by william Todd
Sitting in the front pew, directly in front of the statue, with a broom at his side, was a priest about a decade older than Wendell by appearance. He had squared features and dark, wavy hair, sliced here and there with a thread of gray. He seemed deep in thought and didn’t at first notice Wendell as he rounded the row of pews.
“Hello,” Wendell said. “I’m looking for Father Casey. You him?” The priest crossed himself as he rose and greeted Wendell with a warm smile and bright, enthusiastic eyes. “I am,” he said, taking Wendell’s hand in a vigorous shake. “Who do I have the pleasure of speaking to?” He was also a tall man, and hidden under his cassock must have been a bale of muscles for his grip was a solid, almost painful, one. “Forgive me. You don’t look like any of my parishioners.”
“No forgiveness needed. I don’t go to church here.”
“Oh, where do you worship?”
“I don’t.” The priest’s earnest smile only became wider, “Well, some people liken the church to a hospital. They only go when they are spiritually ill. So what ails you?”
“I believe you know, er knew, my father, William Wiggins.” The priest was hesitant before he answered. “Yes. You must be Alastair then—oh wait; it is Wendell, now, is it not?”
“Yes, Wendell, Wendell Wiggins. I go by my middle name now. Long story.” “Yes, your father apprised me,” he assured Wendell as he motioned for them to sit, and they resumed their conversation in the silent stare of the alabaster Virgin.
“I am very sorry for your loss,” Father Casey started. “For the short time I knew him, he seemed a very nice man.”
“Are you sure we’re talking about the same person?” Wendell quipped.
“Oh, I know he seemed gruff and somewhat offputting at times, if I may say that—”
“You may.”
“—but he really did mean well, for all his faults.” “Yes, I’m sure he did mean well,” Wendell retorted, “but not all he did actually turned out well.” He then eyed fretfully the emergent gloom, like an alien mold, crawling up the wall and along the isles of the church.
“Forgiveness is a wonderful elixir for ill feelings,” the priest offered. “It is not forgiveness I’m seeking at the moment—it’s answers. Answers to things I’ve seen today. Answers to things that I’ve had done to me that I cannot explain, not naturally, anyway.”
He stopped momentarily to look around him once again. Something was close by. He could feel its stare, though the glowing, putrid eyes could not be readily identified. He then continued, “My father wasn’t a religious man, yet he came to you. I, in desperation, am following in his footsteps.” He hesitated only a moment then revealed, “There was something in my father’s room when he died. Something I cannot describe and certainly do not understand.”
At that revelation, and before Wendell could elaborate further—though he really wasn’t sure how that elaboration would take form—the priest’s features darkened into something that seemed foreign to his face. It was as though his muscles puckered into positions unnatural for them. He held up a finger, telling Wendell he wanted to do something before he answered.
The priest went into a small room between the statue and the altar and came back a moment later with more candles. He then lit them from the candles around the statue and set them in the pews all around them. Within a few minutes their end of the church was a conflagration of light and flame.
When the priest sat back down he said, “Does that answer your question? Your father came to me in late winter and articulated this whole ghastly affair to me.”
“And you believed him? Just like that?”
“No, no, not at first. Many supposed supernatural things can have very natural explanations.”
“Did you see it yourself? Did you see the thing in the shadows?”
“No. He tried to show me. It didn’t—or wouldn’t— manifest itself to me.”
“Yet you still believed him?” “I only had to see the look of terror on his face to know he was seeing something. Something very real to him, even if I couldn’t see it. Yet in my line of work, you don’t need to see evil to know it’s there. It can manifest itself in so many ways. In his case it was his sleeplessness and paranoia to the darkness. A possession of sorts but like no other possession I have ever read about or seen.”
“So in the end, there was really nothing you could do to help him?” The priest’s blue eyes wandered over to the glimmering, snowy marble of the Blessed Mother. There was a sense of failure in them. “No, and I can’t tell you how sorry I am that I couldn’t. His fate was sealed long before he ever sought me out. In the end, all I could do was help prepare him for what was to come.”
