Legion

Legion - Chapter 7

The following day, when Roland made preparations with the Vatican envoy to distill the corruption that had become a blight upon the earth, Roma and Michael found themselves pursuing a very different - and ultimately critical - line of investigation. That which had escaped them for so long was to become known to them, but not before the tables were turned and evil exacted a terrible victory.

         It was Ichabod Hannan who sought them on the day following the town meeting. Roma and Michael had returned to their cottage hideaway the previous night to enjoy together the simplest and most satisfying luxuries of life - solitude, silence, a hearty hot meal, the warmth of an open flame and the joy of a companionship that transcended language. They talked long into the night, of all things and nothings, until they fell asleep in each other's arms and emerged from a restful slumber several hours later.
         Ichabod Hannan's expression was one of quiet reflection. Roma smiled. She pulled her travel boots on over worn trews and donned a weathered coat. She read his deeply lined face like an open book.
         "Not what you would expect one of the wealthiest women in all Europe to be wearing," she noted with mild amusement. He shook his head in wonderment.
         "From our first meeting I knew you were set apart - special somehow," he confessed, searching for an appropriate articulation of his upended thoughts, "I suspected you had at least come from a privileged upbringing. Your education, your acumen, your insight was expertly chiseled and refined," he explained.
         "I have Roland to thank for that," Roma replied, "He has been my mentor since birth. He was only ten years old when my father charged him with the onerous task of tutoring me."
         "Ah, your father," Ichabod Hannan concurred, "He is who I think he is, isn't he," he alluded.
         "Yes, he is," Roma concurred, "I am the result of a short-lived affair he pursued with my mother, who was a servant in his ancestral home when he was still a young man. Due to his delicate post at the time, and especially now, given the lofty heights to which he has risen, he has never been able to acknowledge me. But I am a Medici all the same, which is why my identity has been concealed by the Church. Among some circles it is known that I am of the Medici bloodline. But only to several, now including your good self, is my paternity known."
         "In a hundred lifetimes I would never have deduced your lineage," he admitted, shaking his head in open admiration, "Your family has a powerful reputation for ruthlessness and hardnosed brutality. Even among these crude backwaters. You are a singular credit to their name," he congratulated her. She broke into a smile.
         "I did not grow up in the company of my family," she clarified, "Due to my father's...position...I was sent to an abbey at birth following my mother's death. I was raised by a very kind, very compassionate Abbess who treated me as a daughter and whose kindness, nurturing and guidance were not influenced by the plentiful coin that accompanied my acceptance into the abbey. In fact, the Abbess did not touch a single ducat of my allowance and instead set it aside until the day I left the order. She said that she had always known my vocation would one day take me out of the abbey and into the world and she wished only that I would want for nothing," Roma divulged, taking up her satchel. Michael finished splashing his face at a wash bowl, ran his fingers through his hair and joined them.
         "Whatever the circumstances of your upbringing, you have certainly risen above the worldly entrenchment in material things esteemed by your family and soared to unimaginable heights in your spiritual vocation," he extolled in approbation before his expression took on a more sober mien, "Which brings me to the purpose of my visit," he added gravely, "I've been to see Molly Abernathy this morning to check on her condition. We've found something and it has disturbed her deeply."
         "Found what?" Michael queried. Ichabod Hannan's expression paled a little and the lines around his eyes furrowed.
         "Frankly, it unsettled me to my core just to look upon it. The scale of it defies explanation," he struggled to express the significance of the find.
         "What did you find?" Roma asked, suddenly aware of a subtle shift in the air about her, as though even the unspoken reference to the undiscovered find carried untold portent.
         "This is something best beheld by your own eyes," he avowed solemnly, "I fear any attempt on my part to describe it, much less explain it, would fail to impart upon you the enormity of it."
         Taking up his coat and hat, Ichabod Hannan left the cottage, leaving Michael and Roma to follow in bewilderment.
         The short but comfortable trip in the aged physician's open buggy passed in silence. As it was apparent to Roma that whatever he had witnessed had taken its toll upon him, she respected his need to process the discovery and come to terms with it. She lent herself to earnest and sincere prayer, for something within her and in the very air around her bespoke a change in the course of events within which she tumbled, as though something had pivoted and deviated subtly from its axis, creating a crucial shift in a preordained future. If she had been asked to describe the weight of this sensation, she would have said that it felt as momentous as if the moon had toppled from its orbit and plummeted to the earth.
         They reached the greatly improved lodging of the infirm Molly Abernathy. Ichabod Hannan found her grazing her oxen in a grassy knoll on the eastern corner of her newly acquired land parcel. She stroked the animal with loving tenderness, whispering soothing reassurances to the mellow, placid beast of burden.
         "Ho there, Molly," Ichabod Hannan called out and the widow turned to the approaching party. Her weary, stricken features softened into a smile of gratitude and relief upon seeing Roma.
         "This way," she directed them as she turned away from the good-natured oxen and stepped past the boundary of her allotment towards the hilly, wooded glen beyond.
         Soon the party penetrated the lightly forested hillside country and within minutes came upon a sheltered cave mouth at the foot of a mossy incline surrounded by fir trees. Flickering light glowed from within the alcove, evidencing the several torches that illuminated the cavern within.
         "If it's all the same to you, I'd just as soon remain here," Molly Abernathy asserted nervously, unwilling to enter the cave. Roma placed a reassuring hand upon her shoulder as she passed the anxious widow. Michael and a stoic Ichabod Hannan followed.
         Roma traversed a short passage of darkness just inside the cave mouth before the light of the first torch lit her path. It took her eyes several moments to adjust to the diffused light before she was able to take a look around.
         When her gaze fell upon it, she gasped. Rooted to the spot she looked all around. To her left, her right, it even spanned the length and breadth of the low roof of the cave. It was leviathan. No words could describe the scope of it. It was everywhere. No patch of cave wall or ceiling was unmarked. It was like standing within the Sistine Chapel. Every inch of rock face was a veritable cacophony of remarkable imagery. Every image was portentous in its detail and depiction.
         "It defies human comprehension," Ichabod Hannan broke the brittle silence, his upturned gaze trembling at the sheer scale of it, "He must have begun it in early childhood."
         "Who?" Roma asked, reluctantly breaking her gaze away from the mesmerizing pictorial to turn to the ashen doctor.
         "Tobin Abernathy," he replied, transfixed by the lifelike representation of the images before him.
         "Molly's son? The savant?" Roma probed, her porcelain brow creased in curiosity.
         "He was the only one who knew of the existence and location of this cave," the spellbound physician disclosed, his voice almost dreamlike in his total immersion in the hypnotic scene before him.
         "Then how did she know of its existence?" Michael interjected, his staid expression betraying none of his bewildered fascination.
         Ichabod Hannan turned to them, his complexion ashen.
         "She didn't," he replied grimly, "...until I told her." Roma's confusion blossomed into curiosity.
         "You've lost me," she admitted, concerned by his expression of withered sobriety.
         "I received another visit from little Penelope Abernathy last night," he confessed, "She told me that Tobin had a secret, that he had found a place to hide from the monster that ‘tore at his soul in the night'. She spoke so quickly and in such riddles that much of what she said was incoherent to me, so rather than attempt to understand it, I merely resolved to commit it to memory. But then she broke into startling clarity and bid me go directly north-west from her place of rest until I came upon the mouth of the sleeping angel or ‘la collina di l'angelo di riposo' as she called it where I would discover ‘a wonder beyond all earthly proportion'," he explained, "I stopped first to see Molly, both to check upon her condition and engage her thoughts on the significance of the visitation. It was she who led me here," he clarified. Roma's eyes widened.
         "La collina di l'angelo di riposo. The hill of the angel of repose," she murmured, stunned and baffled that the secluded region should be described in her native Italian.
         "I think the interjection of a language not her own was her way of telling me to bring you," Ichabod Hannan hypothesized before continuing, "Certain of the details I related to Molly which made neither head nor tails sense to me were as clear as day to her. Seems Tobin's condition produced in him a unique way of communicating with his family, a code of sorts, to which only they were privy. Penelope spoke to me in this code, the content of which was clear and unambiguous to Molly. She led me to the cave and we found this," his arm swept out to encompass the inconceivable mastery around them, "Tobin was unable to read or write but he could draw. He drew on anything he could find. Rocks, trees, in the soil of the earth if no other surface presented itself. Molly said that each time the nightmares and the headaches came upon him, he would disappear the following day. She had never known where and to what end," he sighed, his exhalation loaded with compassion, "Now we know."
         "Incomprehensible," Roma murmured, her gaze transfixed to the mesmerizing pictorial all around her. She swayed several times. Every inch of wall and ceiling were illustrated and her roaming stare caused her to overbalance more than once.
         However, it was not the scale of the mural or the masterful realism that held their collective attention so much as the content.
         It was a chronicle of Roma's life since her departure from the abbey and assumption of her vocation. An unabridged narrative of her activities, from her first encounter with the Smiling Man to her chilling dialogue with Pope Leo X on his deathbed. It was a frightening visual record of her every encounter with other worldly forces. Astonishingly, Tobin Abernathy could never have known of the macabre events to which his eerie fresco bore witness, for they had occurred in other parts of the world. Tobin Abernathy had never in his life ventured from the shire. More disturbing were the events that Tobin Abernathy detailed of which Roma had not experienced.
         "What is that?" Ichabod Hannan peered closer at a depiction of the Smiling Man clinging to the ceiling above Roma in the rectory bath chamber on the night of the Spring Dance.
         "I never really knew what it was," Roma replied distantly, her gaze drawn to the myriad images above and around her, "The best explanation I can give you is that it was a creature of a damned realm that took captive a human host that died suddenly before it could expunge itself. The death of its human host locked it in the corporeal world, encased in a decaying corpse, although it did retain a significant percentage of its unholy power. It is the only known case in the history of Christendom of a demon becoming irrevocably entangled in this reality without the ability to shift at will between realms. It was able to slow the decaying process of its host but not halt it entirely. It has been my pursuer and tormentor since I took up this life. Part of the favor I enjoy from our Supreme Pontiff stems from his own association with the Smiling Man. It had pursued him since boyhood until I took my present post, at which time it singularly devoted its every attention towards me. It was Pope Hadrian who taught me how to defend myself and schooled me in the spiritual discipline required to keep it at bay. When I came to be among you all here in Lymington, it increased the frequency and severity of its attacks. Until the night before Michael's recovery."
         "What happened on that night?" Ichabod Hannan queried. Roma shook her head.
         "I don't know," she replied, "I lost all sense of it. I've always been aware of it. In my sleep. In my every waking hour. In every triumph and failure. In every moment of celebration or desolation. Neither geography nor barrier of the spirit could sever its link to me. Believe me, I tried. And then suddenly it was gone. I have no basis for my hypothesis, but I think it is dead."
         "Dead?" Ichabod Hannan probed, intrigued, his brow lined.
         "I know," she echoed his amazement, "After I submit my report to my superiors, it will most likely also be the first reported case of the death of a demonic consciousness."
         "Astounding," Ichabod Hannan muttered.
         "You'd better take a look at this," Michael's resonant voice broke through their exchange. Roma and Ichabod Hannan joined him at the far end of the cave. He held a torch up to a magnificently detailed pictorial.
         It depicted the demon Legion in its woodland nest surrounded by the Vatican envoy. They each held aloft a rosary, their gazes resting upon the words of the Bibles held open in their hands. Roland stood apart from the Cardinals, his head lowered, his hands clasped in prayer. The demon stood before Its enemies, its head and arms thrown back, body braced as a terrifyingly silent roar thronged from its gaping maw.
         It took Roma less than a heartbeat to surmise in a sweeping glance the scene she beheld.
         "He saw things not only past and present, but future," she whispered. Michael gave her a moment to absorb the image before her. He took a deep breath.
         "Now that you've seen what you've seen," Michael began, "Would you like to see what I'm seeing?" he ventured. Ichabod Hannan peered at him quizzically. Roma took the aged physician's arm. In all her life she had never known a man to so closely resemble her imagined concept of a father as Ichabod Hannan. His every word, mannerism and action towards her shone forth with paternal affection. In him she knew she had a confidant as infallible as God's law and as constant as the presence of the living Christ. In that moment she knew she would confide in him things she would not even disclose to the Vatican on her deathbed.
         "Michael has the ability to see things you and I cannot," she replied, taking a moment to collect her thoughts.
         "What ‘things'?" Ichabod Hannan persisted.
