The False Face of God

They were the first to arrive on Sunday morning, the shadows they cast darkening the temple doors as Gus opened them. He blinked, surprised, and the taller of the two men waved as if he and Gus had met. He stared and could not determine who they were. This must have been a friendliness directed toward his profession, not his face.

Sunlight bleached the even square of his clerical collar bone-white. The taller man pointed at it.

“You’re the priest around here, then?” He asked in a faintly southern accent.

Gus nodded.

“I am. Are you seeking counsel? I should tell you that I’ve only just unlocked the doors, I haven’t really had much of a chance to wake up. My advice might be… less than stellar,” Gus admitted, raking his fingers through locks of thick black hair. His face had always been rugged, his beard scruffy despite a constant effort to keep it trim. Across from these smooth young faces he felt rather brutish.

“Not strictly speaking,” the man said. “More like a place to stay?”

His gut lurched, tugged at the base of his throat and the center of his heart, and he could not say if what he felt was fear, guilt, excitement… It had been years since he’d had proper company, since this church had seen a fresh face.

“Yes!” He said. “Of course. Just the two of you? There’s a spare room in the basement, a bit dusty but livable, I assure you. It’s a bunk, if that’s okay?”

The second man laughed.

“We’ve spent the last four weeks sleeping in tents in the woods,” he said, and his accent was almost Russian, sharp to the first’s peach-softness. “A dusty old bunk is nothing, Father.”

They carried very little with them, a backpack full of clothes each and a sleeping bag. Their tents had been carried away in a windstorm, the southern one explained, they had searched for a cave before eventually curling together beneath the gnarled roots of a massive tree.

“I grew up on the run,” he said. “I mean, not according to my mama, but I was always out and about. Slept maybe fifteen nights in my room after the age of fourteen. But this chill is different. I appreciate your hospitality, Father.”

“You don’t have to call me Father,” Gus said. “My name is Augusto Casparo. You may call me Gus, if you’d prefer. I’d like to shirk the formalities.”

“My name’s Jason, that’s Eryk. He can be a bit blunt, but don’t hold it against him. That’s the way he’s been since we met in college. He says it helps, and I guess I understand that. Can’t say it’s the most effective method,” Jason joked, bumping his shoulder against Gus. It was a bizarrely informal action, and if it had not been rude Gus would have jerked away.

It took all of twenty minutes for them to settle, Jason with bright comments and Eryk with silent grins and quips sharp and swift as whips. Gus made casual conversation with them, helped Eryk lay out his sleeping bag over the ancient bedsheets, jotted down a list of groceries to make their stay more comfortable.

“Is it okay if we invite some friends to visit?” Jason asked. “Not to stay, of course, I got some manners, but to visit? We’ve all had a bit of a spiritual awakening lately. It’s part of the reason we thought to seek out a church instead of a hotel. That and lack of cash.”

These friends visited sooner than Gus expected. Three days after Jason and Eryk had arrived, Gus returned from the grocery store with an armful of heavy brown bags to several cars in the gravel lot of his dinky church. He frowned.

Golden-white light flooded into the building as he stepped in. The snap of the great wooden doors closing snuffed the light as quickly as it had come, and Gus paused to let himself adjust to the dim rainbow of dark stained glass. 

Jason stood at the podium, long fingers curled around the raised edge in a knuckle-whitening grip. A grin sliced his mouth from ear-to-ear, and his blue eyes shone like water off a midnight river.

An assortment of men sat on the floor around him, some lounging and some stiff-backed, all caught in Jason’s stare. Gus counted five including Jason and Eryk. He did not recognize the other three; they did not live in town, then.

“Jason?” He said, setting the bags carefully at the end of a pew.

Jason blinked, and the wolflike grin on his face softened.

“Father Augusto!” He greeted, hopping away from the podium and landing a scant inch from one of the stranger’s fingertips. The stranger shouted something incoherent. 

“I brought you gro-okay!”

Jason was tall, but he was not especially muscular. Somehow his grip felt like being crushed. Gus’s breath escaped him all at once and refused to resurface to him until Eryk slapped him on the shoulder. Oxygen returned like a stone to water.

