by Alex Archer
No cars had been permitted to park within several hundred feet of the church. No new ones arrived, and no headlights shone. A few news crews stood off to the sides in isolated pools of glare, but otherwise very little artificial illumination was visible except a few lights from the village nearby. Annja saw a number of law-enforcement officers bundled in black fake-fur hats and dark bulky jackets with big reflective initials on the back.
The occasion itself enforced the mood. Even a group of mildly punked-out Anglo kids who had walked near Annja for the past few hundred yards, scoffing among themselves, paused to buy candles from a little card-table vendor set discreetly on the outskirts of the church grounds. Now they walked softly without speaking, their young faces showing mostly a sort of awed expectation in the lights of the fat little yellow or white votive candles they carried in gloved and mittened hands.
Annja approached the church through a grove of cruelly topped cottonwood trees, with thin shoots rising unnaturally vertically from the lopped-off stumps of once mighty limbs. Many leaves still clung to shoots and limbs, probably still colorful to judge by what she had seen of the rest of the river valley and its flanking mountains, where great stands of aspen had caught flame in autumn yellows and reds. The snow muted any color the dry leaves held, made them sodden and dull. On the outskirts of the little grove several ambulances and emergency vehicles were parked. The EMTs stood around or sat in open doors, chatting and smoking.
Annja's boots crunched in the new snow. Despite the solemnity of the setting and affair, and the overhanging sense of dread, Annja felt a certain schoolgirl's delight at walking through snow. It was still a relative novelty for her. Growing up in New Orleans she could remember seeing snow only twice, once during a freak dusting of the city, a second time during a field trip some of the girls unaccountably were taken on to Cleveland, Ohio around Thanksgiving.
"And how is our warrior maid this evening?" a voice called softly in French.
Annja turned quickly around to see the trim, erect form of Father Robert Godin standing beneath a tree with utterly bare limbs, his hands in the pockets of his scuffed leather jacket. She felt an urge to move away quickly, and another urge to walk right up and slap him.
What she did was sigh and walk toward him. She kept a hand discreetly ready to move for the butt of the compact .40-caliber Glock 23 she carried in a holster clipped at the small of her back. She was not going to be caught off guard again. It gave her range the sword lacked. Also, if she did have to defend herself its effects would be a lot easier to explain.
"I'm cold," she said. "I didn't pack for this weather. I wasn't really thinking of this as a skiing trip."
He laughed softly with that seamed hound's face of his. "Let us hope you don't find things too warm soon."
She recoiled slightly. He frowned and shook his head. "Ah. Forgive me. A careless choice of words, was it not? I intended no reference to your illustrious predecessor. But rather to the possibility of vigorous action. Please forgive a young, gauche Antwerp wharf rat grown into an old, gauche Antwerp wharf rat, if you will."
She laughed and shook her head.
She came and stood by him, all the while wondering why. Just seeking the comfort of familiar companionship, on such a strange and fraught occasion, she thought. Although the more cynical part of her wondered why she might take comfort from the presence of someone who'd recently tried, determinedly and skillfully, to disable or kill her. She was beginning to understand the complex connection between Roux and Garin a little better.
"What are you doing here?" she asked, still speaking French. It seemed a useful security measure. Many of the people she had overheard spoke Spanish, and most of the rest spoke English.
"The same as you," he said. He didn't look at her, but instead scanned the scene ceaselessly from behind his round lenses. "Something will happen here tonight."
He glanced at her then, with a hint of a smile. "Or do you pretend to yourself not to sense it?"
She shook her head, frowning. "I don't even know what the hell I'm doing here talking to you. Aside from the fact you tried to shoot me – "
"A misunderstanding, shall we say?"
"I did a little online research on you. You have quite the résumé. Belgian paratrooper. Congo mercenary. French Foreign Legionnaire. Ph.D.s in history and psychology."
"Please don't leave out civil engineering," he said. "That was the hardest, by far."
