The Seventh Seal

"Watchman, How Much Longer the Night?"

Canto XII

A Covenant With Death

Scene 1

belladonna — n. In Italian, a beautiful lady; in English, a deadly poison. A striking example of the essential identity of the two tongues.
— Ambrose Bierce

The damage to Sean's van was considerable, and Brisco declared it would take him a few days to get it street worthy again. So it was in Vance's aging conversion van that three Sentinels pulled up in front of the Covenant House.

The Covenant House was an expansive, two-story structure in a rehabilitated brick warehouse. The neighborhood contained run-down apartments to one side and a run-down industrial area on the other, but had renaissance possibilities.

Stepping through the front door, Vance, Sean and Billy found themselves in a sizeable lobby. The ceiling was open to the floor above, with a walkway that ran around the edge. A staircase took up one corner, and offices could be seen through the doors around the walls of the room. The place was clean and quiet, with the normal sounds of an office drifting through the hush of the air conditioning.

"How can I help you?" asked the receptionist, a young man at the desk just inside the door.

Sean began the introductions with a friendly smile. "Hi, This here is Billy Jim Cole. You may recognize him, a well-known blues musician in the Chicagoland area. I'm Jason Kilarney, and this is Keith James. We're about to embark on organizing a fundraising concert to benefit disadvantaged youth, but haven't yet identified the right organization to receive the funds. We are here to see if Covenant House is possibly that organization."

"Wait just one moment, and I'll have someone step out to talk with you," the man said pleasantly, reaching for the phone.

A moment later, a short Hispanic woman stepped out of an office and introduced herself as Renee, the administrative assistant who coordinated Covenant House's fund-raising efforts. She thanked them for their interest and gave them a brief tour of the offices, the dining room and kitchen, and the copy room. This last room was a large, busy space with several older teens tending to the work at hand. The teens smiled pleasantly at them when they peeked in. The upper floor, Renee explained, pointing to the doors along the upper walkway, consisted of dormitory rooms and a classroom.

Sean noticed that there was a set of double doors leading to another part of the building.

"And through there?" Sean asked, gesturing toward the pair of doors Renee had not mentioned.

"Through there," came another woman's voice from behind them, "is the gymnasium, the pool, and the director's office."

As they turned, Renee said, "This is Cynthia Wier, our chief administrator." Cynthia was a taller, professionally dressed woman of Asian descent. Even through the librarian-style look, the three men couldn't help but note her head-turning beauty.

"Gentlemen," Cynthia said in a friendly, but all-business tone. "Sorry it took me so long to join you, but I was in the middle of a phone call. Thank you, Renee, I'll finish the tour with them."

As Cynthia was listening to Billy explain their story, a door opened on the floor above them, and soon students were spreading through the building. As she led them on their tour and answered their questions, the Sentinels observed the students, as many as 25 of them between the ages of about twelve and twenty, going about their schedule.

"We offer a safe, loving environment that includes shelter, meals and counseling," Cynthia explained as she walked them through the rest of the building and back to the front office area. As they passed students, many of them greeted Cynthia as 'Sister Wier'.

"In-house classes help them catch up on—and keep up with—their education. They all work in various duties around the House as part of their stay, contributing to a solid work ethic and a sense of ownership in the mission of Covenant House. At its core, Covenant House is a spiritual community. We aim to lead these young people in their spiritual development and teach them how to deal with the temptations of the world."

"I know a young woman," Billy interjected, "a disadvantaged youth who could benefit from some spiritual encouragement. I'd like to bring her here if I could, to see if she takes to the place." Vance and Sean hid their surprise.

"When did you have in mind?" Cynthia asked.

"I think I could bring her this evening, if your schedule allows."

"Well," said Cynthia, "all of the teens are usually involved in special activities and in the service held in our sanctuary. It's not the best time to welcome a new member, but perhaps I can arrange it. Is there a number I can reach you at?"

Billy gestured to Sean. "Jason, my agent, keeps his phone handy."

Sean gave his calling card to Cynthia, from the ones he had printed up just for this purpose.

"I'll contact you soon," she said, smiling pleasantly, and wished them a good afternoon.

Scene 2

"It was tense, but then, important waiting is always tense. It's filled with tension, every waiting moment of it."
— Robert Rankin, The Hollow Chocolate Bunnies of the Apocalypse

Cynthia waited with the phone to her ear. After two rings, the call was answered by a smooth, male voice.

"Yes."

"We had some interesting visitors this afternoon at the House."

"Oh?"

"Possible benefactors, or so I thought at first."

"What did they look like?"

"Two of them could possibly be the people who visited St. Francis. One, a middle-aged blues musician, and the other a pleasant, attractive assistant with a slight accent."

"Ah. I see."

