Tales from the Vatican Vaults: 28 extraordinary stories by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Garry Kilworth, Mary Gentle, KJ Parker, Storm Constantine and many more

by David V. Barrett

  He laughed. His eyes twinkled, and he looked at me with warmth.

  ‘They even had me believing it,’ he said as if we were old friends who understood each other.

  I was appalled by his familiarity. ‘Believing what?’

  ‘Those lies. Those hateful lies told by men who couldn’t accept what their lives had become. I never did anything, except do my best to exemplify God’s love.’

  My breath caught. He had been here at least ten years, and he still thought himself innocent. He thought himself the victim.

  I hadn’t expected that. I hadn’t expected this man before me, an older version of the younger one, eyes still bright with intelligence.

  I had convinced myself I would find one of two men here: a monster who knew what hell he had brought into the world, or a broken man who begged for forgiveness.

  I had found neither. I had found an older version of Father Joe, and I realised with a chill that had he been at some parish with families and children and teenage boys, he would still be trying to show them what he so horribly called God’s love.

  I almost stood and left, but I made myself stay. I had sat across from murderers, people still covered in blood, people who never took responsibility for the lives they had taken, and none of them had upset me as deeply as this man did, right now.

  I guess that boy was still inside me, the one who needed the order and discipline of the Church. I guess that boy wanted to know – needed to believe – that this remedy worked, that exile turned men like Father Joe into someone else, someone who asked for and finally received the forgiveness promised in the Scriptures.

  He didn’t even know he needed forgiveness. He believed he was more sinned against than sinning.

  ‘You’re not here to take me back, are you?’ he asked, and this time, I recognised the bitterness in his voice. It was deep and practised, a well-worn groove in a life gone wrong.

  ‘No,’ I said, and noted with a touch of surprise, I could no longer call him Father Joe.

  ‘So why are you here? To get some kind of personal satisfaction by accusing me of hurting you? You have to see me face to face, is that it?’

  My breath caught. Had he hurt me? For one brief moment, I worried that I had repressed old memories.

  But I knew I hadn’t. I hadn’t been one of Father Joe’s boys. I had watched from the outside. Father Donnelly had actually seen me one afternoon, staring longingly at the troop who flocked behind Father Joe, and had said, You think you want to be part of that. But nothing is as it seems, my son. And the fact that you’re here, now, while those boys are walking away shows me just how much God loves you.

  I swallowed hard. If God had loved me, had he hated the other boys? I couldn’t believe that.

  I was taught that such things didn’t follow one after the other, but I recognised now what emotion had fuelled my quest. Not just curiosity, but guilt. Guilt that I had somehow – through luck or the love of God – dodged something awful.

  Father Joe was watching me, his expression guarded.

  He didn’t remember. He didn’t remember if he had touched me or not. I would have wagered in that moment – and I would wager now – that he didn’t know the names of most of the boys he hurt.

  He reached across the emptiness between us and grabbed my arm. I resisted the urge to pull away.

  ‘I rescued you once,’ he said. ‘I took you away from an awful life. You owe me.’

  I stared at his hand. The hand I didn’t want on me now, the hand those boys hadn’t wanted on them then.

  ‘You want me to rescue you,’ I said.

  ‘That’s why you’re here, isn’t it? To get answers? And sometimes getting answers requires action. Such as simply returning a favour long past.’

  A feeling of calm descended over me.

  ‘I can do that,’ I said.

  He smiled that old Father Joe smile. I had forgotten what charisma he had and what great charm. Anything felt possible in the wake of that smile.

  Or it had. Now that smile looked odd on such an angry and battered face.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said, pulling his hand away as he started to stand up.

  ‘Sit down,’ I said.

  The tone I used wasn’t a boy’s. It was a voice I hadn’t used in years, not since interview rooms in the Chicago PD. I didn’t yell or speak any louder than I had before, but this voice of mine, learned over long difficult years, made the most hardened criminal sit down.

  Father Joe sat down.

