Blood Lust: A Supernatural Horror (7 page)

Inside the wall, signs of the monastery’s hasty abandon
ment
remained in spite of an effort by the church to clean up
the compound. Broken statues and stone benches unceremoniously piled against the inside wall
for later removal had been
forgotten
.
Wais
t-
high weeds sprouted through the gravel pathway leading from the
gaping entrance
to the church
steps
.
A second path broke off
directing parish
i
oners
to a side door of the building. A low brick curb lined both walkways
in an effort to discourage worshippers from wandering the
compound
grounds.
Someone had
forced
the side door
. J
udging from the graffiti, one of the local Latino gangs
bore responsibility
.
The rusty doorknob lay
discarded
beside the path.
The door opened onto an antechamber or sitting room
stinking of urine, vomit and feces, some disgustingly human
. There was no furniture, but t
here was plenty of evidence of
partying
.
Needles, syringes and broken beer bottles littered the filthy floor.
A few
grimy,
stained
mattresses lean
ed
against the wall.

“Lovely spot,” Lew said with undisguised rancor
.

I kicked an empty quart
beer
bottle
across the floor
. “Yeah, one of the finer clubs.”

A second door
opened onto
a long
corridor
that in turn led to the sanctuary. Sun filtered in through a dozen
gaping
holes in the roof and through the broken stained glass windows in the front and along the side of the building
. O
ur friendly neighborhood vandals
had been hard
at work
. The pews, the altar and the statu
ary
were missing,
long ago transferred to some other church,
but
oddly,
a
large
crucifix of Christ remained, leaning against the rear of the apse
rather than hanging from the wall
.
Dirt and litter
formed
small piles across the room
.
It looked as if someone had attempted to clean up the place
but had stopped
,
as if
daunted by the
enormity of the
task
.
The
stink of pigeon crap only added to the oppressive smell of stale, musty air.

“I was a choirboy once,” Lew confided
, staring
around the empty space.

“Really?”
I was surprised at this bit of information.
He rarely spoke of his childhood.

“Yeah, wore a white robe and everything.”
He pointed to
a spot along
one wall. “That w
ould have been
the chancel where I sang.”

I knew
Lew
did not
attend church now.
In fact, he never spoke about religion. It was one of the subjects we avoided.
“What happened?”

“Choirmaster tried to get a little too chummy with me. I kicked him in the balls and ran home. Never went back.”

I laughed
a
t
the
image
of an eight
or nine
-year old Lew kicking the Choirmaster in the nuts
as I walked toward the rear of the church
.
He
wore a size 12 shoe now. I bet he could deliver a good solid blow even back then.
The sound
of my footsteps
echoed eerily
, sounding out of place, like laughing in a cemetery
.
I stopped
.
Doors on each side of the apse
at the rear of the nave
were ajar.

“Check out that door
,” I told Lew, pointing to the one on the left, “
and I’ll
take
this one.”

A
foul stench
pervaded the
church
growing stronger
the deeper we ventured
. It rode on the
motes of dust
we kicked up
with our footsteps
like a
bad memory
. It went beyond stale
,
musty old building smell and old feces and urine odor. It reminded me of a petting zoo or a barnyard, an animal smell.
Just beneath that smell,
I detected
a second, more subtle odor.
It took me a minute to recognize it – ammonia, like on the roof. Not the ammonia smell of old urine
, but
purer, like ammonia out of the bottle or from one of those turn-of-the-century
iceboxes
I once saw on exhibit at a home show back when I was married to one or the other of my exes. It
had
leaked ammonia so badly
t
hey had to shut it down.

