by David Dean
The priest knelt with a grunt to fumble with the ring of keys he had brought from the rectory, finally succeeding in opening the hasp after several attempts. Nick reached down to pull him away from the doors. “I’ll go first, Father.” He, too, now produced a .45 semi-auto from its holster.
Scurrying back a few steps, the little priest threw open first one door, then the next, to clang against the cement foundation that supported them. A gust of dank air rose to greet them, bringing with it the smell of damp earth, moisture, and the underlying scent of things that crawl in dirt and darkness.
“If he’s in here, he already knows we’re around. Right, Professor?” Nick asked. Preston nodded in reply. “So there’s no point in pussy-footing around with this thing—you two wait here.” He made to descend the slick-looking steps that led into the belly of the church.
“I will accompany you, Chief,” Father Gregory announced. “As I am a priest of this parish and responsible for this church, I must insist.”
“Me, too,” Preston croaked, his throat and mouth gone dry, as much from fear as from nearly twelve hours without a drink. “I discovered this horror and I want to see it destroyed—after what it’s shown me, I have to see it die… it’s my right.”
Nick regarded both men from the corner of his eye while scanning what little of the cellar was revealed in the early morning light. The floor was of packed dirt, dark and oily-looking. Numerous objects appeared to lean into the dim light of the open doors: plaster saints draped in stiff robes, faces chipped and faded, old cabinets long ruined by the damp, and a pensive Saint Joseph clutching a plank of wood and a hatchet, a hole where once he had sported a nose.
“You’re certain that there’s no way into the church from the cellar, right?” he asked Father Gregory in a quiet voice.
“Absolutely certain,” the priest replied.
“Let’s go, then,” Nick said, descending the stairs. The two older men followed a few steps behind, the old wooden steps creaking with the weight of the three. “There’s a light switch?” Nick asked.
“Ah, yes,” Father Gregory replied. “It is just to your left, if memory serves. I’ve only been down here a few times before, I’m afraid… I never liked it.”
“Really,” Nick chuckled. “I can’t see why… it’s so cozy.” He felt the switch and flicked it up. The length of the cellar was now illuminated by a few bare bulbs smothered with ancient dust. The shadows grew and obtained density with the coming of the weak, yellow light. The farthest from them winked off and on like a beacon… or a warning, Nick thought. Just beyond it was the window behind which Beckam waited like a patient hunter.
Waving the older men behind him, Nick began to advance very slowly along the makeshift corridor created by the ecclesiastical cast-offs: discarded and broken pews, stained, musty furniture, a crucifix bearing a bloody Christ-figure too gruesome to suit the current fashion. As Nick’s gaze slid from object to object so went the barrel of the gun. It occurred to him that Gabriel, if he was in the cellar, was awake and watching them from somewhere within the shadowy jumble. He felt beads of sweat forming along his hairline even in the cool dampness.
From amidst a nest of soft moldering materials covered in dust and dotted with mouse droppings, Gabriel did, indeed, watch their approach. He peered through the semi-darkness at ankle level with the intruders, his pupils gone great and black. He felt a rumble deep within his gut, recognizing the fear that wanted to escape in a snarl, but remained silent. He understood the terrible danger of the gun that was clutched in the big man’s fist, while behind and above him his pricked ears defined the threat of the human waiting outside—he grasped at once that he was trapped and that the jaws of this trap were quickly closing.
He recognized the largest man as well, remembering their brief violent encounter as Gabriel had tried to sup on Preston Howard’s daughter. In all his long life, it had never occurred that a man had been successful in laying hands on him before that night, and the memory of the strength in his grip and the pain it inflicted flooded his senses with terror. Gabriel voided his bladder onto the stinking cloth he crouched upon.
Behind the silhouetted men the doors to the outside world remained thrown open, but this was of little use to him as he could see the strong sunlight that had begun streaming in with the rising sun. Even if he could somehow escape past the hunting men without grievous injury, he would be rushing out into a brilliant world in which he would be virtually blind and helpless, the terrible sun exposing him in its cruel brilliance. He watched the steady approach of the men with the thunder of his own blood sounding in his head.
