“It’s best if we find another place to keep this, my boys,” I stammered out fearfully. “Somewhere far from here.”

“What? Why?” Thomas asked.

“Because it will draw something terrible to us,” John angrily snapped back at his brother. “This is important to them. They will come looking for it.”

Robert and Sir Lucas both nodded.

“I would suggest out of town,” Robert offered.

“Yes, yes. Somewhere on the outskirts. Let them have it,” Sir Lucas said.

At that, I was forced to disagree. Whatever this servant the etchings spoke of, I shuddered to imagine the ritual being completed and that servant being unleashed upon us.

“If it’s important to them, we cannot let them have it,” I declared, quashing my earlier terror. My sudden change of heart plainly confused my boys and Sir Lucas. “I fear that allowing whatever ritual this was to be completed will be a far greater danger.”

Thomas looked as though he had been struck on the head by a bell. His eyes flickered back and forth between me, the chest, and the others in the room in rapid fashion.

“Father, just a second ago you said—” he began to protest, but I cut him off.

“Yes, I know. I’ve thought better of it,” I angrily interjected. “Getting it out of this inn and making sure it doesn’t fall into the wrong hands aren’t incompatible. We can do both.”

“What idea do you have?” Robert inquired.

“The only place in this town I feel can be safe.”

We made for the church of St. Peter’s on the north end of the market square. It was around nine at night, but the church was still lit as the priest and his assistants were doubtlessly preparing for the final Christmas festivities. The final Sunday of Advent was the following day and it was only then that I realized that I had celebrated only one of the Sundays of Advent that year. That was a loathsome tally for a man formerly in the service of the Church.

John and Thomas carried the chest under a large black cloth while the rest of us, including two soldiers, surrounded it to avoid anyone sighting the accursed box. The streets, however, were mostly clear that evening with only a couple of staggered drunks conversing near the town’s central clocktower. They paid us no mind and we were keen to return the favor. For any who spotted us, they must have been terribly confused at the spectacle we provided.

Once we arrived at the church’s doors, I knocked repeatedly on the rough and splintering wood. One of those splinters even entered my right hand, but I did not notice that until later. When the doors opened, a young priest, wearing festive vestments of green and white, stood before us. He was a red haired fellow with a round face and very thin neck.

“God’s blessing be with you,” he said in a strong Welsh accent. “I’m sorry, but mass isn’t until seven tomorrow morning.”

“If you will pardon me, Father…” I began.

“James. You may call me Father James,” he said cheerily.

“We are on a Royal mission on behalf of His Majesty and we have an object of great importance that we believe can only be protected on these holy grounds,” I implored him.

He squinted his eyes at me.

“Who are you?”

“My name is Francis Willis. I am a physician in service to His Majesty and I have been sent here to Clwyd as part of that service.”

Father James nodded his head and opened the doors further. He showed us in with a bow and a motion of his hand. We eagerly scurried in as we heard the winter winds howling again. What Mayor Cooper had said to us was fresh in my mind. The red banshee could well have been lurking around the town that very evening. We set the box down in the vestibule. Its horrible crashing echoed down through the empty nave.

Stolen novel; please report.

“What is that?” Father James gasped.

“An unholy thing,” I said. “We know not its precise purpose. Only that there is a foul ritual to be performed with it and we dare not allow this object to fall into malicious hands.”

Father James nodded as he looked at the chest again.

“You came to the right place, Doctor Willis,” he said resolutely. “Come with me.”

He led us down to the chambers below the church where the church’s supplies and various important artifacts were stored. He explained to us that the church was one of the few sanctuaries in Clwyd sufficiently blessed to ward off the pagan influences that abounded in Clwyd.

“I should warn you, however,” he concluded as we neared the vault where the most important artifacts were stored, “those who have come to us to thwart the designs of these demons have met with grisly ends or have disappeared altogether. The blessings of this church are confined to its premises alone.”

