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NASTY. This is one of several scenes that my ex-editor, Victoria Blake, asked me to create for the (now cancelled) Underland Press edition of my novel, A VERY FAST DESCENT INTO HELL. Here’s a quick set-up: Phelan, the Hollow Priest, has been commanded by a powerful force to renew his investigations into the matter of eternal life, a quest Phelan had abandoned decades ago, for it had led Phelan to a dark and “unpleasant” corner of his own heart…
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THE ROOM WAS SMALLER THAN HE REMEMBERED, his books and notes heaped in one corner, the smashed remnants of his equipment everywhere else. Judas Priest, he’d once thought himself capable of defeating death with this junk? Phelan didn’t know where to begin. He reached into his clerics, searching for a cigarette he knew wasn’t there. He checked every pocket, he looked down at the dusty knives on the floor, his beautiful scalpels ignored for so long, waiting to be held again. Phelan bent close. The blades. The blades dusty. The blades sharp. The blades whispered, sang.
Phelan blinked, shuddered, then spun out of the room. He banged the door shut and ascended the stairs to the main level.
His heart slammed. His breathing…
“Peter!” he half-shouted to one of the altar boys.
…his breathing, he realized, was heavy.
“Yes, Father?”
“I must speak with you concerning a grave matter. Come.”
He led the child down the stairs.
“It has,” Phelan panted, “been brought to my attention,” he wheezed, “that some of the parishoners,” he coughed, all the while leading the boy down the crooked stairs, down into the dark, “some of the parishoners have seen you on the grounds, smoking.”
The boy gasped, almost lost his footing on the steps.
“Careful.” Phelan caught the boy’s arm, feeling the sinew beneath the fabric, the soft young muscle. “Careful, ha ha ha.” He realized he was shaking.
“Oh Father Father Father!” the boy named Peter sputtered. “It was a dare! Tommy Brightman is evil! I—”
“Then why, ha, why do you carry a pack of, ha ha ha, a pack of cigarettes in your, ha, pocket? Careful, more steps, ha ha.”
“How did you know?!”
“I know. Oh Peter. I am so disappointed. What am I going to—” and here Phelan almost completely lost it—“what am I going to do with you?”
“I can make penance!”
“Indeed. And so you shall! But, ha, first…”
The Priest and the boy had reached the bottom of the steps. The black door loomed, waiting.
“First,” Phelan breathed, “give me the cigarettes.”
The boy guiltily handed them over. Phelan smiled, trembled. And with the softest of nudges he pushed the black door open.
•
Darkness. A match snapped, ripped to life. A tiny fire roared and danced. Trembling fingers brought the flame to the tip of a cigarette, and the little room was lit by soft flickers that caught the wet gloss of blood on the walls, the half-face of a boy smashed against the floor. The child’s open eye and open mouth was frozen in a rictus of disbelief. Phelan sucked desperately on the cigarette, shook out the match, and darkness claimed the room again, cloaked the pieces and parts of Phelan’s first victim in two decades. He sucked on the cigarette. Better, he told himself, his breath still ragged but slowing. Better, better. Slowing. Better, better, better, oh boy…
Once the memories had taken hold, Phelan had known it would just be a matter of time. But the second he saw the knives—all had been lost.
“Sorry, little Peter,” he said to the dark, the fragments of dripping flesh. “Never trust a junkie.”
Phelan wondered, not for the first time, if this was how “normal” people felt, post-congress. The lanquid warmth, the relief. He sighed.
Phelan finished his cigarette, found the light, clicked it on. He glanced at the gore on the floor and walls, neither disgusted nor aroused. It was simply a mess, and it had to be cleaned up. He did note, however, with a certain amount of satisfaction, that his old skills hadn’t vanished; there was nary a drop of blood on his clothes, his hands. From high above, the slow drone of the church organ rose and fell. Mass had begun. Phelan shook himself with another little sigh, and he set about addressing the mess, already composing his alibi, absently concocting a reasonable story to explain the disappearance of Peter Saltzer, altar boy, aged 12. Where had he left the damn mop?
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3 Comments
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See, this is why I don’t smoke….Nasty habit, that…….
Horrifying. Incredible use of breath, from the coughing to the smoking. A great thing to focus in on.
The constant “ha ha’s” reminded me of Montresor leading Furtunato to his doom…