Vespers

I

It was his custom to reflect upon worldly problems during evening prayers, reciting the litany by rote, the prayers a mumbled counterpoint to his silent thoughts.

The Priest. At such times, he thought of himself as The Priest. The T and the P capitalized. The Priest. As if by distancing himself in this way, by referring to himself in the third person as if he were someone not quite himself... a character in a novel or a movie, perhaps... someone outside his own body, someone exalted and remote, to be thought of with reverence as solely The Priest. By thinking of himself in this manner, by sorting out The Priest's problems as the problems of someone other than himself, Father Michael could... Because, you see...

It was he, Father Michael, who could find comfort ... the hateful threats in the rectory... this is blackmail, blackmail... the pounding at the central portal doors... the black boy running into the church, seeking sanctuary, Hey man, hep me, they goan kill me!

Blood running down his face... gone to ruin, all to ruin.

Graffiti on the massive stones of the church, barbarians on ponies storming the gates. Almost six weeks since all of that ... today was the twenty-fourth of May, the day of Ascension all that time, almost six weeks, and he was still on his knees to... I came forth from the Father and have come into the world; now I leave the worm to return to the Father, alleluia!

There was the sweet scent of roses on the evening air.

The roses were his pleasure and his vice, he tended them the way he tended the Lord's flock.

Something still and silent about tonight. Well, a Thursday. The name itself. Something dusky about the name, Thursday, as soft and silken as sunset.

Thursday.

God is rich in mercy; because of his great love for US... I'll tell, I'll tell everything... The boy's blood dripping on the marble floor before the altar.

The vengeful cries echoing inside the church.

Still on his knees... by this favor are you saved. Both with and in Christ Jesus, he raised us up and gave us a place in the heavens.

Beyond the high stone walls of the garden, The Priest could see the sooted upper stories of the buildings across the street, and yet above those, beyond those, the sunset-streaked springtime sky.

The aroma of the roses was overpowering. As he moved past the big maple set exactly at the center of the garden, a stone bench circling it, he felt a sudden suffusion of love.., for the roses, for the glorious sunset, for the power of the words that soared silently in his prayers, God our Father, make us joyful in the ascension of your Son Jesus Christ, may we follow him into the new creation, for his ascension is our glory and our hope. We ask and noticed all at once that the gate in the wall was open.

Standing wide.

The setting sun striking it so that it cast a long arched shadow that reached almost to the maple itself.

He had thought... Or surely, Martha would have... He moved swiftly to the gate, painted a bilious green by a tasteless long-ago priest, and yet again recently with red graffiti on the side facing the street.

The gate was wooden and some four inches thick, stone walls on either side of it, an architectural touch that further displeased The Priest's meticulous eye.

The narrow golden path of sun on the ground grew narrower yet as he swung the gate closed on its old wrought-iron hinges.., narrower.., narrower.., and then was gone entirely.

Alleluia, come let us worship Christ the Lord as he ascends into heaven, alleluia t The lock on the gate was thoroughly modern.

He turned the thumb bolt.

There was a solid, satisfying click.

Give glory to the King of kings, sing praise to God, alleluia t His head bent, he turned and was walking back toward the rectory, past the shadow-shrouded maple, when the knife... He felt only searing pain at first.

Did not realize until the second slashing blow... Knew then that he'd been stabbed... Turned... Was starting to turn...

And felt the knife entering again, lower this time, in the small of the back... Oh dear God... And again, and again, and again in savage fury...

Oh Jesus, oh Jesus Christ...

As complete darkness claimed the garden.

Not a day went by without Willis expecting someone to fred out about her. The open house tonight was on the twelfth floor of a renovated building about to go co-op. There were a great many strangers here, and strangers were dangerous. Strangers asked questions. What do you do, Mr. Willis? And you, Miss. Hollis? Willis and Hollis, they sounded like a law firm. Or perhaps a dance team. And now, ladies and gentlemen, returning from their recently completed tour of the glittering capitals of Europe. we bring you... Willis... and Hollis!

