A somewhat imprecise way of putting it, diluted by the Catholic penchant for mixing metaphors, but yes, indeed, that is the case.”
The priest thinks it over, and thinks it over some more. After a long, long pause, a pause that brings to mind geological eras passing, glaciers forming and reforming, the priest tells the demon, “I’m going to have to get back to you on this.”
The girl collapses, and the odor goes away, and the room is filled with the sounds of a ticking clock and the girl snoring, and it’s obvious the demon is gone.
3.
Over the next few weeks, the incident at the Jean-Baptiste de la Salle transient hotel fades in Father Bill’s memory. The only trace of that evening that lingers – at least in the priest’s mind, gnawing at him even now – is the proposition that a man of the cloth would consider an alliance with an unclean spirit. For nearly a month, the very idea of it lies in the pit of Father Bill’s midbrain like a cyst, keeping him up at night, making even more aware of the shadow-spaces in the corners of every anonymous alley, every boarded storefront, every dark window. And for someone in Father’s Bill’s line of work, this added a layer of cognitive dissonance is an unwelcome distraction. He lives a monastic life — the life of a ghost — moving from assignment to assignment in his battered mobile home, with its nicotine-yellowed cabinets, dusty old Philco record changer, particle board bookcases crowded with occult tomes and theological apocrypha, and peach crates stuffed with Stan Kenton albums. He has no regular friends, no living family, no dependents or responsibilities other than to serve the Sanctum Instrumentum.
A secret unit of the Catholic church known only to a handful of functionaries at the Vatican, the S.I. (or Holy Instrument) is the sum total of Father Bill’s entire raison ’d’être. Other than a few harmless vices – a taste for unfiltered cigarettes, old whiskey, and bebop jazz (especially Thelonious Monk, in whose music Father Bill believes God resides) – the priest lives and breathes solely for the unit, an arcane group whose purpose stems from a long and convoluted history. For years the Church has employed a group of clerics and specialists to investigate alleged miracles around the world – from weeping Madonna statues to the face of Christ manifesting itself in grilled cheese sandwiches – with varying degrees of success. Even the most rigorous of these investigators can fall prey to either the power of suggestion or mass hypnosis. And like a venerable old insurance company, the Church is obliged to conduct due diligence on all claims. This is where the Sanctum Instrumentum comes in. Agents of the shadowy SI – and there are only six in the world, Father Bill being the only one based in the U.S. – are charged with investigating the investigators.
Which is precisely what Father Bill is doing — weeks after the events at the Jean-Baptiste de la Salle — when he begins to believe he’s being followed.
The realization hits him in stages, a little more each day, as he goes about his business. In Natchitoches, Louisiana, Father Bill is in a backwater settlement of tin shanties and kudzu-covered cabins, lurking in the cool blue shadows of the neighboring cypress grove, making notes in a his log book, keeping tabs on the visiting emissaries in their black frocks and wide-brimmed hats, as they poke and prod a ghostly reflection of Satan on the oily surface of rain-water caught in an upturned satellite dish, when a twig snaps in the darkness behind the priest. Footsteps, furtive footsteps, in the woods, thirty yards away, making Father Bill start, then whirl. There’s nothing there, but Father Bill feels the presence shadowing him. He’s been feeling it for days.
Less than a week later, he’s standing on a viaduct over Highway 127 just north of Harrodsburg, Kentucky, in a hard spring rain, his London Fog drenched and sticking to his back, when he hears a whisper – right next to him — so close, in fact, it seems to emanate from within his skull, as he peers through binoculars at a group of clerics in the gray distance, about a quarter mile away, gathered around a lightning-struck telephone pole, the timbers contorted into the shape of an inverted cross. The invisible whisperer seems to think at him more than speak the words: THEY’RE COMING FOR YOU… DO YOU KNOW WHY?
With greater and greater frequency, the strange disembodied warnings accompany his investigations. As the months pass, he begins to see more and more signs of anonymous pursuers, more and more shadowy figures skulking just on the edges of his vision, in the peripheral blur of his travels, as he zig-zags across the country in his ramshackle trailer, investigating the investigators, his intake of Bushmills and Camel Straights increasing.
Even his dreams become stuck like a needle on a defective record album, haunted by the incessant advances of the demon Malefar.
4.
“Your time is running out.” In the lurid cinema of Father Bill’s dreams, the demon always appears black on black, the antithesis of a human figure, an anti-figure without face or features — a vacuum within a vacuum. “They’re planning something over here… and it concerns you in the most personal manner.”
“Where’s ‘over here’?”
“The place without God.”
“Hell is an actual place?”
“What is it with you Catholics? Always with the literal interpretations. Do you or do you not want to know what the letters mean?”
“I’m not signing anything.”
“It’s a simple proposal, Father, a bargain – your trust is all I require.”
“Sorry no.”
“A one-time only deal.”
“All due respect, I’d rather die.”
