Ultimate Supernatural Horror Box Set (22 page)

When he reached the bottom floor, he broke into a trot toward his quarters.  He wanted more than to wash his hands.  He wanted a shower.

‡

The
Greenbriar
—east of Gibraltar

“A woman on board,” Captain Liam Harrity muttered as he thumbed tobacco into the bowl of his pipe.  “What utter foolishness is this?  Next they’ll be after telling me the ship can fly.”

Gibraltar lay three leagues ahead, its massive shadow looming fifteen degrees to starboard against the hazy stars.  Lights dotted the shores to either side as the
Greenbriar
prepared to squeeze between two continents and brave the Atlantic beyond.  A smooth, quiet, routine trip so far.

Except for this woman talk.

Harrity leaned against the
Greenbriar
’s stern rail and stared at the glowing windows in the superstructure amidships.  A good old ship, the
Greenbriar
.  A small freighter by almost any standards, but quick.  A tramp merchant ship, with no fixed route or schedule, picking up whatever was ready to be moved, from the Eastern Mediterranean to the UK and all points between, no questions asked.  Harrity had been in this game a long time, much of it spent on the
Greenbriar
, and this was the first time any of his crew had talked about seeing a woman wandering the decks.

Not that there weren’t enough places to hide one, mind you.  Small though the ship might be, she had plenty of nooks and crannies for a stowaway. 

But in all his years helming the
Greenbriar
, Harrity had never had a stowaway—at least that he knew of—and he wasn’t about to start now.  Like having a prowler in your house.  You simply didn’t allow it.

Maguire had started the talk that first night out of Haifa.  Harrity’s thought at the time was that Dennis had been nipping at the Jameson’s a little earlier than usual.  He’d let it go and not given it another thought until two nights ago when Cleary said he’d seen a woman on the aft deck as they were passing through the Malta Channel.

A temperate man, Cleary.  Not the sort who’d be after seeing things that weren’t there.

So Harrity himself was keeping watch on the aft deck these past two nights.  And so far no woman.

He turned his back to the wind and struck a wooden match against the stern rail.  As he puffed his pipe to life, relishing the first aromatic lungfuls, a deep serenity stole over him.  The phosphorescent flashes churning in the wake, the balmy, briny air, the stars overhead, lighting the surface of the Mediterranean as it stretched long and wide and smooth to the horizon.  Life was good.

He sensed movement to his left, turned, and fumbled to catch his pipe as it dropped from his shocked-open mouth. 

She stood there, beside him, not two feet away.  A woman…at the rail, staring into the east, back along the route they’d sailed.  She was wearing a loose robe of some sort, pulled up around her head.  Its cowl hid her features.  Now he knew why Maguire had thought she’d been wrapped in a blanket. 

He shook off the initial shock and stuck his pipe bit between his teeth.  He should have been angry—furious, for sure—but he could find no hostility within him.  Only wonder at how she’d come up behind him without him hearing her.

“And who would you be now?”

The woman continued her silent stare off the stern.

“What are you after doing on me ship?”

Slowly she turned toward him.  He could not make out her features in the shadow of the cowl, but he felt her eyes on him.  And the weight of her stare was a gentle hand caressing the surface of his mind, erasing all questions.

She turned and walked away.  Or was she walking?  She seemed to glide along the deck.  Harrity had an urge to follow her but his legs seemed so heavy, his shoes felt riveted to the deck.  He could only stand and watch as she followed the rail along the starboard side to the superstructure where she was swallowed by the deeper shadows.

And then she was gone and he could move again.  He sucked on his pipe but the bowl was cold.  And so was he.  Suddenly the deck of the
Greenbriar
was a lonely place.

‡

Cashelbanagh, Ireland

Like everyone else, Monsignor Vincenzo Riccio had heard the endless talk about the green of the Irish countryside, but not until he was actually driving along the roads south of Shannon Airport did he realize how firmly based in fact all that talk had been.  He gazed through the open rear window at the passing fields.  This land was
green
.  In all his fifty-six years he could not remember seeing a green like this.

“Your country is most beautiful, Michael” he said.  His English was good, but he knew there was no hiding his Neapolitan upbringing.

Michael the driver—the good folk of Cashelbanagh had sent one of their number to fetch the Monsignor from the airport—glanced over his shoulder with a broad, yellow-toothed smile. 

