She looked me in the eye, held her gaze then moved closer to me. “We’ll take care of each other. Okay?”
“Absolutely,” I said. “Can you do me one favor?”
“I was hoping you’d ask.”
She kissed me. Not something I was expecting and being kissed, as wonderful as it was, was not the favor I was about to ask pf her. I was going to ask her to stay with me, for at least that night, but I fully intended to give her my bed and I was planning to sleep on the couch.
I’m not one to kiss and tell, so I won’t tell you the details of that night Rachel and I spent together. I will say that neither of us slept on the couch.
Part Two:
The Assembled
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
“How many others are in place?” Phillip asked.
“Enough,” Henry said. “I have just enough to pull it off.”
“And they’ll all listen to you?”
“They know what’s in it for them. They’ll all listen. Just like you will listen.”
“You failed once. What makes you so certain you won’t fail again?”
“You’re right, I did fail before. But then, I was stupid, naive. I thought I could pull this off all by myself. This time I hand selected every member of my team. Just like I handpicked you. We are more powerful than he is and too powerful to fail.”
“And if he finds out about your plan?” Phillip said, his attention momentarily darting away from Henry and towards an uncertain direction.
“You don’t understand things yet, Phillip. Him knowing means nothing. Him finding out threatens nothing. He is the ultimate failure and he knows it.”
“And if this works…”
“When it works.”
“And when this works, then what? What happens to me?”
“Power. Glory. The fulfillment of what was originally promised but never realized. He didn’t have the courage and is still filled with regrets. He is useless, yet millions obey what he commands. Our commands will be certain. Clear. He wants to go back and we will send him.”
“If he’s so weak and unimportant, how is it that he’s ruled this realm for thousands of years?”
It was a good question that Phillip asked. One that Henry himself had pondered. The one whose power Henry was plotting to usurp was never in question. It was how the power was wielded. “Because for thousands of years,” Henry said, “no one had the balls to do what I’m doing. No one thought it was possible, despite him doing nothing but hiding somewhere and screaming in agony. He’s not been seen since day one when he was given control of this realm but still millions worship him, follow him and are terrified of him. If they only knew.”
There was a long, heavy pause before Phillip spoke again.
“When do we begin?”
“It’s already begun.”
Phillip pushed towards Henry, hoping that the lack of distance between them would lessen any chance that their conversation could travel and reach unsympathetic ears. “You haven’t told me your plan.”
“That’s because you only need to know your part of the plan.”
“You haven’t even told me my part yet. Just that I need to listen, obey and be ready to change direction at the drop of a hat.”
“There are four others,” Phillip said after a pregnant pause. “Only one of them is charged with building their own following. The others were picked either because of their previous positions or to complete a very specific task.”
“Only four?” Phillip asked. “You think that it will only take the other four and us two to overthrow him? That’s insane.”
“Tell me, Phillip. How many others have you seen on this side? How many do you know about?”
“I’ve seen thousands. Millions, perhaps. I don’t know of any but you and him.”
“And if you were to ask any of those millions you’ve seen shuffling about, just waiting for a chance to make the leap to the other side in order to find favor with him, many would recognize my name. And if you pressed them, they would tell you that they’ve never seen him. They don’t know anything about him, but they all believe he’s in charge because he was first to arrive here. He’s here by his choice and so is everyone else. The difference is, Phillip, he regrets his original decision every fucking minute of every fucking day. Don’t you think the others understand that?”
“Doesn’t mean he doesn’t have power. Doesn’t mean he can’t make us suffer if we fail.”
“There’s nothing left of him to make anyone suffer. You’ll see.”
“What do you mean by that? What do you mean, ‘I’ll see?’”
“Because my old friend,” Henry said as he began to increase the distance between himself and Phillip, allowing the silt to cloud their views, “you are going to kill the Devil himself. That’s your role. And when he’s dead and gone, and the fucking losers here find out that my team did what we’re doing on the other side and that one of my people took old Lucifer out, they’ll be more than happy to follow me. And when I am in charge of his place,” Henry said as he turned away, “then the fun begins.”
“You are asking me to kill him?” Phillip said as he trudged closer to Henry. “That’s impossible. First off, I have no idea where to find him. Second, how do you propose that I kill someone that isn’t alive?”
“Give him this,” Henry said as he handed a small, heavy object wrapped in heavy cloth to Phillip. “Don’t open it. Trust me, you do not want to see what’s wrapped up in that. When you find him, close your eyes, unwrap it and toss it to him. Then get the fuck out of there. And as for finding him,” Henry said, again moving away from Phillip, “that will be a challenge, so I strongly suggest you start your quest immediately. The others are about ready and if you don’t complete your task, we may be in for a shit storm of biblical proportions. Good versus evil is one thing but evil versus evil? We’re entering uncharted waters.”
Phillip felt the weight of the object in his hands. The temptation to open the cloth to see what it covered was powerful but so, too, was Henry’s portent. “If I’m going to try to do this, I gotta know who else is on your team. I need to know who I’m working with.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Henry chided.