         "Other realities that overlap our own and interact with it," she attempted to explain the complexity of Michael's enhanced perception. Ichabod Hannan turned to Michael.
         "You see angels and demons at work in the world?" he asked, agog.
         "Among other things," Michael replied, "I also see the true character of every individual I look upon. No element of a human being is hidden from me."
         "You can look upon a man's soul?" Ichabod Hannan gasped, feeling at once exposed and awed.
         "Only God can look into a man's soul and see into the core of him," Michael corrected, "I merely see through the disguises both consciously orchestrated and unknowingly projected we put on every day. I see a man's heart, not his mind, his thoughts or his soul." A man of vast worldly experience, with more than seventy years' insight into the workings of the human mind, Ichabod Hannan was not blind to the ramifications of this unbelievable gift.
         He turned to Roma and concern flashed in his piercing eyes.
         "There are those of this world," he warned, "even among those of your world," he alluded grimly to the Church, "who at best would covet such a gift, at worst exploit and abuse it. It must never be known to another soul beyond we three," he urged in a suppressed whisper.
         "I'm afraid it is already known to the highest echelon," she disclosed resignedly, "The hounds will already be slavering to sink their jaws into him as we speak. The demon is merely an obstruction and it is only delaying their real purpose here." Ichabod Hannan had not become the leading mind in his field by virtue of leaden thoughts and inert foresight. His prudence was as lateral as it was keen.
         "I have many friends here and abroad. There are places you can go, the both of you, and people who can shelter you," he placed a loving hand upon Roma's shoulder and regarded Michael with fraternal fondness, "And not even the wiliest Medici much less a Vatican emissary would be able to track you."
         "I'm afraid even this development is but a cog in a wheel so big that no crank within our reach can prevent it from turning," she replied, casting him a consolatory smile, "But thank you, just the same." He nodded but did not contest her evaluation.
         "What is it you see?" Ichabod Hannan turned to Michael. He turned to the image and pointed to the first of the Cardinals.
         "This one," he began.
         "Di'Angelo," Roma identified him.
         "In his hand he holds a dead black dove," he revealed, "He holds aloft a decaying human heart," he added, "The bird is a perversion of the dove of peace. The heart is his own."
         "How do you know this?" Ichabod Hannan inquired.
         "I don't know," Michael responded openly, "I know only that for everything I see in another human being, I see also the meaning in each representation."
         "Di'Angelo is the most war-like of the envoy," Roma explained, "Every infraction against the Church by its enemies would be revisited ten-fold via the long arm of Vatican clout if Di'Angelo had his way. There would be no peace in the world. I have had the misfortune of engaging in several discourses with the man. His only interest in his post is power, not the provision of God's love. There is no humanity in his heart. He merely wishes all opposition - political, religious or otherwise - to the Church to be annihilated."
         "And this one?" Ichabod Hannan indicated to the Cardinal next to Di'Angelo.
         "He holds aloft a small bag of grain with a tear in the sack cloth. The grain is spilling out. In his other hand he holds a bag of coin - thirty pieces of silver. He is duplicitous, deceitful," he replied.
         "Richellieu of France," Roma added, "He gives with the one hand and takes with the other. He makes a show of giving to the poor, the widowed, the orphaned and the dispossessed but goes to great pains to uphold the appearance of giving more than he in fact does. There have always been unsubstantiated rumors that he has been filling his personal coffers by siphoning funds from underworld crime lords in exchange for overlooking their secular activities and providing unchallenged, unconditional forgiveness of sins," she elaborated, "Thirty pieces of silver," she considered with interest, "I guess those rumors were true."
         "Absolution for sale," Ichabod Hannan pondered, "So much for the Vow of Poverty. And what of this rather unsavory looking character," he indicated to the next cardinal in the procession.
         "What makes you think him unsavory?" Michael queried, curious, for although this particular cardinal was to his heightened perception the most grotesque, he knew the elderly physician simply could not see what he could.
         "Nothing in his countenance or representation," the wizened aristocrat replied, regarding the image with a probing gaze, "However, this is second time I have looked upon this man and it is the second time my skin has dimpled with gooseflesh and I have experienced a great unease deep within me."
         "He is the only one amongst them whose physiology appears altered. A pair of buckled ram's horn protrude from his forehead and beneath the hem of his robe I see cloven hooves where his feet should be. About his waist there is not the cord of his rank and oath but a rope of entrails. He holds aloft a handful of ash that was once the Word of God and in his hand he holds a rock on which a quantity of seed rests, never to germinate. This man is utterly empty," Michael revealed gravely.
         "Without a doubt my most ardent detractor, Cardinal Norfold," Roma sighed, " ‘Some fell on rock, and when it came up, the plants withered because they had no moisture'" Roma quoted verbatim, "The Parable of the Four Soils," she explained, "Norfold is the seed Christ placed upon the Rock - literally the Rock of St Peter, the Vatican, the resting place of the first and greatest of all Pontiffs, the capstone of the Catholic Church - which did not draw nourishment, or moisture, from the Word of God and perished in spirit. He is without a doubt the most dangerous man I have ever met," she cast Ichabod Hannan a wry grin, "And I am a Medici. I have seen dangerous men. He is currently the primary candidate for papal succession at the next Conclave providing he falls within the age limit," she disclosed solemnly, "If Cardinal Norfold rises to the throne of Saint Peter at the next Conclave, I have more than my employment to worry about."
         "And the handful of ash?" Ichabod Hannan pursued.
         "His disregard and disdain for the Scriptures," she explicated, "Norfold has never sought the face of God. He merely aspires to global power."
         "And this fellow?" Ichabod Hannan pointed to the next cardinal. Michael considered the image for some time.
         "He holds aloft a cup of poison, the very same cup that Christ asked to be taken from him at Gethsemane. In his other hand he holds a large locust," Michael related, "This man fears the men of power to whom he owes his position. He is a plague upon the faithful."
         "Alvarez," Roma confirmed, "He has been planted in the Vatican by very wealthy, very influential men. Men who have elevated serpents to the post of Supreme Pontiff in the past. He actions their bidding. The cup of poison he holds away from himself is the cup that Christ asked to be taken away from Him but drank from when He understood that it was God's will. The poison was His coming trials, tribulations and eventual execution. To drink from the cup consolidated His commitment to fulfilling His destiny. Alvarez cannot drink from the cup, he fears man more than God, he cannot endure the trials and persecution that followers of Christ risk for the sake of His name. He is nothing more than a puppet. He exploits the helpless and abuses the weak."
         "And this last chap," Ichabod Hannan jabbed a bony finger at the final figure in the assembled envoy.
         "His mouth is sewn shut and about his neck is a yoke of iron. He holds aloft a inverted crucifix. In his other hand he holds a palm full of dust. The dust is the Covenant of the Lord, the tablets once stone but pulverized to powder by his sins. This man has broken every Commandment handed down to us by the Lord," Michael divulged.
         "Wolenczek of Serbia," Roma concluded, "Jeremiah 28. Amongst some of those more pure of heart and sincere of love for the Lord in the Vatican, Wolenczek is referred to as the ‘false prophet'. He is called thus because there are two cardinals among the college, pious men of clean hearts, who possess the ancient gift of prophesy. One of them, Cardinal Bellarosa, has predicted that Wolenczek would die within the year for bearing false witness against the faithful, just as Jeremiah foretold the death of the false prophet Hananiah. The prophesy has Wolenczek terrified. Not one of Bellarosa's prophesies have failed to come to fruition. The Serbs themselves disowned him long ago and refuse to recognize his post, renouncing him on the grounds that he neither represents the Serbian people nor the orthodoxy as God intended. The dust and the upturned crucifix themselves bear witness against him and his facile spirituality."
         "Extraordinary," Ichabod Hannan murmured. A thought struck Roma.
         "Michael, what are Roland and the demon doing?" she asked, the urgency of her voice drawing him from his thoughts. He peered at the mural once more and the lines of his brow became more pronounced.
         "The demon is pointing to the sky and smiling," he replied, "Roland's face is turned skyward," he paused, apprehension etched across his ordinarily placid features; he turned to Roma, "I don't know what he is seeing but I don't like what I see in his eyes. It is an expression I've never seen him wear in all the years I have known him."
         "An expression of what?" Roma pressed.
         "Disbelief," he replied warily.
         A terrible knowing filled Roma. It was a sensation she experienced infrequently, for in her experience it only ever preceded an event of momentous and calamitous portent. She had experienced it just before her first encounter with the Smiling Man. She had experienced it again when she had conversed with the late Pope Leo X on his deathbed. She had experienced it only moments before first encountering the demon in the forest. It was not dread, for dread was too shallow and diluted an emotion to describe the sensation. Dread did not plumb the depths nor communicate the potency of so chilling a sensation. It was like being submerged in a darkness so total, so dense, as to strip a soul of any sense of ascent, descent or direction; a darkness that stripped a soul of all memory of light or warmth.
         Her expression was stricken.
         "We need to move quickly," she grabbed Michael by the hand and placed her free hand in the crook of Ichabod Hannan's arm.
         "What is it?" Ichabod Hannan insisted as he was hurried from the cave.
         "The exorcism is to be held at three o'clock this afternoon," Roma explained hastily, "It is generally held to be the Hour of Christ, the hour of his death on the cross, when the sun ceased to shine, the earth shook, rocks split and the curtain in the temple tore in two. Almost every exorcism occurs at this time because it is widely believed that this is the hour when the forces of God are at their strongest in the world of Man."
         She had almost exited the cave when a scene so unparalleled in its serenity and clarity presented itself to her. It was almost identical to that of the cardinals facing the demon, except that a different group of individuals confronted Legion. She saw herself, Michael, Roland and their dearest friends on their knees, hands clasped in prayer before the mighty beast. At first she quailed at the vision, for she would never bow to the monstrosity. She turned to Michael.
         "What do you see?" she asked anxiously. He smiled.
         "Above each of our heads a tongue of fire speaks of the Holy Spirit in each of us, moving through us. We kneel in prayer to our Savior, not this vile abomination. Above our hands the dove of peace flutters. Prayer, simple prayer, is decimating our enemy. The demon is regarding us with horror."
         In that moment she understood what it was they were to do. In a single moment of unabridged lucidity grew an awareness that the answer had been simple and final all along. She could not have known that leagues distant, in New Forest, Roland had reached the same startlingly cogent conclusion.
She emerged from the cave mouth to be greeted by a blustering, cold northerly wind. She squinted into the glare of the sky. The sun had disappeared behind bunched, angry clouds. The weather had turned foul. Molly Abernathy had departed, most likely to tend her pasture. Roma had no sense of the passage of time, "What time is it?" she asked Ichabod Hannan, who withdrew a magnificently engraved timepiece from his waistcoat pocket and flipped open the gold case lid.
         "A quarter past two," he replied. Roma set them in motion again but Michael took her arm to halt her after observing that even the short dash to the cave mouth had left the aged Ichabod Hannan breathless.
         "Stay with Dr Hannan, I'll fetch the buggy," he instructed, dashing through a thicket to obscurity. Roma and Ichabod Hannan set a more modest pace.
         The sense of doom that gripped Roma did not ease its icy grip upon her throat, but she admirably fought to conceal this from Ichabod Hannan. She struggled to push down the feeling of urgency compelling her into action. She had not fully conveyed her insight into the coming events as revealed in the mural via Michael's enhanced sight. Even Michael could not know what she knew, for although he saw the demon pointing to the sky and the look of astonishment upon Roland's face, the mural did not depict the object of their unified attention. Roma knew precisely what had left Roland agog, for only a demon could summon it and Michael's description concisely encapsulated Roland's reaction upon witnessing it - disbelief had been Roma's immediate response the first and only time she had seen the phenomenon she feared once again rode the gathering storm.
         Time lagged with excruciating lassitude as Roma and Ichabod Hannan made their way through the wood. It was not long before the agitated whinnying of the good doctor's disconcerted steed preceded Michael's appearance. Ichabod Hannan took a moment to soothe the disturbed beast before climbing into the buggy behind Roma and taking the reins from Michael. The buggy lurched into motion. Roma observed the horse closely. The storm had obviously formed swiftly for she had seen this kind of nervousness in spirited animals when a squall blew up seemingly out of nowhere.
         It was no natural storm. The elements were being manipulated. She had encountered it in past cases of demonic possession but not to the extent to which the demon had shown itself capable. The worsening weather was merely a prelude to a much more violent arrival.
