I shook it.
“Call me Bobby. Should I be inviting you in?”
“It’s a matter of some urgency,” the Father said. “If you don’t mind. I will try not to intrude very much.”
Inside, I offered him an iced tea. He declined.
“So have a seat,” I said. “I need to let the dogs out.”
After putting Tina and Sketch—my Jack Russells—in the backyard to run and romp away the restlessness of a day in their kennels, I joined Father West in the living room. In his hand, he had an old book, bound in leather.
“Father, I wasn’t kidding. You aren’t planning to start reading from the Good Book, are you?”
There was no reaction at all, other than the further adjusting of the book where it rested. The joke was apparently lost on him.
“It’s your grandfather’s journal,” Father West said flatly.
“My grandfather?”
“Father Terrence Macaulay,” he said. “It was given to me by his closest friend, Father Fic Rule.”
“Fic? What kind of name is Fic?”
“It’s a nickname that stuck. A long story.”
“These two—priests—were friends?”
“Father Rule was your grandfather’s mentor.”
“Look, padre…I think you have the wrong guy. My grandfather—Grandpa Robert—he was killed in action in the war. World War two. He never even met my father. And there’s never been a priest in the family; I’m pretty sure about that.”
“Detective Macaulay, I don’t wish to insert myself into your family concerns. Father Terrence Macaulay was indeed your grandfather. There’s no mistake. He wasn’t in the war. His name was not Robert. He died…”
“Listen, sorry Father, uh, West. I was named after my grandfather, okay? Besides, this story makes no sense. Priests swear an oath of celibacy, correct? How could this man be anyone’s grandfather?”
“It’s complicated.”
“I bet. Tell you what, Padre; let’s work on the easy stuff, like why you’re here at all. For the moment, let’s say what you’re telling me is true. What is important enough to bring you here from…?”
“From London,” West said.
“Seriously? From across the ocean.”
“Father Rule died a few months ago. His instructions were clear. Deliver this journal to you upon his death.”
“Your priest—Rule? He’d have been a very old man.”
“The Father was one hundred and nine when he passed,” he said.
“Christ. Oops, sorry.”
He smiled, waving off my faux pas.
“So, okay, I’ll bite. Why?”
“There is a letter within the journal. I was asked to do this one favor. It’s there my involvement ends.”
“Involvement?”
“Detective Macaulay—Bobby. I’m certain I have the right person. If you would only agree to accept delivery of the journal, we can conclude this business. Whatever is written within these pages, including the letter, I assure you, remains private. You will be free to act as you wish.”
“You said you know nothing; that your favor is to deliver this journal only.”
“Yes.”
“Then what action are you referencing?”
“Sorry?”
“You said I could take action or not.”
“Hmm. Yes, well, free to read or not to read, that is all.”
I thought it over. It was clear Father West had convinced himself I was the Macaulay he was looking for. Taking the journal, therefore, was a bit of a foregone conclusion. And the only way I was getting him out of my world.
“Fine. Leave it.”
“As I say, act as you wish.”
“Yes, you said.”
He stood and again extended his hand.
“Blessings be with you, my son,” he offered.
“Thanks, padre. Come to think of it, I know someone who could have used your services recently.”
Detective Macaulay,
I understand how confusing this must all seem. I was a very good friend of your grandfather’s. In fact, I’ve missed him very much these many, many years. He was the kind of friend a man or woman is lucky to find. Being a police officer—trusting your life in other people’s hands on a daily basis—I’m sure you can understand the profoundness of such trust.
There is a long story to be told, but it’s not for me to tell it. The history—the story—is within these pages. What I can tell you is that your grandfather was excommunicated from the priesthood. The action was a long time coming. Our ideas and methodology were not popular. Not for a great many years.
Your grandfather’s removal from the cloth was more than just a travesty, Detective—it was an affront to the powers of good. Terrence Macaulay was too honorable a man to place blame on anyone but himself. Your grandfather was the finest of men and a devoted servant to God, and he never put that much importance in an article of clothing or in a title.
No, it wasn’t his dismissal that plagued him. The ghosts of our journeys—the specters of all those horrible things we learned over the decades.
THEY haunted him.
He met and married your grandmother only a few short months after our final tasking together. I fear it was an ill-fated union because your grandfather was searching for something he could not define. How, therefore, was your grandmother to ever fill that emptiness inside him?
As God would have it, your grandparents perished not long after your father Patrick was born. I’ve decided not to relate the circumstances of their deaths. It was God’s will.
Know that they died together, so they left this world contented—on to the hereafter side-by-side. Your father—Paddy— was adopted by the brother of Father Macaulay. Paddy’s uncle.
Your clan, Detective—the Clan MacAulay—is steeped in a tradition of protectors; your grandfather knew his heritage. Your clan sheltered the greatest Scottish son of all, the rebel William Wallace. Your line has always been dedicated to the preservation and defense of its world. It’s no coincidence that you’re an officer of the law. You spend your days serving and protecting those who are unable to do so for themselves. It’s a duty your ancestors have served for a very, very long time. Centuries. Millennia, even.
