THE WANDERING UNHOLY
VICTOR SALVA
STENECKER WATCHED THE falling snow out the window of his sedan and thought of something his mother had told him long ago when he was a child. “It is the dust of the angels,” she had once said, and he could never look at a snowfall without thinking of this. And as his caravan jostled down the shallow ravine that passed for a road, Stenecker dozed off and drifted back to the small house he had grown up in, with the snow on the windowsill and the warmth of the kitchen where his mother was always baking bread….
The sedan hit a sharp crag that jolted him back to reality.
“Forgive me, Herr Field Marshal.” His driver stared at him from the rearview mirror. “I think this road was meant for something other than automobiles.” Stenecker looked at the boy’s face and remembered back when he, too, had looked like Hans: young, handsome, blue-eyed, and vital. The picture of Hitler’s ideal soldier.
The sedan rolled to a stop, and Stenecker looked ahead at the large covered truck and its platoon of soldiers. Major Grunwald hopped from the cab and strode through the snow toward him. Stenecker rolled down a window as Grunwald’s oddly square head leaned in. Mist blossomed at his lips with each word. “We might be getting close, Herr Field Marshal.”
“We’re looking for a cross,” Stenecker told him, “a large one. Take two men and make certain the pass is clear.”
Grunwald waved two fingers in the air and Gunnery Sergeant Kimmel climbed out the back of the truck with two of the soldiers. “Clear the pass,” Grunwald told them. “And remember, the white of the snow makes you easy targets.”
Kimmel and his men had rounded two bends of banked snow- and ice-capped trees when one of the soldiers whispered through chattering teeth, “What exactly are we looking for out here, Sergeant?”
“For soldiers who use their eyes and not their mouths,” Kimmel snapped back. “Stay quiet!”
A sound to the left of them.
They hit the ground hard, rifles leveled at a bank of snow some yards away. When the sound came again, it was with the strange sight of the snow shifting and churning as if something were under it. Something large and working its way toward the surface.
A hand jutted from the ice, and they almost fired. It clutched at the cold air as if it might scoop up oxygen, and Kimmel and his men bellied toward it. A head emerged then—white and frosted over like the rocks and trees around them.
* * *
Kimmel’s mouth dropped open at the sight. The eyes looked frozen shut, and as a shoulder broke through the ice, the coat it wore bore stripes. “This man is a German officer!” Kimmel launched to his feet and barreled toward him. And halted abruptly when the frozen man’s head dropped back and his eyes popped open. You could hear the sound they made, the lids were so brittle, and the eyeballs themselves had a nightmare aspect, as they had frosted over completely.
Kimmel’s throat tightened, and he could barely get out words. “… What in the name of the Führer?”
And the snow beneath that frozen head erupted with gunfire.
The officer was shooting! Lurching up, waist deep in the snow, his semiautomatic cut down Kimmel’s soldiers as the gunnery sergeant flailed back and returned fire. The truck’s soldiers spilled out as Kimmel’s own rifle obliterated the snowbound officer. But there was more snow moving now, all around him.
To his left, another bank erupted, and two more on the bank opposite, all with frozen hands, fingers splaying in the icy air. Beyond those, the snow exploded again as another soldier erupted from the powdered earth, firing in all directions.
Using the truck as cover, the Nazi ranks fired back and Kimmel spun around, crashing to the snow to find his own cover as the ice soldiers held their position and their guns blazed.
Soldiers at the truck split off and charged down the ravine, ripping off shots as they moved. Anchored in the ice, their element of surprise gone, the snowbound assassins were easy targets, and they finally dropped and buckled under the barrage of return fire.
Kimmel pulled himself to his feet. In the new stillness, neither he nor any other approaching soldier could fathom what had happened. A young soldier met Kimmel’s eyes. “Where did they come from?”
But something was already springing out of the snow behind him. The boy’s breath was cut short by a terrible slicing sound, and his eyes went wide. Their gaze dropped to the frozen bayonet sticking out of his sternum. His last breath visibly drifted into the air as he slid off the blade to reveal his icy executioner.
