”No more ghosts or bad dreams,” Blake said. “I guess it’s time to get out of here.”
“We tell the police about Lester Carlson, and the town clerk, and the coffin out here,” Katherine said. “But that’s it. No faces in the night; no blue light; no Kevin Flanagan, no Elijah Durman coming back.”
“I guess,” Blake said. “It’s over, and who’s gonna believe all that anyhow.”
They dressed by the water’s edge and together they made their way over to the large tree that Blake had tied their canoe to the night before. He steadied the canoe for Katherine as she scrambled in and seated herself. Long orange clouds were streaming along the eastern horizon, their shape and color etched clearly onto the blue-green surface of the water. It promised to be a fine June day. The sun reflected silver rays off the waters of Quabbin while overhead an eagle glided over Curtis Hill Island and banked into the rising sun.
* * *
Postscript: Chapter 100
Father Phil spent that night kneeling by his bed holding the crucifix his mother had given him 45 years ago. Right after midnight, he saw from his window a burst of blue shooting stars in the night sky. He gripped his crucifix tightly and waited. If Katherine and Blake and Lester Carlson had managed to interrupt the entrance of the creature or the devil or whatever it was out there on the island in Quabbin Reservoir, then he was safe. If not, the thing would be back for him tonight.
It never came.
He knelt there by his simple bed as the midnight hours stretched into the deep darkness of pre-dawn, the loneliest time of day. He knelt in the stillness holding his head high and his body quiet and steady and thought of his mother and her gift and how the crucifix had saved his life on this night. And from that thought he segued into a remembrance of his days in Chile with the Jesuits, and how back then he rose every day with eagerness and a clear purpose, primed like a young acolyte to make this creaky, cranky old world a slightly better place on this day. Somehow, over all the years, that simple thought had been lost. Make today matter!
He rose to his feet and looked out the window. It was 5 a.m. and the first wisp of dawn was splitting the darkness in the east. Father Phil startled and pulled back from the window. He drew a deep breath and looked again. An older woman in a long gray dress that he recognized as a nun’s habit stood holding the hand of a girl, perhaps 12 or so. They stood quietly in the yard looking at his window. Father Phil was still dressed. He stood and slipped out of his bedroom and opened the creaky wooden door that led to his small porch.
When he stepped out the girl addressed him in a clear, thin voice.
“You did it,” she said. “You helped to stop him.”
“Who are you?” Father Phil said. “What has happened? What do you mean?”
But instead of answering, the girl pointed at him. Father Phil closed his eyes as if ordered to do so by a hypnotist. And then he saw a vision. He was walking on a narrow dirt country road somewhere in an undeveloped country. There were no cars and only an occasional battered ancient farm truck creeping along the road. People were walking beside him or working in the adjoining fields. Some of the people were old and others in poor health, limping or groping their way down the road. Father Phil walked with them his head high and alert. The people knew him. He had come to help.
The young woman spoke again, jolting him from his vision. “You have one more road to travel,” she said. “One more road to walk before you can come home.”
The older nun looked at him and nodded. She took the hand of the girl and they turned and started walking away.
“Wait a minute,” Father Phil called. But even as he spoke the two figures vanished into the darkness at the edge of the woods.
He returned to his bedroom and knelt again on the wooden floor listening to the silence as he waited for the morning. When the sun glinted behind the hills to the east of the monastery, he rose from his knees and slipped from his rooms and drove to the access road for Old Enfield Road. He parked and walked down to the waters and scanned the distant islands with his binoculars. He saw two naked figures far in the distance on Curtis Hill Island. That’s good, he thought. Naked means good. Naked means they made it.
Later, back at the monastery, he called his old friend Father James C. Hannigan, S.J., the Provincial of the New England Province of the Jesuits. As usual, the Reverend Richard Higgins, SJ, Socius, Executive Assistant, picked up the phone, always on the second ring.
“Phil DiMarco here. Is Hannigan around? And how’s your colitis?”
“You’re calling so early,” Father Higgins said. “It’s not yet 7 in the morning of a new day. The colitis is worse, but Father Hannigan is right here.”
A moment later the familiar voice of his old friend James Hannigan, came on the line.
“Hi Phil. What’s up? Are you calling because you heard the news about the vandalism of the grave?”
“What grave?”
“You remember old Father Baker. The one with all the historic papers that you were going to check out. Somebody smashed his gravestone here in Weston. Last night. Didn’t touch another gravestone in the old Jesuit cemetery out on Broad Street, just his. Smashed it up good and threw pieces of the granite marker all over the grass. Pretty strange.”
Father Phil paused for a long moment. “Jim, the reason I called is something happened last night. I think I actually saw the devil.”
There was a long pause on the other end. Finally Father Jim Hannigan spoke. “Phil, are you really doing OK out there?”