         "Are you alright?" Michael checked, taking Roma by the hand. She nodded but did not smile. Several miles away, a fierce debate raged, one soon to be disrupted by an intrusion of a decidedly more sinister nature.









"This won't work," Roland shouted above the roar of the rising wind that snatched and snarled at his robes. The cardinals that stood before him were a veritable wall of obstinacy.
         The revelation had come upon him only hours earlier and he had realized his disastrous mistake all too late.
         "You summoned us here for this very purpose," retorted Cardinal Richellieu, a balding, portly man of little physical stature. Roland's expression was one of exasperation.
         "I know," he admitted, flustered, "But I did so in error. I see that now. Roma was right. This is not the answer. Worse than that, I think this is a trap," he urged, clearly desperate to convince the envoy.
         "The Medici!" Cardinal Norfold gestured in fury, the deep purple vein on his neck bulging, "But for that woman's family and alliance with His Supreme Holiness, I would have her excommunicated for heresy and executed for sorcery. She has been a barb in the soft flesh of the Throne of Saint Peter too long!" His rage was uncontained. By now all of the cardinals fought for stability against the howling wind.
         They stood at the edge of the demon's lair and both the edifice and the altar were visible to the party. There was no sign of the demon.
         "With all due respect, Your Excellency," Roland fought for calm and civility, "but Roma is not the issue. We cannot expunge a non-parasitic form. There is no host. It exists in its own right here."
         "Impossible!" snorted Cardinal Wolenczek, "It is beyond the capacity of an unholy entity to breach the sanctity of the mortal plane. The feet of Christ once pressed upon the earth. All things in nature and of nature are hostile to any embodiment of unholy composition. That is why they possess. They do not breach. They cannot," he maintained adamantly.
         "This time one did," Roland persisted, "My report was comprehensive. There is no host, no usurped body, no besieged soul. It is an organism in its own right, not merely a projected consciousness. It wears only the skin of the dead boy. It shields it somehow. We need to begin to examine our counter-offensive in terms of a re-examined assessment of the constitution of this incarnation."
         "At the moment of your request, you relinquished your governance over this situation and acknowledged our authority in such matters," Cardinal Di'Angelo reminded the maddeningly frustrated priest with undisguised condescension, not unlike a wizened parent dismissing an irritating child, "I think we know best how to control and resolve this anomaly."
         The party turned to enter the clearing of the demon's lair. Their unwitting ignorance and impregnable arrogance in any other context would merely have disturbed and disconcerted the young priest. However, in their current environment and situation, their haughty conceit would most likely prove their downfall. Their inability to recognize the sheer superiority of intelligence they faced in their foe could only end in catastrophe.
         "Gentlemen, please, I beseech you," Roland implored. They ignored him and proceeded into the large clearing before the altar.
         The wind blew ferociously and it did not escape Roland's attention that the temperature dropped dramatically and very suddenly. For the first time his gaze was drawn to the sky. The clouds overhead, angry and bruised, coalesced swiftly. Too swiftly. No storm of natural origin gathered with the speed and tumultuousness of the squall brewing above. More disturbing than this, it appeared to be forming an epicenter over the demon's lair. The heart of the squall was almost motionless, in a holding pattern of abnormal stillness. The clouds banks surrounding it swirled with uncommon regularity, like serpents circling. Beyond them, the clouds whipped and churned irregularly, like beasts snapping at their own tails. Like ripples in a sky-bound pond, the clouds furthest from the eye of the storm roiled with the greatest fury whilst those at the heart of the squall hung motionless, like a predator ready to attack at any moment.
         The wind in the clearing began to whirl cyclically. The cardinals assumed a semi-circular formation several yards before the monolithic altar and edifice. Each took a set of rosary beads from within the folds of their robes in one hand, opened a Bible in the other, held the beads aloft and began the ritual of Exorcism in spite of the demon's apparent absence.
         Roland stood beyond the cardinals, bereft, adrift. A plummeting sensation overwhelmed him. He had summoned them and too late had realized they were perhaps the least equipped to deal with their adversary. Roma had been right. Ritual was no weapon in the fight against the demon, for they were not pitted against a parasite infecting a host and partially stifled and constricted by the limitations of human beings. It had entered the world of Man in its own right, unfettered by the restrictions of the human form and consciousness. Rites were to a demon incarnate as a thimble of water to a forest fire.
         Roma had been right. A greater weapon than Church lore was required. A mighty faith and unquestioning trust in Christ. It was impossible for a demon to exist in its wholeness in the world of Man, and it would take an inhuman investment in the love of Christ, an inimitable entrenchment of faith in the Trinity, to divest the demon of its power and excise it from human existence.
         How could he have been so monumentally wrong? His guilt lay siege to his mental faculties until a movement drew him from his doleful reverie.
         The demon emerged from the pit it had dug for itself in the ground with unhurried languor, like a sated lion following a kill. It approached the altar with predatory stealth, regarding the party with little more than idle curiosity.
         "We thank you, priest," it turned to Roland, the corner of its mouth snarling into a perverted smile, "You have brought more fodder. An especially sweet meat, for there is nothing more succulent than wolves clothed as lambs, and we are many, our hunger is insurmountable," only several of its most dominant entities spoke.
It turned its attention to Cardinal Wolenczek who, unprepared for the enormity and grotesqueness of the demon, was unable to conceal his terror. For so long he had believed the term ‘beast' to refer more to the character than the physicality of evil, but then the face of evil had always been human in his experience, as demons had always worked through human beings. The beast before him was truly monstrous and its form alone reduced his bladder to a sieve. It had not even begun to demonstrate its true nature, nor even its capabilities.
         "Steel yourselves, my brothers," Cardinal Norfold bellowed above the howl of the wind, "We must endure."
         They continued to chant the ritual of exorcism, though Cardinals Alvarez and Richellieu also fought to suppress their rising fear.
         The demon laughed. It was not a smug, arrogant expression of superiority. Alarmingly, it was the triumphal exhortation of victory, confident and knowing, like one who had seen into the future and been assured of conquest. It thronged deep in the very marrow of their bones.
         Roland fell to his knees, clasped his hands and placed wholly his faith in the limitless love and mercy of his Redeemer.
         "Have you reconciled your sins with your Maker, you Threshed Chaff?" the demon addressed the cardinals who uniformly ignored it, "for the Hunt is begun and you are neither hunter nor herald, mount nor hound," its expression once again transformed into a malicious sneer, "And like the terrified fox, you shall break ranks and scatter."
         It laughed again, this time a cold and sinister sound, like a hollow ringing in the isolated vacuum of space. It raised an enormous arm and a wickedly talonned finger pointed to the sky in the north west.
         Roland's gaze was drawn to the rolling heavens behind him, following the direction indicated by the demon. In spite of the leaf litter and ground debris whipped up by the wind stinging his face and muddying his field of view, he raised an arm to shield his eyes and peered into the distance. What he witnessed was both inconceivable and terrifyingly magnificent to behold.
         The random, violent churning of the blackening clouds seemingly took on a more purposeful motion. Instead of wildly rolling and twisting, they began to move directionally, slowly coalescing into forms. Forms in motion.
         A thunderous crack fractured the air. Roland grimaced as his hands covered his throbbing ears, although he suspected his middle ear was already damaged. A small trickle of blood down his lobes confirmed this. Sheeting rain suddenly pelted the windblown party with such ferocity as to sting every part of exposed skin.
         Then the distant moan of baying could be heard, growing ever closer as the undulating cloud bank continued to take shape, shifting and splitting to form several leviathan forms. Hounds. Each one easily larger and longer than three sloops placed bow to stern. Cavernous maws lined with fangs the length of fence posts opened and the terrible baying splintered the air again, piercing even the screaming wind and timpanic thunder. The baying grew in intensity and the sodden hairs at the back of Roland's neck stood on end. The very sound planted the rancid seed of terror deep within his heart, its putrid tendrils momentarily paralyzing his stalwart resolve. The cardinals looked upon the scene developing before them in a stupor, like yearlings caught in a blinding light.
         The profile of another form began to take on structure at the rear of the hounds. Even as they evolved, the hounds began to careen in unison, as though lashed to one another, with dark intent towards the stunned party. Behind them, riding upon a magnificent chariot and holding in one powerful hand the tethers of each hound, the Hunter took shape. The sight of it produced unmitigated terror, the potency of which few people on earth had ever experienced. Man-like in form, it was beastly in every other respect. With stag antlers jutting from its forehead and bony spines jutting from its back, it was beyond primal. Its eyes were of a blackness so pitch as to seem like punctures through the cloud itself and into the cold silence of space. A blinding flare briefly painted the sky red as the hounds opened eyes like molten coals and turned them upon their prey. They looked upon the helpless assembly with a baleful gaze that bore into the courage of even the most staunch among them. The Hunter turned its attention towards the party and Roland saw that it stood fully twice the height of his church. Small, indescribably hideous creatures swarmed over the entirety of its body and a titanic snake lay coiled about its waist, its head warped and abominably disfigured. An abhorrent perversion of what could only be described as a primate sat perched upon its shoulder. Lightning illuminated the Hunter from within its titanic form, amplifying its menace.
         Roland felt his hands trembling, only to realize something extraordinary.
         He had pitted wits against the Father of Lies himself. He had waged spiritual battle against the Monarch of the Pit. The darkest of all foes.
         Leviathan though it was, the manifestation lurching towards them through the sky was a lesser evil. The horror of it physical manifestation corroded resolve and stripped the steadfast heart of all valiance. But at the core of it, even should it fill the sky with its form, it was still merely a subordinate of the Unholy Host.
         Fearful by instinct, Roland's exceptional intellect superseded his immobilizing dread. He was about to shout to the cardinals when Roma and Michael broke into the clearing at a bolt. Roma waved her arms frantically.
         "Take cover," she screamed as she staggered past Roland towards the cardinals, "The Hunt! It is the Hunt! Take cover before he releases the Hounds!" she reached Cardinal Norfold, prepared to put aside her personal animosity to save his life but was unprepared for the stinging backhand that cracked across her face. She slid on the rain slick leaf litter, lost her balance and crashed to the ground. Michael, who was less than five yards behind her, was upon the cardinal in a heartbeat and dealt the surprised cardinal a staggering blow that knocked him from his feet. Before the incensed cardinal could lend voice to his threat, Michael loomed over him.
         "Touch her again and you'll draw your last breath with my fingers around your throat," he seethed and the cardinal's indignation melted in the face of Michael's uncontained fury. His jaw dropped and any repudiatory retort dissolved before taking voice. Michael turned to Roma and helped her to her feet. She rubbed at her jaw, cast the cardinal a murderous glance and spun on her heel and was at Roland's side, dragging him to his feet.
         "Get up!" she urged, tearing at his robes as he staggered to his feet in the downpour, "They're here for them," she indicated towards the cardinals, "but are indiscriminate in their rage. They will devour us too if we don't flee now!" Roland fought against his saturated robes. Finally he prevailed against his weighty garments and staggered from the clearing. Neither Roma nor Michael acknowledged the demon who ignored them all to raise its mammoth arms towards the descending Hunt like a mother beckoning a child. Fleetingly, it occurred to Roland that the fear-riveted cardinals were in absolute and mortal danger, for they were quite literally caught between the hammer and the anvil.
         A terrible roar broke from the demon's yawning maw in response to the penetrating baying of the relentless pack as it bore down upon the clearing. A flash of movement caught Roma's attention through the rain obscured brush several hundred yards distant. A panicked horse screamed in the distance and Roma made out the indistinct form of the speeding buggy as it barreled through the vine choked forest skirting the perimeter.
         "This way," Roma shouted as she veered towards their only chance of escape. Ichabod Hannan, though advanced in years, showed none of his growing infirmity as he drew hard on his terrified mount's reins. The buggy came to an unsteady skid close by and the party leapt into the tray. Not wasting a moment, the elderly physician wheeled the steed and slapped the soaked leather against its rump. Roma and Roland clung to the side of the careening buggy for dear life.
         Michael held fast, his gaze planted firmly upon the clearing behind him as the buggy jolted into motion through the unrelenting squall. His remarkable sight granted him a unique insight into the horrific events that unfolded within the demon's lair only moments later.
         To the gaze of every other onlooker, the Hunt rode through the stormy sky. The cry of the Hunter was like that of a bird of prey, chilling to the marrow any who heard it. It split the clouds and sent lightning flashing from its antlers. The hounds bayed with piercing intensity, their howls like a hollow gong invading even the most quiet places within and without. It was without a doubt truly Hell in motion.
