Exorcist

by Steven Piziks

  “Or work shorter hours,” Chuma said, the rebuke clear in his voice.

  Sarah emerged from one of the tents with a black bag and trotted over. Straw-blond hair made becomingly curly in the heat poked out from under her hat, and Merrin was seized with an urge to give one lock a gentle tug, like a schoolboy seeking attention.

  “What’s wrong with him?” Sarah asked, kneeling next to the man and taking a stethoscope out of her bag.

  Chuma explained as she examined the man. Merrin’s gaze, meanwhile, drifted over to a group of workers standing a short distance away. They stared at him with stony faces, outrage written in their posture. They looked ready to tear him apart. Merrin wanted to look away and found he couldn’t. He remembered stories of wild beasts who wouldn’t attack until you broke eye contact, and he knew in that moment they were thinking the exact same thing. Would they rush him?

  Cold fear trickled down Merrin’s back, and he involuntarily backed up a step. His foot came down on Chuma’s instep, causing Merrin to stumble and look away. The motion broke the spell, and Merrin suddenly felt foolish. The workers muttered among themselves but didn’t rush forward like the howling savages of his silly imagination.

  “They blame the British,” Chuma said.

  “For what?” Merrin asked.

  “For uncovering the church. They believe it’s cursed.”

  Merrin automatically glanced over at the building. A four-legged animal was standing on the dome. Merrin squinted into the bright sun. A hyena? He blinked, and the animal was gone. Merrin shook his head. Now he was seeing things.

  “Maybe I should take a little walk,” Merrin said. “Give the men a break from…from…well, just to give the men a break.”

  Before Chuma could respond, Merrin strode away from the collapsed worker and the hateful gazes of the other men. He went down into a shallow canyon a ways from the site, trying to figure out what was going on at this dig. The canyon walls offered a little relief from the overbearing sun and gave him the feeling that he was indoors.

  Merrin took a drink of warm water from the canteen hooked to his belt. He still had no clue about who Semelier was or why he thought a Sumerian artifact would be found in a Byzantine church buried in East Africa. He didn’t know why the church had been built, or why it had been buried. He couldn’t understand why the place made the natives so nervous. He needed more information, and he supposed the only way to get it was to keep digging.

  Gravel rustled above Merrin’s head and a handful of stones clattered onto the canyon floor. A pang shot through Merrin, and he thought of giggling hyenas. He looked up and just caught sight of a boy disappearing around an outcropping. The boy looked familiar.

  “Joseph?” Merrin called. He trotted forward. More gravel skittered down the canyon wall. “Joseph!” This time his tone was more anxious.

  A shadow fell on the ground behind him and glided closer. Merrin saw it out of the corner of his eye. He spun around. No one there. He looked up. Joseph was perched on a rock halfway up the canyon wall. The boy gave a cheery wave.

  “Harabi, Mr. Merrin!” he called, and jumped down to the ground with a youthful agility Merrin could only remember. Merrin shook his head.

  “Are you out here by yourself?” he said.

  Joseph nodded. “I’m collecting rocks.” He gestured at his trouser pockets. They bulged with uneven lumps.

  “That’s quite a treasure,” Merrin said, amused. “Careful your trousers don’t fall off.”

  “I have suspenders,” Joseph said, clearly proud of his cleverness. “See?” He snapped one of them.

  Merrin smiled. Nice kid. He opened one of the kit bags attached to his belt and pulled out a small hammer. Instead of a claw opposite the head, this hammer had a little spike. The whole thing weighed barely a pound and was meant for delicate work.

  “Since you’re clearly dedicated and well prepared as a rock hound,” Merrin said, “I believe you’re about ready for one of these. It’s a real rock hammer, like professional diggers use.”

  He handed the tool to Joseph, who looked at it with pleased amazement. “Thank you, Mr. Merrin! I will use it every day.”

  “You’re welcome,” Merrin said, and turned to go.

  “I know a secret.”

  The tone of the boy’s voice, high-pitched and strange, made Merrin stop. “Really? What is it?”

  Joseph leaned forward and whispered, “I know why Father Francis is really here.”

