Comes a Horseman

by Robert Liparulo

  The discovery had given him an inspiration. From this basement sanctuary, he could venture into the rectory and church, terrorizing the old priest. He could strike—say, vandalize the property or cast his shadow where it would be merely glimpsed—and then retreat to the old servants’ quarters, where no one would find him. In this way, he would be able to execute a slow, grueling campaign of terror. When he became bored of the game, as he surely would, he would slaughter the priest and vanish into the shadows of the city. It was a perfect plan.

  Besides, he had been instructed to watch for this investigator—anyone asking about the files and near-death experiences, taking more interest than the theft of old papers warranted. Why not have some fun while he waited?

  He descended the flight of narrow stairs. A candle burned on the floor in front of a scattering of blankets and dirty clothes. He sat on the pile and pulled a tattered duffel bag into his lap. From a side pocket, he withdrew a sleek new cell phone and flipped it open. He punched a number, twelve digits long. He listened and then punched in another four digits.

  A deep voice answered, speaking briskly in a foreign tongue.

  The man in the rectory basement said, “She’s here.” He listened, his grin widening, splitting his lips in three places.

  39

  Fr. Duncan McAfee motioned for Alicia to step out of the file room and back into his office. She did and dropped onto the sofa, reclaiming her notepad and pen.

  Father McAfee turned off the file room’s light and shut the door. He was about to sit down at the other end of the sofa when something caught his eye, and he walked to the door they had used to enter the office from the hallway.

  “Did I leave this door open?” he asked, pointing at a six-inch gap between door and jamb.

  Alicia shook her head. “I don’t know.”

  He stepped into the dark hallway, looked one way, then the other. Back in the office, he shut the door, holding the handle until the latch clicked. He took his position on the sofa, sighed, and ran his fingers through his hair.

  “My endears . . . ,” he said thoughtfully.

  “I’m sorry?”

  He looked at her as though surprised he had spoken aloud. “Endears, that’s what I call people who have had a near-death experience. ‘NDE-ers’ is too awkward for my old tongue, and it’s too clinical sounding. Besides, they are very endearing people, passionate for life because it was snatched away for a brief time.” He smiled warmly.

  Alicia found herself sufficiently charmed. “You said these people, your . . . endears . . . went to hell ?”

  “Naturally, they didn’t stay there,” he said. “They came back, scared out of their minds. And you have to get to them quickly, or else they tend to repress the memories. It’s that terrible. But talk to them within a day or two of their finding out just which direction their souls are heading, and you can tap a reservoir of vivid images and feelings. Few people actually believe they are heading for hell, and those who suspect it have no clue how truly hideous it is. Afterward, many find God and worship Him. Others try to make amends by feeding the poor, doing good deeds. The change in behavior and attitude is usually quite startling. You could say they literally got the hell scared out of them.”

  Alicia thought for a moment. “Do any become obsessed with religion?” she asked.

  “Wouldn’t you? You have just discovered not only that hell exists, but you’ve earned a ticket to it. But if there’s a hell, there’s a heaven, right? So that becomes your new goal: to make it to heaven. To hell with hell. You visualize it, read about it, keep reminders of it around—you do all the things someone serious about attaining a goal does. To answer your question, yes, many people who’ve glimpsed hell go a little overboard with their efforts to reach the other side. They attend every service or mass their church offers. They wear crosses and T-shirts with religious messages. They collect Bibles, and some actually read them.”

  Alicia thought of Cynthia Loeb’s bedroom. “What about angels? Could someone become obsessed with angels?”

  “Residents of heaven, sure,” he said. “They represent the place an endear desperately desires to go. He wants them to be his friends and neighbors. And another thing: I’ve interviewed several endears who’ve expressed a strong belief that God’s angels pulled their souls out of hell and put them back in their bodies. These angels, they believe, wanted them to have another chance. So they develop a fierce gratefulness to angels. One way of acknowledging this debt is by collecting angel paraphernalia—books, illustrations, statuettes.”

  Cynthia Loeb to a tee. But then, the panels she painted on plastic trash cans were fiery and hellish. Like the Bosch print in Daniel Fears’s den.

  “With endears,” she said, “can a fascination with heaven coexist with an interest in hell?”

  He didn’t answer right away but turned his head to look at her from the corner of his eye, as if sizing her up, wondering if she knew more than she was letting on. Finally, he said, “This case you’re working . . . I would love to know more.”

  “I can’t say anything at the moment, Father, but I’ll remember you when I can. Please, my questions are important.”

  He thought about that, nodded. “More often than not, an endear’s initial enthusiasm for religion subsides into a gentle awareness of his soul,” he said. “His passion becomes . . . if not altogether subconscious, then at least subtle. Where once he hummed Beatles tunes, now he’s humming hymns. His doodles might start leaning toward religious themes. When the experience of going to hell seeps into the subconscious, endears may be as inclined toward hellish images or symbols as heavenly ones.”

  “Are you familiar with the works of the painter Hieronymus Bosch?”