         Michael, however, observed a vastly different set of events unfurling before him.
         It began with the Hunter. It turned its gaze to the earth below for the first time, orbs that were now like blazing furnaces. Its attention fell upon Cardinal Wolenczek, whom it regarded dispassionately. The Hunter raised its monolithic hand and pointed directly at the cardinal. In a heartbeat a single hound broke from the lashed pack and thundered through the squall towards its oblivious prey. In moments it was upon the impious cardinal, attacking, rending, slaking his putrid soul. His true self, whom only Michael could see, had barely raised his amorphous arms before the hound fell upon him, brutalizing his nebulous form with the ease of a lion mauling a hare.
         Wolenczek himself remained oblivious to any such assault and only became aware of a sharp pain in his chest. He clutched at his breast and staggered. So entranced by the spectacle in the sky were his fellow Exorcists that no hand was extended to break his fall to the saturated ground. Clawing futilely at his chest, his vision began to swim as the initial pain spread like a wall of fire moving through his torso and into his arms and legs. At once experiencing a numbness and immense pressure inside his head, the fraudulent cardinal submitted to an experience of death that rung cold and utterly desolate, his last living thought an awareness of a terrible presence awaiting him on the cusp of mortality, a terrible presence pacing and slavering in frenzied anticipation.
         Michael turned away from the dying cardinal, unwilling to bear witness to further savagery. Roland grabbed Michael's sleeve, drawing him away from his internal turmoil.
         "We have to move swiftly," he shouted above the wailing storm, "If they survive, they will return to Rome and their highest priority will be to remove me from office and petition for Roma's excommunication. God Himself only knows what they have planned for you. We have to return this very eve!" he yelled, his voice hoarse for the exertion. Michael merely nodded. His gaze turned to Roma. Sodden through, with rivulets of water streaming down her face, she stared grimly at the ever diminishing cardinals. Her expression was unreadable but for the first time Michael noted that she was not shadowed by a spectral representation of her character. Its absence betrayed her transparency - she hid nothing.
Roland's eyes narrowed slightly and Michael smiled. Already he had conceived a strategy to both correct the arrogant blundering of the cardinals and ensure that both Roma and Michael were immune to the powers of retribution that lay in their adversaries' hands.









         At the rectory, Roma changed quickly into garments she had unwittingly left behind at the time of her hasty departure. Roland loaned Michael a change of civilian clothing, whilst merely exchanging his sopping robes for dry vestments. Ichabod Hannan, in the habit of keeping spare clothing in his buggy when house calls took him afar and into foul weather, similarly doffed his wet garments and slipped into dry clothes. Their conversation was short and concise. Roland's confident leadership shone like a beacon in a great fog.
         "My zealous spiritual renewal led me falsely to believe that my faith in my God must be mirrored by my faith in the Church. I'm no wide-eyed acolyte, I should have retained the presence of mind to calculate the incompatibility of my personal devotion to pockets of corruption prevalent within the Church. It has conducted me towards disaster and now a man has lost his life," Roland confessed openly, turning to Roma, "I won't be a priest for much longer. They are going to make sure of that. But they cannot return to Rome before I can take care of two matters and right two terrible wrongs. Tonight I am going to expunge the demon from this plane. And then I am going to preside over your matrimony," Roland's last assertion transformed the bustling rectory library into a room of statues, none more motionless than Roma and Michael.
         "Our what?" Michael asked, his tone level. Roland gave them his undivided attention.
         "I know you know about the dossier I sent to the Holy See regarding your abilities," Roland admitted, "They believe you are the Chimera, a gifted individual extensively documented in an eight hundred year old prophesy. The long and the short of it is that your gift would see you taken to Rome to be placed in the service of the Church. This would be done with or without your consent. In summary, you would become a prisoner of the Church and your gift would be used against its enemies, most likely more for financial gain than spiritual munificence."
         "Once we have taken care of the demon, we will go into hiding if need be," Roma intoned, casting Ichabod Hannan a knowing glance which was returned in kind.
         "No need," Roland grinned triumphantly as he tied a coarse cord about his waist and knotted it three times, "I was a scholar long before I became a priest and my interests lay mostly with Church Law, or more precisely, the interrelation of its laws, the extent of its reach and the ambiguities that give rise to conflicting interpretations. What we have working in our favor is that Church Law is not open to interpretation, it is literal, which is not to say that it has no ambiguities, and when such ambiguities arise, the Law becomes hierarchical. Certain laws are given priority over all others and when these conflict with lesser laws, these greater laws prevail. The greatest of these, after the Commandments themselves, are the Sacraments. Baptism. Communion. Confirmation. And Marriage. Laws were created in the year Ten Fifty Three, after almost three hundred years of recorded dogmatic debate, declaring that all steps must be taken to secure the Chimera in the service of the Church to prevent the enemies of God from using him against the Church, rendering him a virtual prisoner if need be, for the Chimera is prophesied to come into far greater gifts even than his sight, but that is a conversation for another time," his grin broadened, "The beauty of it is that Michael's immunity is secured by the simplest of evasive actions."
         Michael smiled.
         "Marriage," he confirmed and Roland nodded, "The Church is resolute in its opposition to divorce. If I am married, I will never be permitted entry to the Vatican."
         "How can the mere fact of marriage protect him?" Ichabod Hannan interjected.
         "The union of marriage is considered by the Church to be among the holiest states of existence," Roland clarified, "Part of the matrimonial vows taken by and man and a woman utter aloud the words ‘what God has joined, let no man come between them'. To take Michael by force if he is married constitutes a violation of this Sacrament, and all Sacraments take precedence over all lesser laws, most notably those concerning the steps permissible to gain control of the Chimera."
         "Remind me never to engage you in a battle of wits, young man," Ichabod Hannan clapped a congratulatory hand on Roland's back, "especially after my evening constitution." Roland took a deep breath.
         "The question remains," he balked, "is whether or not you both wish to enter this union. And as brilliant a resolution as this strategy may appear, I cannot in good faith join you in matrimony but for reasons entirely disparate to what I have just told you."
         Roma looked to Michael.
         "Yes," he said without hesitation, "and not because of the immunity it grants me," he turned to Roma and brushed a dripping lock of hair from her face, "The first time I saw you was the first time in my life that I felt something shift inside me. Something in me that I had always thought was whole suddenly revealed itself to be incomplete and I was unaware of it until that day. I saw in you, before I even spoke to you, the other half of what was lacking in me. Seeing you that day felt like you were coming home instead of coming into my life for the first time. I love you and have known since that day in the glade when we were surrounded by butterflies that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with you. But I have no money and no possessions to offer you," he swallowed hard.
         "Even if your wealth eclipsed mine, there is still nothing you could give me that I want except for what I already have - your love," she smiled tenderly, "So if it is your wish, I will give you my love, my life and my devotion, beyond death and even into eternity." Her response was simple and unconditional.
         "Good enough for me," Roland remarked conclusively, "But we need to take care of the small matter of a petulant demon in our midst because I for one would like to get on with enjoying my last days as a priest before I am summoned to Rome to be tossed to the wolves," he cocked a curious eyebrow, "So let's get on with it, shall we?" he redirected his attention towards Ichabod Hannan, "The storm is dissipating. I need you to take your buggy and collect Mother, Camilla, Tom Borland and Molly Abernathy. Ichabod, Molly knows nothing of the presence among us. I leave it to you to brief her on the situation as it stands."
         "And when she asks me what it is we want from her?" he responded cautiously.
         "Only the power of her prayers," Roland replied succinctly, "It all started when the demon took her son's life. Her daughter has come to you twice. We never needed visibly powerful representatives of the Church to defeat this foe, only the simplest and most faithful of its flock. That woman is closer to God than almost every person ever to have walked the earth since Adam. It is that kind of faith, a faith that has never depended upon the pendulum of life swinging in her favor, that was the mettle of the prophets of old, the Disciples of Christ, the martyrs who died in the Great Arena. She is a giant in a war against a titan and we need giants. Those men that faced the demon today? They were less than slugs beneath its foot. If the spirit is insolvent, no amount of power in this world can prevail against a wickedness that malevolent and purposeful. A thousand cardinals as bereft of virtue as those five could not so much as compel the demon much less defeat it. If they truly knew their craft and their own doctrine, they would also know that the laws relating to the discharge of exorcistic power state that in the absence of an exorcist or even a priest, a lay follower has both the spiritual authority and sanction of the Church to perform the rite."
         "But you just agreed that an exorcism was futile," Roma replied, confused.
         "An exorcism as we know it, yes," he assented, "But it is the rite that is fruitless in this case, not the intent. An exorcism is not merely a ritual. Going through the motions does not create a conduit for God's power if the soul is devoid of true belief. The rite without faith cannot prevail, but faith without the rite can overcome - overwhelm! - even Satan himself," his eyes glinted with zealous conviction, "How much moreso an evil of lesser scope."
         Ichabod Hannan donned a broad brimmed hat and all-weather coat, also accoutrements of his often mobile trade, before making purposefully for the door.
         "I shall meet you back at the site within the hour," he avowed before disappearing, the determination of his stride carrying about it the vigor of a man fifty years his junior.
         Roland lost no time in rallying his aids.
         "Come, we shall have a dialogue with our adversary before our reinforcements arrive," he resolved, cocking a knowing eyebrow.
         Roma grabbed his wrist as he made to leave.
         "Every recorded encounter with demons, both biblical and thereafter, warns against discourse with hellions. The words from their mouths cannot be trusted. Even Christ compelled them to silence that their lies might not pollute the sensibilities of those who heard them," she warned, her grave expression stricken with alarm.
         Roland returned her gaze with one of pure confidence, not in himself but in the Holy Spirit that guided him.
         "As much can be learned from the lies of the damned as from their truths," he replied undaunted. Roma held his gaze a moment longer, probing his eyes for any glimmer of presumption or pride. There was none. His trust lay in a might far greater than his own. She nodded.
         Moments later the rectory was deserted and an unremarkable gig that drew no attention left the cobbled roads of the village and bumped along unsealed trails into the sparse hinterland ringing New Forest. It disappeared into the dim cover of the canopied forest towards a foe of incalculable enormity.









They found the demon perched atop its altar devouring a rotting pig carcass. All around them nature was destroying itself. Birds flew backwards through the air about them, smashing into trees, into one another; still others simply collapsed in a distorted, writhing mass, their bodies destroyed by the perversion of their impossible motion. Insects and invertebrates of every description turned themselves inside out, the hard exoskeleton cracking and folding in on itself, wrapped in the soft, boneless tissue of its internal cavity. Worms wound their bodies into impossible knots. Rodents convulsed, heaved and retched their vital organs into steaming piles upon the cool ground before rectally expelling their intestines. Small reptiles ate their own extremities until little more than a torso stump remained. The wind whipped all things around them and yet their clothes hung motionless, their hair unmoving. They felt not so much as a breath against their skin.
Since the passing down of the proclamation prohibiting all townsfolk from entering the forest and surrounding regions, opportunities for the demon to provide itself with meals of a human persuasion had all but dried up. Since its debate with the priest in the fire, it had demonstrated an unwillingness to stray far from its lair. Roland had never disclosed the content of their ‘discussion' but for every alarming future outcome he had learned from the demon, he had responded in kind, disturbing the beast to its core with his knowledge of the horrors that awaited it not only upon expulsion from the world of Man but at the Day of Reckoning towards which all things in existence were hurtling. Since that day, the demon had kept its nest within eyeshot.
         Roland had long surmised that the demon had merely passed but the first in many obstacles - entry into the world of Man. Rightly he had deduced it could not remain nest-bound indefinitely. It was vulnerable in stasis to both spiritual assault and the limitations of its second skin. It needed to move and soon, to the nearest metropolis where it could achieve mobility within shadows, subterranean passages, sewers and canals, where the increased concentration of population per cubic mile meant that the discharge of its selves into the populace exacted a lesser toll and decreased recovery time; where elements like the cover of night, the desperation of the destitute and the hedonism of the affluent converged to provide a glut of opportunities for the demon to ravage tens of thousands.
         When the demon became aware of the party, it tossed aside the carcass, aimlessly licked its distended fingers and gracefully alighted upon the soft leaf litter blanketing the ground.
