Comes a Horseman (27 page)

“Hello?” she said.

Somewhere inside, a door closed and a light came on, dimly revealing a sitting area beyond the door. She leaned nearer. A face suddenly appeared. Only wide, darting eyes and a sharp nose were visible through the opening.

“What is it?” said an irritated voice.

“Father McAfee?”

He paused before answering. “Did you open this door? Wasn't it latched?”

“It opened after I rang. But I didn't see anyone until you came.” As she spoke, his faced moved back. She could tell he was looking around. He was starting to spook her. “Is something wrong, Father?”

His face reappeared. “He's watching us. You must go.”

“Who's watching? Do you need help?”

“Of course not. Who are you? What do you want?”

She held up her FBI credentials. “I'm with the FBI. Special Agent Alicia Wagner. We spoke over the phone last night.”

“About the NDEs?” His silver brows furled. “I told you I can't help you.”

She stepped closer. “The robbery you mentioned, when did it happen?”

“The robbery? You wanted to know about near-death experiences, some case you were investigating.”

“Your robbery and my case may be related.”

“Related? How?”

“May I come in?”

He looked around again. Without a word, he shut the wicket door. A long moment of silence passed. Alicia wondered if she had seen all she would tonight of Father McAfee. She sighed. He must realize he could not hide from her forever. Certainly the church was open during the day. She would return in the morning and question him whether he liked it or not. She was turning away when she heard the dead bolt disengage; then the door opened.

Father McAfee's appearance surprised her. He looked like an aging movie star: The crisp blue eyes she'd seen through the wicket door were set in a tanned face. He had a muscular jaw and dimpled chin that complemented deep, long dimples on either side of his mouth. Crow's-feet at the corners of his eyes added a sophistication his face probably lacked when it was younger. Although he was at least sixty, his hair was more black than gray, and it was full, almost luxurious. Gray whiskers studded his cheeks and chin. Shadows filled his eye sockets and the hollows of his cheeks. He was tall, six feet three, she guessed. He didn't look like someone who would scare easily. He wore black slacks and a black button-down, short-sleeved shirt. No clerical collar.

He stepped aside to let her in.

“Thank you,” she said. The only light came from a hallway off the sitting room she'd seen through the wicket door.

“I don't know what you expect to gain from this visit,” he said, shutting and bolting the door.

“If you could start by telling me—”

He stopped her with a harsh “Shhh!” and put an index finger to his lips. Without a word or gesture, he walked into the lighted hallway. She followed him, out of the hall, through a darkened room that appeared to be a library, into another hall. Constantly his head swiveled, as though searching for a small child. He led her through a door into an office. Dark wood furniture arranged on dark hardwood flooring. Somewhere, incense burned, mulberry or some other sweet plant. It did not quite mask an unpleasant odor Alicia couldn't place.

The priest moved behind a desk and dropped into a chair with cracked burgundy leather. An amber-shaded attorney's lamp was lit on the desk. On a dingy white wall behind the desk was a clean spot three feet square, where a painting or picture was missing.

She surveyed the rest of the room. Two ancient-looking lamps on end tables at each side of a burgundy leather sofa added their light to the room, making it bright but also cozy. On the wall above the sofa was a huge painting of a bearded old man in a brown robe and cap, holding up a staff to repel a hideous flying creature that was part man, part dragon. Red eyes like apples bulged from its long-snouted face, fangs dripped with saliva, clawed hands raised over the staff as if feeling its power. Despite the creature's obvious intent to destroy the man, the man's face was peaceful, almost sublime.

“St. Anthony of Egypt,” Father McAfee said. “A hermit. They say demons attacked him frequently. The word of God dispatched them back to hell.”

“His face . . .”

“Like a man sunning on a beach, not fending off monsters. Faith in God grants peace in chaotic times.” His tone was flat, detached.

She turned to him. “It sounds like you don't buy that.”

“Oh, I do. I have no doubt.” He looked at his fingernails. He said, “It's a level of faith few of us possess.”

