The Exorcist meets Da Vinci Code
As a New York City police detective, Ed Holloway has stared down the barrel at criminals of every kind. Yet, nothing can prepare him for the ancient evil stirring beneath the city streets.
The world watches in awe as the Catholic Church unveils a new ritual—the Eighth Sacrament. Promising an unprecedented connection with the afterlife, it offers solace, mystery, and a glimpse beyond death’s veil. But not all miracles come from the light…
A dark force seizes its moment to rise. And Ed Holloway is caught in a web of supernatural intrigue and earthly peril, when he discovers the sacrament’s true purpose—a facade for a secret society’s vision of the apocalypse.
Thrust into an unlikely alliance with a determined young exorcist and a beautiful INTERPOL agent, Ed rushes from the darkest corners of Manhattan to the shadowy catacombs of the Vatican. Battling supernatural threats and human deceit, the trio races against time to save humanity from a hellish demise.
But is it already too late to stop this ancient evil before it consumes the world as we know it?
FIRST THE SMILES, then the lies: it was the Vatican way.
Pope Lando II paced the anteroom. The cold marble bit into his feet through his slippers, his arthritic fingers twining through the wisps of what was left of his white hair. He gawked at the immense curtains that separated him from the central balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica. On the other side, three hundred thousand souls awaited him in the grand piazza. Soon he would push through the heavy red velvet, flash his fake smile, and tell his lie. He still clung to the hope that doing so would save her.
The pope paused, dragging the sleeve of his cassock across his forehead, staining the white fabric with sweat and fear. Two Swiss Guards flanked either side of the curtains like wooden soldiers in their blue and gold ceremonial dress. Each held a halberd, its silver axe-blade glinting ominously.
“It’s time, Holiness,” a sharp voice from behind him announced, jerking Lando from his dream-like state of anxiety. He turned to face Archbishop Mario Pazzo. The thin man in scarlet and black gave a reassuring nod to his comrade of over forty years.
The pope snarled, then exploded. “Basta, basta, Mario,” his hands gesticulating in a dismissive wave that was uniquely Italian. He approached the archbishop. “Enough! Do I need to be constantly reminded? Don’t you think I know what time it is?”
Pazzo stilled; his lips twitching upward. “Yes, Holiness,” he said.
Seeing his old friend’s humility extinguished the pope’s blaze of anger. He sighed and clapped Pazzo on the shoulder, his papal ring catching the overhead light and returning a golden flash. “I am sorry,” he said in resignation. “Thank you for your help, my friend.”
The archbishop raised his head, still smiling. Pazzo’s avian nose, sunken cheeks, and round rimmed glasses had always reminded Lando of a wide-eyed owl. Those features had earned Pazzo the nickname Il Gufo back in seminary, although no one ever called him that to his face. Lando had relied on Pazzo’s counsel over the decades, especially during his ascent to the papal throne. Did he trust him? Of course not. This was Rome. But he respected Pazzo and often heeded his always pragmatic advice.
Now his advisor was counseling him to announce this lie as a righteous political and prudential move for the good of the Vatican and the Catholic faithful, but Lando still balked in his heart. Standing beside his old comrade, the gravity of the situation hit him again; affection for Pazzo fading back to affliction in the moment.
Lando’s voice was a low hiss, “The people will crucify me if they ever find out, Mario. But if I don’t do this thing, they say she will die.” He swallowed hard, staring through the heavy red curtains and into an expanse of nothingness. “And I believe them.”
Pazzo cocked his head like a bird, studying his old friend in profile. Lando stood silent, his eyes unblinking and dulled.
Somewhere deep in the pope’s mind a defense mechanism activated, forcing him to obsess over seemingly insignificant details. As long as his mind clung to these banalities, it couldn’t focus on the terrible thing he was about to do on the other side of those curtains. It was a fight-or-flight reaction of the psyche, and the red draperies became his maniacal obsession.