         "We prefer more redoubtable sport," it was almost complimentary in its greeting, "to the pitiable assembly of worms that hitherto slithered from among us," several of its more dominant selves addressed the silent onlookers. It took a tentative step towards them but would not bridge the ten foot gap between itself and the priest it now so evidently feared.
         "Soon you will be gone and your goal shall have fallen so far short of your objective that none but handful of us shall ever know you had walked among us," Roland replied, unwavering, "Your mischief will be explained away by means of superstition and foul play, consigned to the realm of folklore designed to frighten little children who won't brush their teeth or go to bed, and eventually forgotten. T'will have all been for naught."
         The demon's taut slash of a mouth turned up in a vengeful sneer.
         "Tell me," Roland clasped his hands thoughtfully, languidly pacing back and forth before the agitated demon, "did you actually think that with all your cunning, all your brilliance, all your superior intelligence, that you could actually outwit even the simplest minds among us?" he asked cryptically, drawing a low, guttural growl from deep within the demon's barrel chest. Composing itself, it spoke. Later the party would come to recognize that not a single word it had uttered had been an untruth, the fact of which was far more terrifying than if it had tried to deceive them.
         "A new Babel shall arise centuries after you have long since been reduced to dust. An age will come in which Man will once again marvel at its own magnificence," the demon warned, its gaze bearing down upon each of them, "Advancements in art, science, rational thinking, medicine and a new advent which shall be called technology - ‘progress' - will not only delude Man into thinking himself invincible, invulnerable, but mutate further to bring about a revolt against the Holy One of God. It will become a relentless campaign to dismantle and pulverize the faith of the masses. Beware, O you sons of Thomas! For only the faithful shall endure! ‘Facts' will be unearthed. ‘Works' will be written, all of which will provide inscrutable evidence that Jesus was but a man and not the Son of God. And the unbeliever, the undecided and the apathetic will ascribe to these lies. The very authenticity of the Word will be brought into question. Millions will drop away from the Light of the World in a magical age in which people hurtle through the sky from land mass to land mass across oceans as the mighty angels do. They will speak to one another in voices unraised from opposite ends of the world. Popular belief will unseat and replace deeply rooted faith. Individuals of global renown - be they scholars, luminaries, high profile criminals, disaffected religious figures - will spout their delusions, spawn new religions, each one a golden heretical calf more blinding than the last, and the masses will clamber to emulate them, for fame will become the new religion. They will be elevated like gods by multitudes who need to see, hear and touch their deities in preference to one in whom they must place total faith. Celebrity will become the greatest of all aspirations, not moral perfection or the unity of Mankind. The disillusioned, the dissolute and leaderless, the directionless will be their disciples. Evil men will form foul associations and use the marvels of the new world to pool their resources and create a lifestyle devoted to raping, sodomizing, defiling and degrading infants and children. A trade in the theft and harvest of human organs will thrive. Your healers will begin to euthanize the very souls entrusted to their care. Your priests will molest and terrorize the young of their flocks and your Church will conceal their wickedness. Millions will suffer in the bowels of poverty, disease and famine while a handful will possess almost all of the world's wealth and resources, yet they shall do little to raise up their fellow Man. You shall stain and render uninhabitable countless tracts of earth with cataclysmic agents of death that can slay at a distance. The work of the Fallen in the world will diminish because there shall be little need of it, for Man's insatiable gluttony for self aggrandizement will be his downfall. Eventually my kind and Man's belief therein will disappear alongside the belief in God but it will be of little consequence. Satan will dance, for Man will do his work for him by creating false religions to accommodate individual proclivities for greed, lust, gluttony, wrath, envy, pride, and sloth. Society will crumble. And then one shall come among you, work miracles, abolish diseases, resolve age-old conflicts - ending war and famine throughout the world for the first time in the history of history - and unite all of Mankind. All but a few will think him a Savior - the Savior. The many shall ultimately perish in the Lake reserved for the damned. Only the few who see him for his true self - the Deceiver - shall know Paradise, but even then only after unremitting persecution and terrible suffering. And then shall come the Day. All shall stand before His judgement. Terrible shall be the Day for those who rejected the Holy One of God. Terrible and eternal," it concluded, its voices registering the dread of its own words at the mention of the Reckoning.
         Roma and Michael remained silent but undaunted in the face of the demon's horrific prediction. Roland brought the crucifix about his neck to his lips and kissed the feet of Jesus before pressing his palms together in prayer. His gaze bore deep into the demon as he spoke in a timbre soft but suffused with the authority of the prophets of old.
         "Holy One of God, flawed and fallible is your servant but I humbly ask that you send your Holy Spirit to illuminate the prayers of your faithful as we undertake to sluice the cancer of wickedness from this world and cleanse the earth of its stain," he paused, ensuring he had the demon's full attention as the low rumble of a buggy in the distance reached his ears, "It is begun."
         Roland turned and walked away from his adversary whose instinctive reaction was to lunge for him in spite of its fear of him.
         Roma stepped in, for this aspect of intervention was her unique skill. Her ability to command and compel evil was but one of the gifts that had elevated her to the station of Principal in her post.
         "Stand down," she demanded simply. The demon balked, turning its attention towards her, its shoulders bunching in contained fury, its snarl capable of liquefying the most tested mettle.
         "Think you yourself still a vessel of authority now that the hybrid," its gaze flickered towards Michael, "has spoiled in you the rose that was perfect?" it sneered in reference to their physical intimacy. Roma did not skip a beat.
         "I will stand before the Redeemer on that Day and account for my sins in their totality - those of the flesh and of the spirit," she replied openly, "My contrition, my penance, my faith, and the mercy of the Son of God shall free of me from the bondage of my transgressions," her eyes bore into the darkest chasms of the demon's consciousness, "But only fire and suffering and eternal darkness await you on that most glorious Day. Feet, root thy soles to this hallowed ground, deep and unremitting, like the thousand-year oak in Gethsemane's garden," she commanded sonorously, with almost song-like eloquence.
         The demon boldly moved towards her but instead found its inability to do so both vexing and perplexing. Looking down to its immense feet, it was astonished to find that two large iron spikes had penetrated the top of its feet and bore deep into the ground beneath. Its heavy brow furrowed in confusion as it attempted to wrench them free, at first by virtue of the power of its muscular legs alone and then by gripping its knee, to no avail. Its leviathan head snapped up, its expression lethal.
         "Sorceress!" it spat savagely, "The furnace of damnation awaits those who wield the terrible magic of the World Under. And there shall I wait for you."
         Michael shifted nervously. He did not fear the demon that had almost taken his life, but he had never witnessed Roma in the discharge of her vocation and was unaware and unprepared for the enormity and breadth of her authority.
         Roma smiled a small, confident smile that unseated the demon to its core.
         "Be still," she said quietly, "Your feet are fastened to this world by the same stakes that nailed the blessed soles of our Savior to His final Cross. You cannot remove them for they stretch from this place to eternity," she explained. The demon blanched for but an eye blink before its enforced stance took on a sinister countenance. Roma still lay within striking distance.
         "Release me!" it screamed, the full cacophony of its six thousand voices thundering with such force that all the trees for a cubic mile in every direction trembled violently and once again spontaneously shed their leaves.
         The last rays of a dying sunset suddenly flooded the previously dim woodland and the demon flinched at the brutal onslaught of natural light.
         "Heavenly Host," Roma's gaze rose to the sky as did her upturned palms, "Lash the wings of this flightless serpent, render impotent its baleful intent," she bowed her head and prayed in silence a moment before returning her steady gaze to the demon's lifeless, vengeful eyes, "Move your arms," Roma instructed it.
         Michael gasped and fell backwards suddenly, his eyes wide with wonder. They flicked back and forth to a fixed point on either side of the demon as though taking in a scene too astounding to comprehend.
         Roma did not need to see the angels that Michael witnessed to trust fully in their presence among them. So deeply invested was she in her faith that she walked up to the demon and stood close enough to the reeking beast to feel its fetid breath upon her face, like the exhalation of decay. Its body tensed and the great ropey muscles of its chest and shoulders bunched in preparation for assault.
         And yet its attack never transpired. Its head spun from left to right and back again as it examined its immobilized arms. It felt nothing confining it and yet it was unable to move them as though its wrists had been bound at its side and unseen bonds had staked them to the earth below.
         A cold wash of turmoil poured over the demon when it realized its paralyzis.
         Michael was similarly rendered inert. He had witness the alighting of two mighty, winged beings of pure light and spirit on either side of the colossal demon. So blinding was the radiance they emanated that he could barely make out their individual forms. He perceived that the silent sentinels each secured the demon's wrists and stood stationary beside their helpless captive, their shimmering wings tenderly caressed by a gentle breeze not of the world of Man. About them hung an ethereal glow that saturated the air with calm and spiritual stillness.
         The demon could not see or even perceive the seraphs and remained bewildered and enraged by its imprisonment. Roma did not need to see them. Michael slowly found his feet, as much awed by Roma's faith as by the proximity of the taciturn Messengers.
         The demon opened its gaping maw to scream rage upon the woman before it and a thronging of voices both primal and maddened rung out, splintering tree trunks, causing the earth to vomit up root and vole, splitting rocks. It heaved once before vomiting forth a swarm of flies over its foe. In a staggering demonstration of her immunity to harm, every fly that touched Roma's skin and clothing fell to the earth, dead.
         Roma's gaze returned to the demon, her expression awash with serenity. She knew no fear and no doubt.
         "I am no sorceress," she responded quietly, "Christ testified on numerous occasions that Man need rely only on faith and nothing would prove impossible to achieve. In fact, Man need only have a faith the size of a mustard seed, the smallest germinating seed on earth, and a mountain would throw itself into the sea at his command. I prayed to my Redeemer that your feet might be rooted to the earth from here unto eternity and He made it so. I asked that He might send the mightiest of his angels to shackles your wrists," she leaned closer, its rank breath pungent in her nostrils, "What is it you think currently prevents you from choking the breath from me?" she whispered and the demon's head snapped back and forth from one wrist the to other, confused and mystified, the source of which was plain to Roma, "Can't see them?" she probed quizzically, "You exist in my world now, Legion, Bringer of Mayhem. Here you cannot see your enemy, even as they bind and imprison you. Still feeling triumphant in your clever breach into my world?" she cocked a curious eyebrow, "Don't go anywhere," she taunted coolly, "You haven't seen everything yet."
         She turned from the incensed entity whose confined physique braced and bunched to howl its rage but even this impotent aperture of frustration was thwarted. As she walked away, Roma raised her hand in a gesture of hush.
         "Be silent," she commanded in a voice barely audible but utterly incontestable, "I have heard quite enough of what you have to say. Now you shall hear what we have to tell you. Prepare yourself, wraith. The prayers of the faithful burn like the Lake itself." Her simple but flawless faith gagged the beast's infuriated opposition, stifling even this avenue of articulation. It was unable to open its jaws even, as though gummed shut with resin. Only its baleful red eyes followed Roma - its adversary, its prey, its nemesis. It glowered malevolence the likes of which few human beings had ever known.
         Roma approached Michael who had witnessed the marvelous confinement in two spheres, that of his physical sight and of the vision with which he was gifted. More remarkable to him than his insight into the juxtaposed spiritual realm interacting with their reality was his knowledge that Roma could see none of this and yet trusted wholly to her faith in the presence of things beyond her sight that required inscrutable belief therein. Until that moment he had thought his own faith stout; as powerful as the sea itself. With sickening realization, he understood that it was not hard to believe when tutored and raised by saints, when granted far-sight into a world of angels and hellions. His faith felt suddenly porous and fraudulent alongside one both mute and blind to the worlds within he dwelt. Faith without proof, he realized, was the sole domain of the mighty ones of Jesus. He realized his belief had never had to rely on faith. Proof had been his inheritance as far back as his first memories. He was at once humbled and appalled by his misconstrued sense of his own relationship with his Savior, even as Roma offered him her hand to help him to his feet. Her expression was both compassionate and understanding. What was unreadable in him to others was transparent to her. At a glance she could perceive the spiritual turmoil that racked him, the revelations that had rocked the foundations of his faith.
         "You are not as faithless as you think," she whispered as he arose on unsteady legs, "You were chosen for something greater than we can know at this time. The things you see make you no less a pilgrim of the Light and a servant of the Lord than the rest of us. You witness as truth what others take purely on faith. It does not mean Christ will not find some other way to test the mettle of your fealty to Him."
