He was deep in the building, all alone, and he thought perhaps somebody had lured him here. The idea of getting a cop had never entered his mind. He’d been too intent on protecting his beloved school. But now he thought that he’d been a fool. He laughed a little. It wasn’t surprising, was it? He could be a damn fool. One of his skills.
Distantly, there was a thud, like a deep underground explosion or a faraway bomb blast. In that second the lights went out. He started to yell, but the words stopped in his suddenly very dry throat. He could see literally not a single thing. The hallway opened onto doors, and all the doors were closed. He might as well have been in a cave.
He flapped his hands around his head, felt for the wall. Then he heard something—a click, very faint. The air moved just a little.
Then he knew that Mrs. Kielbasa’s door had been opened. He stepped back once, then again. And suddenly his feet were slipping out from under him. He’d backed all the way to the top of the stairs. He almost overbalanced, but he regained his footing. Had he gone down those stairs, he would now be lying in the landing, broken or dead. He caught his breath. Reaching back, he felt for the top of the banister, then turned and went down.
There was more light in the broad foyer, which opened out to the street in front and the playground behind. He wished to hell that he’d brought his cellphone. Well, whoever was in here, they were going to get a taste of the cops just as soon as he got back to the rectory. Damn bastards and their bastard games, he could’ve been killed.
He was unlocking the front door when he felt something. There was a sensation between his legs. Before he had a chance to move, his genitals had been gripped. For a moment, it felt like somebody was goosing him from behind and he started to get furious. Then he realized, by the vibration, that it was not a hand.
The vibration spread like fire down his legs and up into his solar plexus. The pleasure was so intense that it actually surprised him. Before he could so much as draw another surprised breath, it became more intense still. He was aware that he’d gotten a tremendous erection.
The vibration deepened, sending gusts of white heat all the way up to his face, flushing him, causing wild, savage desire to burst forth in him. He threw his head back, he cried out, he couldn’t do anything else, it felt so good that the deepest part of him, the savage part that sleeps beneath the heart, was awakened and did not cry out or scream, but roared as the apes who spawned us must have roared when they found pleasure.
He was agonized, tormented, exalted. The vibration would lessen and he would bend forward gagging, gasping, trying to ask for respite. Then it would go deep again, touching him in sexual places he didn’t even know existed—behind his balls, in his anus, along the rigid shaft—and he would howl again, throwing back his head, every muscle tensing, the spittle flying, the sweat pouring out of him.
It kept on like that, not for seconds but for minutes, until he was screaming and babbling, gushing sweat, his guts churning, his balls aching between bouts of hideous delectation. In his mind’s eye he saw women dancing in heavenly light, and he almost went mad with desire, wanting not only the pleasure but the flesh, to kiss, to lick, to enter it. He had never felt himself in a woman but he wanted to now, he had to, oh, God, he had to!
The vibration rose higher and higher and went deeper and deeper. His penis became impossibly rigid, tensing against the fabric of his pants, and it pumped and pumped and pumped and pumped, and he felt all over him hot semen, running down inside his pants, greasing his legs.
Then it stopped. The instrument—and he felt now for certain that it was not a hand, but a cage of stiff wires that caught on the weave of his trousers—was withdrawn. He choked, toppling forward, seeing a flash as his forehead hit the door.
He still had the key in the lock. Gathering what presence of mind remaining to him, he turned it and stumbled out onto the front steps. Somebody came out right behind him, he heard them—heard a buzzing, crackling sound, anyway. It reminded him of the throaty sputtering of a grackle. He whirled around, just in time to glimpse a shape about four feet tall go rushing into the bushes that grew beside the entrance.
“Hey—hey!” He dashed forward and clawed into the bushes, trying to part them. Deep among the branches, he saw a black disappearing gleam.
Silence, but for the night wind and a distant radio. “The song of love is a sad song…” a voice crooned. Across the street was an old house. He knew the occupants enough to smile and say hello. They weren’t parishioners. He would go there, knock on the door, use their phone.