“I understand. We would become the hunted regardless of what we did with this chest. It’s best that it be in your care here, no matter what may happen to us,” I said.

“God bless you, Doctor Willis. You are a wise man,” he stated as he unlocked the heavy iron door to the vault. “You should place it in there with the rest of these vile items.”

Inside the vault, which was only partially illuminated by the candles from the hallway, were a variety of astonishing and queer artifacts. Many were stone monoliths of various kinds, tributes to old Celtic deities largely long-forgotten. There were also gems and rings, crystals, wood carvings of monstrous creatures, and stacks of books whose words I intended to never read. After we placed the bone chest inside the vault, I noticed further a collection of what appeared to be various and sundry animal parts, though they were from no animals that I recognized.

When I left the vault and Father James sealed it up again, I could not shake the feeling that there might have been something useful among those artifacts. I, of course, had seen similar depositories of strange artifacts in my travels as a member of the clergy and I struggled against malevolent forces elsewhere in Britain. This store in Ruthin, however, was something altogether different in both its size and range of items.

“Father James,” I said as he sealed up the vault, “how long would you say that the church has been collecting such things?”

“God knows such things. I do not know myself,” he replied placidly.

“But it has been since well before you came to serve as the priest for this church?”

“Well before, that would be fair. On the basis of those records I inherited from my predecessors, I wonder if it is the case that the church was built here precisely to be the house of such things,” he said. “When one spends so much time trying to understand these matters, one finds that the truths at the core of it all are—”

Right as he said that, I noticed an odd rumbling and shaking that at first was intermittent. Then it was sustained. We all fell silent in the vault as the unnerving noises continued.

“What is that?” Robert asked.

“I’m almost too scared to find out,” Thomas chuckled awkwardly.

We all hurried back up to the church’s nave. From there, we could see out the windows a strange burst of flame on the horizon, coming from Moel Famau. It shone brilliantly against the night sky and caused us all to stare breathlessly.

“God save us,” Father James gasped. The rest of us looked to him to explain his reaction in some manner of greater detail. “Caorthannach’s minion. A fire spitter. We had heard gossip for months, even years, that those trying to resurrect the Irish fire demon had found something they found useful. The red banshee must’ve found it.”

The fires that burst skyward expanded outward in one massive conflagration, extending over much of the hilltop on Moel Famau. At last, then, they subsided. We realized that this did not mean that the threat had passed. Rather, it was clear that it only meant that the ritual was concluded, whatever it had been.

“I don’t understand,” Sir Lucas squealed in terror. “We interrupted the ritual by getting that box, yes? How did this happen?”

“There was more than one ritual,” Father James muttered. “Whoever is behind all of this is holding nothing back.”

He again looked toward Moel Famau, which now stood smoking, wispy dark strands rising from the mountain to shroud the moon. It was a sight unlike anything I had seen before. I wished that I had told the Prime Minister that every supernatural or otherwise peculiar event I had deal with was of a much more meager magnitude. I had never seen anything like what we encountered in Clwyd. Father James, from his shaken demeanor and ashen countenance, had not, either.

“I don’t think you should go back to your rooms in the inn tonight,” he said. “I can’t guarantee your safety. There are accommodations down in the cellar, far from ideal, but serviceable. You can sleep there for the evening.”

“What? You think that they will hunt us down and kill us in our beds?” Thomas asked, exasperated.

“Yes, precisely that,” Father James replied dryly. “You, of course, are free to do as you will. I can only speak to the evil in the air tonight. You are all in terrible danger.”

Despite Thomas’ attempt to seem disagreeable with the suggestion, I knew that he was simply being needlessly contrary, as was his nature. Not one of us truly objected, even if the accommodations the priest spoke of were beds of straw and blankets of crude wool.

With heavy walls on all sides of us, we had no difficulty sleeping that night, even as the world above us seemed to be careening toward disaster. I prayed all night long that God Almighty would intervene to end this crisis, but as a wise American colonist said more than a decade ago, “God helps those who help themselves.”