Something knocking, p.5
Something Knocking, page 5
“No wounds on the victims?” Lauren asked.
“None,” the Cardinal confirmed.
“Okay,” Lauren said, “so the deaths don’t have an immediately apparent cause. Why do you suspect demonic possession?”
“The church does not officially suspect possession yet,” the Cardinal corrected, “however, both nuns were found to be in possession of copies of Lemegeton Clavicula Salomonis, and both books were found opened in their rooms on the nights of their deaths.”
“I’m sorry, what book?” Lauren asked.
“It’s known as the Lesser Key of Solomon in English,” Father Emilio explained. “It’s a well-known grimoire and details many arcane secrets of the Adversary and his demons.”
“Unproven secrets,” the Cardinal interjected, frowning at Father Emilio. “But yes, it’s believed that the book contains secrets of the occult.”
“So, the nuns were reading books they weren’t supposed to read and happened to die in mysterious circumstances,” Lauren summarized.
“We recognize that you are skeptical, Lauren,” Father Emilio said. “We’re not asking you to believe in the occult or in the possibility of demonic possession. Only to assist me while I attempt to ascertain the truth.”
She sighed. “Forgive me, Father, Your Excellency, but this is all…” she searched for the word.
“Crazy?” Father Emilio offered with a smile.
She sighed. “I don’t want to insult the two of you.”
“You’ve made that clear,” Father Emilio said. “We are not insulted. We simply must know your answer.”
Lauren thought a while. On the one hand, the whole thing seemed ridiculous almost to the point of being ludicrous. Demonic possession? It was like a bad horror movie. Would she be expected to wave incense around and implore the power of Christ to compel the demon to leave this mortal plane? It was all just absurd.
And she wasn’t sure if she wanted to be involved with the Church again, even in an auxiliary capacity. She had left the convent because of a crisis of faith and her life as an FBI agent hadn’t helped to soften her views on Catholicism or God in general. Father Emilio and Cardinal Bertolli might not be actively attempting to convert her now, but Father Emilio had all but professed his intention to bring her back to the fold at a later date. She didn’t want to deal with constant pressure to return to the Church, no matter how benign or well-meaning.
Then again, she didn’t want to leave the fates of these nuns in the hands of superstitious old men. And she didn’t want to go back to her house and remain alone with her grief.
She wouldn’t actively investigate, she promised herself. She was only here to consult. That was all. No pressure, no obligation. If this became too much to handle, she would excuse herself.
A small voice in her head told her that she wasn’t being entirely honest about wanting to stay away from investigative work. Her FBI career may have ended in tragedy, but while it had lasted, it had been the most fulfilling work of her life. Maybe what she needed was a chance to immerse herself in a case and for a time, at least, drown out the demons in her own head.
“All right,” she said, “I’ll help.”
Cardinal Bertolli sighed with relief. Father Emilio beamed. “Thank you, Miss Lamb,” the Cardinal said.
“You may not believe it yet, Lauren,” Father Emilio replied, “but you are doing the Lord’s work.”
Lauren only smiled in response to that.
“Excellent,” the Cardinal said. “Fernando will drive you back to Arezzo so you may both gather whatever belongings you need. Father Emilio, I will speak with Bishop Cavaldi about assigning a priest to watch over your flock while you are otherwise engaged.”
“If I may be so bold, Your Excellency,” Father Emilio said, “I would like to nominate Father Paolo of Cortana. He is young, but he is full of wisdom as Saint Timothy was in his youth, and blessed with the zeal of Barnabas and the compassion of—”
“No doubt he is as saintly as you describe him,” the Cardinal interrupted, a wry smile on his face. “You know your flock very well, Father Emilio. I approve of your choice and will communicate that request to the Bishop.”
Father Emilio bowed. The Cardinal stood, and Father Emilio stood as well. Lauren followed suit and the Cardinal led them to the elevator. Lauren made a mental note to ask them about the secrecy later. It couldn’t possibly be that secret if a Cardinal was the head of their order.
