“Our candle went out, for one thing.”
“What candle?”
“Oh, you know, when you were in there laughing it up, the candle went out. The mouse noticed.”
What in hell?
The boy released him. “Do I have to show you?”
What would this lead to? Bob was fascinated. “Please do.”
He marched off toward the side door. Bob followed him. On the way to the church, Bobby murmured a kind of litany, “I died, oops, I just died again, whoa, I got burned, I died, died again, got drowned, got starved, got shot, oops, oops…”
“What’s that all about?”
“Bobby radio. News to myself. What’s happenin’ to me all around the world all the time. Bobby radio. Would you kiss me?” He held up his hand like a little prince. “Prove your respect,” he said.
Bob took the child’s hand and held it, but he had no intention of kissing any part of this youngster or any desire to. He unlocked the church. “I want this thing kept open, boy! What if somebody wants to come in here and talk to my dad?”
Talk to his ‘dad,’ indeed, the blasphemous wretch. Who ever heard of a twelve year old with a Jesus fixation? Poor little abandoned crazy fella.
“All right, now, what’s wrong in here, young man?”
“What’s wrong is in the ding-dong sanctuary, Bobus.”
As the boy marched through the sacristy Bob hurried along behind, he felt, like a prissy old woman. When he straightened his shoulders and concentrated on striding, laughter pealed ahead of him, and it was so bright and so delightful that he laughed, too.
“See,” Bobby said, pointing at the sacral candle, which was out. “You’ve been in here.”
“I live here.” He pointed at the tabernacle. “Son, you mustn’t blaspheme.”
“Okay.”
“You obviously don’t live in the tabernacle.” He shrugged. “So anyway, light it.”
Bob no longer smoked, so he had to get matches from the sacristy. He took them from the small box beside the tapers where they were kept, and returned. As he did so, he turned on a couple of the sanctuary lights. It took him a moment to realize what he was seeing—a small, dark animal standing there. Its head snapped toward him, he saw yellow, vulpine eyes—and then he saw Bobby.
“Hey, Fath,” the boy said, and this time when he smiled his teeth gleamed like pearls behind his damp, heart-shaped lips, and the thought crept into Bob’s mind that children could be devastatingly sensual. Then he thought, ‘I have just seen this child’s soul, and this is a very dangerous child.’
“Oops, I went in a sewer, oops, my brain got blowed out, uh-oh, that’s hot…” He shook his head. “I die about sixty times a second nowadays.” He stamped his foot. “Honestly!”
“You die when other children die?”
“I die when anybody dies, and I am very busy dying all the time. Especially with the ones who pray-ay-ay, I die inside them like a heart or some damn thing. I’m always, like, stopping. Like the brakes’re something.”
Bob struck the match and lit the sacral candle.
“Mm, that’s nice. That makes it warm in my bedroom. I share, you know. I share with all the cold kids all over the whole world. That’s why my daddy wants the candles, so the children will be warm.”
As he spoke, he walked toward the altar.
“You should have kissed me when you could,” he said, “but you were afraid of yourself. You’re going to miss that kiss.” And with a flip of his hand, the hand he had raised for kissing, he disappeared right before Bob’s eyes. Or rather, he walked into the altar and was gone.
Bob heard somebody cry out, realized that it was he himself, then rushed toward the altar. Fumbling frantically, he unlocked the tabernacle and reached into the dark space with shaking hands. He closed his fingers around the neck of the chalice he had so carelessly thrust in after mass this morning and drew it out of the tabernacle. His hands were almost out of control. His inner voice was babbling so fast he could hardly understand himself. ‘Miracle,’ it was saying, ‘miracle, miracle,’ and there was within him something that was going to turn into madness of the kind that you did not recover from.
The thought of the infantile whining and posturing he’d done at this altar a few hours ago made the acid of revulsion boil up into his throat. He was a damn priest, it was in his blood, what had he been thinking? The old ladies he so detested—he saw them now as extraordinarily noble souls. He saw their lives as they had been, the follies they were balancing with the rosaries of age.
