Saints and Monsters

1820

The Pastor sits in his empty church long after all the congregation has left. It is night, and the air is cold and still as death. He wears a faded suit and hat. His hair is gray and thinning at his crown, a thick beard concealing his jaw, his face weathered and eyes red from crying. He rises from the pews and walks to the table beneath the podium. It is lined with candles. He lights them one by one, until their collective light casts dancing shadows over the bronze crucifix on the wall above him. He gazes with forlorn eyes at the face of Christ--the empty eyes pleading with an unresponsive heaven--and kneels his heavy body to the floor. 

“Is there a Heaven left for me, Father?” He whispers deftly. He bows his head in shame, wringing his hands. “Canst thou look upon me with any mercy left in thy heart?” His voice falters. “I have sinned...but if thou cannot forgive me, have mercy on my Mary…,” He casts his eyes out the open window, and realizes with a pang of fear that he is looking into a darkness black as his soul. “Save my Mary…,” He pleads, a sob breaking from his chest. “Save her…,” 

“‘Almost thou persuadest me to be a Christian’.”

The Pastor startles, jumping to his feet at the familiar voice. His son stands just outside the entryway. He is in many ways just like the pastor in his youth--the same dark hair and build, but with the bright blue eyes of his fair mother. He has her gentle face, her gentle voice, and gentle mannerisms. A rough farmer's boy with the presence of a gentleman. He is dressed in black so that all but his pale face is absorbed in the darkness. His long mouth is stretched into a self-important grin.  “Convincing, even for you.” His son muses. 

“What are you doin’ here boy?!” The Pastor bellows, rubbing at his face to conceal his tears. “Shouldn’t you be drunk in a gamblers den? Or in the arms of a harlot?”

There is a long pause before his son answers. “When I told you I was going to save mother, I was telling the truth.”

The Pastor, despite his grief, let’s out a scoffing noise. “So now you’re a saint…?”

There is something menacing in his son's response. “Far from it.”

“Then what is it you want?”

His son's eyes are accusatory. “Do you really have so little faith in me father?”

The Pastor stares angrily at him. “To have faith in something, Will, you need to believe in it.”

Will nods, as if accepting this, before turning his gaze on him like the barrel of a gun. “Like these people believe your sermons?”

The pastor raises his head, his temper flaring.

“If only they could see...that same passion you pour into your speeches...lashed out on the back of your defenseless son, the face of your innocent wife—,”

“Enough! Speak another word or—,” The pastor roars, his voice carrying across the chapel. The noise stops him, awakening a sense of guilt. He sees his wife cowering on the floor, sobbing...begging. These are the memories that haunt him, the sins that torment him.

“Or what father?” Will challenges, a smirk on his face. “You’ll beat me? In a church?”

The Pastor’s lip trembles with suppressed rage. He glowers across at his son, wanting nothing more than to hit him. But it is that thought terrifies him—his aggression. His violent past. It is over now. He wills it to be over. “You ashamed me—brought shame and slander on our family and this church, broke your mother’s heart and abandoned her in her time of need. She’s dying now and—,”

“Ma is healed, father.” Will cuts him off with a sharp look. 

The Pastor stares hard at him. “You’re lying.”

“No father, I don’t lie. But you do.” Will glares at him. “You lie every day to these ignorant sheep who call you Father.” He spits the word like a vile taste in his mouth. 

The words slice directly through the Pastor’s heart.  “How is she healed?” He asks. 

Will gazes at him with steady eyes. “I saved her.”

Now the Pastor really does laugh, slow and building and mocking until it reverberates off the walls. “Saved her? Do you mock me, son?”

“I saved her because I was willing to sacrifice everything for her—something you could never do.”

“Sacrificed?! When have you ever sacrificed? You killed her. With your insolence, your foolishness...you have been nothing but a burden all these years!”

Will keeps his gaze on him, but it is burning. When he speaks this time, it is with unadulterated loathing. “I have been afraid of you all these years...all my life been afraid to so much as look at you,” he growls, blue eyes narrowed into slits of ice. “But I look at you now and I see what a fool I was for fearing you...because you are nothing. You are weak. You are the fool. I look at you now, and all I see is cowering vermin.”

The Pastor rears his head at this, eyes bulging with anger. He marches slowly down the steps, contemplating his next move carefully. “What did you say?”

His son smiles. “You will never hurt me again.”

His father raises a finger, pausing midway down the pews. “You leave here now, and you never set a foot in our house, or this church ever again.”

His son looks up, and his eyes are not the same. The darkness of his pupils has consumed all the light in his blue eyes. They are cold, unmoving. The eyes of a dead fish. They are fixated on his father. “What is it you always say, father? Liars will...burn in hell?”

His son moves from the shadows, taking his first step into the church. His polished leather shoe hits the floorboards, and ignites into flame. 

Only he is unharmed.

His son continues to walk, fire lurching with every step, filling the church with its radiant, blazing heat, scorching the walls and engulfing the pews. The Pastor stumbles backward, hands raised to shield his face, which is a ghastly white. His mouth hangs agape at the sight of Will smiling like a cherub in a lake of fire and brimstone. Flames lick over the pews, spreading like a plague, condensing it all to ash with his son’s every touch. 

Will comes to a stop a few feet away, and the pastor falls to his knees, gasping for breath and sputtering from the thick, oily smoke. “Son, son, I beg of you...what’s come over you?! Have you a devil?!” He pleads. 

But His son, the pastor realizes, is gone, and in his place stands a figure as empty as death itself. His eyes, black as midnight, are unforgiving. “No, father, the devil has me.”

His father shakes his head, face ashen, beaded with sweat. “William...what have you done? What have you done?” He wheezes.

His son stares coldly at him, letting the flames rise higher around them. “I saved her, father. Her soul, for mine.” His voice is calm as falling snow.

The pastor coughs, looking up gravely into his son's blank eyes. “William...you are mad. Please—,”

“Father, loosen your kerchief,” Will says softly, raising a finger just as the white kerchief around his father's neck begins to squirm, growing scales and a head with fangs. In the kerchief's place, a black snake hisses, pulling itself into a knot around the pastor's throat. “You’ve always worn them so...tight.”