  He laughed, two loud hacks that could have been to clear his throat if it weren’t for the merriment on his face. “Oh, Agent Wagner, I am going to hold you to your promise to open up to me about this case when you can. Bosch is a favorite among endears. No matter that his depictions of hell and of demons devouring and torturing sinners are dark and vile; they hold a strange, almost hypnotic wonder over them, who seem to be at once repelled by the artwork and attracted to it.”

  Alicia looked down at her notepad. In the Pitman shorthand the academy had taught her, she scribbled reminder words: endear, hell, religious obsession —> subconsciously—what word had he used?—inclined! toward heaven/hell imagery, Bosch favorite . . .

  She looked up to see him watching her write. “Any idea why Bosch is an endear favorite?” she asked.

  “Endears themselves don’t know. I’ve asked. By the time they stumble upon his work, their minds have repressed much of the horror they witnessed. But still, he resonates with them. My guess is Bosch was an endear. He’d witnessed the demons and hellish landscapes he depicted in his paintings. His work captivates endears because they’ve seen them too.”

  “Hieronymus Bosch painted what he saw during a near-death experience?”

  “That’s what I believe, but there is no historical evidence to prove it. His life is a complete mystery. He seemed to have intentionally shielded himself from the world. Even his name is a pseudonym. His real name was Jerome van Aken. Let me show you something.”

  He pulled himself up off the sofa. Alicia could hear his joints popping. He opened a desk drawer, withdrew a heavy coffee-table book, and returned to the sofa. Seated again, he placed the book between them on the cushions, facing her. It was called Heaven and Hell in Art. Under the title was an apparent Bosch painting, demons committing all sorts of atrocities to humans. He opened the book to a marked page, a double spread of a painting showing some kind of religious ritual in what looked like the ruins of a cathedral. There was a monk in a blue robe, a priest with a high hat and gold garb, a monkey holding a skull on a tray, and a finely dressed woman with the face of a mole. Around them, a city burned and wicked-looking creatures rode deformed fish, fowl, and rodents. Alicia felt a tinge of nausea.

  “This is the center panel of Bosch’s The Tempt
ation of St. Anthony,” Father McAfee said.

  She glanced at him, a question in her eyes.

  He nodded. “My St. Anthony. That’s him in the blue robe. It’s a Black Mass, meant to ridicule Catholic Mass. Participants worshiped Satan. They used urine instead of wine. The services were often conducted by defrocked priests, who recited Scripture backward and spat on the cross. On the altar they put animal corpses and severed human heads. Medieval practitioners believed that just as Holy Mass invoked the miracle of the transubstantiation—that is, the transforming of wine and bread into Christ’s blood and body—Black Mass put evil into the dead flesh. They would later deliver the infected corpses and heads to their enemies, hoping to curse them.”

  She moved her eyes away. Here was a vileness obvious even to nonreligious people, the kind of wrongness that kept atheists fighting on the side of a generic “good.”

  Father McAfee pointed to the spot on the wall where a painting was missing. “For ten years, I kept a framed print of this panel right there.”

  “Why would you want such a disgusting thing here ?”

  “For the same reason I think Bosch painted it. For inspiration, and to honor those whose faith endures through onslaughts of temptation.” He planted a finger on the Black Mass in the book. “This ritual represents temporal distractions: carnal pleasures, rejection of institutions, our own will versus God’s. But see? St. Anthony is holding strong. He’s not participating. See how he’s on his knees in prayer, looking out at the viewer as if to say, ‘My strength comes from outside my world, and it is greater than the pressure to give in’?”

  Alicia thought that, like most interpretations, Father McAfee’s favored his own beliefs. He saw what he wanted to see.

  “An endear I interviewed years ago found the print and sent it to me. If nothing else, it was a great conversation piece.”

  “I see how it would be. Where is it now?”

  “The Vatican, I imagine.”

  “A print?”

  “I doubt the Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga in Lisbon will give up the original, but my print disappeared along with all my files.”

  “The files Father Randall wanted?”

  “For the Vatican archives, he said. The Holy See maintains one of the largest archival libraries in the world. It owns documents that chronicle how every major and many minor world events affected the faith, the Church, the human race: alliances, treaties, prophecies, visitations, exorcisms, as well as the mundane—births, baptisms, marriages, annulments, deaths. Since the time of Christ and before. It’s an amazing collection of knowledge and attitudes throughout history. Randall wanted to pull my work into this erudition, make a new collection out of it. He said he would send over a truck and people to box it up the very next morning.”

  “But you didn’t give it to him?”

  “Of course not! Every time I published a book, some journalist would contact the Vatican for the Church’s ‘official position,’ and every time I was made out to appear a little unhinged. Not enough to warrant removal or sanction, but the message was clear: Father McAfee has his own agenda, his own hobby; leave the Church out of it, thank you very much. I told him I’d be happy to bequeath my work to the Church, but short of my death, my files weren’t going anywhere.”

  “How did Randall take your refusal?”

  “First he acted dumbfounded that I would defy his authority. He stammered about taking the matter to his boss, a cardinal with immense power and respect within the Church. In fact, he was once favored for the papal seat. Now he’s too old. I told Randall, ‘Well, have him call me so I can tell him what I’m telling you.’ He grew insistent, and naturally I became a brick wall for him to pound his head against. Veins were bulging in his head. He said, ‘We will see what your archbishop says,’ and I said, ‘You do that.’ I showed him out, and that was that.”