"The musician, at least, bears the mark of the chosen."

"That's what I was afraid of. The others?"

"I didn't spend the energy to check them because of tomorrow's plans."

"Just as well, then. Do you think they'll interfere?"

"They asked about bringing a teen they know to the House. Tonight. I told them I would call them back if it would work with our schedule."

"This could work in our favor. Invite them to come to the House in time for the service in the sanctuary tonight."

"Them? Not just the kid?"

"Sure. Why not? We'll put them in the back, to observe, and let them enjoy the incense."

"And if that doesn't work?"

"Have a couple of Brothers on-hand to persuade them. Put them in the holding area before bringing the final seven to the church."

"I just don't like their timing."

"Ah, but think of what rewards the Seven might offer in exchange for bringing them members of the Chosen. Tomorrow night will be historic."

Scene 3

zeal — n. A certain nervous disorder afflicting the young and inexperienced. A passion that goeth before a sprawl.
— Ambrose Bierce

"You want me to do what?" asked Rab.

"I told them I was going to bring in a young woman in need of some spiritual encouragement," explained Billy. "I think you'll play the part marvelously. You already have the attitude, piercings, non-conformist clothes and hair color. With you on the inside, I think we can do this!"

"So, you're going to get her into a place that we think might drug and abuse its members." Jimmy pointed out matter-of-factly.

"But they'll know that this wayward soul has someone on the outside that will look in on her," said Sean. "See how she's doing."

"If a potential money source is keeping tabs on her, you can bet they won't mess with her," proclaimed Billy.

"Will that make it less likely she'll learn anything?" asked Jimmy.

Vance had been quiet for a while. "No matter what we do, its risky. And there's no guarantee of success, either. While she's on the inside, we'll have to keep digging on the outside."

Vance turned to Rab. "Are you willing to do this?"

Rab shrugged. "It'll be more exciting than showing up for work. I'd better call and tell 'em that I'm going to an out-of-town family funeral. That I'll be gone a while."

"I have my own angle of investigation," said Jimmy. "I'll start tonight. I want to check the place out quietly while everyone is busy."

"Okay," said Vance, "At least we shouldn't run into any trouble immediately."

Scene 4

"If you hold a cat by the tail you learn things you cannot learn any other way."
— Mark Twain

Billy arrived at the Covenant House with Vance and Sean again, but this time Rab was the focus of attention, using the name Veronica. She was only twenty to begin with, so acting sixteen years old didn't take much effort. When they were met at the door, Billy, Sean and Vance were practically ignored while the Covenant House staff welcomed her and gave her a tour to put her at ease.

"I'm Scott," said the broad-shouldered, clean-cut man who approached the Sentinels. "Veronica will be well looked-after, I assure you. While they are getting settled, can I offer you a beverage? We have about half and hour before the service begins in the Sanctuary."

The three accepted graciously and were led through the dining room to the kitchen while Scott explained that the three of them would be allowed to observe the service, an uncommon privilege for non-residents. Before long, they could hear the students moving through the building and down the stairs to the basement chapel. Just before 9 PM, Scott led them down the stairs, through the doors and into the Sanctuary.

The basement room was large, and easily fit the 20 or so students and a few of the staff. Four faux-stone pillars marked the corners of the sanctuary proper, and a raised platform anchored the wall on their right. The middle of the room was dominated by a four-meter circular design in the carpeting. A seven-point star radiated from the center, and seven corresponding focus points on the outer edge of the circle were marked with what looked like large Greek letters.

The teens were seated on the floor in a unified circle within the design on the carpeting. Each had their hands interlocked with their neighbors. The lighting was soft, allowing the many candles lit by the pillars and platform to easily catch one's eye. A strong, sweet incense burned from four thuribles hanging from the pillars. Billy, Sean and Vance were led over to folding chairs that had been placed outside the circle for them.

The service began when Sister Wier stepped out of a side room and walked to the platform. In contrast to her appearance when they spoke to her earlier, she was now wearing a form-fitting, sleeveless black dress. It was made of a thin material that lay close against her body, accenting her model's figure and sparking the men's imaginations. Sean exchanged guilty glances with Billy and Vance. This was definitely going to be interesting.

Scene 5

You say, "We have made a covenant with death, and with the nether world we have made a pact; When the overwhelming scourge passes, it will not reach us; For we have made lies our refuge, and in falsehood we have found a hiding place."
— Isaiah 28:15-19 (NAB)

Jimmy stood outside in the dark examining the window of the Covenant House director's office closely. It was wired to the alarm system, but he was comfortable dealing with that. Such alarms were designed to protect against force more than finesse.

