Blackened Spiral Down (15 page)

              Six was clearly in a frenzy of blood lust as he stood up, and the priest was on the verge of passing out.  The bloody stump of his left arm was quivering in unimaginable agony.

              “You’re a miserable piece of shit!  How many others did you rape?” Six’s eyes were intense, staring down at the priest as he rolled on the floor, silently begging for his life.  He was a blubbering mess – tears streaming down his face and blood still pouring from his mouth.  “Now I’m in control!  I hope you rot in hell, you bastard!”

              Six unleashed the pain that had been bottled up inside him for eight years.  All the misery and hatred that boiled for what felt like an eternity now erupted in a display of incredible and sadistic violence.

              “Robert died in 1959.  No one calls me that any more.  There’s a headstone at the cemetery with that name on it.  You motherfuckers killed the old me and created a monster.  A fucking monster!  You bastards did this to me!”  He glistened with sweat, and his chest heaved.  He felt alive for the first time since his captivity.  “You’re supposed to help people, not allow what they did to me!”

Six proceeded to kick and stab Father O’Donnell with the crucifix, as the chaplain barely held on to life.  By the time he was done, the dead priest was naked in the corner of his cell, the metal crucifix sticking out of the middle of his chest.  Father O’Donnell’s lifeless body was covered in deep gashes and stab wounds.  Steam rose from a dark red pool of blood on the concrete floor, and Six was gone.  Only his name remained on the back wall of the cell, written in the blood of the priest that he claimed as his first victim the night his rampage began.  The killing machine was unleashed.

Thirteen Nuns

1

Sister Mary Concordia was running as fast as she could.  It was a cool, early spring night.  A blood moon was high and provided an eerie red hue to the path that led deeper into the woods that surrounded St. Michael’s Academy.  She wasn’t supposed to be out of the convent at this hour, being a novitiate in only her second year.  If she was found out of her room, it would have meant fasting for at least 24 hours and silent study of her lessons in the tiny cube they called a bedroom.  It would be several more years before she would take her final vows and become a nun, but she studied hard and did everything Mother Mistress asked of her.  However, she knew that Mother Mistress would be furious that Boris, the convent’s cat, had gotten out again.  After a year being well-cloistered from society, Sister Mary Concordia was finally enjoying socializing with others in the church.  The older nuns at the convent had begun to accept her, teaching her their secrets, and Mother Mistress let her take care of Boris, which she enjoyed a great deal.  Mother Mistress made it known how much she and the other nuns loved the orange and white tomcat and what tremendous responsibility her task bore.  Now, as she ran deeper and deeper into the thick forest, all she had on her mind was catching up with Boris and getting him back inside before anyone found out he was missing.

“Boris! Boris!” she whispered, fearing discovery.  “Where are you?”

Only the night sounds in the enveloping darkness replied.  No sign of Boris.  The usual crickets, nocturnal creatures that stirred in the brush, and the cry of a distant owl were the only noises the young woman heard.  Suddenly, she felt a chill and shuddered at the thought she may actually be lost.  The path had many twists and turns, and the idea that Mother Mistress was likely to come check if she was in her room caused Sister Mary Concordia to fear that  she would be discovered missing.

“Boris!” she called out again.  There was no reply from her feline friend.

She decided to go just a little further into the woods before she would have to turn back.  As she came up over the crest of a small hill, Sister Mary Concordia heard something that she couldn’t make out.  It sounded almost like a low rumble.  Holding her breath, she strained to hear what now sounded like voices.  She thought it might be a gathering of people, very low and distant – deeper into the blackness of the forest.  Staring up at the blood moon, Sister Mary Concordia questioned whether she should continue.  She heard some of the nuns talking this week about the rare blood moon that would appear on this night, but they acted like they didn’t want her to hear what they were saying about it.  There were many times when she felt like some of the sisters were guarded about what she was able to hear, so Sister Mary Concordia didn’t give it much thought.  She had never seen a blood moon before, and out in the woods so late, it definitely added to hear fears.  Staring up at a crimson full moon almost seemed unreal.