  What on earth? Merrin thought. “Why is he here, Joseph?”

  “To save our souls.” He flashed Merrin a grin and ran off toward the dig site. Merrin shrugged and followed. This was no secret—in addition to his work at the site, Will Francis was setting up a school in an unused room back at Emekwi’s hotel, and priest-run schools made no bones about the true purpose behind the reading, writing, and Latin.

  Back at the site, Merrin saw things had calmed down. The workers were digging again, though at a slower pace, while Chuma and Jefferies supervised. The only person who noticed Merrin had returned was Sarah. She was standing outside the tent set aside as an on-site clinic, watching the downed worker being helped away by a pair of friends. Merrin headed over, intending to ask about the man.

  Is that the only reason you want to see her? whispered that inner voice. Careful you don’t break any of those vows.

  “Shut up,” he muttered.

  “Pardon?” Sarah asked. She was closer than he had thought.

  “Nothing,” Merrin said quickly. “Just talking to myself. How’s our man?”

  “His seizures stopped.” The doctor had removed her hat, and she had to shade her eyes against the sun’s glare. “I wanted to keep him at the hospital for observation, but he wouldn’t stay. I think the Turkana have stopped trusting my medicine.”

  “That must make your job difficult,” Merrin said.

  “You have no idea.” She ducked back into the medical tent and Merrin followed. The tent’s interior was almost as hot as the exterior. Dim light filtered through the canvas, and Merrin smelled disinfectant. Sarah went over to a water bucket, rolled up her sleeves, and scrubbed her hands. A string of blue numbers marched across her inner forearm. Merrin stared at them, then looked away. Sarah noticed. She turned her back, dried her hands, and jerked her sleeves back down.

  “Water?” she said.

  “Yes, thank you,” Merrin said, glad of something to break the silence.

  She poured him a cupful from a container made from a large gourd and handed it to him. The water was tepid, and Merrin wondered what it would be like to drink something cold again.

  “So what is it you hope to find here?” Sarah asked, pouring herself some water and sitting neatly on a camp stool.

  Merrin finished the water. “The answer to how a church ended up in this place a thousand years before Christianity arrived.”

  The doctor looked him up and down, and Merrin felt oddly naked. “You were a priest once, weren’t you?”

  The question surprised him. “Yes.”

  “What happened?”

  Merrin looked into Sarah’s blue eyes. They weren’t hard or harsh as he had been expecting. Instead he saw genuine compassion there, something he hadn’t seen in a long, long time. Something inside him shifted a tiny bit, and a crack appeared in a wall he had thrown up long ago. The tattoo marked Sarah as a survivor, just as he was. She, of all people, might understand where the Church had not.

  “It was just before the War ended, and there was a shortage of priests,” he said. “So I was pulled away from field archaeology and put in charge of a parish in a village called Hellendoorn in Holland.”

  “Holland was occupied by the Nazis,” Sarah said quietly.

  Merrin nodded. “The previous priest had…disappeared, and I was his replacement.” He paused and cleared his throat. “One day, a Nazi soldier found—”

  “Bloody savages!” The tent flap was ripped aside and Jefferies stormed inside. His face was faintly sunburned, and his boils looke
d a little better. “Stupid fuzzies can’t wipe their own arses without instruction.”

  The man’s entrance destroyed the moment. Sarah strode for the exit. “I have to get back to town.”

  Merrin opened his mouth to say something, but Jefferies beat him to it. “Wait!”

  Sarah’s hand was on the tent flap, but she stopped and reluctantly turned to face him. Jefferies shuffled his feet uncomfortably and looked shy. Merrin grimaced. On a boy’s face the expression would have been cute. On Jefferies’s pocked face, it looked inhuman.

  “I found this,” Jefferies said, and held up a round medal, tarnished with age. On it was an image of a bearded man holding a child. Both man and child had halos. The medal hung on a new chain. “It’s St. Joseph. For luck.”

  He moved forward, obviously intending to put it on her, but she shied away.

  “Please,” Jefferies said. “For my behavior.”

