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This is a serialized novel that will take three or four episodes to reveal each of the main characters.
PROLOGUE
Near Oban, Scotland
The foul smell
of death surprised him. Yes, bodies had died and rotted in a slow, tortuous
death in that collapsed tunnel nearly two hundred years ago, but the odor should
have long been withered with the decomposition of the dead.
The breakthrough
was at the apex of a six-and-a-half foot mound of fallen earth, and Ian
McConnell stared into the head-wide opening for only a moment, peering into the
impenetrable blackness. He then turned to catch a whiff of cleaner air—stagnant
in the re-excavated catacomb but cleaner, none the less.
At first,
anguish over an uncertain future had brought him to that labyrinth of tunnels
under the monastery. It was a lonely, melancholy place best suited for the type
of introspection he had needed to undertake. But although uncertainty had
brought him there, the pumping adrenaline of anticipation kept him there and now
fueled his desire to proceed. It was an anticipation and desire for things holy
that he hadn’t felt in a long time. Too long. At least in the four months
he’d been at the monastery and probably a year before that. He was cautiously
excited.
The
corridor in which he was about to enter had been absent of viable human
occupation for nearly two hundred years, but its slumber would soon be
disturbed. There were things needing reclaimed beyond the obstruction of
compacted dirt and rock in front of him, and Father Ian McConnel would unearth
them regardless of how arduous it was to breathe the foul stench seeping through
the hole.
He gazed hard
into the cavity once more, hoping to tear back some of the gloom and catch a
glimpse of something, anything, that would dispel the haunting notion that he
was peering into the emptiness of a vast pit, a never-ending shaft that seemed
to go on for eternity. His desire was granted, but it was not quite what he had
in mind. He suddenly felt a preternatural sense that something beyond the
opening, something in the blackness where his eyes could not reach, was staring
back at him. Waiting. A snake of ice slithered along his spine and nipped at his
neck. He knew dead bodies, long-rotted in their lightless tomb were no doubt
scattered among the relics he would find. Maybe that was that what he
perceived—their eyeless sockets staring at him forlornly, proclaiming how
woefully belated the release from their subterranean prison had been.
On one level he
felt infinitely saddened for those unfortunates who’d been trapped so many
ages ago, well before his obsession to exorcise some personal demons by focusing
his energies to reclaiming the only tunnel of five that was still under dirt and
granite. But on another level they were not the objects of his quest. He
couldn’t think about just how horrible a demise they must have suffered.
Better things were to be discovered, or more aptly put, rediscovered. Dealing
with the co-existence of bad and good, evil and holy . . . dead and alive; that
was the premise of a priest’s life. So misgivings were naturally amalgamated
with his enthusiasm. None the less, he persisted as all good priests do. To him
that was an encouraging sign. Not all of what a priest should be had left him.
The dirt at the
base of his feet began to give way. He halted his scrutiny of the seemingly
endless universe of black just behind the barricade, descended and filled a
rusted metal wheelbarrow at his feet with one last scoop of loose dirt.
A rust-pocked lantern sat on an out-cropping of stone just behind the dump cart
like a cloistered lighthouse on a lonely craig. Its sour-yellow light cast a
warped, serpentine shadow of the priest along the spade-etched concavity of the
tunnel walls.
When he finished
filling the corroded barrow, he pitched his shovel into the heap of rock and
soil.
“Murray!” he
yelled off behind him in a thick Scottish brogue, plumes of vaporized air
issuing from his mouth like a fire-breathing dragon in the chilled air. “Come
here, lad. I’ve another load for you.” His voice seemed decibels louder than
it actually was in the diminutive confines, and it lingered down the
re-excavated tunnel in a series of hollow echoes.
Ian
mused at the praying mantis-like shadow Murray Kilborn cast on the tunnel wall
with his head hunched over and bending at the waist to keep from scraping the
top of the tunnel. A few seconds later, carrying a lantern of his own, Murray
emerged, pushing back dirty locks of wiry, black hair from his equally encrusted
and freckled forehead. He was the same height as Ian but was no more than
two-thirds his weight. Though this twenty-year-old’s lean stature was built
more for basketball than tunnel digging, his enthusiasm to help with such an
undertaking made the choice an easy one for Ian, and that more than made up for
any physical limitations.
