The Ameritat

Tendrils of smoke wove their way upward as a small orange flame pierced the shroud of a dank night. The match’s illumination revealed the symmetry and proportion of a well-bred face. His cigar’s ember grew to a surging beacon as a cloud grew and billowed round the outsider’s hard, pallid countenance. His striking eyes shifted heavenward and drank in the gothic monument before him. St. Patrick’s Cathedral once invoked a sense of awe and reflection in many who gazed upon it. But he viewed it with disenchanted eyes and any inspiration was fleeting. The smoke clung to his hair and shoulders urging him back to the darkness as he abruptly passed through a streetlight and crossed 51st Street. Quickly, quietly, he moved forward into the ambient light of St. Patrick’s illuminated walls.

The cathedral’s spires once dominated the skyline, reaching toward heaven, pointing to an awesome and enabling god. Now their cold stone facades impudently compete with temples erected to a more gratifying dominus. Massive, dark monstrosities, in smooth glass and impenetrable steel, tower overhead with unseen spires pointing not upward, but inward, magnifying a more insidious deity. They congregate in a skyline of monetary exaltation that leaves New York’s cathedrals forgotten and insignificant.

Anxiously, Patrick’s patrons politely bumped past one another in the nave of this refuge, clamoring to gain an audience with the Almighty. Night after night, they grope in vain supplication and morbid self-abasement - impotent and fearful.

Lucius avoided entry at the front door, and stole toward the shadows of the cathedral’s west side. He crept backward into the darkness and sought cover from the drizzle that now assailed the city. With the cool masonry at his back, he kept a keen eye on the Fifth Avenue traffic and waited patiently for his quarry to exit the monolith.
Cars crept past, apparitions sloshing along in the evening’s pallor. He watched them file by like rats with noses thrust in the air on the scent of some acrid carcass. Their pilots, driven by instinct, longed to gorge themselves upon the misfortune of some wretched soul.

As he mused, footfalls in the antechamber pricked unnatural senses and inclined his regard to Patrick’s heavy door. After all of this time, the search was finally over.

Father McCree pushed past the door out onto Fifth and shuddered under the autumn night’s breath. McCree felt the oppressiveness envelope him in its uncaring embrace prompting him to draw his overcoat round his ample body. A shock of white hair was quickly capped with a weary fedora. His face was bright, but shadowed by a veiny, bulbous nose. Obtrusive as it was, it threatened no detraction from his active, overgrown brows. Many years past his prime, he was still quick of wit and quite perceptive. The air of a heavy burden pursued McCree out of the doorway. In spite of his discernment, he would have missed those piercing amber eyes glinting in the veiled corner of the entryway, if not for the pungent cigar smoke.

McCree looked over and gasped as an impressive figure emerged from the blackness. He peered up over his nose at the looming creature swathed in an Oxford gray suit made of silk.

Lucius freed the cigar clamped between his teeth with his thumb and middle finger and released a billow of white smoke that strayed out of his mouth and rose past his nose. It undulated up over angular cheeks and danced around raven strands of long, wavy hair. He pitched the stub toward the gutter, looking on as it flipped and rolled in an array of sparks.
McCree, thankful for a distraction from those terrible golden eyes, watched it settle and hiss in a puddle.

“I’m sorry if I alarmed you, Father,” Lucius nodded his head in nominal respect.

McCree fumbled for words. “Indeed, you gave me quite the start. No matter though, no harm done,” voice rough after years of rousing homilies.

“I regret troubling you at this hour, but I’m in dire need of your assistance.”

The priest was transfixed by the stranger’s presence. Lucius’s voice was more a presence in his mind than a tickle in his ear. Its tone and caliber sang to him like an orchestral movement with mournful, autumnal cellos that poured smooth and sweet over the priest’s ears.

McCree felt himself assenting though his intuition screamed from the back of his consciousness defying this siren’s song. His impulses demanded that he plug his hairy ears with his fingers and run screaming. Yet his reason, assuring his safety, won over doubt, and the outsider’s voice allayed his fear. Even if it were the young hours of the morning; he felt compelled to acquiesce to the stranger’s appeal.

“My son, I have sworn duty to the cross and to the church and I will hear your confession,” he said, straightening his posture as he turned hoping to retreat back within the refuge of Patrick’s walls.

“Yes, well, I don’t believe we’ll have any of that tonight, thank you,” Lucius sneered.

“My purpose is merely to have a piece of your mind.” His eyes sparkled and McCree shuddered again. “My name,” he said presenting his hand “is Lucius.”

McCree finally relented, and apprehensively extended his own appendage. A well-manicured hand extended from a French cuff and clutched the priest’s.

