The Hollow Priest
by G. Carrion
Some doors only open once every fifty-two years.
Part of a trilogy
Book Three of Calix Sanguinis
Read the full trilogy→
In the mountains of Calabria, a village called Pietralta has been keeping a secret since 1246. In a sealed archive on Mount Athos, a letter written eight hundred years ago names the only human being who has ever struck a bargain with the thing in the Russian cave and walked back out.
And in a limestone chamber above the upper Pronya valley, fifty kilometres south-southwest of the city the Mongols burned in the winter of 1237, a priest who has been waiting seven hundred and eighty-nine years is about to explain what Dr. Rafael Volkov is turning into, and why.
Father Konstantin does not snarl. He does not threaten. He has spent eight centuries in silence, waiting for a man who can listen without interrupting — and when Rafael walks into the second chamber of the cave, Konstantin offers him the one thing the trilogy has been circling from its first page: the truth. The names of every hunter in Rafael’s bloodline. What the cave is. And what it finally costs, at the end, to refuse to trade the truth for complicity.
For readers of Justin Cronin’s The Passage, Christopher Buehlman’s The Lesser Dead, Paul Tremblay’s A Head Full of Ghosts, Adam Nevill’s The Ritual
“Some doors only open once every fifty-two years.”
— Calix Sanguinis
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