A feeling came over her. That she would be found out and that the punishment would be severe.  With one more year of study as a novitiate, Sister Mary Concordia would begin five years of work in the convent before taking her final vows. She didn’t know if an offense such as this would cause her to be removed from St. Michael’s, but the curiosity of what the source of the voices was in the darkness drew her in.  She stopped thinking about Boris and stepped quickly yet gingerly down the path toward the unknown.

The voices got progressively louder as she moved closer.  The timber became almost opaque, and the brush was like a wall of impenetrable thorn and thicket.  There was now a glow in the distance, from what appeared to be a campfire.  The voices were now clearer to her, yet still low in tone and measured in timbre.  One voice was more prominent than the rest, and as Sister Mary Concordia continued ahead, she could make out the other voices answering the apparent leader in unison.  To her, it sounded more like a religious ceremony, such as a Catholic mass.  She still was not able to make out the words, but as she got closer, she decided to take cover off the main path to avoid discovery.  The gathering was about one-hundred yards in the valley below.  Although she had no idea what was going on, her guttural reaction was drenched in dread.  Still, she continued forward, the runaway cat still removed from her thoughts.  The blood moon was casting an ominous blood-red blanket across the valley in every direction.

A few minutes later, Sister Mary Concordia found herself quivering with fear behind a dense cluster of bushes, only twenty feet from the gathering.  There was a fire pit and an altar of dark stone, with a man standing behind it.  He was dressed in little more than an animal skin that obscured his head and upper body, as he spoke with the command of a seasoned preacher at the pulpit.  There was a small congregation of men and women kneeling before him, and they were naked in the crisp evening air.  She didn’t know what to make of this strange perversion.  On the altar was a crucifix, yet it was upside down, and the man in the animal skin was drinking from what looked like a human skull.  Then he continued to speak to them in Latin.

“In nomine magni dei nostril Satanas!  Introibo ad altare Domini Inferi!” he cried out as the congregation before him repeated the infernal words.  She didn’t know exactly what he was saying, but she had sat through enough Catholic mass to pick out some words.

Suddenly, a woman in a black robe stepped out of the shadows and walked up to the altar, carrying something in her arms wrapped up in a blanket.  Sister Mary Concordia was mesmerized at what she was seeing.  The naked men and women then began to fornicate as a group, intertwining themselves in carnal lust, of the likes she had never witnessed before.  At only 22 years old, the young novitiate had never seen the naked body of a man, let alone the mass of indecency that was now only a breath away.  Being found out by these evil people was a terrifying thought.  She was afraid to run back to the path, fearing they would hear her.  The noise of breaking twigs and branches underfoot would surely give her away.  All she could do was hide behind the bushes and hope to avoid detection.

Now the woman in the black robe was at the altar and laid down upon it the blanket’s contents.  The man in the animal skin dipped his hand into the skull he was drinking from, his fingers stained with a dark red substance.  Sister Mary Concordia assumed it to be blood. The woman opened up the blanket to reveal a naked infant boy squirming in the cool midnight air!  The baby was crying, his arms and legs flailing, as the man rubbed the blood on the baby’s forehead, saying something that she couldn’t make out.  He reached down behind the altar, then abruptly stood up, his congregation in the midst of their orgy before him, and held up a 10-inch butcher knife.  The blade gleamed in the moonlight.  Sister Mary Concordia gasped as the man brought the knife down upon the infant’s chest.  The woman in the robe held him down as his little voice screamed out in pain.  His tiny body convulsed in agony!

Things appeared to play out in slow motion to Sister Mary Concordia.  The bright red blood that flowed from the infant was dripping from the stone altar as the man held him up to the sky, speaking once again in Latin.  Blood poured down the leader’s arms and dripped from his heaving chest.  The woman let her black robe fall, pulled the animal skin from the man’s body, and the two locked in a bloody embrace of horrific evil, sharing a deep kiss and rubbing the warm blood onto each other’s skin.  The young nun-to-be was in utter disbelief at what she had witnessed, the cries of the congregation escalating, and the two at the altar now joining in the fornication.  They appeared older than the rest.  He bent her over the dark stone, knocking the inverted crucifix over.  Her writhing body cried out, rubbing the sacrificial blood on herself as the disturbing act continued.

