by Patrick Best
THE FORSAKEN
PATRICK BEST
The church had never been so full, yet, to Father Jacob Gleick, it had never felt so empty. St. Mary’s was just large enough for a small congregation of two hundred and fifty souls. Crudely made stained-glass windows on the side of the building and a larger, more finely detailed window behind a modest altar and life-sized porcelain crucifix filled the hall with cold light. The smaller windows depicted the dove, the cross, blank-faced saints and other simple designs in blue and gold. The Virgin Mary occupied the large window, with the infant Christ in her arms. The hair on the back of Jacob’s neck was standing on end. He felt like he could feel the eyes of Mary and her two sons, the child and the martyr, watching his every movement. He thought he saw one of the featureless saints moving in one of the smaller windows.
Jacob struggled to remain calm.
“This morning, I’d like to talk to you about the nature of sin,” Jacob said, standing over his lectern, running a trembling hand through his grey hair.
Jacob’s words echoed within the stone walls.
“Sin is God’s gift to mankind,” he said. “That’s right. Sin is, in fact, a blessing. It is God’s gift to humanity.”
In the faces of the congregation was no-one he recognized. Their faces, pale in the blue light shining through the scene of the Virgin Mary behind him, were devoid of emotion. There was no joy and no understanding - this was normal - but there was not even a trace of recognition. Their eyes were fixed on him, but they did not seem to even acknowledge that he was speaking. His unfamiliar congregation looked upon him as if he were a statue of a person they had never heard of.
“Without sin,” Jacob continued, “there would be no goodness in the world. We are all of us sinners first. Through God’s love, as we learn by committing our sins and being forgiven, we are made perfect.”
They were unmoved, unblinking. Their complete silence and their utter stillness was deafening, distracting.
“Without anger, there can, uh,” Jacob said, stumbling. “Without anger, there can be no forgiveness. Without hate, there can be no love. Without greed, there can be no generosity.”
Someone giggled. Jacob looked up at the congregation over the top of his reading glasses, his face flush with embarrassment.
“The light shines in the darkness,” Jacob said, louder, “and the darkness has not overcome it.”
The laughter came once more.
“Is something funny?” he said, more pleading than angry.
A boy in the front row tried to hunch down to avoid being seen. He looked up and met Father Jacob’s gaze, and a mischievous smile broke across the boy’s face. He was ten years old with curly black hair. He wore a waistcoat over a pastel blue shirt and black tie. One of his eyes was green, the other blue. The boy grinned behind his hands. The adults either side of him, a man and a woman, stared up at Jacob with unflinching resolve. Jacob frowned and looked down at his script to find his place. He searched and searched, but the words were unrecognizable to him. Panic began to take hold. Looking up, he saw a man stand and turn towards the door. Another person stood. And another. And another, as Jacob grasped for words.
“Where-” he managed, as everyone else stood in unison, blank-faced, turning their backs to him to head for the exit. “Where are you going? I haven’t finished!”
Jacob turned his script face down with shaking hands.
The boy in the front row laughed and looked around as the church emptied.
“Wait!” Jacob said, addressing the congregation as they filed out the doors. He stepped from behind his lectern and followed them outside, pleading his case. “Come back! There’s more!”
Jacob knew he was dreaming and he knew this was where he always woke.
But tonight, he didn’t.
The dream propelled him forward after the moving crowd as they abandoned him. He pulled them back, grabbing at their arms, but they did not relent in their slow escape. Their eyes did not drift from the door.
Outside, the crowd dispersed and headed in all directions. Jacob followed them into the sun and watched in horror as their flesh began to turn to cinders and crumble away from their bones. In the biting winds of a bleak January morning, Jacob’s fire-ravaged congregation got down on their hands and knees in the cemetery that surrounded St. Mary’s. They crawled and tumbled into yawning holes in the ground, screaming as their bodies warped and fragmented under invisible fires as they descended into open graves beneath tombstones that all read: “Jacob Gleick”. One by one, they disappeared into the seemingly bottomless graves down into the earth, like ants disappearing into the dirt. The stench of burning flesh filled Jacob’s nostrils.
