THE PRIEST A Gothic Romance

by Thomas M. Disch

  “You surely don’t need our help to do that,” said Father Pat. “So while you take care of that, I can wait here with the girls.”

  “I’m not sure that’s a good idea, Father,” Hedwig said. “I’m not supposed to leave them on their own.”

  “They won’t be on their own, will they? They’ll be with me. Indeed, I’ll be able to hear Alison’s confession while you’re away. Unless we need another key to open the confessional?”

  “No, of course not. But, Mary, perhaps you should come with me.”

  Alison exchanged a glance with Mary.

  “No,” said Mary, in a tone of tentative self-assertion. “No, if I could, I’d like to say a prayer before the altar.”

  “A fine idea,” Father Pat agreed.

  Hedwig offered no further opposition beyond a reproachful lowering of her head.

  When the elevator doors had closed, Alison almost skipped up the side aisle toward the nearest confessional, which was built on the same XXXL scale as the Shrine itself, though more old-fashioned in its style, with its dark wood carved into all kinds of twisty shapes and curlicues. She parted the heavy curtain and at once knelt down on the stone floor and felt under the kneeler for what she hoped would be there.

  It wasn’t, but there was still time (Father Pat had lingered beside Mary) to check out the compartment on the other side. And there it was, a smooth cylinder the size and weight of a flashlight. In the curtained darkness of the confessional it was too dark to examine the can of Mace to see if there were instructions on it explaining how it worked, but she assumed it was like any other aerosol, a deodorant or bug spray.

  She heard the central half-door of the confessional opening, and a moment later, after some fumbling, Father Pat had pushed aside the panel separating confessor and penitent, and she could see, through the loose mesh of the screen, his bent head, in silhouette, black against the darkest of grays. “I’m here, my child,” he whispered.

  “Bless me, Father,” she began, “for I have sinned. It’s been—I don’t know, a pretty long time—since my last confession. I haven’t even been to Mass for a while. We haven’t been able to, of course, until you came, but even before I was brought here—”

  “Yes, yes, my child,” said Father Pat impatiently, as though he knew that she was playing for time until Hedwig returned.

  Which of course was what she was doing, but being inside the confessional she felt protected. He was a priest, after all, and had to play by the rules. Even so, it would probably make sense to offer him something more interesting than missing Mass or using profane language or even sins of disobedience. Confessing sins of that sort was a little like riding a bicycle with training wheels. It was what you confessed before your first communion, when you hadn’t had a chance to find out what sin was all about. On the other hand, she didn’t want to start with sex until she absolutely had to.

  “Well, Father, one of the worst things…”

  “Yes?”

  “I did a lot of shoplifting.” This was a lie. She’d done a little shoplifting. Mostly things like candy bars, or batteries for her Walkman, and, once or twice, clothes. But nothing expensive or risky. The last time, at Kmart, she’d almost been caught stealing pantyhose (the very ones she was wearing now and into which, under the waistband, she’d slipped the can of Mace), and that had cured her of shoplifting.

  “Yes?” he said, but it was a different yes, not so much impatient as puzzled, as though shoplifting was a foreign concept.

  So she began to invent details: shoes from Dayton’s, CDs at Music Mart (even though she didn’t have a CD player), and then, because she could tell his interest was flagging, she topped it off with, “And one time, at Walgreen’s, I shoplifted some condoms. The thing is, I was just too embarrassed to take them to the cash register.”

  She was certain he’d want to know more about the condoms—especially whether they’d actually been used for their intended purpose—but evidently he was after bigger sins, because he didn’t bother with the condoms but proceeded straight to the real sin that had brought her to Birth-Right.

  “You’re pregnant,” he pointed out.

  “Yes, Father. That was the time we didn’t use condoms.”

  “Oh.” And then another “Oh,” as though he was just making the connection. In some ways Father Pat seemed awfully dim, even for a priest.

  “You used these… condoms… to prevent the natural passage of the male essence?”

