Reggiani opened the nearest door with the key he’d used to enter the building. They entered.
Inside, someone was seated on a wooden chair facing the center window. Reggiani moved slowly through the barren room. Sister Florence followed. It was very cold; a horrible odor of decayed flesh pervaded the air.
Reggiani walked around the chair. “Father Bellofontaine,” he whispered, his voice choked with emotion. He looked back at Sister Florence and beckoned.
She moved to Reggiani’s side and crossed herself. “May God have mercy on his soul!”
Reggiani stared at what had been Father James McGuire. Father Bellofontaine resembled his predecessors. He sat motionless, holding the gold crucifix. His face was shriveled and colorless, the skin wrinkled and pocked. His pupils were covered with cataracts. The hair on his head was matted together and strangely damp. His fingers were dry, spindly, tipped by long curled nails like the claws of a sloth. There was no detectable movement in his chest, no sign that he was actually alive.
Yet, he was. Seated as had been intended from the beginning. Although they’d nearly failed, Father Bellofontaine’s salvation had been achieved.
Reggiani shook his head. The past months, with their achievements and failures, had nearly severed him from sanity: the deaths of Sister Angelina and Biroc; the intervention of Ben Burdett, Gatz, and so many others; their manipulation of Burdett, once he’d become convinced that Faye was the chosen; the sham of the death watch, perpetrated to continue McGuire’s unknowing path and cover the nature of the aging process; the horrible revelation of Faye’s identity; the transformation of Ben Burdett’s opposition to allegiance; the miraculous escape from the burning building; and finally, Franchino’s death, his sacrifice, the incredible courage of a man who’d allowed himself to be destroyed by Satan, so that Father McGuire would be further drawn along, unaware of his destiny.
So many things. So many moments.
“And so it ends,” Reggiani said softly, though he knew that someday the process would start again…perhaps in his lifetime.
During Reggiani’s two weeks in Los Angeles, he’d made the necessary arrangements to protect Father Bellofontaine. Cardinal Willings of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles had been contacted, and, of necessity, included in the small circle of knowledgeable church officials. The land adjoining Father Bellofontaine’s sanctuary had been purchased, and preliminary architectural plans had been commissioned for the construction of a modest church from which Father Bellofontaine could be unobtrusively observed and guarded. And a successor to Monsignor Franchino had been appointed from within the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, charged to oversee the building, secure the safety of Father Bellofontaine, and prepare for the day when a new Sentinel would be chosen.
“We must go,” Reggiani said.
Sister Florence nodded, content. She’d asked to see Father Bellofontaine, and Reggiani had granted the request.
They descended the staircase to the ground floor and emerged onto the front lawn, where they paused to look up at Father Bellofontaine’s shaded outline. The focus of the midday sun was directed against the glass. They squinted, and black-stepped toward the sidewalk, trying to frame the image for their memories. Then they turned to the north, walking up the block toward the corner.
Moments later, Father Bellofontaine inched forward in his chair and lowered the cross, his hands seared along the palms. He did nothing for several minutes, then sat back, flashed a sardonic grin, and began to laugh, the sound emerging from a deep well of non-emotion, his body gradually losing its substance, reforming into that of Charles Chazen, eyes burning with fire, rebelling in success. The entire room filled with shapeless forms waiting for a sign. Chazen smiled. The clamor began anew, the sound of clashing metal and baleful cries.
“I call ye and declare ye now returned,” he cried. “Successful beyond hope to lead ye forth. Triumphant out of this infernal pit.” How many times had he called his armies, to no avail? But now it would be different. Prior to the transition, he’d preyed upon Father McGuire, when there was no one to protect the priest. For the first time since the millennium, a chosen successor to the Angel Gabriel had been perverted! Father McGuire had taken his life and joined them. And Chazen had assumed McGuire’s mortal form, to accomplish the charade for Cardinal Reggiani and Ben Burdett during the transition, his consummate powers also preventing the Almighty God from discovering the deception. And now he needed only time, moments in the grand scheme of eternity, to muster the armies of the night, the legions of Hell. Brazen with defiance, he called again. “We move triumphant out of his infernal pit. Abominable, accursed, the house of woe, dungeon of our tyrant.”
The building began to rumble; the clamor rose. Chazen stepped into the masses and stopped before the forms of Jack Cooper’s and Ben Burdett’s souls, both without substance, like wisps of air. And then into the doorway stepped his anointed, the soul of Father James McGuire, the chosen of the Lord God, the perverted instrument of the Almighty’s powers…now one of them.
“Now possess, as Lords, a spacious world, to our native heaven little inferior, by my adventures hard with peril great achieved.”
Amid a swarm of flashing light and vapors, Hell’s own echo filled the room, rocking the foundation with a tremor of cataclysm.
Chazen watched the dimensionless hordes, realizing that the next Messiah would be himself.
The outcry continuing, he inched back toward the seat, sat once again, and placed the cross in front of him, to perpetuate the deception until the time was right, to wait in the seemingly deserted building in a downtrodden neighborhood on the east side of Los Angeles.
Postscript
Two days after Cardinal Reggiani had returned to Rome, he was awakened by an aide at three o’clock in the morning and handed a telegram annotated “urgent.” The telegram came from the offices of the Archdiocese of New York.
Sitting up on the edge of his bed, Reggiani turned on the table lamp and opened the message. He read:
REGGIANI. NEW YORK MEDICAL EXAMINER HAS COMPLETED WORK ON THE REMAINS FOUND IN THE 68 WEST 89TH STREET FIRE, BODY FOUND IN ELEVATOR SHAFT HAS BEEN POSITIVELY INDENTIFIED AS THAT OF FATHER JAMES MCGUIRE. PLEASE ADVISE.
Reggiani shot to his feet, looking out into the shadows of the room.
“Are you all right?” the aide asked.
Reggiani began to tremble, saying nothing. Suddenly, he grabbed for his chest, the realization of what had happened striking his body like a jolt of electricity. He stumbled. The aide grabbed him and laid him on the bed. He began to gasp, grabbing his chest again, convulsing. He arched high on the bed, then settled back onto the twisted sheets, as the sudden coronary overwhelmed his body.
Soon, he was dead.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Born in New York City, Jeffrey Konvitz is an entertainment lawyer, film producer, and novelist. A graduate of Cornell University and Columbia Law School, Konvitz has both written a New York Times bestseller (The Sentinel) and produced a film whose worldwide box office gross exceeded $100 million (Spy Hard).
His first novel, The Sentinel (1974), was second on the New York Times Mass-Market Best Seller list and is considered to be a horror classic. After writing and producing the film adaptation of The Sentinel for Universal Pictures in 1977, Konvitz published two more bestselling novels: The Guardian (1979), the sequel to The Sentinel; and Monster (1982).
Konvitz has served as executive producer and financing counsel for three major motion pictures: O Jerusalem, I Could Never Be Your Woman, and The Flock. He is currently working on a historical novel, The Circus of Satan, about the late-nineteenth-century destruction of the national Irish Mob and the subsequent rise of Italians and Jews in nationwide politics and crime in the early twentieth century.
Konvitz is also preparing the third book in the Sentinel Trilogy, which continues the saga from where The Guardian left off.
He cur
rently resides in Los Angeles.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © by Jeffrey Konvitz
Cover design by Andy Ross
978-1-5040-2752-6
This edition published in 2016 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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