The questions about himself were merely annoying; he wondered why everyone in America had to know immediately what everyone else in America did. He was sometimes tempted to say he sold crack to innocent schoolchildren. He wondered what sort of response that would get. Tell them you're a cop, they looked at you with raised eyebrows. Oh, really?

Cut the crap and tell us what you really do. Really, I swear to God, I'm a cop, Detective/Third Grade Harold O. Willis, that's me; I swear.

Looking you over. Thinking you're too short to be a cop, a detective, no less, and ugly besides with your curly black hair and wet brown eyes, let me see your badge. Show them the potsy. My, my, I never met a real live police detective before, do you work in one of those dreadful precincts we're always reading about, are you carrying a gun, have you ever killed anyone? The questions. Annoying, but not dangerous.

The questions they asked Marilyn were dangerous.

Because there was so much to hide.

Oh, not the fact that they were living together, this was already the Nineties, man, nobody even thought about such things anymore. You got married by choice, and if you chose not to, then you simply lived together. Had children together, if you could, did whatever you wanted, this was the Nineties. And perhaps.., in such a climate of acceptance.., you could even.., well, perhaps.., but it was extremely unlikely. Well, who the hell knew? Maybe they could, after all, come right out and say, Look, people, Marilyn used to be a hooker.

The raised eyebrows again.

Oh, really? Cut the crap and tell us what she really did.

No, really, that's what she really did, I swear to God, she used to be a hooker. She did it for a year or so in Houston, and ended up in a Mexican prison on a dope charge, and then picked up the trade again in Buenos Aires where she worked the streets for five years, more or less.

Really. That's what she used to do.

But who would believe it?

Because, you know, you looked at Marilyn, you saw this woman who'd be only twenty-six in August, slender and tall, with long blonde hair and cornflower blue eyes and a complexion as flawlessly pale as a dipper of milk, and you thought No, not a hooker.

You didn't survive being a hooker. You didn't come off six years of peddling tail -. not to mention the time in that Mexican hellhole, and look like this. You just didn't. Unless you were Marilyn. Then you did.

Marilyn was a survivor.

She was also a murderess.

That was the thing of it.

You opened the hooker can of peas, and everything else came spilling out.

The cocktail party was in a twelfth-floor corner apartment, what the real estate lady kept calling the penthouse apartment, although Willis didn't think it looked luxurious enough to warrant such a lofty title.

He had been in court all day long and had come up here against his better judgment, at the invitation of Bob O'Brien who said there'd be good booze and plenty to eat and besides neither of them would run the risk of getting shot, a distinct possibility if ever you were partnered with a hard-luck cop like O'Brien.

He'd called Marilyn to tell her that O'Brien's girlfriend Maizie - who turned out to be as ditsy as her name would be coming along, and maybe the four of them could go out to dinner later, and Marilyn had said, sure, why not? So here they were with the sun just gone, listening to a real estate lady pitching renovated apartments to supposedly interested prospects like O'Brien who, Willis discovered for the first time tonight, planned to marry Maizie in the not-too-distant future, lots of luck, pal.

It was Maizie who looked like a hooker.

She wasn't. She worked as a clerk in the D.A.'s office.

But she was wearing a fuzzy pink sweater slashed in a V over recklessly endangered breasts, and a tight shiny black skirt that looked like a thin coating of crude oil, and high-heeled, ankle-strapped black patent leather pumps, a hooker altogether, except that she had a tiny little girl's voice and she kept talking about having gone to high school at Mother Mary Magdalene or some such in Calm's Point.

The real estate lady was telling Willis that the penthouse apartment, the one they were standing in this very moment, was going for only three-fifty negotiable, at a fixed eight'and-a-quarter percent mortgage with no points and no closing fees. Willis wondered if he should tell her that he was presently living in a town house uptown that had cost Marilyn seven hundred and fifty thousand-dollars. He wondered if there'd be any former hookers living in this fine renovated building.