  He watched me like they used to in those Chicago interrogation rooms, uncertain what I would do next.

  ‘When I was a boy,’ I said, ‘my father was drinking his way into the gutter. I tried to get him to stop, and finally I told you about him.’

  Father Joe was watching me, obviously confused about why I was bringing this up now.

  ‘You told me that God gave everyone the freedom to choose his own life, and I had to respect that choice, even if it was a bad one.’

  Father Joe leaned back just a little, his mouth open slightly, as if he were going to argue.

  ‘You said I just had to be there when the other person realised how bad his choice had been, maybe to catch him, or maybe to help him recover.’

  I leaned forward. ‘But you left something out. You left out the most important part.’

  He turned his head, but his gaze remained on me. I could feel how desperately he wanted to look away, and how he was too frightened to.

  ‘I learned,’ I said, ‘that there are people who like their bad choices so much that it doesn’t matter how many opportunities you give them. It doesn’t matter how many hands get extended to them, how many times someone offers to rescue them. They don’t want to be rescued.’

  ‘I do want rescue,’ he said tightly.

  ‘No, you don’t,’ I said. ‘Because you don’t even see what’s wrong with this moment.’

  ‘That I asked a boy I rescued to return the favour and he won’t?’ His voice vibrated with fury.

  ‘That you sit in the most beautiful church I have ever seen, in the presence of a God that you vowed to serve every day of your life, and you beg me for rescue. Me, a former cop, with no powers at all.’

  His face flushed.

  ‘I can’t rescue you, Father,’ I said. ‘You don’t want to be rescued. You don’t think you did anything wrong.’

  He watched me, his eyes glittering with rage.

  I stood.

  ‘You were right, all those years ago,’ I said. ‘God gave us free will so that we could choose the right path. And part of choosing that path is recognising that most people won’t.’

  ‘You came here to tell me that?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ I said quietly. ‘I think I had come here to see what a monster looked like. And instead, I found that you look no different at all.’

  *

  I left the room, and climbed the stairs.

  The sun had moved, muting the light through the stained glass. The sanctuary looked like half a dozen sanctuaries I’d been in, that moment of reverence gone.

  I did then what I hadn’t done when we hovered in the back: I walked up front, knelt, and bowed my head.

  Not to pray for Father Joe. Others could do that.

  Not even to ask for forgiveness for all I had done in my life.

  But to give thanks for that moment of clarity.

  I wanted order so badly that I somehow believed the Church’s very existence would provide it. Even as I aged, I hoped that something magical in these places would take a man and make him something he wasn’t.

  A man’s redemption didn’t come from the outside.

  It came from the inside.

  And I had already found it, even back then, even as a boy. I had wanted to change. I had wanted to make my life better, and I had known – somehow – that I had to do it. No one else could.

  Perhaps that was why Father Joe never touched me. I hadn’t been lost or desperate. I had just been hungry and grieving. Father
Donnelly, with his baseball, Father Bill with his jokes, they had been enough for me.

  And the world they all opened for me had enough rules to give me guidance, and enough freedom to let me walk away if I needed to.

  I wasn’t sure God could forgive men like Father Joe. I never believed in prison conversions. They were too easy. And people who had destroyed lives like Father Joe had didn’t deserve easy.

  I stood, my knees cracking with age and effort.

  This place was aptly named. It was Hell Island. Hell’s waiting room. Even here, though, there was a chance for salvation. I stood inside that chance right now, with the light from the stained glass fading around me.

  I doubted any of these men would take that salvation offered them.

  Which made the island’s nickname apt as well. The Island of Lost Priests.

  This island wasn’t even a detour on the road to eternal damnation.

  It was the end of the road.

  The last stop, before true punishment could begin.

  Ω

  There is much work still to be done on uncovering the secrets of the Island of Lost Priests – not least, ascertaining just where it is, ‘one of many unoccupied islands found in the world’s oceans’. The writer of this account indicated that the Church owned other hidden islands as well; perhaps the island he visited was just one of several performing the same job, or perhaps other islands have other purposes.

