Nightangel

By David Ruggeri

When a young priest hears the confession of 14- year-old Alma Sanchez, who claims to be a virgin impregnated by an angel, and finds his pastor crucified in their church, he begins a strange journey into the supernatural. Still wracked by guilt because he had once done nothing to stop his high school sweetheart ( now a child psychiatrist) from aborting their child he is now on the run with her, compelled to protect Alma from those who think she could be the mother of the antichrist. A police detective with the tenacity of a Javert, the Church, and The Sodality of the Blood of Jesus pursue Father Mike, Maureen Molloy and Alma Sanchez from San Francisco to Lake Tahoe to a small village in Chiapas, Mexico where supernatural and natural forces conspire in chaos, death and a sudden understanding of true evil. [Explicit sex and violence]

• Language: English
• Publisher: David Ruggeri
• Release date: May 27, 2012
• ISBN: 9781476022642

David Ruggeri

Mr. Ruggeri spent over 35 years in commercial banking. The US Air Force sent him to Yale University to study Chinese for Cold War assignments after a lengthy stint studying for the priesthood. His recent decision to leave the workforce and its constant downsizing and merger upheavals came easily after having raised his two children and rediscovering the joys of writing, one of his first ambitions. He is the author of 12 published books. His adult two children, Kelly and Sean are successful in their personal and business enterprizes and are a source of unending pride. Mr. Ruggeri currently lives in Anaheim and spends quality time baby sitting his grandchildren.

Book preview

PROLOGUE

Do you want to see the tapes?

No. That won't be necessary. The young woman shakes her head, black hair sliding back and forth across her shoulders like a dark curtain.

I have them right here, the reporter says eagerly. I'd be happy to show them to you, if we can find a VCR.

That won't be necessary. Your tapes are blank.

No. Just the parts I've indicated. The reporter thinks his rejoinder is properly deferential and not really contradictory. At least not enough to make her angry.

"I told you: They're all blank."

You can do that?

Of course. It's easy.

The reporter nods. I have copies.

I've erased them too.

The reporter suppresses a shudder when he notices the young woman isn't smiling. She is serious. Very serious.

She couldn't even know where he'd stored copies of the tapes he'd made twenty years earlier, but he has no doubt that she can somehow reach out and touch them with her power. If she is anything like her mother, she could do almost anything she wants.

And that is a frightening thought.

Maybe he has overstepped his bounds, tracking her down, demanding her story after all these years. Maybe he should have just let it be. But it is too late. He is here now.

And afraid.

He is frightened, not because she has agreed to talk to him, but because he suddenly knows that, like his precious tapes, he can be just as easily erased.

It would be so simple to just say, 'I was born,' and leave it at that, the young woman begins. But it wasn't that simple. Nothing ever is. I suspect life will be as difficult and complicated for my child as is mine, and as my mother's was before me.

The reporter is surprised to see her clasp her hands lovingly over her stomach.

He didn't know she was pregnant. She doesn't look it. And, although he'd asked around, he had never heard of her being seen with a man. He knows she isn't married.

Of course, we are both a part of this, the woman continues. But you don't want to hear about me or my child.

Oh yes I do!

We are like snow flakes yet to melt and flow into an endless river. Someday we shall have our own story. But now is not the time, not while my veins still run hot with the blood and memory of my mother.

The reporter watches her large, dark eyes look around the grounds, noting that the attendants keep a respectful distance. None come near enough to make eye contact or overhear what she has to say.

Finally, she sits back, as if she is perfectly at home in the garden of the hospice, her voice a pleasant drone in the late afternoon sun.

"The priest was there, as was his woman with her copper-colored hair and alabaster skin, skin so unlike my own, yet as soft to touch as an unguarded moment.

"There were others there too, shadows that filled the air with hate, love, anger...and confusion. They are all part of the story--the priest's story.

P A R T I

"The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned..."

The Second Coming

William Butler Yeats

CHAPTER 1

Father Mike Gilroy hurried out the back door of the rectory. It was the shortest path to the sacristy at the rear of the church and he was anxious to spend a little quiet time in front of the altar.

Mike frequently thought that although, St. Theresa's might not be as atmospheric as Mission Dolores, just a couple of miles away, it was a good place to pray and meditate. It was his place, his ministry.

He was almost halfway across the lawn when he realized that the security lights weren't working. They had three powerful motion-sensor spotlights--one over the back door of the rectory, one on the back wall of the church and another over the sacristy door--and not one of them had come on when Mike moved into the darkness of the garden.