In her high, piping voice, Maizie was telling someone that a nun named Sister Letitia used to hit her on her hands with a ruler.

O'Brien was looking as if he expected to get shot at any moment, Marilyn wondered out loud how such a reasonable mortgage rate could be offered in this day and age.

The real estate lady told her that the sponsor was a bank in Minnesota, which meant nothing at all to Willis. Then she said, "What do you do, Mrs. Willis?”

"It's Hollis," Marilyn said.

"I thought..." She turned to Willis. "Didn't you say your name was Willis?”

"Yes, but mine is Hollis," Marilyn said. "We're not married.”

"Oh.”

"The names are similar, though," Willis explained helpfully.

"And are you in police work, too, Miss. Hollis?”

"No, I'm a student," Marilyn said.

Which was the truth.

"My education was interrupted," she said.

And did not amplify.

"What are you studying?”

All smiles, all solicitous interest; these were potential customers.

"Well, eventually, I want to be a social worker," Marilyn said. "But right now, I'm just going for my bachelor' s.”

All true.

"I wanted to be a doctor," the real estate lady said, .and looked at Willis. "But I got married instead," she added, as if blaming him for her misfortune.

Willis smiled apologetically. Then ha trn, t, O'Brien and said, "Bob, if you plan on staying a while longer, maybe me and Marilyn'll just run along, okay?”

O'Brien seemed to be enjoying the warm white wine and cold canap6s.

"See you tomorrow," he said.

"Nice to meet you," Maizie said to Marilyn.

The church garden was crowded now with two ambulance attendants, three technicians from the Mobile Crime Unit, an assistant medical examiner, two detectives from Homicide, a woman from the Photo Unit, and a uniformed Deputy Inspector from Headquarters. The D.I. was here because the police department in this city was largely Irish-Catholic, and the victim was a priest.

Detective Stephen Louis Carella looked out at the assembled law enforcement officers, and tried to remember the last time he'd been inside a church.

His sister's wedding, wasn't it? He was inside a church now. But not to pray. Well, not even technically inside a church, although the rectory was connected to the church via a wood-paneled corridor that led into the sacristy and then the old stone building itself.

He looked through the open rectory doorway and out into the garden where roses bloomed in medieval splendor. Such a night. On the paved garden floor, the priest lay as if dressed in mourning, wearing the black of his trade, festooned now with multiple stab and slash wounds that outrioted the roses banked against the old stone walls. A small frown creased Carella's forehead. To end this way, he thought. As rubble. On such a night. He kept looking out into the garden where the crowd of suits and blues fussed and fluttered about the corpse.

Carella gave the impression even standing motionless with his hands in his pockets of a trained athlete, someone whose tall, slender body could respond gracefully and effortlessly to whatever demands were placed upon it. His appearance was a lie. Everybody forgot that middle age was really thirty something. Ask a man in his mid-to-late thirties if he was middle-aged, and he'd say Don't be ridiculous. But then take your ten-year-old son out back to the garage and try to play one-on-one basketball with him. There was a. look of pain on Carella's face now; perhaps because he had a splitting headache, or perhaps because he always reacted in something close to pain when he saw the stark results of brutal violence. The pain seemed to draw his dark, slanting eyes even further downward, giving them a squinched, exaggerated, Oriental look.

Turn a group photograph upside down, and you could always pick out Carella by the slanting eyes - the exact opposite of almost anyone else in the picture.

"Steve?”

He turned from the open doorway.

Cotton Hawes was leading the housekeeper back in.

Her name was Martha Hennessy, and she'd become ill not five minutes ago.

That is to say, she'd thrown up. Carella had asked one of the ambulance crew to take her outside, see what he could do for her. She was back now, the smell of her vomit still lingering in the rectory, battling for supremacy over the aroma of roses wafting in from outside. She seemed all right now. A bit pale, but Carella realized this was her natural coloration. Bright red hair, white skin, the kind of woman who would turn lobster red in the sun. Green eyes. County Roscommon all over her.

