The Kingdom (Berkeley Blackfriars Book 1) Read online

  “Yeah,” Richard said, realizing his parade, his success, was about to get rained on as well. “My thing. It’s what I do.”

  “I know that. I’ve always known that. But in the past month, I’ve seen you exactly twice, and one of those times, I spent the whole evening trying to comfort you while you were having one of your inferiority attacks or whatever they are—insecurity, existential anxiety—whatever it was, it was all about you.”

  “I–I’ve been busy,” Richard stammered. “We had a gig, a paying gig. And I had a rough spot. You were wonderful, you helped me through it. You gave me exactly what I needed—”

  “Yeah, but at no time during this whole month did I get what I needed—and that’s the thing.” Philip raised his voice but then lowered it when he realized he was attracting the attention of other patrons. “I need this to work for me, too. And it isn’t. I have crises too. I have times I need to be carried, and held, and…loved. And you’re never there when I need you. So, I’m done. We’ve had some lovely times, Dicky, but it’s over. I’m sorry. I really am, but I can’t continue like this.” He rose from the table and kissed Richard on the cheek. “I’ll miss you,” he said, and he was gone.

  Richard sat frozen—activity went on in the coffee shop around him, but he did not notice. “Sweet Jesus,” he finally said out loud and then lowered his head to the table, a bit more quickly than he’d anticipated. His forehead smacked with unexpected force on the wood, and, in his present state, the sensation seemed appropriate, even pleasurable.

  He smacked his forehead on the table again, a little harder this time. Then he did it again. And again. “God hates me,” he said out loud, between head bangs. “The motherfucker really, really hates me.”

  “I not fond of you, either,” a harsh voice said from just behind him. “And if you break that table, God will not be only motherfucker on your ass.” Richard raised his head to see Mr. Kim, the Korean owner of the Gallic Hotel—a small man with a thin mustache coloring his lip, and a grimy towel hanging from his belt. His arms were crossed, and his jaw was set with a don’t fuck with me rigidity. Richard didn’t.

  “Sorry, Mr. Kim,” he said and laid his head down on the cool of the table, waiting for the stars to stop spinning in front of his eyes.

  “And I don’t want to hear about you fag-monks’ sex lives,” Mr. Kim added, in English that wasn’t quite broken but was undeniably cracked.

  “We’re friars, not monks. And this is Berkeley,” Richard said. “Our sex lives are tame by comparison to most of the people in here.”

  Mr. Kim looked around, and Richard followed his gaze as well as he could without moving his head. There were exactly three other patrons in the joint, all of them elderly.

  “Uh-huh, whatever you say, Father,” Mr. Kim said. “And stop spit. It disgusting.”

  Just then Richard’s cell phone rang, a cheesy Casio version of the triumphant “Rise Up, O Men of God,” which Richard had picked for the double entendre. Richard raised his head from the table, trailing a string of drool, and flipped open the phone.

  Fr. Terry Milne’s reedy voice cut in and out, but it was still comprehensible. “Dicky, drop whatever you’re doing.”

  “God hates me,” Richard told him.

  “What? You’re breaking up. Listen, get your ass in gear, and meet us over in the city. Pacific Heights, corner of Baker and Clay. We’ve got a gig.”

  “God hates me,” Richard repeated.

  “Dicky, I can’t. I’m sure it’s lovely, whatever you just said. I’ve left messages for Dylan and Mikael as well—we’ve got demon ass to kick, and we’re going to need backup. Ciao for now, sweetie.”

  2

  LANTERN IN HAND, Alan Dane descended the steps of the catacombs beneath his family home. Unforgiving rock, dank and dark, loomed above his head, and he breathed in the familiar cold and musty air. Reaching the bottom, he held his lantern up and surveyed the tomb in which a hundred years of relatives were buried. The Danes were the closest thing to old money that San Francisco had. At one time, they had been rivals of the Sutro clan—and, paradoxically, high-society friends as well.

  He was a tall, lean man in his middle thirties, well groomed, and fashionably attired. His hands were large, prone to grand gestures, and sported many rings, among them a large, red jewel on his right hand.