“You know, Mario,” the pontiff droned in an almost inaudible purr, “I never noticed that gilded piping on the outer edge of the curtains before. Funny. It’s the little things…” The fight-or-flight mechanism whirred at flank speed, his intelligence desperately seeking an escape from this reality.
Pazzo had to snap his friend out of this spiral into madness, but the two guards were watching. Even if they couldn’t hear what was said, they would certainly notice an archbishop striking the pope with an open-handed slap. No, he had to do it gracefully, diplomatically.
“It’s for the good of Holy Mother the Church, Holiness,” Pazzo reminded him, trying to steer the bishop in white back to the present. The two of them had been over this a hundred times before, and both had agreed the announcement was the only option. Now was not the time to be distracted by curtains and piping. Now was not the time to escape reality. How did the Americans say it? Ah, yes. Now was not the time for the pope to lose his shit. Lando’s mind could crumble later, but first, he must do this thing.
A light flickered on and off in those papal eyes, like a house with faulty wiring. Lando’s head fell; his shoulders slumping forward. “Thou shall not bear false witness, Mario,” he said. “This isn’t just bearing false witness. It isn’t a fib or a justifiable political misdirection.” His voice rose in horror, “This is papal deception without precedent. The lie to end all–”
“But didn’t someone once say the bigger the lie the more people would believe it?”
The pope’s eyes widened. The lights deep within his pupils glowed with a brilliant intensity. The virtual slap had worked, the faulty wiring fixed. Lando was back, sober and staring into the gaping maw of actuality. “You know who said that, right?” the pope, a keen student of political history, asked.
Pazzo gave him a catbird grin, “Yes, Holiness.”
“That doesn’t make me feel any better,” Lando said. He stared at Pazzo with perplexity. Hitler? Really? Maybe he could have asked Der Führer himself if what he was about to announce to the world wasn’t a total demonic sham, but for now the pope wondered what card Il Gufo was playing. He scrutinized his old friend’s strigine eyes and saw in them something he had not seen before; something alien, almost predatory. It frightened him.
Then a whisper of manufactured courage swam up from his belly. “Maybe you are right, Mario. Perhaps the people will find it too difficult to fathom that the Vicar of Christ intentionally deceived them on such a grand scale.” He paused, the rising hint of mettle now just below the surface, “and maybe that will be enough to save her, to save the Church.”
With the tang of fortitude filling his mouth, the pope burrowed deep and extracted tempered steel, determination and resolve erupting like a breaching whale. He straightened and motioned to the guards. “Open them,” he said with a firm wave of his hand. “I will not be remembered as the pope who let her die.”
An American movie he had seen as a boy flew before his mind and he muttered under his breath, “Not on my watch!” It filled him with virile strength. He’d be the hero-pope who didn’t let the world destroy her. It wouldn’t be a lie. No. It would be a salvific act. Surely God understood this, even approved of it.
With imaginary spurs jangling, he strode forward like an Old West sheriff to save his damsel in distress by any means necessary. The guards pulled back the heavy draperies, and a burst of afternoon sunlight lit the pathway to the marble balcony.
Pazzo studied this frenzied behavior as if watching a leaf carried on a capricious wind. This pope was no shepherd of souls, he was a wretched creature tyrannized by dread and self-doubt; a man not steering destiny but being yanked along by it, like a dog on a taut leash. Instead of piloting humanity through spiritual tempests, he was forever buffeted by his own internal squalls, his psyche a turbulent sea under a tenebrous sky. For his entire adult life, this pope had hunted with darting eyes for something—anything—to justify his existence and bless his choices. Now he was a soul adrift, floundering in dark waters, tender and ripe for the unseen puppeteers who pulled the strings of the world from the shadows; just waiting—practically begging—to be seized by hands far more cunning than his own. Lost, weak, and perfectly primed, he was an optimal ferry to carry out the master plan of a cabal Pazzo knew only as The Drivers’ Club.
Lando paused at the threshold of sunlit brightness, the brilliant blue sky hurting his eyes. He squinted and turned back to Pazzo. “Afterward, old friend, you will hear my confession.” With that, Lando strode into the light and onto the papal loggia, his arms raised in a gesture of welcome.
