As Beth Iverson mourns the murder of her uncle, she discovers her entire family has been targeted for revenge by religious fanatics called the Sacred Guardians. (a fragment of a novel in progress).
PROLOGUE
The young man, alone in the cathedral, bowed his
head and prayed to the holy martyrs whose images surrounded him. May he be
worthy of them, he prayed, and may he, if it be God’s will, accept death as
they did.
He lifted his head and stared at
the giant wall painting beside him, studying the familiar small figures on it,
the blessed saints undergoing their final agony before being received into
heaven. He knew this mural was called “August” but the black lettered sign
which had informed the faithful of this fact had been removed.
He turned to check the murals for
July and September. They too were bereft of labels. Even though his colleagues had
informed him of this desecration, he had refused to believe it. But now, he saw
it was true. Not only had the names of the months been erased but also the
calendar number beside each suffering saint was missing.
He gripped his hands together in a
spasm of anger. What evil person would commit such outrage, destroy the heritage
of a glorious past? Even worse, the paintings had been allowed to fade so that
the tortured saints were barely visible, just pale blobs on the wall where once
they existed in full colour, brilliant testimonies to their holy deaths.
Sacrilege!
He bowed his head. May these
desecrators, these Jew-loving traitors to the fatherland, be punished in the
same manner as depicted on the wall. And, he murmured fervently, “please
Heavenly Father, anoint me, your servant, and all the Sacred Guardians, as the
instruments of their deaths.”
Tears came into his eyes. He stared
up at the beautiful blue ceiling, the black and green marbled altar with its
statues and gold trimmings, the holy paintings on the pillars. For the first
time he realized the church was empty and it shocked him. In his childhood,
there was always a certain
bustle of noise, the mumble of dozens of people praying, the whispers of other
dozens coming and going, the clank of coins in the candle boxes, the smack
of kneeling benches being raised and
lowered, and the thud of the outside doors opening or closing every second or
two.
Eight years old in this very pew. While his
classmates intoned a prayer of thanks for the destruction of Communism, he and
his best friend, Chico, were pointing to the murals and giggling. Back then, the
colours had been bright, the numbers and labels sharp and black. His laugh was
suddenly cut short when the massive hand of Father Thaddeus hit the side of his
head with a loud crack. He gave a surprised yelp.
“Stand up,” the furious priest had
whispered. “What’s this laughter?”
“My death, Father. I am to be
drowned in a very small bucket.” The boy rubbed his head with one hand and with
the other, pointed to the August mural and his birthday number, August 2,
beside the image showing a holy martyr face down in a small bucket, held in
position by two burly soldiers in medieval costume. He could not help but smile
and he knew his classmates were covertly smirking behind their folded hands.
“And Chico here is going to have his arms and legs hacked off.” Father’s long arm would have caught him on
the head again if he had not dodged backward, almost falling into his best friend
who was kneeling, face in hands, pretending to pray.
“Idiot,” the priest snapped.
“Superstitious idiot. These murals have no magical powers. They were painted,” and
here the priest raised his voice for the class to hear, “in 1708 by the pious
artist, Charles de Prêvot, to depict the entire martyrdom of the blessed
church. The Martyrologium
Romanum.”
As the priest rolled out the last words, the
boy felt himself being grabbed by the collar and shoved into a kneeling
position. “Pray, disrespectful boy,” Father Thaddeus said, holding him in place.
“Pray hard for forgiveness or maybe, one day, I will drown you in a bucket.”
The class snickered and the present day twenty-eight year old Andras
smiled at the memory.
Now, he reached into the inner
pocket of his leather jacket and took out the diagram his colleague in the
Sacred Guardians had researched for him. On one side, a list of three names:
the first, Paul Chandler with his birth date, August 11. Using the drawing as a
guide, he searched the scenes of torture on the wall until he came to a man
burning at the stake. Taking out a pencil, he made a mark beside Chandler’s
name, a mark that signified “fire.” He
moved to the aisle, genuflected, and walked around the perimeter to find the
correct image in the January mural and, after checking the diagram carefully,
set a second mark beside the name of the Chandler woman. Good one. Rape. He
moved on. The figures in the mural for the month of March were almost
obliterated with neglect and age but at last, using his diagram, he found the
painted saint for March 21, about to be beheaded him with a large saber. This
final name received a mark denoting, “decapitation.” So be it. He folded the
paper carefully and put it back in the inside pocket of his jacket. Later he
would destroy it.
But he would remember the information.
He genuflected again and walked out
the side door trying not to look at the purple curtain covering a third of the back
wall. He knew what was behind the curtain: a blank space. The mural, which had
been there for three hundred years, had been torn out and removed, and this had
been done over the protests of many of the local citizens. Another sacrilege. He
felt himself shaking in fury as he bolted through the door, body gripped in spasms
of rage.