Preston noticed it first as they neared the sputtering bulb, his long patrician nose wrinkling in disgust. “He’s near… I smell his damned musk, its unmistakable!”
Gabriel heard and understood the professor’s words just as the humans did, but was powerless to control the reaction that caused them. Like any animal, his instincts governed him, and when he grew frightened or ardent, his musk gland opened to emit the chemical that befuddled both prey and pursuer alike.
Glancing over his shoulder at Fanny’s father, Nick asked, “Where is it coming from… can you tell?” To Nick it appeared to emanate from the very air around them. Already he could feel his palm growing sweaty, his vision beginning to blur.
“No… not exactly,” Preston hissed. Snatching up a wooden curtain rod that lay propped against a forgotten chair, he began to jab the pole into the debris piled to either side of them. “But he’s close, I know that much… the little bastard is watching us!”
“Don’t get in front of me,” Nick warned.
A stack of children’s chairs clattered to the floor as a result of Preston’s efforts, and both men lurched back to avoid being struck.
“Goddamnit, Preston,” Nick cursed.
“Please, gentlemen… language,” Father Gregory admonished in a frightened whisper.
Nick saw a movement in the shadows from the corner of his eye. “Quiet,” he commanded, “there’s something over there!”
A shadow had detached itself from the rest, but now remained so still and motionless that it was easy to believe that it had been there all along. The stench grew.
The toppling of the classroom chairs had forced Gabriel to move or be struck and injured. Now he waited for what might happen next, his lean body as still as any of the sculpted saints he shared the cellar with. He could see the faces of the men who wished to harm him—frozen masks of fear and terror—they were not sure that he stood before them. Gabriel’s breath froze in his throat.
“Is that him?” Nick breathed.
“Shoot it… shoot it for Christ’s sake!” Preston demanded.
All Nick’s training forbid the use of deadly force without provocation, and this shadow offered none. In fact, was it the creature at all? His thoughts felt blurry and indistinct and the odor was overpowering—the idea of lying down and resting a moment occurred to him.
Suddenly the window that Beckam was guarding was thrown open and the younger man’s face appeared, “I heard shouting.” Sunlight haloed his head, illuminating that corner of the room.
Gabriel was no longer a shadow, but stood exposed to his pursuers. He remembered the ancient wound to his breast as he stared wild-eyed at Nick’s pistol. Catching sight of the black-frocked priest, his mind raced through all he had learned from listening to the humans and their worship.
Falling to his knees, he raised his long hands together above his head, his grappling hook fingers tented in an attitude of prayer. “Do not let them kill me, Man-of-God,” he cried out with passion. “Did not the Creator make me as surely as you?”
The creature’s words hung in the fetid air—a challenge to their common decency, an unmistakable plea for mercy. His words struck them all dumb, all but Beckam. “Shoot him, Chief, you’ve got a better angle than me.”
Nick felt his aim drifting, his thoughts coming apart like an old cobweb. Beckam had said something, but he couldn’t quite gras
p the meaning of his words.
Crawling on its hands and knees now, the creature came toward them, pleading for its life. “Is the sheep guilty of eating grass, or the wolf its meat?” he wailed. He reached the little priest, prostrating himself before him. Stroking Father Gregory’s shoes with his filthy talons, he cried, “Am I to be crucified for the appetite God gave me, Holy Man?”
Father Gregory gasped at the creature’s touch, scuttling backwards. Undeterred, Gabriel resumed crawling, dragging his belly across the dirt and bleating words he did not truly understand, though his fear was genuine enough. Once or twice his eyes flickered toward the big man with the gun, noting his confusion, his hesitancy. “May I not have sanctuary, Father?” he pleaded. “Will you let me be murdered in God’s church—at the feet of Christ Himself?” He raised a shaking arm to point at the bloody, torn figure watching from his worm-riddled cross.