“Aye, that it is, Monsignor.  But wait till you see Cashelbanagh.  The picture-perfect Irish village.  As a matter of fact, if you’re after looking up ‘Irish village’ in the dictionary, sure enough it’ll be saying Cashelbanagh.  Perfect place for a miracle.”

“It is much farther?”

“Only a wee bit down the road.  And wait till you see the reception committee they’ll be having for you.”

Vincenzo wished he’d come here sooner.  He liked these people and the green of this land enthralled him.  But the way things were looking lately, he wouldn’t get a chance for a return visit.

And too bad he couldn’t stay longer.  But this was only a stopover, scheduled at the last minute as he was leaving Rome for New York.  He was one of the Vatican’s veteran investigators of the miraculous, and the Holy See had asked him to look into what lately had become known as the Weeping Virgin of Cashelbanagh.

The Weeping Virgin had been gathering an increasing amount of press over the past few weeks, first the Irish papers, then the London tabloids, and recently the story had gained international attention.  People from all over the world had begun to flock to the little village in County Cork to see the daily miracle of the painting of the Virgin Mary that shed real tears.  Healings had been reported—cures, visions, raptures.  “A New Lourdes!” screamed tabloid headlines all over the world.

It had been getting out of hand.  The Holy See wanted the “miracle” investigated.  The Vatican had no quarrel with miracles, as long as they were real.  But the faithful should not be led astray by tricks of the light, tricks of nature, and tricks of the calculated human kind. 

They chose Vincenzo for the task.  Not simply because he’d already had experience investigating a number of miracles that turned out to be anything but miraculous, but because the Vatican had him on a westbound plane this weekend anyway, to Sloan-Kettering Memorial in Manhattan to try an experimental chemotherapy protocol for his liver cancer.  He could make a brief stop in Ireland, couldn’t he?  Take a day or two to look into this weeping painting, then be on his way again.  No pain, no strain, just send a full report of his findings back to Rome when he reached New York.

“Tell me, Michael,” Vincenzo said.  “What do you know of these miracles?”

“I’ll be glad to tell you it all, Monsignor, because I was there from the start.  Well, not the very start.  You see, the painting of the Virgin Mary has been gracing the west wall of Seamus O’Halloran’s home for two generations now.  His grandfather Danny painted it there during the year before he died.  Finished the last stroke, then took to his bed and never got up again.  Can you imagine that?  ‘Twas almost as if the old fellow was hanging on just so’s he could be finishing the painting.  Anyways, over the years the weather has faded it, and it’s become such a fixture about the village that it became part of the scenery, if you know what I’m sayin’.  Much like a tree in someone’s yard.  You pass that yard half a dozen times a day but you never take no notice of the tree.  Unless of course it happens to be spring and it’s startin’ to bloom, then you might—”

“I understand, Michael.”

“Yes.  Well, that’s the way it was after being until about a month ago when Seamus—that’s old Daniel O’Halloran’s grandson—was passing the wall and noticed a wet streak glistening on the stucco.  He stepped closer, wondering where this bit of water might be trickling from on this dry and sunny day, for contrary to popular myth, it does
not
rain every day in Ireland—least ways not in the summer.  I’m afraid I can’t say that for the rest of the year.  But anyways, when he saw that the track of moisture originated in the eye of his grandfather’s painting, he ran straight to Mallow to fetch Father Sullivan.  And since then it’s been one miracle after another.”

Vincenzo let his mind drift from Michael’s practiced monologue that told him nothing he hadn’t learned from the rushed briefing at the Vatican before his departure.  But he did get the feeling that life in the little village had begun to revolve around the celebrity that attended the weeping of their Virgin.

And that would make his job more difficult.

“There she is now, Monsignor,” Michael said, pointing ahead through the windshield.  “Cashelbanagh.  Isn’t she a sight.”

They were crossing a one-car bridge over a gushing stream.  As Vincenzo squinted ahead, his first impulse was to ask, Where’s the rest of it?  But he held his tongue.  Two hundred yards down the road lay a cluster of neat little one- and two-story buildings, fewer than a dozen in number, set on either side of the road.  One of them was a pub—Blaney’s, the gold-on-black sign said.  As they coasted through the village, Vincenzo spotted a number of local men and women setting up picnic tables on the narrow sward next to the pub.

