The wakening, p.3
The Wakening, page 3
He should have expected the Lockhart boy wouldn’t keep his promise of silence. Who had he told? His father? His mother? It didn’t matter. Someone had believed him, had gone to the police. And now there’d be hell to pay for his transgressions.
I’m soiled. Dirty. Unclean to the very depths of my soul. For the first time, he understood his own hypocrisy. How could a man who took pleasure in the sins of the flesh, right in the house of God, carry Jesus’s word to the people?
As he unlocked the window, he found himself wondering why God allowed such things to happen under his own roof. He’d never questioned the Lord’s motives before, and certainly never objected to the advances of the parish priests when he’d been an altar boy, or a novitiate.
Still, he’d always known they were wrong, and he’d made sure to do his penance after. But this….
I must atone.
A firm knocking on the door turned him away from the view of the street.
“Father Doyle? Open the door, please. It’s Officer Rose.”
Bannon sighed. Alex Rose. Of course. A parishioner of Holy Cross, his family had deep roots in the community, from long before Bannon took over as pastor. They’d shared more than a few whiskeys on cold winter nights, both in the rectory and down the street at the Hickory Tavern, discussing everything from the church to politics to movies. He considered the officer a friend.
And now he’ll be the one to put me away.
How can I possibly explain to him what happened, when I can’t even explain it to myself?
“It’s open,” Bannon said. A second later, Rose entered, wearing his blue uniform beneath a rumpled overcoat. His graying hair stuck out at angles, as if he’d been running his hands through it. A mixture of regret and anger showed in his eyes, but when he spoke, his voice was calm.
“We got a situation, Father. You’re gonna have to come to the station.”
“I’m sorry, Alex. I didn’t mean for it to happen.”
Rose stared at him and said nothing, the silence dragging on until it became uncomfortable. Bannon wished he’d say something. Anything. An accusation, or perhaps an apology of his own for what he had to do. Even an angry condemnation for his act of perversion.
“You must respect those in authority, Doyle.”
Bannon jumped at the words. That voice! It couldn’t be…. It was his old parish priest, Father Brendan Donahue. The man who’d introduced a young Doyle Bannon to the dark pleasures of sex back in Dublin more than forty years ago.
Bannon opened his mouth, but no words came out. Rose continued speaking in the long-dead priest’s voice. “Take off yer trou, boy. Let Father Brendan show you how to be a man.”
Memories came flooding back. Bending over the chair. The sharp pain as something entered him. Donahue’s animal grunting, in time to the sound of flesh slapping against flesh.
“A good shepherd tends to his flock.”
“The spirit of God flows through us all.”
“Jesus gave himself up for us.”
Every Friday, in Donahue’s chambers. He’d teach the Bible and more.
“You know what you have to do.”
“What?” Bannon opened his eyes. Rose still stood several feet away, his mouth closed, his features twisted in a manic grin. Had he even spoken? Was I hearing things?
The officer pointed at the window. It took Bannon a moment to understand. Then everything became clear.
It wasn’t his old friend speaking to him. It was God the Almighty. Using Rose as a tool, a human burning bush. Like he’d done with Samuel, Ezekiel, and Moses, the Lord had descended to personally deliver a message to a mortal man.
And that man is me.
The time had come for him to pay the price for his sins.
A sense of peace came over him, and he knew the weight of guilt had been lifted from his soul. Rose continued to stare, his arm still extended. A sign that couldn’t be ignored.
“Forgive me, Lord,” Bannon whispered, “I was weak in the face of temptation.” He went to the window. When he opened it, a pigeon leaped from the ledge, startled by the movement. The sounds of the neighborhood came to him from twenty feet down, the twittering of birds and squirrels, music from a nearby house, the muted growl of someone blowing leaves. A delicious odor wafted in, the mouth-watering scent of frying hamburgers from the Barton Hotel a block away.
He loved the town, and he’d tried to do right by it, despite his personal failings. Now he’d never see it again. Never get to say goodbye to his family. He turned back to look at his old friend as a new thought came to him. If he committed suicide, what would happen to his soul?
“Is there no other way?”
Rose reached out and approached him, moving swiftly across the office. Bannon’s heart soared and wonder filled him when he saw his friend’s feet weren’t touching the ground.
A miracle! I’ve been forgiven. Truly this is a wondrous day and the Lord has—
The officer’s hands struck him in the chest and then he was falling over the ledge, sailing through the air. As he plummeted, he saw another face superimposed over Rose’s.
A twisted, evil visage with yellow eyes and a laughing mouth.
He had time for one last thought – the Father of Lies has deceived me! – and then Bannon’s back and ribs shattered as he landed on the iron railing of the church stairs.
Dead on impact, he never saw the large, iridescent-black beetle that launched itself from the window ledge and flew away.
Boston, MA, forty years ago
Father Leo Bonaventura hung up the phone and tugged his sweater tighter around his shoulders in an attempt to ward off a sudden chill that had nothing to do with the November weather or the poor insulation in his office.
“You’ve been transferred, Leo. A big opportunity. Your own parish plus a teaching position at a university. This is just what you’ve been asking for.”
