Mercy: The Devil is in the Details...

By Alan J. Paul

Anthony Banna remembers the day the demon first came for him. It had been at the age of eight, when his grandfather’s corpse had grabbed him from its coffin, eyes blazing, speaking in a voice that was not his own . . .
 
Years have passed. The demon comes and goes, never staying away for long, never giving Anthony the norm

• Language: English
• Publisher: Silver Fruit Press
• Release date: Mar 31, 2020
• ISBN: 9780578653228

Book preview

Prologue

Streetlife Serenade

(Present Day)

The old man sat on the front bluestone patio of the white house on Rock City Road listening to the music of Blind Faith on his iPhone. He could afford to live in one of the more chic sections of town (he actually hated that there even were chic sections of town), but this was where he felt most vibrant. He was right next door to the Colony, with its live music from local and not-so-local bands playing virtually every evening during the tourist season. And he didn’t even mind the tourists so much; after all, they came like pilgrims offering homage at the altar of the cathedral which imparted raison d’etre to an entire generation.

Ironically he also felt most vibrant here because he lived just a couple doors down from the old town cemetery, where so many years before, he’d first discovered the tombstones baring the weathered names of Bonesteel and Engle, the founding fathers of the village. And when he looked straight ahead from the front patio of the compact Victorian-style dwelling, he beheld another burial ground: the hill upon which the famous Artists Cemetery resided. This had become yet another must-see attraction for curious visitors from several generations. Just a few doors down to the left from where he sat on his prized spalted maple antique rocking chair, was the Village Green: world-wide crossroads of Hippie Nation. Its iconic road marker boldly displayed the famous street names: Mill Hill Rd., Tinker Street, Old Forge Rd. and Rock City Rd. Yes, the very spot where he now sat had been his most beloved place in all the world, for nearly two-thirds of his life.

Blind Faith was one of his favorite albums of all time—well, his time, anyway. He couldn’t help but call a collection of songs by a specific artist or group an album, even though his kids and grandkids mocked him mercilessly for this and other back-in-the-dayisms he frequently spouted. Just to annoy them, more than anything else. The album Blind Faith, by the group Blind Faith was essentially one-of-a-kind; it was the only album that this particular group of consummate musicians—Eric Clapton, Steve Winwood, Rick Grech, and Ginger Baker—ever made together. Though all the members went on to make wonderful music on their own or with other groups, this former vinyl platter and the music it embraced, were transcendent to the old man. The former vinyl platter was now, somehow, magically transformed into a humongous horde of digital ones and zeros and stuffed into a pocket-sized electronic marvel which had become symbolic of a modern-day religion for this new generation of hipster sapiens. This seemed, to him, oddly sacrilegious. (And, besides, digital sounded like crap, compared to vinyl.)

Ironic, he thought, that this particular collection by this particular band, is my all-time favorite, especially considering my warped and sordid history.

It was an unusually pleasant late August evening: cool, fragrant and utterly perfect, as few August evenings can claim. His wife of forty-odd years sat next to him on an identical antique spalted maple rocking chair; she squeezed his hand gently and when he looked at her still strikingly beautiful face, she smiled and motioned ahead at something in the distance. He looked there just in time to see the neon-orange ball of the sun, partially obscured by pines, beginning to sink below the crest of Artists Cemetery hill. He and his wife had witnessed this particular otherworldly meteorological display hundreds of times since they’d lived in this house, but they never grew tired of the experience. Adding to the unmitigated delight of the evening was the cherished presence of their constant companion, the twelve-year-old, black-phantom cockapoo named Gilligan, who was never far from one or the other of them.

Like the music of Blind Faith, beautiful companions, beloved pets and unusually pleasant August evenings, this very sunset was as close to perfection as real life would permit.

