Faces in the Night

by Thomas Conuel

  “Ok.” Katherine called after him. “Be careful. We’re going to look around a bit.

  Try to find the old cemetery.”

  Blake threaded his way through an overgrown thicket and picked his way along the shore of the island. The night was quiet; the only sound the steady slap of small waves on the rocky shore. Bobcats lived on these islands. Blake recalled how Hudson Richardson had talked for an hour about the bobcat study project at the university that used these islands. Kind of too bad that Lester Carlson had come along. He and Katherine could have had some fun out here by themselves. A little skinny dipping to start things off.

  * * *

  Chapter 91

  Father Phil stood in his sparse office gazing into the darkness outside the Franciscan Monastery. His visitors with their map questions had come and gone and he was alone. The monks had long since gone to bed. The Brothers rose at 4 a.m. for prayers and work and were seldom about after dark. It was nearly midnight and the summer solstice was minutes away.

  He was thinking now of Lester Carlson’s confession.

  “Bless me Father for I have sinned.

  It is 45 years since my last confession.

  Please forgive me for all my sins, my bad temper, my anger at times toward my wife and children, but especially for every wrong decision I made about the Vietnam War.”

  Father Phil had handed out a simple penance: “Say three Our Fathers and forgive your enemies, both old and new.”

  Lester Carlson and Katherine had come tonight seeking his advice on finding the old grave site of Elijah Durman. And Father Phil had obliged, unfolding his maps, and tracing a route by canoe out to the Quabbin islands, specifically Curtis Hill, where they hoped to find the old grave site of the historic Elijah Durman character, and also the missing coffin of Blake’s old wartime buddy, Kevin Flanagan. They were looking for connections, and who was he to say there were none, or even, heaven forbid, that there were some.

  After they left, Father Phil opened his filing cabinet and brought out the letter from the Jesuit priest, Father Baker, who vanished out near Curtis Hill in the 1930s when the reservoir was under construction.

  He studied the final paragraph of the letter, a single sentence written in the small cramped script of Father Baker: “This cross that I have hunted for, in the wrong hands, and used with the remains of a member of the Flanagan family (the Durman family line being now defunct) at a specific time of year, which time I have yet to determine, could exert an unholy and perhaps eternal influence allowing the devil to assume a human form in this century.”

  That was specific enough. If you believed old Father Baker.

  Father Phil found a yellow-lined notepad on his desk and wrote out a list.

  1: Sebastien Rale, the first Jesuit to get involved in this, finds an unusual blue stone whose color is so strange as to be remarked upon by all who saw it. The stone is later embedded in a marble cross created by Sebastien Rale.

  2: A blue stone is mentioned in the descriptions of a cross used by devilish characters in the 18th century, and tracked by Jesuits seeking the stolen cross.

  3: A blue stone is embedded on the cross carried by Elijah Durman and ends up cemented onto his gravestone in a nearby town.

  4: A blue light is seen by both Katherine and Lester Carlson when they describe an apparition chasing them,

  Father Phil briefly contemplated calling his Jesuit superior and good friend, Father James C. Hannigan, S.J. But it was late, and what would he say to Hannigan?

  “Jim, I think there may be a devil trying to get back into our world. It could be real. I know it sounds crazy, but I’m totally serious. And, yes, now that the weather is warm let’s get together. I’ll even go golfing.”

  That wouldn’t work and it wouldn’t help. Let Jim Hannigan get his sleep.

  Father Phil moved to the window in the sitting room that looked out over the porch. The wind was rising. A few minutes before midnight, he thought. Perfect timing if you believed in the old legends about the summer solstice cracking open the doors of the universe and letting spirits back in. He heard it again—the wind rising and now howling with near hurricane intensity, but nothing was moving on the lawn or the field beyond. With a wind like that, the trees should be bending over. But, the trees were still and the field brightly lit by a three-quarter moon was quiet.