“Jim, I want to come see you and tell you all about last night. I’ll even play golf. But the main thing is, I want you to transfer me.”
“I can find you some other assignment where you won’t be by yourself so much,” Father Hannigan said quickly. “Being out there all alone in the country is tough. Come see me Phil and we’ll figure something out.”
“Jim. I want to go back to Chile and work with the poor in Santiago. Just like what you and I used to do when we were young and brave. When every day mattered.”
There was an even longer pause.
“Jim, I saw true evil last night and I realized I was standing on the sidelines.”
“Sweet, Jesus,” Father Jim Hannigan said. “What happened?”
Father Phil drew a long breathe. “Sit down, Jim. It’s a long story.” And then he told Father Jim Hannigan of the face at his window, of his terror, of its grip on his soul, and his escape using the crucifix his mother had given him so many years ago, and finally of the vision of the girl and the older nun in his yard early that morning.
“But Phil,” Father Jim Hannigan said when he finished, and after a long pause, “you’re one of our stars. The Jesuits need visibility. They need real world people like you. And now you just want to walk away and help build water filtration systems for the poor in South America. You saw real evil. I believe you, but you’re what--67 years old? You, a former member of the United States Congress and a law professor at Boston College. Why?”
“I had a vision last night,” Father Phil said. “Actually, this morning, early. After I saw the face. The nun and the girl left me with a vision, I was walking down a road in a poor country, and I realized that this place, this dirt road in the middle of nowhere was my final stopping place here on earth. Not some classroom in Boston. Last night, I saw that there is true evil, and it can get back into the world. And there is also true good. I have to get back to that place and walk that road again. That’s why I became a Jesuit. To help people. Why don’t you come with me, Jim?”
There was an even longer pause. “Phil,” Father Hannigan said finally, his voice a bit choked. “I’ll get you to Chile. I can’t go, though. I have to stay here. Obedience. That’s the way of the Jesuits and it’s my road. I have to stay here. It’s how I have to serve now. But I’ll get you back to Chile.”
“Thanks, Jim.” Father Phil said. “Thanks for helping me find my way home.”
* * *
Postscript: (Fall 2018)
“One more time,” Jim said to Clayton, pointing over to a sand bar jutting out several feet into the channel. “Could be a bass or two there. We’ve got another 20 minutes or so before we have to get back to the dock.”
Jim cast using a small silver bass lure. The lure plunked down several feet from the sandbar and Jim began reeling in the line. He felt a slight tug and then realized the lure had snagged on the bottom near the sandbar. Jim tugged methodically at the line and slowly the lure came free dragging weeds and mud from the sandy bottom on its barbed hooks. He reeled the lure in quickly and efficiently—he’d been fishing for 30 years—and bent to take hold of the shiny lure and clear the weeds tangled in the barbed hooks.
“Hey, Dad, what you got there,” said Clayton taking hold of the line. “Hey, you snagged some sort of cross.”
Jim bent forward to look rocking the boat slightly in the water. Clayton tossed some weeds back into the water and held up a stone cross carved from marble with a blue stone at the center. The blue stone was shaped like an eye, but light blue on the outside with a darker blue interior.
“Huh! Must be an artifact from the lost valley, “Jim said. “Way back in the 30s when they built this place they moved all these towns and people. I read somewhere where stuff from houses and cemeteries still turns up. This must be something like that. Maybe from an old grave site.” He took the blue cross from Clayton and held it up to the light.
“Nice color,” said Clayton. “But strange, looks like two-shades of blue.”
“Whata you think?” Jim asked.
“Oh, a no-brainer, Dad. Keep it and sell it on eBay. I bet you’ll get a hundred dollars for it.”
“Hey, why not,” Jim said. “Doesn’t do anybody any good lying there at the bottom of the water.”
Jim and Clayton looked at the cross glistening in the sun. “Must have some real history behind this,” Jim said. “You sell it for me on eBay and we’ll split the profits.”
“That works for me, Dad. Thanks,”
Clayton took the stone cross with the blue gem in the middle and placed it in his shirt pocket.
“I’ll take a picture of this and post it online tonight,” he said.
“Well, we didn’t get any bass today, but at least we got something,” Jim said. “We got that cross.”
* * *
About the Author
Thomas Conuel is the acclaimed author of Quabbin: The Accidental Wilderness, the true story of how four towns and six villages in the Swift River Valley of Massachusetts were flooded in order to make way for a giant reservoir supplying water for Boston and forty-three other cities and towns. He is coauthor of The Nature of Massachusetts and is the former Field Editor for the Massachusetts Audubon Society’s Sanctuary magazine. He has taught environmental journalism and nonfiction writing at Boston University, and lives with his family in the North of Quabbin region of Massachusetts.
Table of Contents
Faces in The Night by Thomas Conuel
Faces in the Night Page 36