Death of the Body

by Rick Chiantaretto

  “You must be Edmund.”

  The voice behind me was stronger than the one on the phone. I jumped.

  “Sorry if I startled you. I’m Father Paul,” he said, walking around me and taking a seat at his desk. “I have to admit, I’m really rather excited to talk to you. You told Kathy you were at Saint Vincent’s as a child?”

  I nodded my head, “For about twelve years.”

  “Were you there during the…” he hesitated, “… incident?”

  I nodded again, not mentioning that I was the incident.

  “Well that is just fascinating. I have to admit though, when we got your call and you mentioned to Kathy that Saint Vincent’s was your last parish, I tried to look you up…”

  I interrupted. “I changed my name and asked that those records be sealed.”

  “So you never attended a Catholic parish under your current name?”

  “No.”

  The priest pursed his lips. “It’s been a long time since your last confession then.”

  I grinned, “Indeed.”

  Based on his scowl, that wasn’t the response he was expecting. “Well, if you came for a confession, this isn’t the usual way to go about it, but we have the confessional open…”

  “I didn’t come for a confession.”

  “So you do not intend to return to the faith?”

  “Sorry, Father, but no.”

  He crossed his arms and I saw his eyes turn defensive. “Then what can I do for you today?”

  “I was hoping you could provide me a list of the names of the children, workers, nuns, and priests that survived at Saint Vincent’s, and, if it is possible, where those children were sent, and where the workers and staff were reassigned.”

  His jaw dropped. “For what purpose?”

  “My reasons, ” I paused, “are personal.”

  “I’m sorry, Edmund, but you are going to have to do better than that. Church records are private, probably not even available to a member of the church, and certainly not to a heathen.”

  This was going to be harder than I thought. “Well, then, perhaps you could inquire as to the whereabouts of Father Michaels’ journals?”

  Father Paul sighed. “Actually, Edmund, after your call I became a bit fascinated by the Saint Vincent massacre. I called the diocese and told them I might have one of the children from that incident in my congregation. They sent me a copy of the journals.”

  Now we were getting somewhere. “Can you tell me if there was anything in them that stood out to you?”

  Father Paul chuckled. “Just a part about a boy named Alexander claiming to actually be named Edmund, but I’m certain you already know all about that.”

  My stomach muscles tightened reflexively, just like someone had punched me.

  “Are you that boy? If you answer truthfully we may be able to have a more honest discussion.”

  Father Paul emphasized the word honest in such a way as to make me believe he wasn’t being honest at all.

  But still, I considered, and then nodded.

  “More interesting than the journals of Father Michaels, whose entries obviously end just a few days after he makes reference to the ‘Edmund conundrum,’ are the journals of a Sister Mary Elizabeth. I was only able to read a few months past the time of the death of Father Michaels, Sister Mary Chantale, and Sister Mary Rafaela, but Sister Mary Elizabeth has been kind enough to agree to send me the remainder of her writings on the subject.”

  “Sister Mary Elizabeth is still alive?” I asked in amazement before thinking of the consequences of my question.

  “She is.”

  “Where?”

  “I’d rather not say. She didn’t trust you much, at least not after your communion. Before that she thought you were very special. She blames you for the deaths in the orphanage. Her formal report to the Vatican was that Father Michaels was performing an exorcism on you at the time of his death. I must admit I find that rather shocking. Are her report of the events true?”

  “I don’t know, I haven’t read them.”

  “Would you like to?”

  I knew there had to be a catch to this question, but I narrowed my eyes and nodded.

  Father Paul pulled open a lower drawer on his desk, and took out a file folder. “Here is a copy of Sister Mary Elizabeth’s statement to the Vatican,” he tossed the folder toward me. “As I said, I find this story fascinating, and since I am the first church representative to have contact with you since your… disappearance, I must admit I am looking forward to our future conversations.”

  “So your intentions, then, are to help me as long as I answer your questions?” I asked, feeling like Father Paul was more interested in the story inside of my head than in me as a person, as a human, or as a Catholic.