As the young man
put his lantern on top of the heap and squatted down to pick up the barrow, he
noticed the hole in the earthen wall in front of him and gave the priest a
querying glance. Well, Ian could only assume that the look was of an inquisitive
nature for within Murray’s eyes hovered a dingy gray cast as muted as a bank
of fog rolling in from the Irish sea. And they were cradled in hollow sockets,
making him look perpetually sallow and hung over, though Ian could only attest
to having seen him drink no more than two pints in any one sitting at the local
pub.
Acting on his
assumption Ian pre-empted, “I’ve poked my shovel through a small openin’
up top there, and I think we’ve come onto another uncaved stretch of tunnel.”
“I’ll dump
this load,” Murray replied with significantly more eagerness in his voice than
his gaze would betray, “and be right back t’help get the opening a bit
bigger t’crawl through.”
Hunched over
like a palm tree in a hurricane, trying awkwardly to manage both the barrow and
lantern, Murray shuffled back towards the main tunnel vein.
As he waited for
the young man to return, Father Ian sat on the dank tunnel floor and grabbed his
coat, which lie beside the lantern and draped it across his legs. From an inside
pocket he pulled out a dozen or so time-worn, yellowed pieces of parchment, each
a bit smaller than a normal sheet of paper. They were documents retrieved from
the rubble in a long-forgotten room down the tunnel they had just previously
inspected a few days prior. They were written in Gaelic, the ancient Celtic
language still used by some of the Scots on the Western Isles and coastal
fishing villages. His interpretations were crude, for he knew only a limited
vocabulary of Gaelic taught to him by his highland grandfather. But luckily that
was enough to understand the general motif.
He went directly
to the third page, which was where he had previously left off and began doing
his best to decipher more of the worn documents. That wasn’t the easiest of
tasks, given the fact that the pages were ripped in places, smeared or faded in
others, and altogether missing in yet others. Two hundred years had not been
kind to them. From what he had interpreted thus far, he was about to happen upon
something ethereally wonderful. Somewhere under the kilt of Scotland were
ancient relics that archeologists could only dream of uncovering. Something as
old as Christianity itself—probably older, if his extrapolations were
correct—and a wonder pill for his ailing faith. They were icons he found
sacrilegious to have been somehow forgotten or ignored. He sensed that the
objects he was looking for were just beyond that wall of dirt. Had to be. He
felt them. They seemed to beckon him.
And he, them. He
needed something of substance to rekindle the embers of his dying faith. The
sense of supernatural mystery and spiritual veneration that had once been the
foundation of faith had been replaced by overwork from too-few priests in an
ever-growing Church, an at times unsympathetic hierarchy, and the stifling
burden of strict adherence to its ancient traditions, refusing to bring the
Church and her people into the modern era. To him the Church often seemed no
more holy an institution than was Microsoft or General Motors.
But if the
papers were to be believed—provided he’d deciphered them properly—that would
all change. He was again absorbed with a singular enthusiasm that had once
coursed his veins but had long been arrested, as the weeks of digging and
sweating and burrowing and little sleep were finally paying off.
But if outwardly
he was enthusiastic of the progress they were making, inside, for reasons yet
unknown to him, he was also beginning to become increasingly apprehensive. He
felt as though he had just cracked open a door to a realm he knew little about.
What would be revealed when that door was swung wide open?
He heard Murray
shuffling up the tunnel, so he folded the papers up and put them back into their
secret place. But as he repositioned the coat on the dirt floor, a piece of
paper fell from another pocket. A picture. It bore the reason why he was there,
why he had begun to question his faith. He didn’t want Murray to see it. No
one but the Bishop knew what the particulars were of his being there, but the
picture would tell the whole story. Quickly, he picked it up and put it in his
back trouser pocket.
Murray,
carrying a shovel himself this time, was breathing hard from the hurried trip up
to the main tunnel and back. He stopped and smiled excitedly at Ian, tapping his
boot on the floor and leaning on the butt of his spade. He seemed as anxious as
Ian to see what was on the other side of the barricade of earth. So, the two
pitched their shovels into the dirt and deposited their loads onto either side
of the tunnel to be picked up later. After ten minutes of shoveling, the opening
was big enough that, with a little effort, they each could squeeze through to
the other side. The occlusion was about five feet in thickness and, lying on his
stomach with half his body in the opening and the other half dangling, Ian
peered deep into that coal-black void. “Hand me a lantern,” he finally said.