They met Fernando just outside the building where he had evidently been waiting for them. He smiled and opened the door for Lauren when she arrived, then did the same for Father Emilio. After a brief word with Cardinal Bertolli, he got into the driver’s seat and pulled smoothly away.
Lauren gazed out the window as they passed St. Peter’s Basilica. When she was younger, she had dreamed of a pilgrimage to the Holy City. Now she was here, and though from the outside the building was as grand and majestic as she imagined, she felt none of the spiritual connection she always hoped for.
But she did feel the familiar rush of being on a case. Whether she was doing the Lord’s work, serving as an instrument of justice, or simply catching a bad guy, she had a purpose again. For now, that was enough.
CHAPTER SIX
Lauren wasn’t sure what to make of Father Emilio.
He seemed kind enough when she first met him, but that was before she knew he was an exorcist and a member of a secret Vatican order that investigated potential spiritual crimes. She wasn’t sure how she felt about the fact that his order even existed.
The Church was too powerful. She had always believed that, even when she was considering being a nun. The church had always been too concerned with things that a church shouldn’t concern itself with. They existed as shepherd’s not as rulers, but the more she learned about the Church, the more she wondered if it was God’s will they represented or their own.
And Father Emilio was an agent of theirs, evidently a well-known and well-regarded one. She didn’t believe in the will of God or fate or anything like that, but she didn’t believe in coincidence either; and it concerned her that she, a former nun, somehow found herself in the company of a high-ranking member of a secret investigative order of the Catholic Church’s ruling body.
Lauren glanced over at him. The Father stared silently out of the window of the train that would take them from Arezzo to Pescara, a ten-hour journey. The car would have been faster, but Fernando had other engagements and was assigned to the Cardinal at the moment. Lauren had only just arrived in Italy and didn’t have a car, and Father Emilio, like most Europeans, didn’t drive.
The normally smiling Father Emilio became unusually withdrawn after the train pulled away from Arezzo. He gazed at the receding city with a troubled frown and spoke hardly at all. His eyes bore a pain with which Lauren was familiar, having seen it in the expressions of many veterans in the Bureau during her years of service. The Cardinal had mentioned that Father Emilio was an exorcist for many years. Lauren didn’t believe in demonic possession, but she could imagine the father had seen many things he wished to forget, whatever the cause was.
She spent the first hour of the journey brooding herself. The first seeds of doubt that had crept into her head lingered as the train accelerated from Arezzo and began the first leg of its journey. She could sympathize with Father Emilio’s traumas, assuming she was right to believe he had experienced some, but that didn’t change that his loyalties lay with an organization that she didn’t trust as far as she could throw it.
She had come to Italy to escape the tragedies she’d suffered at the Bureau. She had joined the Bureau to escape the anger and hurt she felt toward God and the Church. She had done this only to find her grief equally unbearable and now she was working as an investigator for the Church. She didn’t find the irony all that funny.
She wondered what she would feel when they reached the convent. She had spent five years in a convent in America, and though she was sure the surroundings here would differ from America as much as the rest of Italy did, she knew the atmosphere would be the same. Holiness, devotion, love for God that Lauren cynically believed was simply love of feeling more righteous than others, an insistence that the answer to every question was “the Lord’s will,” or the “temptations of the Adversary.”
No one ever called him Satan. Occasionally, they would refer to him as the Devil, but only in the possessive form. The Devil’s work. The Devil’s wiles. The Devil’s lies. When speaking of him directly, he was the Adversary or the Serpent or the Deceiver. Occasionally, a visiting priest would speak of Lucifer, but Satan was a forbidden word. She was sure that wasn’t true of all Catholics everywhere, but she found it interesting that so many feared to speak his name, as though doing so would mean invoking his presence.
Lauren eventually broke the silence. “How long have you been a priest?”
