The Blessed (24 page)

“They hurt.”

Lucy reached for Agnes’s forehead as she stood up, to get a sense of her temperature, and noticed her skin felt cool and clammy. She could feel that Agnes was getting increasingly unsteady on her feet by how tightly she was beginning to hold her arm. The November daylight was fading fast as the storm was waxing once again. Without even the cold white glow of the corner streetlamps, still silenced by the blackout, night was falling unchallenged.

Cecilia proceeded to light the votives stacked on the cabinet from her single taper and positioned them throughout the room, turning the walls into funhouse mirrors of flickering shadows.

Agnes appeared flushed and sweaty.

“Let me get a look at them,” Lucy said. “Cecilia, can you bring that candle closer?”

Lucy rubbed at her eyes, which were blurry now and
watery from the dust and mildew. Agnes winced as Lucy untied the knotted fabric holding the wraps on. The black threads that cinched the wounds together were shiny in the light, and the edges of the cuts were still red, raw and oozing. Unhealed. It was in that stage where it wasn’t possible to tell if she was getting better or worse.

Lucy made an amateur but accurate diagnosis. “That’s not looking too good.”

“Don’t scare her,” Cecilia whispered harshly.

“Maybe you should leave?” Lucy pressed. “Go back to the hospital.”

“No!” Agnes shouted, mustering every bit of strength.

“She’s not going anywhere in this weather. Who even knows if there is a hospital left,” Cecilia said, taking charge. “Let’s just keep the wounds clean and dry for now.”

Agnes ambled over quickly, leaning slightly, arms limp at her sides and exposed to the dank air, as if navigating a balance beam in gym class.

“Don’t humor her. This is serious. Her wrists are infected,” Lucy said, grabbing Cecilia’s arm. “People die from this shit.”

“And they also die in tornados!” Cecilia shouted. “I’ll talk to her. Just give us a minute, okay?”

Lucy nodded.

“Do you smell something? Something sweet?” Agnes asked. “Is it roses? I smell roses.”

Now Cecilia was getting worried. Not that she could smell much of anything, but the only scent starting to come
through was the stink of rot from Agnes’s arms.

“Maybe some late bloomers survived in the courtyard,” Cecilia said unconvincingly, since it had been far too cold lately.

“I don’t want to leave,” Agnes pleaded.

“Here? Or him?” Cecilia asked, turning the faucet on and gently cleansing Agnes’s wound.

“You don’t either. I can see it in your face. Lucy’s, too.”

“We’re all going to have to leave eventually,” CeCe said. “The storm can’t last forever. Nothing can.”

“Maybe not, but we need to worry about right now,” Lucy interjected. “That door is not going to hold much longer.”

CeCe wrapped Agnes’s arms quickly and tried to think.

The heavy bronze inlaid wooden portal they’d entered through suddenly began to shimmy on its rusted hinges. It was beautiful, solid, a work of art in and of itself—or had been once, until it was allowed to fall into such disrepair. With nothing to barricade it, the door would soon be useless against the encroaching winds. The flooding rain was already beginning to seep underneath.

They felt trapped.

“We need to keep going,” Cecilia said, a new urgency in her tone.

“To where?” Lucy asked.

“There,” Agnes spoke up, pointing toward the smaller rear door.

“Outside?”

“No, Sebastian said it goes to a chapel downstairs.”

“Underneath the church?” Cecilia asked, wondering if she might be completely delirious. “Have you seen it?”

“No,” Agnes answered, turning her wrists to CeCe. “I tried to open it but I couldn’t. Sebastian said I should try again when I was ready.”

“No way the storm can touch us down there,” Lucy observed, eyeing the door.

“He said something else,” Agnes added.

“What?” Lucy asked skeptically.

“That the answers were down there.”

“Answers?” CeCe asked.

“To our questions. Why we’re here,” Agnes added.

Lucy was getting spooked. She felt Agnes was beginning to ramble, her elevated white blood cell count speaking for her, distorting her reality. And theirs. She was afraid to go down, but the alternative was far more frightening.

Cecilia grabbed a few long candles and lit them. “Hurry! It’s not safe by that door.” She handed Agnes and Lucy each a candle and they scrambled quickly for the door. “It’s now or never. Are we ready to try it?”