Murray handed
Ian the lantern he was holding, then bent down and picked up the other from its
rocky perch.
Struggling, Ian
managed to squeeze the lantern between himself and the wall of the cavity. He placed
it in front of him and off to the side to afford himself an unobstructed view of
the dark spaces beyond. The lantern was like a tsunami of harsh light that burst
through the hole and drowned two hundred years of darkness as the tide of
lamplight swept shadows back into the farthest reaches of the tunnel. They had
broken through to thirty feet or so of open tunnel. At the far end, mounds of
earth and rock blocked passage through to the last twenty feet or so of that
particular stretch of the catacombs.
“I’m goin’
in,” Ian said. He belly-crawled through the tight opening, inching the lantern
ahead of him as he went. Occasionally, fine particles of earth broke free from
the top of the opening and lodged themselves in his eyes and mouth. He spent
more time extricating the muck from his orifices than the time it took to
actually maneuver through the crawl space. But he finally broke through to the
other side, birthed into a dead, dark world that still held the promise of life
somewhere within its confines. Ian was doggedly bound to find it . . . again.
Once out of the
opening, he struggled to his feet, and the foulness of the dead air hit him with
full force, twisting his stomach into knots. It had to be originating from
decayed flesh and organs. They had surely long turned to dust, but the stagnant
air was taken with the aroma of a miserable and slow death; a nauseous odor
trapped with nowhere to go that would not be released from its captivity until
now. He visualized robed skeletons sprawled on the earthen floor, bony fingers
clasping rosaries for one last dying prayer for help that was never answered.
Pulling a hanky
out of his back pocket and covering his nose, he called in a heavy whisper back
through the crawl space, “Get your lamp and crawl through. And you better have
a hanky ready. The smell in here is somethin’ fierce. Hurry now!”
After
considerable agony trying to twist and shimmy his tree-like frame through the
hole, Murray, with Ian’s help, was now on the other side, handkerchief to
nose.
With the
combined power of both lanterns now to give life to the darkness, Ian inspected
his surroundings. To his immediate left was a wooden door layered with a thick
skin of greenish-brown grime and muck. The metal doorknob was rusted and mottled
green in the acidic air. The intricacies of fine craftsmanship were still
discernible, however, on the doorknob plate and door hinges: crucifixes
surrounded by trumpeting angels carved into the metalwork below the keyhole and
along the hinge-plates. No ordinary room would have such fine images emblazoned
on them. It denoted importance, a holy room of some sort. The same etches were
found on the door to the previous room they had investigated, and he’d been
rewarded with the stash of ancient papers he now guarded.
A smile creased
his stubbled and weary face.
Ian tried the
knob. Flakes of centuries-old rust and muck tainted his hand in its hard grip,
but the door would not budge. He pushed on it briefly, being careful not to
cause too much tension because the tunnel could collapse from too harsh a
disturbance, and they would share the same miserable fate as those friars whose
skeletons they were bound to stumble across shortly.
“Take a lamp
and see what you find down the hall while I see if I can get this open,” he
said quietly to Murray without taking his eyes off the door.
“Right.”
Murray picked up his lantern and slowly investigated the remaining portion of
tunnel.
Ian scratched
his head, perplexed. The door to the other room had not been as corroded as
this. It had a blanket of dust on it, and was oxidized and hard to open, but not
to the extent of this door and not with this encrustation. It looked as though
it had been left to rot in untold years of acid rain and something altogether
different. He grabbed the knob again with both hands and began to twist harder
without jarring it too badly, trying to break the mechanisms free of their
bindings. He twisted and contorted his body to try and get the best possible
leverage using all of his weight. Slowly, it began to twist in his stubborn
grip. He turned it the other way, then the other, and then the other again.
Finally, hands aching and bruised and scraped from his clenching grip, the knob
turned just enough clear the bolt from the latch, and with his help, the door
swung open, filling the tunnel with a loud, scraping creak.
Shortly
afterwards, Murray yelled to Ian, “Uh, Father . . . Ya better come ‘ere
an’ take a look at this.” His voice held a note of apprehension. He was
standing at another door at the very end of the tunnel, brows wrinkled as he
inspected it.