Sergeant Kimmel swung his pistol up and picked him off with a single shot to the head. He dropped to the snow with the sound of ringing metal as the fatal shot punctured the soldier’s helmet.
Now Field Marshal Stenecker strode toward them from the sedan. His look betrayed nothing as he took silent inventory of the frozen carnage all around them.
“They look like they’re blind!” Major Grunwald sputtered. “How could they fire a rifle?”
“Not blind, their eyes are frozen over.” Kimmel could barely find his voice.
“This man has an Iron Cross! He was decorated!” Grunwald jabbed a finger at a frozen corpse. “These are all German soldiers—why in the fires of Hell would they be shooting at us?!”
Kimmel called out and they rushed to the frozen soldier with the bayonet. “I took him down with a single shot to the head.” He pointed to the hole between the soldier’s frosted eyes.
“Not a drop of blood,” Grunwald whispered. “These men are iced to the bone….”
“Not just that, Major, look! He’s already been shot!” Kimmel became more unglued as he pointed to an iced-over wound in the soldier’s neck. “And more than once!” Kimmel brushed snow off an old chest wound that had ripped the soldier’s frosty uniform.
“What are you saying?” Stenecker asked calmly.
Then Kimmel saw something across the ravine that paled him even further. He scrambled to the officer who had first clawed out of the ice. The man was still waist deep in a snowbank, and Kimmel reached down and yanked him out by the arm.
The officer was only half a man. He ended just below his frozen waist.
“These men were not only buried in the snow.” Kimmel dropped him back into the ice. “They were dead when they attacked us.”
The wind whistled as the snow fell and the men surveyed the countryside.
Only Stenecker showed no horror. “Moving forward with eyes sharp, gentlemen,” he said at last without emotion. “We have come to the right place.”
* * *
Greystone Abbey had the aspect of a gigantic stone box carved into the rocky mountainside. A massive granite cross centered the battlements over the mammoth gates, collecting snow as the caravan pulled up and Major Grunwald and Sergeant Kimmel moved out into the bracing cold.
“This is a convent?” Kimmel asked, staring up at the ugly stone cross. “It looks more like a fortress.” He reached out to an oversized bell at one of the hefty rusted hinges on the fortress’s high walls.
“Do not ring that bell, Sergeant.” Stenecker’s voice cut through the wind. He stood at the front of his sedan, young Hans at his side. “Do nothing they would expect.”
Kimmel lifted a large megaphone he had brought and took a breath, but before a word could be uttered, the ground began to rumble, and so deeply that they could feel it through the soles of their boots.
The great gates to the abbey were parting. Opening to reveal a vast courtyard covered in snow. Grunwald’s command brought the platoon off the truck, and they raced past the field marshal and dropped to one knee, aiming at the hulking stone palace the courtyard presented.
The falling snow disguised the abbey’s lower dimensions, including a long granite staircase that rose to a high outer balcony: one that was already filling with a strange procession of thick black shawls and strings of heavy rosary beads that rattled and rolled across large oval collars of starched white.
Collecting flakes of snow, each of the assembling wore a tall black headdress as the faces beneath them stared down with a grimness as stony as the granite they stood on. The oldest, a small, withered-looking woman of considerable age, took a half step forward as her voice carried across the frozen cobblestones below. “Can we be of service to you?”
Major Grunwald’s square jaw tightened as he shouted up at them, “We will ask the questions, Sister. This is, we presume, Grey stone Abbey?”
The old woman’s hands twitched with palsy as she wrapped her gnarled fingers nervously around her rosary and bowed her head in the affirmative.
“I am Major Hermann Grunwald and this is Sergeant Kimmel.” He nodded back to the caravan. “We are twenty in number and we will need rooms for sleep and hot water to bathe. You will also supply food and drink for us.”
The old nun’s voice quivered and she had to clear her throat. “We can make you as comfortable as we are able, Herr Major, but you might find us lacking in some of the amenities of the modern world.”