From the piazza below, three hundred thousand voices erupted in a roar to greet him.
“Yes, Holiness,” Pazzo breathed to the now-empty air.
In his frantic state, the pope had not noticed the tall, portly figure with eyes like dark raisins lurking in the shadowy corner of the great room. Now the grey-haired figure in red cassock and sash stepped into view and asked in a Manhattan accent, “Will he do it?”
Unsurprised, Pazzo turned to the fat American who always reminded him of the heavy-browed pigs they had raised in the Northern Italian village of Brescia when he was a boy. He straightened and inhaled, as if relieved to finally remove a suffocating plastic mask, no longer needing to play the fool in front of Il Papa. “Yes, Cardinal O’Brien,” Pazzo said, “tell them, we are on schedule.”
Father Vincent Monroe’s jaw fell as if unhinged. Perched high in the pulpit of Saint Paul’s, the oldest Catholic church in Manhattan, the priest drank in the throng of faces below him, his eyes widening as if witnessing a miracle unfold in real time.
Over the past decade, the number of faithful in the pews had dwindled. On any given Sunday, the church was maybe a quarter full. Most of the attendees were elderly first-generation immigrants: Hispanic, Vietnamese, and Filipino. Father Vince had chalked this up to a secularized faithful who worshipped at the altars of the NFL and Nordstrom’s instead of the Cross of Jesus Christ.
The pandemic hadn’t helped. Bishops around the world had announced that Mass was not essential. Parish doors were closed and locked. The people had simply gotten used to staying home instead of coming to church.
Then there had been the studies showing that only one-third of Catholics believed the Holy Eucharist was the actual body, blood, soul, and divinity of Christ. To Father Vince, it seemed that God had already flushed the toilet, and the Church was simply circling the bowl.
Vincent Arthur Monroe had come from what people today would call privilege. His father had gotten in early on a few tech companies like Apple and Microsoft pre-IPO, and that had given him and his siblings a pretty comfortable life. Remember, Vinnie, his father’s repeated wisdom laced with the smell of old Scotch and expensive cigars echoed in his mind, it’s always best to get into something on the ground floor. Otherwise, you end up like every other schmuck. Choosing the life of a priest, Father Vince knew that he had come about two thousand years too late to get in on the ground floor of the Roman Catholic Church. He had accepted that. The Church was well past its initial building phase. He had merely inherited its now ancient halls.
But for the past few years, he had been acutely aware that he was part of something that wasn’t just old and established; it was on its way out. He couldn’t shake the feeling that he had arrived not at the middle, but at the end. The best was over and all that was left was the death throes of a dying Church, a fading faith.
Which is why what he now witnessed from the pulpit was so surprising. Today, the 29th of June, Saint Paul’s Church was full to bursting. People were wedged into the pews like cattle, the old benches groaning under the excessive weight. They stood two rows deep beneath the fourteen Stations of the Cross that ran along the stone walls. It would have been easier to get by someone on a subway car in downtown rush hour than to squeeze through the knot of people in Saint Paul’s today.
He knew why they were here, but it was still a shock to behold the crowd. They had come to see the Holy Father announce what the newswires had called an “Eighth Sacrament.” That hashtag had bounced around social media like a ping pong ball on speed.
The congregation’s attention was now on the jumbotron television screen that stood where the altar rail used to be. There were smaller screens set up in the cry room and the vestibule for those who either couldn’t or didn’t want to join the sardines in the main church.
A solitary figure in the sea of bodies caught Father Vince’s eye. Harold Destone, head of maintenance, pushed through the mass of humanity to the foot of the pulpit and looked up at the priest. He wore navy blue coveralls with a tan utility belt that would have made the Dark Knight envious. Harold put the walkie talkie to his ear and nodded. He pressed the button saying, “Okay, Jimmy,” then snapped the walkie into its holster.