He stopped. The dark was complete. No light reached back here from the street or from the windows of the rectory.

He started to pick his way carefully across the damp grass again.

What was that?

Something had moved in the darkness.

He squinted into the depths of the garden, trying to make out what looked like a darker shadow than the others.

Who's there?

No reply.

What do you want?

Nothing.

His imagination?

No! He saw it again, a slight, shifting movement in the shadows.

Okay, come on out of there!

As he moved toward the deeper darkness, Mike was brought up short again, this time by an unfamiliar noise. At first he thought it was the sound of his own footsteps in the grass, a shushing, like light wind in a wheat field. But then he realized it was behind him. He looked over his shoulder.

The sound stopped

He could see nothing.

Had one of the local gangs decided that this was a good time to rob the church? How many were there?

He moved and the air behind him began to rustle.

Mike wanted to give in to his fear and head back to the rectory where he had been sitting just a few minutes earlier.

Don't you find it ironic, Mike asked Father Larry Chin, that as priests we have less time to pray than we would like?

Chin laughed and prodded a potato in the bowl of stew from the pot their housekeeper, Bridget McClusky, had left warming on the stove.

G. E. Lessing said: 'One single grateful thought raised to heaven is the most perfect prayer,' Chin quoted.

G. E. Lessing was full of shit, Mike said. You can't tell me that some eighteenth century aesthetic had the faintest idea what kind of life a twenty-first century priest would have to live.

Chin laughed and shook his head. Callahan is right, you've got the makings of a first class heretic.

Callahan is full of shit too. If he hadn't decided to get out of here and go to Mondran's funeral in the Philippines, I would have started to salt his cereal with Prozac or something.

Chin smiled. Can't say I blame you there. He's been acting pretty strange the last couple of months. In fact, he didn't even say good-bye or leave final instructions when he left for the airport. Did you drive him?

Me! Can you imagine the two of us in the same car together for an hour. I don't know how he got to the plane. One minute his bags were sitting by the door of the rectory, and the next they were gone.

Maybe, Chin suggested, he got some parishioner to give him a lift. He's too damn cheap to take a cab.

If you ask me, our good pastor is having a nervous breakdown, Mike said. And he's been trying his best to share it with the rest of us."

He's just stressed out. And now, with Ray dead in Manila, we're facing a real shortage of manpower.

As if we weren't running lean before! That's what I meant when I said, there's barely time to pray.

You want to pray? Chin asked. Here, you lock up the church tonight. The Chinese-American priest reached in his pocket and threw his keys on the kitchen table. You can go over to the church and take all the time to pray you want.

See what I mean, Mike chortled. "Now you want me to do your job too."

Just trying to help out a confrere in need.

Chin reached for his keys, but Mike grabbed them before he could pull them back.

No, that's okay. I'll take your offer.

Mike pocketed the keys and pushed his perpetually tousled brown hair out of his eyes before going back to his late meal.

How old are you Mike? Thirty-four or five?

Thirty-six.

And you've been a priest for ten years, right?

Uh-huh. Mike savored the thick Irish broth and chunky vegetables. Here it was after nine o'clock, and it was his first chance to eat since breakfast thirteen hours earlier.

I'd think you'd have learned by now that as priests we live for others. Not ourselves.

Mike nodded. I don't need a lecture, Larr. I'm just tired and frustrated tonight.

Tonight?

Mike laughed. Especially tonight. Not only was my day as full as yours, doing our best to cover for both Callahan and Mondran, but I had to finish up at a meeting with Manuel Salinas and The Sodality of the Blood of Jesus.

Ouch! No wonder you're down in the dumps. That would be enough to try the patience of a saint.

And I'm no saint, right?

Right. What are those fanatics up to now.

Mike shrugged. Who knows. I stopped in for five minutes and then blew it off.

You shouldn't do that, Mike. Those conservative loonies can be a lot of trouble.

I wasn't in the mood for their nonsense tonight.

I hear that. Just watch your back around Salinas and his buddies.

* * *

A sound came from above.

Mike looked up into the night sky. It wasn't overcast, but he couldn't see any stars.

Sound suffused the darkness, moving rapidly toward him.

Wings? Was that the sound of flapping wings filling the air.

The owl!

The old palm tree in the corner of the garden harbored a large owl which had recently claimed the yard as its own. Not only had it picked the surrounding neighborhood clean of vermin, but it had recently taken to swooping down after small pets and the bare heads of unwary parishioners.