The old man frequently found himself counting his blessings. Another ironic choice of words. He had a very comfortable life; money was not a problem, he lived in a place that continued to speak to him like few others in the world ever had, and he was surrounded by people who still loved him, in spite of himself. On top of it all, he had his health (outside of an arthritic, balky left shoulder dating back to a serious injury incurred when he was in his mid-twenties, and other concessions to advanced age). And he was free to pursue many of the things that still gave him pleasure, like writing, music, photography and family. Life could aways be better, he supposed, but he was happy and content—that was the word—with what the good Lord had given him.

If only his saintly, departed mother could be privy to her radical son’s musings on this day; she would be delighted. Maybe she could; maybe she was.

The rising symphony of cicada song, coaxed him out of his thoughts; or maybe it was his wife’s second, not so gentle, squeezing of his hand. He looked over at her again; she was frowning now, her brow furrowed, her face dark with concern. She gestured once more to a point in front of them, across the road, slightly to the right this time, under a streetlamp which had just that moment flickered to life. There appeared to be an elderly gentleman with a squarish head and bushy mustache, wearing an ill-fitting dark suit standing under the garish light. The lamp blinked again, and the figure it illuminated now looked like a young man with a horribly disfigured face, wearing some kind of military uniform. Once more the light flickered and the tableau it shone upon this time was populated by a short, headless, heavily muscled man with a serpent’s tail, surrounded by a small herd of hideous looking creatures.

The streetlamp stuttered one final time and when it came on again for good, no one was standing under it. Just then a chill current of wind, with October on its mind, washed over the man and his wife and blasted a wind chime hanging above them. It made a sound not unlike a crystal chandelier being struck by a baseball bat, prompting Gilly to yelp, jump and then bark angrily at the unseen intruder. Some moments later, when the last of the barking and wind chime notes had faded into the night, they both heard faint laughter in the distance. Except it wasn’t really laughter at all, but something even more chilling than that cold blast of late summer wind which had come, like a warning, out of nowhere.

So much for that once utterly perfect August evening…

1

Unliving Things

(1956)

Anthony Banna had a wholly unholy preoccupation with unliving things. He wasn’t fascinated with unliving things per se; road-kill, for example, did not hold a particularly esteemed position in his heart or any other part of his being. And he clearly wasn’t a lover of decaying and/or putrefying flora or fauna of virtually any description. Inanimate objects, for the most part, were equally uninteresting to him, unless they were stone carvings greater than a century old. Anthony Banna had a wholly unholy preoccupation with old cemeteries, particularly old tombstones and, by association, with the specific decaying and putrefying fauna they identified.

He was not entirely sure where this morbid fascination came from; he had a pretty good idea, but those deeply entrenched memories weren’t for public consumption. (He didn’t consider it to be morbid, of course, but just about everyone else in his familial and social circles certainly did.) Once, though, when he was pressed by a former friend to think hard about the origins of his peculiar hobby, he of course recalled an event from his past that could have planted the seeds that encouraged his propensity for wandering through stone gardens to take root. So he told him only the parts of the story which he was willing to share…

When Anthony was about eight years old, his grandfather died suddenly from a massive heart attack. His grandparents had lived in a once grand, but by this time crumbling five-bedroom Victorian house in Hackensack, New Jersey. The beating heart of the house was the marginally finished basement, as was the case for many Italian immigrant families who came to America during the dawning of the 20th Century. If they had had enough money to buy a house (few did, but Anthony’s grandfather was an accomplished stone mason by trade, who had managed to make and keep a fair amount of money in the pre-depression days), they wanted to ensure that the show portion of the house—the living room—remained showroom quality. This room was rarely, if ever, occupied by family members.

So instead, the old Italians migrated underground. Anthony’s grandmother’s sunken dining room, while certainly far from fashionable, was none the less clean, spacious and comfortable. Gram had had nine children and eventually twelve grandchildren, all of whom routinely attended Sunday supper at the Hackensack house each week. She did all her cooking on a coal stove, and served the meals on an island-of-a-table which was fully a dozen or more feet in length. There was a coal bin at the far end of the room, which took deliveries once a month and supplied the solid fuel which warmed the house and fed the mammoth stove. On the opposite side of the basement there was an old sofa and an open area where the cousins played when it was too cold or otherwise inclement to go outside.

