Mark Edward Hall

Chapter 22

Rick Jennings came awake with a start, his head pounding, his stomach sour and churning. Staggering away from his bed he made his way to the bathroom. By now his entire body was thumping like a vast heart. More than a year without booze and he knew he had poisoned his entire system. He went to his knees hugging the bowl as the wretched undigested whiskey spewed up from the center of his being like liquid fire. He hated puking. He hated whiskey. On this morning he hated everything and everybody, but mostly he hated himself.

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“Teach us, Good Lord,

To love thee as thou deservest

To give, and not to count the cost,

To fight, and not to heed the wounds,

To toil, and not to seek for rest,

To labor, and not to ask for any reward,

Save that of knowing—that we do thy will,

Amen.”

—Saint Ignatius Loyola

Chapter 21

Following the short Jesuit prayer, the six monks in the black robes rose somberly from their places of worship and filed one by one toward the stairway door beside the altar. They had all arrived within the past two hours, most were tired from their journey and tempers were heated. The discussions thus far had been impassioned and vociferous, as Redington suspected they would be. Read more…

Chapter 20

By the time Rick Jennings left the scene of the murdered family in Exeter New Hampshire it was late and he was severely depressed and weary with fatigue. He knew very little about why a seemingly disaffected family had died the way they had, and even less about why their young daughter had literally disappeared without a trace. The more he thought about it the more he believed that CSI Kohler had been right when he’d said that something supernatural had happened to them. It was the only explanation that made sense, tasteless as it was. Read more…

Part Two

The Artifact

Chapter 19

April 22

The temple sat on a hilltop so that God could see everything that went on inside. This was the hope at least. That the maker, in all His beneficence, would see what man had sacrificed in His name, that He would peer in the windows and come to know and respect the name of man as man had His.

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