CHAPTER ONE
The exorcist closed his eyes and inhaled deeply. The smell of human wreckage filled him, caused his lips to tremble on the verge of a smile. Yes. Shit and pain. The dungeon smelled like shit and pain, and this was good. It was like coming home.
This was his favorite part of the job, and he was good at it.
Father Willard opened his eyes and allowed the idea of a smile to fade. The ancient, labyrinthine dungeon was before him. Tucked into their cold, dank cells, the possessed began to groan and howl. They knew he had arrived. They could smell his cleanliness, his purity.
“How many?” Father Willard said.
Beside him, the jailer’s clean jawline and bold eyes betrayed the youth that had escaped Father Willard. The jailer was a promising young priest, eager to please and full of ambition.
“We have nine occupied cells, Father,” the young jailer said while adjusting his lantern so that light beamed down the old corridor.
“There were nine last time.”
“The ledger is updated, Father. The names and dates are accurate.”
Father Willard spoke through grinding teeth. “I don’t care about the ledger, Father Ricci.” He stopped himself. This old castle was in his charge and administration was his biggest failure. Records meant nothing to him. He was the only working exorcist in the castle and its stewardship had fallen upon his unwilling shoulders, but he didn’t care how many of the possessed waited in the darkness, as it only represented how much work lay ahead of him. None of it mattered. The cardinal had already arrived for the inspection, and it was inevitable this castle would be shut down.
Why should he care now? He never glanced at the records. There was no pretense in a priesthood of killers. If you knew one of them, you knew all. There was no administrator, no ruler, no captain, no lord. There was an unspoken hierarchy of power that protected him from jealousy; he left them alone, and they respected his proficiencies, because his work gave them the screams they so desperately wanted to hear. They learned from him, watched him. Faith meant nothing in this fortress of pain.
This collection of lunatics was doomed. The castle was going to be scoured by the cardinal, each depraved cleric exiled into the abyss beneath the dungeon. Cardinals were executioners, the purifiers who washed those infected with terminal madness down the drain of darkness. The castle was hardly more than a deteriorating asylum, and its residents could not be allowed to appear in society again. Father Willard had entertained the notion of running into the abyss on more than one occasion; his fate was meaningless. His function would have been served. His existence was a program involving rituals and arcana that defied logic, and his participation with it was indication enough that his grasp on reality was weak.
This jailer might be salvaged by the cardinal. Young and fresh, eager to please. Father Willard had read his file, but his cracked memory left only an inaccurate impression. Father Ricci had to be a killer, like the rest of them. Within the young priest’s mind, there was still a notion of identity, the concept of a past that had led to this moment. A withering of forms would stop Father Ricci’s ideologies, his perception of purpose behind the ritual of existence itself. Permission to maim and hurt another person beyond their endurance—Father Ricci helped shut the eyes of life and exercised an absolute power over reality. Eventually, the abyss would call to him.
Father Willard surveyed the young jailer’s face. He inhaled deeply, allowing the infusion of human waste from the imprisoned to fill the back of his throat. To taste the proof of life.
“We have one fresh occupant,” Father Willard said. “I assume we can trust the confirmation, and the occupant is actually possessed.”
“Two, actually. We had three, lost one to the abyss.”
“Was I told about this?”
“Uh, no, Father. Forgive me, but—”
Willard stopped the young priest with a wave of his hand. “It makes no difference. Why did we lose one?”
“The other jailer, Father Stephan, came down here with a field agents. I found Father Stephan’s body. There, just in front of that cell.” He pointed a few feet away. “His throat was cut. The agent and one of the occupants were gone.”
Father Willard sighed and rubbed the bridge of his nose. One of his priests had been killed, and one of their guests had been released by a field agent.
“You told me I should never alert you when you’re resting,” Father Ricci said. “I’m the only one who reports to you, Father.”
“Fine. What else?”
“We no longer have a field agent working for us.”
“The one who killed Father . . . ”
“Markus.”
“Yes, Father Markus,” Father Ricci said.
“The field agent brought two new guests, murdered Father Markus, and escaped into the abyss with one of the others?”
“Yes.”
Father Willard stared into the darkness beyond. The abyss was his destiny, just as it was the destiny of all those who could not receive the exorcism rites; in the galaxy of nothing beyond the dungeon, an entire tribe of savages thrived. They haunted this sanctuary of human waste, and only the light could persuade them to remain in the dark.
Father Willard had failed as an administrator, and the cardinal had come to deliver the reckoning. How much time had passed in isolation, his eyes poring over old, leather-bound books until they succumbed to the weight of his eyelids?
It didn’t matter.
“The new occupants, then. Show me.”
“I heard about the last one,” Father Ricci said.
The last one. The last exorcism.
“And now you want to share your opinion, Ricci.”
“I told them to tie him down good. Sometimes I wonder if I could take on the wildest ones. Those idiots deserved what happened to them. I knew how strong he was, saw him almost break one of those doors down. He smashed another jailer’s head against the wall.”
Father Willard had tied the girl down himself, a task reserved for those assigned to work beside him. The man’s restraints were tied too loosely and he nearly broke free. Father Willard didn’t realize until after the debacle that he wanted him to break free.
The challenge had amused him.
Father Willard observed the young man’s smooth features. The nearly hairless chin. Un-calloused fingers. Eyes that have yet to witness the abyss.
“Maybe you will work for me on this next one,” Father Willard said.
Father Ricci nodded, his face betraying no hint of enthusiasm or dread at the prospect. “Yes. Of course, Father. I wish to learn from you.”
Father Willard wanted to tell him there was nothing to learn, that humanity was an illusion, the idea of a soul nothing more than a story concocted to enable religious offices like the one he had abused for so long to exist.
Instead, he said, “I am sure more experience will give you a better opportunity to leave with the cardinal.”
“Leave?”
Father Willard ignored him. He listened as the cell occupants shouted obscenities and spat at him between the iron bars that covered the small aperture at the top of each door. Father Willard inhaled their stench. His stomach rumbled hungrily.
Together, the exorcist and the jailer descended into the deep dark. Father Willard clasped his hands behind his back and peered into the torch-illumined cages. The hoary faces, lips puckered, split, blistered. Strings of matted hair, moustaches, talon-like fingernails. They retreated from the iron bars and into the familiar cold. ...
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