"Globally renowned antiterrorism expert. And if I paid attention to conspiracy sites, what you've done the past twenty years has been a lot spookier than what you did in your mercenary days, and not a lot less bloody."
His smile was abstracted. He was scanning the scene again. His weight was rotated forward on the balls of his athletic shoes. He seemed tense as a hunting dog who's caught the first whiff of prey and is straining at the leash.
"You're well advised to ignore them. Their purported facts are absurdly mistaken. If not necessarily their take on the nature of what I am about."
She stared at him with mingled disbelief and horror. "You admit it? You're actually a hit man for the Vatican?"
Several Latino couples passing nearby, middle-aged and dressed in their Sunday best, looked sternly over at her outburst. Fortunately, they gave no sign of understanding what Annja had said.
"My niece apologizes," Godin told them in Spanish. "She finds herself somewhat overwrought by the occasion. She is an impressionable child."
The matronly scowls softened into smiles and nods. The men smiled, too, trying not to look too closely, much less too approvingly, at the leggy young gringa.
The youngest of the women noticed Godin's collar. "Your blessing, Father?" she asked shyly.
"To be sure," he said warmly. He blessed them. They crossed themselves and murmured thanks.
A shadow passed over Godin's face. He set his mouth, coughed behind his lips. To Annja's look of concern he gave a quick shake of his head.
"Sometimes I don't know whether to hug you or punch you," she continued in French.
"If you don't answer my question I'm walking away," she said. "Are you really a secret enforcer from the Vatican?"
He stuck a thumb inside his collar and fished out a round silver medallion hung from a fine silver chain. She squinted to look at it in the uncertain light. Then her eyes widened in shocked surprise. It looked like a crudely struck coin. It prominently showed a cross, not of squared timbers, but logs knobbly with the stubs of hacked-off limbs. To the left the cross was flanked by a small bush, possibly laurel. To the right was an upright straight-bladed sword, not so very different from the one that answered Annja's call. Around it were inscribed tiny words.
"Exurge domine et judica causam tuam," she said, half-breathlessly.
He nodded. "'Arise, O Lord, and judge thy cause,'" he translated, though certain she knew it. "Your eyes are very fine."
"I don't have to read it. That's the insignia of the Inquisition!" she exclaimed.
"Quite."
"I didn't think the holy office existed anymore."
"They have gone through some changes. And my functions are not – how shall we say? – openly acknowledged."
She took a step away from him. He laughed.
"You need have no fear of me. I have not the slightest interest in burning heretics or witches. But even as my somewhat questionable predecessors thought they were doing, I am engaged in protecting the body and soul of the church. And of humanity itself, communicant or otherwise."
"How?" she asked.
"You are familiar with the concept of spiritual warfare?" Godin asked.
"You wage spiritual warfare for the Vatican?"
He smiled. "Not exactly, my dear. When it ceases to be a metaphor – and moves beyond the purely spiritual, as it were – that is when my real work begins."
"You fight demons?" Annja asked.
"Demonic influences. When they break into our world and begin to cause actual destruction and pain. It happens far more frequent
ly than you would feel comfortable believing. You will come to know the unsettling truth soon enough."
"Are you serious?"
"Only when absolutely necessary. On that subject you might consider lightening up somewhat. You're still young. There's time to head off certain tendencies toward humorlessness before they become set in the stone of habit. That frown, for example. Do you want that lovely face stuck that way?"
She laughed. Then quickly stifled herself and looked around, feeling guilty. She didn't want to incur any more matronly wrath. Nor did she wish to show disrespect for the event or the participants.
But she had little call to worry about being overheard. They stood apart from the crowd. The doors to the church itself had opened. The pilgrims had begun to file inside. Some sang hymns.
"Truce?" Godin asked.
She glared at him. "Why should I trust you?"
"Because we may face a common enemy," he said, "quite soon."
"But what about your determination to repossess your precious relic?"