Too caught up
with the possibilities beyond the now open door Ian gave no credence to the
uneasiness in Murray’s voice and said in a loud hush, “Go inside. What do
you think I brought you down here for? And if you find anythin’, for God’s
sake don’t yell, just come fetch me, unless you want t’be stuck down here
yourself for another couple-hundred years.”
Holding up the
lantern, Ian went inside the room. It was partially caved in. Vacant spider webs
like a silky veil hung down from the uncaved portion of ceiling and undulated in
a flow of disturbed air like a bed of kelp in a cool ocean current. There was no
stench in this room, but it followed him in from the hall, giving him only a
momentary respite from its noxious presence.
In the middle of
the floor in front of him, underneath a mound of debris was what looked like the
exposed portion of an alter of some sort, again strikingly similar to one he had
found in the same room as the ancient papers. Though mostly concealed under
earth and rock, he knew its features; it was in the form a circle, about five
feet in diameter, although only half of the circle was visible here. Around the
circle—the portion he could still see—were long, tapered candles that at one
time were fastened to the floor with their melted wax, one placed at each hour
of the day. He imagined that they had once shone brilliantly, their flickering
flames worship-dancing around an alter that had served some mysterious purpose.
But now they lay broken and clothed in dirt and filth.
He briefly
inspected the rest of the confines. Unlike the other room—it was threadbare,
save the strange alter, one broken crucifix and the papers found under a
collapsed desk—this room had racks of snuffed votive candles, a crudely-made
kneeler for prayer at the circle-alter, and the walls not buried under the heavy
weight of Scotland above them had twisted and tattered paintings of Mary and
Jesus and Saint Andrew on them.
After taking in
the small room and its contents, he knelt down for a closer inspection of the
candle-girded, cryptic ring on the floor. As he carefully discarded some rubble
for a closer examination, his lantern washed shadows from an object that
protruded from beneath the heap. Ian’s heart began to pound between the bars
of his rib cage. Sweat seeped through the pores in his hands like a saturated
sponge. It was what he was searching for, of that much he was certain.
He carefully
picked up a bowling ball-size stone that the object was pinned under, placed it
beside him and wiped a sheath of grime and dirt off the top of a small, wooden
box. Slowly, he opened it. Inside was a dry-rotted, leather pouch. There was
supposed to be two. The papers said there were two. Where was the other one? It
was around here somewhere. He’d find it. At least he’d found one.
His hands trembled so fiercely he couldn’t risk picking up the satchel just yet and
shaking its ancient contents into a thousand pieces. He took some deep breaths
and tried to work the nervousness out of his fingers by alternately stretching
and fisting them. Then, with a careful confidence, he picked up the pouch and
placed it in his coat pocket. He decided to leave the box where it lay and take
only the satchel for fear that removing the box as well might make the pile of
stones settle in its place and cause another cave in.
On his hands and knees, Ian peered into all the dark crevasses and under all the
loose rocks looking for the other satchel. But it wasn’t there. It was gone.
Just then, Ian
thought he heard something, a low keening, a quick sound. Though he could not
necessarily distinguish it from his anxious respirations and the crunching of
dirt and pebbles underfoot, something about it caused a prickle across his neck
and shoulders.
It was then that
Father Ian remembered just how uncertain Murray had sounded when he called to
him only moments ago. Murray wanted to show him something. What?The other
satchel?
He listened for
a moment. Nothing. The silence chilled him more than the air. There were no
sounds echoing through the tunnel, no foot steps, no shuffling, no ‘Hey
Fathers’, only his own hanky-muffled breaths.
He took the
cloth from his nose and yelled in a harsh whisper, “Murray. Murray, find
anythin’?”
The only
response was from the undulating ranks of cobwebs above him as his movements
stirred the air and set them in motion.
Still cautious
but louder this time, “Murray!”
Still no
response.
Something was
wrong. He got to his feet, picked up the lantern and went back out into the
tunnel.
Where Murray had
once stood was another door, which was open. In the doorway was placed a small
vessel of some sort, about the size of a large soup bowl. He was too far away to
make out exactly what it was. Had he noticed it before, he might have given more
faith to Murray’s uneasiness and went to him and inspected it when he called.