“We’re all set, Father,” Harold said, although the word “Father” came out Fadda in Harold’s thick Brooklyn accent. He couldn’t afford to live in Manhattan. Who could these days? So Harold rode the 5 Line back and forth Monday through Friday and sometimes on Sunday.
“Thanks, Harold,” Father Vince said. “I guess we’ll start then.” Harold gave the priest a thumbs up, then disappeared back into the forest of people.
The pulpit’s microphone seemed almost sentient, perched atop its chrome gooseneck like a vulture awaiting its next meal. Father Vince flicked the black switch on the mic and tapped the screened ball twice. The PA system responded with a shrill squeal, as if the electronics were voicing their own spiritual discomfort.
He could feel the eyes of his congregation on him. He cleared his throat with a phlegmy, “Ahem,” then began, “Good morning. I’d like to welcome everyone to Saint Paul’s Church.” His amplified voice reverberated off the stone walls. The din of a hundred chattering conversations hushed.
“This is certainly a big day,” he chuckled as he vented his Roman collar with two fingers. Why was he so nervous? Certainly, some of his unease came from the fact that he had never addressed so many people before because his church had never been this packed. But most of it, he thought, was the nature of this announcement. This new, supposedly holy, thing.
An Eighth Sacrament? How was that even possible? He thought back to his catechism: A sacrament is an outward sign of an inward grace instituted by Christ. That last part was the problem: instituted by Christ. Of course, the pope was Christ’s vicar on earth, but did the transitive or communicative or whatever property it was in mathematics work that way with God and His Church? Could a representative of Christ, and not Jesus Himself, establish a new sacrament? It was all too confusing, but he was just a simple parish priest obediently following orders, so maybe it didn’t need to make sense to him. Maybe.
He spoke in a nervous monotone. “His Holiness the Pope is scheduled to begin his announcement at–”
The jumbotron came alive. Half a world away, a camera transmitted an image of the empty papal balcony high above an ocean of people. Two great red velvet curtains hung down. They parted and the camera zoomed in on Pope Lando II appearing from the shadows and onto the loggia. His arms were raised, hands waving to the crowd. Three hundred thousand voices rose in a unified cheer from Saint Peter’s Square below.
The congregation in the pews of Saint Paul’s felt the intensity of that roar four thousand miles away. Father Vince struggled to swallow, his throat now sandpaper.
(First the smiles.)
The pontiff wore a closed mouth grin, but Father Vince noticed the Holy Father’s smile did not rise to his eyes. His lids looked heavy, weighed down with a great burden. The roars of the Vatican crowd intensified as the pope continued greeting them with his waving arms.
A solitary archbishop in scarlet and black emerged from the shadow between the curtains and stood off to one side of the balcony. Father Vince couldn’t remember his name, but the archbishop always reminded him of an emaciated owl.
Then a large, overweight cardinal in red appeared. Father Vince certainly remembered this one. It was his bishop after all, His Eminence John Cardinal O’Brien, Archbishop of New York.
The pope approached the microphone centered at the balcony rail and hushed the crowd with his hands. The square fell silent, sucked into a vacuum of expectation. Saint Paul’s Church went as still as a crypt, punctuated only by the occasional cough or the rustle of clothing. All eyes fixed on the broadcast. Even the centuries-old murals and relics seemed to lean in toward the jumbotron, drawn by the gravity of the moment.
“In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit,” Lando began in Italian. His amplified voice echoed in the vast space of the Manhattan church. White capital letters appeared at the bottom of the screen translating the announcement into English.
(Then the lies.)
“We announce today,” Lando continued, “the inception of an Eighth Sacrament. The sacrament of Communicatio cum Defunctis; allowing the living to commune with the dead.”
A collective gasp echoed off the walls of Saint Paul’s as a thousand hearts skipped a beat, shuddered, then resumed. The murmur sweeping through the crowd was a cacophony of confusion and awe, raw human emotion caught in the grip of what they assumed was divine revelation.