Yes, it was. But when he’d heard the name of the school from the archbishop, he’d gone cold and momentarily lost the ability to speak.
St. Alphonse.
Memories of the beautiful upstate town of Hastings Mills and the terrifying events that had led him there that summer came flooding back. Fifteen years had passed and he still had nightmares.
And the scar on his arm to remind him it all really happened.
He remembered the drive to the campus on the morning he’d learned the impossible insects had disappeared. How he’d thought he’d love to settle down in a place like that.
“Be careful what you ask for,” his mother had been fond of saying.
Now he understood the truth of that old adage.
Praying he hadn’t made the worst decision of his life by accepting the position, he returned to the sermon he’d been writing and flipped over a new page in his notebook.
The subject of his talk would now be decidedly different.
Chapter Three
Hastings Mills, NY, thirty years ago
A brisk October wind, redolent of crisp dead leaves and the first hints of winter, swirled around the small group of students standing in the night-darkened shadows of St. Alphonse University’s Dallas Hall. Caitlyn Sweeney shivered and Rob Lockhart put an awkward arm around her. They’d been dating since the start of the school year but only recently gone ‘all the way’, as Caitlyn had phrased it that night in her dorm room. In the days that followed, he’d been struggling with confused thoughts and feelings. He enjoyed spending time with her, but the physical part of the relationship…lacked something. Something he hated to admit he needed. He’d thought this time would be better because Caitlyn was different from his other girlfriends.
Now he feared she might not be different enough.
“Are you sure we won’t get in trouble?” Caitlyn asked. She kept her voice to a whisper, even though they were alone behind the building.
“Chill out.” Her older sister, Lori, poked her in the arm.
“We won’t get in trouble if we don’t get caught,” Rob said, taking a set of keys from his coat pocket and jingling them.
“That’s comforting,” Caitlyn muttered.
The seven of them – Michael Choi, Maggie Brown, Kylie Johnson, and Patrick O’Hare made up the rest of the group – had left the warmth and cheap beer of the Hickory Tavern to sneak up to the fifth floor of Dallas Hall and party in the supposedly haunted attic storage area that had once been a commons room for the dorm.
“Relax. Everyone’s gone for the weekend. This is gonna be our best chance to do this.” Rob approached the heavy metal door that would let them into the back stairwell of the massive brick-and-stone Gothic structure.
The second oldest building on campus, Dallas Hall stood two stories higher than any of the other dormitories and was something of an architectural wonder in the daylight, with expansive archways, numerous cupolas, and a sharply peaked roof done in a California Mission style. Its ivy-covered walls didn’t match any of the other buildings on campus and it seemed to stand sentinel in front of the more modern gray-stone structures, its brooding presence the first thing visitors saw as they entered the campus. In keeping with the university’s century-old dedication to learning, the original architects had included bas-relief plaques on the front wall representing the seven medieval arts: Tonus (music), Numerus (arithmetic), Ratio (dialectic), Lingua (grammar), Tropus (rhetoric and literature), Astra (astronomy), and Anglus (geometry).
To the chagrin of the administration, a recent survey by the school paper had shown not a single student questioned could name even one of the symbols.
In the dark, the building morphed into something better suited to a medieval monastery than a co-ed residence hall, and the bas-reliefs took on the appearance of sinister glyphs.
The idea had come to Rob after hearing a story related to him by his father, who’d worked as a librarian at the university for several years. A story about the fifth floor being haunted.
“A girl committed suicide up there in the fifties,” he’d related one night after dinner. “Before my time. Rumor has it, she was pregnant. A real sin back then. The school covered it up, probably with help from the parents. After that, strange things kept happening until one day, they just stopped using the whole floor.”
Now, as a resident assistant in the dorm, Rob had a master key to all the doors in the building. Including the top floor, which had been converted from a commons area to a storage room back when his father worked at the school. Aside from the six RAs in the building, only maintenance and campus security had access to the back entrance.
The open door revealed a narrow staircase leading up into a lightless void broken sporadically by small emergency lights set into every fifth stair.
“No way, I am not going up there.” Lori turned and looked at Pat. “Let them go. We can wait for them back at my room.”
“C’mon, babe.” Pat gave her a quick kiss. “Midterm break is the only time we’ll get a chance to do this. The rest of the year there’s too many people around.”
“I’ve been up there a dozen times, and it’s not scary,” Rob added. “The worst thing I ever saw was a mouse.”
Lori frowned but followed Pat as he made his way up the stairs. Kylie, Maggie, and Michael went next, with Caitlyn and Rob bringing up the rear. They waited until Pat clicked on a small flashlight before shutting the door. In the resulting darkness, the emergency lights glowed like eerie alien life-forms beneath their feet.
“You know,” Rob said, his voice echoing off the cement walls, “they say the girl killed herself up there on Halloween.”
“Shut up, Rob.” Lori’s voice floated down to the others from somewhere above.
“She slit her wrists,” Rob continued. “And now, every October, you can hear her crying for her baby in the early morning hours.”
“Rob, stop it. You’re creeping me out.”
“Seriously. And that’s not all. There were the animal sacrifices.”