“A pleasure, I assure you.” McCree offered in feigned confidence, failing to reciprocate with his own name.

He squirmed in the Lucius’s hard, sinewy grip. McCree tried to halt the gesture, only to be disappointed by a prodigious strength that steadfastly held him in place, then altered his course. Much to his chagrin, after a small scuffle that sent his hat sailing, he found himself spun around to face the walkway.

“Why don’t we take a little stroll?” Lucius smiled wryly, and he led the priest down Fifth Avenue to 51st Street. They crossed Fifth Avenue at the intersection and started toward the Hudson River. All around them, buildings loomed, blocking the starry night while casting ominous shadows. And as the evening waned, the mist grew to a dense fog that lurked in the alleys, creeping out to the streets gaining boldness as it grew.

Lucius led the priest by half a stride. Vigorously and in silence they strode past Broadway and then Eighth Avenue. The river drew ever closer. In a rare display, the city had grown dormant. Even the dependable deluge of traffic had subsided. The night pressed in on them, stalking them like a hunter. The street lights hummed a mournful liturgy, their radiance dulled under the oppression of a fog that evolved from the drizzle. The priest’s footsteps were the only sound; they echoed in his ears and filled the vacant street.

McCree argued with himself the whole way. He could not shake Lucius’s influence. It irritated him, a thorn under his flesh picking at his calm disposition. Though neither spoke, McCree still heard the stranger’s silvery voice and felt that presence in his mind. It proved a powerful opiate, and he continued to follow.

“McCree isn’t it?” Lucius inquired as he turned to face him.

McCree froze in his tracks, but had no time to react before his arm, replete with flesh, ached with the cruelty of Lucius’s grip. The physical warning was followed by a sharp command, “Keep moving!”

“I arrived in New York only hours ago. How could you possibly know my name?” The priest’s mind raced, searching a lifetime of faces until finally he came to an alarming conclusion. “Who sent you?” He demanded.

“Sorry, I work under my own auspices. Let’s just say that I have a personal interest in you,” Lucius said resuming their walk.

“I have never known an instance when that was favorable for the quarry,” McCree replied, unwittingly following Lucius’s lead. His nerves dug at his bowels.

They emerged from the dark forest of hulking buildings into the heart of Hell’s Kitchen. The titans of Manhattan’s business district brooded behind them disapprovingly. Residential and commercial properties that bore the aura of a troubled past cowed at the feet of modernity’s imposing architectural marvels. The surroundings were veiled by a spectrum of nocturnal hues: malignant swatches of black, indifferent grays, and cold blues. McCree evaluated tenant buildings weary with age and abuse - their black tarred roofs were gaping maws pleading with the night for retribution. Pinpoints of light in windows probed the shadows that nightly reenacted the atrocities committed in narrow alleys and hidden corners. It all set McCree’s teeth on edge.

McCree eyed the stranger with the distrust he might afford a stray dog, keeping his distance. It was a vantage that afforded him the time needed to assess his abductor. He feared Lucius’s intentions; however, he was not prone to emotional displays. Instead, he satiated his already well nurtured curiosity by following.

He scrutinized Lucius up and down and back again as they walked. Every detail he catalogued about Lucius slowly built a scorn that the priest hoped would ward off fear. The stranger was stylish and attractive as far as he could surmise, but something was wrong with him. McCree found him easy to look at, yet he hated the sight of him.

Lucius walked with calm assurance, the stride of a purposeful man. A misplaced confidence, the priest wagered, as he estimated Lucius’s age to have just rounded thirty. As with most young men in the new millennium, he wore his hair longer, most of the way down his neck, but not to the shoulders. Great wavy layers of black mane swayed brushing the collar of a costly suit. He was ostentacious to be sure, but McCree had difficulty dismissing him so easily.

The priest wavered, knowing all too well the danger of pigeonholing an untested opponent. Accordingly, the dull throb in his arm testified to Lucius’s unknown nature. His mind swam, Lucius effecting control over his faculties.

“Do you plan to lead me to some lair and drain me of my vital fluids, placing my parts in jars for amusement?” McCree laughed, hoping for some reaction that would lighten the mood or provide the reassurance he needed to act. There was only silence.

The pier was a dark extension of the city, jutting into nature’s last bastion in the concrete jungle, the Hudson River. The long narrow structure bore the finality of a dead-end where the pier dropped off into the hostile water. Only once they traversed its length did Lucius turn to face McCree.

“Pardon my cryptic behavior.” Lucius’s tongue inspected his bottom as he calculated his words. “I had to be sure that we could speak . . . privately.”