On this particular Sunday, a few days after Grandpa had died, while Gram and the aunts were preparing supper, the kids occupied themselves with a relatively subdued, given the circumstances, game of hide-and-seek. The older kids were too cool to play a child’s game, and the younger ones not yet savvy enough to grasp the subtle complexities of this classic pursuit of youth, so that left the middle four. Georgie, being the youngest of this group was naturally handed the initial it duties, charged with shielding his eyes and counting to ten while Anthony, Joey and Tommy scurried off to find suitable hiding places. All three boys raced upstairs, with Joey and Tommy securing spots in two of the bedrooms on the main floor and the slightly older and somewhat bigger Anthony getting the more prized living room, with its myriad hidden nooks.

Georgie was, quite literally, a snotty little kid, having acquired, at a very early age, the nauseating habit of picking his nose and enthusiastically slurping the boogers. It was for this reason that the others began calling him Boogs, and the nickname endured well into adulthood.

Seven… eight… nine… ten! Boogs shouted. Ready or not, here I come!

Anthony hunkered down behind an overstuffed maroon velvet chair in the dimly lit living room. The house was always dark, even on the brightest of days. When the structure had been built in the 1850s, windows were kept to a minimum because only the wealthy could afford them, and because the art of glazing was still in its relative infancy. Too many windows in a house as large as this ensured that the unforgiving northeast winters were that much more so. Heavy drapes were dutifully hung on every window to further provide that the cold be kept at bay, where it belonged, but this also had the negative effect of keeping the light out as well. This particular day was far from sunny and bright; it was a cloudy afternoon, low-hanging sky heavy with the promise of precipitation. It was the third Sunday of the month of November, three days after Grandpa had died, and four days before Thanksgiving, usually the third most joyous holiday of the year, after Christmas and Easter. This Thanksgiving, of course, there would be decidedly less to be thankful for.

Anthony could hear Boogs’ feet clomping clumsily on the uncarpeted stairs as he plodded up in search of his three concealed cousins. He turned right at the top landing and barged through the kitchen and into the guest bedroom. Anthony could hear him stumbling around, looking under the bed, opening and closing the closet door and otherwise panting, giggling and talking to himself. When he was reasonably certain that the room contained no hiders, he quickly moved on to the next, larger bedroom, on the same side of the house. A moment later Boogs shouted too loudly, I got you, Tommy! His older brother had been nabbed.

Anthony shifted in his crouch behind the over-plush chair, considering if his was a secure enough hiding place, or if he needed better concealment. He shot a glance to his right, toward the wall nearest to him and was at once startled by a face peering back at him, though he knew he was the only one in the living room. Panic immediately set in. He clamped his hands over his mouth to stifle a scream, and scurried awkwardly toward his left, and away from the face. As he did so, he glanced back to where he had seen the face and realized that there was a curio cabinet with a mirrored back against that wall.

Just as he was about to let out a sigh of relief, he crashed into something large and heavy just behind him. The massive wooden object was sitting on the equally massive mahogany coffee table that was the centerpiece of the room. The entire mass rocked and creaked, nearly upending itself. Anthony spun around, thrusting his hands out to steady himself and the wooden pile, still vaguely aware of the game of hide-and-seek playing itself out at the other end of the hall. His hands fell upon something soft and pliable, but cold; very cold. He was unaware that he had shut his eyes when he crashed into the thing in the center of the room, but when he opened them again, he beheld a sight which wrenched the previously stifled scream roughly from deep in his throat.

The massive wooden thing on the coffee table was his grandfather’s casket, with the old man’s body stuffed snugly inside, dressed in Grandpa’s only good suit. Time froze for several agonizing moments. Anthony tried in vain to jerk his hands away from the corpse, but they would not move. He heard muffled voices and muted scurrying sounds in the stairwell and hallway—as though he were under water, listening to people talking above him. Something bitter cold and violently strong had latched onto his arms and his mind. He looked down again, hoping desperately to free his hands from the dead man, and to his horror Grandpa’s eyes were wide open. Except they weren’t his eyes; they were instead shimmering, black, cat’s eye marbles that bulged grotesquely from the old man’s skull.