Fifty-five years old or thereabouts, wearing a simple blue dress and sensible low-heeled shoes.

She'd told them earlier that she'd found Father Michael in the garden as she'd come out to fetch him for dinner. That was at a little after seven tonight, fifteen minutes before she'd starting throwing up. It was now seven-forty; the police had been here for ten minutes.

"I sent one of the blues out for coffee," Hawes said. "Mrs. Hennessy said she might like some coffee.”

“Actually," she said, "I asked Mr. Hawes if I could make some coffee. We've got a perfectly good stove...”

"Yes, but...”

“Yes," Carella said, almost simultaneously, "but the technicians will be working in there.”

“That's what Mr. Hawes told me.

But I don't see why I can't make my own coffee. I don't see why we have to send out for coffee.”

Hawes looked at her.

He had explained to her, twice, that this entire place was a crime scene. That the killer might have been anywhere inside the church or the rectory before the murder. That the killer might even have been in the priest's small office, where one of the file cabinet drawers was open and papers presumably removed from that drawer were strewn all over the floor. Now the woman was questioning, for the third time, why she could not use the priest's kitchen. where, among other utensils, there were a great many knives. He knew he had adequately explained why she could not use the kitchen or anything in the kitchen. So how had he failed to communicate?

He stood in red-headed perplexity, a six-foot-two-inch, hundred-and-ninety-pound, solidly built man who dwarfed the Hennessy woman, searching for something to say that would clarify why they did not want her using the kitchen.

There was an unruly white streak of hair over his left temple, a souvenir from a slashing years ago while he was investigating a burglary. It gave his haircut a somewhat fearsome Bride of Frankenstein look, which, when coupled with the consternation on his face - made it appear as if he might throttle the little housekeeper within the next several seconds, a premise entirely distant from the truth. Side by side, the two red-heads stood, one huge and seemingly menacing, the other tiny and possibly confused, a blazing torch and a glowing ember.

Carella looked at both of them, not knowing Hawes had already explained the sanctity of the kitchen to her . twice not knowing why Hawes was looking at her so peculiarly, and beginning to feel a bit stupid for not understanding what the hell was going on. Outside in the garden, the priest lay on blood-stained stones, his blood still seeping from the tattered wounds in his back. It was such a lovely night.

Getting away from the matter of the goddamn kitchen, Hawes said, "When did you last see Father Birney alive?”

"Father Michael," she said.

"Well, his name is Michael Birney, isn't it?" Hawes said.

"Yes," Mrs. Hennessy said, "but you can have a priest named.., well, take Father O'Neill as used to be the pastor here. His name was Ralph O'Neill, but everybody called him Father O'Neill. Whereas Father Michael's name is Michael Birney, but everyone calls him Father Michael.

That's the mystery of it.”

"Yes, that's the great mystery of it," Hawes agreed.

"When did you last see him alive?" Carella asked gently. "Father Michael, that is." Slow and easy, he told himself. If she's truly a stupid woman, getting angry isn't going to help either her or the situation. If she's just scared, then hold her hand. There's a dead man outside in the garden.

"When you last saw him alive," he prompted.

"The time. What time was it?”

“A bit past seven," she said. "When I come to fetch him for dinner.”

“Yes," Carella said, "but he was already dead by then, isn't that what you said?”

"Yes, God ha'mercy," she said, and hastily made the sign of the cross.

"When did you last see him alive ? Before that.”

"When Krissie was leaving," she said.

"Krissie?”

"Yes.”

"Who's Krissie?”

"His secretary.”

"And she left at what time?”

"Five. She leaves at five.”

"And she left at five tonight?”

"Yes.”

"And that's the last time you saw Father Michael alive?”

"Yes, when Krissie was leaving. He was saying good night to her.”

"Where was this, Mrs. Hennessy?”

