The Right Hand of Evil

CHAPTER 30

Father MacNeill barely slept. When the first light of the sun crept through the window of his small room on the second floor of the rectory, he wished he could pull his single thin blanket over his head and hide from the day. But he resisted temptation, despite his certainty that he would find no more rest in the brilliance of the morning than in the darkness of the night that had finally passed, so upset had he been by the last entries he and Monsignor Devlin had read in the Bible Cora Conway had entrusted to her last confessor.

The Bible that was itself a confession of the sins of the Conways.

But more than those chronicles of ancient wrongs had kept him awake. Through those early hours when sleep refused to come, he'd also had the uneasy sense that somewhere beyond the walls of the rectory, evil was afoot. He tried to tell himself it was nothing more than a reaction to the horrors of which he'd read, but the feeling stayed with him. Several times he left his bed to peer out into the darkness, searching for the source of the unease that kept him from sleep.

There had been nothing.

Nothing, at least, that he could see or hear, save for the flickering of a few jack-o'-lanterns left lit on porches or in darkened windows, and the plaintive hooting of an owl hunting in the darkness.

Yet he'd known that somewhere, concealed in the blackness, some evil was hidden. Each time he turned away from the window, he dropped to his knees in prayer-prayer that brought him no comfort. The hours seemed to stretch on forever in an endless cycle of searching, praying, and tossing restlessly on the thin pallet that was all he allowed himself for a mattress.

Now, he rose, stretched the knots of tension from his arms, pulled on his clothes, and went down to the kitchen. Putting on a pot of coffee, he went to the front door, where the Sunday newspaper would be waiting. As he was bending down to pick up the paper, something in the periphery of his vision caught his attention. The unease of the last hours flooding back to him, Father MacNeill straightened up, scanning the gardens around the rectory, the churchyard, and the cemetery. Nothing seemed amiss. But as he looked at the cemetery a second time, he saw it.

One of the mausoleums-one whose very presence had always offended him-didn't look quite right.

From where he stood on the porch of the rectory, staring at it, he could see that the door of the crypt was slightly ajar. It was the narrow shadow cast by the open door, he realized, that had caught his attention as he bent down to pick up the paper.

Going back into the rectory, Father MacNeill called the police department, and was relieved when one of his own parishioners answered the telephone. As he sat down to await the arrival of Ray Beckwith-who had spent his entire career as one-quarter of the town's tiny police force-his fingers counted the beads of his rosary. His lips moved rapidly as he silently spoke the words of his prayers, repeating them until his orisons were interrupted by the chime of the doorbell. As he opened the door, the look of mild curiosity on Sheriff Beckwith's face turned to one of concern.

"Are you all right, Father Mack?" the officer asked. "You look like you've seen a ghost."

"I didn't sleep well last night," the priest confessed. "I had a sort of-well, I suppose you could call it a premonition. And I'm afraid it might have come true."

Beckwith's brows knit into a worried frown. "What's going on?"

"I'm not sure yet," Father MacNeill said. "But something happened in the cemetery last night, and I called you right away. I didn't want to run the risk of disturbing anything."

"Disturbing anything? You mean like one of the graves?"

"One of the crypts," MacNeill told him. "Let me show you."

Together, the two men made their way through the cemetery until they were standing in front of the mausoleum. Now, though, they could see that it wasn't simply that the door had been opened.

It had been defaced, as well: above the door, staining the white marble, was a bloodred pentagram.

"Oh, Jesus," Ray said softly. "Who'd want to do a thing like that?"

The priest gazed at the pentagram in silence, and then the inscription beneath the crypt's door:

GEORGE CONWAY

BORN JULY 29, 1916

DIED JUNE 4, 1959

"I'm afraid I can think of a lot of people who might want to do something like that," the priest said, his voice grim. He shook his head. "I still don't understand why they let him be buried here. He died in sin."

Beckwith's lips pursed. "That's why they deconsecrated this part of the cemetery. That's how come the fence is around the mausoleum."

Father MacNeill shook his head. "It's still within the grounds of the church," he insisted, his agitation rising. "It should never have been done."

Beckwith sighed, unwilling to argue with the priest. "Not much anybody can do about it now. Do you want to take a look at the coffin?"

"Don't you need to find out if there are fingerprints?" the priest countered.

Beckwith shook his head. "Everything's so weathered and rough, nothing would show." He glanced around at the empty streets. "But if you want to have a look inside, we better do it now, while there's no one around. Otherwise the whole town'll be talking. Let's just not touch anything more'n we absolutely have to."

Together the two men slid the coffin just far enough out of the crypt to reveal its broken latches. As Beckwith supported the weight of the coffin, Father MacNeill carefully lifted the lid open and peered down into the moldering face of George Conway.

The man's eyes had sunk so deep into their sockets they had almost vanished, and his skin, no doubt initially treated with embalming fluid, had dried and stretched over the years, until now it was a transparent sheath over the skull itself. The teeth showed clearly, and the flesh of the neck, though still showing the abrasion of the noose that had killed him, had desiccated to the point that it seemed the black suit George Conway had been buried in had been put on nothing more than a skeleton.

The priest leaned closer. As his eyes fell on the hands that had been crossed over Conway's chest, he gasped.

The right hand was missing, severed at the wrist.

When the priest gasped, Ray Beckwith struggled to peer around the open lid, and finally worked his way far enough around the end to afford a clear view. "Oh, Christ," he whispered. "What in hell is going on?" Then, remembering to whom he was talking, he quickly apologized. Holding his breath against the odor of ancient death drifting out of the open casket, Beckwith bent to examine the corpse. The cut in the leathery skin looked fresh, and there was a clean nick in the end of one of the arm bones.

"It was done last night," the priest said softly. "I'm sure of it."

"Okay," Beckwith said. "Let's just close it up for now. I'll get a crew out here later on to examine the area more closely. Let's just have us a look around the rest of the cemetery and see if they did anything else."

Sliding the coffin back into the crypt, they closed the door as carefully as they'd handled the coffin itself, then walked through the cemetery, looking for any other signs of vandalism.

The graveyard appeared undisturbed, until they came to the grave of Cora Conway.

On a tree next to her grave, held in place by the sharpened end of a crucifix, was the skin of a dead cat, complete except for its head.

But it wasn't the grizzly hide of the cat upon which Father MacNeill's eyes instantly fixed, but the profaned crucifix.

He recognized it immediately.

It had come from inside his own church.

He turned to face the policeman.

"We're going to find out who did this," he said, his voice unsteady. "We're going to find out, or I fear all our souls will burn in Hell. Every single one of us."