He then firmly fixed his gaze back onto Wendell. “But you . . . Your father told me about how he passed this affliction onto you, as well. I was going to search you out tomorrow. I may still have time to help you, if the Lord wills it.”
“For the sake of argument how about we just assume he does.” Suddenly, there was a noise hidden in the gloom on the opposite end of the altar—a slow, scratchy clatter that reverberated off the stone and stained glass.
Wendell turned so fast he thought his neck would snap. His heart felt like it was going to tear through its cage of bone, and it was though his very breath was in terror, for it refused to leave his body, clinging painfully in his throat. He reflexively moved away from the noise in the dark, almost knocking Father Casey from the pew behind him.
Suddenly, from within the inky shadows where the candlelight could not penetrate, an old, withered man on unstable feet shuffled into the light, wearing similar garb in which the young priest was attired. “Father Casey, your supper is getting cold. I thought you’d be done long before now. You know the rule: we eat together.”
“Sorry, Monsignor Thomas. I was just saying a little prayer to the Blessed Mother before coming in when this gentleman, Mr. Wendell Wiggins, William Wiggins’ son, came in for some consoling words; as you know Mr. Wiggins died today.”
“Well, supper waits for no one. Do you think Jesus waited on the Apostles at the Last Supper while they gabbed with the Pharisees out in the street? Come, come. And what’s with all the candles? This is how you run your parish—wasting candles like this. The Church isn’t made of money, you know. Blow them out and come to supper.”
To Wendell he said, “Young man, I’m sorry for your loss. I knew your father. Good business man. We have Mass in the morning at 7:00 a.m. I suggest you get your consoling then.”
He then wobbled and trundled his way back into the darkness. Wendell looked upon Father Casey with brow askew, to which the priest replied, “Don’t let his tone fool you. He’s well meaning. He’s just so long in the tooth he’s forgotten how to show it.”
“Maybe he and my dear old dad are related.” The priest rose from the pew and grabbed a couple glass votives and handed them to Wendell. “I hope this is enough light to get you back home without incident. I have to do the morning Mass, but can I call upon you afterwards? I can share with you then the things I’ve been able to uncover, however little it has been. It is only a start, but every journey, no matter how short or how long, has to start with a first step.”
“You can’t divulge your findings now?” Wendell asked anxiously. “I don’t have time, now. If I’m not in there to eat my cold supper in the next few minutes, I won’t eat again for four days. That’s my penance for not being to supper on time.”
“I take it it’s happened before.” “Only once, and I wish it to never happen again. Monsignor takes his meals very seriously. Although this is my parish, he is a guest here. He is a senior priest, and I need to give him the respect he deserves, however much it may pain me.”
Father Casey paused a moment, as if in reflection on what he was about to say. He then added, “Monsignor is dying. He has a cancer on his legs he acquired when on a missionary trip to the tropics. The ulcers are spreading. So, if sitting together with him at supper comforts him, then I will sit with him every nig
ht till God takes him home. I know I ask a lot of you when I ask only for this one night, but I am only one man and others need me, as well.”
The priest’s expression turned serious. “Will you be alright till tomorrow morning? Can you stay awake?” Wendell shrugged. “I don’t know that I have a choice. It won’t be my first all-nighter, but it’ll be the first I’ve attempted sober.”
“Good. Where shall I call at?”
“The Reed House, room 313.” The priest started rounding up the votive candles he took from the room, quickly blowing them out one by one. As he did so, and before Wendell turned to leave, Father Casey said, “I will tell you this one thing, and it will have to suffice till tomorrow: if you find yourself in the company of this evil, what it does to you, as real as it may seem and feel, is only an illusion. That, I only know because of what your father had already relayed to me in our conversations together. Whatever it does to you will not kill you. It wants something from you and cannot get it if you are dead.”
