He was drawn to the man, whose name he did not know, like a comet to the sun, and like those celestial bodies, passing in the dark, close and yet so far. Keeping an ear open for reports of missing boys in the various nonwhite Catholic communities, he and his underground army would watch those streets and wild areas, hoping to catch him before his next sacrifice. Several times over the past decade, they nearly had him. That one night in the New Jersey marshlands, when they’d come upon the still-warm body of the Vietnamese boy and heard the monster rumbling off through the brush like some sort of insane bear. Running as fast as he could, his knife drawn, Grale arrived at the roadside only to see the disappearing taillights of the killer’s vehicle.
It had been many months since Grale had last heard rumors of the demon—these two bodies appeared to have been killed a very long time ago—and he sensed that his quarry was far away. Maybe gone forever from New York, killing and defiling in some other community. But he felt the man’s presence in the clearing as though he were watching from behind one of the ancient trees.
Walking to the edge of the graves, he dropped a set of beads back into each grave. “I will pay you for your prizes, Sheila,” he said in a voice that tolerated no objection. “But these must remain with the bodies for the police to find.” He knelt at one grave, noted the horrible gash that had severed the throat, knew that the bodies had been sexually assaulted to satisfy the lust of a dark god that demanded blood and perversion.
Grale administered last rites, feeling that God would understand. When he finished, he chose one of the more respectable-looking and dependable of his group—one who merely looked like one of Manhattan’s ordinary bums—to carry a message for him to the Village Voice.
“Ask to speak to Ariadne Stupenagel, tell them to say to her that Grale has a message for her,” he said. “She will come. Then when you are sure she understands how to find this place, tell her to call the police.”
Grale then appointed two more of his most trusted lieutenants to stand guard over the graves until the morning. “They are not to be disturbed,” he warned, noting the faces that turned away looking guilty. “Or the transgressors will feel my blade as surely as the one who did this thing.”
The last threat probably wasn’t necessary. Except for a creature known as Spare Parts, who was the acknowledged king of the mole people, Grale’s word was the closest thing there was to law in the tunnels, and he was regarded with superstitious awe. But it never hurt to capitalize on that, and he’d seen the hungry looks.
Grale was about to push back through the bushes around the clearing when a shadow passed between the moon and the earth. The mole people around him yammered and mewed in fear, and he had to catch himself as he staggered forward like a man struck by a blow.
“He has killed again,” Grale whispered. “God, give me strength.”
• • •
Fifteen hundred miles to the west, a great bear of a man limped across the sagebrush desert near the Rio Grande Gorge. Other than labored breathing through his broad, flat nose, he made no sound, nor did he respond to the frightened whimpers of the ten-year-old boy he pulled along behind him with a rope. The boy was naked, without even shoes to protect his feet from the sharp rocks and prickly pear cactus. But if the child tried to stop because of the pain, he was yanked forward so hard by the noose around his neck that he choked and gasped for air.
It had been easy enough to capture the boy, as well as those who’d preceded him. Indian children were taught to trust Catholic priests implicitly, and this one had willingly climbed in the truck when asked if he could help direct him to the grocery store. He’d taken the child to an abandoned shack on property owned by the St. Ignatius Retreat and left him hog-tied on a filthy mattress until he could return for him that night.
• • •
Father Hans Lichner stood more than six and a half feet tall and weighed in at close to three hundred pounds, most of it muscle from the hard labor he put his sixty-three-year-old body through, chopping wood and gardening. His face was nearly covered by a full beard, which was usually littered with bits of his last meal. Tonight he wore sandals and a brown monk’s robe with nothing beneath it.
The limp was the result of the American bomb that had fallen through the roof of his family home in Berlin in February 1944 when he was four. His shattered leg had been improperly set by a town veterinarian—the family’s real doctor having long since died in the snows outside of Leningrad, as had Lichner’s father. But the deformed leg was still better than what had been done to his mother and older sister a year later when the Russians arrived and made him watch as they gang-raped the screaming women and then slit their throats. He’d been bayoneted and left for dead. But American soldiers found him and took him to a hospital.
After his release from the hospital he was sent to an orphanage established by a Catholic relief organization, where the priest who ran the facility had taken a special interest in the sad little boy. He’d endured the nightly abuses from the sweating priest, who, when finished, would beat him and call him horrible names. “This is your fault, you filthy creature,” he’d ranted.
Like the other orphans, he’d hoped that some nice American couple would adopt him and take him away from the nightmare of the orphanage, but no one wanted a lame little boy when there were so many healthy ones available. His hope had turned to anger by puberty, much of which he spent torturing animals; he’d been especially fond of playing the role of one of the ancient Jewish patriarchs and “sacrificing” his prey by slitting their throats in the basements of ruined buildings.
As a teenager, he’d discovered that the bloodletting aroused his sexual desires. However, he perceived girls as filthy creatures like his mother and sister, who he had come to believe had not screamed in agony but with pleasure during their rapes and deserved having their throats cut. Instead, he’d taken up where his former tormentor left off and begun raping younger boys at the orphanage. Not just any boys, however, but the dark children of Cain, the offspring of the unnatural mating of German women and Negro servicemen. He made himself believe that by raping these evil children he was insulting Satan.