As he crossed the street, he became aware that his gut was aching down deep, that his penis felt as if it had been sanded, and that he was wobbling on his feet and had semen dripping down his inner thighs. He couldn’t be seen, dared not risk something being visible, a wet spot or some such. He bypassed the house and went straight on along the block, past the bulk of St. Mary Martyr with its thick, square steeple with the electronic bell concealed in it, and the black windows reflecting scenes from the life of the Virgin, ending with the martyrdom of her heart at the feet of Jesus’s cross.
He reached the rectory, threw himself at the front door, fumbled for his keys and fought with them, finally got the door open. He ran down the deep central hall, past the life-sized statue of Mary that stood beside the circular staircase and up the stairs.
He went into his bathroom with its old clawfooted tub and worn porcelain sink. He turned on the light, went to the mirror.
He looked at the apparition in the glass without understanding, staring at the horrible, hollow eyes that stared back, and the skin dripping its curtain of red. His face, his hair—he was soaked with blood. He tore at his collar, ripped it off and tossed it aside, then tore open his shirt.
Blood, blood, blood! He screamed, then immediately stopped. Heaving, gagging, he held onto the sink. Big drops of blood dripped down, spattering against the dim white of the porcelain.
“Oh, God…oh, God…”
He raised his hands to his face, wiped them through the sheet of blood. There were no cuts, there was no pain…but it was—and then it hit him. He was sweating blood. He was.
“I’ve got something…oh, Jesus help me, help your son…”
A sound? Was that somebody downstairs, just coming in, that faint creak sounding ominously like the back door when you close it.
Oh, Jesus, Jesus… (Yeah, now you pray. Now, you better believe you pray, just like the assholes you’ve preached against, pray only when you’re in trouble.)
He prayed, he prayed hard. He went into the hall—there was a footstep on the stair, that creaker just below the landing, oh, shit.
He ran down to his room and grabbed the phone. He hurt, he was aware of it, his dick hurt like it had been worked in some kind of a steel damn tube for hours. They had used a flashlight tube filled with gauze at the seminary. “Boys, you’re going to do it. Keep it private and give your failings to God.”
“Check it out.”
“What? Who is that?”
Nobody there. Strange voice, a little too soft, a little too hard—a childish, soft voice with a rasp in it. If an animal could talk, maybe that’s how it would sound.
He grabbed the phone, a lifeline in a storm, jammed at the buttons. “911, what is your emergency?”
“This is Father Robert Strickland, St. Mary Martyr. We have an intruder in our rectory.”
“Saint Mary Martyr, 153 Oak Avenue?”
“That’s the church. Rectory, 157 Oak.”
“One Five Seven Oak Avenue?”
A long, rattling cough echoed through the dark. It was an immense sound. “Hurry! Good Christ, hurry!”
“The police are on their way.”
He hung up the phone. What the hell had this been? He’d been lured away from the rectory, that was obvious, so whoever this was could get in without being detected. But what had happened at the school?
He was caked with drying blood, his shirt ripped open and his guts aching like he’d been rubbed raw inside. He was on fire, he wanted to scream, but what was worse was that something had been broken open inside him. Something that he had kept tightly locked up for years had been ripped open and the guts of it had fallen out, and those guts were all the joys and the pleasures he’d given up on behalf of the little piece of bread.
Another cough, and then a scraping sound. That voice again: “Help me, Father.”
What? That sounded like a kid. Little kid with a voice full of—God, was it age? It was the voice of an ancient child.
He was going to say something. Reply. Yes, he was. His throat felt as if it contained an out of control blowtorch, but he opened his mouth. He spoke. “We can help each other.”
A shadow appeared in the doorway. It reached up. It turned on the light.
Standing there was a boy. He was about four feet tall, maybe eleven or a smallish twelve. He wore white shorts and a white t-shirt. His skin was almost as white. On his face there was the suggestion of a smile, the lips partly opened, the teeth just visible behind them. He had one of those ambiguous boy’s faces, lovely and soft and yet full of the harder presence of the coming man.