Beating the darkness into a frightening froth of cold air, the sound thumped against the night. Louder and louder.

Instinctively, Mike ducked. Crouching, he threw his hands over his head in an attempt to protect himself from sharp, hooked talons that could tear his eyes out.

Larry's going to hear about this, he fumed. Monsignor Callahan's last order before leaving for the Philippines had been for Chin to get rid of the damn bird. Evidently, Chin hadn't done it.

Freezing air buffeted Mike. He hadn't realized the bird was so big, but he'd only seen it once. How could it stir up so much wind? The night around him filled with the stench of rotting meat as the sound swooped closer.

Mike sprang up, flailing his arms to fend off the invisible bird as he ran toward the dark doorway of the sacristy. The sound had cut him off from the rectory and he had no choice now but to find refuge in the church, where he had been headed in the first place. He had already forgotten about the possibility of intruders.

The back door of the sacristy was locked. Mike fumbled through Chin's key ring. He seemed to find a key to everything but the sacristy.

Behind him he could hear a steady thrumming in the air a few feet from his head. The all-pervasive odor of rotting offal made him gag. Visions of hunting-honed talons tearing into him filled him with terror.

Finally the right key!

Pushing his way into the sacristy, he slammed the door behind him before the claws could reach him, before the powerful beak ripped flesh from his unprotected neck.

Mike's fear was immediately replaced by anger. He grabbed the phone and dialed the three digits for the kitchen.

Good evening, honey-baked kosher hams. How May I help you?

Mike knew Chin would see that it was an internal call, and could only be from him, but he was in no mood for their old familiar joke.

The security lights are out and that damn owl came after me before I could get in here and it's your responsibility to see that the lights are working properly because Callahan told you to get rid of that freakin' owl and if you'd done what you were supposed to do I wouldn't almost have gotten the shit torn out of the back of my head.

Mike was out of breath.

Chin was silent on the other end of the line, evidently amazed at this endless flow of accusations.

You've got a vivid imagination, Mikey. The lights were working just fine a little while ago. And if you'd been around yesterday, you'd've seen the Animal Control people take the owl away.

Maybe the bird escaped. Or it has a mate or something.

Then I'll get the animal control people back first thing in the morning. If we've got to, we'll trim the palm tree down to a toothpick so nothing can live up there except a few sparrows.

Mike was suddenly mollified. He felt foolish, yelling at his friend.

I'm sorry, Larr. I'm just blowing off steam.

Steam away, buddy. I've got broad shoulders.

I'll leave your keys on the secretary's desk.

Okay. I'm turning in. Don't call me unless it's the second coming.

Mike laughed as he hung up. He could always count on Larry Chin to diffuse his frustrated anger, which seemed to happen more and frequently lately.

Mike turned to stare out across the long, dark chancel. The huge cathedral-like church was dark. Candles flickered in crevices and corners and at small shrines, islands of twinkling stars in the darkness. Distant exit lights glowed like green eyes watching from a jungle.

Mike thought he saw movement in the darkness--shadows within shadows, wispy black wraiths creeping between the dark pews, slithering toward the altar. He shivered, remembering what had just happened in the garden.

He opened the master panel to turn on a few more lights and the dark phantoms dissolved.

The additional lights did little to dispel Mike's feeling of unease. The old building was quiet. Nothing moved except the few shadows still thrown by the candles against old wood, cold stone, and polished tile. Behind the altar, on either side of the tabernacle, two wavering red lights glowed, testimony that Christ was present in the form of the Eucharist.

It looks different, Mike thought. He couldn't put his finger on it, but in a subtle way the old church no longer seemed like a familiar refuge from the chaotic world outside.

Mike walked across the marble sanctuary, listening to his own footsteps echo through the church and bounce off the walls within the altar rail.

The odor that had assailed him in the garden seemed to have followed him into the church, sweeter, more sickly, stronger.

Mike suddenly realized that he had been smelling vestiges of that odor for the past few days, whenever he said Mass. It had seemed to hover around the altar, but now it permeated the entire sanctuary.

He slipped into the first pew and made the sign of the cross. His eyes sought out the altar, the site of consecration and prayer, the place where he found the greatest peace, requite for anger and frustration, respite from doubt and skepticism.

For a moment he couldn't believe what he saw.

The plaster Christus from the life-sized crucifix that hung high above the tabernacle lay on the altar, in its crotch, the head from a statue of the Virgin Mary nestled in simulated fellatio.

Shocked, Mike sprang to his feet, his gaze moving to the cross from which the crucified Christ had come.