  Passing row upon row of shelves cut deep into the rock, he glanced at the mummified remains of his ancestors. He bowed dramatically to the first one and uttered a very formal, “I trust you are enjoying your stay in Hell, Grandmother Dane.” He shuffled left and bowed again. “And, Uncle John, I hear the worms feasted well on you, and it makes me glad.” He continued to greet his ancestors in this manner all the way down the hall, each time bowing low with a grand sweep of his bejeweled hands, until he had reached the end of the inhabited shelves, at which point he turned to face the hallway and addressed them collectively. “For raising my father in the way that you did, I say to you all, fuck you. You have made him the monster he is.” Or was, he thought to himself, swelling with pride for, at last, having the upper hand.

  This was no time to gloat. While it was true that his father would be tormenting no children in the immediate future, it was clear to Alan Dane that his job was far from finished. There were still children suffering, even if not at his father’s hands. There were other fathers, other monsters, other sources of suffering. There were so many children to save.

  With a sense of mission, he unlatched the large wooden door at the end of the hallway. As it swung open, the lantern light shone upon a richly appointed room, revealing the form of a small boy, sniffling and mewling for his mother.

  “Shhhh, it’s okay,” Dane said, closing the door behind him with a boom that reverberated through the rock. He smiled at the child, revealing true compassion as he withdrew a scalpel case from his breast pocket. “No one will ever, ever hurt you again. I promise.” He said it mechanically, as if he were reciting lines, for it was a ritual he had enacted many times. “I am your savior, and I have come to deliver you. Everything is going to be all right. Your suffering is finally at an end…”

  3

  AS RICHARD SQUEALED to a stop in front of a Pacific Heights mansion, he saw Terry and Mikael waiting for him on the sidewalk, their arms crossed impatiently.

  “Took you long enough,” Terry called.

  Richard said nothing. The traffic had been terrible coming over the Bay Bridge, but he was in no mood to make excuses, or to be concerned about Terry’s legendary nitpicking. He grabbed his kit bag from the trunk and strode over to where his friends were standing.

  Terry and Mikael were a study in contrasts. Terry was short, the ring of his tonsure cut so close as to be almost undetectable. The product of a Japanese mother and an Irish father, his black hair and oddly shaped eyes lent him an elfin appearance. He was a nervous, agitated, and extroverted man just nearing forty, his face red with exasperation.

  Mikael, on the other hand, was tall—over six feet—with a shock of wild jet-black hair that radiated from his scalp like the rays of a negative sun. He was a calm, quiet man, just barely thirty, the friars’ most recent oblate. His tonsure had been symbolic—a lock of hair was cut at his admission but allowed to grow back, as befit a struggling power-punk musician.

  As Richard approached, Terry’s anger transfigured into concern. “Dicky, what’s the matter?”

  Richard stopped within arm’s reach of his friends and struggled to master himself. “God hates me,” he said.

  “God can be a right bloody bastard,” Terry agreed. “What did the jerk do this time?”

  “Philip…” Richard was proud of himself for having held it together this long—all the way over the bridge, in fact. But the shock was wearing off, and the reality was sinking in. He lost it, and buried his face in Terry’s black cassock.

  “Shh…Honey, there, there,” Terry said, stroking his neck and looking up at Mikael with a concerned grimace. Mikael laid his hand on Richard’s shoulder and
gave it a squeeze that passed for an acceptable, manly, and decidedly straight display of sympathy. “Did he dump you?”

  Richard nodded into Terry’s shoulder, and the smaller man cursed in response. “That damned nelly wannabe. I knew he would be trouble. You deserve better, Honey.” He rocked Richard for a few seconds.

  Richard picked his head up and looked, sniffing, at the gray, brooding sky. “No. He deserved better than me. He was totally right. I just haven’t been…available.”

  Terry took Richard’s hands in both of his and gave them a good shake. “Dicky, listen to me. We’ve got a demon in there. We’ve got an exorcism to do. Are you up for this? Because if you’re not, I want you to go straight home. I’ll handle it myself—Mikael can help. It’ll be a good learning experience for him either way. I would really like to have your help in there, but not if you can’t handle it. I don’t need to remind you about the dangers. And if you’re in an emotionally vulnerable place…” He did not finish the sentence. He didn’t have to.