  “But it wasn’t.”

  “No. I worked late that night and came in early the next morning. The place was trashed, my files were gone. How’s that for coincidence?”

  “You didn’t hear anything?”

  “I sleep on the second floor, right above us. My housekeeper’s room is just down the hall. Neither of us was disturbed. There must have been several of them, all working very quietly. I wish I’d caught those . . .” He tightened his lips on the word he had in mind.

  Alicia felt her mind drop down into a low gear the way a four-wheel drive does to trudge through mud and over trenches. If this break-in had anything to do with the Pelletier killings—and for all of its strangeness, she thought it did, somehow—Father McAfee and his housekeeper would never know how lucky they were not to have awakened that night.

  “Why didn’t they take the file cabinets, any idea?”

  He thought for a moment. “They’re heavy as statues. Maybe their transport to the airport or to Italy couldn’t accommodate the weight.”

  Sounded reasonable. She wasn’t ready to accept the Vatican’s involvement, but if it wasn’t, he was right about its being an extraordinary coincidence.

  “What did you do?”

  “I called the police! Two detectives showed up, scribbled on a clipboard, and told me to take it up with my diocese.”

  Alicia nodded. “It does sound like an internal dispute over Church property.”

  “They were my private papers!”

  “Did you contact your diocese?”

  “Of course. They said they’d look into it. After a week, they said no one at the Vatican had requested my files.”

  “And Father Randall?”

  “A researcher in the Archives, but he told the diocese he’d never heard of me, let alone gotten into it with me over files he certainly had no use for. I tried contacting him myself. Always unavailable. I tried Cardinal Ambrosi, the prefect of the Archives. He won’t take my calls or return them. Even more disturbing . . .” He trailed off. His eyes roamed to the hallway door.

  “Yes? Father, what is it?”

  Whatever distraction from his worries her visit had provided left him. His eyes became distant, his complexion paler. “I know Father Randall’s purposes are evil because of what came into this sanctuary with him, because of what he left behind.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Someone . . . something has”—he swiveled his head back and forth, looking for a word—“haunted this place since that night. A shadow, always watching me from dark corners. It vandalizes the rooms. Smell that lovely odor, just under the jasmine?”

  Her nose had grown used to the smell she had sensed when she first entered the room. She sniffed, caught an unpleasant hint of it. She nodded.

  “Rotten eggs, thrown on the floor and in my desk drawers. I think it’s urinating on the carpets, or at least oozing a stench.” He paused, thinking, looking as weary as a beaten dog. “This thing, it howls and laughs. At night, it screams in my bedroom, but when I turn on the light, nothing is there. Maria, my housekeeper, couldn’t take it anymore; she left a week ago.”

  “What about the police?” Alicia asked, thinking she knew the answer.

  “They suggested setting up a video camera. They wanted proof I’m not mad.”

  “Did you?”

  “The thing keeps stealing the tapes. Whether it’s demonic or human, Father Randall brought it here.”

  “Demonic?”

  He turned disheartened eyes to her, unwilling to go there with an obvious unbeliever.

  She looked down at her notes, made a few more.

  “Father, in your books do you identify endears by name?”

  “They’d have my head if I did, most of them. They want their privacy, and I promise to honor that.”

  “No way at all to identify them?”

  “I change their doctors’ names, the names of hospitals, employers, street names—anything that can give them away. The average endear, especially one who’s gone to hell, is more cautious than a homosexual these days. There’s no one standing up for them, telling the public that having a supernatural
experience does not make you a freak. And going to hell? Well, that does tend to cast aspersions on one’s reputation.”

  “But they talk to you.”

  “It helps that I wear a collar. And as I said, I get to them quickly, before they’ve fortified their defenses.”

  “How do you become aware of a possible NDE?”

  “I give lectures at hospitals, speak frequently on radio programs and at conventions for people who appreciate this kind of thing.”

  “What kind of thing?”

  “Supernatural, paranormal. I fit right in with the UFO and poltergeist crowds. Point is, I get the word out. A lot of people know what I do and how to contact me. Even skeptical physicians . . . when they come face-to-face with a resuscitated patient screaming about fire burning their flesh and creatures snapping at them, they suddenly believe or have enough questions that they pick up the phone and call me.”

  “You drop everything and go?”

  “Until recently, NDEs were fairly rare. Now that we have more ways of reviving people whose hearts have stopped, I’m getting more calls. Now I ‘drop everything and go’ only when the experience seems particularly vivid.”

  “So you have the names, addresses, details of, what, hundreds of hellish endears?”

  “Thousands . . . or, I used to.”

  “They were in your files, all the information about these endears?” This was it, the heart of the matter.

  “I kept the door locked.” He pointed over his shoulder at a heavy dead bolt on the file room door. “They must have picked it.”

  She scribbled a note about that. Then she flipped back a few pages, found the sheet she wanted, and ripped it out. She held it out to him.