“Do as the major says,” a voice said from behind the assembled sisters. Both nuns and Nazis turned to see a tall woman stepping onto the balcony as the others parted to put her at its center. Even at seventy, her strength and power were evident. “You must forgive Sister Mary Ruth,” the woman said, bowing apologetically. “She is young and has yet to learn the ways of the order.”
Kimmel and Grunwald stared at Sister Mary Ruth. Young? She looked as if she were at Death’s door….
“And what order is that, specifically, Sister?” Stenecker’s voice cut across the windy plaza.
Grunwald moved aside and said, “May I introduce Field Marshal Stenecker.”
The tall woman bowed again. “We are the sisters of St. Ignatius, Herr Stenecker. The order has been here for more than two centuries now.”
“And during that time, have you always been in the practice of insulting your masters by looking down on them?” Stenecker’s eyes narrowed.
“We meant no disrespect—”
“Come down this instant!” Stenecker’s words were clipped and cutting. Led by their imposing mistress, the nuns started a quiet descent down the stone steps. “We stay on the parapet for our own protection, Herr Stenecker—”
“Field Marshal Stenecker,” he snapped.
She stepped to the courtyard floor and again bowed her head. “I am Sister O’Cyrus. Mother superior of the abbey.”
“No,” he said sharply, “your title is not recognized by the Führer. Therefore it would be equally insulting to refer to you as ‘superior’ in any way. You are, in the eyes of the Reich, superior to no one, Sister.” He didn’t hide his quiet joy in demoting her.
Mother O’Cyrus showed no indignation. There was something behind those eyes, something being masked by that stoic face, but it wasn’t anger. And Stenecker did not like it. He did not like that his presence left these old women so seemingly undisturbed. He suddenly turned to all of them and hissed, “Heil Hitler.”
He waited a moment, then stabbed his arm into the air. “I said, Heil Hitler!” The nuns bowed their heads and Stenecker turned to the mother superior. “I will say it once again, and only once. Heil Hitler, Sister….”
She stared at him before she lifted her arm. Her words were soft in the whistling snowfall. “Heil Hitler, Field Marshal Stenecker.”
“All of you!” Stenecker swung around and grabbed Sister Mary Ruth by her tremulous arm and jerked her forward as he would a disobedient child.
The nuns all raised their arms now, Sister Mary Ruth’s shaking with palsy as they gave a somber, joyless salute to the Führer. Stenecker moved back to Mother O’Cyrus and leaned in so close he could smell the dampness of her woolen shawl. “You said you stay on the parapet for your own protection, Sister. Protection from what?”
“You have entered a very dark and strange country, Herr Field Marshal,” Mother O’Cyrus replied.
“Have we?”
“Beyond your darkest dreams,” she said quietly.
He leaned even closer and studied her with a quiet menace. His words billowed mist into the icy air. “I doubt you could fathom the darkness of my dreams, Sister.” He looked back at the massive gates and the mountains beyond them. “And if there is so much to be wary of here, then why, in fact, did you open the gates?”
Mother O’Cyrus looked up slowly as if she were going to answer. But she didn’t.
* * *
The vast dining hall was flanked by two enormous archways, each sentried by Stenecker’s soldiers, guns at the ready, suspiciously eyeing the sisters who worked to clear the long table where the platoon was finishing their meal. The men’s voices echoed to the high rafters and found their way down again to the second table, closer to the fireplace, where logs snapped and popped and warmed the field marshal, Kimmel, and Grunwald as they ate.
Hanging high above them was a long blue banner with large Latin words embroidered in gold. Abyssus abyssum invocat.
“What does that say, Sister?” Major Grunwald nodded to a small, skeletal sister who was collecting their dishes. The tiny woman lifted her eyes and studied the banner as if she couldn’t remember.
“Hell calls Hell,” Sister Mary Ruth answered for her, “is the literal translation, Major.”
“A Latin warning that one misstep leads to another,” Kimmel added.