Father Emilio sighed and turned away from the window. He smiled a little absently, but his tone was agreeable enough when he answered. “I took my vows when I was twenty years old.”
“So you always wanted to be a priest,” she said.
“Oh no,” he said with a laugh. “I wanted to be a soldier.”
“A soldier?” Lauren said incredulously.
His smile widened a little. “Yes,” he said. “I had a toy rifle I carried with me everywhere I went. I imagined myself a hero of the Army leading my soldiers to victory against the communist horde. You must remember, I was a child in the sixties. The Russians were the greatest evil in the world back then, at least as far as the secular world was concerned.”
“So what changed your mind?” Lauren asked.
He chuckled. “The Spirit did,” he said. Seeing Lauren’s skeptical face, he said, “I know that’s hard for you to believe, but I don’t have another answer. I was praying in the church one day and I felt the Spirit move me to become a priest. I called my father the next day and told him of my calling. He supported me and encouraged me, and the next day, I spoke with Father Constantine and began my training.”
“And you’ve never looked back?”
His smile faded. “I wish I could say that were true, but I’m afraid I look back quite frequently, even today.”
But unlike me, you never turn back, Lauren thought with a touch of guilt.
“So how did the exorcism thing start?” she asked.
His smile faded the rest of the way, and Lauren said, “I’m sorry. That’s personal. I don’t mean to pry.”
“No need to apologize,” he said. “If we are to be partners, we should be open with each other. There was a girl in my church many years ago, shortly after I took my vows. She was… afflicted. I reached out to the Vatican for assistance. They sent an exorcist to help her, and he invited me to join him as his assistant. After that, I felt the Spirit call me to assist others who were similarly afflicted.”
He didn’t elaborate, and Lauren let the subject drop. After a moment, he asked, “So Lauren, the Lord moved me to ask for your assistance. I assume this means you have some background in investigative work?”
Lauren nodded. “I was with the FBI for ten years before I moved here.”
He didn’t seem at all surprised by the revelation. “And when you lost your father and fiancé, you left that life behind.”
“Yes,” she said. “I… well, like I told you at the church, I felt lost. I needed to find my way again.”
“But you no longer feel lost?”
Lauren hadn’t registered the past tense until now. She blinked and said, “Well… I don’t know. I guess…” she searched for the words. “I know where I’m going right now, and that’s enough for the moment.”
“The steps of a good man are ordered by the Lord,” Father Emilio quoted.
“If you say so,” Lauren said, with unintended bitterness.
“You have a lot of animosity toward God,” Father Emilio said. “May I ask why?”
Lauren’s lips thinned. “Perhaps another time, Father.”
“Of course,” Father Emilio said, showing no sign of offense or disappointment. He gazed out the window again, and his smile faded into the withdrawn frown he wore at the start of their journey. Lauren looked down at her phone and busied herself with one of those simple puzzle games she used to play on a case when she wanted her conscious mind to relax so her subconscious mind to sift through the details of the case and hopefully find connections that eluded her conscious mind.
They rode on. Father Emilio gazed out the window, his eyes communicating the trouble his voice could not. Lauren thought of her mother, taken by cancer thirty years before her time. She thought of her father, taken twenty years before his. She thought of Kevin, taken before he even had a chance to really live.
She wondered how many years she would leave behind. Was she once more courting an early death? Would this killer, whoever he was, finish what Fiero had started?
She closed her phone, the puzzle failing in its purpose of quieting her thoughts, and chose instead to spend the remaining hours of their journey in sleep.
***
Arezzo was a medium-sized city that felt like a small Renaissance town. San Vito Chietino was a genuinely small town and the sense of disconnection from modern life was even more powerful here. Aside from the red-brick and stucco buildings and Roman era cobblestone roads, the people here seemed to genuinely hold to the superstitions and lifestyle of a bygone era.
