The Night Church by Whitley Strieber

Author:Whitley Strieber
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: Horror, Queens (New York, Fiction, Satanism, General, Religious, N.Y.)
ISBN: 9780671469559
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 1983-06-14T10:00:00+00:00

MARY: THE SHADOW OF THE INQUISITION

Now HAS COME the night of highest peril. We will kill her or cure her. She is useless to us as she is.

We own this town—its shops, its hotels, even the spring that feeds the grotto. But the great underground river beneath the grotto is nobody's property. Alpheus, the river of life and death.

It is not like the little aboveground trickle into which Catholic pilgrims dip their infirm parts. Alpheus is wild and dark and dangerous. If it sweeps you away you are lost forever. I think it may be more than water, more than a simple trick of geology. If a demon had a body it would be very like Alpheus, a freezing torrent raging against the rock of the earth.

This week at Lourdes many of the pilgrims are our people. We have booked the best rooms, taken the best charters. Some of our Catholic customers will have to wait until next week to continue buying their kitsch and bathing themselves in one another's sweat. Yet our beloved child is in as much jeopardy here as at home. As if the Inquisition had a sort of shadow...

Our people have made us welcome. To them it is the highest honor to have the Prince and Princess among them. Never have two people been so well guarded.

When Gottlieb told me that her paralysis would prevent childbirth, I remember I said I wanted to die.

He is a wise man. "Concentrate on your work. Keep to the plan." How I threw myself into my work!

I've arranged the worldwide vaccination program, the food supplies, all we need to see us through the coming extinction.

I even have Mike performing his allotted role. I am insisting he wear a vetiver cologne I had compounded at Keil's in Manhattan just for him. But it is more than scent. Jerry Cochran has mixed his vaccine into it.

Every time Mike splashes some on, he contributes to the immunity he will some day need in order to fulfill his place in our plan.

If all goes as we intend, we will require him to remain alive some little time after the others are dead.

Such a fatherly man can be put to good use.

Lately I have really been trying to seduce Mike, to make him love me as he has never loved anybody before. Frankly, I hope we will be able to convert him.

Still, I could not bear to be with him tonight. I lay on that miserable pallet in the Catholic part of the hotel downstairs, sweating and worrying until I could bear no more; now I am here where it is risky for me to be, in the suite where a princess of the Night Church belongs, writing and writing and trying to pretend that I am not exhausted, that I do not tremble, that my hand is as firm as ever.

Stupid woman. You calm yourself by writing in your jour-nal. Then you tear out the pages and burn them.

Outside quiet multitudes file toward the aid stations for their vaccinations.

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