He felt a vibration move across the table. He saw his wine goblet rattle beside his fork and studied it a moment before turning away.
A sharp scrape turned him back.
The other officers now stared as well. “My wine,” Kimmel said, “did you see? It moved. It moved by an inch….”
He looked over at Stenecker, who calmly spoke while picking his teeth. “What’s the matter, Herr Kimmel? Are you letting your imagination get the best of you?”
The gunnery sergeant lifted his eyes to the rafters. “I am wondering what other black magic we have walked into here. I am remembering dead soldiers attacking us in the snow.”
Stenecker stared past his toothpick at him. No one had mentioned the events of this morning, and now suddenly all were thinking about it again. “Do you know what we are talking about?” Stenecker narrowed his eyes at Sister Mary Ruth. The old woman reached down with a palsied hand and took his plate. He grabbed her gnarled fingers forcefully. She dropped the dish and it clattered back to the tabletop. “I asked you a question.”
She looked at him with milky gray eyes as he gripped her tighter. “These things in the snow that once were men? Do you know what they are?”
“The wandering unholy.” Mother O’Cyrus’s voice echoed from a distant archway. Her words turned every Nazi head in the room. “That is what we call them.”
“You seem strangely untroubled by their presence.” Stenecker released Sister Mary Ruth and pushed his plate toward her.
“We have been in these mountains many years now.” Mother O’Cyrus moved toward him. “We have seen many things that might trouble those who have not.”
“Does it not challenge your beliefs, Sister, to have these ‘unholy,’ as you call them, walking about?”
“You would be surprised, Herr Field Marshal, at the kinds of creatures wandering the woods these days.”
A sudden silence, and then Stenecker smiled at her note of irony. He stood and encouraged the smiles of those around him—and then backhanded the mother superior viciously.
Even the officers were taken by surprise. The old woman reeled and almost fell to the floor. Stenecker’s whispered voice again was laced with menace: “Watch your tongue, Sister, if you would like to keep it.”
Mother O’Cyrus did not look up. Her hand went to her lip as she kept her head bowed and said softly, “Perhaps you misunderstood my meaning.”
“Or understood it perfectly. I am sure you are aware, the Führer has nothing but contempt for your Christianity.” She found the strength to look at him then. He added, “The greatest setback in the history of Man, to use his exact appraisal. The most severe blow mankind has ever endured.”
“We are aware the Führer has other allegiances, gentlemen,” Mother O’Cyrus said, leveling her look at Stenecker.
“Then you might also be able to guess the focus of our mission.”
“You would do me a great kindness by telling me.”
“You have a necromancer here, Sister,” Stenecker announced. “We know this now.”
The mother superior narrowed her eyes. “I am not even certain I understand the meaning of this word—”
Stenecker grabbed her by the throat, and her large white collar bent as he pulled her to him. “I will break your neck with my bare hands, old woman, if you lie to me again. Did you think we could be stopped by a few frozen corpses this creature might throw in our way?” He searched her eyes for fear and again could find little. “You have a necromancer. Either here, within these walls, or you know where this creature dwells.”
He released her and she brought a hand to her throat.
“If a necromancer is someone who can raise the dead, Hen-Field Marshal, in my belief, there is only one man capable of this—”
Stenecker swung his pistol from his holster and pointed it directly at her. “If you think, even for a moment, that I will leave this place without taking with me what I have been sent to retrieve, then you underestimate my resolve.” He took a step closer, until the barrel of the Luger rested upon the creases of her forehead. “Do you admit you know of this creature?”
Mother O’Cyrus nodded without meeting his eyes, and Stenecker nodded back. “You will take me to him.”
“To her, Herr Field Marshal.”
She met his look then, and a wave of panic rushed over him. Grunwald and Kimmel lurched up from their seats to draw their pistols. “No,” Mother O’Cyrus said softly, “it is not I.” Stenecker lowered his gun, and Kimmel and Grunwald poorly masked their relief.
“It is the sister who began this order. Our mother foundress.”
“You told us the order had been founded over two centuries ago.”