Father Vince was trapped in the eye of this storm. His mind first felt a tremor, then the full weight of the pope’s announcement crashed into him like a tsunami, flooding his senses and threatening to drown him in an abyss of questions far beyond those he had initially imagined.
“We now continue,” the pope’s voice bellowed from the jumbotron speakers, “with the implementation of the new Rite of–”
The jumbo went dark. A discord of gasps and chatter filled the church. Father Vince scanned the nave. It wasn’t a blackout. The lights were still on.
Harold rushed to the giant screen, fiddling with various knobs and controls. He pulled the walkie off his belt and said something into it. Then, he approached the pulpit and looked up at the priest.
“It ain’t the equipment, Father. That’s all good,” he reported. “It’s the signal. The monitors in the cry room and vestibule are out, too. We got power, but nothing’s coming through.” Harold scratched his head and raised an eyebrow. “It’s like something’s…I dunno…something’s blockin’ it.”
“Blocking it?” Father Vince asked. “How?”
“I dunno, Father, but Jimmy checked with Rome and told me just now that the Vatican is still transmitting. We should be receiving it, but we’re not.”
Father Vince looked up in exasperation.
Guilt fell on Harold like a leaden blanket. “I’m sorry, Father. I’m not sure how to fix it.”
The priest’s face softened. “It’s not your fault, Harold. Don’t worry.”
“I’m hoping it’ll just come back on, Father, but I dunno. Me and Jimmy are gonna check the junctions, okay?”
The priest nodded, and with that, Harold was off.
Father Vince surveyed the bulk of bodies in the church. About half were standing now. All were bustling. They were strangers to him, but they were still his flock. Their eyes were wide and filled with what looked like terror. He had never seen this before. The young, the old, the faithful, the skeptics, all unified in their vulnerability, all seeking solace in someone to lead them, all needing a shepherd.
He, too, was terrified, but he realized he didn’t have time for terror. These people needed him. As his mind fumbled for the right words, he heard a voice behind him.
“Father Vince, Father Vince,” hailed Mrs. Brannigan, the church organist. She was a woman usually of iron faith and steel composure, but her voice wavered now. It was the same trepidation thrumming through the rest of the church. “What does it mean?”
His mind groped like a blind man reaching in the dark for the right response. Seeing glistening confusion in Mrs. Brannigan’s eyes, he nodded, turned, then spoke into the microphone, resorting to the old standard from childhood. The words were just above a whisper, but it was the only raft he could offer in this surging storm.
“Hail Mary, full of grace,” he began, although the prayer tasted of dust and apprehension. He was in uncharted waters, a new verse in the ancient song of his faith. The melody was a requiem for the world he once knew, a dirge for the traditions that were slipping through his fingers. If this was getting in on the ground floor of something new, he didn’t want any part of it. He found himself longing to be just another schmuck.
This Eighth Sacrament smacked of dark doors swinging open. Despite being a priest of the Catholic Church, he did not want to find out what lay in wait on the other side.
Neither Father Vince nor any of the thousand other souls in Saint Paul’s Church that day—save one—noticed the woman in the middle of the fifth pew whose hands glowed red.
Harold hadn’t suspected an attack. He certainly never imagined someone would plant a bomb deep within the structure of the Manhattan landmark where he worked and worshipped. Neither had Jimmy Dole, his assistant. So Jimmy never thought the red glow of the woman’s hands was anything dangerous.
The two men snaked their way through the crowd to the foot of the back stairs. Harold ran his hand over the oak railing, feeling the hundreds of thousands of souls that had found solace in these walls through the centuries. Saint Paul’s had remained largely unchanged since the signing of the United States Constitution.
That is, until today.
At fifty-three seconds until detonation, Harold and Jimmy climbed the stairs to the choir loft where the junction boxes hung. Maybe it was as simple as a blown fuse. Harold was optimistic that if he and Jimmy could fix this issue with the flip of a switch, they’d both be heroes to Father Vince, and as his great aunt Lorraine had always said, it was never a bad thing to be on the good side of a priest.
