The Black ChapelChapter 4: The Drowned Priest
October 7th, 2021 – 2:15 PMSt. Michael's Cemetery, Albany
It had rained the night before, turning the cemetery soil into black pudding beneath Maria's boots. She followed Renner through rows of tilted headstones, each name half-swallowed by moss and time. The sky hung heavy with clouds, as if even the sun didn't want to witness what they were about to do.
Row G. Plot 42.
Father Caleb Stroud.Died June 17th, 1999.Cause of death: accidental drowning during a retreat.
Except there had been no retreat. And no one else on record had been present when he'd died.
Renner stopped in front of the headstone, motioned to a man waiting nearby — a freelance gravedigger he'd paid in cash, no questions asked.
"You're sure about this?" Maria whispered.
"No," Renner replied. "But if I were sure, I wouldn't be digging."
By sunset, the coffin was up.
The smell hit first — sharp, acrid, chemical rot laced with formaldehyde and wet linen. The gravedigger turned away gagging, muttering a prayer through clenched teeth.
Renner pried open the casket with a crowbar.
The body was still mostly intact — pale, bloated, curled unnaturally like something trying to get away even in death. But what stopped Maria cold wasn't the position.
It was the cloth in the mouth.
A folded piece of black silk, pressed between Father Stroud's teeth, like a gag. Maria reached in carefully with latex gloves, pulled it free.
It wasn't just silk.
It was part of a liturgical vestment — one that bore a sigil she didn't recognize. A crude black cross with three horizontal lines and a single vertical slash through the base.
Renner stepped back, face pale. "That's not a Roman cross."
"No," Maria murmured, turning the fabric over. Sewn into the hem was a phrase in Latin:
Sanguinem pro fide, silentium pro vita."Blood for faith, silence for life."
Hours later, back in Maria's apartment, she uploaded the sigil into several Vatican and university symbol databases. No matches.
Then she tried an obscure digital archive of forbidden texts — scanned pages of books excommunicated or banned from seminary libraries.
There. A flicker.
The symbol belonged to a sect that had been silently purged from the Vatican archives in 1963.
An internal tribunal. Secret rituals of absolution.
The name translated loosely to:
"The Thirteenth Sacrament."
She leaned back in her chair.
The name from the envelope. The falsified death reports. The chapel with no records.
They weren't just silencing priests.
They were sacrificing them.
Across town, in a candlelit chamber beneath the chancery, Archbishop Favreau stood before three men seated in darkness.
"She has the name," he said quietly. "And she's not alone."
A voice from the shadows replied:
"Then it's time. The next Mass will be a Black one."