“It does to me.”
“Fair enough. I’ll tell you about my team.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
“You seem different, Cardinal. I’ve known you for forty years so I know a thing or two about you. And I know that you’ve changed over the past several months. Crisis of the soul?”
Cardinal Joseph O’Keefe laughed, his loose belly jiggling from the effort. “Is that how long it’s been? Forty years? My good Lord, it seems much longer.”
The two old friends were sitting together in the small study attached to Cardinal O’Keefe’s Manhattan office. Though the two had known each other for many years, their busy schedules prohibited them from getting together as often as they did when they were both newly ordained priests.
“Your wit remains, but there’s something about you,” the Cardinal’s friend chuckled, then quickly quelled his laugher. “I can’t quite put my finger on it. You changed when you returned from your lengthy sabbatical, Cardinal. Nearly a full year, if I recall. That was a rather long sabbatical.”
“Father Jeffries, my sabbatical served only to renew my spirt and my determination to serve our Lord as best as a humble and broken man like myself can. If I’ve changed, it is only a change back to whom I was when I first heard and accepted my calling to serve. Though I must admit my energies have diminished and my belly has grown, my loyalty to the Church and to whom we serve is as it was.”
Cardinal Joseph O’Keefe had been a Catholic priest for over four decades. His sharp wit and tireless dedication to the advancement of the religion earned him much recognition and praise over his years of ministry. He was advanced to the position of Monsignor after serving as a parish priest for fifteen years, to Associate Bishop of the Diocese of New York after twenty-six years, and then to Cardinal on the thirty-fifth
anniversary of his ordination.
When he requested and received approval for an open-ended sabbatical, many in the church wondered if there was a scandal he was hoping to avoid coming to light. But as the months of his sabbatical passed and nothing of concern came to anyone’s attention, people began to feel that Cardinal O’Keefe was simply tired. After all, he had served tirelessly for so many years and no one could recall him ever having taken a vacation of longer that two days in all his years of service.
Some close to the Cardinal pinned his assumed exhaustion on a mission to Guatemala he took. It was at the very start of that mission when he requested his sabbatical. Though the Cardinal’s report never mentioned anything that raised concerns, there were others who shared stories of a horrific and terrifying ordeal the Cardinal experienced.
It was a possession, though the Catholic church did its continued best to deny that demonic possessions ever occurred. They chose to attribute unexplained things on the fragility of the human condition. Psychosis and severe mental illness were much more likely to be the cause than was a demon assuming residence in someone’s body and soul.
Yet the rumors and stories of something beyond the explanation of science surrounded the Cardinal’s visit.
Cardinal O’Keefe had served the church on many missions, most to poor countries in central America where he was able to take full advantage of his fluency in Spanish. His mission to Guatemala—his fifth to the country—was scheduled for six weeks and was focused on ministering to the Catholics and Christians who lived far away from the capital city, Guatemala City. Though poor (most living on less than eighty dollars per month), the people were kind, generous and faithful.
When he was advanced to the position of Cardinal, many in the church thought that O’Keefe should give up his missionary work.
“Joseph,” a friend had said to him, “people thought it was unusual for you to continue your missionary work when you served as a Bishop. But now, as a Cardinal?”
“My appointed position does nothing to ease the suffering of people,” O’Keefe responded.
“But with your duties as a leader of the church, how will you ever be able to manage your affairs when traipsing around the world?”
“People’s needs should always come before office and clerical duties.”
“And your age?” the friend continued. “Most stop mission work long before they reach the age of sixty, but you are planning a six week mission one month after your sixty-fifth birthday?”
“There will never be a lack of reasons to not help others. It will never be hard to justify staying comfortable and letting others do the work that you know needs to be done. There may come a time when those reasons are compelling enough for me to give up mission work. But they are far from strong enough now.”
The last mission he had completed, now over a year in his past, was made to the Central American country of Guatemala. He arrived at a small village of Santiago, located near Lake Atitlan. The lake was popular with adventurous tourists seeking both an authentic Guatemalan experience and the stunning views of the lake and the San Pedro and Fuego volcanoes. When he arrived at the village church, Cardinal O’Keefe was immediately asked by the local priest to visit a family that lived a few miles north of the village.
“I am sorry to ask this of you so soon after your arrival, Cardinal,” the priest said before showing O’Keefe to his room. “But there is a family in need. I have visited them several times and have tried to help, but…”
“What seems to be the problem, Father Cortez?” O’Keefe asked. His patience and kindness were seldom tested, but after the long and difficult travel to the village, he wanted nothing more than a brandy and a bed. “Is this family so in need that my visiting tomorrow will make their challenge unbearable?”
“It is their daughter,” Father Cortez said. “She is, she is not well.”
“Perhaps a doctor is a more suitable person to call, yes?”
“It is not her body that is sick, Cardinal. It is her soul.” Cortez paused, his nervousness and reluctance clearly etched across his face.
“Her soul?”