Now it wasn't Christ on the rough wooden cross, it was the naked body of Monsignor Frank Callahan.

The odor of putrefaction grew stronger as Mike moved back toward the sanctuary. Just as he was overwhelmed by the stench, he saw see the dark blotch of dried blood between Callahan's legs where his genitals had been removed.

Mike staggered back and turned to vomit. He banged his head against the altar rail as he fell, his stomach heaving over and over until there was nothing left of Bridget McClusky's Irish stew but bitter bile.

And then, fear filled the new emptiness in his belly as the body began to move.

CHAPTER 2

Mike watched with a mixture of fear and horror as Callahan's arms began to unwind from the crossbeam of the crucifix, like two snakes slithering from the limb of a tree.

Evidently he hadn't been nailed to the wood, but his arms had been impossibly wrapped around the cross and his feet braced on the wooden block that had once held Christ's crossed feet.

The naked corpse floated away from the cross, its white stomach bulging and stretched from burgeoning gases accumulating in its decomposing organs. Black patches dotted the pallid, cracking skin.

Mike stared in horror as the patches became a cloud of flies that stirred as the body moved. They rose into the putrid air, leaving their bloated banquet. The body looked like a dead sea creature waiting for the incoming tide to wash it away. The stench was tangible.

Callahan's vacant eyes, already melting into a glutinous gel, stared at Mike. The mouth gaped open, as if about to speak, but the black cavern in the puffy face remained silent. The great scab of crusted blood between the dead man's distended legs stood out in dark relief.

The sound of gases escaping from the body startled Mike and filled the sanctuary with a new, stinking miasma, moist and more cloying than before.

Mike scrambled to his feet, and reeling backward blindly, tried to breathe through his mouth, but oily bile filled his throat. The acrid taste of hot stomach acid coated his tongue.

He stumbled and fell to the floor, slamming against the edge of a pew, banging his head again with a stunning crack. His empty stomach heaved, wracking his body, bringing dizzying black spots and bright lights dancing before his eyes. Soon the kaleidoscope of flashing colors were drowned in complete darkness as pain pulsed in his head.

The extra lights Mike had turned on spill isolated pools of light up and down the church. But not where Mike sits on the floor. Here there are shadows. The dark pew at his back seems hot and sticky, its old, dried wood rustling with each heaving breath he takes.

Mike's ribs ache. He's still too dizzy to move. He can't take his eyes off Callahan, floating in the air, arms extended as if in greeting, offering a macabre embrace.

Mike has a sudden, irrational fear that something is beginning to stir in the dead brain behind blank eyes, where he knows there should be only an eternal darkness.

For a moment he is a child again and something is hiding under his bed, waiting to grab him the minute he closes his eyes in sleep.

But now he can see it hovering in midair.

Hail Mary full of grace...

He is a prisoner to his own inability to move, to the pulsing pain in his head, to the silent command of the floating corpse.

...The Lord is with thee...

The stink reaches him again, bursting full-force from the cadaver on roiling waves, an incredible smell.

...Blessed art thou among women...

Something sucks the air out of Mike's lungs and he can barely breathe.

The creature that was once Monsignor Frank Callahan is moving toward him.

...Holy Mary, mother of God...

A gray shadow disturbs the depths of the church. Mists of black haze stir and part so the floating corpse can drift closer.

Mike wants to close his eyes and make it go away.

...Pray for us sinners now...now...

The air around Mike is disturbed. The odor swells, a wave of putrescence. The bloated corpse stands in the air before him, legs spread, an emasculated colossus bestriding the gateway to hell. Empty eyes glare with impossible intensity.

Mike tries to finish his prayer--Now and at the hour of our death--but the words won't come. He tries to get up and run, but he is bound tightly by invisible chains.

The stinking, naked corruption seems to know this as it approaches even closer. A huge grin ripples across the dead man's face, splitting the cracking skin at the mouth until it gapes from ear to ear in a bloodless, obscene grimace.

The lips open and close. Again and again.

It's trying to talk.

Mike doesn't want to hear what it has to say.

Make it go away.

But it is as if the corpse of Frank Callahan must communicate before it can melt into the oblivion of its own extinction. It still holds its hands out in supplication.

Oh God, no!

Mike can't take his eyes from the bloated belly above the bloody, torn groin. The stretched skin is beginning to ripple with a life of its own. It bulges with small lines that swirl between the distended navel and sagging, black, tumescent nipples.

Words.

It's making words in its skin!