Up ahead, at the far end of the street, a crowd of people waited before a neat, two-story, stucco-walled house.

“And that would be Seamus O’Halloran’s house, I imagine,” Vincenzo said.

“That it would, Monsignor.  That it would.”

There were hands to shake and Father Sullivan to greet, and introductions crowded one on top of the other until the names ran together like watercolors in the rain.  The warmest reception he’d ever had, an excited party spirit running through the villagers.  The priest from Rome was going to certify the Weeping Virgin of Cashelbanagh as an inexplicable phenomenon of Divine origin, an act of God made manifest to the faithful, a true miracle, a sign that Cashelbanagh had been singled out to be touched by God.  There was even a reporter from a Dublin paper to record it.  And what a celebration there’d be afterward.

Vincenzo was led around to the side of the house to stare at the famous Weeping Virgin on Seamus O’Halloran’s wall.

Nothing special about the painting.  Rather crude, actually.  A very stiff looking half profile of the Blessed Mother in the traditional blue robe and wimple with a halo behind her head. 

And yes indeed, a gleaming track of moisture was running from the painting’s eye.

“The tears appear every day, Monsignor,” O’Halloran said, twisting his cloth cap in his bony hands as if there were moisture to be wrung from it. 

“I can confirm that,” Father Sullivan said, his ample red cheeks aglow.  “I’ve been watching for weeks now.”

As Vincenzo continued staring at the wall, noting the fine meshwork of cracks in the stucco finish, the chips here and there that revealed the stonework beneath, the crowd grew silent around him.

He stepped closer and touched his finger to the trickle, then touched the finger to his tongue.  Water.  A mineral flavor, but not salty.  Not tears.

“Would someone bring me a ladder, please.  One long enough to reach the roof.”

Three men ran off immediately, and five minutes later he was climbing to the top of the gable over the Weeping Virgin’s wall.  He found wet and rotted cedar shakes at the point.  At his request a pry bar was brought and, with O’Halloran’s permission, he knocked away some of the soft wood.

Vincenzo’s heart sank when he saw it.  A cup-like depression in the stones near the top of the gable, half filled with clear liquid.  It didn’t take a rocket scientist to deduce that water collected there on rainy days—rarely was there a week, even in the summer, without at least one or two rainy days—and percolated through the stones and grout of the wall to emerge as a trickle by the painting’s eye.

The folk of Cashelbanagh were anything but receptive to this rational explanation of their miracle. 

“There may be water up there,” O’Halloran said, his huge Adam’s apple bobbing angrily, “but who’s to say that’s where the tears come from?  You’ve no proof.  Prove it, Monsignor.  Prove those aren’t the tears of the Blessed Virgin.”

He’d hoped it wouldn’t turn out like this.  He’d hoped discovery of the puddle would be enough, but obviously it wasn’t.  And he couldn’t leave these people to go on making a shrine out of a leaky wall.

“Can someone get me a bottle of red wine?” Vincenzo said.

“This may be Ireland, Monsignor,” Father Sullivan said, “but I hardly think this is time for a drink.”

Amid the laughter Vincenzo said, “I’ll use it to prove my theory.  But it must be red.”

While someone ran to Blaney’s pub for a bottle, Vincenzo climbed the ladder again and splashed all the water out of the depression.  Then he refilled it with the wine.

By evening, when the Virgin’s tears turned red, Vincenzo felt no sense of victory.  His heart went out to these crestfallen people.  He saw his driver standing nearby, looking as dejected as the rest of them.

“Shall I call a taxi, Michael?”

“No, Monsignor,” Michael sighed.  “That’s all right.  I’ll be taking you back to Shannon whenever you want.”

But the airport was not where Vincenzo needed to go.  He hadn’t figured on this quick a resolution to the question of the Weeping Virgin of Cashelbanagh.  His flight out wasn’t scheduled until tomorrow night.

“Can you find me a hotel?”

“Sure, Monsignor.  There’s a lot of good ones in Cork City.”

They passed Blaney’s pub again on the way out of town.  The picnic tables were set and waiting.  Empty.  The fading sunlight glinted off the polished flatware, the white linen tablecloths flapped gently in the breeze.