"In his study. I went in to clear the tea things.., he takes tea in the afternoon, after he says his three o'clock prayers. Krissie was just going out the door, he was sayin' I'll see you in the morning.”

"Krissie who?" Hawes asked.

"Krissie who's his secretary," Mrs. Hennessy said.

"Yes, but what's her full name?”

"Kristin.”

"And her last name?”

"Lund. Kristin Lund.”

"Does she work here full time?”

"No, only Tuesdays and Thursdays. Twice a week.”

"And you? How often do... ?”

"Who gets the coffee?" a uniformed cop asked.

"Here's your coffee, Mrs. Hennessy," Hawes said, and took the cardboard container from him.

"Thank you," she said, and then, quite suddenly, "It was the Devil who done it.”

The only problem was that Willis loved her to death.

It bothered him day and night that he loved a woman who'd killed someone. A pimp, yes a fucking miserable pimp, as a matter of fact but a human being, nonetheless, if any pimp could be considered human. He had never meta pimp he'd liked, but for that matter, he'd never met a hooker with a heart of gold, either. Marilyn was no longer a hooker when he'd met her, so she didn't count.

She had been a hooker, however, when she'd killed Alberto Hidalgo, a Buenos Aires pimp who by then had been living off the proceeds of prostitution for almost fifty years. In addition to Marilyn, there'd been six other whores in his stable. He was hated by each and every one of them, but by none so fiercely as Marilyn herself, whom he'd casually subjected first to an abortion and next to a hysterectomy performed by one and the same back-alley butcher.

So here was Willis a police officer sworn to protect and enforce the laws of the city, state, and nation in love with a former hooker, a confessed murderess, and an admitted thief, not necessarily in that order. Only two other people in this entire city knew that Marilyn Hollis had once been a prostitute: Lieutenant Peter Byrnes and Detective Steve Carella. Willis knew that the secret was safe with either of them.

But neither of them knew that she was also a killer and a thief. Willis alone had heard that little confession, he alone was the one to whom she'd... "I did. I killed him.”

"I don't want to hear it. Please. I don't want to hear it.”

"I thought you wanted the truth t”

"I'm a cop.t If you killed a man...”

"I didn't kill a man, I killed a monster! He ripped out my insides, I can't have babies, do you understand that? He stole my...”

"Please, please, please, Marilyn...”

"I'd kill him again. In a minute.”

She'd used cyanide. Hardly the act of someone with a heart of gold.

Cyanide. For rats.

And then... "I went into-his bedroom and searched for the combination to the safe because that was where my passport had to be. I found the combination. I opened the safe. My passport was in it. And close to two million dollars in Argentine money.”

On the night she'd confessed all this to Willis, a night that now seemed so very long ago, she'd asked, "So what now? Do you turn me in?”

He had not known what to say.

He was a cop.

He loved her.

"Do they know you killed him?" he'd asked.

"Who? The Argentine cops? Why would even give a damn about a dead pimp?

But, yes, the only one who split from the stable, yes, and the safe was open, and a lot of bread was gone, so yes, they probably figured I was the perpetrator, is that the word you use?”

"Is there a warrant out for your arrest?”

"I don't know.”

And there had been a silence.

"So what are you going to do?" she'd asked, "Phone Argentina? Ask them if there's a on Mary Ann Hollis, a person I don't even anymore? What, Hal? For Christ's sake, I love you, want to live with you forever, I love you, Jesus, love you, what are you going to do ?”

don't know," he'd said.

He was still a cop.

And he still loved her.

But every time that telephone rang, he broke out in a cold sweat, hoping it would not be some police inspector in Buenos Aires, telling him they had traced a murder to the city here and were planning to extradite a woman named Marilyn Hollis.

It was easy to forget your fears on a night like tonight It was easy to forget that some problems might never go away.

At a little past ten o'clock, the city was ablaze with light. For all Willis knew, this could have been springtime in Paris: he'd never been there. But it felt like Paris, and it most certainly felt like spring, the balmiest spring he could ever remember. As he and Marilyn came out of the restaurant, a soft, fragrant breeze wafted in off Grover Park.