Wendell replied pensively, “It has already revealed its demand—my children.” Father Casey made a sign of the cross and said, “Then God be with your children, my friend. And whatever you do, whatever it does to you, do not consent when it asks for them. Do you understand? Any assent on your part, however slight, is all the license it needs, and their fates will be sealed.”
“That is the one thing about this whole affair that I do understand.”
“Good. I’ll see you in the morning.”
5
Wendell opened up the church doors to a landscape that had been hungrily consumed by the night. The moon hung shyly just below the tree line, as if worried it might be the next course, keeping the gloom thick.
His two flickers of salvation delicately danced on either side of him, as he took his first apprehensive steps away from what strangely felt like a place of refuge.
The first block was traversed without incident. He constantly took in his surroundings in an anxious dread, peering into the blackest crevasses. Movement was felt more than seen, as the ring of light surrounding him kept him in a cocoon of safety.
As the hushed desolation of the house-lined street began to give way to small shops, some still open and alight a block and a half from the hotel, Wendell dared to breathe a sigh of relief. In many spots, the lights from the shops outshined his candles and if it weren’t for an ever-present fear of being drawn and quartered, he would have, if even briefly, considered extinguishing his own candles.
Then it happened. He stumbled on a root along a footpath between two darkened properties. Wendell caught himself before the stagger became a fall, but in righting himself, both candles were extinguished.
The tenebrous night to his right began to yawn awake. Wicked whispers caressed Wendell’s ears while he desperately searched for an ignition source to relight his candles. He quickly realized that there were none, but before the thought of running became a reality, something from the shadows snatched him and pulled him into its onyx embrace.
Roiling all around him, like thunder clouds on a moonless night, a pall dropped over Erie. Wendell was not only alone, he seemed void even of a firmament, suspended in a heavy broth of nothingness with those manic susurrations confessing an evil he could not understand.
His eyes became cataract, his heart hammered so violently that he felt certain that it would detonate within his chest. He could feel its pounding in every limb as he floated in that black soup.
Then, slowly around him there came vague suggestions of substance. His feet stretched impossibly at it, hoping something firm would reciprocate the reach.
At once, it was as if someone turned the lights back on. Wendell found himself prostrate inside a hollowed piece of metal, its volume only about twice Wendell’s size. His heavy breaths echoed off its brass-colored walls.
“I missed you,” came the filthy voice from
somewhere to his right outside his containment. “I was so hoping you would stay and play some more.” Suddenly, the thing’s grotesquely slurred voice was now at his left. “But all is well, now. You have returned. Shall we resume playing?”
“You are not getting what you asked for,” Wendell cried out. “I will never give up my children. Do to me what you will.”
“And I shall. We have ample time, for eternity is pregnant with it. Make no mistake. I will get what I want. Did you know it took your father nearly a year of my company before he finally gave you up? He was a strongwilled man, stronger than most. I suspect it will take decidedly less time than that before you will be willing to give up the entirety of the world to make the pain stop.”
Wendell was surprised at the revelation. Not so much of his father’s admission that he had given Wendell over to a demon; the confession was self-explanatory, if not wholly unbelievable at the time. He was more surprised that his father would endure a year of tormented afflictions of unimaginable pain to try and save his son. He had always thought his father held an untold disappointment or even dislike of him; but if that were so, why did the elder Wiggins not give Wendell up right away to stop the torment? Maybe his father had cared for him more than he realized.
Wendell unbuttoned the collar of his shirt, as the temperature in the metal entrapment began to warm. He began to squirm uncomfortably.
“If I am to do my job properly,” the voice went on,” I need to know what makes you tick, since we are only newly acquainted.” Something like bony pincers clicked excitedly. “Let me ask, if I may be so bold as to do so, what scares you? What things—terrify you?”
“Big breasted, bare naked blonds,” Wendell quipped. “Scared to death of them.”