  Richard considered. If Terry could see that he was so upset at one glance, then he wasn’t going to fool any demon. And demons were nothing if not brilliant exploiters of weakness. On the other hand, it might prove even more dangerous for Terry to try it alone. Terry was a good exorcist—certainly he was brave—but his area of occult expertise was Enochian magick, not demon magick. Goetia—the kind of magick in which one summons and manipulates demonic entities—was Richard’s own area of specialized study, and more than once he had saved the Order’s collective ass due to his knowledge of the field’s most excruciating minutiae.

  As for Mikael, he was the magickal equivalent of a driver’s ed student. It’s not that he was useless, but he had only seen one exorcism previously, and it was a mild one. He was there to learn, not to help—for his own safety and everyone else’s.

  “Where’s Dylan?” Richard asked.

  “Under deadline with a big web job, the one he and Susan have been working on all week. It goes live tonight.”

  “Shit,” Richard muttered. He considered going home, but the truth was he simply did not know what he would do with himself when he got there. He didn’t really feel like relating the whole story to the others back at the Friary, and given a choice between being here and beating up on demons or sitting alone in his room and beating up on himself, it was not a hard decision. Besides, even if he was in a delicate place, the work would be safer if there were two experienced priests on hand. “Let’s kick some demon ass,” he finally said, trying to sound resolute.

  “You sure?” Terry looked up at him uncertainly.

  “No. So let’s do it while I’m still in shock.” He slung his kit bag over his shoulder, and together they passed through the wrought iron gates. As they approached the doors of the mansion, it occurred to Richard that surely the likes of them would not be admitted to such an opulent place. They were, after all, on the brink of poverty, and that due to circumstance, not pious adherence to their vows.

  “Wait,” Terry said, turning to Mikael. “Do I look buff? ’Cause I don’t wanna face any demons if I don’t look buff.” He struck a Charles Atlas pose.

  Richard answered instead, grateful for an opportunity to lighten his mood. “Ter, you’re not just buff, you’re butch.”

  “Fuck butch. Dykes are butch. Fags gotta be buff.”

  “Well, actually,” Mikael said, “Your rouge is a little uneven.”

  “Oh thank you,” Terry said. “Heavy on the right or left?”

  “Left. Your left.”

  Terry rubbed at his left cheek while Richard contemplated ringing the bell.

  “We don’t belong here,” Richard said, hesitating.

  “I feel it,” Terry agreed, “but we do this job, Honey, and we may actually get a paycheck.”

  “I’ll believe it when I see it,” Richard said and reached for the button.

  “Stop!” a voice forcefully whispered, loud enough for them all to hear. The friars turned, searching out the source of the command. In the shadow of a stand of bushes about a foot away from the house, a slight female figure crouched. Once they had seen her, she put her index finger to her lips, signaling silence. Then she waved at them to follow, and turned, disappearing into the shrubbery.

  Terry looked at Richard for a decision. Richard shrugged and set out after her. A couple of steps brought them to the shrubbery, and soon they were winding their way along a little path directly beside the mansion.

  After about thirty yards, they cleared the bushes and found themselves beside a wooden gate that loomed over them. Fumbling with a ring of keys, an attractive young woman in blue scrubs visibly battled her anxiety. Eventually, she found the right key, and, pushing her long red hair back with one hand, she peered intently at the lock. She inserted the key and turned it. The lock responded with a satisfying click, and the gate swung inward. Looking around nervously, she motioned them to enter, and following them, shut the gate behind them.

  They were in a small, neatly kept garden with high walls and tasteful Greek statuary. The young woman paused, closed her eyes, and caught her breath. Richard noticed that her hands were shaking.

  She, apparently, noticed it, too, and pressed them together. Then, seeming to suddenly remember her manners, she extended her hand to the friar nearest her, which happened to be Terry. “Sorry for the intrigue. I’m Jessica Stahl, Mr. Dane’s resident nurse.”