Both of them smiled. He hailed a passing taxi and told the driver to take the park road uptown. They were still smiling.

The windows were down. They held hands like teenagers.

Harborside Lane, where Marilyn owned the town house, was within the confines of the 87th Precinct, not quite as desirable as Silvermine Oval, but a very good neighborhood anyway - at least when one Considered the rest of the precinct territory. Number 1211 was in a row of brownstones adorned with ssible spray-can scribblings. A wrought-iron gate to the right of the building guarded the entrance to a driveway that led to a garage set some fifty feet back from the pavement; the gate was padlocked.

There were wrought-iron grilles on the ground-floor and first-floor windows, and razor wire on the roof overhanging the third floor. There were now two names in the directory set beside the bell button: M. Hollis and H. Willis.

Willis paid the driver and tipped him extravagantly; it was that kind of night. Marilyn was unlocking the front door as the taxi pulled away from the curb. It turned the corner and vanished from sight, the sound of its engine fading, fading, and then disappearing entirely. For an instant, the street, the small park across the way, were utterly still. Willis took a deep breath and looked up at the sky. Stars blinked overhead. A Pinocchio night. He expected Jiminy Cricket to come hopping up the sidewalk.

"Hal?”

He turned.

"Aren't you coming in?”

"It's so beautiful," he said.

He would later remember that these were the last words he'd said before the telephone rang. The last words before the terror started.

He went into the house and closed and locked the door behind him. The entry foyer and the living room beyond were paneled in mahogany. Old thick wooden beams crossed the ceiling. Marilyn began unbuttoning her blouse as she climbed the walnut-banistered staircase to the second story.

Willis was crossing the living room, yanking down his tie and unbuttoning the top button of his shirt, when the telephone rang.

He looked automatically at his watch, walked to the phone on the dropleaf desk, and picked up the receiver.

"Hello?" he said.

There was a slight hesitation.

Then a man's voice said, "Perd6neme, senor.”

And then there was an empty click.

The altar was naked.

The altar was a twenty-seven-year-old woman who lay on her back on an elevated platform shaped as a trapezoid and covered with black velvet.

Her head was at the narrow end of the trapezoid, her long blonde hair cushioned on a pillow covered with black silk. White against black, she lay with her legs widespread and dangling over the wide end of the platform, her arms at her sides, her eyes closed.

Lying between her naked breasts was a thick silver disc on a heavy silver chain, sculpted in relief with the Sacred Sign of Baphomet, the Black Goat, whose image hung on the wall behind her as well, its horns, ears, face and beard contained within the center and five points of an inverted pentagram: Smoke from the torches illuminating this symbol swirled upward toward the arched ceiling the abandoned church. Smoke from the candle clutched in the hands of the woman who was altar drifted up toward old wooden beams that Ion ago had crossed over an altar made not of flesh of marble.

The mass had started at the stroke of midnight.

Now, at a little past one A.M., the priest between the spread legs of the altar, facing celebrants, his back to the woman. He was wearing black cotton robe embroidered in richer black with pine cones that formed a phallic pattern. robe was slit to the waist on either side, revealing priest's muscular legs and thighs.

The celebrants were here to mark the day of Expulsion. Some twenty minutes earlier, during Canon segment, they had each and separatel partaken of the contents of a silver chalice offered the priest. The chalice had tonight contained not k red wine symbolic of the blood of Christ, but something called Ecstasy, a hallucinogenic drug that was a potent mix of mescaline and speed, A capsule of Ecstasy sold for twenty dollars. There were at least two hundred people here tonight, most of them young, and each and every one of them had swallowed a cap of X immediately after the conclusion of the third segment of the mass.

