On the Third Day Read online

  The brilliantly shining blood rode on Father Thomas’ brow like a ruby diadem. It was hypnotic, as were the words pulsing through Father Prescott’s brain. Something was trying to surface, some singular, horrible truth, but he couldn’t quite make it out through the assault of light, blood, and sound on his senses. Corpum. Sanguinus. They signified the body and the blood. Donovan’s eyes snapped open and he stared, dazedly, at Father Thomas.

  “No,” Donovan whispered. “My God, no.”

  The words barely passed his lips. The sound was dampened and swallowed. Donovan fought another step forward, the muscles in his legs corded and taut. There were no wafers. There was no wine. There was nothing on that altar for Father Thomas to bless except himself. “No!” Donovan screamed the word, and it became audible. He didn’t shatter the silence, nor did he break the spell that Father Thomas and the Mass had woven, but he was heard. What had been a dynamic of one point had become, for a brief moment, two.

  There was a rustle of sound. It did not come from Thomas, or from the direction of the altar, but from all around. Donovan didn’t react at first. He assumed it was just another aspect of whatever prevented his progress, and he did not feel strong enough to deal with any sort of distraction, so he fixed his gaze on Thomas, mouthed his single syllable negative once more – again making a ripple in the fabric of the moment, and took another step forward.

  In that ripple, Donovan became aware of those around him. Not just a single focused entity, the congregation moved separately. They drew away, one from another. There were no drastic movements. No one spoke in answer, and no one rose to join him in the aisle.

  Still, they knew he was here, and he hoped it would be enough. He turned and scanned the pews to his right. He wanted to catch the eye of someone strong enough to help, anyone who might aid him along the aisle and up to the altar.

  They stared, grim and unwavering. They focused their separate, and yet somehow collective gaze on him, even as Father Thomas drew them back toward the altar. Donovan spun to the left and it was the same. Their bodies faced forward. Their hands were clasped, but every face was turned toward him. Every expression asked him why and screamed at him to stop. They pinned him in place with the depth of their hunger and the cold, clammy grip of their accusation.

  Their eyes were open very wide, so wide that they spread across more of each face than was possible. This did not disturb Donovan as it should. Some part of his mind registered it as wrong – impossible – but he returned their stares and as he did the eyes widened, and then again, spreading out until all he saw, all that there was to see, were the whites of a hundred hundred eyes, their gaze focused on him, driving against him and pounding into his skull.

  Donovan held that collective gaze as long as he could, but it was too much. He choked out a cry and closed his eyes. He wanted to bring up his hands to shield him from the onslaught, but he found that they were too heavy, drooping limp and useless at his sides. His thoughts wound in and around the image of Father Thomas. The image of the statue, so far away, with the blank dirt at its feet. Gladys Multinerry’s face. Father Fernando’s face. The jungle and the blood.

  It was too much. He opened his eyes, ready to face whatever waited if it would just replace the thoughts slamming about in his head.

  * * *

  It was dark. The moon had slipped behind the cover of a cloud, and though it rimmed the misty white barrier in silver, the shift from the brilliance of Father Thomas and the dim sunlight from the overhead windows robbed Donovan of his sight. It took a moment for him to make out the form of the statue before him. It took a moment longer still before he sensed those around and behind him. They stood very still, but they lined the square, three, maybe four deep. The villagers had gathered and ringed him – concentric semi-circles stretching to the walls beyond and into the streets and alleys, out of sight.

  Donovan turned very slowly. They glared at him. The faces were different, but the expression was the same. There was desperation for something no longer within their grasp. Donovan bore the weight of their loss, and their anger. They murmured softly among themselves, but he could make out none of the words. Then the villagers started forward, and a single man, standing a foot closer to Donovan than the others, held up a hand. They stopped, clearly unhappy, and waited.