  He smiled. “Perhaps you could start by telling me about what happened after you left the orphanage. How did you escape the massacre when everyone else in the room was killed? You were placed with a foster family, were you not? Tell me about them.”

  I balked. “Why don’t you just ask my foster parents? They have already asked me those questions. Surely, you know who they are.”

  “They’re dead.”

  Any emotion I was feeling at that moment was washed away with a sense of surprise at the amount of loss that swept through me. My foster parents were disgusting role models, but I found myself now being unable to focus on anything but their redeeming qualities.

  “You didn’t know?” Father Paul was legitimately taken aback.

  I pressed my lips together in a tight line in an attempt to control my emotions, and shook my head. “How long ago?”

  “Six weeks. Your mother three days after your father.” Father Paul’s voice was now filled with genuine concern.

  “Heart attacks?”

  Father Paul blinked in surprise; his answering tone reflected that emotion. “Yes.”

  “Father Paul,” I stood and put my hands on his desk so that he could see the pleading in my eyes. “I really need that list. I know of nine deaths that occurred after the massacre at the orphanage, the most recent a friend of mine named Ruth. All of them had heart related injuries. In Ruth’s case the coroner guessed that as she hung herself, her own fear of death caused heart failure, killing her before either asphyxiation or the breaking of the spinal column. Does that sound possible to you?”

  Father Paul’s eyes lit with understanding, “The deaths in the orphanage all had heart related problems as well?”

  I nodded slowly.

  “You think… but… the deaths in the orphanage were ruled homicide.”

  “Homicide, suicide, natural causes, it doesn’t matter. The injury is the same.”

  “You want this list because you think someone is trying to kill everyone who survived?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “According to Sister Mary Elizabeth, you were the reason all those people died,” Father Paul said with a slight amount of fear in his expression.

  “Sister Mary Elizabeth believed I was possessed.”

  “Were you?”

  “Father Michaels performed the exorcism didn’t he? And I’m still Edmund, aren’t I?”

  “I don’t know, did he? Are you?”

  “I’m sorry Father Paul, but these are questions with answers that I don’t have any explanations for. Perhaps you need to find those answers yourself. Can you at least tell me how many people survived?”

  “Thirty-four children, nineteen staff members, and six nuns.”

  “Please, Father, check that list and find out how many are still alive.”

  “Why would anyone still want these people dead?”

  “I don’t know, Father, but that is what I am trying to find out.”

  Eleven

  It is just over a seven hour drive from San Diego to Prescott, Arizona, and although it was a few minutes faster to go up I-15 and catch I-10 across the desert, I always preferred to take Interstate 8 up through Yuma. My chosen path might have been less po
pulated all together, but the population was more widespread, making me feel like I wasn’t in the middle of nowhere, at least until I had to start going north on 95.

  I remembered Prescott being a big town when I was a child, but that is when I thought twenty thousand people all trying to get rodeo tickets was the defining characteristic of a big city. Even though the population had now close to doubled that, there was still no comparison to the millions of people in San Diego. Not only did the city feel small to me now, but sort of reminded me of the kind of town in a horror film.

  My foster parents owned a square cut, three bedroom, southwestern cottage with barely 1,000 square feet, but the lot that the house sat on was large enough to comfortably fit one of the larger UCSD buildings. There were no cars in the driveway when I parked my beat up Toyota Tacoma against the curb but the horses were in their stalls and hadn’t been taken care of. I glanced at my watch and deduced from the hour that if my older sister hadn’t been staying in the house and had to work or something, then she probably wouldn’t have made it over to let the horses out into a shared pasture that was tucked behind our property line.

  It had been two years since I had done any work in the stables but I was still quick at it. I led the horses to the pasture and had the stalls raked (which, I might add, obviously had not been done regularly) in just under an hour. Then, since I didn’t have a key to the house, I climbed a large willow tree that grew at the end of the pasture and watched the horses nibble on the grass.

