The Eternity Project

46

ST PATRICK’S CATHEDRAL, MANHATTAN



‘I don’t know how this is going to help, Karina.’

Karina Thorne reached up and grabbed a solid iron door knocker, slamming it three times on the tremendous, ancient wooden doors. To Ethan, everything about the cathedral seemed to dominate the street before it. The doors themselves were probably forty feet high, ornately decorated, and the cathedral’s facade and twin spires climbed high into the morning sky. Standing with Jarvis, Lopez and Karina, he felt entirely dwarfed by the building.

Karina looked across at Lopez. ‘We need help, Nicola. We can’t fight this thing on our own. It’s not of this world.’

‘Sure,’ Ethan agreed, ‘but the people that run these places don’t have any answers either.’

‘Monsignor Thomas is not your average priest,’ Karina assured him.

The huge doors clicked loudly, and Ethan heard what sounded like a heavy iron bolt being dragged through its mounts, before a smaller door was heaved open by a young man inside.

‘Miss Lopez,’ said a young man, ‘Monsignor Thomas is expecting you.’

Ethan followed Jarvis, Karina and Lopez inside as the man hefted the door closed behind them, the wood hitting the jamb with a dull thud that echoed around the cavernous interior of the cathedral.

Normally filled with tourists, the nave was empty this early in the morning. Chandeliers hung from lines that ran up into the enormous vaulted stone ceiling high above their heads, illuminating in a gentle glow the endless ranks of pews and the towering fluted columns that supported the roof.

Giant stained-glass windows set high into the walls glowed blue with the light from the sky outside, and the sheer audacity of the architecture and the complexity of the artwork forged into the stone walls took Ethan’s breath away. He wasn’t by any means a religious person, but the scale of what men could achieve in the pursuit of worship astounded him nonetheless.

‘Built by men of power,’ Jarvis said as they walked, ‘when ordinary people were starving all around them. Such are churches. Building libraries would have served the people better.’

‘Churches help people when they’re afraid,’ Ethan murmured in reply.

‘Do they?’ Jarvis challenged.

Ethan slowed as he walked, gently pulling Jarvis aside. ‘There’s something I need to tell you.’ Jarvis looked at him expectantly. ‘Joanna’s alive, and she’s here in New York.’

‘You found her?’ Jarvis asked, surprised.

‘No,’ Ethan admitted. ‘She found us.’


Jarvis stared at him for a moment. ‘When?’

‘Hell Gate,’ Ethan replied, ‘and outside the courthouse. She was the reporter following us, Doug.’

‘Jesus, Ethan, when did this happen?’

‘Last night,’ Ethan replied as they began walking again. ‘Doug, she’s not the killer we’re looking for.’

Jarvis raised an eyebrow as he fell in step alongside Ethan. ‘She would say that, and you’d believe her, Ethan.’

‘She knew all of the CIA agents,’ Ethan explained, ‘cornered them all and gave them a good knocking about for information, but she left them all alive. She didn’t want any of them dead because she wanted them to be put to trial for what they had done.’

Jarvis slowed, looking at Ethan as he walked. ‘You’re sure? Absolutely sure?’

‘One hundred percent,’ Ethan replied. ‘It makes absolute sense, Doug. Her motivation is revenge, but she won’t get that from murder and she knows it. She said that they all died within two days of her finding them.’

Jarvis stared straight ahead as they walked for a long moment before he spoke again.

‘Where is she, Ethan?’

‘I’m meeting her tomorrow,’ Ethan said. ‘I’ll get more detail then, hopefully.’

‘Karina.’

The monsignor’s voice carried from the choir gallery at the front of the church all the way to where they were walking. Thomas stepped out into the nave and walked toward them, reaching out a hand for Karina who took it and smiled. Ethan and Jarvis joined her and Lopez as the monsignor looked up at Ethan.

‘Thomas, these are friends of mine from out of town, Ethan, Nicola and Doug.’

The monsignor smiled at them both. ‘Welcome, friends. Your call sounded urgent, Karina. What’s happened?’