Scenes flashed by in rapid succession behind Anthony’s own eyes, images of his grandfather with various other people. And the boy knew at once, though he would not understand what he had seen until many years later, that there was an even darker side to his grandpa than the sullen, uncommunicative hulk who liked his wine and whisky too much. This man had also physically and verbally abused his wife—Anthony’s Gram—and had purposefully and shamelessly molested several of his six daughters—the boy’s mother and aunts—when they were only girls themselves.

Anthony also witnessed visions of his grandfather as a much younger man, still living in Italy, where he had apparently been responsible for the deaths of many other men. Unbeknownst to virtually everyone, Grandpa had been a foot soldier in La Cosa Nostra specializing in low-level assassinations. When the Carabinieri began to take notice of his activities, he fled to the United States.

Finally, Anthony’s arms pulled free from the dead man, and he briefly lost consciousness, slumping to the floor just as the living room became filled with most of his frantic family. His dad was first to him, quickly pulling him to his feet and he could hear his mother saying, Oh, dear God! He was sure she was crossing herself as she said it.

Are you okay, son? his father said.

I think so, said Anthony, rubbing his eyes. What happened? He had no recollection of his close encounter with his grandfather’s corpse; the last memory he had was catching sight of himself in the curio cabinet mirror.

W-we were just playing hide and seek? said Georgie, thinking he would somehow get blamed for whatever it was that had just happened. He always did get blamed, he thought. Boogs and the other boys only now became aware of the coffin, which was still resting on the coffee table, if somewhat precariously. While the uncles righted the casket, Anthony’s dad took the opportunity to chastise the boys.

What were you kids thinking, rough-housing up here around Grandpa’s coffin!? scolded Mr. Banna.

Anthony didn’t know what to say, realizing only then, that there even was a coffin in the room. Wealthier families availed themselves of the facilities at a local funeral parlor for viewings of the deceased; no one in this particular neighborhood possessed that level of luxury, so their showplace rooms became showplaces of their dead for the duration of the viewing period.

The other kids remained mute on the subject of their inappropriate game of hide-and-seek. After an uncomfortable silence, Anthony finally spoke up.

Sorry, Dad. he said, timidly. We didn’t know that Grandpa was up here.

Get downstairs now—all of you, his father said a little too sternly. The people will be coming soon. Help set the table.

The boys did as they were told, while the aunts and uncles all busied themselves with getting the showroom ready for it’s solemn display. For the better part of the next three days and nights, friends and family came in and out of the old house on Williams Avenue to pay their respects to a man very few of them liked and an even greater number had little to no respect for. Who could respect a man who gave up his job as soon as his children were old enough to get jobs of their own. He was barely in his fifties when he contented himself with living off the money his children earned.

Many feared this man, because it was said of him in hushed tones, often in smoke-filled rooms, that he was connected. There were rumors about his life back in the Old Country, and for once, the rumors paled in comparison to the actual truth. Of course Anthony knew none of this. He had no great love for his Grandpa, either, but he did fear him; all the kids feared him at least a little, though none of them really knew him, and that’s the way the old man preferred it.

But the people came, and pretended to mourn him, because that was what was expected of them; some sobbed, even wailed, at the sight of him laid out in the living room, because that was what one did. They had done it for your family; you would do it for theirs. The women invariably wore shabby black dresses, and the men threadbare black suits, white shirts, and cheap ties, hastily knotted. They came, they gave their rehearsed condolences, then they eagerly devoured Gram’s food, and they happily drank her wine. This, too was expected. It was the very wine that the dead man himself had made, earlier this fall, from homegrown grapes, pressed under his own bare feet, in one of the two giant vats that stood like sentinels in a garage that housed no cars.