Mother O’Cyrus nodded, and Stenecker’s pistol raised again. “You want us to believe that this woman is over two hundred years old and still living?”
“She has many powers the Lord has seen fit to give her. One is longevity beyond human boundaries.”
“And she is your necromancer?” Stenecker’s words brought the hall to a sudden silence. Only the popping of the logs in the fire punctuated his next inquiry. “Answer me! She then is your necromancer?”
Mother O’Cyrus stared back in silent confirmation.
“You will take us to her.” His voice became hushed and full of purpose. “Now.”
* * *
The long stone hall was lined with cruel-looking iron-pronged candleholders, all of them empty, making the fire from the sisters’ candelabras the only light for Stenecker, his officers, and six armed soldiers as they were led into the abbey’s lower chambers.
Major Grunwald, at the rear of the procession, watched the squarish shape of his head, its shadow cast by the candlelight growing and shrinking as it glided down the wall next to him until he could clearly make out two small points, jutting out just above his ears. He looked to the soldiers moving between them, deciding it was the upturned barrels of their rifles that added this sinister affectation.
“There are no lights in this part of the abbey, Sister?” Kimmel inquired.
“Not for the mother foundress,” Mother O’Cyrus called back to him and then met Stenecker’s suspicious stare. “She takes great exception to light.”
“Why do you keep her so isolated?”
“She is, with all due respect to her, frightening to the other sisters, Herr Field Marshal.” Her admission made the officers exchange glances. She saw this and said, “Make no mistake, she is a gift from God. The Sisters of St. Ignatius were created solely to watch over her. We have done this now for many decades.”
Stenecker was getting uneasy. They were moving farther from the dining hall and deeper into the ancient convent. “I warn you, old woman, if you think you might lead us into a trap, any action taken by you or your gaggle of old geese will be met with the most severe opposition.”
“With my most sincere apologies, Herr Field Marshal, it is I who must warn you.” She came to the end of the hall and slid her candelabra onto iron prongs beside a set of substantial double doors. “There was a time when the mother foundress would commune with deceased saints to answer questions of papal importance—”
Stenecker cut her off abruptly. “And why our intelligence reports back to us that His Holiness, your pope, makes great use of this creature.”
“But she has grown over the years,” she cautioned. “And her powers have grown with her, powers no longer restricted to her communiqués with the dead.” Her words were cut short as Stenecker pushed her toward the doors. “You asked us why we opened the gates for you? It takes twelve of us to open the courtyard gates, and they can only be opened manually.” She looked past Stenecker at all of them now. “We did not open them, gentlemen. The mother foundress did.”
Stenecker was having none of it. “Then why did we not see her there?”
“Because—” The nun spoke, then hesitated. The sudden silence was as unnerving as her next words.
“She does not need to be in the courtyard to open the gate.”
“I have heard enough talk, Sister. Open this door,” Stenecker ordered.
“The men in the snow who attacked you? We did not send them to stop you!” She turned to him as he tried to reach out and pull the iron handles. The doors were locked, and her words became a cutting whisper. “We did not even know you were coming.”
“Unlock the door, Sister.”
“She knew. The mother foundress. She pulled them out of the snow where they had died and she sent them to stop you!”
For the first time, Stenecker could see fear in her eyes. And not because of him.
It was because of what lay beyond that door.
This troubled him, and though he would never betray this, he turned and pushed back through his men to young Hans, whispering in his ear, “Go back to the dining hall. Find Gerhard and tell him to radio our position. Tell him we may need more men.”
Stenecker grabbed the candelabra from Sister Mary Ruth and gave it to him. Hans and his flame retreated and were swallowed by the cavernous hall as Stenecker strode back to Mother O’Cyrus. “Open this door.”
“There is a protocol for communicating with her,” she said.
Stenecker turned to five of his six soldiers. “If anyone comes down this hall, shoot them.” Then he nodded to the sixth. “You, draw your pistol and stay at our flank.”
