Ultimate Supernatural Horror Box Set

I despaired.

The Lord oppressed me, my fellow men oppressed me, the very air oppressed me. Perhaps the only fitting place for me was in Sodom or Gomorrah, cities of the dead, hidden beneath the lifeless waves. I threw myself into the salty water but I could not drown.

Even the sea will not have me!

--from the Glass scroll

Rockefeller Museum translation

TWO

Manhattan

Father Daniel Fitzpatrick stopped in front of the Bank of New York Building, turned to the ragged army that had followed him up from the Lower East Side, and raised his hands.

“All right, everybody,” he called to the group. “Let’s stop here for a sec and organize ourselves.”

Most of them stopped on command, but some of the less alert—and there were more than a few of those—kept right on walking and had to be pulled back by their neighbors.

Father Dan stepped up on the marble base of a sculpture that looked like a pair of six-foot charcoal bagels locked in a passionate embrace and inspected the ranks of his troops.

Even if we turn back now, he thought, even if we don’t do another thing tonight, we’ll have made a point.

Already they’d garnered more than their share of attention. During the course of their long trek uptown from Tompkins Square Park they’d earned themselves a police escort, a slew of reporters and photographers, and even an Eyewitness News van complete with minicam and blow-dried news personality.

Why not? This was news, a mild spring evening, and a fabulous photo op to boot. A small army of chanting, sign-carrying homeless marching up Park Avenue, around and through the Met Life and Helmsley Buildings, to the Waldorf—the contrast of their unkempt hair, shambling gaits, and dirty clothes against the backdrop of luxury hotels and pristine office buildings was irresistible.

As Dan raised his hands again and waited for his followers’ attention, he noticed all the camera lenses coming to bear on him like the merciless eyes of a pack of hungry wolves. He was well aware of the media’s love of radical priests, so he’d made sure he was in uniform tonight: cassock, Roman collar, oversized crucifix slung around his neck. The works. He was well aware too of how his own appearance—clean-cut sandy hair, slim, athletic build, younger looking than his thirty-two years—jibed with that of his followers, and he played that up to maximum effect. He looked decent, intelligent, dedicated—all true, he hoped—and most of all, accessible. The reporters would be fighting to interview him during and after the demonstration.

And as far as Dan was concerned, that was what this little jaunt to the Waldorf was all about: communication. He hated the spotlight. He much preferred to keep a low profile and let others have center stage. But no one else was interested in this little drama, so Dan had found himself pushed into a leading role. Media-grabbing was not his thing, but somebody had to get across the message that these people needed help, that they couldn’t be swept under the rug by the presidential wannabe appearing at the Waldorf tonight.

That wannabe was Senator Arthur Crenshaw from California, and this high-profile fundraiser was a golden opportunity to confront the senator on his radical proposal to solve the homeless problem. Normally Dan wouldn’t have given a second thought to a crazy plan like Crenshaw’s, but the way it had taken hold with the public was frightening.

Camps.

Of course Crenshaw didn’t call them camps. The word might elicit visions of concentration camps. He called them “domiciles.” Why have a hundred programs scattered all over the country? Senator Crenshaw said. All that duplication of effort and expense could be eliminated by gathering up the homeless and putting them in special facilities to be built on government lands. Once there, families would be fed and sheltered together, with the children attending schools set up just for them; all adults would receive free training for gainful employment; and those who were sick or addicted or mentally ill would receive the care they needed to make them productive citizens again.

The public—especially the urban-dwelling public—seemed to be going for the Domicile Plan in a big way, and as a result the concept was gaining support from both parties. Dan could understand the attraction of getting the homeless out of sight while balming one’s conscience with the knowledge they were being cared for as they were retooled for productivity, but he found the whole idea unsettling. The domiciles did sound like concentration camps, or detention camps, or at the very least, gilt-edged prisons, and he found that frightening. So would many of the homeless folks he knew—and Dan knew plenty.

But how many homeless did Senator Arthur Crenshaw know?

These were people. It was easy to forget that. Yes, they were on the bottom rung of the socioeconomic ladder—hell, most of them had fallen off the ladder—and they sure as hell didn’t look like much. They tended to be dirty and smell bad and dress in clothing that wasn’t fit for the rag pile. They offered nothing that society wanted, and some undoubtedly had AIDS and wouldn’t be around much longer anyway. But each had a name and a personality, and they’d hoped and dreamed about the future before they’d forgotten how. Truth was, they could all vanish into smoke and the world would not be appreciably poorer; only a few would mark their passing, and even fewer would mourn them.

