EVO

It didn't start with the voices.

The voices came later.

It started with a smell.

Somewhere between mildew and burning metal,

the scent would drift in just before dusk,

through the dormitory hallways of the San Miguel Seminary

outside Caracas, Venezuela. And it wasn't constant, just a trickle at first, a strange,

brassy stink that clung to cassocks and altar cloths no matter how often they were laundered.

The janitor blamed the plumbing.

The rector blamed the humidity.

And the seminarians, being seminarians, they blamed each other.

Now, boys are inventive when they're cloistered,

especially when there's something unsettling in the air.

The seminary was built in the 1960s, a squat concrete complex wrapped around a modest chapel

with a peaked tile roof.

It wasn't haunted.

At least it didn't used to be haunted.

That designation would come years later, whispered into cell phones and

retreat centers and passed between bishops like contraband. But in the summer of 2017,

one name echoed through every hallway like a warning shot. Brother Tomas. He was 21, bright,

reserved, the kind of young man who brought up the Council of Trent

...