  This tree was familiar to me. I had spent hours amongst its branches as a child. Even now, I could feel the warmth of its life force cradle me as I curled up between the junctures of its trunk. Yet the tree remained silent.

  Trees, I had discovered, did not have the best of memories—at least not individually. Their consciousness was somewhat collective, and as such, the collective thought patterns of the grove become the forefront concern. Everything else would be forgotten until the trees agreed on a new item to ponder. Unfortunately, this willow was part of a grove whose roots intertwined halfway across the desert. Although I had had many conversations with this tree in the past, it was always hard to garner the attention of the grove.

  The horses also were not very chatty, they were just angry. Their regular schedule had been interrupted since the death of my foster parents. My sister was obviously not as meticulous as my foster father had been at ensuring their care. On top of that, they were upset that I hadn’t come to ride them, to discuss their needs, or to spend time with them over the past two years. Horses, unfortunately, had a phenomenal memory—and they knew how to hold a grudge.

  “Well now, this is a surprise. What are you doing here? Come to see what they left you in their will?”

  The voice came from below me, but it was familiar enough to be instantly recognizable. I grinned down between the branches to where my foster sister, Jane, was standing at the base of the tree.

  “I didn’t even hear your car pull in,” I yelled down at her.

  Jane’s face was pale with exhaustion. She didn’t seem overly happy to see me, but I half expected that. There was a persistent warmth in her hazel eyes though, warmth that I realized I missed. “You always did get lost in your own little world up there. Let’s go inside where it is a bit warmer,” she chirped. “I’ll make us some lunch.”

  The small house had not changed much. It still smelled of sugar and dust and cleanliness was forgotten among shelf after shelf of religious trinkets. The only difference now was that it felt colder. Jane must have thought the same thing, because the first thing she did was turn up the thermostat.

  “It’s supposed to snow this afternoon. Just an inch or two but we should keep an eye on the roads.” She tugged the door to the fridge open but stopped to look at me as I walked into the kitchen. “I’m assuming you aren’t staying long.”

  “Sorry,” I stated. “I’ve got classes tomorrow.”

  “Do you have any plans for Christmas?”

  Wow. Christmas. I had almost forgotten it was less than six weeks away. I glanced over toward the calendar on the wall—November 6th. “No, not really,” I answered.

  Jane cracked an egg into a flour mixture she was preparing. Pancakes, from the look of it.

  “Look, Jane. I’m sorry I didn’t come. I didn’t know.”

  She hesitated for just a moment while tucking a stray strand of strawberry blonde hair behind her ear. “I know. I tried to call…”

  “I changed my number.”

  “Did you really hate us that much?”

  “Hate?” I had to search my emotions here. “No. I never…”

  I stopped as I saw tears well up in her eyes. She covered well, turning quickly to the refrigerator to get out the milk, only lingering a bit longer than necessary, like she couldn’t remember where she put it. I knew she was composing herself.

  “Well, it was…” she started blinking rapidly, “… hard without you. You know how they got.”

  “It didn’t get any better when I left?”

  Jane added a cup of milk to the batter and started stirring. “A little, honestly. A few days after you were gone, when they were sure you weren’t coming back, they went through your room.”

  I hadn’t expected less.

  “After they burned everything you left behind, they tore up the carpet, and painted the entire room white, the floors, the ceilings, the walls. They were so convinced the symbols you had everywhere would bring evil into the house.”

  None of this was news to me. The reason I left so abruptly was because they had accused me of being a worshipper of Satan. Our arguments had escalated when the trees started to hear rumors that concerned me, rumors of energumen. I insisted on protecting myself the only way I knew how but protective symbols from my life in Orenda weren’t exactly welcomed in a Catholic household.

  I had been accused of being in league with the devil once, and that ended in the massacre of dozens. I wasn’t about to stay in a place where I was accused of the same thing. As little as I loved my foster parents, I didn’t want them dead.