But it was so hard to give something that he struggled himself to keep.
As he started
down to the other door, a brief thought had crossed his mind; he hadn’t yet
come across any skeletal remains. Surely the stench was caused by a score of
dead monks, though none were found yet. Maybe Murray . . .
The silence now
seemed more absolute. Footsteps and breaths no longer caromed across the tunnel
walls but instead seemed to be sifted into another dimension. The space seemed
to be so devoid of life for so long that it swallowed sound like a hungry beast,
belching back only muted static.
That growing
uneasiness he had begun to experience earlier deep within himself was now slowly
making its way to the surface. Something felt wrong, all wrong, and he damned
himself for not knowing why he felt that way, damned himself for not knowing how
to correct it.
At the postern
he stopped—and stared in unbounded astonishment at a doorway lathered in
crucifixes, both crudely made wooden crosses and finely crafted brass-like
cruciforms. There had to be at least twenty nailed to the doorway, and to the
door itself, another thirty or forty. More inexplicable than that, the coffer on
the floor in the middle of the entrance held what looked to be water, still
full, as pristine as if it had just been poured.
Ian put his
lantern down and picked up the vessel.
How could that
be? He thought to himself. Two hundred years without evaporating? Impossible.
Something moved.
The darkness within the room seemed to be alive. An adumbration, like molten
tar, even darker than the inky spaces it occupied, rustled from within the room.
“Murray?”
Ian called out. He held the lantern out to the open doorway. A sliver of sour
light touched the shadowy back wall of the room. More crucifixes, hundreds
nailed across the wall, everywhere. Skeletons. Piles of skeletons, a carpeting
of skeletons.
Suddenly,
something appeared from the purple-black recesses not touched by lamp light,
hurdled at him lightning quick—oh God!!—and it landed on top of him, sending
him reeling backwards against the far tunnel wall. The lantern and vessel of
liquid flew from his grasp. Ian was dazed only momentarily before fear seized
him, and he threw the thing off of him and staggered back to the doorway. The
priest looked down in utter horror. It was the mutilated carcass of Murray. His
twisted neck stared grotesquely down his backside from the heap of flesh piled
on the floor. It was obvious that all his bones had been crushed. His remains
lie on the tunnel floor like a pile of soiled laundry. Ian tried to scream but
terror had rendered him mute, in shock.
Then something
within the room growled, low, wet, insidious. Bones, like dry leaves, crunched
under its movement. Without warning it burst through the entranceway lightning
quick, knocking Ian back even harder than the dead Murray had, sending a jolt of
pain through his head and back as he slammed against the far wall once again. It
let out an ear-piercing, agonizing shriek as it passed the army of Jesus’ in
the doorway as if by somehow coming into close proximity to anything holy gave
it unimaginable anguish.
Currents of pure
evil oozed into the tunnel from the dark room in the wake of the thing that had
just been released. A macabre energy seemed to hover around the semiconscious
Ian, whispering gleefully in his ears of the torture he would endure in the Hell
that awaited him. But the presence stayed only momentarily. Then, as if by
sensing a goodness in him that could not be overcome—at least not yet—the
tunnel fell silent once more.
Ian moaned and
gently rubbed the knot on his head as he groggily pulled himself off the floor
of the tunnel. Only seconds had passed, but he felt as though he’d been
knocked silly for hours.
Squinting
through throbbing, dizzy eyes, he searched for the lantern. Finding it on its
side but still lit, he picked it up. Murray, agglomerated silently beside him,
was now all that was there. A rivulet of blood dripped from the corner of his
clenched mouth onto the back of his shirt. He looked like a contortionist killed
in the midst of the performance of a lifetime.
The opening into
the tunnel was now three times the size they had made it. Whatever it was, it
dug out pretty damned fast. Ian reached into his pocket and pulled out the
little leather pouch and studied it, then looked at Murray, then looked at the
reamed opening.
Finally, words
came to him in a fearful whisper. “What unspeakable act have I just done?”
The beginning of the night had held so much
promise. The promise of renewal, and the promise of purpose, divine direction
that had slipped away from him. He thought that his transformation back to the
priest he’d once been had begun with the discovery of at least one of the
keys. He knew that this was only the beginning. But the beginning of what?
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