He glanced up at the painting, something like resentment making his face hard. After a moment, he asked, “What is it you think I can help you with?”

Alicia sat on a fat arm of the sofa, pulled a small spiral notepad and pen from a blazer pocket, and flipped to a page of questions.

“Father, on the phone you said the church offices were broken into and your files stolen about three weeks ago. Do you remember the exact date?”

“April 20.”

“You reported the break-in?”

“I told you I did. And no one wanted to hear about it.”

“Who took the report?”

“NYPD, of course.”

“And they didn't investigate? Didn't they look for points of ingress and egress, dust for—”

“They did
nothing
!” he snapped. He planted his elbows on the desktop, parting his hands in a gesture of frustration. “You are a very dense young woman!”

Their eyes locked on each other's. As hard as he glared, she refused to look away. After a good thirty seconds, a muscle on the right side of his face twitched. It moved like a parasite under his skin from below his eye to his bottom lip. She realized he was on the verge of weeping.

He dropped his face into his palms and said, “I'm sorry. I'm not usually like this, this ornery. I haven't slept more than two hours straight in weeks. I'm not eating. I'm . . . I'm . . .”

Alicia dropped the notepad and pen on the sofa, went to the desk, and reached out to him. When her fingers touched his temple, he jumped, but his face stayed buried.

“What's happened, Father?” She hesitated. “I'm a friend right now, not a cop, and I'm a pretty good listener.”

He raised his face. This close, she saw just how worn he really was. Blue folds of skin hung under his eyes like drapery. Electric currents of reddened blood vessels in his eyes fanned from the corners to the pupils. His flesh was as pale and dry as onionskin.

He let out a heavy breath, and his whole body seemed to deflate. He shook his head.

“I know who broke in,” he said. “At least, who ordered it.”

“Someone
ordered
the break-in?” She gripped his shoulder, sharp bones under his shirt.

“A Vatican priest, Father Randall, Adalberto Randall.” He could not hide the disdain in his voice.

“I don't understand.”

“Join the club,” he said with a dry laugh. “He came in, claiming to represent the Secret Archives of the Vatican.”

“It's actually
called
‘secret'?”

“Yes—
L'Archivio Segreto Vaticano
. Secret, not because nobody knows about it, but because it is closed to journalists and all but a few privileged researchers. Its
contents
are secret.”

“What did Father Randall want?”

“He congratulated me, said my files had been deemed
Magnipensa Scripta Conservanda
. The phrase applies to documents and writings important to the Church: the epistles of St. Francis of Assisi, the Handbook of Creeds, these sorts of things. And now the Holy See wants to include
my
files in this esteemed catalog, to preserve them and make them available to serious religious scholars? Something was rotten in Denmark—or rather, in Rome—and I told Father Randall so.”

“What kind of files?”

“Ahh—” He rose, reclaiming a measure of dignity with straight shoulders and an erect spine. Unconsciously flattening his shirt over his stomach, pushing the folds into his waistband, he walked slowly to a door to the right of the sofa and end table. He opened it and switched on an overhead light in a room about ten feet square, lined with old wood filing cabinets, each as tall as Father McAfee. He yanked open a drawer. It rattled on rails, then thunked to a stop. Empty. He pulled out another drawer, from a different cabinet, at a different height. Empty. He held out his palms, helpless.

“My life's work,” he said.

She stepped in, opening a drawer on the other side of the room. A lone paper clip resided within.

“What was in here?”

“Newspaper articles, interview notes, hospital records, EKG and EEG graphs, death certificates, journals, drawings, diagrams, photographs, manuscript drafts . . . everything.”

“For your books?”

“For my life's work,” he said again. “All of it, gone.”

“Did you have copies, backups?”

He laughed and shook his head. “I started my research long before personal computers. I trust paper, something I can hold. I like to pore through my research, a sea of paper on my office floor, and write my manuscripts longhand. My books have sold fairly well, so my publisher allows me that indulgence. As for making photocopies . . . well, I simply never thought of it.”