Gus catalogued the three new men as they stood, a scrawny redhead and a lanky brunette and a chubby bald man, each with prodding eyes and each with a danger he had seen in Jason on the podium, fading by the second.

He must have imagined it. The colored light of the stained glass had painted those hard lines and bared teeth, a trick of the light no different from when the great cross at the back of the church seemed to rattle and the son of the Lord appeared to blink. Just a trick.

“What were you doing up there?” Gus asked, hands clasped tightly in front of him. “Not exactly proper, is it?”

“Forgive me, Gus,” Jason said. “I always wanted to try my hand at preaching. How’d I look? Pretty legit?”

“You looked like you belonged in a bigger church than this,” Gus admitted. Years ago, Gus had visited one of the churches in the neighboring city of Lux, a giant next to Sunless’ half-starved woodland. The priest there had used grand hand gestures and grander facial expressions, as if every word angered and enthused him in kind. Gus had left trembling, a feeling like failure balled in his gut.

Jason threw his head back in a boisterous laugh.

“No, I like it here. We all do.”

This was a fact that would have made itself evident in time. A week passed, then two, three, four, and before Gus had time to look back it had been months. Jason had grown a beard, Eryk had cut his hair, and the three friends - Henry, Golde, and Nick - were in more than they were out.

The group spent much of their time in the basement chatting. What time spent away from the shadows was spent huddled around the podium, bathed in dim red light. Gus rarely caught them upstairs, but he found the occasional candle or cushion, once a piece of paper marred by incoherent scribbles.

Six months after their arrival, Jason approached him with a grim smile.

“We need blood,” Jason said. “There’s something we have to do and we need blood.”

Fear welled in Gus’ throat. He swallowed it back.

“What could you possibly have to do that requires blood?” He demanded, sharper than intended. He mumbled an apology.

“We want to speak to God. Not like you do. We want to speak directly to God, no buffers and no wait, face-to-face.”

Gus blanched. Face-to-face with Him? What would he do? What would he say? Would he look upon Gus and feel disappointment, anger, or mere confusion? Perhaps all of that would culminate in a fine, tempered hatred.

“Where do I get this blood?” He found himself saying, the words thorns on his tongue.

“Ourselves,” Jason answered easily. “We need a ritual knife. Some guy found it in the mountains a while back. We need you to buy it from him and bring it here.”

He pulled a note and a thin bundle of cash from his back pocket, unassuming at a glance but enough that Gus swallowed his nausea as he took it, a jolt racing from the tips of his fingers to the top of his spine. 

“We should have a holy man help us speak to God,” Jason stated plainly, stuffing his empty hands into his pockets. Gus could not return the note or the money if he tried. “You know what to say. You’ve been trained. We’re just a bunch of regular guys.”

Regular guys, Gus heard, but he saw the lean, bearded face of a monster in the shade of a fool. This plan was as dangerous as it was difficult to fathom. Still, he could not say no to that smile, and so he bowed and left.

The man at the written address looked surprised to see Gus, sounded a lot less surprised when Gus stated his business. The knife was lean and gnarled, like a length of broken bone sharpened with the stones of the great black mountain that guarded Sunless. Gus felt dirty holding it, as if he held in his hands the embodiment of sin.

“Be careful with that,” the man said, counting the cash in one hand. His eyes were dark, wary, concerned. “That thing’s not meant for people like us, Father. That thing’s a disease.”

Gus nodded weakly. There’s nothing I can do about it.

The group waited in the pew closest the door, leaping to their feet the moment Gus stepped inside with the blade wrapped in dark cloth and held in his hand. Jason rushed to him, prying the knife from his grip and sneaking a peek with a low, impressed whistle.

“She’s beautiful,” he said. “Come on. Let’s go. We have everything set up.”

Jason took the lead, followed by Eryk and Nick at Gus’s fore, Henry and Golde at his rear, all their forms bathed in the blood-red mixture of evening and painted glass. Their shadows stood long and tangled, skewed by the pews and the pillars so that even the stockiest of them took the ghostly shape of barbed wire.