“Then you will. You will. Every last one of you. In the worst possible way.”
5.
As the weeks pass, Father Bill begins having second-thoughts about the demon known as Malefar. During World War II, Pope Pius XII tried to work with Nazi liaisons. The foundation of the modern world has been shifting subtly yet tectonically beneath Father Bill’s feet. Even the alleged “miracles” themselves – the once banal flirtations with the supernatural, more suited to the pages of tabloids than to theological studies – are becoming more and more foreboding. Salamanders falling from the sky in Memphis. Tributaries of the Amazon changing direction and hue, running as red as ox blood. A woman in a New York morgue reanimating for five and half minutes, long enough to say three Hail Mary’s and tear the flesh from her
face. Something is shifting in the netherworld. The people who pay attention to this sort of thing are noticing changes. The agents of hell seem to be marshaling forces, perhaps to make another play for power in the earthly dominion, as they attempted in 1902 in Martinique with their invasion of snakes, or in 1883 when they set off Krakatoa, or way back in 1346, in Crimea, when they unleashed the Black Plague. Father Bill keeps updating a stack of Excel spread sheets locked in his files, most of which reflect this ascension: Demonic possessions over the last ten years have increased 37% over the previous decade. Phenomena have started to center around certain areas of the world for unknown reasons. Never-before-seen instances of dual and multiple possessions have increased – with unprecedented combinations of lower demons, entities who were previously antagonistic toward each other. Perhaps all of this is why Father Bill is not only paranoid — hearing footsteps behind every blind corner — but why he’s not altogether surprised when they finally come for him.
They come on a warm June evening, a few minutes before the stroke of midnight. Father Bill is alone at that point, striding down a narrow footpath along the east boundary of Resurrection Cemetery, just outside Hammond, Indiana, playing his flashlight across the base of a two-hundred-year-old elm that has allegedly formed stigmata-like sores in its bark, when he hears two things that raise the hackles on the back of his neck.
The first is the distant noise of footsteps – or perhaps three or four pairs, muffled by the thick grass of graves – coming toward him from the heart of the cemetery. It’s too dark to see who it is, but the sound of it, the inertia in those steps – the solemn vigor of the sound, like the muffled march of brown shirts – tells Father Bill this is no girl-scout troop coming to sell him cookies.
The second thing that makes his flesh crawl – and it takes a lot to make the flesh of a man like Father Bill crawl – is the faint sound of a voice. It comes from above him, and it’s a tinny, papery whisper, like the voice of a doll triggered by a pull-string.
“Too late, Padre, you’re surrounded,” the voice informs him. The footsteps are closing in on all sides. Are they apparitions of the dead? Are they figments of Father Bill’s whiskey-ravaged brain cells? He looks up and sees an enormous crow perched on the elm branch above him – a bird the size of an anvil – glowering down at him through black ball-bearing eyes. The raven shivers, its oily wings convulsing as though molting from the force of the spirit possessing it, its tiny beak contorting as it speaks. “Only chance you’ve got is to try and flee to the north.”
Father Bill does not pause more than a nano-second to make all the connections, to allow the situation to sink in: the blackbird has the demon Malefar inside it, and the footsteps are approaching fast. He wheels around and runs as fast as he can – his duffel bag and flashlight flying out of his hands – toward the distant gravel lane to the north.
The crow takes wing in a flurry of black slimy feathers, soaring after the priest, as the hunters converge on the tree line from all corners of the cemetery. The bird swoops down and lights on the fleeing Father Bill’s shoulder with the force of a grappling hook digging into his frock. It makes the priest stumble and nearly fall. “They’re the Segreto Polizia,” the bird warns in its plastic toy-voice. “They investigate the investigators of the investigators.”
“Why… should I… trust… you?” The priest gasps for breath as he keeps sprinting for the row of gaslights bordering the property. Father Bill can see, in his peripheral vision, the men gaining on either side, a brigade of dark cloaked figures, their duster-tails billowing behind them, as they charge closer and closer.
The raven’s voice in his ear: “Ironically I’m the only friend you have left.”
Running, lungs heaving: “Evil spirits… are… congenital liars.”
“I’m giving it up for Lent. Besides… you’re about to learn just how alone you really are.”
Father Bill is about to form a reply when the hood comes out of nowhere, plunging down over his face, taking away the moonlight and making him stumble.
He falls in a puddle and feels the weight of two men pressing down on him, a heavily-accented voice bringing this phase of his life to an end: “Eet ees best for you, Signore, if you do not struggle.”
6.
For most of the journey, they keep a black muslin hood over Father Bill that has that candlewick and cardamom odor of the church. In fact everything has the smell of the Church with a capital ‘C’ – the shiny new SUV in which the thugs whisk Father Bill off to the nearest international airport, the sterile atmosphere of the private jet in which they spirit him across the Atlantic – all of it screams Vatican. But Father Bill also knows that the alphabet soup of Holy See intelligence agencies can be so convoluted it is nearly impossible to keep the factions straight. One thing he knows for sure: these six burly fascinonorosi who have, in effect, kidnapped him, are as far removed from the Church as the caged wolves are from the zookeeper.
