The Hollow Priest: Book Three of Calix Sanguinis
Some doors only open once every fifty-two years.
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. In the Bay of All Saints, a Brazilian aunt says her brother Bruno was not the kind of engineer Dr. Rafael Volkov thought he was. 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 Rafael Volkov is turning into, and why.
Dr. Rafael Volkov has been changed by a bite in a Siberian boiler room and by a forest that looked at him in the Amazonian interior. His father hunted this thing and never told him. His grandfather hunted this thing and did not finish. An Israeli religious historian, a Serbian medievalist, a Russian ex-Spetsnaz, a Candombl *m e de santo*, and a woman who has made her career over for him are all converging on the cave where the end of the chain lives.
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 outside Ryazan, 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 thing in the cave is. What the fifty-two-year cycle really does. What Rafael is becoming, and how long he has. And what it finally costs, at the end, to refuse to trade the truth for complicity.
The Hollow Priest is the final book of Calix Sanguinis - a propulsive, historically grounded horror thriller that closes the story begun in the polar night of Severobor and deepened in the Candombl houses of Salvador. From the stone villages of the Sila Greca, to the forbidden archives of Mount Athos, to a cave outside the former city of Ryazan in the Russian December, Dr. Rafael Volkov walks into the oldest question the work has ever asked him, and carries back the only answer that was his to carry.
For fans of Justin Cronin's The Passage, Christopher Buehlman's The Lesser Dead, Paul Tremblay's A Head Full of Ghosts, and Adam Nevill's The Ritual.
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