But they were people, dammit!

People.

Not a cause.

People.

Dan hated that the homeless had become such a trendy cause, with big-name comedians and such doing benefits for them. But after the stars took their bows, after they were limoed back to their Bel Aire estates, Dan stayed downtown and rubbed elbows with those homeless. Every day.

And sometimes at the end of a particularly discouraging day of elbow-rubbing with the folks who wandered in and out of the kitchen he ran in the basement of St. Joseph’s church, even Dan found a certain guilty attraction in Crenshaw’s Domicile Plan. Sometimes he wondered if maybe Crenshaw could indeed do more for them than he ever could. But at least with Dan they had a choice, and that was important.

And that was why they had come here tonight.

They stood quietly now, waiting for their last-minute instructions. They numbered about thirty, mostly males. Dan had hoped for more. Forty or fifty had promised to make the march but he was well satisfied with a two-thirds showing. You quickly learned to lower your expectations when working with these people. It came with the territory. After all, if they had enough control over their lives to act responsibly, if they knew how to follow through with a plan—even as simple a plan as gathering in Tompkins Square at six o’clock—they probably wouldn’t be homeless. About half of the ones who were here carried signs, most of which Dan had hand printed himself during the week. Among them:

SAY NO!

TO CONCENTRATION CAMPS

FOR THE HOMELESS!

and:

WHAT ABOUT US?

WHERE DO WE FIT IN?

and Dan’s favorite:

ARE WE OUR

BROTHER’S KEEPER?

OR DO WE TELL

BIG BROTHER TO KEEP HIM?

“All right,” he said, shouting so he could be heard in the back. “Let me say this once more in case some of you have forgotten: We’re not here to cause trouble. We’re here to draw attention to a problem that cannot be solved by putting you folks in camps. We’re here for informational purposes. To communicate, not to confront. Stay in line, don’t block traffic, don’t enter the hotel, don’t fight, don’t panhandle. Got that?”

Most of them nodded. He had been pounding this into them all week. Those who could get the message had already got it. This last harangue was for the benefit of the press microphones and the police within earshot, to get it on the record that this was intended as a strictly peaceful demonstration.

“Where’s Sister Carrie?” someone of them asked.

That had to be One-thumb George, but Dan couldn’t place him in the crowd. George had asked the question at least a dozen times since they’d left Tompkins.

“Sister Carrie is in her room at the convent, praying for us. Her order doesn’t allow her to march in demonstrations.”

“I wish she was here,” the voice said, and now Dan was sure it was One-thumb George.

Dan too wished Carrie were here. She’d done as much as he to organize this march, maybe more. He missed her.

“And I’m sure she wishes she could be here with us,” Dan shouted. “So let’s make her proud! Waldorf, ho!”

Pointing his arm uptown like an officer leading a charge, he jumped off the sculpture base and marched his troops the remaining blocks. He was just starting to position the group when Senator Crenshaw’s limousine pulled up before the entrance. Dan had a brief glimpse of the senator’s head—the famous tanned face, dazzling smile, and longish, salt-and-pepper hair—towering over his entourage as he zipped across the sidewalk, and then he was through the front doors and gone.

Damn! He’d shown up early.

He heard groans from the demonstrators but he shushed them.

“It’s okay. We’ll be all set up for him when he comes out. And we’re not leaving until he does.”

They spent the interval marching in an oval within the area reserved for their demonstration, demarcated by light blue horses stenciled in white with Police Line - Do Not Cross. Dan led them in chants updated from the sixties, like: “Hey, hey, Arthur C., why you wanna imprison me?” and “Hell, no! We won’t go!” And of course there were the endless repetitions of “We Shall Overcome.”

The choices were calculated. Dan wanted to bring to mind the civil rights marches and anti-war protests of the sixties to anyone who saw this particular demonstration on TV. Many of the movers and shakers in the country today—the President included—had participated in those demonstrations in their youth; many of them still carried a residue of nostalgia for those days. He hoped enough of them would realize that but for luck and the grace of God they might be marching on this line tonight.

As he marched and led the chants and singing, Dan felt alive. More truly alive than he had in years. His priestly routines had become just that—routine. Hearing confession, saying Mass, giving sermons—it seemed little more than preaching to the converted. The souls who truly needed saving didn’t go to Mass, didn’t take the sacraments. His priestly duties around the altar at St. Joseph’s had become...empty.