  “Yes, Father.” She might have fibbed and said she’d been worried about AIDS, but she knew that from a priest’s point of view that probably didn’t matter. She still remembered Father Cogling’s little speech on the subject of contraception, how birth control was worse than incest.

  “Oh, my dear child, that is a very grave offense!”

  “I realize that, Father. That’s why I felt such a strong need for confession.”

  “I can well understand.”

  “I know it’s wrong, of course. A mortal sin. But my boyfriend insisted, and the truth of the matter is that if we had always used the condoms I wouldn’t be here now.”

  “Your boyfriend”—he pronounced the word as though he were repeating an obscenity—“might insist that you follow him to hell. Would you do that? Would you like to spend eternity in flames that are never extinguished and that never consume but forever visit new pains upon your sinful flesh?”

  Did he expect her to reply? He’d fallen silent and seemed to be waiting for her response, and for just a moment she imagined reaching into her pantyhose and taking out the Mace and squirting him with it right through the veil of cloth between them. That would have been stupid and definitely sinful. But how in the world do you answer such a question?

  “I’m really very sorry,” she said at last. “It was a terrible sin. I see that now.”

  “Tell me,” he said in a gentler tone of voice, “how it is that you have come to be with child.”

  “Well, Greg and I—Greg is my boyfriend—I think the first time we went all the way—”

  “You must be more specific, my child. How did you go ‘all the way’?”

  “When he— When we—” What did you call it when you were in the fucking confessional? “When we had intercourse.”

  “So.” He sounded pleased. “When you had intercourse: Where were you? What led up to it? Were you cooperative, or did he force you?”

  “No, he was kind of… insistent. But I wouldn’t say I was forced. I mean, it wasn’t the first time we were together. We both had— Oh, you know.”

  “Yes? Go on.”

  Maybe, Alison thought, he didn’t know. Maybe he didn’t have a clue. Maybe for all that he was certainly a lech, he hadn’t had five minutes of practical experience, so the idea of her and Greg getting each other off was beyond his comprehension. She’d known kids like that in eighth and ninth grade, little wise guys who pretended they were sex fiends when in fact they’d never done anything but jerk off, if that. You had to feel sorry for them, in a way. But what could you feel for someone as old as Father Pat who was, sexually speaking, in eighth grade, and retarded at that?

  Alison realized, to her complete astonishment, that in some very important ways—maybe in the most important way—she was more of a grown-up than the man on the other side of the confessional screen. Who was—she did the arithmetic in her head, not without difficulty—probably three times as old as she was.

  It was just then that the alarm went off.

  Alison was up off her knees and out of the confessional in a flash. But she came to a sudden stop as she felt the cylinder of Mace, as though by its own willpower, dislodge itself from the waistband of her pantyhose and fall to the floor of the Shrine. She scooped it up at once and glanced back at the confessional—while the Whoop! Whoop! Whoop! Whoop! of the alarm, magnified by the dome, filled the air of the Shrine—but Father Pat had not yet come out, and she was able to push the Mace back inside her pantyhose, this time shoving it down alongside her thigh, where it co
uldn’t possibly escape.

  The alarm went off, and at the same moment Father Pat emerged from his compartment of the confessional, looking thoroughly flustered and, unbelievably, fumbling with the zipper of his fly, just like the old men you hear about in porno movie houses with paper bags in their laps. At that moment she vowed she would never get inside a goddamned confessional again.

  “Alison!” Mary Tyler called aloud into the sudden silence. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine,” Alison replied as Mary’s question echoed through the Shrine. “Are you?”

  “The alarm went off.”

  Alison sprinted down the main aisle till she stood beside Mary. “Yes, I heard.” She glanced at Father Pat, standing before the confessional, frowning. People don’t run in church.

  “Whatever set the alarm off,” Alison said with a smile, “it wasn’t anything we did, Father Pat and me. I was worried about you. I thought you might have—I don’t know what.”

  “Broken out of here through those metal doors? No, I didn’t do that. I was praying, like I said I would. We need prayers.”

