When the entity first arrived at Our Lady of Miracles, Father Dolan thought someone was playing a prank. A particularly tasteless and sacrilegious prank. He had slipped into the sacristy following the scantily attended morning Mass to remove his vestments. The spring day dawned clear and bright for a change, and Father Dolan could see from the oriel window Mel Howard’s battered work truck and mini excavator parked behind the graveyard.
A muffled curse floated toward the priest, and he saw Howard’s figure straighten in the trench he’d dug, clutching a shovel. Finally, he’s getting to planting the hedge, Father Dolan thought. He crossed the small room toward the low side door, meaning to stroll across the graveyard and see how the work progressed. He paused to make his devotions before the statue of the Blessed Virgin in her niche but halted in shock at her changed visage.
Two slender tracks of scarlet tears ran from the statue’s eyes and dripped from her chin. Her usual expression of serene compassion had been turned woeful, and her beautifully painted gaze beseeched him. Shock turned to outrage, and Father Dolan gave vent to his own heartfelt curse.
“Damned vandals!”
He stormed from the sacristy into the arbored cloister walk that led to the tiny rectory. He intended to call the police. This was not the first episode of vandalism Our Lady of Miracles had suffered. In the last few weeks, numerous small childish acts of mischief and one petty theft had plagued the church. The wicks had been pinched from the votives at the front of the nave; the bulbs in the chandeliers above the pews had been loosened, causing them to flicker wildly; an enormous urn of flowers before the sanctuary had been tipped, spilling water and petals into the aisle; two bottles of unconsecrated wine had been stolen from the locked cupboard in the sacristy and the lock broken.
These incidents had caused a furor of finger pointing and hot gossip among the congregants. If there was one thing Father Dolan could not tolerate—and one thing the parish of Our Lady of Miracles suffered as though it were a plague—it was gossip. It was, he felt, the slippery slope to the dissolution of community; the acid that ate away at good will. He would not have his parishioners delighting in it. He castigated them from the lectern, a bold reprimand that earned him offended grumbling rather than obedience.
Compounding this dissatisfaction, he had resisted pressure to lock the church’s doors between services. He held a fierce belief that a church should be a sanctuary and a comfort to all, at any hour of the day or night.
Prayer knows no schedule; the soul keeps no time clock, he had boomed in a fiery sermon, the same in which he had remonstrated with the congregation on the evils of letting their tongues wag unchecked. Yet, with each incident he had considered a bit more seriously the call to lock up the church. This attack on the Virgin herself was the final straw. Father Dolan boxed the air in frustration. When he found out who was behind these acts …
His angry musing was cut short by movement in the shade of the cloister. A shimmer of the air, like heat rising. There was something furtive about it that raised Dolan’s hackles. Perhaps the vandal was still on the premises, hiding in the greening vines and shrubberies.
“Who’s there?” he barked. “Come now, out with you. Show yourself.”
A heavy pause like that of a cat before a pounce weighed upon the morning air. Father Dolan imagined some disgruntled congregant crouched in the rhododendrons, or perhaps two of them whispering furiously about their best course of action. As the pause drew out, he began to imagine other, less prosaic, things and shuddered.
“Come out now. Nothing to fear.”
Again, from the corner of his eye, he thought he detected a subtle disturbance of the air, this time much closer to him. His nostrils quivered at a sweet, spicy scent. Alarm flared, and he turned sharply toward the movement, his fists rising.
Be at peace. I am here.
The voice filled him, a sound that was not sound. He understood what it said without the clumsy mechanics of speech. He thought it would have been beautiful if it were not so alien. Despite its pleasant tone, terror squirmed in the dark of his lizard brain, struggling to erupt and command his limbs.
“Who … what are you?”
You are afraid.
The voice/not voice attached no emotion to the statement. If anything, it seemed satisfied. His terror spiked.
I am a visitor. You would call me ‘an angel’. It is acceptable.
An angel! Father Dolan reeled. He was no longer certain he believed in angels or demons or much of anything beyond the imperative to help his recalcitrant fellow beings. Even God had dwindled to an academic concept in this pinched place as Father Dolan worked to feed and clothe the poor in his rural parish, to occupy the wild youth in productive ways, and to alleviate some of the struggle he saw as a rising tide.
The unseen being made a sound, a glissando of tones like a fall of shattered glass, that might have been meant as laughter. It had plucked the thoughts from Dolan’s mind.
Belief is irrelevant. I am here for you. I will mend your troubles.
Father Dolan felt faint and sick. Far from being an uplifting or mystically ecstatic experience, the presence of this supernatural creature punched a hole in his concept of reality that felt akin to a fatal gunshot wound. He wished it gone. Better yet, he wished it had never made itself known to him. He suspected that it heard his every thought, and this added to his maelstrom of sweating fear. He had not asked for an angel. He possessed no protocol for hosting one.
“Show me your form,” he demanded of it, his suspicion equal to his terror.
You cannot understand my form. How would you have me appear?
Images from Christmas cards and movies flooded Father Dolan’s mind and were instantly dismissed as ludicrous. The angel repeated its disturbing sound of amusement.
