The cathedral lay at the end of Haverford road, where the wood thickened and the cobblestone eroded into broken earth.
Snow floated down in fat flakes, like memories in Arden’s mind.
She had been over and over the details of the case, and none of it was making sense. The body that had been found here one week ago—the priest who ran the small but hearty parish—was now the source of all rumor and dreadful whispers. The locals gathering in the pub who otherwise would have been drinking their pints amid chortling choruses of Christmas carols and old traditional drinking songs were now solemn, casting wary glances at anyone who seemed as though they didn’t belong.
Which of course, made it a difficult season to be a tourist here for the holiday season. As far as Arden could tell though, that didn’t seem to deter anyone. The streets were packed and the markets were full as the New Year approached. And despite the locals’ subdued suspicion, the pubs were packed. It was as snowy a season as the small yet bustling Alpine town had seen in the last several years, according to the local Sheriff. He had been initially put off by Arden’s presence, not wanting an outsider—and least of all an American—coming in and interfering with their investigation.
But by the Monday before Christmas, he was glad to have someone on hand who hadn’t gone into complete hysterics from what they’d seen in that cathedral.
Arden was no stranger to witnessing the unexplainable. It came with her job. That didn’t mean that seeing a man morph into a long-limbed monstrosity or confronting a very pissed off painting possessed with the disembodied consciousness of the artist or traipsing through the tall pines of the Pacific Northwest hunting down a killer mountain bike ever got any easier.
All it came down to is this: the career she had chosen. It may not have been what she imagined when she was going through rigorous training at Quantico to become an F.B.I. agent, and she wasn’t prepared for what she saw during the shootout in Miami, when two gunmen took more than two dozen rounds each and kept coming, blinking out of existence and back again in some kind of deranged time loop. But after witnessing it, and after surviving—saving the lives of her partner and two other agents during that encounter—she was offered an opportunity. She had witnessed something that there was no going back from. Her options were either a solemn oath to forget the event occurred and walk away, never speaking of it again under the severest federal penalties and loss of the career she had worked so hard to get into.
The other was to accept the offer to be screened and become a part of the candidate pool for a special division of the Bureau. One that she would come to find out had its own name, designation, and clearance levels. An arm of the U.S. government that the public had no idea about, because anyone who witnessed elements of it or the phenomena with which the D.C.B. dealt either forgot of their own accord, thanks to resonant frequencies given off by incursion events, or because the Bureau (her Bureau) made sure they forgot through other means—elsewise signing the copious amounts of NDAs which Arden had avoided when she joined up.
And so she led the Sheriff and two other deputies to the cathedral, following reports of a disturbance to the cathedral that morning, the sky a blinding gray dispersing more snow onto the frozen earth below. Arden wanted to lull herself into the false sense of security that, indeed, it was just vandals—teenagers coming in to check in on the rumors in the aftermath of a crime scene, the likes of which the little idyllic town of Hallstatt, Austria had seldom seen.
She stood aside as one of the deputies unlocked the notably intact padlock on the large arced sanctuary doors. When he pulled them open, Arden took three steps forward, and upon seeing the terribly familiar distortions in the air—emanating like shimmering petrol on cracked cement—she knew they weren’t at all prepared for what they would find inside.
How could they be, when she barely was?
Six deep breaths, Arden, she coached herself.
One, two three…
The deputy who had unlocked the door stepped inside, flashlight raised.
Four, five…
As she drew the sixth, a terrible realization cracked her mind like an egg.
“Wait, don’t—”
She couldn’t get the words out before the beam clicked on.
And the screeching followed.