Reborn

1

Brother Robert knelt on the cold, rice-littered floor by the window and silently chanted the Prime. When he was through, he remained kneeling. His window faced east and he looked out at the brightening sky.

The evil was growing stronger. Every day it cast a greater pall over his spirit. And it was from there, to the east, from somewhere on Long Island, that it seemed to emanate. Martin had driven him the length of the island but he had been unable to pinpoint its source. The closer he got, the more diffuse it became—until he had been engulfed in a cacophony of evil sensations.

A sign, Lord. Show me who it is. Show me Your enemy.

And then what? How would he fight Satan incarnate?

Will You teach me, Lord?

He prayed so. He had no battle plan, no strategy. He was not a plotter, not a general. He was a contemplative monk who had given up the world in order to be closer to his God.

Forgive the impertinence, Lord, but perhaps You made a mistake in choosing me to lead this flock. The burden is wide and my shoulders are so narrow.

Perhaps he hadn't given up enough of the world. He had fasted and prayed and worked in the fields around the monastery, but still he had wanted to know. The lust for knowledge had driven him to petition his abbot, and the Abbot General himself, for permission to search out and catalog other monastic orders. Not the Benedictines and similar well-established examples, but lesser, more obscure orders that might have something to offer the monastic life as a whole.

He had been given two years, but he had gone beyond that. His trek across the world had been endlessly fascinating. He had met with some of the Orphic brotherhood and a few Pythagoreans in Greece. He had found remnants of Therapeutae and Anchorites in the Mideast, and even a trio of Stylites, each sitting alone atop a stone pillar in the Gobi Desert. In the Far East he investigated many cenobitic Buddhist sects, and in Japan he met with the last two surviving members of an order of self-mutilating monks.

He should have stopped then. His compendium of monastic orders and their ways of life was the most complete on earth. But it was not enough; he went further. He had been tantalized by hints he had heard of dark secrets buried in ancient ruins, in forbidden books. He had searched them out. And he had found some of them. He had dug into the fabled ruins, had read some of the ancient, mythic tomes.

And he had been changed forever.

He no longer lusted for knowledge. All he wanted now was to retreat to his abbey, to hide himself away from the world and what he had learned.

But that was not to be. The changes within had led him here, to these Catholic Pentecostals. Secrets were unraveling, and he sensed that the Lord wanted him here when they were revealed.

But would he be able to rise to the challenge? Neither his boyhood on a farm in Remy, nor his adult life in a contemplative monastery had prepared him for anything like this.