Karina gestured him to one of the pews. ‘You might want to sit down for this,’ she suggested. ‘Ethan and Nicola will explain, because, right now, I don’t know where to start.’

The monsignor’s features creased with concern as he looked again at Ethan and Lopez. Ethan decided to let Lopez do the talking and leaned against a pew as she laid it all down for the monsignor. Step by step, she explained the course of events that had led them to seek out advice, relating the Pay-Go robbery, the accident and deaths on the bridge, then the murders of the thieves, the clerk, the convicts and the lawyer.

Ethan watched the monsignor closely as Lopez explained the details of the case. He betrayed no emotion, simply sitting with his hands in the lap of his ornate robes and absorbing everything that Lopez said. When she had finished, he let his head drop for a long moment before seeming to pick his words with care.

‘And there can be no mistake?’ he asked Karina. ‘That you have all seen this anomaly, this spirit, and that it has killed?’

‘You had to be there, Thomas,’ Karina replied. ‘There’s no doubt about it, no trickery. This thing tears people apart as though they’re made of paper, crushes hearts inside people’s chests. I’d say that us being mistaken is now less likely than this thing being real.’

Monsignor Thomas nodded slowly and then took a deep breath.

‘What do you want me to do?’ he asked her.

‘We need a way of stopping it,’ Ethan replied for Karina. ‘While there may be a reason that it’s killing people, we need to let the law handle it. A vigilante poltergeist isn’t what this case needs right now. We need answers, not corpses.’

Monsignor Thomas slowly stood from his seat, his hands clasped before him as he glanced across at the choir gallery glowing in the candle light and a huge golden crucifix suspended above it.

‘There is so much that we do not know about our existence,’ he said finally. ‘Science has answered so much and will continue to do so, but there are some things that it is not equipped to measure. I fear that a phenomenon such as a wraith loose in New York City is one such event. You cannot defeat such a force of nature by strength, only by guile.’

‘Force of nature?’ Karina gasped. ‘There’s nothing natural about it!’

Monsignor Thomas smiled and shook his head. ‘Isn’t there? We call such entities supernatural, but only because our senses are not equipped to detect them easily and because they do not frequently interact with our world.’

‘We need to stay in the here and now,’ Ethan cautioned the monsignor, ‘not get caught up in speculation about the afterlife.’

‘I’m not talking about the afterlife, as you call it,’ the monsignor replied easily, not taking offence. ‘I’m talking about what we can detect, and how you might be able to use it to control this wraith.’

‘Control it?’ Lopez asked.

‘Contain it, then,’ the monsignor corrected himself. ‘Put simply, our universe, whether you believe it was created by God or that it simply exists, is a universe of energy. That energy takes different forms such as heat, light, objects, gases and so on, but all of it is energy nonetheless. You have heard of Albert Einstein’s Special and General Relativity, yes?’

Ethan blinked and almost laughed. ‘You’ve studied them?’

‘My PhD was in theoretical physics,’ Monsignor Thomas replied without taking offence. ‘As a scientist and a believer, I see no conflict between science and faith. For me, the one leads to the other.’

‘So what does this wraith have to do with Einstein?’ Jarvis asked.

Monsignor Thomas gestured to the candles near the choir gallery. ‘Einstein worked out that everything is energy by asking questions about and studying the properties of light. One of the conclusions that he drew and that is little known is that, for his equations to work, he had to create an energy field that exists across space and time. It was once referred to, in ancient times, as the “ether”, a field which would carry the passage of light. Einstein didn’t believe in its existence or in the consequences of it being there: that the universe must be expanding due to this mysterious field of energy, so he fudged his equations to cover the gap. He later called it “the greatest blunder of his life”.’

‘So there is an energy field, all around the universe?’ Karina asked, and was rewarded with a nod.

‘It goes by many names, many of them associated with the strange world of quantum mechanics,’ Monsignor Thomas replied. ‘But essentially, it is the seething energy field of all atomic particles, invisible but constantly buzzing. There are particles popping into and out of existence in every square inch of our universe.’