“Ready,” Agnes said.

“Lucy?”

“Ready,” Lucy responded.

They each took hold of the large oval knob.

“Pull!” Lucy screamed.

“We can do this!” CeCe wailed.

With all their strength they tugged at it, again and again.

The three of them.

Refusing to stop.

Until it gave way.

“We’re safe,” Agnes wheezed.

“We’ll see,” CeCe said.

They slipped through the doorway just as the sacristy door burst free of its hinges, hitting the cellar door and slamming it with a horrible thud. They were thrust into complete darkness, darker even than when they’d first arrived at the church.

Lucy lit a small candle that she’d been carrying around with her and handed it over to Cecilia, who stretched her long arms out in front of her.

“Either this is a staircase or it’s the biggest walk-in closet ever,” Lucy said. They walked slowly down. The steps were cobblestone and slick from condensation like old cellar steps in a brownstone. The smell of staleness intensified with each step downward.

With only a tiny flame to light the way, the staircase seemed endless, as if they were descending into a catacomb, the very bowels of the city, of the earth, even. The passage narrowed and headspace shrank, but the deeper they went, the safer they felt. The safest, in fact, since they’d arrived.

“All right?” Cecilia said, pausing for a moment.

“Yes,” said Lucy. “I do my best work in the dark.”

“Too many club nights,” Cecilia swiped, adding a little comic relief.

“Back at you,” Lucy lobbed.

At the bottom of the steps, another wooden door, shorter and squatter than the one above, was gradually revealed in
the candlelight, the panels painted in a medieval style—angel head statues, alert and at-the-ready expressions with child-sized hands supporting cherubic chins, rough hewn from stone rather than cast and molded in plaster, appeared to guard the entrance on either side. A cross of bone sat above the entrance.

“I don’t know about this,” Lucy said, ogling the bleached-white cruciform.

“Do you think it’s like one of those Wild West warnings? A scalp nailed to the fort door?” Cecilia put on her most ominous voice. “‘Come no farther.’”

Agnes shed a bit more candlelight on the door and ran her fingers into the groove cut into it.

Carved into the door were the words
“Omnes Sancti.”
Running along the archway from one side to the other, lettered in faded and chipped gold paint were more words that they could barely see or understand.

“You’re the Catholic schoolgirl,” Lucy said to Agnes. “Go ahead. Make your mommy proud.”

Agnes read the inscription of unfamiliar words, haltingly, phonetically.

“Probasti cor meum

visitasti nocte

igne me examinasti

et non est inventa in me iniquitas”
¹

“What do you think that means?” Cecilia asked. “I only speak pig Latin.”

“I have no idea,” Agnes offered apologetically.

“All that money down the drain,” Cecilia said, squeezing Agnes’s shoulder.

“I’m betting it says something like ‘Must be taller than this Roman numeral to ride,’” Lucy joked nervously, running her fingers along the splintered indentations of the letters like a blind person.

“No,” Agnes said, accessing what little Latin she’d learned in class. “It’s something about a trial, I think.”

“Why would there be a courtroom under a church?” Lucy asked.

“Or a prison,” Cecilia added.

Each felt the bolt of doubt and fear shoot up their spine, like the punishing electric shock from a Skinner box, but said nothing.

“C’mon,” Cecilia said, taking a deep breath. “Let’s not freak ourselves out.”

“Maybe we should wait for Sebastian,” Agnes suggested. “Who knows what’s in there?”

Lucy ignored her and stepped forward to take the lead.

“Seeing is believing,” she said, reaching for the ornate iron handle.

Lucy’s jaw dropped as the interior came into view.

“No need to wait for Sebastian. I think he knows where this place is.”

Cecilia slid by her and through the doorway into the
room, with Agnes in tow. Their reaction too was silence, turned mute by complete sensory overload.

Unlike the dinginess of the stairwell and church above, the circular room was beautifully lit with station after station of burning votives in opaque rose-colored glass cups. Semi-hardened pools of melted wax grew drop by drop on the floor beneath them. The blazing light was almost painful, shining into every crevice of the chapel. It was vibrant and bright, brimming with signs of life and reminders of death all at once.