At forty-five seconds until detonation, Father Vince led the congregation in the Hail Mary. “Holy Mary Mother of God, pray for us sinners,” the boy immediately to the left of the woman with the red hands repeated. He looked at her lap with wide eyes, but never stopped praying. She’s probably just hiding the game, he thought. Maybe Minecraft? Minecraft was his favorite. No, she couldn’t be playing Minecraft. Minecraft was green, not red.
He knew you weren’t supposed to play video games in church. Jesus didn’t appreciate that, unless you were little, like his baby sister. But he was ten, and ten-year-old boys were old enough to respect Jesus. At least that’s what his mom and dad had told him. His dad was working today, something he called campaigning, but his mom and little sister were next to him. He continued his Hail Mary and never gave the woman’s iPad or her red hands a second thought other than, Maybe she’s playing Angry Birds.
She had knocked out the video feed when she armed the device with her iPad. At that moment, the tablet’s screen had turned from a calm, powder blue to an alarming fire engine red. Now the iPad was in her lap, and she had both hands over the screen. The light was so bright that it shone through her flesh, illuminating veins and corpuscles, as if her hands were on fire. Her eyes were closed. The boy next to her noticed her lips moving, but no sound came out.
At thirty seconds until detonation, Harold and Jimmy reached the junction boxes in the choir loft. “Jimmy,” Harold said huffing from the long stair climb. “Go look over the railing and tell me if the jumbo comes back on. I’ll play around with the boxes.”
“You got it, boss,” Jimmy said in his northern New Hampshire accent. He had come to New York five years ago to try his chops on Broadway. As an aspiring actor, he ended up being a half-decent maintenance assistant.
Jimmy leaned on the choir loft rail and looked down at the jumbo. “Still nothing,” he reported, now casually scanning the crowd. Most were seated in the pews and standing along the walls. It was a gaggle of clattering humanity down there. Father Vince was on his third Hail Mary, but Jimmy figured only about half of the folks were praying. Everyone else was losing their freakin’ minds. He hoped Harold could get that jumbo up or else Jimmy was afraid they might start a riot. He had seen it happen at an Anthrax concert in Manchester. It wasn’t pretty. That incident had cost him half his pinkie toe. Now, he was getting that same “hackles up” sense as he looked over the throng of bodies.
Then he noticed the woman with the glowing red hands in the fifth row. They were neatly placed on her lap and her head was bowed. The little boy was looking up at her.
Jimmy’s first and last thoughts were of his Fantastic Four comic books and Johnny Storm, the Human Torch. Johnny used to yell, “Flame on!” and his hands, arms, and body would erupt into red flames. Man, he was cool! Jimmy always wished he could catch fire and fly like the Human Torch. The maintenance assistant would soon get his wish.
Four seconds before detonation, Harold pried open the main junction box. He wiped his brow with the sleeve of his coveralls, then his eyes went wide. Nestled within the box was a device of two sinister cylinders bound by sleek black electrical tape. An iPhone flashed a blinding red, pulsating like an electronic heart. “What the–”
The blast peeled back layers of history with indifferent ease, shattering stone, glass, and bone as if they were tissue paper. Atop the church’s spire, the colossal statue of Saint Paul with his long beard, book, and sword toppled into a lake of flame and vaporized.
The shock wave blew out the windows of the New York Stock Exchange building. Heat like a blast furnace melted the green street signs, blue corner mailboxes, and grey parking meters that stood along the perimeter of the church. A hundred car alarms bleated out of time with each other as a column of smoke rose above what, until five seconds ago, was the oldest Catholic church in Manhattan.
From the rooftop ten blocks away, a lone figure watched the black and grey mushroom cloud billow into the blue morning sky. One burned and twisted hand lowered the binoculars from his eyes. The other pressed a device in his ear and reported, “It is finished.”
A warm wind blew from the devastation, carrying ashes that swirled around him like blackened snowflakes. With his mission complete, he descended the fire escape and began his long journey home.