Chapter 3

3

Farryn

“How do we know this world isn’t Hell, Father?” Palms sweating, I knelt before the confessional screen, the unforgiving wood sending an ache to my bones.

“We are still graced by God’s presence.” The priest’s raspy voice filled the small, cramped space that smelled of cleaning oils and age.

I’d known Father Bane for about ten years, thanks to Aunt Nelle dragging me to church every Sunday since I was fifteen. I didn’t know why I continued to attend confession every few weeks. I’d never really found comfort in the church; in fact, the confessional box itself left me feeling claustrophobic. Maybe just for a sense of loyalty to my aunt.

“Are we?” I asked. “What I’ve seen … I find that hard to believe.”

“I can assure you, there are places where the suffering is far worse.”

“Maybe. I’ve had the most terrible dreams, Father,” I whispered.

“Tell me of these dreams.”

“I’m walking through a dark field. With a blood red moon. Bodies lie scattered everywhere. Burned bodies. Mutilated bodies. Blood spattered across dark wings. But I remain unharmed.”

“Dark wings, you say?”

“Yes. Angels’ wings.”

“Pah!” he dismissed. “They’re just dreams, child.”

“It’s how I feel when I’m … dreaming them that concerns me.”

“And how is that?”

I pondered the question, recalling my most recent, which had felt more of a premonition than a dream. “Uncertain. I’m not even sure I entirely believe that angels exist.”

“Ah.” An air of intrigue lit the tone of his voice. “Well, you cannot be faulted for such things. It is the temptation surrounding us that lures us to sin and blinds our eyes to the devil’s work.”

In the quiet that followed, I lifted the sleeve of my shirt from over the birthmark on my arm. “Father, are you familiar with a group who called themselves the Pentacrux?” On glancing up and toward the screen, I just caught the quick movements of his hands.

The sign of the cross.

“I’m sorry, I do not.”

“They were a group believed to be from ancient times.”

“I said I do not know!”

At the sharp bark of his words, I didn’t press. Clearly, he’d heard of them, though.

“My apologies for being so terse.” His voice was much calmer that time. “It is not the first inquiry I’ve had about them.”

“Someone else asked about them?”

“Weeks ago, yes.” He leaned into the screen and lowered his voice. “I probably shouldn’t say anything, but he asked about you, as well.”

Frowning at that, I looked away for a moment. “Detective Hines, by chance?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact.”

“What did he inquire, if I may ask?”

“Oh, just simple questions, really. How long you’ve been coming to the church. Nothing entirely too personal.”

A cold feeling swept over me. “You didn’t tell him where I lived, or anything, did you?”

“No, no. Of course not. It was benign conversation, really.”

Hopefully, he hadn’t shared details of the few times I’d confessed, though the occasions were relatively mild. And supposedly, priests were sworn not to talk about confessions.

Despite the lingering discomfort of the detective having asked about me, there was nothing I could do about it at that point. The guy had already figured out where I worked. Probably wouldn’t take much to figure out where I lived. Desperate to push away thoughts of Hines breaking into my house at night, like some crazed stalker, I tuned my thoughts to distraction. “Father, is it possible for any one person to hold a higher purpose in God’s eyes?”

“Oh, yes,” he said, once again, making me frown at his unexpected response. “We are all born to accomplish the magnificent. The Holy Father expects some of us to fail. While others will ascend to the resplendent heights of His grace and praise. There is much work to be done. But when His eyes feast upon the glory of our toils, it will be complete exaltation!”

His exuberance cast an uneasy chill down my spine, as I sat quietly absorbing his passionate words, slightly disturbed by them. “Do you dream of things, too?”

“Yes!” he hissed and leaned into the screen. In the dimness of the confessional, I could just make out two milky white eyes staring back at me. I’d never really felt threatened, or uncomfortable, by his disability, until right then. “It is the only time I truly see.”

“How did it happen? Your blindness?”

“Parasites, as a child.”

“That’s horrible.”

“It was The Holy Father’s mercy that allowed me to become what I am today. We must never question His motives. For they will lead us to the divine.”

Sitting there for a moment, I glanced up at a flyer clipped to the wall inside the confessional--one I’d ignored when I first walked in. A special vigil for one of the choir boys who’d apparently committed suicide a couple of weeks prior.

“The choir boy who took his own life, do you believe his soul to be damned?”

“God has entrusted us with stewardship of the soul, and as such, it is not our place to carelessly dispose of such gifts.”

“Do you believe in Purgatory, Father?”

“Of course. But do not be fooled by stories of the afterlife, child. One way, or another, we all burn for our sins. Dominus vigilans.”