Behind him, Jacob heard the familiar laughter.
Jacob turned and saw the boy. A shadow loomed over him. The shadow placed its hands on the boy’s shoulders. The shadow had eyes of fire and horns and the very air around it bent in the haze of intense heat. Jacob fell to his knees and crossed himself. The shadow looked at him and then began to speak.
The shadow spoke in a language Jacob had never heard, in a voice that made his stomach turn, his bones shake, and his ears bleed.
The boy laughed.
The shadow said Jacob’s name.
When Jacob awoke, his sheets were drenched in sweat and his hands were shaking. He could taste vomit in his mouth like burning.
It was six in the morning and the sun was rising over Ventura, New Mexico. The Sunday sermon began at ten. Jacob went for a run, showered, and read over the notes for a speech he had delivered ten times before to the same ten people.
Jacob stood behind the lectern and organized his script. The same old faces filed in, ladies walking their canes and former alcoholics from the support group which met in the basement every Wednesday.
Moments before the sermon began, the doors of the church opened and, flanked by his parents, in walked the young boy from Jacob’s dream.
*
“Father Gleick, thank you for a wonderful service,” the boy’s father said, shaking Jacob by the hand as they stood in the doorway.
“Jacob,” he replied, “please. I don’t believe I’ve seen you here before. Have you just moved down? I only got here myself six months ago.”
“Henry Staiger. No, no. We’ve always been here. Used to come to church every Sunday back when Father Russell was running the show, but we stopped a while back. Everything just got so busy. Well, we’ve been meaning to come by and introduce ourselves and we found ourselves with a free Sunday so, we thought, why not today?” Henry ruffled his son’s hair. “And Stephen, well, it’ll do him some good to get away from the comic books and video games for a few hours. Isn’t that right, Stephen?”
Stephen looked around impatiently, looking for their car in the parking lot, his fists bunched and his feet shuffling back and forth. “I need to pee,” he said, frowning. He looked as he did in Jacob’s dream. Everything was the same, from the dark hair to the pale blue shirt and black tie. Stephen was no more than ten years old. One eye was blue, the other green.
Margot, the boy’s mother, reached over and shook Jacob’s hand. “We better get going,” she said, laughing, “before we have an emergency on our hands.”
“Well, I haven’t shut my doors just yet,” Jacob said. “He can use the commode in the back, if you like.”
“What do you say?” Margot said to Stephen.
Stephen shouted a “Thank you!” as he ran for his life back into the church.
Jacob called out directions. When he turned back, Stephen’s parents were both looking at him, a little unsure.
“You know,” Henry said, “I was expecting a younger man. I thought once someone was in with a church that became their home. Do you mind me asking why they sent you here?”
“Well, Father Russell left very big shoes to fill,” Jacob said. “They wanted someone with a little more experience.”
“That must have been quite a shock for you, no?” Henry said.
“Henry, don’t pry,” Margot said, then, turning to Jacob, “He’s always like this. Part of the job.”
Jacob smiled, “Police officer?”
“Journalist,” Henry said. “Well, former journalist. So what’s the story with you?”
“Are you asking for yourself or for the news?” Jacob said.
“Oh, I’m not working at the paper. I got a cozy job at the high school over in Gage, talking to bored teenagers all day.”
“Well, at least they show up to school,” Jacob said, smiling. “We’ve not had anyone under the age of forty the whole six months I’ve been here. Not until your Stephen showed up, that is.”
“Where is that boy?” Margot said, shaking her head. She stepped inside the archway and called his name: “Stephen! If you don’t get a hustle on we’re going to go without you and you’ll miss your shows! Come on, sweetheart.”
Stephen ran down the aisle and out past Jacob towards the car without a word.
“Slow down!” Margot said. She shook her head and smiled at Jacob again. “Say, we were thinking, you should come around for dinner one night,” she said.
“It looks like a bomb site at the moment,” Henry said, “but it’d be great to have you over. Margot makes a mean spaghetti. Whaddya say?”