         In her eyes, the coachman saw something beyond wisdom. He felt as though he was looking beyond her into what lay at the very heart of her, at the root of Christendom itself, at the face of the One to whom all of tender and forgiving hearts were called.
         They shared a single, beautiful moment of total empathy and concord. It plumbed a profundity of intimacy removed from the world of physical sensation, in a realm of the spirit alone.
         Roma moved past the tall coachman to greet the party entering the site in silence. An additional member was among them, the former slave, Zachary Matumba. They exchanged nods. In the short time Roma had known him, she had come to enjoy his company and acute wit immensely. His worldly experience, so different from her own, fascinated and intrigued her. And his obvious love for Mother had earned him an unusually large allotment of her heart.
         Each expression, steadfastly affixed to the monstrosity beyond Roma, reflected the differing and conflicting reactions of those assembled.
         Ichabod Hannan, the rock of ages, demonstrated wariness and erudite caution.
         Mother, the very soul of stoicism, exuded resolute implacability as she regarded the beast.
         Zachary, as sage as time immemorial, considered the abomination with a mix of fascination and repulsion.
         Camilla, like the reed determined to remain erect in a storm, looked pitilessly upon the vile creature that had so very nearly taken her son's life.
         Tom Borland, the obdurate mountain of bulk and bravura, was unmoved by the intimidating figure cut by the demon.
         But it was Molly Abernathy whose plethora of emotions flashed fleetingly and erratically across her face that left Roma awash with compassion. Her every reaction was laid bare upon a face weary with grief. Dismay, at the grotesque form before her. Horror, at the recognition of her son's visible birthmark. Sorrow, as the keen laceration of loss bit deep into her once more. Astonishment, as she struggled to come to grips with the presence of the demon in the world. But no rage. Even as she faced the evil that had slain her son and now wore him as a shield, she harbored no hatred in her heart.
         One by one, they alighted from the buggy and Roma greeted each. Ichabod Hannan was the last to step down. Beneath his arm he carried a Bible. He patted Roma gently on the arm.
         "Let's see to it then, shall we, my dear?" he prompted, leading the others towards the clearing in which Michael, Roland and the demon stood facing one another.
         A stillness fell over the assembled party when Molly Abernathy approached the demon. She was as transfixed by its inhumanity, both in form and nature, as by the mere fact of its presence. The demon glowered at her, its wrath and loathing fully communicated in a single glance. Molly regarded the aberration a moment before speaking.
         "You wear my son's skin. He was a special boy. He had a unique relationship with the Blessed Lamb and His Mother. I know it was you who invaded his dreams and tormented him. He would scream out your name in his sleep," she divulged openly without fear, "Now he is with Jesus where he need never fear sleep again, where hardship and want are no longer a yoke upon him. Where once he heard your voice, he now listens to choirs of angels. He was beloved of God in life. Your judgment, which is not mine to pass, will be delivered by the Son, who takes to his breast and defends the undefended. We will meet again at the Reckoning where the last thing you shall see is my joyful reunion with my children before you are consigned to your destiny," she simply turned away from the demon without awaiting a response and knelt upon the ground with head bowed, hands clasped in prayer.
         The demon struggled against its gag and restraints to retort but was powerless against the imprisonment borne of Roma's faith.
         Roma assisted Ichabod Hannan to kneel. Michael removed his coat, folded it and placed it under the aged physician's arthritic knees, much to his appreciation. Mother and Zachary made the sign of the cross and eased themselves onto their knees. Roland quietly sank to his knees in earnest prayer, as did Tom Borland and Camilla. Finally Michael and Roma dropped to their knees in the soft leaf litter cushioning the earth.
         Each prayed in their own manner, both in silence and aloud. Roma, Mother and Zachary prayed in their native tongues. Roma's voice was as soft as an underground river. Zachary's enthusiastic prayers were punctuated with the hoots, whistles and whoops of his people. Mother, as rhythmic as the ebb and flow of the tides, put her prayer to song, filling the forest with the soulful hymns of salvation that had been the very pulse of life urging her onward during those long years of slavery. Her hands were raised high and though her eyes were closed, her face was lifted towards heaven. Ichabod Hannan, Camilla and Tom Borland prayed in silence.
         Roma was momentarily distracted from her prayer by Michael's supplication. She did not understand it fully and respectfully refrained from interrupting.
         "I know, Father, we shall neither meet nor speak again while there is breath in me," Michael whispered, "and I feel the tests to come like a terrible storm brewing on a horizon not yet visible to me. But this is my hour of need and I ask nothing for myself. I beg only that you bring these prayers of ours, these imprints from our hearts, before the One who so readily entrusted His Church and His mission to you, and that you uphold our supplication; for surely you, who were so greatly loved by Him in life as in death, will be denied nothing if you but ask it of Him," he beseeched. Roma was astonished by not only the power of his words but the intimacy of them. Whomever he addressed was known to him. Roma might have pursued her curiosity were it not for the fact that they were gathered for a very specific purpose to which she henceforth earnestly applied herself.
         In a small clearing in a remote part of a defoliated forest, eight prayerful servants of Christ the Redeemer leant their souls to a singular, simple purpose - prayer for the removal of the greatest threat to the fabric of humanity. A seemingly impossible mountain to scale. But it was Molly Abernathy who, moved by the Spirit, became in person as in soul, the cleansing fire that brought the hand of God to bear among them.
         She arose slowly, an old rosary clutched in her hand, her eyes raised to the cause of her mourning and stood before it.
         She completed her novena before speaking to the demon for the last time. Hers was to be the last human voice it would ever hear.
         "Being a mother has been the greatest joy of my life. Only a mother can know the ecstasy that comes from bringing a new soul from heaven into the world. Only a mother can know the kind of love that would sacrifice her own life for the life of her child. Only a mother can know the emptiness of outliving her own children," she paused, lost in reflection a moment, "But not even this grief can stand beside the desolation of being removed from Jesus. It avails me nothing to hate you, for when you Fell to the furthest outreach of eternity from the Light of the Word, your sorrow at being exiled from the Lamb eclipsed any pain I could ever know. The Lord holds my children in his left hand and my healed heart in his right. I take from you your authority to be here," she placed her free hand upon the demon's breast and instantly a steam that did not sear Molly yet burned the beast rose from the point of contact, "I claim back from you the flesh seeded by my flesh, that it may return to the dust from whence the Divine Hand forged it."
         The demon writhed beneath the insufferable pain of a destitute woman's touch. The most powerful entity in the world of Man trembled beneath the unbearable touch of a simple woman of piety. The demon convulsed, its goliath frame heaving under the intolerable agony imparted by her gentle touch. So violently did it fit that the skin that had so reliably protected it split wide in several places. The dermis beneath began to steam, bubble and deteriorate. Incalculable pain registered in the demon's maddened eyes as it tore them from the woman that lay waste to its physical integrity to look upon Roma with every measure of its antipathy.
         The effect of Molly's touch soon caused the skin that had once preserved it to become a living cinder. It did not ignite into flame but merely smoldered and blackened, falling in fragile sheaves of whisper thin ash to the ground that smoked beneath its feet. Divested of its protective shield, the demon quickly deteriorated. Its own flesh, a hellish blood-like claret, could not withstand that sanctity of the natural world. The gentle breeze that caressed the faces of the faithful began slowly to slough to a fine ash the demon once flesh and entrail, marrow and bone. It drifted in streaming trails from the demon's perishing form like the gentle curls of smoke from a snuffed wick. Though it could not break free of its constraints, it managed to fracture the gag that had stemmed even its screams of agony as Molly's maintained touch devastated its form.
         "You are fated to dance with us all the days of your life," it rasped at Roma, "You will never be rid of us, not even as you breathe your last. We will come back for you," it vowed, its six thousand strong voices screaming in frustrated rage, before it turned to Michael, "We shall take her from you, Chimera, and give her back to you, altered and abhorrent, a curse upon your memory of her, but not before we have laid waste to your soul," it spoke its last as its heavy jaw disintegrated, drifting away in particles upon the wind.
         What remained of the demon's demolished frame shuddered once before collapsing entirely and blowing away on the cool current until not even the smudge of ash in the air could be detected.
         Molly lowered her hand.
         It was gone.
         "Be at peace, son," Molly whispered to the last remnants of ash that floated from her open palm on the breeze. She turned to the now silent party, her gaze at last resting upon Roma.
         "Thank you, child," she murmured, cupping the younger woman's porcelain cheek in her hand, "You have set my son free."
         "No, Molly," Roma replied, "He was released from the demon's grip the moment it slew him and has been walking in Paradise since. Rather, you set us free. All of us. All of Mankind." Roma rose to her feet and took Molly's hands in her own, kissing them in deferential gratitude.
         "Do you think you shall ever see it again?" she queried cautiously.
         "Of that I've no doubt," Roma avowed, "But not here and not in this way ever again. This shire, this land, is free of its menace."
         "How do you know it will not return here?" she asked as the others slowly found their feet, stunned to silence in the presence of an insurmountable faith capable of overwhelming utterly so seemingly unconquerable a foe.
         "Because I will not be here and it will pursue me for the rest of my life. It will go where I go," she replied.
         "What is to stop it taking another mother's son and returning as flesh?" Molly probed, distressed even at the prospect of another mother suffering her anguish.
         "It will not clothe itself in flesh again," Roma smiled reassuringly, "It has seen, and felt, the monumental failure of that. Now that it knows it can be bound and compelled, that its earthly shield can be penetrated and ravaged, it will devise another way to reach me. It came to your son in dreams, to me in flesh. It will find another way to fulfill its mission here. It was not among us to wreak havoc at random. It came with purpose and intent and it did not accomplish its objective. It will come back for me. But I will be far from here." She looked to Michael, then to Ichabod Hannan and finally to Roland.
         He nodded once in solemnity.
         Roma addressed her friends.
         "I know that what has transpired here since I have arrived has been taxing upon your bodies, upon your hearts, upon your spirits, and now also upon your very souls. But I ask only one more gratuity of you before I leave these shores," she beseeched.
         "Child, you just saved the lives of every citizen in this land and who knows how far beyond," Mother replied emphatically, "You could ask me for my right arm and I'd willingly give it up right here and now."
         "I think what Mother is trying to say, my dear, is that it would be no inconvenience whatsoever to accommodate your last request," Ichabod Hannan chuckled.
         "Come," Roland urged, "We must make haste."









"Dearly beloved, we are gathered here in the sight of God to join this man and this woman in the sacrament of Holy Matrimony," Roland held open a small Bible in the palm of his left hand, his right hand raised above Roma and Michael's heads.
         The bride wore neither dress nor veil, the groom no top hat or tails. Their faces were grubby, their garments disheveled and grimy. Their attendants bore no bridal gifts. The church was dimly lit and no floral garlands adorned the pews. And yet in spite of the absence of the trappings of a wedding, the candlelit church was suffused with an atmosphere of love and fellowship.
         Roland continued with the ceremony and Roma and Michael exchanged vows.
         "If any Man should bear exception to this union, let Him speak now or forever hold his peace," Roland looked up, a wry grin on his face, for there was no congregation assembled to voice an objection.
         "Hmph," Mother snorted, "If there be such a fool, he's going to have to come through me!" Roma shot her a grateful smile.
         "That said," Roland moved along, "By the power invested in me, I now pronounce you Man and Wife," he congratulated the newlyweds who wasted no time in awaiting an invitation to kiss. They shared their first intimate moment as husband and wife amidst the applause and cheers of their dearest and closest confidants. But the time to celebrate was necessarily deferred in light of greater matters which required addressing.
         Roma retrieved several pre-prepared satchels from the pew nearest her and addressed each attendant in turn.
         "Camilla," she addressed her mother-in-law first, her smile warm and genuine, "What was lost is found once more," she handed her a satchel filled with deeds, titles and letters of appointment and employment, "Your ancestral home is yours once again. It is my gift to you. Though unequal to the gift you have given me," she glanced at her husband, "I hope that your return to the home of your childhood will bring a new dawn to your life. You will receive an annual income equal to that of your former family trust. For the past month your staff, groundskeepers and curators have been restoring your home and its grounds to their former glory. At the bottom of the satchel you will find a key. It will unlock the main entrance of your home. Go home, Camilla," Roma smiled gently, "Make new memories. Live well. Be happy."
         Camilla's hands trembled and the tears brimming in her eyes conveyed what her choked voice could not. She could barely stand and required Tom Borland's strong arms to keep her upright. Roma tenderly kissed Camilla's cheek. She turned next to Tom Borland.
