Author’s Note: The following tale first appeared in the “Roads Through Amelia” short story anthology published back in 2008. There are a couple of alterations that were made in the interim, and the latest version is what is presented to you now.
Faith In Amelia
He had been Father Michael Sternin before his fall from faith. A preacher. A community leader. A tender of God’s flock. But something had happened to divide him from the Holy Host. When had it happened, he wondered as he walked along yet another street whose name he didn’t recall in his half-drunken haze. When had the sweet harmony between himself and his savior evaporated like morning dew off of the grass on a sunny spring day?
Booze had become his crutch through these dark and troubled times, as often happens to those who find themselves suddenly falling out of their lives at maximum velocity. One moment, you’re floating amid the stars. The next, you’re plummeting through the atmosphere at break-neck speed, wondering if you’ll burn up on reentry or have the dark satisfaction of seeing the ground hurtling up toward you at a hundred miles plus an hour.
He recalled vaguely when the moment had finally come, the moment at which he felt himself breaking from the church. For years Michael Sternin had been convinced utterly that there was true evil in the world, real evil. He had sensed it from the moment he had moved into the small rectory at the back of his church in Amelia City. Some presence, some force, had been in this city for a long time, and he sensed that it had no intention of ever going away quietly.
One evening, he had called one of his higher-ups and tried to discuss the sense he was getting of the city around him. “Sir,” he had said, “there is something very, very wrong with this city.”
“What do you mean, Mike,” the man on the other end of the line asked.
“There is an evil here, sir. I don’t mean the culmination of my parishioners’ sins, which are plentiful by the way. I mean, sir, that I believe there is an entity here, or entities,” he said. There had been silence on the line, and for a moment, Father Sternin had been hopeful. His heart rate accelerated, and beads of perspiration formed slowly on his forehead as he waited for a response to come down the line. Perhaps the church would send an expert to him in Amelia City, an authentic exorcist. But none such luck.
“Mike, you’re in a new place,” his superior said calmly. “You’ve just got the jitters. It happens to all of us. You’ll get settled in, and when you do, you call me again.” But Michael had done no such thing. True, he had settled in, but that sensation of some budding, waiting evil watching him, making plans and moving throughout the city, would not go away. Now here he was, drunk on a Friday night, shambling along. He stumbled a little on the next street corner, and an aging prostitute he had never seen before on this rambling route of his for the last few weeks asked if he wanted some company.
“No, my child,” he replied, his voice only slightly slurred, trying to keep a track of which of her four hazy eyes were the real ones, and which the result of alcohol. “I do not covet sins of the flesh.”
“What’re you, some kinda fag,” she retorted hotly, strolling away to peddle her wares elsewhere. He chuckled at this, because the ludicrous thing was, he had hesitated. He had actually considered taking her up on her offer. What broke me, he wondered as he turned in the opposite direction, away from the bars and the crowds and the painful lights and sounds of drunken merriment. When did it really hit me? What happened to send me screaming from my duties? He made his way back to his rented hotel room with these thoughts burrowing under his skin, tormenting him silently. He entered his room, flopped onto the bed, and stared vacantly at the ceiling.
And through a haze of drunken memory, it came back to him.
Michael sat in his small study, poring over various volumes of accounts of paranormal activity. He had not spoken of the materials he borrowed from the library to anyone, least of all to the librarian who gave him a curious look as she checked his card into the system. It was a balmy Friday evening, a splendid sort of night for a walk. He would take one for himself, but not until he had done a little more research.
Mostly during his walks this last week or so, Father Sternin thought of and prayed for the safety of three boys in his flock. They were from North Perry, the suburb directly north of Amelia. The boys had gone missing and their parents were grief-stricken, fearing that the worst had happened to them. Truth be told, he feared much the same, but he consoled them, and told them that the Lord would look out for their boys.
His mind had wandered off onto those three when the phone began to ring on his desk. He plucked the receiver from the set and put it to his ear. “Hello?”
“Father Sternin,” asked an unfamiliar voice. The man on the other end of the line had a certain quality to his voice that, unfortunately, Mike had become familiar with. It was likely a policeman. “This is Detective Corbain, North Perry Police Department. There’s some folks here who’d like to speak with you.”
“What might this be about, if I might ask,” said Father Sternin.
“It’s the boys that went missing last week,” said the detective. “We found them.”
When Father Sternin arrived at the Amelia City morgue, he stepped into a waiting room dripping with sorrow, so much of it that he could barely breathe. Three sets of parents, all of them looking both grieved and horrified, sat in maroon chairs around the room, all of them belonging to his parish. He stepped quietly and knelt beside each set of parents, giving them his condolences and trying to comfort them each. As he was with Mr. and Mrs. Worl, a heavyset man in a dark brown suit with a badge on a loop around his neck approached him.
“Father Sternin,” the man said.
“Yes. Are you the detective who called me?”
“I am,” said the officer. “There’s a reason besides these folks I called you down. Believe it or not, I’m with these folks in your church every Sunday for Mass,” the detective said. “Would you mind coming with me?” Father Sternin followed detective Corbain down a narrow, sterile hallway, around a corner, and stopped just shy of a large viewing window. “Father, you’re not going to like what you’re going to see, but those folks out there wanted you, and I could use your help.”