“Ah, a sense of humor in the face of adversity.” “I got that from my mother.”
“Your father was rather a dry and direct person, I admit. Your torment might be more enjoyable than I first thought.”
Wendell adjusted himself in the oddly-shaped enclosure, and it was then, when he felt the heat radiating from underneath him, that he began to take in his surroundings with more scrutiny. The walls rolled up and around at odd angles and at one end, the end he was facing, it narrowed severely with two small holes burrowing to unknown places at its most contracted point.
Now the mucoid slur of odd intonation was all around him, echoing off the brass walls in every direction, as it said, “I will endeavor not to disappoint you in my attempt at your suffering. I never have to look far when I try to realize new and different ways of instilling it. Man, since time immemorial, has had an uncanny way of knowing just the right way of inflicting pain upon his fellow man. It is an odd concoction—pain and terror—and just the right proportions distills the most gratifying drink. It is an aptitude I am surprised your god befitted you with but a gift I am only happy to replicate.”
The heat was becoming unbearable. Wendell’s clothes were swiftly becoming saturated with sweat. He could no longer touch the metal’s surface. Even his clothing was no longer a barrier. He struggled to a crouching position with his knees tucked up to his chest so at least the thicker soles of his shoes would provide a brief respite.
It was in this crouching position that he noticed the metal underneath him began to take on a different color.
Wendell, with quick repetitions, beat upon the sides, only to have his hands burned in the attempt. The voice outside again said, “I was there when Perillos of Athens created this wonderful piece. It’s always been a personal favorite of mine.”
“What are you doing to me?” Wendell pleaded. “What contraption do you have me in?” He tried to move, but the soles of his shoes were beginning to smoke and adhere to the now glowing metal. The heated air was nothing compared to the scorching knives of pain now beginning to stab up through the soles his feet.
“Have you ever heard of the Bronze Bull? No, probably not; education isn’t what is should be. You are inside a hollowed out bronze bull under which a fire has been lit.”
Wendell shifted, but his feet did not move, making him lose his balance.
He fell to his right, and his arm was immediately seared. He pushed himself upright as he cried out, but the agony lingered. His shirt was charred and burned away, while the skin underneath was beet-red and bubbling.
Now, even the air was so hot Wendell’s lungs burned with every breath.
The orange-red bronze beneath him began to transform to yellow-white. Wendell screamed in agony, however every inhalation of the super-heated air only made it harder to breathe.
“All you have to do is say yes,” the voice said. “Yes is such a simple word. Even near death anyone can manage a yes. I say again, give me your children.”
“Y-y,” Wendell stuttered, as he tried to release his burning feet from the melted shoes. “Yes, say yes, and this will all be over.” The purulent voice had an eager tone. “I will leave you in peace until I return to collect what is mine. This will all go away. I promise.”
Wendell began to smell singed hair. “Y-y-y—”
The pain was unbearable, insufferable.
“Say it!”
His clothes began to smoke.
“Say it! Say it! Just say yes!”
“Y-y-you will never have my children!”
The thing cried out in a thunderous volume, a hurricane of saturated incantations from a nameless dialect. The bronze bull rocked violently, which sent Wendell onto his back. In an instant the cloth was burned away, and his skin melted onto the white hot metal. He tried to scream, yet the air inside was now like a cauterizing iron. He felt like he had swallowed liquid steel that settled and hardened in his lungs, making breathing impossible. The smoke and fire from his burning clothes and flesh rose up in wispy columns on either side of him, as he screamed a silent scream.
6
Wendell was again pulled from the nightmare by a tug at his shoulder. He awoke with a start, flailing his arms about wildly.
“Whoa, whoa there, mister.” The man backed away with his arms out ahead of him defensively. “Didn’t mean to scare ya.” He was a short, thin, middle-aged man with wild, dark hair all pushed to one side. A gray carpet of stubble covered a weathered face.