“Father, I need to pee.” What?
“Where did you come from?”
The boy smiled, a little anger in it, a little confusion. Then he came into the room, marched past Bob and entered the bathroom. An instant later, there was the sound of a powerful stream going into the toilet.
Bob stared at the closed door. He felt drained, his body ached, he wanted to sleep. But he had to deal with this situation. There was a child in his rectory in the middle of the night. Once, it wouldn’t have meant anything. He’d have called the family or, if there was no family, put the kid up for the night and taken him downtown to Catholic Welfare Services in the morning.
You put a kid up now, you’re a kidnapper, a pederast, you’re going to be questioned by the police, and so is the kid. Did he put his hands on your body, son? Where on your body? Here, point on this doll where he put his hands. Did he have you open your zipper?
“Have we got any more of that cake?”
“What cake?”
“The Entenmann’s chocolate cake Mrs. McCorkle left in the fridge. Hello?” When he smiled, his face looked like something out of the middle ages, some painting of a Satyr. The teeth glistened. “What? Have you had some kind of a stroke? Hello, Bob, it’s me. It’s Bobby.” As the child came closer, Bob backed away. “Get out,” he stammered. “Go home. You have to go home.”
“Oh, yeah, like she’d let me in at this hour. You got some kind of a problem, Father? ’Cause you look weird.” He reached up and put his cold, wet palms on Bob’s cheeks and pushed his lips together. Then he giggled. “Father Fishie!” He patted his cheeks and strolled away. Suddenly he whirled around. “You know I’m scared to go to the frigging kitchen alone! Now, come on! Damn you.”
Bob followed him. In the gloom of the long back corridor, his blond head looked like a lantern. Who was he? Where had he come from? Had he been at the school? Had he…done that?
Oh, God, no. But he could have. Look at him, he acted like he owned the place. How did he know about Mrs. McCorkle? How did he know about the cake in the fridge? Dear God, how had this person who had never been in his life before suddenly appeared in it like this?
Something terrible had happened at the school, something that had somehow restitched the world, put it back together in a new way. Who had been in there?
Bob had no sexual interest in children, least of all in boys. Conceivably, he could have been attracted to a girl mature beyond her years, but that was just nature. A boy, no, never. Especially not that one with his gangly, pre-adolescent limbs and the hardness that was coiled in his vulnerable little boy’s eyes. That was a kid who would tell anybody anything, a destroyer.
“You have to leave. Where’s your home? What’s your phone number?”
“It got disconnected.”
“You still have to leave. We have no accommodations for you here.”
The boy appeared indifferent to this. He opened the refrigerator, leaned into the yellow light. “I do believe we’ve eaten the whole thing. Shitabrick. We ate it all at supper.”
“I didn’t…eat the cake. I dislike those cakes, she knows that.” The boy turned around. “Well, I certainly didn’t eat an entire cake, not after all that roast beef we stuffed our faces with.”
“You—you weren’t here. You didn’t eat here. You’ve just appeared!”
The boy put his hands on his hips. “You crazy horn, stop tooting your crazy song. I got enough trouble without you going nuts on me.”
“What trouble do you have, son?”
“First off, don’t you ‘son’ me, son. I got a mother won’t stop drinkin’ and the socials wanna foster me an I got no place to go and, good sire, I have not a penny farthing.” He opened his arms. “But I have enough love to fill the whole world.”
“Who are you?”
“Oh, manny man, this is so nuts. I am me, Bobby, Roberto, BobbyPot, as I was known in the springtime.”
He came close and put his arms around Bob and hugged him. Bob looked down at the cowlick that swirled in his hair. The child’s arms were strong and he hugged hard, and he pressed his cheek against Bob’s chest. Bob could not help but feel compassion toward him, and he said, “How can I help you, son?”