“Dominus vigilans. What does that mean?” I’d studied enough Latin to know it’s literal translation, but not its significance in the conversation.

“It means, watch yourself, for you are watched.”

* * *

Leaning back against the cushioned chair at Aunt Nelle’s old-fashioned desk, I stared down at the symbol on the image Hines had left me.

Boxes sat on the floor beside me--my father’s old journals that Aunt Nelle hadn’t bothered to unpack, but had locked away in a cabinet in her office. Perhaps she hadn’t wanted me exposed to his madness. It wasn’t until she’d left the aged, two-story Victorian to me in her will, as sole heir, that I’d been given access to the keys, along with a decent-sized inheritance.

The money kept me afloat. The notes? They fueled a renewed quest for answers about what had really happened to my father in those years we’d been apart.

I pulled my locket from where it lay tucked inside my T-shirt and ran my thumb over the tiny picture embedded inside. A small piece of my past that I kept with me every day.

They’d called him crazy, my father. We’d lived in a small fishing community on the east coast, where he taught Ancient Christianity and Christian Apocalyptic Literature at Yale. I’d spent the majority of my childhood on campus, oftentimes tucked away in his office, reading books.?My mother, a secondary education teacher, had homeschooled me up until fourth grade, when she’d died in a horrific car accident. Lightning had struck a nearby tree, and in swerving to miss it, my mother had veered through a guardrail and over the edge of a seaside cliff.?Tire tracks and random car parts were found after search crews combed the waters. But the vehicle and my mother were never recovered.

My father had subsequently gone through a number of stages of grief, the most notable being his obsession with the afterlife. He’d believed something had stolen my mother that night, and that it had not been an accident, as investigators had dismissed it to be. In an effort to prove as such, he’d thrown himself into his studies, closing off the world around him.

Searching for my mother in the inexplicable.

According to him, she continued to walk among us. Or in another realm.

A place called Nightshade.

His infatuation with what he’d insisted was a real world had soon become the ravings of a madman. One who’d attempted to drown me on an afternoon in early spring, when I’d just gotten home from school and my father had called me up to the second-floor bathroom. He claimed he’d fallen and hit his head while trying to start a bath, and as I’d rushed to help him, he attacked me for reasons I’d never understood. He’d thrown me into the bath and held me underwater, ranting and raving that I’d been spawned from Hell and sent to murder his wife. I couldn’t recall what had happened after that, as I’d blacked out. When I awoke, I’d found myself in a hospital bed, with a woman I’d never met telling me I’d be coming to live with her.

At his own insistence, I’d been sent back to Chicago, where my father had grown up, to live with his estranged sister, Aunt Nelle. Sometime later, he’d apparently moved there, as well, and while I wasn’t allowed any contact with him, he’d managed to keep himself in the forefront of my thoughts with the occasional gifts he’d leave behind for me. Small trinkets and tokens that would only have meaning to me, like the infinity symbol made of string that he’d left on the bannister of Aunt Nelle’s porch. I love you infinity. Something he’d always said to me as a child.

And then, one snowy, winter’s eve, Aunt Nelle had received word that my father had allegedly leapt to his death from his downtown apartment building. Like with my mother’s tragic accident, no body had been recovered. The only evidence of his apparent suicide had been a rooftop camera that showed some strange erratic behavior, as if he were talking to someone who wasn’t there, and seconds after, the lens had captured him jumping over the edge.

According to police, he’d have never survived the six-story fall. And so, it remained a baffling mystery.

I’d blamed myself. For the years that I’d acted out, distracted him from his work. And in my sadness and grief, I’d eventually followed in his footsteps and pursued degrees in subjects that I’d hoped would better help me understand him.

I rifled through the contents of the box nearest me, not finding a single reference, or note, about the Pentacrux, in the few books I’d thumbed through. Instead, I drew out a book whose seal I’d recently cracked, setting it down on the desk.

Chronicles of Nightshade.

Nightshade. The shadowed world he’d become obsessed with—a land far beyond our own world, which he’d often likened to Purgatory.

A fairytale, as far as I was concerned.

The date written on the inside page read December 21st, 2016.?Just below the date was a hand-drawn image of a crescent moon inside a circle, and at the base of the crescent, another smaller circle. The symbol for Nightshade. Like the Pentacrux symbol, it’d also plastered my father’s office walls. After tracing my finger over it, I turned the page.

The best Pri’scucian translation I could decipher were the words ‘shadow’ and ‘moon’, which I later cross-referenced in Roman text as ‘noc’tu umbraj’, or Nightshade.

