Rats? Erica shivered, hugging herself and looking around. In the other corner was a bucket and as Erica took a step toward it, her foot kicking something. She glanced down and saw a book with a red cover and gold letters-
“What is this place? How did you know this was here? And what is that awful smell?” Erica gagged again, pulling her collar shirt up to cover her nose. She glanced over the rim of the bucket and saw the thing she’d feared-a rat-but it was long dead. It looked like something had been eating it.
She went over to where Father Michael was squatting by the mattress, looking down at the doll with the missing eye and deformed face. He looked up at her and she saw tears welling in his eyes.
“Come on.” He half-stood-that’s all he could do, walking stooped over, taking her hand and leading her back to the stairs. “I’m sorry. I just had to show you.”
“I don’t understand,” Erica said as they climbed the stairs. “You said Father Patrick kept a daughter down there? He had a daughter?”
“My mother.” Father Michael closed the trap door and Erica frowned, looking at the latch. It was seamless, hidden completely from view. No one ever would have known it was there, if they hadn’t been looking for it. It bothered her and she wasn’t sure why. She had seen something like it before…
“Your mother?” Erica was having a hard time making sense of anything. “Can we get out of here?”
“Yes, of course.” Father Michael returned the crosses to their previous horizontal state, shutting off the lights before leading her out of the inner sanctum. Erica took deep, cleansing breaths when they stepped out into the hall, clearing her head.
“So Father Patrick had a daughter he kept down in that hellhole?” Erica surmised, the thought of it making her want to gag again, in spite of her distance from that awful smell. “And your mother told you about it? How did she know?”
“She was that little girl.” Father Michael let that sink in, and when it did, Erica sank too, sliding down the wall in utter disbelief, staring up at the young priest with wide, horrified eyes. “I’m sorry, Erica. I had to show you. You wouldn’t have believed me otherwise.”
“Oh I believe you.” She rested her forehead on her knees, trying to think, but her brain felt fuzzy, warm, too bright, like her mind was a breaker box that had just blown every fuse at once.
Father Michael sat beside her on the cold basement floor-the tunnel floors were cement-putting a hand on her shoulder. “There’s more. I don’t want to tell you, but I have to.”
Erica groaned, wrapping her arms around her knees, but nothing would keep out the words.
“Marianne… my mother…. She was born with a birth defect. A cleft palate. Do you know what that is?”
“Yes.” Erica had seen a girl like that once on a vacation in New England. Boston, maybe? They were on a boardwalk, it was summer, and they were feeding the birds, when a mother had walked by holding a young girl’s hand, and the child had smiled at Erica with that strange, twisted mouth. She’d been very young and had pointed and exclaimed about it. Her father had taken her aside and explained it to her, but she couldn’t remember the incident now without reddening in shame.
“The nuns raised her for a long time, like they raised me.” He swallowed, she heard the thick click of his throat, not looking up at him. “But when she got older, he came to get her. My mother told me the story…”
Erica did look up then, when he hesitated, and saw the tears brimming in his eyes.
“She was a teenager by then. A beautiful young teenager-with that damnable cleft palate. She showed me a picture. She was beautiful, just beautiful, and he came to get her, and she thought he was coming to bring her home, to live with him.”
“Did she know he was a priest?”
“No.” Father Michael’s voice broke. “All she knew was her father was coming to get her. That’s what the nuns told her.”
“Oh my God.”
Father Michael didn’t reproach her for taking the Lord’s name in vain. “And he did bring her home, didn’t he? Right here, to the place she was conceived. And he kept her locked up down there. Until she got pregnant.”
“Oh my God!”
He didn’t say anything about her second offense either, continuing the story. She noticed he was crying. Silently, no sobs or hitches or sniffles. Just tears. Rivers of them running in rivulets down his face. “That was 1915, the year she turned twelve. She had a little girl.”
“A… girl?” Erica lifted her head, puzzled. “You have a sister?”
“She named her Susan. He let her choose the baby’s name before he took it, and gave it to the couple he had hand-picked to adopt her.”
“Susan…” Erica repeated the name.
“Can you guess who that baby was?”
“No!” she cried, incredulous.
“Yes, Erica. Your mother was my sister. My mother spent another fifteen years in that hole, and I don’t know how she managed not to get pregnant for another fifteen years. Maybe he didn’t visit her as often, I don’t know. A lot of her mind… is muddled… she wanders.”
He was really crying now, tears just streaming down his face.
“But she knew enough to tell me about the tunnels and the inner sanctum. She described the crosses, the rituals, the trap door under the crosses. She told me what I’d find in that little room. And it was there, everything she said.”
“No, oh God, no…”
“And when she did get pregnant again, when he noticed her belly was growing big, he took her out of that hole in the ground and he had the nuns clean her up and he sent her to Magdalene House. My mother said he wanted a son this time. A son to carry on his legacy.”
“That was you?”
He nodded grimly. “That was me. I’m sure he didn’t count on his infant son contracting polio, but it certainly gave him a good excuse to give me to the nuns to raise until I was old enough for him to take over that job.”
“What happened to your mother after that?” Erica asked.
“I stayed at Magdalene House for the first few years. And he let her stay there too. She threatened to expose him if he brought her back… here.”
“So she stayed in the laundry?” she asked. “She worked at Magdalene House?”
“Yes. He came for me when he decided I was old enough.”
Erica puzzled over this. “But she didn’t expose him?”
“No. I think she just kind of lost all her fight when they took me away.” He wiped at the tears on his face, as if noticing them for the first time. “Do you know what this means?”
“That Father Patrick is a lying, sick, disgusting pervert?” she snapped.
“It means we’re related,” Father Patrick repeated quietly.
“What?”
“Susan Nolan was my sister. That would make me your…uncle.” Father Michael told her. “And it would make Marianne Locke your…grandmother.”
“Oh…” Erica laughed. She threw back her head and laughed. What else could she do? Father Michael looked at her like she was insane. “We’re not related. Oh my God if that’s the only bright spot in this humungous pile of crap, I’m going to kill myself.”
“Don’t even joke about that, Erica,” he said, squatting and putting a hand on her arm.
She just looked at his hand resting there, shaking her head. “I was adopted. I don’t know who my parents were. I might have been one of those Magdalene babies. I just happened to fall into the hands of a woman who decided to sterilize me and perform sick rituals on her only daughter. Because apparently I’m just that special.”
“That’s what he did to my mother,” his voice was a stunned whisper now. “After I was born. And to Susan after that, and every woman who became a Mary after that. The first doctor did it because my father told him Marianne was his daughter and had given birth to a monster like her. Every doctor after that, he paid. The church paid. We have endless coffers, Erica. Bottomless amounts of money. The doctors did what he wanted them to do.”
“How do you know all this?”