  In the mid-1970s, when he wrote this account, the Church was only just beginning to admit to abuse by its priests, but the extent of it had still not been revealed; the writer admits that he ‘had to sign all kinds of confidentiality stuff.’ Only since Pope John Paul launched the Commission of Enquiry into Abuse in the Church, with police and social services working closely together with Church officials, has it not only been honest about the issue, but shown its determination to root it out and deal with it.

  1978

  This account of events in the necropolis far below St Peter’s Basilica, on the night of 6–7 August 1978, must be one of the very last documents to be placed in the Vatican Vaults before the election of Pope John Paul.

  It reveals the existence of a covert intelligence network within the Catholic Church – but that is the least of its revelations.

  Apocryphon

  Stephen Marley

  ‘I have lived my life according to a simple maxim: what can exist does exist.’

  Monsignor Felici’s parting words haunted Father Jerome as he descended the spiral stairway to the Vatican necropolis beneath St Peter’s. As he passed below the foundations of the fourth-century Constantine basilica, Jerome was still puzzling over the significance of the monsignor’s remark, delivered barely ten minutes ago in the Italian dignitary’s office in the Apostolic Palace.

  As Sister Yi Zhenmei was fond of observing, Monsignor Felici ‘majored in Cryptic’. Appropriate enough for a cleric who exerted considerable influence in the Crypt, as the Catholic Church’s covert intelligence network was known to its close-mouthed insiders, who were themselves designated as ‘ghosts’. As a novice ghost to the Crypt, summoned from his first parish in North Yorkshire barely six months after arriving fresh-faced at its presbytery door, Father Jerome was still trying to find his way in the protean power structure of the Vatican secret service.

  So it was all the more inexplicable that Felici had chosen him to keep vigil in the Chamber of the Vates. And wasn’t Monsignor Ortega the assigned watcher for tonight’s vigil? Although, with the necessary ‘sanitising’ of records and ‘disappearing’ of sensitive files necessitated by the prospect of a new Pope, that particular monsignor may well have been called away to take charge of ‘Cleansing’. True enough, Felici had assured him that Sister Yi Zhenmei would try to get to the Chamber before him, but there was no guarantee. She might be an hour – two hours – late. In the meantime, he would be alone. The only reason he could fathom for the responsibility falling on him, after barely three weeks in the Crypt, was that everyone else was too busy rushing hither and thither since the death of His Holiness less than two hours before Jerome was summoned to Felici’s office. By now, almost midnight, the Camerlengo would have taken the Fisherman’s Ring from the Pope’s finger and ceremonially destroyed its signet. The Catholic Church was bereft of a leader. This was the time of the sede vacante, the interregnum of the Empty Chair.

  Jerome shook his head. Life as a parish priest was much simpler. He was out of his depth in Rome.

  And descending into the depths. The air became denser, drier, warmer, as he trod the final steps down into the necropolis, six storeys below St Peter’s marble floor. When his feet touched level ground and he stared down the narrow street of the dead, he experienced a sudden sense of . . . what? – apprehension? – dread?

  What can exist does exist.

  He brushed off the presentiment, berating himself for foolishness. He was as bad as those visitors on the ninety-minute guided Scavi tour, suffering panic attacks the moment they entered the first passageway, squeezed by claustrophobia as the walls of ancient brickwork closed in. No such misgiving had troubled him on his two previous visits, tagging along behind the tourists. He should know better. He did know better.

  The necropolis was no Stygian underworld, bedevilled by wraiths. It was once, simply, a network of miniature streets, open to the sky and lined with replica houses for the dead, on the southwest flank of Vatican Hill stretching down to the banks of the Tiber. When the Emperor Constantine ordered the construction of the original St Peter’s in 326, the city of the dead was buried under tons of soil and masonry fragments that provided the foundations of the mighty basilica. Not until 1940 was it rediscovered. The story of the necropolis was archaeology, not demonology.