CHAPTER ONE
Like a bullet striking the wall of the house, a loud
snapping noise sent Beth Iverson leaping from her bed and into the dark living
room, running for the phone. Was Uncle
Paul’s killer trying to kill her too?
Beth’s
hands trembled so wildly she could hardly hold the receiver. She took a deep
breath to calm herself and then another. Listened. Everything was still. Had it
been a nightmare after all? She shut her eyes and listened again, directing all
her concentration past the whimpering of her own breath to focus outside the
small house, through the frosted walls and windows, to the road and then further,
across the fields of snow and into the forest beyond.
Dense silence. Not a car, not a
footstep, not the smallest whisper or creak or purr of a motor. The Canadian
winter shrouded her uncle’s cottage in silence, a quiet so deep it stretched to
the core of the world. Even the over-sized furnace in the basement was still. Perhaps
she’d been mistaken, had a crazy dream. Her legs felt rubbery as she groped in
the dark for the sofa and sat, confused and feeling foolish, trying again to
calm herself by deep breathing.
Beth Iverson was twenty-eight years
old and a tall woman, close to six feet. Her face, long and boney with high
cheekbones and blue eyes had the pale golden tan of the California
resident. Heavy dark blond hair hung
untidily below her shoulders. But she carried her athletic Californian build
with a bouncy confidence that turned heads, something she was entirely unaware
of.
If Beth thought about herself, she considered
herself ordinary, plain-faced, sensible, a bit shy perhaps, but also methodical
and hard working. A person ready to help
out, get things organized, make everything go smoothly. She knew she had led a sheltered life. Except
for the few times her parents travelled, she had never been alone overnight
before. Even when she went to university to train as a librarian, she had lived
at home until her marriage.
Beth had been born in Canada but she
could barely remember it because her parents had moved to Santa Barbara when
she was six. Except for a couple of
trips to Mexico with girlfriends, she had no experience with foreign lands. Besides, whoever thought of Canada as
foreign. Canada had always seemed to her and, she was pretty sure, to everyone
she knew, as just an extension of the United States, cold, of course, dull,
uninteresting, but basically the same.
Now, sitting on the sofa, her
breathing slowing, a feeling of safety returned but along with it, a searing
loneliness. She had to talk to someone, hear the voice of another human being
Holding the house phone steady on
her knee, she punched her husband’s Santa Barbara cell number on the illuminated
key pad. It must be sometime after midnight in California, but her husband
often worked very late on their downstairs construction site, sometimes until
two or three in the morning. As she dialed, she prayed he’d remembered to take along
his cell.
Larry’s funny, swooping “helloooo,”
which usually made her smile, now echoed like a ghost from another life. At the
same time, she heard voices in the background and knew some of his friends were
working with him on what they called the Venture, the project to turn the large
downstairs floor space into an upscale coffee house.
“Larry, it’s Beth. Listen, darling.
Please.” She tried to keep the desperation out of her voice. She would not
whine like a child. “Can you send me some money tonight? Through American
Express? I know we’re short but I don’t want to stay in this house another
minute.” In spite of herself, she heard her voice sliding upward into a plea. “It’s
Christmas, Larry. I want to go home.”
“Hey,
hey, babe.” His voice was soft, caring. “Take it easy. I hear you but you can’t
leave yet. I know it’s tough but it won’t be long. Okay, so your credit card doesn’t
work there. Different country; different system. Phone the Canadian Visa
tomorrow and get them to reopen your card. It’s that simple. Take it one step.
One step.”
“I’m
totally sorry, Larry. I know I’m being ridiculous. But this house is so sad.
Uncle Paul’s things are everywhere: his clothes, his books, even a little
Christmas tree. It makes me cry to see it. And I can’t go outside; it’s cold
outside, way cold, thirty below zero.”
She heard him sigh. “It’s costing
you nothing, right? Yesterday, you said you had a freezer full of food and the place
was warm. So okay, it’s a shack in the boonies. But only a few more days until
that dumbass hick lawyer gets back in town. Tough the stuff. Hang with the
plan, doll. Hang with the plan.”
Beth sighed. After she’d received the
news of her uncle’s murder, she’d flown from Santa Barbara to the Canadian city
of Thunder Bay where two police officers had met her at the airport. An
afternoon of intense questions followed before they drove her to a near-by
hotel. But then the credit card debacle. Their suggestion that she stay in her
uncle’s house seemed sensible at the time. But she hadn’t known how remote it
was, how far from town, somewhere in a snow world.
Now, all she wanted was to get back
to California, to sun and warmth and people.
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