About five minutes later, he was standing inside behind the director's desk. The furnishing hinted at an obsession with the occult. The antique desk was carved with archaic symbols. The ebony bookshelf was filled with various books of all sizes. Wrought iron candle sconces hung on the walls where modern light fixtures would normally be. An ornately framed oil painting portrait of the man Jimmy assumed to be the director himself hung on one wall. Creepy.

Jimmy began with the desk. Administrative stuff, a docking station for a laptop computer, a beverage coaster. Mundane, normal things. A blotter on the desk held a notepad, but any pages containing notes were gone. Jimmy paused, and pulled a little pen light from his pocket. Shining the light across the pad, he could make out the impression in the paper from what had been written on the pad. St. Peter he thought. Or spelled Pedr. Something very close to that.

Inside the center desk drawer, Jimmy discovered a small key. The kind that goes to filing cabinets, Jimmy thought as he moved to the cabinets along the end wall. He opened the drawers and scanned through the files looking for anything interesting. One section held files on various teens that must be residents here. At the end of those files was a rather thick manila envelope which drew Jimmy's interest. Rather than finding a sheaf of reports on a particularly troublesome character, Jimmy was shocked to see that the envelope held hard copy prints of forty-nine missing persons reports. All but seven of them were marked with a simple red "X" slashed across the photo. That doesn't look good. Jimmy debated over whether to take the file, but decided to leave it where it was for now. He memorized some of the names to check up on later, closed everything thing up quietly and returned the key to its place.

The bookshelf was fairly full. Although the majority of the books were normal looking, the subjects definitely revolved around the occult and mythology. Some of them seemed to be novelty titles. A handful of the books were old tomes, probably rare. Looking closely at them, it appeared to Jimmy that they had something to do with demons and necromancy. Bad news, boys and girls.

Poking around even further, he noticed a long metal object lying behind some of the books. Pulling it out, he found himself holding an iron tube, just over an inch in diameter and about a foot long. A piece of parchment was curled inside. Gently, Jimmy slipped the paper from the tube and shone his penlight on it. The writing consisted of rows of characters made from jumbles of lines and little triangles. Nothing Jimmy had ever seen before. Other symbols and doodles were placed in the wide margins. They reminded Jimmy of magic circles and stuff from fantasy artwork he had seen.

This looks important. I don't want to leave this here... but I don't want them to know that it's gone. At least not right away. Setting the scroll aside, he ripped a piece of paper from the back of a notepad on the desk and scrawled "Repent" on it in childish letters. He rolled this paper up and placed it in the tube, and then returned the tube to its place. It was a poor substitute, but putting it there was amusing to Jimmy.

Jimmy figured that he was missing something, but felt he had stayed in one place too long. Gently, he place the scroll in his backpack and slipped back out the window into the night.

Scene 6

"It's like we fell down the rabbit hole, woke up in ... I don't know. Stephen King's basement."
— Wanda, in Sandman #34: Bad Moon Rising

Well after midnight, Jimmy drove his bike past the Covenant House again and was surprised to see Vance's van still parked in the adjacent lot. He pulled into the lot and stopped his bike. That's not right. Not at all, he thought.

Stepping quietly around the building, he once again stood outside the office window as he had before. Confident that no one was around, he stole back into the office. Immediately he could see that someone had been in the office while he was gone. At the base of the cabinets he could make out a box that had not been there before.

First, Jimmy moved over to the bookshelf. He pulled three of the suspicious old volumes and put them in his backpack next to the protected scroll.

When he moved across the room and shone his little light into the box, Jimmy was startled. He was looking at three wallets, two mobile phones, a pen knife and two blues harmonicas. Harps, Billy called them. His friends were definitely in trouble.

Jimmy quickly examined the objects and confirmed his fears. The phones were Rab's and Sean's. Wallets from the three guys. He stuffed them all into his backpack.

Jimmy moved over to the door and listened for several long breaths. Nothing. Quietly, he pulled the door open enough to get a look. He was standing in a large hallway. A door to his left appeared to lead outside. The door across the hall was named by the plate on the wall as the gymnasium and pool. To his right, a pair of unnamed doors. Everything was quiet.

Jimmy padded to the double doors and listened again. Hushed voices at a distance. Getting louder, but still not close. With a smile of recognition, Jimmy pulled the door open an inch and peered through. He was looking at the large reception lobby, and as he watched, his four friends came up the stairwell! Jimmy pulled the door all the way open and walked casually into the lobby.

His friends spun around to face him when they heard the sound of the door closing. Jimmy had already pulled his backpack forward and unzipped it. Before anyone could say anything, he was handing their personal effects back to them.

"Check to see if everything's here, or if it's been tampered with," Jimmy advised.

"How...?" Rab started to say, but Jimmy cut her off with a hand gesture.

"If you're ready, let's get out of here. You guys sure look the worse for wear. C'mon. We can talk more somewhere else."