By mid-morning, the plane has reached the Bay of Biscay, descending through lightning storms over the Pyrenees,’ then bumping over the Mediterranean. Father Bill, blind and wheezing for air in the hood, grips the arm-rests and picks up little clues: the hushed radio chatter in Italian, the g-forces pushing up through the cabin as the plane begins its descent into Roman air space. Less than an hour later, the plane is on the ground at Leonardo Da Vinci International, and Father Bill Buonaserra is being ushered, as helpless and sightless as a troglodyte, through noisy jet-ways and corridors. Another three sweaty hours in the hood, and the priest realizes he’s descending into the earth. He can smell the musky stench of loam, as the vehicle bangs over steel thresholds, and the odor of defunct olive groves and withered lemon trees give way to the tarry black chill of the underground. The engine echoes, and the tires whine for what seems an eternity.
Rome was established twenty-seven centuries ago, but the catacombs, which perforate the earth for miles around the Viate Vaticano, worming their way under the Basilicas and outlying ruins, are endless and virtually uncharted. And it is within these labyrinthine worm-holes, at some nameless terminal point miles outside of the sacred city, that they finally disembark and lock Father Bill in a crumbling, fetid, windowless cell – keeping him there for days without charge or explanation, feeding him prison fare and questioning him in the manner of an enemy counter-intelligence officer.
At last, on the eleventh day, a guard comes and escorts Father Bill deeper into the warren of stone tunnels.
Moving through pools of dim, incandescent light, they pass the various and sundry offices of the Segreto Polizia – the secret vigilante organization that has long ago splintered away from the Holy See – the rooms clicking with keyboard chatter and buzzing with muttered prayers. A rag-tag assemblage of the defrocked and the demoted, dedicated to eradicating the influence of the netherworld, the Polizia is the theological analogue of 1960s militant groups such as the Weathermen, the PLO, and the Brigate Rosse. And as Father Bill passes the last doorway on the left, he notices something that he had always disparaged as urban legend: the padded, electrified armchairs of the remote viewers, mounted to the floor in the stark, gloomy room, awaiting the next team to plug in and perform their uncanny reconnaissance. Father Bill remembers hearing rumors about the “viewers” in the early 1970s. Allegedly recruited out of the Defense Intelligence Agency, this select group of gifted psychics can remotely “see” through the eyes of enemy operatives, and gather intelligence for military purposes. But only the Segreto Polizia would think of targeting their vision downward – or perhaps inward is more precise — into the circles of hell.
Finally they usher Father Bill into a Spartan, desolate interrogation room, where a high-ranking cleric in the Polizia is sitting behind a steel desk. They sit the American priest down across from the clergyman. “One last time I will ask you, Father,” the cleric says in a low monotone, without emotion. The interrogator is an old man in a threadbare silk vestment with a thick manila file in front of him. He may or may not ha
ve once been an archbishop. The deep wrinkles around his sunken eyes are magnified by half-moon reading-glasses. “What exactly is the meaning of the sequence?”
The old man pushes a forensic photograph across the steel table.
In spite of his malnourishment and exhaustion, Father Bill recognizes the close-up of welts on the body of a comatose boy from Little Rock, possessed by the demon Malefar for twenty-three days, the sores appearing as strings of crow’s feet raised on the tender flesh of the child, forming the letters: AAAGTCTGAC AGAATTACCT TAATAACAT. The series – which had come to be known as Undetermined Sequence ‘A’ in Father Bill’s notes – is the reason Father Bill is here, the reason he is being broken, softened up. “I wish to see a consigliare,” Father Bill says for the umpteenth time.
“YOU ARE NOT IN AMERICA!” the old man shrieks at the top of his lungs, making the guard – a burly man draped in a monastic robe, standing behind the cleric – jerk with a start. “You have consorted with the unclean,” the old man goes on with veins bulging. “You have addressed lower demons by name. The hemographic wounds — what do they mean? We have studied them for months, and have found nothing. You will tell me now. What. They. Mean!”
Something shifts in the earth beneath the room, the joists creaking.
“I wish to see a consigliare, a procuratore, and that is the last word I will utter on the subject until I do,” Buonaserra declares in a hoarse murmur, despite the fact that he has no earthly clue what the letters mean. He has consulted his own experts, cryptologists at the University of Chicago, theologians, and nobody can make any sense of the sequence. The only thing Father Bill knows for sure is that the sequence is a message – either a riddle, a codex, or a trick — proffered by the demon Malefar.
“Take him back!” The old man barks the words in Italian to his beefy functionary, slamming a gnarled fist on the file. “And withhold his rations until he decides to loosen his filthy tongue!”