What scant furniture there was had been shoved into the far corners of the basement, replaced by a carved symbol Gus could not recognize in the candle-lit dimness, but knew to be neither holy nor unholy. It was not a cross, it was not a pentagram. He did not wish to know what it was, and if he had he could not ask; his throat had closed with the basement door.

Jason gestured at an empty space between two candles. Gus knelt, hands pressed together between his knees where the other men could not see.

Lord, if you listen do not surface here. Let nothing holy surface here, leave this church as empty as it has always been. Please do not meet me face-to-face; it’s better to love You from afar.

The men sat around the symbol, Jason and Eryk on either side of Gus. It might have been protective if it had not felt like a prison escort. Henry sat farthest from them, Golde and Nick flanking him. He hid one hand in his pockets, fabric rippling with the nervous twitch of his fingers.

“Dear Lord, forgive me for having so little to say just now,” Jason said in a voice that seemed bright and rang with cold distance. “I fear that if I spill all my thoughts in this moment that I will have nothing to say when we meet. Excuse the rapid progress of this ritual. I’m only eager to see the face of God.”

The cloth dropped from the knife in a delicate flutter, landing in a crumpled heap on Jason’s knee. He swiped the wicked blade over his palm, the first spot of blood staining the white heel of his shoe and the second surge filling the carved lines that made the symbol. Wood turned red, blood spiderwebbing through fine cracks. Jason passed the knife to Gus.

He hesitated for barely a moment and Jason glared at him with fury to rival the heart of a flame. Gus swiped the blade quickly over his hand, one of its tiny branches catching a muscle and pulling. He hissed, passing the blade quickly off to Eryk and letting his blood fill the divot before him and seep into his fraction of the symbol. A faint glow pulsed where he and Jason’s blood conjoined. He blinked the illusion away.

Dark blood flooded the symbol hand by hand. Henry cut his in the shadow of his side, crying out at the pain. Nick went last. 

“Lord, please meet us eye-to-eye!” Jason exclaimed, squeezing a few droplets more from his tattered palm.

Nothing happened. Gus swallowed a sigh of relief.

Light exploded through the room with a deafening CRACK!, filling every corner and every knot in the wood for a single moment. When it faded Gus blinked. All light had fled the room. Over the ringing of his ears he heard Jason yelling.

“What did you do? This wasn’t what the book said would happen!”

“I used a rat!” said Henry. “I thought it would work, I didn’t think anything would happen-”

The darkness screeched, and Henry’s explanation ended with a thud and the sound of something being torn apart, louder than his friend’s terrified cries by an impossible mile. Gus stumbled away from the circle, the heel of his boot dragging through a thin river of blood. He scrambled across the floor, wood biting into his palms until he found the base of the stairs.

The god, the devil, the being they had summoned dragged itself from Henry with a horrible, choked growl. The wood creaked beneath it, and the tearing sounds started again.

Gus ran. He ran up the stairs, he ran out of the church, he ran through the dusk-darkened woods and left Jason and his friends screaming at his back.

Jason did not surface. Gus spent a month in a motel waiting for he or one of his followers to show in a fit of rage or a burst of gleeful tears, their survival simultaneously Gus’s grandest hope and greatest fear. They never appeared.

He left the motel only when he had to, and spent the entire time looking the way he had come, toward where the church lay in the shadow of the mountain. Something would show eventually, he thought. Something would return to finish the job.

Or perhaps it had fled? This was a hopeful thought, and he considered it only twice. Once a week after the incident, the other at the end of the month after too much to drink in the midst of a nagging, burning curiosity.

He returned to the church.

It was not as he remembered it.

If he had not known better, he would have thought that it was a thousand years old, only recently dug up by some small-time archeologist. Wooden beams jutted from the ground like teeth, fragments of stained glass clinging to them like colorful mushrooms. The place smelled of iron and sulfur, and nothing moved.

His relief at the latter fact was brief. Out of the corner of his eye he saw a flash of pink. Gus jerked around.

The creature was raw and malnourished, like a bald rat left in the sun to bake. Still, it’s belly was fat, and its teeth were stained brown. Beady black eyes searched the woods where Gus hid.

Don’t come back, they said. Run or die.