He looked forlornly at the file drawers, the way a patriarch might look at the crypts of his prematurely lost family.

“So everything stolen pertained to near-death experiences?” Alicia asked.

“Forty years of research, yes.”

“What was in the files that didn't make it into your books?”

“Oh, tons of stuff. Interviews with people who claimed to have endured an NDE but whose stories I couldn't corroborate. Lots of those.”

She leaned back against a cabinet. “How do you corroborate a near-death experience?”

“The physiological facts are easy. Were there witnesses to the accident or coronary that caused the heart to stop? Medical records? Was CPR performed? By whom? How long was the heart stopped? Was rapid ischemic damage noted? The metaphysical experience is less definitive, of course. I look for signs that the subject was outside of his body, such as did he revive with knowledge he shouldn't possess?”

“For instance?”

“Knowing something about the activity going on around him when he or she was clinically dead. Ideally, it will be something a living person could not have received through the senses, so knowledge of the conversation taking place around him isn't good evidence. Knowing that a nurse tied her shoelaces or missed the trash can when she tossed refuse at it
is
good evidence. Sometimes, people come back knowing an ancient language or something else uncanny, but that's rare. Most times, they have no gained knowledge that can be corroborated at all. The best evidence is the person's state of mind upon reviving.”

“State of mind?” She wished she hadn't left her notepad on the sofa. “What do you look for?”

McAfee raised an eyebrow. “Terror,” he said.

Alicia squinted in puzzlement. “But I thought . . . you know, a brilliant light, beautiful music, a feeling of peace . . .”

“You haven't read my books. Most writers—‘researcher' doesn't describe their pitiful lack of investigation—most writers do focus on the so-called positive NDEs. I suspect the majority of the stories are pure horsepucky.” He smiled. “You see, my dear, I specialize in finding people who have died and gone to hell.”

38

T
he woman was pretty. He'd seen that when she was on the porch, with the light in her face. She had stared directly at him through the wicket door, though he knew she could not discern him in the darkness. After she and the priest had moved down the hall, shutting themselves in the office, he listened at the door. By her questions, he realized she was the one they had told him to watch for. He heard them enter the file room, and he slipped into the office. The priest was listing the items that had been taken from him: “. . . newspaper articles, interview notes, hospital records . . .”

The man smiled, delighted by the grief of loss he detected in the priest's tone. His upper lip cracked. His tongue flicked out to taste the blood. He let his eyes light on the painting of the monk and the demon. A fiction. In reality, the demon would consume the monk with one snap of its jaws.

He back-stepped into the corridor and skittered into the darkness, remembering every turn, every piece of furniture. This was his domain now. The priest was too afraid to venture far from the few rooms he needed: the office, bedroom, bathroom, and kitchen. Soon he'd be sleeping in the office, forgetting food altogether, and voiding his bladder and bowels into the trash can.

When he finally killed the old man, staging a suicide, he would write something clever on the painting. It would be in the priest's handwriting, and it would close the book on whether he'd gone over the edge. Something like, “My God, my God, why have You forsaken me?”

He laughed, the sound ragged and animal-like, as though the teeth, filed sharp, had sliced it into nasty expulsions of noisy breath.

He opened a door, stepped into a storage closet, and then pushed past long-forgotten water-damaged boxes to the rear wall. A square of plywood leaned against it. He shifted it aside and felt a light breeze rush out of a hole in the wall. When he had first entered the rectory to find where the priest stored his files, he found the closet and loose board in the back. Curious, he'd shone a flashlight into the hole and found stairs leading down to servants' quarters. A calendar on the wall was dated 1974.

The discovery had given him an inspiration. From this basement sanctuary, he could venture into the rectory and church, terrorizing the old priest. He could strike—say, vandalize the property or cast his shadow where it would be merely glimpsed—and then retreat to the old servants' quarters, where no one would find him. In this way, he would be able to execute a slow, grueling campaign of terror. When he became bored of the game, as he surely would, he would slaughter the priest and vanish into the shadows of the city. It was a perfect plan.