  Father Fernando faced Donovan in open hostility. He held his arms out to his sides, as Father Thomas had done on the altar, but there was no blood. He held his congregation back by the symbolic stretch, but it was unclear in his expression whether he intended to maintain that control, or release the flood. There was none of the understanding that Donovan remembered in that expression, nor was there any humility or respect. There was a single question, a word not uttered – why.

  Donovan had no answer.

  Father Fernando’s face blurred. For an instant Donovan thought it was tears that caused it, and he braced for the sting of salt in the corners of his eyes, but it never came. The image of Father Fernando clarified and he saw that the man had grown taller and slightly broader. The priest’s hair, which had been straight and black, cropped at the shoulders, lightened.

  In the next instant it was Father Thomas who stood before him. Donovan held out a hand. There was no anger in the younger priest’s expression, no accusation, but he did not reach to take Donovan’s offered hand, and he did not speak. Then Father Thomas’ face blurred, and Donovan watched the features drip down, melting like the wax of a candle. He saw, just for a second, the bright flaming light and the crimson of the blood.

  The tears came. They flooded his eyes, ran down his cheeks and under his collar and he could not lift a hand to wipe them away. He couldn’t see anything clearly. He tried to step forward, but his limbs were rigid. He might as well have been the stone statue of Peter the martyr, buried in the earth and anchored by the centuries.

  Once more, he closed his eyes.

  * * *

  He opened them on another place. He stood alone once more, facing a wall made of rough-cut wood.

  Donovan didn’t try to move at first. He scanned the wall before him, determined to understand what was happening. If he could make sense of a single moment, he thought, maybe he could draw that moment back to his own reality. If he understood, the pain might subside, and the weight of those eyes – too many eyes – might lift from his shoulders.

  The wall stretched out about ten feet to either side. Above it ended in a peaked roof, roughly shingled with cut-wood shakes. To either side of the building, for he now saw that this is what it was, he sensed only darkness. This place – this barn, or shed, or whatever it was – stood alone in the center of a void, and he before it.

  He heard a steady sound echo in the immense silence. He concentrated, and after a moment recognized it as a drip. Water steadily splashed against a hard surface. He glanced up to the center of the wall before him and saw that there was a dark spot at the point where the wall met the roof. The stain was slowly spreading, and as he watched, fascinated, one long slow rivulet of moisture broke free of that darkness and rolled lazily down the wall.

  A second drop followed closely behind the first. Once the integrity of the gathered moisture’s bubble was breached, drips and trails scattered and ran down the knotted wood of the wall in tiny floods. Donovan watched as they wound over and around one another, filling cracks and swirling through knotholes on their way to the ground beneath his feet. This ground was as obscured from his sight as whatever lay beyond the walls to either side. He was forced to focus, and found that he did not need to be forced, that he was fascinated.

  Shapes appeared in the dripping moisture. Geometric patterns, curves – a myriad of tiny cracks revealed in dark contrast as the liquid filled them, like hieroglyphics carved into the wood by time, insects and entropy. Donovan studied each mark carefully. He leaned closer, not raising his hands, or trying to step forward, just bending at the waist to bring his face closer. It was here, he knew, the answer that eluded him – the reason for all that was happen
ing, and the solution to bringing it to an end. All of it was written in the tiny cracks and larger fissures of this simple wooden wall.

  There was a tangy, pungent aroma in the air, and he breathed deeply, trying to sort it out. He expected the ozone-washed scent of rain, clouds overburdened and pouring their excess back to the earth to be born again as other clouds. That wasn’t it. He thought back through his childhood, a thousand treks through the woods, old buildings explored and trees climbed. He thought of incense, and flowers, gardens he’d strolled through and jungles that had wrapped around him like giant green folding hands, separating him from the world beyond their borders.

  He thought of the jungle. For some reason the scent reminded him of his time there, but it was such a rich store of memory. The loamy, damp soil. The underbrush, ripe with floral scents and the musky presence of animals. The insects buzzing and flitting through air misted with pollen. The clearing, and the cross.