  The sound of that wind somewhere in the distance enhanced the stillness around him, and sent a shudder through Father’s Phil’s thin body. It was, he reflected, like standing in the eye of a hurricane—quiet, but a deep deadly quiet—akin to the seconds before the wind rips the roof from the house. It was still with a sense of impending menace gnawing at the edge of the silence—the certain knowledge that the eye of the storm would soon move and the fury behind it erupt.

  And so it did.

  Father Phil bent at the window and looked out, scanning the field. And then the distant wind died abruptly. Father Phil leaned forward his face closer to the window.

  The face was already there--pressed against the outside window, one eye spinning with a crazy blue light deep inside the skeletal structure, the other eye droopy and bloody, the mouth open in a scream. Though he was prepared for it, the apparition’s face jolted him with a dry-throated nausea. He stumbled back from the window and felt his legs give out. He slid to the floor, fought for and gained control of his bowels and bladder, and gulped a deep breath.

  Lester Carlson and Katherine had been right all along. There was a truly evil presence trying to make its way back into the world tonight--the night of the Summer Solstice. And it was out there now seeking his soul before moving on to greater horrors.

  Father Phil lay still on the floor for several seconds and then called out: “I’m not going out like this,” He yelled again, more to himself than to the face outside. “No way, am I leaving afraid of you and flat on my back.”

  Father Phil pulled himself to his knees. There is always something more you can do in the way of action. That had been his private mantra for his entire adult life. It was why he had become a Jesuit. There was always something more you could do. A wrong you could right; a person you could help. You could never, ever take the setbacks of life sitting still; averting your eyes; shrugging your shoulders and thinking that’s somebody else’s problem. There was always something more you could do in the way of action. He was, after all, a Jesuit—a soldier of Christ.

  Father Phil averted his eyes from the window and the horrifying face out there—bobbing on the wind, sucking up energy from some deadly foul place in the universe, and seeking just a glimmer more of its strange power to enable it to come inside and snatch his soul from his body.

  Father Phil reached inside his shirt. There it was. The old trusty crucifix his mother had given to him so many decades ago.

  “You’ve always been special, Phil,” she told him holding out the small box covered with gold wrapping paper the day he left for the seminary. “It’s always so hectic around here, and we’re always, all of us, rushing about every day that I never get a chance to tell you how special you are and how lucky you make me feel.” Father Phil was 22, not a big hugger at the time, but he reached forward and encircled and squeezed his mother’s thin body. He opened the gold-covered box and lifted out the small crucifix—carved out of white marble, four inches high and about 8 ounces, graced with fine delicate sculpting that delineated the face of Jesus with a beatific smile.

  The crucifix had been with him every day ever since—worn on a simple stainless-steel chain around his neck. “It seems you grew up so fast,” his mother had said that day, wiping away a tear. “We never really had time to talk these last few years. You were here, and then you were gone. To college and then grad school and now this.”

  “Mom, this is beautiful,” he said, holding the crucifix up. “I’ll always wear it and always think of you.” And he had.

  Now, he grasped the crucifix dangling on his chest and pulling himself to his feet lurched over to the window.


  “Hear us our Lord from heaven thy dwelling place. Hear us our Lord and grant us peace now and in our final hours here on earth.” He screamed the words directly into the horrible face bobbing outside the window.

  The window shook and the face outside swelled and grew more distinct. Father Phil held his cross with his right hand inside his clerical shirt. With his other hand he supported himself grasping a nearby chair to steady his shaking body. The wind howled, but the window held as the wind swirled against it.

  “Hear us our Lord from heaven thy dwelling place,” Father Phil yelled.

  “Hear us our Lord from heaven thy dwelling place.” He moved three steps to the door and flung it open. A cold wind ripped at him, and for a moment he lost his grip on the cross. It spun free on his chest swinging back and forth. In that instant, lasting only three or four seconds, he felt a force dragging him into a deep darkness. Is this death, he thought. Everything goes black and a hand tips you over into a pool of total darkness.