My door led to a small alcove with steps to the left ascending to the sacristy, a closet for the storage of religious artifacts.
I doubted anything remained but
out of curiosity, a necessary
element
of my
occupation
,
I opened the door and peered inside. I found nothing but
a thick layer of
dust
and a
crushed
beer can
.
A rustle startled me until I spotted a large rat staring at me from a shelf
above my head
.
It seemed he was curious as well.
He sniffed once and
slowly crawled away
as if he owned the small closet and I was an unwelcome guest.
I admired his insouciance
with
visitors.
The c
orridor
continued
straight
back
to the original part of the
monastery
. The wooden floor bore a thin veneer of fine dust liming old footprints, themselves dust covered.
No one had disturbed this dust in long years.
Small rooms branched off the corridor, all empty except for
their share of
accumulated
trash and dust. Cobwebs
woven by generations of busy spiders
draped the windows and the dark corners of the rooms.
R
elatively clean
rectangular
areas
on the wall
outlined former positions of missing pictures and crucifixes.
As we walked, I felt a low rumble
in my chest
as the floor and walls began to
vibrate
. Dust
and paint chips plummeted
from the ceiling
, joining similar piles on the floor
.

“Subway,”
Lew
whispered
in answer to my confused look
.
He
jerked his head
back toward the door he had investigated. “Nothing there.”

I
no
d
ded
as I
wondered if the subway was one of the reasons for the church's abandonment.
It
s effect on the building
would certainly interfere with a religious ceremony
and was
probably the
cause of the
many cracks in the c
eiling and wall plaster
.
Some first-time worshipers might
attribute
the shaking and rumble
to
the End of Days.
The corridor ended
at a
wall much older than the church. The builders had simply abutted the newer walls
of the church
to the outside walls of the monastery’s main building
.
They had left a
weathered
wooden
exterior
door
in place
.
I tried the handle.
The door
was unlocked but I had to lean my shoulder into it to force it open.
M
oldy plaster
broke away
from
the doorframe and crashed to the floor
.
So much for stealth
, I thought.
I managed to
force
open
the door
just
wide enough to
squeeze through into
a
large
room in
very
bad disrepair
, the original nave
of the monastery
chapel
.
The nave was
extraordinarily
large for a Jesuit monastery
,
nearly as large as that of the
adjoining
church
.
I had mistaken its vaulted ceiling for the building’s second story from outside.
I wondered at the need for such a large place of worship. From
its size
, the monastery
looked as if it
had housed no more than fifty monks.
Perhaps the commanding size and attention to detail had been an act of devotion,
making it
a tribute to God rather than simply a place of worship.

Sunlight
dappled the
broken-tiled floor
through
large
holes in the roof. Birds roosted
within
the
carved
stone
leaves of heavily scrolled capitals
atop twin rows of fluted columns
.
Faded wall murals bore
macabre scenes
depicting the
grisly
deaths
of martyred saints
.
The odor of ammonia was
much
stronger here than in the
rest of the building
. Equal to and unmasked by the ammonia was a second odor, one with which I was all too familiar
in
to my line of work
– t
he
cloying stench
of death.

I followed the
odor
to the apse beyond a stone altar.
Barely v
isible through the gloom
and shadows
was
a pale
, blood-splattered
leg. I
pressed
my handkerchief
to
my nose and
moved
closer.
The sound of my steps frightened a pair of rats that
had been
busy munching on the foot attached to the leg. Two toes had already disappeared, tidbits for
a rat feast
.
I moved closer and saw the lower edge of a
nude
body, a female, probably one of our missing girls.
It was not a pleasant sight.
A
slight
sound caught my attention. Thinking it might
be Lew, I turned to look.
N
obody
was
there, but out of the corner of my
eye,
I saw a shadow descending on me. Before I could react, something or someone hit me in the back with sufficient force to send me hurtling through the air
like a punted football
. I landed ten feet away
,
skidd
ing painfully
face down
across
the filthy
stone
tile
floor.
I felt
the weight of
someone
heavy
standing over me
, pressing me
i
nto the floor; then
a sharp pain
exploded
in
my
right
shoulder.
The pressure mounted, crushing my chest
into the floor
until I thought I
w
ould
pass
out.

“Tack!”