Kissing the altar/woman full on her genitals, the priest had recited the timeless words, "Stan is Lord of the Temple, Lord of the World, he bringeth to me joyous youth, all praise Satan, all hail Satan!" and the celebrants had responded "All hail Satan!" and the girl acolyte had come to the altar and raised her garments to the priest, revealing herself naked beneath them. The boy acolyte had held a silver container to catch her urine, and the priest had dipped a phallus-shaped aspergill into the container arid sprinkled the celebrants with the little girl's urine, If thou hast thirst, then let thee come to the Lord Satan. If thou wouldst partake of the water of life, the Infernal Lord doth offer it. And then he had passed among them with the chalice containing the Ecstasy capsules, and they had washed the caps down with thick red wine offered by the deacon and one of the sub-deacons, sixty-one people times twenty bucks a pop came to twelve hundred and change, The girl acolyte stood to the right of the altar now.

She was a darling little blonde girl, all of eight years old, whose mother was tonight serving as. the altar. She was dressed entirely in black, as was her father who was sitting among the other stoned celebrants and feeling enormously proud of the separate important roles his wife and daughter were playing in tonight's ritual.

The boy acolyte was only seven. He was standing to the left of the altar/ woman, staring a bit wide-eyed at the tufted blonde patch above the joining of her legs. The priest was about to embark upon the fifth and final segment of the mass, called the Repudiation, est significant tonight in that this twenty-fourth day May was what the Christians had named th, Ascension, upon which day the body of Jesus was supposed to have risen to Heaven, but here within these walls was being celebrated as expulsion of Jesus from Hell.

The priest had been supplied with a consecrated at a church in another part of the city, stolen this morning at mass by a woman whose mouth had first been coated with alum protect the wafer from her own saliva. He held wafer between the thumb and forefinger of his hand now, made a deep, mocking bow over it, said, "I show you the body of Jesus Christ, Forgotten One, pretender to the throne of monarch to slaves, confounder of minions to perdition.”

He turned to face the altar/woman, his back to celebrants now, his right hand raised in the sign , his left hand holding the wafer aloft to the goat symbol on the wall.

"All hail Satan!" he said.

"Hail, Satan!" the celebrants responded.

"All praise these splendid breasts that gave suck to the body of Jesus,” he said mockingly, and touched the wafer first to the woman's right nipple and then to her left nipple. Kneeling between her legs, he rested the hand with the wafer on her mons veneris, and said, again mockingly, "Blessed be the generous womb that begat the body of Jesus," and passed the host over the lips of her vagina.

Now began the Repudiation in earnest.

Lifting the hems of his robe, fastening them into the black silken cord at his waist, he wet the fingers of his right hand and then touched them to the head of his now-erect penis. "Jesus Christ, messenger of doom, I offer you to worm and maggot..." he said, touching the wafer to the moistened head of his penis where it clung in desecration, moving closer to the widespread legs of the altar, the boy acolyte watching excited and amazed, "thrust you down with scorpion and snake..." approaching the altar where she waited open and spread for him, "show you storm and savage strife, curse you with famine and filth, bum you in eternal fire, cause you everlasting death to the end of time unending, and reward you With the enduring fury of our Lord, Satan!”

"Hail, Satan!" the celebrants chanted. "All hail Hurling himself omo the altar, thrusting himself! into the woman, wafer and penis entering her, the priest said, "I descend anew, and ascend forever, saith the Infernal Lord. My flesh is your flesh...”

"My flesh is thy flesh," the woman murmured.

"My flesh is our flesh...”

"Thy flesh is our flesh," the celebrants intoned.

"In flesh, let us find the glory of Satan!”

"In flesh, find the glory of Satan!”

"In lust, let us know the goodness of Satan!”

"In lust, know the goodness of Satan!”

"In flesh and in lust, let us all praise Satan!”

"In flesh and in lust, we praise Satan's name!”

"Blessed be Satan!”

"Blessed be Satan!”

"All hail Satan!”

"Hail, Satan!”

This was four blocks away from where the police had chalked Father Michael's outline onto the blood-stained stones in the small church garden.