  After a moment, Sarah nodded and turned her back so Jefferies could put the chain around her neck. She kept her eyes, however, on Merrin. Jefferies noticed.

  “What the hell are you doing?” he snarled.

  For a moment, Merrin thought Jefferies was talking to him. Then he saw Joseph standing in the doorway of the tent looking like a gazelle cornered by a lion.

  “Get the fuck out of here, you little scab!” Jefferies snatched up a heavy alcohol bottle and started to throw. Merrin sprang forward and caught his wrist.

  “Don’t!” Merrin snapped.

  Sarah, meanwhile, spirited Joseph out of the tent and away. Merrin stood there, eyes locked with Jefferies’s. He could feel the other man strain against his grip, but Merrin was the stronger. After a moment, Jefferies relaxed. Merrin let go and took the bottle away.

  “Yeah, all right,” Jefferies muttered. “Didn’t realize you were a fuzzy lover, Merrin. Buggers get into everything—”

  “How long,” Merrin interrupted, “will it take you to get the doors to the church uncovered?”

  Jefferies furrowed his brow, bringing a set of boils into a single, temporary lump. “A few days.”

  “And how do we get inside in the meantime?”

  “We don’t,” Jefferies said. “Chuma’ll take you in through the roof.”

  Five

  Archaeological survey site, British East Africa

  No one knows caution as a regret.

  —Kenyan proverb

  LANKESTER MERRIN CLUNG to the rope and slid down through darkness. Above him, the open dome gaped like a mouth, revealing warm blue sky. Below was a large circle of light that encompassed a smaller speck of light. The speck jumped and bobbed nervously. Merrin clenched his gloved hands to control his slide as he drew closer to the bottom. At the right moment, he jumped clear of the rope and landed on a hard stone floor.

  Chuma was waiting for him, noticeably uneasy. The opening in the dome dropped a circle of dusty white light on the floor, and the foreman remained in its exact center, holding a lit lantern. Merrin tried to see beyond the gloom into the church, but the light prevented him from seeing into the darkness.

  The interior was cool and smelled of dust. Merrin had half expected it to be damp, but of course the air was perfectly dry in this desert climate. He got the sense of a great open space around him.

  A shadow fell across him. Chuma jumped and Merrin dodged aside like a startled lion, but it was only William Francis descending on the same rope. He dropped to the floor with a lithe grace that Merrin remembered from his younger days. His khaki shirt was open, displaying his Roman collar.

  “Following us, Father?” Merrin asked, his voice bouncing and echoing around them. “Or playing the part of Church representative?”

  Francis ignored the question. He stared about instead, trying to pierce the inky blackness that surrounded them. “Is it safe to walk around?”

  The answer, of course, was an emphatic no. Any number of things could be waiting in the darkness—rubble, weakened or collapsed flooring, even animals who had found their way in through cracks and crevices. They should establish a safe perimeter and bring down more powerful lighting equipment, then do an engineering survey to see if the structure appeared sound. But Merrin was abruptly annoyed with Francis’s presence again, and his earlier go-to-hell feeling plucked at him.

  “Let’s find out,” he said, and picked up a second lantern Chuma had set on the floor. He lit it and took a deep breath. No human had set foot in this church for probably a thousand years, and he was going to be the first to explore it. For an irrational moment he recalled the folklore of his childhood, that the first person to enter a house on New Year’s Day should be a dark-haired man. Merrin was fair-haired, which meant bad luck. On the other hand, Chuma had actually entered first, and he had dark hair. Merrin shook his head. Foolishness. He pushed the idea aside and left the circle of light. Francis and Chuma came right behind him.

  Twice in his career thus far Merrin had entered places that no human had trod for countless ages. Each time it seemed like there should be some kind of strange feeling, a tingle or a rush of wind. It never happened. It didn’t this time, either. Merrin stepped into the darkness, his lantern light sweeping the area ahead of him.

  As a precaution, Merrin checked the floor first. It was smooth and flat, the same worked stone as the outside walls. Space echoed around him, and he could sense the height of the ceiling far overhead. No pews, of course—ancient churches expected the congregation to stand throughout the service. Though what kind of service would have been conducted all the way out here?