Behold.
In the air in front of him formed a levitating female figure. It wore what appeared to be a gauzy winding sheet, the frayed and dirty hem trailing below it, obscuring its feet. Its dark hair floated and twisted like smoke in some unfelt current. Its black eyes sizzled in its pale, perfect face like cigarette burns on paper. The priest could see the shrubbery through the edges of the thing.
“Why are you here? What troubles do you think to mend?”
‘The soul reigns in the heart and makes itself known by the writhings of the tongue. What value has a soul when spent on idle lies and lashings? It is a plaything for devils.’
The creature quoted Dolan’s own ill-received sermon, imparting to the cautionary words the ominous overtones of a hex. Before the apparition faded into the tentative sunlight, it made a promise that iced the priest’s blood.
I will remove the affront.
Mel Howard stood in the trench he had opened at the back of the graveyard and scratched at his thinning hair under his sweat-stained ballcap. His old excavator sat nearby, clods of clay and sod stuck between its teeth, and eight privet shrubs marched away from him in a tidy row. Mel cast a sour glance at the privets and then down to his feet and the box he’d unearthed. At first, he’d thought it was a coffin that had got loose from a grave somehow, a shock that had sent an unpleasant chill over him and caused him to hug his shovel to his chest. But upon closer inspection, the box struck him as more of a long packing crate than a coffin.
He pawed the earth away from it as best he could, scraping his knuckles on its rough surface and earning several wicked long splinters that he extracted with snarled curses. A few drops of blood splashed onto the box’s lid, puddling in the weathered grooves before sinking into the grain of the wood. A cloud obscured the sun and in the brief gloom, Mel thought he felt something shift inside the box where it rested against his ankle.
“What the hell …”
He danced backward and sat down hard on the cold damp edge of the trench. A wet seat and a smarting hand helped to relieve his mind of the frightful vision he’d had of a black eye opening in the darkness of the box, and he wiped his filthy hands on his coveralls. He crawled from the trench, scurrying just a little to pull his feet up, and willed iron into his trembling knees. As he drove his shovel upright into the softened sod, his usual surliness struggled to reassert itself.
He’d have to go tell Father what he’d found, and who knew when he’d get back to planting the hedge the man had wanted. Mel indulged in the hope, as he trudged toward the church, that the find would scotch the idea of the hedge, for he surely did not relish the thought of tending and trimming the bitching thing in the coming years. He wondered what the box held.
The black eye, opening, marking him … As though poked with a hot fork, Mel lurched into a shambling run and fetched up against the door of the priest’s house like a drowning man. His blood-streaked fist pounded without restraint.
“What the—Mel, what’s wrong with you, man?”
Father Dolan, coming up behind Mel, put a firm hand on the man’s shoulder. Mel let out a high yipping sound and cringed against the door before glaring at the priest. He huffed out a breath that held a note of angry hysteria.
“Hells bells, begging your pardon Father, you near gave me a heart attack.”
He straightened and tugged with his thumbs at his coveralls, rearranging his expression into one of placid rectitude.
“I was just comin’ to tell you I found something while I was digging back there.” He pointed toward the graveyard. “A wooden box. Three, four feet long. Looks old.”
Father Dolan’s gaze followed the pointing finger, then shifted back to the cloister where his preternatural visitor had vanished. Shaken and frightened, he did not think he could manage another oddity in his day. The uneasy idea that Mel’s find and his own visitation were connected slithered into his mind.
“You opened it?”
Mel snorted. “The hell I did, beg pardon. Got it uncovered and came right down here to you. It must be church property. Don’t know who else woulda buried it there.”
The priest looked hard at Mel, but the groundskeeper looked back without flinching.
“Show me.”
Father Dolan set off through the gravestones, pausing for a moment to lay his hand on the tall Celtic cross that marked Father Rupert Humphry’s grave, his predecessor and mentor. Strange things are afoot, old friend, he thought. I could use your help.
The trench yawned at their feet, thigh deep and waiting for Mel to fill it with the good soil and compost that had been delivered the day before. ‘Gotta dig out that clay, or them shrubs you want is just gonna die’ he’d told Father Dolan, wagging his head at the priest’s ignorance and spitting a contemptuous squirt of tobacco.
Now the men contemplated the box at the trench’s bottom, neither eager to touch it.
“What do you reckon it is, Father? Not … not a body, I guess?”
Father Dolan felt a searing tickle of irritation.
“Of course not. We may as well open it and see what you’ve found. It could be empty.” He stared at Mel, raising an eyebrow when the other made no move to enter the trench. “Give the hasp a good rap with your shovel. That should do it.”
“Bugger me sideways,” Mel muttered as he tugged his shovel from the mud and climbed down beside the box. “Give it a rap, he says. I’ll give him a rap.”
With that, he raised the shovel and brought it down on the rusted hasp in a brutal jab, breaking the lock into three crumbling bits that fell into the cold earth. Mel tossed the shovel onto the grass at the priest’s feet and bent to pry at the lid.
