The Haunted

“He says they cannot,” Brother Augusto translated. “He says the place where the church is to be built is bad land. They will build the church if it is moved to another location but will not do so if it remains at this site.”

Father Juarez felt his anger rising. He and his men had been nothing but kind to these natives, had brought them God and culture and farming techniques more advanced than any seen before in this heathen land. And how were they rewarded? How were they repaid? By defiance, not gratitude.

He was not about to have his decisions second-guessed by savages, to have terms dictated by half-naked primitives, and, trying to hold in his fury, he said, “Inform them that this site has been chosen by God, that, as men, they may not question His will nor defy His edict. They will build the church, and they will do so on the consecrated land. It is so ordered, and any unwillingness, any disobedience will meet with swift and sure justice.”

Brother Augusto spoke for a moment in the native tongue. The leader of the savages turned to his people and spoke. The reply he received was a short, ugly word that he repeated to Brother Augusto with what seemed to be a smug satisfaction.

“They will not do it, Your Holiness.”

“What?” Father Juarez felt the heat in his face.

“They refuse,” the translator said.

“Then kill them all. As a lesson to those who would defy the Church and the will of God.”

“Should I warn them of that punishment?” Brother Augusto asked. “Should I tell them that if they—”

“No,” Father Juarez said. “Kill them.”

There was hesitation, and soldiers looked to one another as though for guidance.

“Kill them all!” Father Juarez ordered.

The rifles began firing. There was smoke and screaming, the sound of explosions, savages running and falling, the smell of gunpowder, blood and excrement. When it was all over, when the smoke and dust had cleared, when the chaos had ended and the screaming stopped, there was an eerie silence. Standing on his cart, Father Juarez overlooked the scene. Bloody bodies lay in irregular heaps upon the ground, dozens of them, men, women and children, chests blown open, limbs torn apart.

He remained unmoved.

“Bury them,” he ordered. “We will build the church upon their bones.”

*   *   *

In the years that followed, Father Juarez came to regret his decision, which had been made in anger and haste. His charge was to tame these savages, to teach them, to convert them from their pagan ways. They were like children and should be punished as such, as he’d learned during the time intervening. His penalty for disobedience and sloth had been too harsh, and he had decided to make his home here at San Jardine to atone for his mistake.

For a mistake it had been. Whether or not this land really had been bad or cursed or evil, as the natives had insisted, it had certainly been stained and tainted by the slaughter he had authorized, and was now as corrupted and debased as the savages had claimed it to be.

The spirits here were not at rest.

Was that his fault? Father Juarez knew not. But more than one good man had been taken from them in the prime of life, felled by spirits unseen, the victim of an unexplainable accident or a suspicious unknown illness. Earlier this week Brother Ignatio, unable to cope with the pressures placed upon him, had taken his own life, drowning himself in the cistern by weighting himself down with rocks and ropes. Father Juarez was grief-stricken and filled with remorse. Brother Ignatio had been his best friend and closest confidant, a studious, industrious servant of God who had dedicated himself to bringing others to the light. As a student of Scripture and a scholar of the Catholic philosophers and theologians, he, more than anyone, had known that to take his own life would keep him eternally from God’s grace. Yet he had died by his own hand.

Father Juarez could not understand such behavior. It made no sense. And for such a devout man to so thoroughly reject his own beliefs, to so flagrantly and irrevocably defy his God … It was beyond his comprehension.

Unless Brother Ignatio had not taken his own life.

Those were the rumors Father Juarez had heard. And it was why he feared for himself. It was wrong of him to have such a focus, and blasphemous to be afraid while under God’s protection in His own church, but when he retired at night to his chamber, when he lay upon his cot and stared up at the painted adobe ceiling, he saw shadows that should not be there, shadows that had no source. Shapes darker than the darkness seemed to move about the room, and he would say his prayers loudly so as to drown out the whispers that called to him, the whispers that knew his name.

Now he worried that if Brother Ignatio had been compelled by demons or spirits to take his own life—or, far worse, if demons or spirits had taken life from him—a similar fate might befall himself.