  Ahead of him, the main aisle stretched into a blackness that swallowed his lantern beam. Two parallel rows of columns reached up to the ceiling, dividing the main aisle into thirds and creating galleries that ran up the left and right sides of the aisle. Merrin nodded. Normal cathedral construction so far. The ceiling was high, but not as high as those allowed by the new construction techniques perfected at the Santiago de Compostela cathedral in eleventh-century Spain. No windows, either, not even the thin, narrow ones this sort of structure could support. That only reinforced the idea that this church had been built with the intention of burying it. Merrin stared around in awe. An exultation filled him. He was looking at a lifetime of study right here. So much to learn, so much to find out. Ancient secrets lay hidden in this church, and Merrin would be the one who ferreted them out.

  Dust lay thick on the floor, and the motes stirred by Merrin’s footsteps danced in the light of his lantern. He heard Francis and Chuma behind him, silent except for their breathing. He wondered if they were thinking the same thing he was.

  They were almost all the way to the main entrance when Francis’s lantern jiggled drunkenly as he tried to open his canteen one-handed. Even in a place of awe, Merrin reflected, the physical needs still held sway. He looked more closely at the huge columns. They were dusty white and massive as trees.

  “This is very strange,” he mused with a thoughtful expression.

  “Stranger than a Byzantine church in the middle of an African desert?” Francis said. “What do you mean?”

  “This place has no windows, and those doors at the end don’t look like they were meant to open easily,” Merrin replied. “You aren’t meant to get in and out of this place.”

  “Including us,” Chuma put in morosely.

  A deep, hollow hiss echoed almost beneath their feet. Francis made an incoherent sound and leaped back. The canteen thumped unheeded to the floor. Something slithered across the floor and away. Chuma’s light picked out a thick, serpentine body the color of sand.

  “Puff adder,” he said. “Very deadly. My nephew’s best friend was bitten by one, and it took him two days to die. A good thing you did not step on it, Father.”

  “Thank God,” Francis exhaled with fervor. “How did it get in here?”

  “Cracks and crevices underground,” Merrin said. “I’ve seen it before.” He played his light across the walls. They were lined with mosaics, thousands upon thousands of shiny tiles that made up pictures.
Merrin’s eye automatically went to the mosaic closest to the entrance and he backtracked to the doors so he could examine it more closely. Through the space between the first two columns he saw a picture of an empty throne—God’s, presumably—surrounded by angels. One angel, blond, was taller and more beautiful than the others. Beyond the second archway, Lucifer was gathering his hosts. In the third, he and his allies rose up against Michael and the other angels. The war continued for three more mosaics. Then Michael’s angels flung Lucifer and those who fought for him out of heaven. They fell, and as they fell, their beautiful faces and fine bodies twisted and tore. By the time they landed in hell, they had become gibbering demons. In the final mosaic, a defiant Lucifer ruled below, while a triumphant Michael exulted above.

  “Lucifer,” Francis breathed beside Merrin. “God’s favorite angel. Cast out after the war in heaven. Astounding.”

  “Not bad,” Merrin said, suddenly unwilling to be awed by anything that impressed Francis, though he did find the mosaics rather unusual. “It’s more customary to show the fourteen Stations of the Cross, not the war in heaven.”

  They had come back to the nave again. To the left and the right were two smaller chambers that made up the short arms of the cross-shaped building. They stayed outside of the lit area to avoid ruining their night vision, but the darkness was heavy and oppressive. The twisted demons on the mosaics seemed to be reaching out of the walls, scratching the air with their claws and biting at it with their teeth, hungry for something real to feed upon.

  Something flashed past Merrin’s head in a flutter of wings. He almost dove for cover, then caught himself and simply ducked, heart pounding at the back of his throat. Francis yelped and Chuma let out a barking cry and waved his hat around. Coarse caws filled the air, spinning and echoing through the church. Something scratched the back of Merrin’s neck with a white line of pain. Warm blood trickled into his collar.

  “Crows!” Merrin shouted, clapping his hand to the back of his neck. The flock vanished into the dark church, though Merrin could still hear their eerie croaks and caws.