Ethan realized where the monsignor was coming from.

‘You think that’s the fuel that the wraith uses to do what it does?’

‘To a certain extent, yes,’ Monsignor Thomas replied. ‘But it will also be drawing energy from our everyday technology. Investigations into paranormal events around the world have documented many hundreds of times the draining of batteries in cameras or the fading of lights in the presence of paranormal activity, as though something is drawing energy from its surroundings to manifest itself.’

‘The lights,’ Lopez said, turning to Ethan, ‘the lights are always out when the wraith is present.’

‘Cellphones and radios fail, too,’ Ethan agreed. ‘But surely, there isn’t enough energy in a cell battery or light bulbs to crush a half-tonne elevator car?’


‘No,’ Monsignor Thomas agreed, ‘not nearly, but these devices are not the source of the energy, only a path to it, a conduit, if you will. The amount of energy in any atom, Einstein proved, is tremendous. If you doubt this then think about the power of our sun or a nuclear bomb. A single nuclear device can level cities and lay waste to entire regions.’ He raised a clenched fist. ‘Yet the bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima at the end of the Second World War each contained a fuel cell for their destructive power no bigger than my fist.’

Karina glanced at his fist. ‘That much power in that small a space?’

Monsignor Thomas nodded, lowering his fist and pointing at a small brass button on his robes. ‘This button maybe weighs a couple of ounces,’ he said. ‘But if I took it and turned it into pure energy right now, it would vaporize this entire cathedral in a spherical explosion that would radiate in all directions at once, including straight up and straight down. The resulting shockwave would level the rest of the block, because the amount of energy in any object of mass is found by multiplying that object’s mass by the speed of light, squared.’

Lopez blinked. ‘That’s a big number.’

‘Big enough,’ Monsignor Thomas replied, ‘to crush an elevator car. I take it that it gets rather cold when the wraith is present?’

‘Bitterly,’ Karina confirmed.

‘It is drawing from its surroundings,’ Monsignor Thomas said. ‘The latent heat energy lost from the atmosphere creates the chill that people often feel when in the presence of what we call ghosts. But a wraith’s power would virtually freeze air if it lingered in one spot for long enough.’

Ethan looked around the cathedral for a moment and then was hit by inspiration.

‘If we could take potential victims to a place where there were no electrical items, it would diminish the wraith’s ability to attack them.’

Monsignor Thomas nodded. ‘It’s possible. Without a means to channel energy efficiently, the wraith’s power would be greatly reduced, although it would still no doubt be able to manifest itself. And that’s what bothers me the most about this case.’

‘Why?’ Karina asked.

Monsignor Thomas frowned thoughtfully. ‘You say that you believe that this wraith is the spirit of a woman, or child, who died recently on Williamsburg Bridge?’

‘My colleague’s family,’ Karina confirmed. ‘Nobody else connected to this case has died, so we figure it must be one of them.’

Monsignor Thomas sat back down on a pew, his features now deeply concerned.

‘What is it?’ Ethan asked.

‘I believe,’ the monsignor replied, ‘that you have made an error of judgment.’

‘How?’ Lopez asked.

‘Well, I’m no expert on these phenomena, so rarely do they occur,’ the monsignor replied, ‘but I understood that crisis-apparitions only appeared to other people at the moment of death.’

‘That’s what we learned a while back,’ Ethan confirmed. ‘They were documented in detail during the First World War.’

‘That’s right,’ the monsignor said. ‘But if this was a haunting, then the wraith, or ghost, would be present on the bridge only. There are literally thousands of cases worldwide of roads haunted by automobile-wreck victims that periodically appear to drivers. Yet you say the wraith is moving freely, almost as if it is intelligent?’

‘It seems to know where people are,’ Lopez replied, ‘if that’s what you mean.’

The monsignor appeared to come to a conclusion, and he stood.

‘Then you’re looking in the wrong place,’ he said. ‘The source of this wraith must still be alive.’