I cannot implore you enough, Detective: honor your grandfather’s memory. Study his time on this earth. Within these pages is not only HIS history, but your own as well. If you’re reading this letter, I’m gone. Darkness is going to fall about your world, my child; the time has come for you to continue his crusade.
It won’t be easy for a man of this age of technology to believe—these present generations are so inextricably self-absorbed and so many are wantonly separated from the realm where good and evil continually forge the shape of the Earth and of the very Universe. Even I let your grandfather down—it’s difficult to believe. It’s even more difficult to understand why God would allow such evil a stronghold on the earth.
Father Terrence Macaulay was a convicted servant of God, but he was also so much more: he was a servant of mankind.
And he died for his conviction.
I can’t share anything more as it’s not my place. I pray for you now, Detective. And I shall look down on you, as will your grandfather, from the Great Beyond.
All the blessings of the fold,
Father Fic Rule
What I felt after reading Father Rule’s letter to me can only be described as a mixture of confusion, disbelief, and outright foolhardiness. I’m not sure exactly what I expected to find in the letter—yet there was a part of me that was hopeful that at least Terrence Macaulay was my relative.
I never met my grandfather, and no matter who or what he turned out to be, I’d still never know him. The journal represented a chance to crawl inside the mind of my distant kin. If Father Terrence Macaulay were truly my grandfather, the reading of the journal could connect me to him in a way I’d never imagined possible.
But this superstitious crap?
It m
ade me more skeptical than ever.
What if I read the journal and this man did turn out to be certifiable? No one wants to find out there is a nut job lurking in the family history books.
The story of my grandfather in my memories was one of noble heritage. He died serving his country. What more honorable thing can one say about a parent or a grandparent—that they gave the ultimate sacrifice?
I joined the Marine Corps, in part, because of my father and grandfather’s service. I’d told many friends about my granddad and his patriotic gift.
Now a book stared up at me that might unravel all those honorable thoughts—all those times I brought up his name in reverent tones.
No. I decided I wouldn’t read the journal. What was there to be learned that would change me or the path down which I had already traveled?
Nothing.
I folded the letter and replaced it inside the book.
CHAPTER NINE
THE MARINE Corps taught me a great deal about the man I am. It had never really been an option for me to make a career out of the Corps. It took a particular kind of man or woman to make such a long-term commitment. I completed two four-year tours, saw no real combat, and made several of the best friends I would ever know.
As a boot at the MCRD in San Diego, California, I was pretty raw. I knew I wanted to join the military and since my father, Paddy, was a Marine, there really wasn’t ever any discussion about which branch. Paddy would never have forced me to join, but he sure as hell wasn’t going to have me enlist in anything other than the United States Marine Corps.
Of course, we had a few other choice names for the elite branch. My favorite—the one that stuck—was The Suck. You might think that is a derogatory term, and you’d be right. But it’s no more derogatory than the names my drill instructors called me.
In fact, it’s a quite elegant moniker compared to those.
A particularly ornery superior was Gunnery Sergeant Montgomery McBride, our Senior Drill Instructor. Gunny was a hard ass. He loved pushups. And leg-lifts.
Oh, sweet God he loved his leg-lifts.
And do you want to know the thing I may have respected most about the man? He always—and I mean always—did everything with his recruits. Not one or two in order to get the group started. No. He did every rep, right there with us.
How can you not respect a guy like that?
I knew many other SDIs. There weren’t any of them that put out as much as Gunny McBride.
One of the hardest things for me was the distance running. Being a basketball player and a track athlete in high school, my muscles were better suited to run short sprints. The technical term is “fast-twitch”.
Long-distance running requires a completely different build. My body was not only unaccustomed to five, ten, or fifteen-mile runs—it was downright appalled by them.
The first couple of weeks I was what the Corp calls a “run-dropper”. After a few miles, I would begin to fall off pace, eventually running out of steam altogether.
It was humiliating.
I was an athlete.
I’d always been an athlete.
Athletes get ‘er done.
Suddenly, I was just a pathetic thing—a man to be humiliated by the Drill Instructors and pitied by my platoon.
I was Bill Murray in Stripes: doing pushups and pull-ups and distance runs after the rest of the platoon had gone in for chow.
Gunny McBride, he pushed me hard. He stayed in my ear. He made me feel two inches tall. Then one.
But he did all the extra calisthenics with me.
And with each run, I did better.
Soon I was cranking them out. I was leading the platoon.
Then one morning, during a Commander’s Run with all the platoons, our group was out in front. I was out on point, leading the cadence:
When I came out of my mother's womb,
Found myself in the delivery room.
All bloody and wet I rappelled to the floor,
Cut my umbilical and crawled to the door.
Cruised the ward, lookin' so good
Lookin' so good like a baby Marine should.