Outside the Covenant House, before the Sentinels had reached Vance's van, a pair of headlights framed them and moved in. The car pulled up short as they scattered.

"We need to talk!" came an urgent voice from the car.

Vance looked into the car to discover officer Ziolkowski, driving an old Camry. Vance stepped forward and spoke briefly with him. As the car pulled away, Vance turned to the others and sighed.

"There's more. We have to re-group, so I we arranged to meet at a Coffee Express joint not far from here. This is going to be a long night."

Scene 7

"When dealing with demonology, possession is 9/10 of the law."
— Jimmy Garfield of Raphael

Jimmy and Ziolkowski listened incredulously as Sean described the chapel "service".

"Sister Wier gave this excellent sermon on the conscious denial of the Seven Tempests and the embrace of something she called Salvation."

"The Seven Tempests seem to be the same as what we know as the Seven Deadly Sins," added Vance.

"Before long, however, we began to feel light-headed from the incense."

"Which wasn't just incense, it was Salvation," interjected Rab, angrily. "Salvation is a designer drug. It has some similarities to LSD."

"Right about the time she finished preaching, I was feeling, well, drunk, and I knew it was well past time to go," Sean continued. "They started chanting. But by that time, Rab was passed out, and Vance wasn't far behind. So Billy and I grabbed Vance and made for the stairs, but three guys from the staff stopped us. In our state we couldn't put up a very effective effort."

"When we woke up," Vance said, "we were chained to a cinderblock wall in some kind of tunnel, or pipechase. Convenient that they had shackles pre-installed. I'm sure we weren't their first guests. Seven of the teens were locked up in there with us."

"We overheard Wier talking to some goon," said Billy. "Wier told him that I bear the mark of the Chosen. But they didn't deal with us immediately because they have something else going on. They were transporting the drugged teens somewhere. And they said something about a ritual happening tomorrow night."

"And something about Seven Dark Lords," added Vance. "And I certainly don't like the sounds of that."

"The design on the chapel floor was a seven-pointed star," said Rab. "Seven this, seven that."

"But you were free when I bumped into you," noted Jimmy.

"Thanks to Rab," said Vance. "They didn't count on one of their captives being able to pick a lock."

"With what?" Ziolkowski asked.

"With one of these," said Rab, pointing to her many piercings. Ziolkowski noted a couple of safety pins among the studs and bars. "I had a paper clip in this spot, which I was able to reach. It took a while to get myself loose, but once I had my hands free it went a lot faster."

"Nice," complimented Jimmy. "As for my part, I visited the director's office there." Jimmy omitted the 'how' part of his visit, since Ziolkowski was present.

"In a filing cabinet, I found an envelope of documents on forty-nine missing teens. All but seven had been marked with a red "X". I left those there, but I memorized some of the names." Jimmy scribbled several names on a napkin and pushed it out onto the table.

"And I brought some other things back with me." He reached into his backpack and pulled out a roll of paper towels, setting it in the middle of the table.

"Wow," said Rab sarcastically. "That's impressive."

"Thanks," said Jimmy in mock courtesy. "Look inside the tube."

Vance extracted the scroll while Jimmy described the iron tube it was originally in. None of the them could make any sense from the scratchy symbols.

"I also found these," said Jimmy, extracting the three old books from his pack and setting them in front of Vance.

"I don't read Latin," said Vance, looking carefully at the books. "But you can bet that the words Daemoniaca and Necromantia don't bode well."

"You just pilfered these things from their office," laughed Ziolkowski nervously.

"When dealing with demonology, possession is 9/10 of the law," Jimmy said matter-of-factly. Rab started giggling, and Ziolkowski just smiled at the pun and shook his head.

"The other thing I found I didn't think was important at first, until you mentioned a ritual," said Jimmy. "But there was a note about St. Peter, except it seemed to be spelled P-e-d-r. Does that mean anything to anyone?"

"There used to be a church called St. Pedr outside of town somewhere," said Ziolkowski. "I'm pretty sure it was closed long ago."

Rab sighed. "I could use some ibuprofen and a drug-free nap, but there's so much to track down."

"There's more," said Ziolkowski. "I confirmed that Bauer has connections with Martin Sardis, the Covenant House director. Digging more, I found some hints in the computer records that I don't have the skills to tease out. I'm confident that Bauer was actively covering something up, but I won't have anything solid until I can figure out those computer files. If what you say is true—that something will happen tomorrow night—we don't have much time."

"I can help you with the computer stuff," volunteered Rab. "If you can find a way to get me in there without raising suspicions."

Ziolkowski looked at his watch. It was 3:30 AM. "If I take you down there now, it's about as quiet as it ever gets."

:: End Canto 12 ::

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