But when he left the main floor and went downstairs to the soup kitchen in the basement—the place he’d dubbed Loaves and Fishes—then he felt as if he truly were doing God’s work.

God’s work...Dan had to smile at the phrase. Wasn’t God’s work for God to do? Why was it left to mere mortals like him and Carrie to do God’s work?

And lately, in his darkest moments, Dan had begun wondering if God was doing anything. The world—at least the part of it in which he spent his days—was, to put it bluntly, a fucking mess. Everywhere he looked people were sick, hurt or dying—from AIDS, from racism, from drugs, from child abuse, from stabbings, shootings, or just plain old kick-ass muggings. And the violence was escalating. Every time Dan told himself it can’t get any worse than this, sure enough, it did.

And every year there seemed to be more homeless—more lost souls.

Tighten up on the misery spigot, will you, God? We’re up to our lower lips down here.

Yeah. Where was the hand of God in all this? Why wasn’t it doing God’s work? A long, continuous howl of agony was rising from this city, this world. The Middle East was ablaze with a fire that might never burn out; when Muslim factions weren’t targeting infidels, they were targeting each other. Suicide bombers in Israel, reprisals in Palestine, race riots if Paris, bombings in London. And Africa—a perpetual cycle of slaughter, famine, AIDS.

Was Anybody listening? Why didn’t He respond? Dan could do only so much.

Like tonight. This was doing something—or at least Dan hoped it was. An infinitesimal something. Who knew if it would accomplish anything? All you could do was try.

And then word came out that the thousand-dollar-a-plate dinner was over. The doorman started signaling the hovering limos forward. Taxis nosed in like koi at feeding time. Dan pulled Dirty Harry out of the line and set him in the middle of the circle.

“All right, everybody! He’s coming. Chant as loud as you can. Harry’s going to lead you.”

“Me?” Harry said. He had long greasy hair, a thick beard matted with the remains of his last three meals, and probably hadn’t changed his four or five layers of clothing since the winter. “I dunno what to—”

“Just keep leading them in the same stuff we’ve been doing all night,” Dan told him. “And give me your posters. I want to get up close.”

Harry lifted the sandwich-board placards over his head and surrendered them with obvious reluctance. Dan grabbed them, waved, and hurried off. He didn’t dare slip them over his own head—not after Dirty Harry had been wearing them.

He headed for the Waldorf entrance. As he squeezed between two of the barricade horses, one of the cops moved to block his way but let him pass when he saw the collar.

Ah, the perks of the Roman collar.

Celebrity gawkers, political groupies, and the just plain curious had formed a gauntlet along the path from the Waldorf entrance. Dan pushed, squirmed, wheedled, and elbowed his way to the front row where anyone exiting the hotel would have an unobstructed view of the sandwich-board’s message:

CONCENTRATION

CAMPS ARE

UNAMERICAN!

Finally he saw his man. Senator Crenshaw appeared at the door. He stopped inside the glass, shaking hands and smiling at some of the hundreds of people who’d plunked down a grand for a chicken dinner. Dan ground his teeth as he calculated how many people he could feed at St. Joe’s for the cost of just one of those dinners.

He watched him through the glass and reviewed what he knew about Senator Arthur Crenshaw, the Silicon Valley giant. At age thirty, he’d started CrenSoft on a shoestring. His software innovations earned him huge profits, which he plowed back into the company, which in turn yielded even larger profits. When Microsoft bought him out for an ungodly sum, he traded the corporate rat race for politics. He didn’t start small. He challenged an incumbent for one of his native California’s US Senate seats and won. Now he had his eye on the Presidency. He hadn’t declared himself yet, but no one seemed to have any doubt that come next winter he’d be stumping in New Hampshire when the next round of Presidential primaries rolled around.

A widower now—his wife had died five years ago—with one grown son, he was a formidable candidate. The born-again line of moral righteousness and family values he spouted guaranteed him a built-in core constituency. But he needed a broader base if he was aiming for national office, and he was steadily building that with his speech-making and his strong-featured good looks. Especially his speech-making. Crenshaw was a mesmerizing orator, whether from prepared text or off the cuff. In unguarded moments even Dan had found himself nodding in agreement with much of his rhetoric.

But when he listened carefully, Dan tapped into an undercurrent that told him this was a man who had quickly become extremely powerful in his own little world and had grown used to having things his own way, a man of monstrous self-esteem who knew—knew—he had the answers, who believed there could be only one way of doing things—the Arthur Crenshaw way.