Sister Mary Concordia was speechless, the actions still in slow motion before her, and the cries distant and tinny like through a cup and string.  She could hear the screams of the baby over and over again as she crouched in the darkness praying she would not be found out.  Yet as the older man and woman continued their desecration of life, joined in an unholy union, she made eye contact with both of them.  To her utter horror, they were both faces she recognized!  In that moment, all she had been working toward since entering the sisterhood, and everything she held dear with her God, came crashing down upon her like a pile of stones.   The man was none other than the Abbott of St. Michael’s Academy – Father Reilly!  She would know that face anywhere, even in the light of the blood moon, in mid-fornication at the altar of evil.  It was terrible enough that he was participating in this perversion, but the woman’s identity shook her to the very core of her being.  Sister Mary Concordia actually questioned her faith for the first time in her life as she gazed at the gasping countenance of the Mother Mistress!

Without hesitation, she ran away.  She ran away from the disgusting ritual toward St. Michael’s.  It felt surreal, like she was running in a nightmare where you feel like you’re moving in place – unable to escape.  Sister Mary Concordia didn’t know if the Abbott or Mother Mistress had seen her, but she did make eye contact and couldn’t be sure.  As she ran faster and faster away, the visions she had just seen were already haunting her, and she could only hope that her presence was undetected. 

When she finally got back into her room and to bed, she closed her eyes tightly in a futile attempt to wish away what she had just seen, but the images of the blood orgy were engraved into her mind, and the cries of that innocent baby reverberated in the stillness of the night.

2

In a private dining room on the third floor of the monastery at St. Michael’s Academy was a feast fit for kings.  The four priests that sat at the table were not royalty, but the monks waiting on them would have had a much different opinion on the matter.  The way the four conducted themselves, looking down at the monks who served them, was appalling. A simple, yet magnificent, oak table with six ornately carved chairs sat in the middle of the Abbot’s private dining room.  Before being seated at the table, the four had enjoyed drinks and Cuban cigars in the Abbot’s office and spent the past hour talking about the events of the night before.  To listen to the four of them, one would have assumed they were fraternity brothers from collegiate days gone by, instead of men of the cloth, who met each other years before in seminary school.  These men were not the usual clergy – far from it.

Father Timothy Reilly sat at the head of the table, as he was the Abbot of the institution and had been for the past ten years.  He was a fit man in his early 60’s with a military-style buzz haircut, chiseled jaw and piercing blue eyes.  The Abbot was pleasant enough to those who barely knew him, but to anyone who worked at St. Michael’s, he was despised for his brash demeanor and elitist attitude.  It didn’t take long to pick up on that quality in him.  He was hardly what most would have assumed a priest to be like.  He spent his early years growing up in Albany, New York, before his calling to enter the priesthood.  It was years later, as an instructor at a seminary outside of Richmond, Virginia, where he met the other three priests that he chose to dine with on this Saturday afternoon in March of 1927.

To the Abbot’s right was Father Cordero Rosa, who made the trip to McHenry, Illinois, by train two days before, from his congregation at Holy Trinity Catholic Church in Cottonwood, Arizona.  It was a four-day trip by rail, yet he didn’t question the Abbot when he was asked to come to St. Michael’s.  To the Abbot’s left was Father Roger Wilkes, who also had a long train ride to northern Illinois from his own St. Luke’s Catholic Church in Hartford, Connecticut.  He was looking forward to catching up with the Abbot, as well as the other priests that he had kept in touch with since they were young priests-to-be at the seminary.  Lastly, at the opposite end of the table from the Abbot, was Father Frank Bartolini.  He arrived to St. Michael’s by car the day before, since he had the shortest trip of the priests, from his Epiphany Catholic Church in Des Moines, Iowa.  All three of the priests were roughly 20 years younger than the Abbot and looked up to him as a father figure.  In some ways, they even regarded him more dearly than that.