Jacob nodded and smiled. “That sounds charming,” he said.
Henry shook Jacob’s hand again and he and Margot walked away to where Stephen was waiting impatiently with his head leaning against the side of their Toyota. Jacob watched him as his parents opened the door, shuffled Stephen into the car and quietly scolded him. Nothing about the boy was particularly strange, which made Jacob feel even more uneasy.
Why are you in my dreams? Jacob thought.
Jacob closed up the heavy wooden doors, collected the hymn sheets and vacuumed the floor. He walked back to his office in the east wing of the church and sat at his desk. He sat and stared at his bookshelf, seeing nothing but the boy’s face in his mind. He turned it and studied it.
It can’t be him, he thought. It can’t be the same boy.
Jacob tried to retrace his steps in his dreams. It was always the same, but last night’s new details evaded him. He remembered someone else being there, someone new, but the shape and the voice were lost. He only remembered that it said his name.
“Jacob,” he whispered to himself, resting his head in his hands.
He closed his eyes and in the darkness the shape began to return.
“Jacob,” he whispered to himself.
Jacob opened his eyes.
He stood and gathered his coat. As he pulled it on, a crumpled piece of paper fell out of the pocket to the floor. Jacob picked it up and moved to free throw it into the waste basket. As he did, he saw the writing. He opened up the note. Scrawled across the entire page in unruly handwriting, with a backwards E, was written a message.
It read: “FUCK YOU AND FUCK J3SUS”.
*
Jacob lay in bed and stared at the ceiling and imagined he could see the stars. His frail, wrinkled hands were folded on his chest. Every part of him save his head was under the heavy winter blankets. The house the church had provided Jacob, his home for the last six months, was a green-and-white, craftsman-style bungalow resting in the shadow of a pine tree that was even older than he was. Jacob listened to its branches rustle in the breeze and tried, for the hundredth time that night, to close his eyes and drift away. He listened only to the pine’s movement and the irregular waves of sound as the breeze came in tides. It reminded him of the jungle, from his younger years. Jacob had learned to live with the quiet here. He had run to New York in the mid-seventies after the war, to the priesthood, to get away from the silence of the jungle that haunted his sleeping nights, to find God’s voice, to get lost in the hustle of the city. Since moving to New Mexico, since the ghost of Vietnam had all but drifted from memory, Jacob had grown to appreciate the quiet again. No sirens, none of the murmuring of the street, no traffic. And no chance of gunfire, explosions, the roar of flames on villages or the screaming of children.
It was crushingly lonely at first, but he felt lucky to have a place of his own, a fresh start. A fresh start was a rare thing at sixty-seven years old. Jacob felt his eyes start to get heavy.
He prayed for sleep.
The quiet was slowly being eroded by something Jacob couldn’t quite place. He lay with his eyes closed, looking at the back of his eyelids, trying to empty his mind.
It was a gently shushing sound, more distinct than that from outside, coming from inside the house, from inside the room. When Jacob placed it as coming from under his bed, he opened his eyes.
It wasn’t a shushing sound.
It was a hiss.
Jacob could feel the thick body of a huge snake sliding into a circle under his bed, pressing up against the underside of his bedframe.
A voice whispered between the hissing, itself a form of hissing, low and sharp. It said, “Do you like video gamessssss?”
“Who-“ Jacob whispered back, “Who are you?”
The weight pressing against the underside of his bed shifted and he felt his sheets lift beside his feet. Jacob could feel the weight of it on the mattress as the snake slid under his sheets and into his bed. Its body touched against his leg. The scales on its skin were coarse and cold. Its body felt the size of grown man’s leg. It crawled over his body.
“I am a messssssssenger,” the voice came from under the sheets as the outline of the snake drew closer to Jacob’s head, as the weight of its body pressed the air out of his lungs.
Jacob didn’t dare look down. He looked only at the ceiling. He tried to tell himself he was dreaming, but it didn’t work. He wouldn’t wake up and he wouldn’t calm down. His heart was pounding. It was all he could hear now along with the snake’s voice and the scraping sound of its scales sliding up over him.