Most striking was an enormous chandelier—more of a candelabra—hanging above the center of the chapel, made masterfully and entirely of human bones. It swayed gently at the breeze of fresh air admitted by the open entrance, candleholders full of melted paraffin bubbled menacingly, straining to contain the overflow and threatening to spill over. Bone fragments of various shapes and sizes were strewn about like broken clamshells on a pebble beach.

Two large monstrances were bookended by a small altar, legs also made from bone, along with two lecterns, each holding an open book.

The front of the altar was bordered by three wooden and velvet kneelers. Behind the altar was a floor-to-ceiling fresco of the Sacred Heart, pierced and encircled by a crown of thorns oozing blood. Four sculptures, veiled with linen sheets tied tightly with twine, sat on marble pedestals before it.

“Not a courtroom or a prison,” Cecilia observed faintly.

“A tomb,” Agnes offered.

They walked in slowly, turning their necks up and
around with each step, trying to take in the compact magnificence of the space. It was beautiful but eerie, conjuring a far more intense reaction in them than the larger edifice above.

Heavy leaden stained glass windows depicting horrific scenes of torture and death, brought nearly to life in the flickering flames, lined the perimeter. Beheadings, beatings, burnings, and worse were ornately rendered in the most beautiful and gruesome detail. In the shimmering candlelight, the windows took on an almost 3D quality, their images floating on the fog as if at the command of a midnight movie projectionist. It was part chapel, part chamber of horrors.

“We think
we’ve
got problems,” Cecilia said to Lucy, studying the panels.

Cecilia thought it was odd that the perimeter was lined with windows when it was literally impossible for any natural light to sweep through them at that depth.

Lucy walked over to one of the pedestaled figures and unsuccessfully attempted to loosen the knot. In front of the statues on a base of its own, Cecilia saw a gold-framed glass case, the same exact one from her nightmare, misted over and shattered on the front side, through the haze. She wiped the dust and grime away carefully, looking for the rings from her dream.

She rolled the grit around her fingertips for a while, confused.

“What is this place?” Cecilia mused.

“A crypt?” Agnes said, awestruck.

“This actually looks like a place I visited with my father in the Czech Republic,” Lucy said. “Like an ossuary. A bone closet. It was a chapel constructed entirely of skeleton parts under the Cemetery Church of All Saints.”

“You went there for vacation?” Cecilia asked.

“It was grotesque, but extraordinarily beautiful at the same time, just like this place,” Lucy explained. “All these bones of people who died during the Black Death were dug up and intricately sculpted into furniture and religious fixtures by a half-blind monk.”

“It just keeps getting better,” CeCe murmured.

“It was an unbelievable sight, like this. A work of art. A real masterpiece. We talked about it for hours, days, after,” Lucy rambled, the thought of being with her dad forcing out the fear that was making its way in as she scanned the windows that lined the entire perimeter of the room.

Agnes approached the lecterns on either side of the altar and stopped. Both books were open. One book was clearly a Bible; a five-ribbon marker hung from it and she opened the book to the page indicated by the first one. It read
“Psalmus.”
Frustrated at both her difficulty seeing the pages in the smoky room as well as her inability to read it, she moved over to the other lectern and noted three bookmarkers streaming from that book.

It was a leather-bound and elaborately illustrated tome, sitting inside a wooden case. A tiny key, for a lock, she assumed, sat on the open pages. She’d never seen anything like it and browsed through with the utmost care. It was
the first book she’d ever seen that needed protection.
Did it need to be locked up to protect it, or to protect others from it?
she wondered to herself.

“Are those the instructions for this place?” Cecilia asked sarcastically.

“Sort of,” Agnes said, slowly turning pages. “It’s stories. Biographies, I think.”

Like the markings on the door, the text was in Latin and very old, as far as she could tell. She grasped the book and turned to its front cover.

It read
“Legenda Aurea.”

Lucy tried to make sense of a bunch of random items—a life-size wooden box in the shape of a person, like a sarcophagus with eyeholes but without any of the facial detail, carved from wood with a hinged opening, the lid inscribed with more Latin that she couldn’t understand:

Mortificate ergo membra vestra quae sunta super terram
²

She opened it and was shocked to find rows of fine needles and short spikes affixed to the interior. Frightened, she stepped away, afraid to touch the box or even to close it. It was far more scary than sacred to her. But not as horrifying as what she stumbled upon next to it.