“You would be doing yourself a great kindness to allow me to facilitate the conversation,” Mother O’Cyrus said as she slid a key into the lock. He pushed her aside and turned the key himself. An ancient tumbler turned, and Stenecker grabbed the large iron handles and pulled. The rusty hinges squealed like a dying pig as the doors swung open onto a vast darkness.
Moonlight streaked in from high rectangular windows and silhouetted a mountainous shadow some yards away. Stenecker grabbed the mother superior’s candelabra and took several steps toward it, just enough to see the enormity of what sat in the center of this room.
The mother foundress was not only centuries old, she was massive.
She was perhaps three times as large as any human being, an insanely obese woman, slumped and motionless in the largest wooden chair Stenecker had ever seen. The soldiers all stared in puzzlement. The woman’s great, shadowed head was bowed in sleep, and thick gray strings of hair hung from it like some oversized mop in need of wringing out. Her guttural snore marked the rise and fall of her enormous shoulders, stooped with the weight of the thick and rusted chains that anchored her to the floor.
For a moment Stenecker could not find his voice. “Why is she chained?”
“She has, on occasion, attacked … some of the sisters,” Mother O’Cyrus whispered back.
“Surely she cannot move.”
“She bites them, Herr Stenecker, when they get close enough to feed or wash her.”
“She is mad?”
O’Cyrus recited a line of Latin and then translated: “God’s beautiful abomination.” The stunned officers moved deeper into the room, trying to confirm this human impossibility.
“Wake her,” Stenecker said.
“She is never asleep.”
“Prove to me this old sow is your necromancer,” Stenecker hissed, “and that you do not think to make fools of us!”
“You have seen her powers,” Mother O’Cyrus insisted.
“I said prove this is the creature we seek! Tell her we wish to speak to her!”
“She hears everything we are saying, Herr Field Marshal, believe this. And she does only what she wishes. She will not perform like a monkey on a chain.”
“She is already on a chain, sister!” He glared at her. “And if what she does will be exclusively her choice, then she can choose to speak to me or watch the rest of you die. Sergeant Kimmel, take your pistol out and shoot that old one.”
Kimmel looked back at him.
“Do it!” Stenecker barked.
The gunnery sergeant raised his Luger and aimed it at Sister Mary Ruth. He saw her hands shaking uncontrollably and swung his aim at another. “Which old one, Herr Field Marshal?”
“Any of them, you idiot!”
“I would not do that, Herr Stenecker,” Mother O’Cyrus cautioned. “The mother foundress likes to teach. Especially the commandments.”
“Shoot any of them!” Stenecker shouted, and Kimmel swung back to Sister Mary Ruth and fired point-blank at the old woman—but his own chest exploded with the shot. The gunnery sergeant went wide-eyed and clutched at his wound as he saw his weapon’s smoking and shredded metal. The bullet had fired out the back of the gun!
As he crashed to the floor, Kimmel heard Mother O’Cyrus’s voice: “Do unto others, Herr Field Marshal—”
Major Grunwald stepped up, aimed his own pistol directly at Sister Mary Ruth’s forehead, and pulled the trigger. The bullet ripped into Grunwald’s own head, and he flailed back and slammed into the wall.
“—as you would have them do unto you.” The mother superior bowed her head.
Stenecker whipped around and aimed his Luger directly at her. She didn’t even raise her head, just said softly, “I would most strongly dissuade you from that.”
The field marshal slowly lowered his weapon as a sound began to fill the room, a deep churning as if from some ancient, titanic machine.
The mother foundress was laughing.
A sound so low and guttural, it surely came from the belly of some mammoth beast. Her shoulders quaked, and her chains clattered, and her great head lifted, drifting through a slash of light. She was more of a nightmare than he could ever have imagined. Her ancient visage was so severely ravaged by time and gluttony, she had the aspect of some grotesque apple doll. The folds and creases of her withered flesh were so heavy and so deep in her face, they eclipsed her eyes as if she had none.