"Let us say that the jury is still out about your suitability to carry it."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"The sword does seem to have chosen you. In spite of your almost defiant refusal to believe. Yet you acquit yourself as a true warrior ought."
"Are you trying to flatter me into letting down my guard?" Annja asked.
"I would if I thought it would do any good," he said artlessly. "What do you feel are my intentions? Think deeply, if expeditiously. If you are worthy of the relic must your judgment not be of the utmost reliability?"
She thought a moment, drawing in a deep breath. The sense of responsibility his words evoked washed over her like a wave that threatened momentarily to swamp her.
No, she thought. I must not doubt myself now.
"You're right," she said. "I believe you're sincere. So far as the words you just spoke. So yes, I agree to a truce. But if you play me false, may your God have mercy on your soul. Because I won't hesitate to send it to him!"
He laughed and offered a black-gloved hand. She shook it firmly.
"Do you note the disparity of persons?" he asked quietly, turning away to nod at the throng entering the church. The sea of folk outside seemed scarcely diminished.
She did. The seekers gathered, at least a thousand strong, she guessed, were your proverbial all-walksof-life assortment.
"What do you feel," Godin asked as they walked toward the church, "from the people?"
"Fear,"she said without he sitation. "These people are genuinely afraid. They've come here looking for – "
She broke off, shaking her head.
Godin was not merciful. "Spiritual shelter? A sense of solace and reassurance that ruthless materialism cannot offer them?"
"I don't see how giving in to – superstition – can be a meaningful response to the problems of the world," she said.
"Why do you dismiss anything spiritual as superstition? Is that not itself a superstition from the days of the Age of Enlightenment, when men and women were defensive because professing reason carried genuine risks? Perhaps it's time to realize that there is no necessary conflict between science and spirituality?"
She still furrowed her brow and shook her head. "It's just hard for me to reconcile reason with faith, with either witch-hunting righteousness or New Age goofiness."
"Which do you sense here, Annja Creed?"
"Neither," she said after a reluctant interval.
A sound trilled through the night nearby, from among the pilgrims now all around, their bodies dark or illuminated in front with the flickering orange of candlelight. Annja's face compressed in bewilderment.
"Is that the theme from The Simpsons?" she asked.
"I believe so," Godin said, even as the jaunty little tune cut off. To her right Annja heard classical music peal out, then a rap tune she was unfamiliar with, bars of a current chart-topper from some English band she could never bear to listen to, the epic fanfare of the Star Wars theme, a Kanye West song, electronic chirps and warbles in half a dozen keys. Each was soon cut off by a muted voice saying, "Hello?"
A middle-aged woman spoke into a cell phone held to her ear not fifteen feet from where Annja and Godin stood. With a start Annja recognized her as the woman she had seen in the Shed restaurant what seemed a lifetime or two ago, complaining about the furtive but frightening black creature that haunted the backyard of her expensive home on Lamy ridge.
"Saw him?" she said. "You saw the Holy Child?" She turned to her companion, presumably her husband. "Harry, Margaret says she and Louis just parked their car and who do you think they saw? The Holy Child! He appeared right in front of them!"
"He told you what?" a man said in hasty Spanish, passing from Annja's right. Everywhere around them people were holding their hands to their ears and talking into them. More and more ringtones sounded, like a chorus of dissimilar crickets, filling the night with tinny dissonance.
"He told you to stay away from the church?" a young woman with a pierced eyebrow and lower lip said.
" – stay away – "
" – from the sanctuary?"
" – there's danger here?"
Annja looked from side to side and then at Godin's face. But his air of confident, slightly humorous detachment was gone. He was frowning.
From the church door, screams echoed.
The crowd went stiff as one. It was as if the bodies around Annja and Godin instantly changed state, like some sudden shift in crystalline structure.