As it came time for him to leave the orphanage, he grew afraid. He knew no other life than the strict discipline of his Catholic overseers, nor did he want to leave the objects of his sexual desires for a world in which they might not be so plentiful. So he’d joined the Jesuit order and studied to be an elementary schoolteacher so that he would always be near his boys.
After his ordination, he’d applied to go to the United States, where he knew there were many more dark children. Once in America and assigned to the New York archdiocese, he discovered that his calling was more important than he’d at first believed. The filthy brown children were threatening to overrun the country, indeed the world, as the Führer had predicted; they all grew up to be criminals and drains on society, breeding like beasts. Godly white men needed to step up, and he had been chosen.
However, the final act that had pushed his warped mind over the edge occurred without having been planned. At a summer camp in the Catskill Mountains, he had fondled an Asian-American preteen who pushed him away and said he was going to tell the counselors. They’d struggled and the boy had fallen backward and struck his head, knocking him out. Afraid, Lichner had waited until he could spirit the comatose boy into the woods, where he dug a shallow grave. His plan was simply to bury his victim but the boy had moaned in pain.
Instead of pity, however, the boy’s suffering aroused him. He’d raped the boy and then he was struck by an inspiration born from the images of his family’s deaths and his sacrifices of the animals. He was Abraham and the child, Isaac. But this time God had not stayed his hand as he pulled back his victim’s head and, using a pocketknife, hacked crudely at the neck until his arms were covered with blood and his victim was dead. When a search was later launched for the missing boy, he’d made sure he was assigned to the area where the grave was located and prevented its discove
ry.
That was many years ago, and he’d perfected his ritual, buying the curved Assyrian blade that enabled him to dispatch his sacrifices with a single slash. It was risky business. He knew others would try to stop him in a misguided belief that he was committing murder. How could the sacrifice of mere animals be considered murder? And indeed there were several close calls. Twelve years earlier, he’d nearly finished with that Puerto Rican child, but he’d allowed his lusts to overcome his good judgment and raped the boy in Central Park too near a footpath before he’d cut the child’s throat. Unfortunately, a couple had come along and heard the boy’s cries and chased him away. The child then reported him to his parents, who’d gone to the church with their complaint.
Fortunately, there were those who understood his mission; chief among them was Andrew Kane, whose law firm represented the church. Kane arranged the payment that bought the silence of the boy’s parents, a couple of drug addicts who killed themselves with the money, and good riddance.
At the time, Kane knew only about his sexual preferences. But Lichner confessed the true nature of his work—believing that he’d found someone else who understood the necessity. A few days later, the lawyer called him into an office at the archdiocese where he told him that the archbishop himself understood that Lichner was performing an important service for God. Of course, Kane said, he should understand that the archbishop could not openly embrace his mission. The unbelievers would raise a stink and might even prevent Lichner from continuing. However, in exchange for the archbishop’s secret protection, he was from time to time to make himself available to perform some service on behalf of the church.
Most of these services turned out to be as a sort of messenger sent to intimidate miscreants who dared threaten the church and its priests over a few sexual indiscretions, such as the slut who threatened his good friend, Father O’Callahan, who’d become his intermediary with Kane. Usually all he had to do was appear and let his size—and what he believed to be his God-inspired inner spirit—cow these people, then suggest that they accept the money the church was offering for their silence. Occasionally, he’d resorted to physical violence. Only once, shortly after the incident with the Puerto Rican boy, were the tables turned. He’d been sent to warn the parents of a young nigger who’d been shot by a police officer—a good, white Catholic detective whom the church had wanted to protect. But he’d narrowly escaped a beating himself; there was simply no reasoning with the inhuman members of that race, and there’d been too many to fight that night.
There was one troubling aspect to his mission when he was in New York. Several years earlier, he realized that he was being hunted. By whom and to what end, he didn’t know, but several times he’d sensed his pursuer near and fled. It filled him with a sense of dread. One man he did not fear, but this one traveled with an army of disgusting subhuman creatures who appeared to have crawled from the bowels of the earth. So when the Vietnamese child escaped his vehicle six months earlier when the trunk did not close entirely and again he was accused of sexual assault by the parents, he had not objected when O’Callahan suggested that he needed to disappear for a time.
They sent him to New Mexico and told him to attend classes for sexual offenders. At first, he’d taken umbrage at the label. As if he was nothing more than a crass pedophile, rather than a German warrior sending a message—no, a challenge—to Satan. He complained in a telephone call to O’Callahan that the doctors at the retreat were forcing him to participate in group therapy. But his friend had urged him to “say what you know they want you to say. The sooner you make them happy, the sooner you can return to us.”