  Frantically he reached for and gripped his crucifix again “Hear us our Lord from heaven thy dwelling place,” he called. The blackness retreated and he stepped outside into the wind holding tightly to the cross.

  The window exploded inward scattering glass shards across the floor. Father Phil looked back once and then walked forward into the darkness beyond the porch.

  The face exploded coming at him out of the darkness, stopping inches from his face. He steadied himself and looked into the cold blue eye and knew that what the Jesuits had been chasing for centuries was real and true and in need of stopping.

  “Hear us our Lord from heaven thy dwelling place,” he yelled directly into the face. “Grant us peace and mercy and protect us our Lord.”

  The face swirled inches from him, and he felt a slow draining of energy from his body. Was this it? His final moments here on this lovely earth. He gripped his crucifix tightly and pushed himself forward.

  “Hear us our Lord from heaven thy dwelling place.”

  “Hear us our Lord from heaven thy dwelling place.”

  “Hear us our Lord from heaven thy dwelling place, and protect us our Lord.”

  The face was backing away as Father Phil advanced.

  “Hear us our Lord from heaven thy dwelling place.”

  The face swirled and started to lose shape. It began to disassemble itself. The wind died down abruptly and the fields were once again filled with deep quiet moonlight.

  “Hear us our Lord from heaven thy dwelling place,” he said again looking directly into the swirling blue light deep in the face’s skeletal eye socket, now fading.

  “Hear us our Lord from heaven thy dwelling place,” he repeated and stepped forward again.

  The blue light waned and flickered. The face faded in seconds retreating with the wind, which howled and then died out.

  Father Phil fell to his knees. He grasped his marble crucifix and drew a deep breath. “Thank you mother for this cross,” he said. “Thank you.”

  * * *

  Chapter 92

  Katherine stood for a moment watching Blake pick his way along the shore of Curtis Hill before gradually fading from sight. Lester Carlson came up to stand beside her.

  “What now?” he asked

  “We’ve got to check up there,” she said gesturing toward the ridge of dark pines. “The actual cemetery was there, right?”

  “Yup. I’m pretty sure. That would be about right. We’re here so let’s have a look.”

  The sliver of moon threw a thin shaft of light along the contours of hill rising behind the old stone building. Katherine and Lester Carlson edged around behind the building, stumbling on shards of rocks dislodged over the decades from the walls and now scattered on the ground. The row of white pines, planted many years ago to separate the stone clubhouse and the golf course from the cemetery, swayed and creaked with the midnight breeze. They walked slowly, picking their way through the dark trees, their footsteps muffled by the thick mat of pine needles on the ground.

  Katherine was the first to see the inlet. She stepped out from the acre of old pines into a long, rectangular field overgrown with small saplings and wild blueberry bushes, and dappled with moonlight. There were no stone grave markers here, and she wasn’t expecting any. When Lester Carlson’s grave digging crew had come to this spot 56 years ago they had removed the headstones. Still, this field was unmistakably the old graveyard she had seen on Father Phil’s map. It’s location behind the stone clubhouse and its neat contours spoke to its former use.

  She paused for a moment and listened. The sound of water gurgling close by whispered through the darkness. Puzzled, she moved several feet to her left. Lester Carlson followed. The field was full of shadows and dim moonlight and brighter than the woods.

  Katherine’s eyes swept the borders of the field, and then she saw the inlet. It was a long, gentle gully cut deeply into the rocks and soil, extending into the field some 50 yards from the waters lapping at the edge of the island. Katherine looked to the other side of the inlet where the field stretched out to meet the woods. She moved a few steps nearer the inlet looking for a place to cross. A large rock formation with low overhanging slabs formed a catch basin in the field where the inlet ended. Katherine turned to her right and swept her flashlight beam across the face of the rock formation. She gasped. There, snug and secure on a ledge above the water, sat a large wooden box—the size of a coffin.