         "Don't let ours be the only nuptials to see out the year," Roma hinted none too subtly, handing him a satchel, "You are a wealthy man now, Tom. Take good care of the woman you love. Also in your satchel you will find a key. It matches Camilla's." He drew her into a bear hug that very nearly squeezed the breath from her lungs as he addressed Michael.
         "You take care of her now, son, or you'll answer to me," he growled with paternal affection.
         "Yes, Sir," Michael avowed.
         "Mother, Zachary," Roma turned next to the former slaves and handed them a satchel, "Mother, you once told me that if you had the means, you would give up this life and turn your hand to seamstressing. Inside your satchel you will find bonds redeemable at any financial repository in the world owned by my family. I have included letters of introduction and recommendation. You will also find the deed to a small shop in central Paris. Paris is the city of dreams. Yours has always been the dream of freedom. Many years ago you freed yourself of the chains of slavery only to be indentured by a new bondage. Now none shall ever bind you again. You have enough money to take your girls with you, to work for you so that they too may be freed from the shackles of this life. I ask only that you be happy and that you not say goodbye to me, for goodbye is final, but ‘farewell' implies that we will meet again. Farewell, my dear friend, my mother. Keep a light on in your sitting room always, for the hour is unknown when I shall call on you unannounced."
         Roma embraced Mother as though she were a daughter by blood. Tears welled in both their eyes.
         "God bless you, child," Mother whispered, her tone fierce with love, "Now you two come a-calling on Zachary and me. You've always a home in our hearts as in our dwelling. May Jesus bless you with every breath you take."
         Roma stole herself and turned to Molly Abernathy.
         "Molly, take this money to do with as you will. Your children are at peace and would want you in this life to know again the joy they have found in Paradise. I can never repay the debt owed you for what you have done today. I hope only that this will make your remaining years comfortable and secure," Roma attested. Molly accepted her largess graciously, unable to articulate beyond a tremulous hug the emotions that coursed through her.
         Finally she turned to Ichabod Hannan.
         "About that offer of yours I turned down earlier," she cocked an eyebrow, grinning wryly, "Have you any friends in Rome with whom we could seek shelter?". His expression registered confusion before the ingenuity of her logic dawned upon him.
         "Cunning. Very cunning," he commended, "Hiding in plain sight. Once it has become known that you have gone into hiding, the Vatican will not think to look in its own backyard for you. Yes, my dear, I have just the person to hide you in plain sight. Conspicuous chap. Likes to tinker with a brush and even a chisel on occasion. He's something of a bohemian and rather stands out among a crowd. And he is wilier than the combined resources of the Medici and the entire College of Cardinals. You will be quite safe," he chortled. Roma embraced him and held to him a long time. She placed a satchel in his hand and whispered in his ear.
         "I love you too much to see one more line of consternation furrow your brow," she whispered, "I know you are a man of great means but the bonds I give to you are more than enough to keep your wife happy in her new home far, far away until well beyond the end of your days." He laughed out loud, though no others had heard their exchange. He removed a large signet ring from his left hand and placed it in Roma's hand.
         "Go to the red brick bakehouse on the east bank of the Tiber beyond the willow grove. You will know him when you see him. Or rather, he will know you. When you give him this ring, he will know what to do," he whispered.
         "By what name shall I address him?" Roma asked, her voice audible only to the elderly physician.
         "Michelangelo," he replied simply. Roma drew back, astonishment etched upon her soft features.
         "When you said ‘in plain sight', clearly you understated your intent," she replied.
         What Roma could not have known was that many years earlier during a trip to Florence, a much younger Ichabod Hannan had met a young artist whose breadth of talent had so impressed the landowner and physician that he had become the then unknown genius' benefactor. Throughout the years they had exchanged correspondence, the distinguished physician and the brilliant craftsman furthering their understanding of human anatomy exponentially as a result of combining their resources and remarkable minds. Of all the works produced by the prolific artist, only one body of work remained the exclusive property of the artist and his benefactor alone. Early in his career the young artist had chanced upon a young girl on an errand for her abbess. Though his carnal proclivities lay with young men, her loveliness had so eclipsed his every notion and experience of beauty, he knew in that moment that only the face of God could inspire more love and devotion. He had sent to his benefactor a sketch of the naive child who had posed so innocently for him one bright and cloudless morning. Over the years he had seen her often and had chronicled her development into womanhood from afar - upon canvas, in marble and on parchment - these works of utter adoration known only to himself and his patron.
         And then three years ago she had disappeared and he had grieved as one whose heart's desire had departed the earth. When Ichabod Hannan had first laid eyes upon Roma and recognized her as the siren that had inspired the artist, he could not conceive of how any man could look upon her and not love her. Even the exuberant images of this young woman committed to paper had not done justice to his vision of her in the flesh.
         Ichabod Hannan would send no letters ahead to his great friend to prepare him for the arrival, for the joy of once again resting his gaze upon his muse would be herald enough. Roma could not have known that the young man she had so blithely humored with her impromptu sitting many years ago was the same man of renown whose name was known almost as widely as her own. Neither could she predict that his role in her life would prove as critical in her fight against evil as the moon's influence over the tides.
         Roma kissed both his cheeks and drank in every feature of his face, that it might be burned for an eternity in her memory.
         She turned to Roland but he would not take the satchel offered him.
         "I've no need of your money to live out my days in comfort after I am removed from my post," he gently pushed the pouch away, "I'm coming with you. This isn't the end. It is only the beginning. Our work has only just begun."
He winked. Relief spilled into every part of her. A terrible, sickening nausea took hold of her every time she had allowed herself to contemplate her pending parting with Roland. He had been her one and only constant throughout life. Her earliest living memory was of his love and guidance. He was more than a brother to her and she had missed him dreadfully in the three years since she had taken up her vocation, though they had corresponded often. Having Michael on her right and Roland to her left gave her a sense of family for which she had always longed.
         Their exchange might have continued had there not been a great disturbance at the far end of the church. The heavy oak doors flung open as Cardinals Alvarez, Richellieu and Di'Angelo were led by a wrathful Norfold whose heavy footfalls echoed like the drums of doom down the wood paneled isle of the near deserted church. Cardinal Norfold clutched tightly in a white knuckled fist a parchment whose contents Roland had been expecting.
         A small smile graced his face, for they were now irrelevant.
         "You face excommunication, Father Bernard," Cardinal Norfold raged, waving the parchment in his fist like a brandished sword, "This letter leaves for Rome this very eve and in it I have petitioned the Holy See for your expulsion from the Church."
         Roland's gentle smile never faded.
         "You're too late, your Eminence," he replied softly. Cardinal Norfold and his fellow exorcists drew up in front of the bridal party, a veritable wall of superior indifference. Roland took Michael's left hand and held it up. His wedding ring gleamed in the candle light. The cardinal blanched, "You're just in time to give the newlyweds your blessing," he faced the astonished cardinal squarely, "And knowing papal law as I do, I know that no excommunication can be back-dated so you have no recourse to void the ceremony I have just performed. Added to this, the Sacrament of Marriage outranks the laws created at the Council of Ten Fifty Three. You cannot touch him. Chimera or no, he is free to do as he will and you are powerless to covet him," he explained triumphantly.
         When Cardinal Norfold turned his gaze to Roma, Michael saw his ghostly personification take on a visceral, primitive posture, like a wild beast salivating before its prey. His form distended and contorted into a vision beyond animal and his loathing was even more palpable than that of the demon.
         Michael stepped forward, his penetrating blue gaze boring almost painfully into the haughty cardinal's dark, hooded eyes.
         "I see what is in your heart, dark wolf," he growled menacingly, "Pray you never see me again. If you do, my face will be the last thing you ever see. And the first face you look upon after your death will judge you. Pray tell, Eminence, when Christ opens the Book of Life and leafs through the pages of your miserable existence, placing your merits and failings on the Great Scale, will you be found wanting? Think you worthy of Eternity with Him in Paradise or does the Lake await you?"
         For the first time in his fifty two years, Cardinal Norfold was silenced and his blood ran cold. He had never feared another man in his life but the certainty and foresight so evident in those pale azure eyes frightened him like a child petrified of thunder.  He took an unintentional step back.
         Mercifully the assembled party was interrupted again.
         The parish deacon, a disheveled young man who had seen the saddle for more than a few days barreled up the isle, waving a large, sealed parchment.
         "Father, Father!" he shouted, "Father, a missive from Rome. From the Throne of Saint Peter. For you!" he enthused exuberantly. Norfold spun on his heel so swiftly the young deacon skidded to a halt.
         "I'll take that," he demanded, reaching for the epistle. Instinctively the young deacon recoiled from the cardinal, intimidated by his glowering indignation. He nonetheless stood his ground, albeit upon trembling legs. Roland strode past the cardinals.
         "It's alright, David," Roland reassured his subordinate, taking the communiqué and returning to the altar. Cardinal Norfold's rage was perceptible to all, though he did little more than seethe as Roland broke the papal seal and read the contents. Immediately his complexion echoed his ashen hair. He looked up slowly and all assembled read in his expression an ominous revelation.
         "What is it?" Roma asked, touching his arm to draw him from his reverie. He took a deep breath and cleared his throat, steadying his nerves. This turn of events was unexpected. Gloriously fortunate but entirely unforeseen. It would change everything. He turned to Roma.
         "The pontiff is dead," he attested, making the sign of the cross, "Conclave has been conducted and concluded."
         "Preposterous!" Cardinal Norfold erupted, "We five-" he too cleared his throat, "We four have not cast our die. The entire College must be present before the Camerlengo can sequester the Body of Cardinals and usher in Conclave."
         "You forget my area of expertise," Roland chastised the irate Cardinal, "I have been studying papal law for almost as long as you have been breaking it. Enough to know that the only office excused from Conclave is the Office of Exorcist. Should Conclave occur simultaneous to an Exorcism in another part of the world whereby the members cannot return to Rome in time to attend, the Camerlengo is authorized to sequester the College of Cardinal sans the absent Exorcists and commence with the voting. As part of the rite of ascension to the post of Exorcist you signed an affidavit surrendering your vote should you be detained in the discharge of your duties elsewhere," Roland veritably brow-beat the conceited Cardinal with his comprehensive knowledge of doctrine, his expression dark, this tone one of unmitigated authority, "Conclave has been held and concluded. Pope Hadrian the Sixth is dead and his successor has been chosen by your peers," he concluded commandingly, turning to Roma and placing a hand upon her shoulder.
         A stillness hung in the cool air and the silence was brittle, electric. Roma had never witnessed so foreboding an expression upon Roland's face. It unnerved her. Cardinal Norfold withered beneath it, for it exuded ill-omened gloom. Again Roma became acutely aware of a subtle shifting in the air about her, like worlds colliding, jostling for realignment. She swallowed hard.
         "Pope Hadrian the Sixth has passed unto the consignment of our Maker," he reiterated quietly, holding her probing gaze, "and Pope Clement the Seventh has ascended the Throne of Saint Peter. Roma, your father has become Supreme Pontiff of the Holy Catholic Church."
         Not so much as a breath could be heard within the hallowed sanctuary of the dimly lit church. Roland looked beyond a stunned Roma to Cardinal Norfold. His expression was one of uncomprehending disbelief. Giulio de Medici, nephew of Lorenzo de Medici, Lorenzo the Magnificent, and first cousin to Giovanni de Medici, the late Pope Leo X, was no friend of the House of Norfold from whence his fellow Cardinal heralded. In fact, their animosity had become so legendary amongst the halls of the College of Cardinals, they had come to be referred to as The Hammer and The Anvil, respectively, for they clashed at every encounter. The Medici's triumphant ascension to the office of Supreme Pontiff was a crushing blow to Cardinal Norfold who would soon find his power hamstrung, if not entirely tourniquetted.
         Adding insult to injury, Cardinal Norfold had made it his mission to slander, discredit and malign Roma's name and work by virtue of his rancor towards her father. His campaign of acrimony had now ended in a devastating defeat. Though Guilio de Medici had never acknowledged his daughter in secular society and they had spoken on only a handful of occasions, he had taken a great interest in her upbringing, provided generously for her and had always supported her vocation as it brought honor to the Medici name and prestige to his post. He had vouched for her on several occasions when Cardinal Norfold had boldly attempted to saboutage her work and reputation. Though poor in divine acumen, he was a shrewd and sharp strategist, a providential byproduct of his Medici education and rearing. In spite of his almost total lack of spiritual integrity, he was a brilliant businessman and his intellectual cunning had served Roma well on more than one occasion.