It was snowing lightly but persistently on the day of the funeral; a picture-postcard kind of snowfall that most would view as heaven-sent on Christmas Eve morning. On Thanksgiving Eve morning, though, on the way to St. Francis of Assisi Church for Grandpa’s interment mass, it was less than welcome. Monsignor Maxwell, who knew the family well, presided at the service. The old priest heaped numerous platitudes upon the dead man, painting for him a fantasy life of faith, gratitude, love of family, and diligent service to his fellow man. It was at this moment in his young life, listening to a man of God, who had known better, memorializing a man who hadn’t earned a fraction of such praise, that Anthony first saw the cracks forming in the previously sturdy cathedral of Catholicism.

Once the mass had concluded, it was a relatively short ride to St. Joseph Cemetery, but, as was the custom of the day, the funeral procession took a detour to drive through the deceased’s neighborhood, passing the family abode that Grandpa would never call home again. The symbolism, I suppose, centered around the hope that the dead person’s soul would be residing, from this point forward, for all eternity, comfortably within the gates of Heaven. Or—God forbid—that other destination to the south, figuratively speaking, which was far less hospitable, if just as welcoming to a certain class of spiritual traveller. Few who knew him assumed that Heaven would be the man’s final destination, and fewer still, who may have loved him regardless, fervently prayed for God’s mercy on his behalf.

The snow was falling more earnestly by the time they pulled through the cemetery gates. The coating of white had the effect of muting the gravestones and the one thing that stood out starkly against the whiteness was the freshly lain green turf throws which covered the dirt mounds adjacent to Grandpa’s grave. As the caravan pulled closer, Anthony could make out the casket, suspended as it was on a lift over the pit. Catholic funeral etiquette dictated that there be no dirt visible, hence the green turf throws; no clear view of the actual hole which would embrace the deceased; and no workers armed with shovels lurking nearby to finish their morbid task. Today, though, owing to the intensifying snowstorm, Anthony could clearly see three men crouched behind a nearby tree, leaning with practiced ease upon their rusty shovels and smoking cigarettes.

Monsignor Maxwell was anxious to complete his funereal duties and get quickly back to the sacristy at St. Francis, where a fine and fiery cognac or two would surely be waiting for him.

Oh God, he began, "by whose mercy the faithful departed find rest, bless this grave, and send your holy angel to watch over it.

"As we bury here the body of our brother Fortunato Napolitano, deliver his soul from every bond of sin, that he may rejoice in you with your saints forever.

Through Christ our Lord; in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Amen.

The mourners all blessed themselves, along with the priest. Then he said:

Please join Annunciata and the family at the house on Williams Avenue directly after this service for a small repast. Drive safely and may God be with you.

As everyone shuffled off quickly to their waiting cars, Anthony paused for a moment near his Grandfather’s casket.

C’mon, Anthony, admonished his mother. We have to get home.

Be right there, Mom, he shouted back.

He didn’t know what he was doing there at the grave by himself, snow cascading down on his trembling shoulders like some cold, but not entirely unwanted blessing from Heaven. He reached out a tentative, gloved hand toward the casket, but was startled by a blaring car horn.

Anthony! his father shouted.

Coming, the boy shouted back.

His hand made contact with the coffin, and the same frigid, powerful force he had encountered in the living room days before reached out and latched onto him again, then abruptly set him free. Anthony turned and ran for the car as fast as he could, but he heard a rasping, ragged whisper following closely behind him, drifting on the cold November wind, like the last bitter breath from a dying—or already dead—man.

You’ve done it now, Anthony, the voice gasped, tinged with a note of sarcastic glee. I’ll see you in Hell, boy!

By the time he’d reached the car, the voice was gone, lost for now in the accumulating snow, as though it had never existed.

2

Turmoil, Sickness, Sadness and Death

(1958-1964)

A few years after Grandpa had died, Grandma was forced to leave the old Hackensack house when Route 80, the trans-American highway, came barreling through. The state paid her next-to-nothing for the property and, in short order, the house was reduced to little more than a memory, replaced by an on/off ramp and an overpass which led, fittingly, to St. Francis of Assisi Church. Gone was the two-car