A figure staggered from the open doors that led into the sanctuary. It was a priest, a stocky, middle-aged Latino. His glasses were askew on his face. He clutched the front of his surplice as if carrying some heavy load. The pristine white was splashed with some dark taint, gleaming wetly in the candlelight and the glow from thickening clouds overhead.
He fell to his knees. More screams rang from behind him, shrill as bat cries and edged with hysteria.
His arms sagged. Dark loops of entrails moistly glistening slopped out over them upon the stoop of the church.
Chapter 18
Terrified people rushed from the church door. The first shied back like startled horses at the sight of the disemboweled priest lying right at their feet. The pressure of others behind thrust them forward irresistibly. Some were forced to trample the body or were crushed in the entryway in front of the door as the fleeing mob drove them onward to the gate.
The outflow met the crowd condensing and flowing in through the arched gateway. It produced swirling turbulence that filled the courtyard and jammed the gate.
Annja ran for the gate. Cell phones still went off all around. The Holy Child was a busy little apparition tonight, it appeared. People were listening to distraught friends and relatives on the other end while looking around trying to figure out why everybody around them was so upset.
Outside the courtyard wall people began to scream, seeing what was going on inside. The pressure of pilgrims seeking entry to the sanctuary ceased. People fell back from the gates in apprehension or frank terror, depending on how much they had seen.
Annja reached the gate.
It was all she could do to hold her ground against the human flood.
She glanced back. She could see Godin likewise just managing to stand and let the stampede flow around him. He had his stubby revolver out, pointed safely skyward in both gloved hands.
She vaulted to the top of the wall to the right of the quaint adobe arch over the gateway. Her feet slipped slightly in the snow. She teetered dangerously, windmilling her arms. She found her balance.
Celebrants still poured out of the church, breaking around the sealed well with the crucifix and the millstone set in the pedestal. From inside the church came shrieks that soared above the panicked noise of the crowd like a terrified bird.
Annja ran forward, pushing urgently against the crowd. She reached the doorway. The screaming from within had also ended. Cautiously she advanced inside.
As s
he entered, her nostrils wrinkled to a terrible stench. The church's interior was darker than outside. The low, heavy roof beams seemed to waver in the unsteady glow of candles. The shadows seemed to live. As her eyes adjusted, Annja made out uncomfortable-looking old-fashioned pews to either side of a narrow aisle.
Then her stomach clenched in horror. At the end of the aisle, in front of the gaily painted altar screen, sprawled a body dressed in black. It was an elderly lady, with a bun of gray hair. Her black pillbox hat with crepe veil had fallen to the side. The gray hair was daubed with red as by the careless stroke of a brush.
Slowly a black shape appeared from the shadows before the altar, looming above the prostrate body. It looked immense. Or was that exaggeration, conjured by adrenaline singing in her veins? The slope of its back to high withers suggested a wild boar. As did the strange grunting, gobbling sounds that seemed to emanate from its direction.
Slowly, Annja advanced.
The beast raised its head.
Dark fluid dripped from its muzzle as black lips drew back in a low snarl. The eyes that rose to chill Annja's soul glowed red in the gloom.
She formed her right hand as if grasping, extended her will. The reassuring cool metal of the heavy hilt suddenly filled her palm and fingers.
"Come on, then," she whispered hoarsely to the horror. "Come on, and I'll send you back to Hell where you belong!"
The red eyes stared at her. The skin on her face and ears and shoulders seemed to contract in an emotion that transcended terror to achieve revulsion. This creature was wrong. Everything about it was wrong. It no more belonged on this Earth than the bloody horror it wrought belonged in the two-century-old air of peace and serenity within the church.
It hunched its shoulders and charged. Not at her. Rather to her left. To her despair Annja saw something she had missed before. A child in a dark winter coat and white-trimmed hat huddled against a carved and painted wooden panel in the whitewashed wall that showed the stations of the cross. The child whimpered, clearly trying to make no noise, but unable to remain silent in the face of such overwhelming terror.