But Father Daniel Fitzpatrick was here tonight to let him know that there were a few folks around who didn’t think Senator Crenshaw had all the answers, and that he was downright wrong when it came to the Domicile Plan.

Here he comes, Dan thought as the glass door was held open for Crenshaw by a broad-shouldered Hispanic with dark glasses and “security” written all over him.

A cheer went up from the onlookers as the senator stepped outside. Lots of normally liberal Manhattanites seemed enthralled with the man. Dan put it down to his physical resemblance to Bill Clinton, but knew it went deeper than that. The man was magnetic.

And as the cheer rose, so did the chanting from Dan’s homeless. Good for you, Harry, he thought.

Crenshaw walked the gauntlet, shaking hands and smiling that smile. When he came within half a dozen feet, Dan held up his placard and thrust it toward the senator to make sure he didn’t miss it. The dark-skinned security man moved to push Dan back but Crenshaw stopped him. He stared at the message, then looked Dan in the eye.

“Is that directed at me?”

Dan was momentarily taken aback by the man’s directness. He’d expected to be ignored. But he met the senator’s steely blue gaze with his own.

“Yes, senator. And at your out-of-sight-out-of-mind Domicile Plan. You can’t lock the homeless up in camps and think that will solve the problem.”

“I resent that,” Crenshaw said, his eyes flashing, his voice soft but forceful.

The crowd around the entrance had stopped cheering; they were listening instead. Only the chanting of the homeless from behind the barricades disturbed the sudden silence.

Dan was not prepared for this. His mouth went dry; his voice was hoarse when he replied. “And I think the homeless will resent being carted off to camps in the middle of nowhere.”

“What’s you’re connection with the homeless, father?”

“I run a kitchen for them downtown.”

Crenshaw nodded. “That’s very admirable. My hat’s off to you. But how many of their lives have you changed?”

“I don’t under—”

“How many have you gotten off the street and into some sort of self-supporting activity?”

Dan had a feeling he was being maneuvered into a corner, but he had to answer—and truthfully.

“I couldn’t say. We barely have enough money to keep them fed.”

“Exactly! They need funds and there aren’t enough funds to go around. That’s why we have to centralize our efforts to help them.” He gestured to the crowd. “Look around you, father. See these people? They support the Domicile Plan. They’re all willing to put their money where their mouths are, because they’re going to pay for the Plan with their tax dollars. But they want to see those dollars well spent. Soup kitchens only perpetuate the problem—like giving a transfusion to a bleeding patient without sewing up the wound.”

God, he’s good, Dan thought. And he means every word. He truly wants to help. That’s what makes him so convincing. But he’s still wrong!

“I couldn’t agree more,” Dan said, “but concentration camps aren’t a moral alternative.”

Senator Crenshaw’s eyes flashed with sudden anger.

“You’re handy with the loaded terms, aren’t you, father. And I’m sure you have a real talent for dishing out the soup on the breadline at your kitchen, but have you ever actually gone into a factory and worked to earn a single dime to pay for their shelter? Or your own, for that matter? Have you ever labored to grow a single grain of wheat or a single kernel of rice to feed them? Or yourself? Have you ever woven or cut or sewn a single stitch for their clothing? Or for your own? If you want to be a man of God, then limit your concerns to Godly things; but if you want to be a man of the people, then get out and sweat with them, Father. Until you do, you’re nothing but a middleman, trafficking in their troubles. A hand-wringing monger of misery, hoisting yourself up on their crosses to allow yourself to be better seen from afar. Which is fine, if that’s the way you want to spend your life. This is still a free country. But don’t block the way of those who really want to help.”

Dan was stunned by the tirade. Before he could frame a reply, Crenshaw turned away and stepped into his waiting limo. His security man closed the door, glanced at Dan with a smirk on his dark face, then slipped around to the other side.

Someone patted him gently on the shoulder. Dan looked around and saw an elderly stranger standing next to him.

“Don’t take it too hard, Father. We all know you mean well. But you just ain’t getting it done.”

Still mute, Dan turned back to the street and watched Senator Crenshaw’s limo pull away. On the surface he knew he appeared unscathed, but he was bleeding inside. Hemorrhaging. Crenshaw’s words had cut deep, right to the heart of his deepest doubts. And the elderly stranger had twisted the knife.