“How horrible it must be”—Stenecker thought Mother O’Cyrus was talking about the hideous thing chained to the chair—“to find that your power came only from a gun, a gun that now will only shoot you.”
“You are a great hypocrite, Sister!” Stenecker spat back. “Thou shalt not kill! Have you never heard of this?! You are breaking your own commandments!”
The mother foundress laughed so hard that her great heft seesawed in the chair. Stenecker felt it right through his boots.
“Are you finding religion, Herr Field Marshal?” The room rocked suddenly as if it struck by a mortar shell. It rattled the doors as Stenecker rushed to throw them open.
The dark hall was lined with the bodies of floating soldiers.
The field marshal thrust his candelabra forward, and its orange light caught their rifles as they clattered to the floor beneath feet that no longer touched the ground.
These men weren’t floating—they were impaled!
Each was on one of the iron candleholders that lined the walls, as if all of the soldiers had been lifted in unison and then slammed against the upturned spikes—left to hang there like grisly ornaments.
Stenecker rushed to the nearest one, whose mouth opened but only sputtered blood. The field marshal barely glimpsed the glistening mass that slipped off the metal spike. It was the soldier’s liver. It had been pushed out and dropped neatly between Stenecker’s boots.
A gentle whisper wafted into the hall: “It gave us no joy, Herr Stenecker, no joy at all”—it was Mother O’Cyrus, stepping from the dark room into the hallway—“to know that the moment she opened the gates, none of you would be leaving.”
The field Marshal stared back as the color ran from his face. “We shall see about that!” His pistol came up again—a reflex. Then he remembered he couldn’t fire, and in desperation he sought out his only remaining ally, the sixth sentry: a soldier who, like him, was the color of a sheet.
Stenecker raced down the hall with him, a move that sent the mother foundress wailing, lurching up from her great wooden throne back in the shadows and straining the heavy chains. One of them snapped as if it were twine, and a long piece of it flew like shrapnel across the room toward the doors.
A terrible sound whirled Stenecker around: he saw the soldier lurch to a halt as if he had been stabbed in the back. His mouth opened, but he never spoke. The length of chain dangled out of his stomach like a rusty umbilical cord—and in the instant he clutched it, it yanked him back like he was a fish on a line.
He ran screaming past the nuns and disappeared into the dark mouth of the mother foundress’s room. The sisters did not look back; they simply bowed their heads, and while Stenecker watched, made the sign of the cross.
The field marshal was no longer masking his terror. He raced away so fast that his candles snuffed out, leaving him to sprint madly through the dark in the desperate hope that it would deliver him back to the lights and fire of the dining hall. He was breathless by the time he staggered through the archway and was met by young Hans. “We have radioed, Herr Field Marshal! They are sending more men!”
Stenecker grabbed him and swung him around. “Run!” He pushed him toward the doors far across the room. “All of you!” The room full of soldiers looked back in utter confusion. “We are leaving this instant!”
“The mother foundress would never allow that,” Mother O’Cyrus said, casting a long, dark shadow as she stepped into the hall with the sisters gathering behind her.
“She is a devil!” Stenecker pointed at her rabidly. “She is a demon and you are at her mercy!” The vast chamber rocked as if it objected to this remark; the floor erupted, hit by an invisible force that blasted several soldiers off their feet. One slid all the way down the long dining table, screaming at its end as he pitched into space. He smashed into the roaring fireplace, striking it so hard that a blast of sparks and cinders flew out like fireworks.
Others who found themselves airborne were equally unlucky: they struck the walls and left gruesome trails of gore as they slid to the floor.
Stenecker could muster only a coarse whisper. “Run for your lives….”
He started a frantic exodus across the hall as it trembled up to its highest rafters.
“How can you pretend that she is something holy?” Stenecker screamed across the room as he ran. “She is pure evil, Sister, and you know this! She is as far from God as any one thing has ever been!”
