The Believing- Chapter 6

Chapter 6- The Meeting with the Cardinal

The meeting with the Cardinal was just a formality filled with the neccasary ritual. He could hardly say the Countess was a murderer, let alone a supernatural monster, possessed by the twisted spirit of a long dead woman.

Instead he trimmed the facts, so that a more conservative mind such as the Cardinal's could absorb much more easily what had happened.

He explained that he had arrested the Countess as instructed, but once back at the Police station a gang of thugs with vicious dogs had rescued her and having killed three policemen, had left him for dead.

Though this was not the truth, it fitted the facts neatly, without him having to explain his brush with the supernatual and run the risk of being branded a madman and securing a one-way trip to the aslyum.

The irony was that the church was the most conservative minded of all the sectors of today's society, yet they were the ones who believed in the unseen and saw the world in terms of faith and divine acts.

After recounting the full, though ammended story, the Cardinal stood up and embraced him, kissing him solemly on each cheek, while telling him that the Countess and her accomplists would soon be hunted down by the authorities and that he need not worry any further and the matter was now thankfully out of their hands.

He enquired what the Father's plans were now that the whole affair was over. The Father replied he would return to his flock in Upper Buckleberry in the rural depth of Berkshire and spend some time there recuperating from his wounds, while contemplating on the recent series of dreadful events.