  “Well, maybe God heard them. Maybe that’s why the alarm went off.”

  Father Pat had managed to deal with his zipper, and he came down the main aisle, looking stern and purposeful. But before he could act on his purpose, the elevator doors opened and a frazzled Hedwig appeared to explain the mystery of the alarm.

  “It must have been my fault,” she said. “Gerhardt has shown me how to work the control panel of the alarm system a dozen times, but there are so many different toggles, and I must have touched the wrong one, because when I entered the sacristy I set off the alarm. But I knew how to turn it off, so there’s no harm done.” She made an apologetic grimace. “I must have given you quite a start. Not to mention Gerhardt. I think this whole expedition has been ill advised, Father Pat, but if you really want to open the reliquarium, I have the key here.”

  “May I?” he asked, holding out his hand to receive a large key of tarnished brass, the kind you only see in movies, with a long stem like a pencil.

  Hedwig, still grumbling misgivings, led them around behind the wall of statues inside niches that formed a semicircle around the main altar, and there, on the easternmost wall of the Shrine, in its own chapel, was the reliquarium. It had been built of great, rough-hewn slabs of dark marble that were supposed to look like the sepulcher in which Jesus had been buried when they’d taken him off the cross. The largest of the marble slabs served as the door of the sepulcher, and Alison couldn’t imagine how they were ever going to get it open without construction equipment. But Hedwig explained that there was a system of weights and pulleys, like elevators used, that made it as easy to open and close as a car door.

  And sure enough, when Father Pat put the key into the concealed keyhole and gave it a twist, the great artificial boulder swung forward to reveal a small empty room all of white marble, ceiling, walls, and floor. It looked like the bathroom of an expensive restaurant. At the far end was a little staircase of three steps that led to a second, much smaller door, and it was there, Hedwig explained, that the holy relic was kept.

  “Who wishes to be first?” Father Pat asked, advancing into the little room of white marble to stand at the foot of the three steps.

  “Can’t you bring the monstrance out here?” Hedwig asked.

  “I’m not sure that would be proper. Why else would the reliquarium have been built except to allow its special veneration here? Just here.” He pointed to the lower step.

  “I think,” said Alison, “Hedwig should be first.”

  “Oh, that’s very nice of you, my dear, but really—”

  “She should be first,” Mary insisted. “Not just because she’s the oldest, but because she’s looked after the Shrine so long.”

  “Well, if you both insist.”

  With a thin-lipped smile of disappointment, Father Pat gestured for Hedwig to enter the reliquarium and to kneel at the foot of the steps. Then he turned around and mounted the steps with due solemnity.

  He made the sign of the cross, and genuflected, and placed his hand upon the small gold handle of the smaller door. Mary also made the sign of the cross and was about to kneel down when Alison pulled at her sleeve to make her move to the side of the outer door.

  Father Pat opened the inner sanctum of the reliquarium and at once the bats, already disturbed in their sanctuary by the opening of the outer door, spilled out from the darkness into the light.

  37

  For generations, in the interstices of the Shrine, wherever no human might disturb their diurnal repose, the bats had multiplied like the tribes of Israel. Thanks to the anxious nature of its founder, Monsignor O’Toole, and to the experience of its architect, Ernst Kurtzensohn, in the building of the Berlin bunker, the Shrine had been supplied with a system of secret passages designed to allow the Monsignor to proceed from his own suite to the Shrine or to any of the other subbasements. It had been this system, whose existence the Monsignor had never confided to any of his aides, which the bats had been colonizing over the years, entering and exiting via the many defective ventilators by which the building drew in air. Only lately, as the Shrine’s concrete had become brittle and begun to crumble, and as their own numbers had multiplied, had the bats spilled over from what could be said to be their own territory into that of the building’s other residents, emerging first in the catacombs of the sixth subbasement and now, so much more spectacularly, into the Shrine proper. Bats have a natural urge to nest in the highest reaches of whatever space they lay claim to—in attics and belfries—and in the Shrine’s system of colonized passages, the stairway that had led from the Monsignor’s chambers to the reliquarium had offered the bats an equivalent to an attic. And so it was here that the bats swarmed in greatest abundance.