A rafter splintered and the long blue banner embroidered with Latin came loose. Its metal pole, still tethered to a heavy rope, fell. Stenecker saw it descending and ran, certain he was its target. He pushed madly ahead of the terrified exodus as the long metal rod swung down in a graceful arc and pierced three retreating soldiers at once. Like a mammoth needle and thread, the pole pulled the rope through them, sewing them together before it found Stenecker and staked him to the wall.
Hans charged toward him as the field marshal wailed. The boy struggled to wrestle the pole out of his lower shoulder: first by pulling madly, and finally by sliding back the others who were skewered on it as well.
They collapsed to the floor, the rope still laced through their wounds like some grisly human necklace.
The pole finally slid out of Stenecker and he howled in pain. Hans pulled him toward their escape, and Stenecker staggered ahead as he found ire enough to bellow back at Mother O’Cyrus, “You crazy old bitch! Don’t you see? She is an abomination! You are in service to a monster!”
He was already gone when Mother O’Cyrus replied, “Heil Hitler, Herr Field Marshal.”
Stenecker almost tumbled down the long descent of stone steps from the abbey. His men ran with him—the ones who weren’t pitched over the parapet by a force unseen that he now understood was the mother foundress, still in a tantrum deep inside the granite walls of her chamber.
He could hear the men raining down the stairs past him and hitting the frozen cobblestones far below. Their skulls cracked and their bones snapped. Stenecker jumped from the steps at the first survivable elevation and staggered to his feet, his shoulder throbbing and his right arm useless as he raced with young Hans toward his sedan. He stopped abruptly with the others.
The massive gates were closed.
Shut tight as a tomb as the moonlit snow fell past them. Stenecker grabbed his men and threw them forward. “On the gates! Everyone!” They charged forward and were struggling to achieve a unified grip when the earth beneath their boots rumbled and shook and the gargantuan doors began parting without their help.
Stenecker stood breathless, peering at the first increment of moonlit countryside revealed. But as the gates swung wider, they presented an even more heartening sight, one that filled the men with joy and brought a cheer from young Hans.
A full German platoon stood out in the snow just beyond the gates.
When they saw Stenecker and his men, they raised their arms in a perfect salute.
“They came! They came, Herr Field Marshal!” young Hans cried out, and he raced toward them as his boots spit up snow.
The field marshal pointed behind him, but words failed as he tried to explain to his rescuers what horrors lay up the dark, stone steps of Greystone Abbey. Instead he could only laugh as he moved forward. Or was he crying? Or were the sounds he made more like a madman singing in the wind?
Whatever they were, they were cut short as the platoon opened fire on him.
In a flash of blinding light and angry sound, Stenecker felt his body being torn into. A terrible burn rushed down his torso and took the power from his legs. He crashed to his knees.
He saw young Hans’s beautiful face as it met a spray of gunfire. It belched out blood from a gaping mouth, a split nose, and an eye socket suddenly missing its globe. The young lad pitched into the snow, and every man around him was cut down as quickly.
Stenecker struggled to stay up and saw that their executioners were more of the frozen Nazi dead, their eyes frosted white, helmets dusted with snow, and flesh the sickly ash-gray of the no longer breathing.
The field marshal was the last to close his eyes. He stayed alive long enough to watch the snow falling past the parapet. “It is the dust of the angels,” he could hear his mother telling him from somewhere. But the only figures he could see were dressed in black and filing onto the balcony with Mother O’Cyrus at their center.
They looked more like an army of Grim Reapers than angels, staring down in their dark shawls as they watched Stenecker finally topple lifeless onto the icy cobblestone.
* * *
In the eerie quiet of the whistling wind, they made the sign of the cross and then headed back inside. Only Sister Mary Ruth slowed as she heard movement in the snow below. She did not turn—she simply clutched her rosary in her trembling hand and walked away.
She had nightmares enough and did not need the sight of the freshly dead field marshal and his murdered men pulling themselves up from their puddles of blood-red snow and moving out the abbey gates.
The granite cross above them cast a deep, black shadow in the snow they crossed—to join the mother foundress’s army of the dead as the great gates of Greystone Abbey swung closed again.