As they walked from the train station to the convent, Lauren noted how the citizens regarded her with an aloof suspicious politeness while Father Emilio was treated with a reverence that bordered on worship. More than a few of the people in the city proclaimed that God had answered their prayers and sent his servant to heal their town and rid them of the demon that plagued them.
Father Emilio accepted this praise with grace and humility, but Lauren could see the tension in his shoulders and the tightness in his smile as he spoke with the townspeople. He was afraid.
Lauren couldn’t blame him. She didn’t believe in demonic possession, but she knew how traumatizing an exorcism could be, not only on the subject but the priests who performed it. In one of their later conversations, Father Emilio mentioned it was ten years since his last exorcism, and though he didn’t share details of that event, Lauren got the impression it hadn’t gone well. She could well understand his reluctance to perform another.
Well, he wouldn’t have to. She would be here to make sure that the real killer, the human killer, was caught and that no one would suffer the trauma of an archaic superstition, not Father Emilio and not any of these poor women lost in the false safety in which Lauren herself had once been lost.
The convent was as modest as the church in Arezzo, though substantially larger, of course. They were met at the door by the Mother Superior, a stout, middle-aged woman who, despite wearing the severe expression all mothers superior seemed to wear, was clearly and genuinely distraught at the loss of one of her sisters.
Standing next to the Mother Superior was a middle-aged man of equally stout appearance in the uniform of the Polizia Di Stato. He wore a serious frown, but greeted Father Emilio with a similar deference to that which the townspeople showed.
“Mother Superior, thank you for receiving us,” Father Emilio said with a compassionate smile. “This is my partner, Miss Lauren Lamb. She will be assisting me in my investigation.”
The Mother Superior fixed a questioning glance on Lauren but didn’t air any concerns she might have. “Thank you so much for coming here, Father,” she said, “I can’t tell you how much it means to us that the Vatican responded so swiftly and so effectively to our request for aid.”
Lauren thought the Mother Superior’s confidence rather premature. Based on the slight but perceptible increase in tension in Father Emilio’s demeanor, he must have felt the same. Still, he only nodded and said, “I pledge to do whatever is necessary to bring an end to this torment, Mother Superior.”
She smiled worshipfully at him. “I have faith that God will allow you to drive this demon from our midst before he takes another of His servants.”
The policeman coughed, sparing Father Emilio from the need to offer another assurance. The Mother Superior cried softly, “Oh! I apologize, Father. I seem to have forgotten my manners. My name is Olivia Costanza. This is Sergeant Pierro Forza with the National Police.”
Sergeant Forza nodded and said, “How do you do, Father. Miss Lauren.”
Lauren couldn’t help but note that the policeman had greeted both of them while the Mother Superior had saved all of her conversation for Father Emilio. Somewhat pettily, she chose to take charge of the conversation.
“Mother Superior, could you tell me a little bit about Sister Katarina?”
Both the Mother Superior and Sergeant Forza turned to her. Miss Costanza’s expression registered the kind of shock one might show if an impudent child spoke out of turn. The Sergeant’s eyes measured her the way a professional investigator measured another. Lauren decided she liked him.
She didn’t feel the same about the nun. She thought back to her training. The standard hierarchy of a convent typically followed a strict organizational structure. At the top of the hierarchy was the Mother Superior, the head of the convent, the general manager, so to speak. She was responsible for overseeing all operations. Beneath her was the prioress or the sub-prioress, who assisted in managing the day-to-day activities of the convent.
After that came the department heads or superintendents, who were responsible for specific areas such as education, maintenance, or healthcare. These department heads were accountable to the Mother Superior and helped ensure the smooth running of the convent.
Beneath them were the sisters, who belonged to different levels of the convent hierarchy depending on their experience and seniority. The novices were the newest members, followed by professed nuns and finally, the senior nuns who had been in the convent for many years. The hierarchy ensured that each member of the convent knew their role and responsibilities, as well as their place in the overall structure of the organization.