That was enough to make Lichner start being an active, even amiable, participant at the retreat. It was more difficult to carry on his work in Taos; the population was smaller and it was not as easy to move about without being noticed. He prayed nightly to return to New York City, where he sensed that great events were unfolding in which he hoped to play a pivotal role. He’d known that ever since September 11, 2001, when the brown-skinned Hittites had crashed the airplanes into the World Trade Center. On that glorious day, he’d looked up and seen the demon’s face in the smoke that billowed from the two towers and knew that the time of reckoning was drawing near.
However, for now he had to play the game with the psychiatrists. But he still kept his covenant with God. Every month during the full moon when Satan was at his most powerful, Lichner would sacrifice a new Isaac to remind Lucifer who was in charge: the God of Abraham, not some fallen angel.
Tonight was such a night. The blood of Isaac would again be spilled in the desert. As he trudged across the soft soil and washes filled with sand, his stride still purposeful despite the limp, he thought about what was to come and felt the old stirring in his groin. He had to remind himself that the act was not about his personal pleasure—that he felt any joy was just one of the rewards allowed to him by God. Still, anticipation made him want to hurry so he gave the lead rope a hard tug that caused the child to cry out. “Silence, Isaac,” he snarled in German. “Soon enough you may complain in hell.”
At last he came to the edge of the gorge and followed a thin path along its rim. He had to admit that the setting was even better than Central Park, where he’d buried many of his earlier sacrifices. It was unfortunate that the police had discovered the graves of the other Indian boys; he’d had to drive much farther this time to make sure he wasn’t discovered. But it was still nearly perfect for his purposes. Earlier in the day, he’d prepared a shallow grave with one end facing the abyss where he imagined his victim’s soul would find easy access to hell and deliver the message that a soldier of God stood between Satan and domination of the world.
He was in no hurry. He’d waited for the eleven o’clock bed check and then stuffed pillows and blankets beneath his sheets to make it appear that he was still there, on the small chance that someone would look in on him later. Then he left, knowing that he didn’t have to be back until just before morning Mass. He’d made his way out of a little-used back gate on the retreat grounds and to the abandoned shed where he kept his victims and an old truck he’d purchased and secreted there. Fortunately, the moon had provided enough illumination that he’d been able to drive the gravel road along the gorge without using his headlights until he arrived at the spot where he and the boy would walk.
Arriving at the grave, he yanked the boy to his knees. “TEUFEL!” He bellowed the German word for demon toward the gorge. The idea was to challenge the demon to rise from the depth of the earth and force him to witness the demise of another of his servants.
Reaching into the folds of his robe with his right hand, Lichner produced his long curved knife. With his left hand he grabbed the child’s dark hair and pulled the head back until the boy was forced to blink up at the brilliant moon.
“Ich schicke Ihren dinener zu Hoelle!” he cried. (I send your servant to hell.) With a swift motion, he drew the blade across the child’s throat. Blood gouted from the wound as the priest stood back and used his foot to shove the dying boy face first into the grave.
Stooping, Lichner wiped the blade in the sand. He would clean it better later, but now he had three final tasks to perform as he lifted his robe and knelt behind the convulsing body. When he was finished with the first he removed the rosary beads from the pocket of his robe.
The gold medallion gleamed dully in the moonlight. He’d seen the box of beads while attending a seminar at the archdiocese—intended he supposed for special parishioners, but he’d thought they would add a nice touch to his own rituals. He tossed the beads in on top of the corpse and picked up the shovel to finish the job.
• • •
A thousand miles to the east, David Grale looked up at the same moon as he recovered from the invisible blow that told him of the murder of another child. “The time of reckoning draws near,” he croaked in a strangled voice as his followers looked at him with fear and scurried for their underground homes.
21
“GO AHEAD, MY SON,” FATHER EDUARDO SAID AS HE PLACED his arm around Charlie Jojola, who stood with his head down in front of his father, Marlene Ciampi, and Lucy Karp.
“You tell them,” the boy implored.
The priest shook his head. “It is not right for me to say something that was revealed in confession,” he said. “In fact, I cannot make you do this at all. But I think you know that you should.”
The boy nodded. He scuffed his feet in the sand of the recreation center courtyard, but wouldn’t look up or speak.
With his heart sinking, John Jojola thought this must be some new trouble his son was mixed up in. But he tried not to let the disappointment show in his voice. “Come on, Charlie, spit it out.”
Charlie frowned. “You’ll get pissed, and I won’t get my new shoes.”
“How did you know about the…,” Jojola began to say, then thought, Heck, teach a kid since childhood how to cover his tracks, he ought to be able to disguise that he’d been snooping in the old army chest I keep under the bed. “Doesn’t matter. Yeah, I may get angry if you’ve done something wrong, but a man takes responsibility for his actions whatever the consequences.”
Jojola stopped himself. He didn’t have the energy for this on Saturday morning after a long, sad week. Two days earlier, on Thursday, another boy had been reported missing from the reservation and was presumed dead. And a few days before that Char Gates had called to tell him that another grave had been found along the rim of the gorge about two miles south of the first one. “Same MO,” she’d said. “Throat slit. Rosary beads.”
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