“Kill it,” Preston mumbled thickly. He, too, was starting to wilt, and he grasped an upright beam to steady himself. “Hurry…”
As if from very far away, Nick heard Beckam’s voice, “Boss…?” His words floated dream-like into the damp cellar. “Boss, don’t let him get between you and the others.” There followed a pause, then, “Do you hear me? He’s getting into the middle of you all, Chief. Neither of us will have shot if you let him do that.”
His last words seemed urgent and Nick turned to gaze dully at the speaker, but all he could see was Beckam’s silhouetted head framed in the small window. He should come in if he’s got something important to say, Nick thought tiredly; otherwise, he should stay quiet… it was distracting… annoying, really.
Father Gregory found himself gazing up at the crucified God just as Gabriel had done and the creature once more reached his feet. “You drink blood, holy man,” he whispered, “don’t deny it, for I have watched you drain the chalice and heard your very words day after day.” Gabriel tilted his large head in an effort of memory while rising slowly to his knees. “This is my blood which will be given up for you,” he lisped, “the blood of the new and everlasting covenant. It will be shed for you, and for all, so that sins may be forgiven—do this in memory of me.” He held aloft his own great hands as if gripping the chalice, smiling, his owlish eyes closing in a parody of beatitude.
The priest looked down on his yellowish eyelids in dawning horror, the memory of their encounter at the Eucharistic devotion returning to him in snatches of disgust and loathing. He took one more step back to create some distance between him and the unnatural beast. Gabriel followed on his knees like a medieval penitent. Holding out his filthy hands to the little priest once more, he pleaded, “Is there no mercy for such as me, Priest of Christ?”
“Man was created in God’s likeness,” Father Gregory managed at last, fighting the mesmerizing effects of Gabriel’s presence, “so that we may honor Him. You… your kind,” he continued, as his words and thoughts returned to him, “have followed us somehow, acquiring our features and likenesses along the way… even our speech, which you now use wickedly to preserve your own life.”
Gabriel shot an angry sideways glance at the man with the gun, gauging his chances… there were mere feet between him and the life-threatening weapon. He could snatch the pistol away and kill the big man within moments in his present state, he thought. The other two he would slaughter at his leisure as they were old and weak. The young one outside troubled him however and caused him to hesitate. The priest raised his voice and Gabriel swung his baleful gaze once more to him.
“You are not human,” Father Gregory accused Gabriel, attempting to rouse his compatriots as well as himself, “but blasphemous and unnatural! You were never meant to make the same journey as man, but followed nonetheless, skulking in the shadows, a child of darkness!” Placing a foot into the creature’s chest, he shoved it onto its back. “Chief Catesby, strike now!” he commanded the policeman.
Gabriel struck the packed dirt floor with an expression of outraged surprise on his pallid face. “You will die first,” he hissed, his jaw unhinging even as he spoke. Leaping to his long furred feet in a single blinding motion, he seized the fleshy throat of the priest, his yellow nails drawing blood at every point they touched.
Even as his great mouth fastened over the pulsing throat of the curate, Nick stepped forward in an almost casual fashion, placed the pistol into Gabriel’s left armpit and pulled the trigger. The creature’s violent movements had, at last, defined the target he had been waiting for in his befuddlement.
Screeching, Gabriel leapt back, clutching the neat hole beneath his arm, his lower jaw snapping back into place. His large eyes surveyed the men arrayed before him, as a tremulous howl erupted from his throat.
Within this echoing cry the men heard and recognized the great aloneness that only such a creature as Gabriel could suffer and give voice to—incapable of mercy and compassion, he expected none from those that walked in the light. With gouts of his own dark blood pumping between his awful fingers, he dropped to his knees with a pitiful whining, then fell over onto his side and, at last, lay still. The silence that followed rang with his cry like a thousand bells.
After several moments of shocked immobility, Father Gregory, touching his unpierced throat, managed to say, “Thank you, Chief Catesby… that was most timely.”
Nodding, Nick took a step in the direction of the thing that he had just killed. In spite of all the differences that appeared so glaring at close quarters, he was unable to shake the feeling that what lay at his feet might be human after all. He felt his legs begin to shake.