He watches the worm-like welts rise. They are spelling out letters, first indistinct and then becoming clearer. Defined. Legible.

Save The Child

What child?

Whose child?

Mike can't save the child.

He has already killed the child!

Years ago.

He and Maureen.

The corpse hovers in front of Mike for what seems like an eternity before the words disintegrate, writhing into a meaningless motif. The welts that a moment earlier were letters, burst open and maggots spill out, a steady flood of squirming larvae, consuming overripe flesh and dried blood.

Floating on a cushion of polluted air, Frank Callahan's moldering body slowly fades back toward the cross above the altar. It seems to fade and disappear into the darkness, leaving behind only a trail of wriggling white maggots on the floor beneath it and a stench of corruption in the air.

Mike shook his head to clear it.

There was nothing holding him down, nothing except the hard pulsing beat of pain in his head. Stomach empty, his ribs sore from dry heaves, he struggled to his feet. He was still dizzy as he leaned against the pew for support.

Had it all been a terrible dream?

He looked back toward the altar.

Mary still nestled between her son's legs and Callahan still hung, naked and dead on the cross.

No. At least part of it wasn't a dream.

Mike looked around the church, its shadows now dark and forbidding, its sparse lights revealing more horror than he hoped to ever see again.

CHAPTER 3

It was almost midnight, and the church swarmed with police. Camera flashes, small bolts of lightning, highlighted the crime scene, throwing instant, deep shadows into the corners of the sanctuary where the ineffectual red tabernacle candles winked back.

Mike and Chin stood in the middle of the church with San Francisco Police Department Detective, Hector Esposito.

Mike thought Esposito was really quite the dapper little dandy. In comparison to his own black-clad, six-foot lanky frame, the policeman's five-foot-five, compact form seemed pressed directly from the pages of Gentleman's Quarterly. Sharply creased dark brown trousers were offset by a tan tweed sport coat, beige shirt and yellow silk tie. Highly polished oxblood loafers with small leather tassels gleamed in the overhead lights. The cop sported a small, neatly trimmed, pencil-thin mustache that outlined his upper lip and followed its curve to the corners of his mouth. It made him look as if he were continually smiling.

Embarrassed, Mike watched investigators skirt the area where he had thrown up. He'd wanted to clean up the mess, but no one would let him, not until their work was done.

Can't they take the body down? Mike asked looking up at Callahan, hanging from the cross.

No. Not until the chief investigator says it's okay.

But you're the chief investigator.

And I haven't said it's okay.

The dark complexioned policeman spoke with a slight accent that reflected his Mexican heritage, but Mike thought his words were chosen to annoy in a very American way.

You get much vandalism around here? Esposito asked.

I'd say this goes beyond vandalism, Mike said.

Esposito pointed toward the tableau of Christ and Mary on the altar. One thing at a time, Padre.

There's always gang-related graffiti, Chin said. We get our share like the rest of the neighborhood.

Detective Esposito looked to Mike.

Larry's the one who keeps tabs on that kind of stuff, Mike replied, rubbing his chin. Normally he shaved twice a day, but today had been so hectic he'd been unable to find the time. Now, next to the perfectly groomed policeman he felt self-conscious and rumpled.

How long have you been in the parish, Padre?

A little over a year, Mike said.

Esposito turned toward Chin.

Five years for me, Chin replied.

And you haven't ever seen anything like this before. It was a statement rather than a question.

You mean, having our pastor crucified over the altar and that...that obscenity. Chin pointed.

They all looked again at the altar.

Where did the head come from? Esposito asked, squinting into the dim church.

Chin pointed toward a small alcove, halfway down a side aisle.

"Which Mary is it? It's been a while since I've been to church, so I sort of get my Marys mixed up.

"La Virgen De Guadelupe," Mike said.

I should have known. And you said the alarm was set?

Chin nodded. The alarm under the altar platform is on all the time except during services.

You need a ladder for that, Esposito said, looking up at the crucifix suspended from the fifty-foot high ceiling by two thin cables.

We have a couple of ladders over in the caretaker's shed, Chin offered. Have to use both of them when we take crucifix down each year for Good Friday. It's a real chore. Takes four of us. Two on the ladders and two down on the platform.

You ever try to take it down by yourself?

Can't be done, Mike interjected. It's too heavy and too awkward.

The detective silently surveyed the cables, his eyes moving from the body on the cross to figures on the altar.

Can we step outside for a bit? he asked.

Sure, Chin replied.

As they followed the policeman down the aisle toward the front door of the church, Mike turned to Chin.