  He followed the southernmost of the two excavated main streets, each orientated in an east–west direction and providing a double-spine to the complex uncovered in the 1940s archaeological digs. Even back in those early days, some one thousand burial sites were identified. After October 1950, many more thousands were uncovered in successive popes’ plans to explore the necropolis almost to the banks of the Tiber. A gargantuan enterprise, and a secret one. Perhaps only the Vatican could have maintained the necessary secrecy for such a mammoth project, knowledge of its existence restricted to the Pope, five cardinals, the Scavi guides and some members of the Crypt. And why the secrecy? Four days ago, before Felici first informed him of the hidden regions of the necropolis and the new-found Chamber of the Vates, he wouldn’t have asked that question because he was as ignorant of the secret excavations as the rest of the world. Now that he knew of their existence, and the reason for keeping them concealed, he wished he’d remained ignorant.

  But Jerome had little time to brood, even while breathing in ancient dust and surrounded by the stern brickwork façades enclosing mausoleums with elaborate tombs and faded frescoes, each casting a sombre spell, a spell no less potent in the humbler tombs with their utilitarian loculi. In the breathless air of the necropolis, rich and poor were as one, a democracy of the dead.

  There was also, he reflected wryly, a tacit ecumenism between Pagan and Christian. Even in death, they had grown old together, differences forgotten. In truth, many mausoleums were in their origin Pagan Christian, Christian Pagan. In one tomb, Christ was portrayed as Helios in his chariot of the sun. In another, he was Sol Invictus, the Unconquered Sun, the god of Constantine. Theologies converged.

  He turned into a narrow corridor that led south-west to a tomb draped in tarpaulin worksheets. It was one of three entrances to the restricted necropolis. Regular followers of the Scavi tour might have noticed that three tombs, close together, had one of them ‘under refurbishment’ at any given time. The open entrance was always ‘under refurbishment’. The opening of each portal was alternated randomly every three or four months; as one was opened, the former entrance was sealed. A single tomb, permanently ‘under refurbishment’, would have roused suspicion.

  Quickly consulting his map, he entered a nondes
cript vault, brushing aside the tarpaulin. He approached a faded mural depicting the upper body of the double-headed god, Janus, then took out an Introibo, which was designed to resemble a black cigarette case. He opened the Introibo and jabbed out a sixteen-digit sequence of numbers on the button display. Crypt code entered, he held up the device to Janus’s right eye and pressed the activation button inside the case.

  Signal transmitted, the wall slid to the right, disclosing an open doorway. After a moment’s hesitation he walked through. Seconds later, he heard the wall slide shut behind him.

  From here on, the necropolis became a fully-fledged labyrinth. He constantly checked his map, carefully navigating a way through the maze. Even with the map it was quite possible to get lost in the dimly lit, twisting tunnels, so he was reassured by the feel of the handheld transceiver strapped to his belt.

  He was further reassured when he entered a cramped courtyard that he identified, from its layout, as the Court of Uriel. From here, according to Monsignor Felici, it was less than five minutes to his destination, the Chamber of the Vates, named after the soothsayers of Vatican Hill, decades before the birth of Christ, but rediscovered only five days ago.

  For reasons best known to the Holy Father, the Chamber of the Vates was declared forbidden to anyone outside the covert Crypt, whether the outsider was a humble priest or exalted cardinal. You had to be a ghost to enter this chamber.

  *

  ‘So this is the famous crypt – a suitable location for a ghost.’

  Sister Yi Zhenmei lofted an imperious eyebrow at the trite remark from Father Dieter. ‘Yeah, yeah,’ she sighed ostentatiously, ‘that joke gets funnier each time I hear it. Crypt as in Catholic secret operations. Ghost as in Catholic secret agent. I get it. I keep getting it. Hilarious.’

  Sister Yi planted fists on hips and tapped her foot, the sound echoing faintly in the spacious rectangle of the underground chamber.

  The German priest raised submissive palms. ‘Sorry, Sister Yi. Really sorry. You can stop aiming that eyebrow at me.’