He drew the lid off the chalice, and remembered how bitter he had felt at giving his life to a little piece of bread. In that instant, a cloud dropped down from above, surrounding him, actually weighing on him like a sheet of iron, crushing him to the floor, to a kneeling crouch with the chalice cradled beneath his chest. The weight was like a great boot on his neck and the chalice began to buckle, the bowl of it twisting toward the floor.
The host—He must not touch the floor, not who was dying all the time with everybody, not somebody that brave, that sacred. He could not reach into the chalice, it was breaking beneath his weight. Forcing his face downward, thrusting with his chin until his mouth and nose were inside the bowl, he gobbled the hosts like a dog.
The weight left so abruptly that he lurched upward, then slipped and fell back. He lay staring upward into gold gleams from the ornate ceiling and the glaring balls of the sanctuary lights. ‘He’s so old,’ he thought, ‘and yet he’s still a child.’
He wondered if Bobby would have been there anyway, even if the hosts had not been consecrated, and what did it mean now that he had eaten them, that he had taken the body and blood within him?
He soon found out what it meant. He was not at all sure what had just happened to him. He’d taken psychology and family counseling courses, and he knew something about psychosis and hallucination. In thinking the thing out, it became clear that there would be one piece of hard evidence that would tell him whether or not this whole, bizarre chain of events had any basis in reality at all.
This was his Caller ID. He went back to the rectory, entered the mahogany foyer and went directly into his office. The small plastic box sat beside the telephone. When he approached it, the screen showed only the date and time. But they were correct. It was working. He pressed the review button. And there it was: a call from the school, just as he remembered it. But the time—it read 4:53 PM, not closer to ten, as it should have. He pressed the button again. There was the call from Bill Crawford about how to use Quickbooks. The readout said 4:19. But hadn’t Bill called more like two? Or no—God, when was it? He wasn’t certain.
He had an idea. He pulled his cellphone out of his pocket and dialed the rectory. As the phone rang, he watched the call come up on the Caller ID. By his watch it was 11:44PM. The reading showed 10:44—an hour earlier. So, the call from Bill would have really been at 3:19, and that sounded about right.
The problem was that he had taken no call from the school this afternoon, not at three or four or any other time.
He decided on a course of action: a major drink was what he needed. Christ wouldn’t appear as that lascivious, evil-looking little monster, anyway. And he certainly wouldn’t refer to God the Father as “dad.” Good Lord, what a stupid fantasy it all had been.
Well, it had passed. He was fine now. He’d been working like the devil on the books. The damn archdiocese had cut its subsidy to pay lawyer bills for Father Richard Jordan, who’d buggered, it seemed, half of the boys in St. Hubertus school, the damned old reprobate. His lunacy was going to cost the Church a cool twenty-five mil, and a lot of that was going to come right out of the Parish Fund. So he had a deficit to deal with, and the local banks were hesitant as hell, understandably. Who wanted to risk having to foreclose on a church? What did you do with it—turn it into a gym? A car dealership?
He went to the sideboard in the dining room and took out the Johnny Walker Black. This was going to be a serious drink, and he intended to use his best. He poured about four fingers of the golden joy juice into a crystal highball glass that was probably fifty years old. Like everything in this wonderful old rectory, it was the very best. A gift, no doubt, from some wealthy and long-forgotten parishioner.
He knocked the entire thing back, then poured another, knocked it back. Better. A little. He was still damn well shaking like a jelly and he was in a very strange mood. The thing was, he wanted that kid. He, him. He was aching for the boy. It wasn’t sex, at least, he hoped not. He just wanted to be with him. Bobby. His same name. That little boy had been the most charismatic person he had ever encountered. Dear God, what the kid said was true. He did want to kiss him. He wanted to cherish him, to protect him. Bobby was like the son of all sons, a child who could set the fatherly instincts of even a dry old priest to blazing.