“No, pardon me, what I think you mean is isolated.” McCree shot back, not knowing where this was leading. He winced and looked up at Lucius awaiting the verdict.

“I do believe you have me on that one. I have required an audience with you for quite some time now, and it is unfortunate that I was not able to track you down until now,” he eyed the priest, “London, Madrid, Jerusalem, Prague, get around don’t we?”

“Well, we’re here, and now we’re alone. I am too damn old for all of this cat and mouse, so get on with it - what do you want?”

The air was markedly cooler by the river. The night’s fog rose off it and marched into the streets. McCree’s skin was clammy, and his head ached because of Lucius’s intrusion. This had clearly gone far enough. His activities were kept in the strictest confidence. If Lucius had followed him to New York from Prague, then he must learn for what purpose. “I cannot fathom how our current situation is going to accommodate a peaceful exchange,” McCree said.

Lucius laughed hollowly. When things took a turn for the worse, the good father would run given the choice. McCree always hated direct confrontation.

McCree’s eyes, frightened creatures scurrying below those immense brows, darted searching for a route of escape. Behind him was an open path back down the pier into the city. He glanced over his shoulder and grimly calculated the distance. There was no way he could outrun Lucius. The other possibility led him into the Hudson.

Intuition had never failed him and in an instant he had made up his mind. He reckoned with himself, and knew his actions may be rash. Nonetheless, the weather and city were now playing heavily on his nerves. A deep sigh escaped the aging clergyman as he resigned himself to his task. He resented that things had escalated so far. He reverently touched his forehead then crossed his heart. McCree had been part of this scenario before.

“I have unnerved you. I thought your profession would require nerves of steel, cool conduct and all that.” Lucius stepped menacingly forward, eyes ablaze. “What happened to all of that ‘Good Father’ business back at the cathedral? Mind you, ‘riddling confession finds but riddling shrift,’ and contrary priests may find themselves at the bottom of a river.”

“I’ll not stand for an affront on the priesthood or threats against my person.”

McCree willed himself to action and peeled back his overcoat - patting vigorously, then desperately for the pistol he kept concealed under his jacket.

“I hope you aren’t hunting about for this,” Lucius said
dourly.

McCree watched the polished steel of his revolver, falling from the stranger’s hand, vanish as it plummeted through the fog and plunked into the Hudson.

“Imagine my surprise when I found that upon inspection of your person during a friendly handshake. Tsk, tsk, an armed priest is a bit unseemly.”

McCree fought to free himself from Lucius’s stare, but failed. Lucius’s eyes were hard and malevolent now, and froze him with fear.
He was unsure about it at the cathedral, but he could not deny it now. The outsider’s eyes glinted and shimmered in the night reflecting light like a cat’s. He trembled, searching them for intent.
For only a moment, McCree discerned in Lucius’s face a weariness, a world-worn experience he was accustomed to seeing solely in friends aged even beyond his own years. Beyond that, he suddenly discovered a presence that he knew, as one knows an old haunt from childhood. Worse yet, it knew him.

Lucius struck like a viper and latched onto McCree’s throat. The priest weakened under the immense strength of the stranger as he labored against the vice around his neck. He shook violently like a feral animal fighting a leash. Guttural pleas and hissing whimpers struggled to escape his collapsing airway. McCree lashed out in vain, striking at any target presenting itself. Lucius wore the triumphant visage of a deranged child tormenting kittens. He patiently waited for McCree to lose strength and fall to the ground.

With the ease of unencumbered movement, the outsider lifted the priest up off the ground, then up to his feet, and up still until they dangled. McCree braced himself on Lucius’s arm, desperately seeking relief. His eyes bulged, bloodshot. The loose skin around his neck and chin bunched around his face forming abundant jowls spattered with flecks of spittle that bubbled out past his bluing lips. His neck complained under the stress of his full weight, threatening to give under the pressure.
McCree stared down into the face of the stranger. Lucius’s eyes blazed back upward, burning with hatred. His vision blurred and his intuition faltered. The stars and the pier tumbled over each other in a sickening cycle. Instinct was all that remained. He forced his eyes closed, pinching his brow and great nose together.

A terrible revelation awaited when he finally opened them again. The phantom that materialized in his streaky, blurred vision made his heart stop. A hellish countenance deformed Lucius’s face, eyes sunken and dark. His lips were thinly stretched around a gaping maw that framed ghoulish teeth, horrible, jagged protrusions that only grew the longer the priest dared look upon them.

McCree fumbled at his chest. Retrieving a silver crucifix that hung from his neck, and, invoking the power of the cross, he slammed his fist into those infernal jaws. The exertion taxed him and caused his vision to go black. His pulse throbbed in his ears, and he felt weightless - then silence.