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Authors: William Peter Blatty
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encounter, as did four other guards on other floors. As to why the Prisoner had spared their lives, they could offer no opinion, nor could anyone else. There were searches, questionings, crime team reports, but in the end they illuminated nothing, and as night and whispers and paranoid terrors filled the mazes of the State Security Building, no heart there beat regularly.
The Prisoner had escaped.
T hree days later, on the evening of Sunday, 17 May, and beginning at precisely forty minutes after sundown, seven young men came together in a straw-strewn barn in the high craggy village of Domni, just as they had gathered every Sunday before at precisely this time for hopeless months. Rough-hewn peasants in their early twenties, they spoke little and in guarded whispers lest the dreaded Sigurimi discover their presence. When they first began to meet they were excited by their mission, at their breath-holding peril in these secret watches,but the hammer of time had blunted their edge and they felt only tedium now, the grip of habit, as they huddled in darkness on the earthen barn floor and waited for a man who never came.
“And so what do you think?”
The husky whisper pierced the silence.
“Do you think he’s been captured?” continued the speaker, a brawny smith from the village of Drishti. “Is he dead?”
“I am happy to find you all well.”
The men were startled. The voice was unfamiliar. Not one of theirs. They scrambled to their feet with sudden fear. This someone in the darkness, this stranger: Who was he? Where had he come from? They had seen and heard nothing: No creak of a door. No movement. No step.
The young smith from Drishti recovered his poise.
“God may have brought you here,” he ventured in a quietly probing, hopeful voice. He felt the pulsing of a vein in his temple as he added the words that could trigger the password:
“Tell us, did you come by the road less traveled?”
The Prisoner stepped forward and uttered the countersign:
“ ‘All of creation waits with longing.’ ”
The smith took in a quick little breath of realization.
“The Bishop! It’s you! You have come!”
The next moment the young men were kneeling all in a row on the earthen barn floor with their heads bowed down while the Prisoner moved swiftly and silently forward and, cupping his hands atop the head of the smith, began to recite with urgent speed a Catholic formula of prayer:
“ ‘We ask you, All-Powerful Father . . .” he began.
The ritual completed in less than a minute, the Prisoner moved to the next of the men, laying on his hands and repeatingthe prayer until, by the end of the seventh repetition, his rich, firm voice had begun to quaver and his hands, lacking fingernails, to tremble, as he sank to his knees and wept convulsively while the newly made priests looked on.
S tanding, breathing above his desk in the haunted darkness of his office, Vlora inhaled the ghosts of flowers, withered and dry and dead in their glass; heard the crisp, rough click of the metal switch as he turned on the crooknecked khaki lamp and held under its beam the puzzling object, the mysterious token, whole and unmarked, found crammed into the mouth of his murdered son. It was a golden-skinned apricot.
“Dimiter,” Vlora murmured numbly.
It was the name of the agent from Hell.
Would the code of the
bessa
take him even that far?
PART TWO
JERUSALEM
CHAPTER 1
D octor Moses Mayo began each day as if expecting the world would end that night. He could find no other way to endure its griefs, the quiet terror of living in a human body. Waking at dawn’s cool touch each day, by seven he was hunkered down at his desk munching poppy-seed bagels and sipping sweet tea as he greeted
The Jerusalem Post
’s grim headlines with a murmured, “Who cares? The world is ending tonight.” But this early March morning he found a different path. In his narrow staff quarters
The Prisoner had escaped.
T hree days later, on the evening of Sunday, 17 May, and beginning at precisely forty minutes after sundown, seven young men came together in a straw-strewn barn in the high craggy village of Domni, just as they had gathered every Sunday before at precisely this time for hopeless months. Rough-hewn peasants in their early twenties, they spoke little and in guarded whispers lest the dreaded Sigurimi discover their presence. When they first began to meet they were excited by their mission, at their breath-holding peril in these secret watches,but the hammer of time had blunted their edge and they felt only tedium now, the grip of habit, as they huddled in darkness on the earthen barn floor and waited for a man who never came.
“And so what do you think?”
The husky whisper pierced the silence.
“Do you think he’s been captured?” continued the speaker, a brawny smith from the village of Drishti. “Is he dead?”
“I am happy to find you all well.”
The men were startled. The voice was unfamiliar. Not one of theirs. They scrambled to their feet with sudden fear. This someone in the darkness, this stranger: Who was he? Where had he come from? They had seen and heard nothing: No creak of a door. No movement. No step.
The young smith from Drishti recovered his poise.
“God may have brought you here,” he ventured in a quietly probing, hopeful voice. He felt the pulsing of a vein in his temple as he added the words that could trigger the password:
“Tell us, did you come by the road less traveled?”
The Prisoner stepped forward and uttered the countersign:
“ ‘All of creation waits with longing.’ ”
The smith took in a quick little breath of realization.
“The Bishop! It’s you! You have come!”
The next moment the young men were kneeling all in a row on the earthen barn floor with their heads bowed down while the Prisoner moved swiftly and silently forward and, cupping his hands atop the head of the smith, began to recite with urgent speed a Catholic formula of prayer:
“ ‘We ask you, All-Powerful Father . . .” he began.
The ritual completed in less than a minute, the Prisoner moved to the next of the men, laying on his hands and repeatingthe prayer until, by the end of the seventh repetition, his rich, firm voice had begun to quaver and his hands, lacking fingernails, to tremble, as he sank to his knees and wept convulsively while the newly made priests looked on.
S tanding, breathing above his desk in the haunted darkness of his office, Vlora inhaled the ghosts of flowers, withered and dry and dead in their glass; heard the crisp, rough click of the metal switch as he turned on the crooknecked khaki lamp and held under its beam the puzzling object, the mysterious token, whole and unmarked, found crammed into the mouth of his murdered son. It was a golden-skinned apricot.
“Dimiter,” Vlora murmured numbly.
It was the name of the agent from Hell.
Would the code of the
bessa
take him even that far?
PART TWO
JERUSALEM
CHAPTER 1
D octor Moses Mayo began each day as if expecting the world would end that night. He could find no other way to endure its griefs, the quiet terror of living in a human body. Waking at dawn’s cool touch each day, by seven he was hunkered down at his desk munching poppy-seed bagels and sipping sweet tea as he greeted
The Jerusalem Post
’s grim headlines with a murmured, “Who cares? The world is ending tonight.” But this early March morning he found a different path. In his narrow staff quarters
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