“Do you like video gamessssssss?” the snake said again, its head was getting higher. Jacob’s hands were balled into fists and he was frozen in terror as the snake crawled up over him towards his face.
“That’s-“ Jacob stuttered, “That’s your message?”
“I’m assssssking for someone elssssse,” it said. “The messsssage... iss from you.”
Jacob lifted his head from the pillow and looked down. The snake was creeping slowly up over his chest, hidden under the sheet. He wanted to move the sheet, but he knew he couldn’t look at it.
Jacob didn’t have a choice. The snake lifted its head and rose up. The blanket slipped down its back and revealed its head.
“Oh, my Christ,” Jacob uttered.
“I like video gamessssss,” the snake hissed through its fangs.
Its scales were a rusty brown
color with dark brown zig zags down its body. Its face was almost human. It was rounded and pale and it had curly black hair. One eye was blue. The other was green.
Stephen, Jacob thought. It’s Stephen.
A forked tongue flicked out over Stephen’s needle-point fangs and he lowered his hideously distorted face to meet Jacob’s gaze. His eyes were inches away from Jacob’s. Jacob was trembling, nearing a seizure.
“We… know,” Stephen said, “what… you are.”
The edges of Jacob’s vision became blurrier and brighter until the seizure took hold.
“Baaaaaaby killer,” said the snake.
The serpent was smiling when Jacob blacked out.
*
Crows sat in the apple trees that lined the dirt road to the Staigers’ farmhouse at the juncture between the town and a hundred miles of nothing. They cawed and shifted, announcing Jacob’s slow arrival as the sun began to set behind the mountains. He admired it as he walked.
Wouldn’t get this in New York, he thought to himself.
“Father Gl
eick!” Margot said. “Come on in. You’re not wearing your collar.”
“I’m off the clock,” Jacob said with a smile, handing her a bottle of wine.
Jacob couldn’t help but look around at the framed vacation photos and souvenir wood carvings in the shape of African animals and imagine what his own life could have been, with a family and a farmhouse and a checklist of comfortable, five-star-resort adventures for himself.
“Stephen!” Henry called up the stairs as he emerged from the kitchen wiping his hands. “Father Gleick is here! Off with television, please!”
Henry shook Jacob’s hand.
“Good to see you, Father,” Henry said. “Hope you’re hungry.”
“I could eat a horse,” Jacob said.
Stephen ran down the stairs as fast as he could manage without falling and jumped the bottom step. He landed with a great thump and gave his father a salute.
“Hello, Stephen,” Jacob said, smiling through the fear of seeing his face once again.
The blue eye and the green eye looked at Jacob and smiled. “Hi!” Stephen said.
There was something about the boy that didn’t fit. Nothing he did or said was out of the ordinary, but there was a presence about him. It unnerved Jacob.
Dinner was grilled trout with lemon and potatoes. They spoke about possible fundraisers for the church, about ways to connect with the high school, and about Star Wars.
“Oh, yes. I remember seeing the very first film in 1977,” Jacob said. “I must have been in my late twenties then. It was quite something. It was special. Now, they blow up the Earth in every other film they put out. Back then, it was different. I’d never seen anything like it. I was in the seminary then, and a whole group of us, we must have filled the cinema, all these young priests sat there whooping and cheering like a bunch of chimpanzees.” Jacob laughed. “I guess times were different back then.”
“How do you mean?” Henry said.
“I had a time in the marines,” Jacob said. “I joined the priesthood to get away from that life.”
“You were in the marines?” Henry said.
“Surely was,” Jacob nodded. “I served for a time over in Vietnam. It was an ugly place. I’d never seen such brutality. And that’s what drew me closer to God. The fantasy of it all – Star Wars, I’m talking about now – it grabbed me, you know? There are heroes and villains and brightly colored lazer guns. There are no shades of gray, no bullets from nowhere destroying lives, and no blood. It was a complicated time – I’d seen enough bloodshed and insanity – and Star Wars was simple and pure. I liked that. Anyway, listen to me, rambling on like some old timer.”