  Lester Carlson, a step behind her, also saw the object. He and Katherine turned to face each other with the moonlight throwing faint shadows across their faces. Both stared at the ledge. Finally Lester Carlson spoke.

  “There it is,” he said. “You were right.”

  Katherine nodded. She picked her way across the rocks at the end of the inlet and climbed up the side of the ledge until she stood beside the object. It was a coffin, and it was new. Lester Carlson came up beside her. Neither spoke for a long moment. Both stood and stared down into the open coffin, its interior dimply lit by the moon.

  The night was quiet with only the sound of water splashing against the rocks in the inlet. Katherine, though she hadn’t known what to expect, was disappointed. There was nothing but a pile of pale bones and a skull inside. They lay on the white plush cloth that lined the interior of the coffin looking inappropriate and misplaced. It reminded her of a piece of pop art she had seen at a New York gallery years ago—an open can of tuna fish on a walnut table set with silver, crystal, and linen. It caught your eye by its jarring incongruity. Here it was the starkness of the jumbled bones reposing on soft velvet. They held and reflected the moonlight.

  Lester Carlson snapped on his flashlight and slowly moved its beam up and down the length of the coffin. He paused to illuminate a medal placed with the bones. Lester Carlson shone the light on the medal and bent forward to look.

  “Purple Heart,” he announced. “Probably put that in with him when they first put the remains in here. Lots of times the family wants the medals buried with the body.”

  Katherine nodded and continued looking. The skull fascinated her. It was large and intricate and empty, like a house completely gutted by fire with only its beams still standing. Death’s head. She had heard the phrase used but never fully understood its meaning until now. This was, she realized, the first and only human skull she had ever seen. The last earthly remains of Kevin Flanagan, Blake’s friend killed in Vietnam.

  Lester Carlson reached over the open coffin to the raised lid and pulled up a corner of an American flag that was still tacked to the top of the coffin. He shook his head slowly and said a single word that Katherine strained to hear. “What?” she said.

  “Vietnam,” he whispered again. “Everywhere I go. Vietnam. It’s always there.” He snapped off his flashlight.

  Katherine turned to Lester Carlson. She was about to speak, to ask him what he wanted to do. Should they try to bring the coffin back in the canoe? Or wait here until morning and then inform the police? But before she could speak, she heard a sound. Les
ter Carlson heard it also. Both stood silent and strained to hear. It came again—clear and unmistakable in the night air. A steady slap followed by a small splash. Somebody was paddling a canoe into the inlet.

  Lester Carlson whispered the first thought that came to mind. “Blake?”

  To Katherine, standing still and listening intently, Lester Carlson’s whisper seemed to plead for an affirmative answer. She waited a full five seconds to be sure. Twice more she heard it. The distinctive soft thud a wooden paddle striking the side of a canoe as the paddle came out of the water and down again to begin the next stroke. She turned toward Lester Carlson and shook her head vehemently no. Blake was too good a paddler. He prided himself on his canoe technique. He would no more paddle a canoe with a choppy flailing stroke banging the side of the canoe than he would walk around the yard in his underwear.

  Katherine grabbed Lester Carlson’s hand and pulled him with her—away from the coffin; up and over the rock ledge and then face down against the soft earth of the field above. They could see the top of the rock ledge. Ten yards away and several feet below them sat the open coffin.

  * * *

  Chapter 93

  They lay side by side in the darkness for several minutes and listened as the paddle strokes came closer. Katherine looked up and focused on the half-moon riding through ridges of dark clouds. She felt calm, almost relaxed, but at the same time preternaturally alert and able to sample every nuance of sight, sound, and even smell in the dark.

  The night was still. The wind, which usually stirred over the waters of Quabbin, was quiet. She wondered where Blake was. Probably not far, but she couldn’t just stand up and call for him. And then the paddle strokes stopped. A scraping sound came from below as the occupant of the canoe dragged it from the water onto the rocky bank where the inlet ended.