[We have decided to run the first excerpts from 2009 novel The Seven, by Michael H. Brown, chapters 27 and 30 -- picking up on strange happenings near a secretive government forest and a priest at an adjacent shrine readying for confrontation with a great evil force that has assumed various "disguises" or personages through history]:

In the confessional, Padre Leo waited patiently to see if anyone would come this day. He had the off-hour. It’s where they had stuck him because they didn’t want him to hear confessions. He had been reassigned with the unstated premise that he would not mete out the kind of penances he had when he first came, nor “read” their souls, for which he was famous in Catania. Usually, it was an elderly woman, a daily communicant, with a list of tiny transgressions, such as scolding her husband. Many had been delivered by absolution, and then healed. In his fantasies, Leo wondered how he would react if Klauss von Rengul Albert came to give his confession.

 He was thinking of Von Rengul because right now he was “seeing” the castle at Werdenfels.

The aroma of diesel, of hay.

Werdenfels was in southern Germany near Garmisch-Partenkirchen. He had once looked it up. He had looked it up because during his “flights” he had even seen road signs. He had certainly seen the castle – so many times in the past fifty years, in his mind’s eye, that it was as if he had been there, had lived there. There were dormers and a highly pitched roof with gables and gates. Huge clanking gates. There was the must. Hitler had thought that this was the center of the world. The castle itself had been built just before the Black Death. It was the reaction of evil to anything that threatened.

“Hier? Da?” he “heard” a custodian say.

It was where they kept the sword, the Heilige Lance. “Holokaustein” meant burnt offering. What meant pestilence?

Leo studied the walls, its plaster piled, crusted, fissuring on top of the much older quarry stone. There was a room and on its door a plaque that said Historisches Museum des Hochstifts Paderbonn. Leo could see this. This is where the ancient orders used to meet, he heard in his mind. The Thules. There was once a table in here forty-feet long. There were the bolts of lightning as an insignia.

Then Leo saw the Indian, the horrid Indian who stood on the ridge. This too he had seen before. Hard and gaunt, with a fantastic costume, his long legs in flaring red buckskin, the headdress of feathers and the bandoleer of fur that crisscrossed his chest, his hips covered with a purple skirt and scarlet sash, his eyes tossing light as if he had gathered up hate and streamed it as fire.

 Now the old monk’s mind flashed to Africa – it always ended back there. Another visione.

Monkeys. Ostriches. There was the savannah. There was a mountain, an old volcano, and with a hole in it, a cave. It was dark. A curtain of moss covered it, and inside was terrible. He “saw” incredible details. Some parts of the cave were eroded by elephants has tusked for minerals. To his right were several huge spider webs and a nest of beetles. There was also a patch of white fungus. Some of the rock sparkled with silica. There was a deep crevice formed during the rainy seasons -- littered with fallen crystals. The spider webs were like valances. Above, bats roosted as knobs of fur. On the floor -- guano and test tubes.  There was a monkey that bled from every orifice. There was a dead centipede. There was a syringe on the floor. Marks like cloven hooves. Moths. A syringe!

Leo saw something else come and waited.

To the left, in the shadows, was Von Rengul.

 A noise startled him. Leo clutched his heart. The doctors had warned him about surprise. It was someone coming for Confession.

"E non ci indurse in tentatzione, ma liberaci dol male,” muttered the priest as an old woman entered.

---------

In the sky -- far above the clouds -- patterns of lightning appeared in the sky.

It was lightning but it wasn’t lightning. Long jagged strands of light wove in and out of each other and back flashed as it appeared first east, then north, then south and west, until the bolts played in all parts of the far upper atmosphere – just there, by itself, in the bare sky, seemingly unrelated to the lower cloud covers, which had not yet gained the strength of a storm.

Linda stared in awe from the window. It was some sort of a sign, some sort of a warning, she thought. It was too peculiar. The sky – above the cumulus – was clear. The storms were yet to roll in. It was daytime – quite bright -- and yet in the sky was chain and sprite lightning, webs of it, arches,  at the heights where if anything one would see the northern lights.

Linda was struck by how the first place she spotted it was in the same area of the sky that had been indicated at Artview by the stranger.

The phone rang. Her friend Ady. Was she seeing this? Another phone call, from her mom. Linda rushed to the television and learned that the aerial luminosities were being seen not only in Western New York but all parts of the North America.

“Meteorologists say it may be a phenomenon called chain lightning that can traverse an entire continent, but there is nothing on the record to the extent we are now viewing,” said a newsman, as reports shifted to various parts of the U.S. – Atlanta, Dallas, Los Angeles. Only Midwesterners who were in the midst of huge storms could not see it. They had their own real lightning. This was more of a display or luminosity. There was not even the vague hint of thunder.

“Well, Brian, they tell us it may be from collisions of charged particles in something called the magnetosphere or interactions in the upper atmosphere with an unexpected emission of hot plasma – ions and electrons -- from the sun,” said another newsman on another channel as Linda flipped and found it in special reports on all cable news outlets.

The next rush of reports featured correspondents in far-flung nations like China.

*

Linda went back to the window and watched the lighting fade and reappear in different parts of the sky. She had tried to call Steve but couldn’t get him. Her phone rang again, and again, with friends making sure she was seeing what they were. The display had been in progress for nearly half an hour, she learned, and lasted another seven minutes.

When it faded she went back to the television but there was another power outage, as there had been all day. When the television came back she wondered at footage from satellite feeds showing various angles of the lights and went to the internet for other reports.

She also clicked around to check the weather.

Straight winds in Kansas had exceeded a hundred miles an hour.

The front had passed Chicago.

It was part of what she saw as strange weather everywhere --- extremes, as the Bible said there would be extremes. Some of them were normal fluctuations. Some of them were signs. Huge thunderstorms were now attacking the areas just east of Chicago as the front push massive cumulonimbus toward the east.

She knew nothing and everything. She knew Steve was in danger. And she knew the danger was greater than any one person.

Again, in her mind, as she prayed, she had seen the old man in a brown cloak who touched her forehead with unctuous fluid and she imagined it was olive oil and she could almost smell it.

With it had come a strange waft in the living room of what seemed like flowers – perhaps roses, or lilies, perhaps a combination.

She felt the swirl of spirits around Bricktown. She had “seen” this since her spiritual blinders had been lifted and especially when she read the Bible or visited a church and especially now that she attended Mass.

She was not a Catholic yet but sought the shield.

Steve had cast a quizzical eye at the holy cards and medals and the Scapular she had; he didn’t know that she was learning to recite the Rosary.

She was surprised herself. She remembered all the aspersions about Catholicism. But she also felt that when it came down to the deepest level of mysticism, the safest route was the oldest route.

Jesus had said that He would build His Church on the “rock” of Peter and the bones of that apostle – the ossified bones – were actually under the basilica of St. Peter’s.

If they were to take the Bible literally, she wondered, how could that be ignored and how could they ignore that last admonishment of Jesus?

“Behold, your mother.”

This had made it difficult to dismiss the Catholic devotion to the Blessed Mother and when Linda had decided to try a Rosary she had been stunned at the flow of grace, reminding her of the first time she had prayed in the Spirit.

Whatever the case, it was an institution that was more than two thousand years old and she needed its guidance through invisible threats because in Bricktown – in many old places -- there was much invisible activity.

There were demons but there were also spirits that were earthbound and the haunted tales on Central Avenue were legion.

*

Nothing matched the way she felt near the crossroads. As she thought about that the power went off again and in her mind’s eye, strangely, she saw a whirlwind on the veldt of Africa...

[resources: The Seven (paperback) or on Kindle]

[Spirit Daily bookstore]