Gazing down at the slain creature, he saw a face that, up-close, was bestial, and this gave him some comfort. Gabriel’s features were large and exaggerated, only meant to be examined at a distance where they might pass for a fellow traveler. Closely scrutinized, the glittering eyes, just visible beneath the lowered lids, were cold and merciless as the space between the stars, the nose too broad, the nostrils distended.
The ears, protruding from the filthy tangle of hair, were overly large as well, obviously adapted for nocturnal hunting, their interiors as convoluted and complex as a dog’s. But it was the wide reptilian mouth that branded him undeniably as something other than human. Nick recalled with perfect clarity its terrible loose gape, the jumbled yellow teeth, and the obscenely red, thick, snake-like tongue, that he had glimpsed as the creature fastened onto the priest. With a shudder, he stepped away again.
Preston spoke from the shadows, “He has two hearts… he’s forgotten that he told me that.” The older man emerged from the darkness still wielding the wooden rod, which he promptly broke over his knee. Hoisting it above his head in the same moment, he poised the jagged end above the creature’s right breast.
Gabriel’s great eyes flew open as Preston’s shadow fell upon him and he threw up his long arms to seize him. But his previous wound had slowed him and the old man was the quicker this time, driving the stake through his rib cage with a sickening crack of bone and deep into his second, and secret, heart. Though his claws raked Preston’s shirt into bloody tatters, these were the throes of true death, and with a great shudder he died, his death being followed by a long, final exhalation. His killers stood round him in shocked, bewildered silence, but for Preston’s exhausted panting. “There,” he gasped, “I’ve done it… he’s dead, by God!”
They witnessed no changing, no sudden dissolution, no crumbling to dust, just the sad, ugly corpse of a misshapen boy spread-eagled in a pool of his own black and stinking blood.
A shadow fell over the three men gathered in the twilight dawn of Our Lady of the Visitation’s cellar, and Officer Beckam remarked, surveying their work, “That took some doing.”
Panting with exertion, Preston replied, “You have a gift for understatement, young man.”
“Listen,” Nick turned to Beckam, “give the prosecutor’s office a call and get them down here. Tell them they’ll want to bring one of the M.E.’s investigators, too.”
“You’re heading back to
the hospital?” Beckam asked.
“The three of us are… she needs us more than they do right now. You can tell them where to find us. Besides, they’re going to have enough of a puzzle on their hands with this body before they even think about interviewing us.”
Beckam hesitated, “You sure you want to leave them this … this thing? What if they believe it really is a boy… a human, I mean? Do you think they’ll understand what’s happened here?”
“Why not just bury it and be done with the goddamned thing?” Preston interjected.
Nick threw him a glance, then answered Beckam’s question, “The autopsy should settle what it is. In any case, Beck, I’ve never been a very good liar. We’ll just have to let the evidence take us where it will.”
Turning toward the sunlight that was now streaming down the distant stairs, he added, “Don’t worry, Beck, you have nothing to worry about out of this. You did everything right and I appreciate it.”
Beck smiled faintly, saying, “I’m not worried about me, Boss. I just wish you’d think of yourself here… this could get very ugly.”
Preston snapped, “Don’t be an idiot, there’s a shovel right over there!”
“Our chief is a very courageous man,” Father Gregory chimed in. “God and Saint Michael will not abandon such a man, I am thinking.”
“Oh, no doubt…” Preston agreed.
The priest smiled at Nick, “Come, good man, Fanny is waiting for you.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Fanny knelt to retrieve the large turkey from the oven, the mouth-watering aroma filling the room and steaming the windows. She was careful to protect her red velvet dress from possible stains by wearing a full-length apron. This was seasonally festooned with tiny Santa Clauses driving their reindeer pell-mell across a starry sky.
Two strong hands grasped her small waist as she bent to her task, pulling her away. She arose to find Nick, looking very dashing in a blue wool blazer, white starched shirt, and red-patterned tie.