  But once the door of the reliquarium was opened, there were new heights for the bats, all in a state of frenzied fear, to move to. Their little radar systems sensed, beyond the antechamber, a much wider and loftier space, almost a second sky—though when they quickly reached the limits of that second sky and could fly no higher, they began to circle the dome in ever increasing numbers.

  Meanwhile, within the reliquarium there had been a grave mischance—almost, indeed, a fatality. For as the bats had poured out of the inner chamber of the reliquarium, Father Pat (or Silvanus, as we know him better) had backed away in panic—as who would not? Forgetting he stood on the third of three steps, he’d toppled backward, falling on the kneeling figure of Hedwig, who had not had time to realize that the worst fear of her life had just come true before she was knocked unconscious. Silvanus lay atop her, stunned, watching the multitudes of bats stream through the narrow white marble room.

  Then, slowly, that room began to darken as Alison and Mary, with their arms covering their heads and faces to protect themselves from the bats (who, being bats, were in no danger of dashing themselves against anything their radar warned them of), put their shoulders against the simulated boulder that served as the sepulcher’s door. As the boulder slipped into position, fewer and fewer bats were able to escape the inner chamber, and two of them had the misfortune of being crushed to death as the door, with a final joint effort by the two girls, slipped into its frame.

  The little antechamber began to fill with the bats that had nested in the lower passageways, summoned by the cries of their fellows. Silvanus could no longer see them, for the sepulcher was once again perfectly dark, but he could hear their shrilling, and sometimes he could feel himself brushed by their wings.

  He covered his face with his hands and, rolling away from Hedwig’s body, pressed himself against the lowest of the three steps in an ecstasy of fear. He knew, at last, that he was in hell.

  38

  The dogs! Gerhardt thought, once he’d settled down again with his Word-Search Magazine, having assured himself that the alarm was in fact a false alarm. The security monitor had said SACRISTY and, under that, MISCHANCE, which meant that someone ha
d accidentally triggered the sacristy alarm and then shut it off within the ten-second allotted period. It must have been Hedwig. There was nothing to worry about, except that the alarm would have released the dogs from their kennel, and they would be ranging about the property, which they considered theirs and were keen to defend against all comers. Ordinarily, Gerhardt would have let them enjoy their freedom for an hour or two, since the Shrine’s twelve acres of scrub wood were enclosed by a ten-foot-high cyclone fence. But Father Cogling would be arriving any moment now, and he had his own key to the outer gate. The dogs had not been taught to recognize Father Cogling as a friend, so any encounter could be dangerous to the old priest. Gerhardt would have to go outside and fetch them back to the kennel.

  He was getting to think that the dogs were more trouble than they were worth, what with the cost of feeding them and having to take them out twice a day to have their dump. They were beautiful animals, of course, and he’d seen them put through their paces after they’d completed their attack training, and it had been an impressive display. But so far there’d never been an occasion for them to translate their training into practice. They were beginning to look like a luxury.

  Gerhardt went up to ground level on the freight elevator, exiting not through the Shrine proper but through the utility core. First he checked out the kennel, and sure enough the dogs were gone, leaving only a bad smell. He realized that he’d been remiss in the past two days with their feeding and exercise, what with his visits into the Twin Cities. They were probably in a mean temper. He took up the leashes from the hook by the door and went in search of them.

  Even before he’d got around to the front of the Shrine, he could hear one of them barking up a storm. He could tell by her voice it was Sheba. And there she was, standing right in front of the main portal, behaving just as though she had cornered a trespasser and was holding him at bay. “Sheba!” he commanded. “Aus!” But “Aus!” didn’t do the trick. Sheba turned her head, recognizing Gerhardt, and then went right on barking at the invisible intruder.