  They had watched him there, as well. The same desperation, and the same almost frantic hunger had warred in their eyes with a desire for relief. The air had been charged, each time he knelt in the clearing, with something more than sunlight. Not hope, exactly, but desire. A desire for completion, whatever the cost. Miracle, desecration, or natural phenomenon, they had wanted release.

  The stains on the wood darkened, and Donovan cried out softly. It was not water, as he’d first thought, that rolled down the side of the old building. The liquid was deep red, thicker now than when it began, and as it continued to drain from above, it left marks and patterns in its path. They were not new to the wood, he could see this, but had merely needed the catalyst of liquid to draw them back to the surface of the wood.

  He saw the eyes first. They were dark, haunted and upturned. The hair flowed over and around a high forehead and dropped down over indistinct shoulders. Tears were etched by raised splinters and rolled down the anguished face that came to life before his eyes.

  Donovan blinked, and it was no longer Jesus staring at him. He knew this image, had seen it and studied it and cast it aside. The virgin mother watched him calmly. Her features were vague, but the shape of the Madonna was unmistakable in the contours of the old planks and knotted wood. Donovan stared, started to speak, and then held his silence.

  When he’d seen this image the first time, it had been faded. There had been almost no way to make out any certain features – the rainy season had passed, and the clogged gutters that had caused the stain held nothing but dry leaves and cobwebs. He had not seen this – though he knew that, even if he had, it would not have changed the outcome of his report. It was a natural occurrence. It was not a miracle, because miracles required the active hand of God for validation.

  And what, he thought suddenly, had caused the clog in the drain? Who had made the leaves and woven the cobwebs? Who had used the years and the weather to carve the pattern before him into the wood? Whose was the hand behind it all?

  A second blink, and the image of the Christ returned. A third and it was Father Thomas, staring at him beseechingly. Then Bishop Michaels, glaring at him, half-afraid himself that Donovan would say something, or see something, that it would all be true and his carefully crafted reality would tumble about his ears.

  Was it so different? Was Donovan himself any more true in his quest to proven or disprove what he found? Did it require proof? Should it? If enough people believed that God was behind a thing, was it man’s job to scoff and explain to them that the Earth itself provided their miracles? Who provided the Earth?

  The thoughts pounded through his head. The images flickered, one after another, blood-soaked on an abandoned barn wall. The sound, so recently diminished, returned. His pulse was a huge drum, and each time it forced blood through his neck he felt a surge, as if it would burst its bonds, or there was no room for it to pass. The pressure fuzzed his thoughts.

  The voices crashed in on him, suddenly as clear as the image had been when the drip of blood or water or whatever it was had ceased.

  “I believe in God.”

  “Hic est inem corpus meum.”

  “Hic est inem sanguinus Meus.”

  “I believe in God.”

  Father Prescott dropped to his knees in the dirt. He felt the soft earth give beneath his weight, and he bowed his head. His hair brushed close to the wooden wall, but didn’t quite touch. He found that he could use his arms again, and he raised his right hand to cross himself before clasping both before him and lowering his head still further. He closed his eyes.

  When he opened them again a few moments later, he knew he knelt on the carpeted floor of the Cathedral of San Marcos. To either side he felt the presence of others, of the wooden pews and beyond them the ornate walls and high windows.

  He tried to raise his head, but found that he could not. An unseen weight rested on his shoulders, holding him in place and bowing his head. He was close enough to make out the patterns in the carpet. He glanced forward in the direction of the altar and saw a puddle had formed ahead of him. Blood dripped down from somewhere above, ran down the final step to the aisle and pooled there. As it continued to flow, the blood broke loose from the boundaries of the puddle and worked slowly and inexorably toward the point where Donovan knelt, watching it’s approach.

  The voice of the congregation rose about him. The sound filled the air, ceiling to floor and teased over his skin. He felt a ripple of energy along his spine and shook uncontrollably in its grip.

  “Through Him, with Him, in Him, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, all glory and honor are Yours, Almighty Father, for ever and ever. Amen.”