         But even the highest office in Rome - in the known world - could not protect Roma and Michael from elements within the Holy See that would seek the Chimera at any cost, by any means. They had no recourse but to proceed with their plans to go into hiding. In many ways Roma's connection to the Vatican afforded her greater protection than ever before, but the pendulum swung both ways and in several respects, it placed her in even greater danger.
         "The hour is growing late," Roland concluded, drawing the short-lived festivities to their abrupt terminus, "Roma, Michael, say your goodbyes. We leave tonight," he instructed before turning to Cardinal Norfold, "Eminence, as per this bull, you have been summoned to Rome. The Holy Father demands an audience with you," he tossed the dispatch towards the bewildered Cardinal who read their declaration with trembling hands. Roland did not linger to glean his reaction, turning his attention from the damned cardinal to address the newlyweds, "Meet me at the rectory when you have gathered your things," he instructed before taking his leave.
         He left the still dumbfounded party pondering the remarkable turn of events as he slipped from the church to gather his few possessions and a rather large, orange cat he would never admit to harboring a fondness for. His mind reeled. Endless opportunities, possibilities and perils had been actuated by this staggering development and he was not about to leave Roma and Michael to face the next chapter of their lives undefended and unsupported. More prevalent than any other feeling was the sense that their work had only just begun and their unique trinity - Michael the Soul, Roma the Heart, and Roland the Mind - would flourish only if they worked in unison.
         A storm was brewing in Vatican City. He could feel it in the deepest part of him. Michael was at the heart of it. Roma would influence the direction of it. But only Roland could control it. The demon was just the beginning. They had not yet faced their darkest foe. Forewarning of it crawled beneath his skin. But the most astonishing revelation was yet to come. And it would be revealed to him under the veil of night in an unmarked carriage on a road to obscurity...

Epilogue








Two lanterns jiggered rhythmically inside the well-lit carriage as it bumped and bounced along a disused road several leagues beyond Lymington. The driver, Ichabod Hannan's most skilled coachman, urged six blindfolded steeds onwards without aid of torchlight.
Inside the coach the curtains were drawn shut. Roma and Michael sat opposite Roland, the heavy silence all but asphyxiating. Roland was lost in thought, Roma leaned against Michael, her fingers interlaced with his.
Michael leant forward and drew a weathered leather satchel from beneath his seat and placed it upon his lap. He took a deep breath and contemplated it for a moment before lifting the flap.
"What's that?" Roma asked, unable to recall him bringing the tote on board.
"I think we are far enough from Lymington for me to bring this to light now," Michael informed his companions uneasily.
"Bring what to light?" Roland leaned forward, his interest peaked. Michael took another deep breath and composed his thoughts.
"I think I was around three when I first encountered him," he began cautiously, struggling to know where to begin and how to explicate his extraordinary tale, "He gave me his name, he sat down and told me that he was a friend of my father and that he was going to be my teacher. The first thing he did was to begin teaching me to draw. And then he began to teach me the first of a dozen languages I was to learn - including Hebrew," he divulged. Roland's attention was still fixed upon the satchel.
"And this has - what? - to do with the contents of that bag?" Roland pressed, keenly aware that the evenings prior revelations were clearly not to be the last.
"I'm getting to that," Michael assured them, "He visited me often and spoke to me of things he had seen, the life he had lived, the time in which he had lived and those with whom he had become involved. He tutored me in everything from history to the origins of civilization to the living God. My father died when I was twelve and he was there when I received the news. That was the first time I realized no one else could see him. He made himself known only to me. He and Tom Borland became the only fathers I have ever really known. They taught me what it was to be a man. About a year ago he told me that a woman was coming and that she would turn my life upside down," he turned to Roma and smiled, "You are why he never taught me to read or write. He left that to you. And then he told me that soon I would come into a gift, the first and the least of several, and that good men and evil alike would covet it. He told me that I would be set three trials in my life and that the last of these would ruin me. Legion was the first. The second, he told me when I awoke from the healed injuries the demon gave me, would start and end in Rome. And then he told me that that would be the last time I saw him until the hour of my death, which remains undisclosed, and that another would come to guide me through the next chapter of my journey."
"Who was this man?" Roma asked. Michael handed the satchel to Roland.
Roland took the soft tote and removed several dozen leaves of parchment, all adorned with extraordinarily lifelike depictions of the same man. In the first of these Michael was pictured with a small boy and as Roland leafed through the images, the boy aged chronologically whereupon Roland recognized the youth as Michael at around the age of fourteen.
"Seems Tobin Abernathy wasn't the only gifted artist amongst us," he murmured, leafing through them swiftly before returning to the first drawing to pore over them more thoroughly.
He was at the third parchment when he stopped. His complexion drained of color and his expression was even more sober than it had been upon learning of the new papal succession. He looked up.
"You said he told you his name," Roland reminded Michael somberly, "What was it?".
"Peter," Michael replied, aware that Roland had finally discerned a great and inconceivable truth. Roma recalled the voice of the angel that she had perceived as Michael was healed and the Scripture quoted. A staggering realization dawned upon her as to the man's identity.
Roland began to scour the images before him, searching for more evidence to support his remarkable hypothesis. He found first one, and then another and another after that.
"What is it?" Roma grilled Roland who flipped through the drawings with frenzied fervour, "Roland, what do you know?" Roma demanded.
Roland finally looked up. Disbelief, astonishment, and bewilderment mingled in a single, uplifted, ecstatic expression. He could not speak for several moments.
"You are the Chimera," Roland murmured. He looked upon Michael with new eyes, with deepened insight - with awe. Michael nodded. Roland turned to Roma, "There are documents held in the Vatican, in the personal safe of the Pontiff no less, that are as significant as the Gospels themselves, but have necessarily be withheld from inclusion in the Bible. From Pontiff to Pontiff since the very first papacy held by Saint Peter himself, certain details have been passed down that could be known only to the current Pope of the time or an individual who had had a literal encounter with a saint, more specifically the First Saints - the Apostles. After Christ's death and Resurrection, according to Peter's own penmanship, his first duty as the Pontiff was to charge each of the remaining Disciples to chronicle every detail of their lives - from their birthplace, family history, upbringing and life experiences to physical identifiers like birthmarks, scars, physical peculiarities. He then ensured that certain of these aspects of the lives of the Apostles, most notably any unique physical characteristic, were never so much as mentioned in the Bible. Upon his death, he passed this information onto his successor who passed it on to his successor and so on and so forth down through the ages until now. The reason is this. Many have claimed to have encountered the Disciples throughout the ages. All but three such allegations, and there have been tens of thousands, have been disproved. You see, the common denominator of the three authenticated cases of actual contact with Christ's Disciples has been that the claimants have been able to describe in great detail information about their lives and very specific physical distinctions of the Saints pursuant to verifying their credibility. As details of these withheld physical identifiers and secrets of their pasts are known only to the Pope, the Pope alone can substantiate the validity of these claims," he turned to Michael, his expression grave, "Michael, are you absolutely certain of these scars and their placement?" he asked, clearly at once conflicted and certain.
"Absolutely," Michael replied without hesitation. Roland shook his head in shock.
"Your tutor, the man who essentially raised you - this man was Saint Peter," he marveled, "The same Peter counted among the Twelve, the same Peter whom Christ Himself professed to love best, the same Peter who became the cornerstone of the Church, the first Supreme Pontiff."
Roma gasped. She looked from Roland to Michael and when she could not articulate her amazement, he simply nodded to confirm Roland's assertion. Roma's head snapped back to Roland.
"If this is known only to the succession of Pope's, how is it that you know of it?" she grilled.
"You forget," he chided gently, "I was secretary to that insidious leech Leo the Tenth for three years. He had no regard for papal sanctity or the mammoth legacy entrusted to him. He had me tending his every administrative task from chronicling his falsified memoirs to inventorying the contents of his personal safe, as long as nothing interfered with his insatiable appetite for wine, opium, whores and the pursuit of power. Against all protocols of sanctity and confidentiality I was instructed to read each and every document therein so that he need not have to bother. He considered it a trivial nuisance. I read the scroll penned by the Apostle Peter himself instructing the Disciples to record as many facts of their lives and physical demarcations as they could, and of the necessity of its secrecy, alongside the documents the ten remaining Disciples provided; there being only ten, for Judas had by then taken his own life. It is known as the Charge of Saint Peter. The Gospels allude in several places to Christ performing signs and miracles, and of passing on Divine knowledge to His Apostles. It is widely held, though as yet unproven, that one of the secrets imparted by Christ was that the Disciples' mission would not conclude at death but rather they would be seen on earth again. I have long believed that this is why Peter had the Apostles document their lives and anything physical that might identify them, and then charged those upon the throne who came after him, for two of the four gospels were not written by the Apostles themselves, to withhold any reference to their physical markings and their past. These documents had always remained the sole property of the presiding Pontiff and only the Pontiff can verify any claim of a divine encounter with the Apostles based on this information, to ensure that none might deceive the Holy See. It was then that I knew I was never meant to come into this knowledge. I have never spoken of it to another living soul. Until now. Similarly, as you know, Roma, certain aspects of demons and demonic manifestations known only to the Holy See, the Office of Exorcist and yourself, have been withheld from the Bible as we know it. Not physical characteristics, but rather the ways in which they identify themselves, things they have spoken of only to Christ and His Disciples, certain abilities they have demonstrated. This is how the Vatican validates or disproves all cases of purported demonic possession. Those claiming demonic interference to evade persecution for crimes committed by perpetrators of perfectly sound mind or those attempting to influence or manipulate others are tested against specific criteria. They must be able to answer questions to things they could have no knowledge of unless truly demonically subjugated, they must be able to exhibit certain abilities beyond the capacity of human beings, and they must demonstrate an ability to speak in languages unknown to them, specifically, unknown to Mankind, for demons have a language all their own, several thousand actually. One who has not come under the influence of demonic captivity cannot present a fraudulent claim of demonic possession because nowhere is it written for the common man to simply read and mimic," Roland elucidated, "Thus, just as we can authenticate or overturn any case of demonic possession, we can similarly prove or disprove all claims of encounters with the saints because of what we know about what they looked like and the marks they bore. Saint Peter had several distinctive scars, scars he obtained while in prison, and though we carry none of the scars of our human life in the hereafter, the saints have continued to bear them when they appear to the chosen few. I know each of these markers because I am the only other human being since the death of Christ, other than a Pope, to have read the Charge of Saint Peter. Which is how I know who it is who mentored you, Michael, and how I similarly know that your claim is not false."
Roma and Roland were dumbstruck and they took a long moment to process the prodigious information into which they had come.
Roma finally turned to her husband and kissed his cheek tenderly.
"For better or for worse. Til death do us part," she stated simply, reaffirming her unconditional commitment and loyalty to the man that had transformed her life, her heart and her soul. Roland looked to Michael and extended his arm.
"Brothers," he averred, "Come what may." Michael took the priest's wrist. Roland's fingers closed firmly around Michael's wrist.
"Brothers," he affirmed, quietly grateful for the priest's pledge of fealty.
"If I may," Roland added, "You said that Saint Peter gave you the name of his successor, the one who would guide you henceforth. Who is he?"
"Saul," Michael disclosed, "of Tarsus."
Roland sat back, shoulders slumped, astounded.
"Saint Paul," he murmured in wonder, more to himself than his companions; his gaze flicked up, "The greatest evangelist of all time, greater even than John the Baptist. First, the Capstone. Now, the Witness. Did Saint Peter tell you anything of the next trial?".
"Only that I must return to the Tower of Babel, the root of Man, the capstone of civilization in order to endure it," Michael replied, "And that to prevail I must trust to the Word of God. And then he quoted John Chapter 20 Verse 30 ‘Jesus did many other miraculous signs in the presence of His Disciples, which are not recorded in this book'. He said I would learn of these things and that they would change me forever. And then he said goodbye," he outlined plainly.
"So be it," Roland concluded, "To Rome we go, then."

The dull rumble of the carriage faded into the night and three fledgling souls winged their way towards a destiny that would yield unknown horrors and untold wonders alike. Thus they made for Rome - the Great City - unaware that deep within the bowels of the ancient metropolis a great evil would spit up a wickedness so vile and incomprehensible to the human condition that only a great and terrible sacrifice would save their lives and ultimately their souls from a vengeful and exacting retribution...