Pick it up. Cleave his skull.
The voice that was not a voice whispered in Father Dolan’s mind, a sickly-sweet ache of anti-sound that was both nauseating and compelling. He stooped and retrieved the shovel, hoisting it above his head, the wicked earth-clotted blade an ugly blemish against the pale blue cheek of the sky. Below him, Mel grunted and strained to heave aside the lid of the box.
Like a pig rooting in dirt. A thief and a drunkard. Pigs are for slaughter.
An image came to him of Mel smashing the lock on the sacristy cupboard, slipping away with the stolen wine under his jacket, and wallowing insensible in his sloven’s hovel, the empty bottles rolling on his floor. With a growl, the priest brought the shovel down, slicing through the grimy ball-cap, the scalp and bone, into the creamy pudding of the brain. Blood gushed forth into the now open box like a benediction.
“Lookee here, Father! It’s a statue. Maybe some saint or even Mary, ‘cause I think it’s a woman.”
Mel looked up at Father Dolan who stood vacant-eyed and with a clenched jaw, his hands rolled into white fists.
“You okay, Father? You ain’t having a stroke or nothing are you?”
Father Dolan inhaled the sharp, deep breath of a man released from a nightmare and passed his hand over his damp face. He no longer cared what was in the box. He wanted only to get as far from it as possible.
“Come out of there, Mel, right now,” he said. Then, to take some of the sharpness from his words, “Let me see what we’ve got.”
When they had pulled it from the trench and stripped away the gauzy wrap that swathed it—like a ragged winding sheet—Mel and Father Dolan had fallen silent before the figure’s fearsome, age-darkened beauty. A fragrance rose from the box, an intoxicating blend of lily, cinnamon, and myrrh.
“That don’t look like no statue of Mary I ever seen,” Mel had whispered, crossing himself in an unconscious warding.
It was no representation of the Blessed Mother, though some blasphemous resemblance could be seen. Sculpted waves of bejeweled hair, surmounted by a gilded diadem, tumbled about the figure’s shoulders in a mantle of angry whips and ringlets. It was an astounding and terrifying piece of artistry, its clawed and beringed toes curled about the shards of crumbling skulls—a queen of some realm, if not of heaven.
Yet, it was the face that struck the men all but speechless. Beauty dwelled there, made monstrous by a feral ferocity, a hunger whose naked blade cut them to the quick and freed a kind of mindless horror. In its glistening, painted eyes, night seethed. Its perfect lips presented the barest curl of primordial cruelty.
“Cover it,” Father Dolan snapped, discerning in its features the face of the self-proclaimed angel that had accosted him in the cloister.
Mel dropped the veil over the thing in reflexive startlement.
“Close the box. We’ll take it down to the barn. I’ll have to make some calls. It’s obviously not church property.”
The men lifted the clay-clammy crate into the groundskeeper’s wheelbarrow. Clouds had begun to mass above them, dousing the sunlight and grumbling with storm pangs.
Mel scowled down at the box. “How’d it get here, Father?”
But Father Dolan had already hastened away through the gravestones, leaving Mel to follow with his heavy burden.
“What are you going to do with it?” Mel asked. “I mean, it looks like it oughtta be in a museum or something. Might be worth a lot of money.”
The men stood among the maintenance equipment in the chilly barn behind the rectory and stared at the painted wooden figure. It posed in regal state atop the workbench, its hands outstretched and open in parody of Mary’s offering of grace. Father Dolan found no solace there. Rather than presenting a gift to mankind, these hands seemed to wait to be filled.
Mel lit a cigarette, adding its acrid smoke to the rich fragrance that clung to the statue.
“I bet old Chess Morely would pay a pretty penny for it. He’s always going on about his art collection and his traveling. This here thing looks like it comes from some foreign place. He’d know about it.” Mel dragged on his cigarette, letting the smoke stream from his nostrils. “It’s pretty and all, I guess, but I don’t mind telling you, Father … it fair gives me the creeps.”
Thief. Drunkard.
The words ghosted through Father Dolan’s thoughts like a taunt. He stared at the give-me attitude of the figure’s hands, imagining them slicked with sacrificial scarlet. Thunder rumbled in the distance and the first raindrops ticked against the metal roof of the barn. Father Dolan shook his head.
“Throw that tarp over it, Mel,” he said, gesturing to a folded painter’s canvas beneath the workbench. “I think if anyone will know when or why this thing was buried on church property, it will be Lavinia Cooper. I’ll call her grandson and ask if he can drive her over here. Chess can wait until I know more.”
Mel dropped his cigarette to the concrete and ground it beneath his boot. He opened the canvas tarp and flung it up and around the sculpture, careful not to touch it.
“He ain’t gonna like it that you didn’t call him first, Father.”
The priest set his lips in a hard line, imprisoning his uncharitable response to what Chess Morely liked or did not.
“Go home, Mel,” he said when the statue was draped. “You can get back to the hedge planting when the rain clears up.”
Ok. I am hooked. So good!
I don't think I'd want to be anywhere near that box and what's in it after nightfall!