“The child, her soul, it is not alone, no longer pure. Something has invaded the poor child.”
“Are you suggesting,” O’Keefe said, trying but finding himself unable to retain his calm demeanor and steady tone of voice, “that the poor child is possessed by some evil entity? Come now, Father, haven’t we as a church moved beyond the superstitious and ignorant beliefs of old?”
“She doesn’t breathe yet she still lives. She hasn’t eaten in weeks nor has she taken any water. And, Cardinal, I know that I am far from being a doctor, but I could find no pulse in the child’s arms or neck. Yet her eyes were fixed on mine during my visit two days ago.”
“Father, forgive me if this sounds like I am questioning your story, but isn’t it possible that since the child does not breathe, has no pulse and has her gaze fixed, that the child has passed?”
“Dead children, Cardinal O’Keefe, do not move and do not speak. This child does both.”
<<<<>>>>
The tired and rusty car the priest was given when he assumed the position of pastor of the small church could not travel the path leading to the family’s house. He parked the car near the bottom of a trail.
“We need to walk the rest of the way.”
Though the path was not long, it crisscrossed back and forth as it made its way up a very steep hill. O’Keefe and the village priest, both feeling their age, struggled up the sinuous path, passing no one as they drew closer to the family’s home.
“Not much further,” Cortez said.
“I wasn’t expecting to climb mountains on my mission,” O’Keefe joked. “This trek may be the death of me.”
When the steep path began to level, O’Keefe could see several small shacks no more than two hundred feet away. The shacks were made mostly of discarded and then repurposed wood, mismatched sheets of rusty metal serving as their roofs. Though it was midday as they approached the shack, O’Keefe remarked on the absence of any villagers.
“Father Cortez,” he huffed, “are you sure that the family is at home?”
“They are home, Cardinal,” Cortez replied, his voice trailing off. “They will not leave their daughter’s side.”
“And the others who live in the other homes? Away working?”
“The houses are empty, Cardinal. The other families will not stay so close to the child.”
O’Keefe wasn’t sure if the feeling that hung like heavy smoke around the shacks was his imagination or reality. He felt as if each step he took moved him deeper into an unfamiliar world, one that offered known and expected sights but foreign feelings. As he walked closer to the home a stench filled his nostrils.
“My God,” he said. “That smell is the smell of death, Father. I am sorry to question you again, but are you certain the child has not passed and is now, forgive my crudeness, rotting away in that home?”
The grunting laughter within the nearest shack captured O’Keefe’s attention.
“The child knows we have arrived.”
<<<<>>>>
There was no door to enter through, just a space where the pieced-together walls formed a gap. As O’Keefe crossed the presumed threshold, the stench dissipated and was replaced by what he could only describe as the smell of blooming wild flowers.
There were no flowers in the two room shack.
A man, his clothes as torn and as worn as any clothes O’Keefe had ever seen, stood up from the dirt floor he was sitting on when O’Keefe entered the home.
“Father Cortez,” the man said in a dialect that was a mix between Spanish and a language O’Keefe had only heard on previous missions to remote Guatemalan villages. “She told us you were coming. She did not say you would be bringing a guest.”
“This is Cardinal O’Keefe,” Cortez said, still standing outside of the shack’s walls. “He is very powerful and important in the church and is here to help.”
>
“Make it leave my daughter,” the man said to O’Keefe. “Make it leave.”
<<<<>>>>
O’Keefe pulled back a dirty blanket held in place by rusty nails above a walkway, serving to separate the main room from a small bedroom. Before him, on a mattress placed on the dirt floor, was a child. A woman, who O’Keefe assumed to be the child’s mother, sat huddled as far away from the child as the eight by ten foot room allowed. Her face hidden by her hands and resting on her drawn up knees.
“Shall I say something witty? Or perhaps you’d rather take me in silence? Tell me, dear Cardinal, which way do you prefer to have me?” The child’s voice was as innocent sounding as any child’s should be. She was no more than ten, but the hard life and inability to bathe with any regularity forced years upon her appearance.
She was sitting upright on the mattress. Too upright. Her legs were straight out in front of her and her torso was so erect as to create a nearly perfect right angle. Her long dark hair, matted and twisted, framed her dark-skinned face. Her brown eyes seemed too innocent to have a role in whatever play O’Keefe had walked into.
“You seem to know my title,” O’Keefe said. “You have me at a disadvantage.”
“You want to know my name before you take me? How thoughtful of you. Always a gentleman, I assume.”
O’Keefe tried to see if the child’s chest rose and fell in a familiar pattern as she spoke. He could see no movement. “And where do you believe I want to take you?” he asked, moving a bit closer to the child.
“To whatever heights of ecstasy a sworn celibate like you can bring me to, of course. You’ve come to fuck me, haven’t you Cardinal O’Keefe?”
“I’ve come to help you, my child.”
“You’re much, much too late for that, Cardinal.”
“May I feel your wrist?” O’Keefe said, ignoring the child’s accusations.
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