A little fantasy rustled up: Bobby comes back. It turns out his mother is the disaster he implied. Father talks to her—and she asks if Bobby can stay at the rectory. She asks. Father Bob doesn’t see why not. So they begin a life together. Bobby excels at St. Mary Martyr. He plays on the baseball team. He loves to fish, which inspires Bob to get his old boat out of the garage and they take fishing trips up to Starlot, the diocesan fishing camp on Lake Binny. Bob gets to watch him grow up, to help him learn, to encourage him when he is struggling, to console him when he is sad, to laugh with him and cry with him over the days of his young life.
Then he felt something down below, something funny. When he realized that he had a huge erection, cold, awful fear went through him. As the scotch came boiling back up like lava, he raced upstairs to his bathroom. Amid the marble and the gleaming brass, he vomited and vomited and vomited, until he thought he would have a stroke.
He sank down on the floor, gazing blankly across the tiles. Dear God, what is happening to me? Please God, help me!
It hadn’t been Christ and it hadn’t been a psychotic break. It had been a damn demon. He’d glimpsed it in its reality—that second when it had looked like an animal, its face covered with black, gleaming fur, its eyes as blank and terrible as an animal’s. But brilliant. Oh, yes, brilliance without the spark of humanity. If there was any better definition of the demonic, he didn’t know what it was.
At least he’d eaten the hosts. He hadn’t allowed that thing near them, no damn way. And he was not going to become some kind of a pederast and end up on the evening news. He was going to go on being the good priest everybody thought he was, and nobody was ever going to hear or even so much as sense his inner doubts or his loathing for the hierarchy. He would not quit. No.
So, okay, he wasn’t going to get drunk, at least. The scotch hadn’t had time to enter his bloodstream. He got up from the floor. A glance in the mirror revealed what looked like some sort of a Halloween mask made from his face. The eyes were bulging with terror, the lips were twisted into a grimace, the skin was gray and slack.
He decided to take a shower. As he undressed, he found that his underwear were sticky. It was vile, just vile. He wadded up the briefs and put them on the drain beside the sink. These could not be seen by his housekeeper, for the love of all that was holy. He realized, also, that his anus hurt. It hurt a good deal, in fact. Reaching back, touching it, he jumped forward.
This was no hallucination. Whatever had or had not happened on this night—whatever was real and was not—he had most certainly been penetrated.
“I’ve been raped,” he said. He looked again in the mirror, and now the face was atrocious, almost unrecognizable, streaming with sweat, as gray as death, the eyes like the eyes of a hog that has smelled the blood of hogs. He knew that look, you never forgot it, not if you were brought up on a farm, as he had been.
“Fucking raped!”
He twisted around, trying to use the mirror to see what it was like down there. He couldn’t see much, but his cheeks looked kind of red where he could see. The way it felt, though—he had received an injury there. But when? Had he gone over to the school, after all? Had it happened there? Dear God, what had happened there?
He threw off the rest of his clothes and ran the shower until it was billowing with steam. This goddamn thing—what if somebody had given him a dose of AIDS or something?
He got into the shower. He still felt like absolute hell. Then he was crying. He was crying hard in the middle of the shower, in the nice, private white place that was always a source of enjoyment.
He had been a good priest, damnit. Never in all his priesthood—and never in his youth, if the truth be known—had he experienced sex with another human being. Oh, sure, he’d failed the Lord many times. He sometimes thought he was married to Sally damn Fivefingers. It had been like this since he was a kid. “Bless me Father, for I have sinned. I have masturbated forty times since my last confession.”
“And when would that be, my son?”
“Three days ago.”
“Dear heaven, boy, are you hurt?”
In all his life, also, he had never had feelings of desire for a man, let alone a boy. When he dreamed of sex, he dreamed about women. Now, he leaned against the wall of the shower and opened his crack and let the stream flow in, let the warm water cleanse him and heal him. But the hurt was deep, it was way too deep.
He didn’t want to go to the emergency room, but there was pink blood in the drain water, he could see it. He was experiencing rectal bleeding, and maybe that plus whatever in God’s name had happened earlier with the blood that had come out of his pores, perhaps that was why he just felt so awfully weak.