Camouflage diaper, black baby shoes
Butter knife sword and baby dress blues
Humvee stroller and a tricycle tank,
Three diaper pins on my collar for rank…
Gunny McBride called out for me to take the guidon—the squadron flag—from the current guide. I barked my enthusiasm and noted (too late) the relief on the face of the guide who gladly passed to me his burden.
My arms almost immediately began to succumb. My legs had felt fine several miles back—now, they felt like they were slowly filling with hot lead. A fire was building in my lungs; they screamed for oxygen that was nowhere to be found.
Twice I began to fall back.
It was unthinkable.
The guidon had to stay at the front of formation.
I fought back to the front. The world around me was going dark. I turned to the man from whom I had acquired this terrible burden. I gave him the universal look of desperation, willing him to please take this thing back from me.
He looked at me as if he had no idea who I was or what I was thinking.
It was the final indignation; the last of what little I had in my tank. It was going to be humiliating—far worse than anything that had happened previously with my fall-outs. But I had no choice.
My body was giving in.
Just before I fell to the ground, someone swooped up the guidon. A fellow Marine.
Recruit Mike Shay.
With the weight gone from my hands, the oxygen slowly returned to my fatigued muscles. I began to run with my head held high again.
When Shay tired, Recruit Johnny Knoblauch took the guidon. When Johnny tired, I took it back.
At one point, perhaps a mile from the finish, I caught Gunny’s eye, running alongside us in the first group.
It was the only time in boot camp I ever saw him smile.
CHAPTER TEN
THE JOURNAL lay where Father West had placed it upon leaving. It would be a lie to say I still didn’t want to read it. Was my fear really what was stopping me, then? The answer wasn’t that difficult; the answers never are that hard to find when the only person listening is yourself.
It’s the admitting of reasons to others with which we struggle.
Who wants to find out that everything they’ve ever known about themselves is a lie? Of course, I could read the thing and discover that my first instincts were correct—that Father West was a crackpot.
But those weren’t my first instincts at all. I wanted it to be my reaction; I wanted to believe that the man was a lunatic. Such reality would make all the rest of my choices so much easier.
But my gut told me from the first moment I laid eyes on the man that Father West was as convinced of his story as anyone could be. This, of course, didn’t in and of itself prove him to be sane. I’d met plenty of crazy people in my line of work. Conviction, in fact, seemed to be prerequisite.
But West did not strike me as crazy. He struck me as scared. Terrified, actually. The most convincing argument that someone knows what they’re talking about is when it becomes clear that they don’t want to know.
It was these truths that ate away at my conscience. I didn’t want him to be right either. I read the trepidation in his eyes. The man was not only terrified; he wanted to be rid of the old journal as much as I wanted the book to belong to some other poor Macaulay.
So my avoidance of the journal had been a cowardly choice. Nothing more. And for a week, I lived with that fact. But it had come time to face the book. Time to discover what was so important that a priest I’d never met had flown five thousand miles to deliver it to a DPD detective in person.
I didn’t want to discover that I had a grandfather who was insane. But I had seen the integrity of honest fear in Father West’s eyes.
I was more afraid to believe what was written within the leather-bound book than not.
This first entry is the most difficult, as all firsts tend to be. How to summarize all I’ve learned these past months? How to clarify the shaking of faith’s foundation with words on the page? It’s likely a fruitless desire, to convey the enormity of what has transpired—of the true profundity behind the conclusions I’ve drawn. And that have been drawn long before me.
The Clan MacAulay. I never understood what that meant. The real history, I mean—when looking back now, I see that all roads led me to this intersection of my beliefs and my fears; that every moment from this to that has prepared me to meet this fate. The most difficult realization has been that I will eventually sacrifice the cloth. Still, Christ sacrificed so much more—I can no more complain regarding my station than a healthy man could grouse in the company of lepers. I will do what has to be done…
Bête Noire, the French called him. The Black Beast. To me, until a few days ago, he was but old Scottish legend. Samhain. God of the Dead. A ghost story to be told to children—like Krampus, the evil beast that accompanies St. Nicholas on his Christmas travels, punishing the bad children.
But Samhain is no folk tale. I’ve now seen the monster himself, and I’ve never witnessed a possession of such physical extremes.
The Book of Ossian, transcriptions of Pictish poetry and stories of Scottish Druids, speaks of Samhain—not simply as God of the Dead but rather, translated, the “very omnipotence of evil.” According to this ancient text, Samhain was cast from Heaven at the same moment as the angel Lucifer. Lucifer took reign over the dark caverns of Hades, and Samhain was his strongest legionnaire.
Only upon the demon’s travels through the world did he become more powerful than Satan himself.
I put the journal down. The pebble in my shoe was still causing me grief.
Samhain.
The black beast.
I couldn’t understand why such writing would affect me at all. I wasn’t superstitious. My father taught us a rudimentary belief in God. He would never tolerate anything approaching the supernatural. So why did these ramblings feel so much like cogs quietly slipping into place?
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