“Idiot.” Caitlyn poked him. “Now you’re just bullshitting us. Besides, Halloween is next week.”
At the top of the stairs, the group gathered on the small landing while Rob unlocked the door. It opened with a loud click.
“Enter, if you dare,” he intoned in a mock sepulchral voice.
Michael laughed, and then stopped when one of the girls shushed him.
They filed into a wide, open space Rob had cleared for them earlier. Pat took some candles from his pockets, placed them in a circle, and lit them. To the far left and right were stacks of chairs, office supplies, and spare bed frames. The ceiling angled from close to twelve feet high in the middle to only eight by the walls. Pink insulation filled the gaps between beams. Rob’s father had told him there’d once been a plan to renovate the space and turn it into dorm rooms, but it had been abandoned back in the early 1970s. Cobwebs draped corners in gray lace, decorated with the husks of long-dead insects. Faint rustlings hinted at mice lurking amid the clutter. Rob caught a glimpse of a dark shape scurrying away from their lights, flat and low to the ground, and he hoped it wasn’t a roach. If the girls saw one, the whole night would be ruined.
“Let’s get this party started,” Rob said, putting the giant bug out of his mind and opening his backpack to reveal a large bottle of tequila and a plastic bag filled with lemon slices.
“What’s with the candles?” Kylie asked, sitting down on the dusty tile floor. The others joined her inside the circle. The flickering light made the shadows come alive.
“Atmosphere,” Pat said, a broad smile on his freckled face. Rob knew the real reason, but kept silent. Their plan had a much better chance of working if everyone caught a buzz first.
They spent the next twenty minutes doing just that. The tequila traveled the circle several times, thanks to the game of ‘I Never’ Rob and Pat started. By the time they finished half the bottle, the girls were in full giggle mode and nobody worried about trespassing or stories of ghosts.
Judging it to be the right time, Rob caught Pat’s eye and nodded to him. In response, Pat lifted the bottle and raised his voice.
“I never had a séance in an old dorm.”
Everyone went quiet.
Then Michael burst into laughter.
“Man, that shut everyone the hell up!”
“Not funny.” Maggie pointed at Pat. “Drink, motherfucker. You ain’t had no séances anywhere.”
“Wait.” Rob held up his hand. “We could all drink, since that’s the rule. Or…we could really have a séance.”
“Séance,” Pat said, just like they’d planned.
“Séance,” agreed Michael, who Rob knew would pretty much agree to anything when drunk. Like the time they’d told him it would be cool to go streaking at the basketball game.
“You don’t know the first thing about a séance.” Caitlyn shook her head, and he imagined her giving him one of her eye rolls as well. His confusion rose up again. Sometimes her attitude grated on his nerves. Like he was a child and she the parent. More and more, he’d found himself wondering if they were right for each other. He’d thought dating a sophomore would be okay, but perhaps he’d be better off with someone else. Someone who’d be thrilled to date a senior. Like one of the freshman girls.
Or maybe someone even younger.
“Not true. We learned about them in Father Leo’s class. He covered the basics.” Pat looked at Rob, who nodded.
“He’s right. We both took the class.”
Father Leo Bonaventura served as head of the religious studies department at the university, but it was his Religion and the Paranormal class, nicknamed ‘Spooks’, that had made him one of the most recognized professors on campus. As an official exorcist for the Catholic Church, Bonaventura brought real-world experiences to the class, which had long been one of the most popular electives at the school. His habit of reserving the front row for ‘spirit friends’ was just one of his many quirks; another was steadfastly sticking to the belief that God and the Devil existed and constantly battled for souls. In an era when the majority of Christians – including priests – believed in a more abstract definition of evil, Bonaventura’s opinions made him somewhat of an anachronism among his peers. That, in turn, only increased his popularity among his students.
“Don’t we need, I don’t know, goat’s blood or a Ouija board or something?” Kylie asked.
“Ta da!” Rob reached into his pack and withdrew a square object that he unfolded to reveal a series of black letters and symbols against a white background. He placed a heart-shaped planchette atop the board.
“You two had this planned, didn’t you?” Caitlyn asked.
“It’ll be fun,” Rob replied, purposely not admitting his guilt. “C’mon. We’ll play for a few minutes and then do something else. But we’ll be the only ones on campus who can say we tried to call a spirit on Fifth Dal.”
“Pat, you’re an asshole.” Lori slapped him on the shoulder. “If you think you’re getting some tonight, think again.”
Pat grabbed her by the waist and kissed her. “Who are you kidding? You’ll be jumping my bones later.”
“La la lalalala!” Caitlyn put her hands over her ears. “I do not need to hear about my sister’s sex life.”
“This shit ain’t right.” Maggie shook her head. “This is how every scary movie starts, with a bunch of kids doin’ something stupid.”
“Relax. It’s just a game,” Michael said.
“Fine. Let’s just do this and leave. I’m cold and I want to get back to the Hickory.” Kylie shivered and wrapped her arms around her chest. “Cindy gets off work in an hour and we have better plans than this.”
“I’ll bet.” Michael made a peace sign and wiggled his tongue between his fingers.
“You’re such an ass.” Kylie gave him a good-natured punch on the shoulder.