Notes which followed described Pri’scucian as an ancient language that predated Enochian. When I turned the page, a diagram of what looked like stars within circles and squares with strange symbols, some overlapping the spaces like a Venn diagram, was labeled as the alphabet. After studying them a moment, running my finger over the hundreds of small symbols written in and out of the embedded shapes, I flipped the page for more of his notes.

From what I’ve gathered, Nightshade a place, not unlike our own world, but much more ancient. A parallel plane described in ancient texts as purgatory. It was believed that the Fallen walked freely there, and could traverse between our world and theirs. Human souls also occupy this plane, though the nature of how they arrive, or why, is obscure. As I understand, they are not free to come and go. Given the information and what is known, I would venture to say these souls belong to those bound for the infernal realm, or those which are easily corruptible with unfinished business.?Lost souls.

It’s here that, I’m certain, I will find evidence of my beloved Evelyn.

The journal contained notes on the concept of human souls, and mentioned articles that debated the human soul hypothesis. With relative coherence, he’d detailed how the mind and brain functioned separately from the soul, and referenced Socrates, who suggested that the soul existed after death. He also elaborated on his theories of angels and what he’d coined their essence, which he believed was something of a fingerprint of the celestial beings.

Once, in the dead of winter, he’d dragged me to the subway station to collect all the pieces of gum that’d hardened to the handrails. He claimed that the gum had effectively captured the ‘fingerprints’ of the angels, preserving them. By the time we’d returned home, I was cold and humiliated, having watched my father enthusiastically rush from handrail to handrail, collecting his evidence and laughing like a lunatic.

I’d desperately wanted to believe him, but I couldn’t. It just seemed that, my whole life, he’d made everything so ridiculous. Like believing in a story. It was fiction to me. All of it.

‘Everything has meaning,’ he’d always said to me. ‘You just have to look for the signs.’

I flipped through the pages to more notes on the angels. Ones he described as the opposite to heavenly angels. The Fallen. I’d known about them from the time I was young. My father had often warned me of their depraved and deceitful nature. They were the boogeymen I’d grown up fearing. Only slightly worse than those he called The Dark Ones, or Sentinels. According to him, the ancients called them messengers. Harbingers of death and ruin. Some were born to protect mankind, but others were made to destroy us, and due to their capricious nature, my father had never entirely categorized them as the good guys.

These beings appear to be some sort of guardian, not entirely like their white-winged counterparts. I’ve pondered the purpose of their black wings and came only to the conclusion that they are designed to disguise themselves among the winged demons.

Turning the page showed a detailed sketch of a man. Crouched on one of the stone remains of the church where I used to play, he stared off, as if distracted by something far away. His profile showed a sharp jawline. The perfect slope of a roman nose. Mature and wise eyes.

All of the details familiar to me.

For most of my childhood, I’d been plagued with visions of a stranger, always in my periphery. On the fringes of my view. He had always watched me play, and for the longest time, I thought he’d lived nearby. Perhaps in one of the few houses in the neighborhood, or as a transient from the old motel up the street from us. Every day that I’d ventured to the church, I saw him standing off a short distance from me. Not once did he approach me. He’d watch for a while then disappear.

For years, that went on, and I’d see him everywhere. At the market when I’d tag along with my father. Across the street from the school playground.

Always watching.

I’d pointed him out sometimes, but those I asked always swore there was nothing there, which quickly earned me the reputation of being crazy.?It wasn’t until I went to live with Aunt Nelle that the visions of him finally disappeared, and an inexplicable sadness, coupled with having been moved from my home, had left me in a state of depression. I was alone. Abandoned by both my father and my imaginary friend.

At least, I’d always told myself he was imaginary, but as I stared down at the sketched image, I wondered if my father had seen him the whole time, after all.

Aside from the hasty scribbles, detailing magnificent black wings that protruded from his back and spanned the width of the page, he appeared to be the exact same figure that’d essentially stalked me as a child.

An absolutely stunning creature with the most scintillating blue eyes I’d ever seen.

Was he the angel my father had always claimed to be watching over me?

Dismissing the thought, I kept on, immersing myself in more of his writing, searching for the bits on Nightshade. The more I read, the more I had to read. A nagging curiosity gripped me, pulling me deeper into the wonder of this strange world he theorized. A place which called to me for reasons I couldn’t understand.

In my reading, I’d gleaned one thing about my father: however deranged and single-mindedly obsessed he’d come to be, he’d loved my mother with fierce passion. So much so, he couldn’t bear the thought that she’d ever left him for good. In some ways, I was a bit like him myself. Ceaselessly chasing truth.