  Donovan tried again, and found that he could lift his head a few inches. He followed the trail of blood to the base of the altar. It had pooled on the surface and on each step leading down. It ran down the face of the polished wood, and as he watched, the trickles of blood took on life of their own. The shift was not subtle, as it had been in the knotted pine boards of the old barn, but sudden and distinct. One moment he stared at dripping rivulets of blood, and the next they formed letters.

  Donovan gasped. Clearly written in brilliant red were the words he’d known he would see, the words he’d stolen from the soil and snatched from the hungry eyes of Father Fernando and his villages. The words of the martyr, Peter.

  “I Believe in God.”

  Father Prescott mouthed them softly, and the whisper rushed through the room with the roar of a great wind.

  One final time, Father Prescott closed his eyes. Then, with fear and joy and a rush of emotion he could neither understand nor control, he raised his head and opened them wide.

  ~ Twenty-Four ~

  It took an eternity for Father Prescott to raise his eyes and fully take in the spectacle before him. His gaze followed the trail of blood in reverse, tracking it up the polished wood front of the altar, over the carpeted edge, and beyond. It had puddle and spread, thick and sticky, and the copper-tainted scent and taste permeated the air. That was the scent he’d recognized from the jungle. It was the blood, more blood than was possible to contain in a single human form. More blood than Donovan had ever seen at one time, even in the jungle.

  He saw the hem of Father Thomas’ vestments first. The thick, ornate cloth blended almost perfectly with the crimson pool on the carpeted floor. It was, in fact, impossible to tell where the priest ended and the floor began. The blood was too thick, still rolling down the folds of material like a ruby waterfall. The robes were lost in the puddle at Father Thomas’ feet and flowed up his legs. He might have been a Cardinal, or some great Pontiff in brilliant red robes in that light, and that moment.

  Donovan forced his gaze up another foot to Father Thomas’ chest. There were criss-crossed veins of red running down the front of the priest’s body. His torso was not as thickly coated as his legs seemed to be, but where the blood did flow it poured, dripping down to blend with the small lake and rivers beneath.

  Father Thomas’ arms were stretched out to either side, rigid as any cross. His palms wer
e upraised, but turned at the wrists, which were held flat and torn. Ragged holes pierced each, and the shadow of something protruded from them, something that Donovan could not make out – and wasn’t sure he wanted to make out. He followed the trail of blood back down one arm to the chest and lifted his eyes a final time.

  Father Thomas’ face was transformed. It was still the man Donovan knew facing him, but only in very general terms. The priest’s eyes were sunken, deep pits of pain. Tears flowed from the corners of his eyes to blend with the steady stream of blood trickling from his brow. Again, though there was nothing there to see, Donovan got the shadowy impression of something beyond the mundane reality he’d lived his entire life celebrating. The shadow of a thorny wreath had wrapped itself around and around Father Thomas’ brow. It was from beneath this that the blood flowed, or possibly, Donovan thought, from within it.

  He was struck again by the impossible amount of blood, but he couldn’t spare it any concentration at that moment. He lifted his head a final time to the huge, bas-relief crucifixion on the wall above and behind Father Thomas. Father Thomas was a microcosm of that figure, and for just a moment Donovan was certain he saw tears flowing from the carvings eyes to drop down the gleaming, brightly painted frame.

  He met Father Thomas’ gaze and placed a hand on the rug before him for balance. He wanted to rise, and to walk forward, but the young priest held his gaze, and he did not. He remained on his knees. The pained expression painted across Father Thomas’ features shifted ever-so-slightly toward a smile. Then, without seeming to move his lips, and without any warning, Father Thomas spoke, still in Latin, and never dropping Donovan’s gaze.

  “Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis.”

  Father Prescott’s heart pumped faster. He grew dizzy, and was suddenly very glad for the hand he’d put out for balance. The words fell like honey from Father Thomas’ lips. Donovan heard them clearly and was certain that every other person in the cathedral had heard them as well, though Father Thomas did not seem to raise his voice, or to strain.