  Jane chuckled. “It’s funny, though. Since Mom and Dad died, your room is the only place I can sleep at night in this house. Even though it is so cold, hard, and stanch white now. Everything else in this place just seems dark.”

  A gust of wind rattled the windows; the sky was turning from a light grey to a smoky black.

  “Storm’s rolling in,” Jane commented while she poured the batter onto the griddle.

  Most of Jane’s story so far was what I had been expecting but there was one piece that bothered me.

  “Jane,” I asked gently, “why would you be afraid of this place? With all the pictures of Christ, the shrines to Catholic saints, the candles, it seems like this is the last place you would feel evil. You always took such great comfort in the Catholic faith.”

  “I’m assuming, since you haven’t asked, that you know how Mom and Dad died?”

  I wasn’t sure how the question was significant, but I answered truthfully. “Yes. Heart failure. I went to see Father Paul at my local diocese. He told me.” I said the last few sentences as easily as possible to make it sound like Father Paul and I were better acquainted.

  “Do you remember when we were kids and I asked you what happened in the orphanage? You used to tell me elaborate stories, about demons in possession of human bodies with yellow eyes. I always believed Mom when she told me that those stories were just your way of coping with what happened to you. I never thought…”

  My heart jumped into my throat. “Where are you going with this, Jane?” The question came out more forcefully than I expected.

  Jane pulled the pancakes off the griddle and handed me a plate, which I took, but didn’t move. Instead I glared at her, willing her to answer my question.

  “It’s nothing, really. Just a strange chain of events. I’m sure it’s nothing.”

  “Tell me.”

  Jane let out a sigh. “Well, a few days before Mom and Dad died, a you
ng man came to the house looking for you.”

  I tried to hide my reaction, which was somewhere between disgust and anger.

  “He told Dad that he had been speaking with Sister Mary Elizabeth from the orphanage about how you and he used to be friends.”

  Two things bothered me about this part of the story. One, just the name Sister Mary Elizabeth was enough to turn my face red. Two, I had no idea what male friend this could have been. The only two I could even remember were Simon and Nicholas, one of whom was dead, and the second would be snoring right now in our dorm room at UCSD.

  “Do you remember this person’s name?”

  Jane shook her head. “I only met him briefly, and not the day he came. After he discovered we didn’t know where you were, he told dad he had come a long way and wondered if he might do some work to earn enough money to travel back. Dad told him we didn’t have much but let him work with the horses for a few days.”

  “I’m still not sure where this is going.”

  “Well, there was something about him I didn’t like. That first night was when Dad started having pains in his chest. I couldn’t help but think this man did something to him.”

  “I admit, the timing is a bit strange, but I really don’t see how…” my attempted words of reassurance and comfort cut short when Jane looked at me with pleading in her eyes. I remembered that feeling and recognized the look. I knew exactly what it was like to plead with someone to believe something that you knew to be absolute truth but made no logical sense. “Why do you think he…?” I couldn’t get the rest of the question out.

  “I know it seems stupid,” Jane said, “but I…”

  Her voice cut off and she began breathing heavily. I watched as her hands started shaking so badly that she had to put down her own plate.

  “Jane, are you afraid?”

  “Edmund, I’ve had dreams of this man. They are always of him…”

  “Go on, Jane.”

  “It’s embarrassing.”

  “I need to know.”

  Jane sat down at the table and started drumming her fingers nervously. “In my dreams this man is on top of me… naked. But it isn’t normal. It hurts. I can’t move, and it’s dark. I hear screaming in the distance, and then I realize it’s my own voice screaming. But at the same time, I can’t speak, I can’t scream. It hurts to even open my mouth. I don’t know where I am or how I’m screaming in the distance. The only thing I can do is watch this man take advantage of me. Sometimes, when I wake up, I have bruises. Two nights ago, I woke up bleeding. I went into the bathroom to clean up. When I got back to my room I looked out the window and thought I saw him standing across the pasture, just inside of the trees, peering at me with eerie yellow eyes.