  Terry shook her hand. “Very pleased to meet you in person. I believe you and I spoke on the phone—was that you?” She nodded. “I’m Fr. Terry Milne, and these are my colleagues, Fr. Richard Kinney and Brother Mikael Bloomink of the Old Catholic Order of Saint Raphael.”

  She shook hands with Richard and Mikael, and seemed to have caught her breath. “I’m sorry about the sneaking around,” she said. “But Mr. Dane—the young Mr. Dane—doesn’t know I called you.”

  Terry raised his eyebrows and shot an uncertain look at Richard. Richard cleared his throat. “What, exactly, are we dealing with, here?”

  “The elder Mr. Dane is dying—he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer well over a year ago, now,” Nurse Stahl obliged. “He’s in terrible pain. The truth is, I’ve never seen anyone hold on like this. He should have…” She swallowed. “He should be dead. And I don’t understand why he’s not.”

  “So why call us?” Richard asked.

  She looked around, apparently concerned that she might be observed. “I think—I know it sounds crazy—but I think his holding on—it’s supernatural. And I know this isn’t scientific, but it doesn’t feel good.” Her eyes were large, and she looked at them fiercely as if daring them not to laugh at her.

  Terry pulled a notebook from beneath his cassock and began scribbling in it. “Can you describe the behaviors you’ve observed?”

  She nodded. “Sometimes, I think I see his eyes glow—they’re kind of red. At first, I thought it was my imagination, but then I was walking through his room in the dark, and…well, I could almost see my way because of it.” She felt at her arms and rubbed them. “Gives me chills just to think about it.”

  “What else?”

  “Well, sometimes, if I don’t do what he asks fast enough—and that’s another thing, he shouldn’t be talking at all at this stage, let alone asking for things—but, if I don’t, he gets…there’s this other voice…it’s deeper, rougher…scarier. It seems to be coming from everywhere. It’s…not Mr. Dane. It’s someone…something else.”

  Terry nodded, glancing at both Mikael and Richard. They all seemed to be on the same page. “Anything else?”

  She sniffed and pulled at her hair with a shaky hand. “Yes, once I was attaching a new catheter, and he grabbed my arm so hard I had bruises for a week. Like I said, he shouldn’t be able to do that. And so hard…it’s not natural.”

  “How did you hear about us, Ms. Stahl?” Richard asked.

  “On my day off, I went to the office of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese. I met with several people—they kept passing me from one off
ice to another. Finally, the bishop’s assistant made sure we were alone, and he said to me—really loud, as if he thought someone was listening—that most demonic possessions weren’t real and that they didn’t have anyone on staff that could help me. Then he handed me your card. And—it was weird—he winked at me.”

  “Unfortunately, that’s the way it has to be,” Terry nodded. “We handle most of the Archdiocese’s exorcism work—and every other diocese, Catholic and Episcopal, in Northern California. But unofficially, of course. Very few clergy specialize in this sort of thing anymore. We’ve actually been busier than you might think.”

  “Father, if anyone believes, I believe.” Her eyes were huge.

  “Can we see him—Mr. Dane?” Terry asked.

  She led them to the sliding glass door and opened it, revealing a dimly lit room. About three times the size of a normal hospital room, it had all of the same accoutrements, yet it was so spaciously arranged it did not detract from the atmosphere of calm elegance.

  For all of its beauty, however, the room was heavy with the stench of bile and disinfectant. Worse than that was a malevolent energy that hit the friars full in the face the moment they entered. Richard cringed at the feel of it, and he glanced at Terry, the most spiritually sensitive of all of them. He could see Terry’s face tighten. If forced to describe the feeling, Richard would have simply said it was wrong. Very, very wrong. The friars looked at one another briefly and wordlessly registered the feeling between them. It was clear that they all felt it. They were in the presence of sentient evil.

  At the epicenter of the wrongness, a withered skeleton of a man lay in a hospital bed flanked by heart monitors and IV bags.

  “It’s been a tough day,” Nurse Stahl said as they gathered around the hospital bed. “The morphine isn’t quite cutting it, today. And it…”—she was, Richard gathered, referring to the demon—“If I could sue it for sexual harassment, I would.”