“What do you mean, my son,” asked Father Sternin.
“Well, this is gonna be bad, I’ll tell you that right off,” said the detective, cold sweat breaking on his forehead. “But whoever killed these boys carved something into their foreheads. It looks like Latin,” the detective said. “I never picked up on it much. But it might be important for us to know.”
“I see. Evidence,” said Father Sternin. Already he could feel his stomach rolling around, queasy gases and fluids beginning a pre-game warm-up before marching the long tunnel of his esophagus. “Of course.” Detective Corbain took the preacher by the shoulder, leading him past the window in such a fashion as to block his view of what was on the other side. When he stepped through the double swinging doors into the lab where the three boys were laid out on steel operation tables, the first thing to strike him was the odor in the room. It was not the stench of death, as he had expected. It was a smell of something familiar but lost long ago, something he had not scented in many years. A scent like a beach bonfire that has been snuffed by high tide.
And when he looked at the three tables standing a few feet apart each to his left, he made a rapid spin to his right, thanking merciful God that there was a sink to vomit into no more than a couple of feet away. The condition of the boys was, to say the least, unpleasant. He had had one moment to recognize the faces of Tommy Worl, Stanley Moore, and Kenneth Bowler, all boys in his parish, two of them considering joining the choir.
“Hey, hey, take it easy Father,” said the detective gently, gripping him by the shoulder. “Believe me, I know it’s bad, especially since they ain’t nothin’ but kids. But we need to know if the stuff on their foreheads means anything. Come on,” he said, guiding Father Sterning by the arm toward the boys’ bodies. Closest to the doors was young Stanley Moore. His body had been cut into three sections, the first being his head, the second his torso and arms, and lastly, his lower body. Whatever instrument had been used to kill the boy, it had been quite sharp to do such a clean job.
Father Sternin nearly heaved again, but he asked God for strength, and he felt a small rush of warmth fill his belly and his mind. It wasn’t much, but he thanked the Host for the boon, regardless of its strength. He walked up the table’s length to stand next to the boy’s head, and took note of the inscription carved into his flesh. The implement was likely a penknife or similar small blade, capable of making very small cuts to create the statement on the boys’ foreheads.
“What does it say, Father,” asked the detective in a respectful whisper. Father Sternin stared dumbly at the words, reading them over and over again, trying to keep his nerves in check. He had a question for the detective before he would tell him what the words meant, loosely translated.
“Where were they found, detective?”
“An old theater in North Perry, a place called Darin’s Theater House. Place closed up back in eighty-something, hasn’t been torn down yet. Why?”
“Because the inscription means, if translated loosely, ‘All this land is our stage, and we will not go quietly.’ Now if you’ll excuse me,” he said, rushing out of the lab and out of the morgue entirely. The entire time he had been in that room with the bodies, he could not shake that odor, or the sense that some ancient, terrible force was watching him, watching and laughing like a lunatic.
Father Sternin sat up in his rented bed, trying to think back to when that had been. Six weeks ago, he thought. Six weeks! A month and a half had gone by, and he could hardly believe that it had passed so quickly. But that happens, he mused, when you’re married to the bottle. “I need some more air,” he said to himself, exiting his room once again for the city streets. He managed to walk for fifteen, twenty minutes before nausea caught up with him mildly. He tried to focus his sight, and found it difficult. He’d expected as much after all the booze, and so he stood stock still, leaning against a street lamp for support. The arc sodium lamp spilled colicky light down around him, but its coloration didn’t phase him. He wasn’t thinking of shades of yellow or saffron. For some reason, he was thinking in shades of blue, cerulean.
Why, though? What had sparked this chromatic association? And why did the thought of the color itself cause the hairs on the nape of his neck to stand up? He remembered, staring down at the pavement. He had driven his small Buick, provided by the church, past Darin’s Theater House the very same night he had gone to see those poor boys in the morgue. And he had seen something, hadn’t he? Yes, he thought he had. The entire building had radiated an aura of deep, shimmering blue. But it was not a powerful aura, as though the actual source of the aura had been removed, taken away perhaps.
He looked up from the pavement, and caught that sickly scent once more, in the night air around him. He focused his eyes successfully at last, and looked up the street, trying to identify visually where the source of the odor was. But the only thing that struck out at him as out of place was a black stone church that he didn’t recall ever seeing in this part of the city before. It loomed over the street, a hunched predator waiting eagerly for the numb, willing sheep to herd themselves inside. Into the belly of the beast.
Father Sternin felt the pull of that midnight-hued church, and faintly, he thought he heard a low, gravel-scraping-concrete voice coming from it. ‘Come on in, Michael! Let’s us have a chit-chat! Confession is good for the soul!’ Invisible strands of webbing pulled against him, beckoning him forth. “I’ve got nowhere else to be right now,” he said conversationally to no one at all, putting one foot faithfully in front of the other. “And I would very much like to rest my feet.”
And so Father Michael Sternin approached a church that, oddly enough, nobody else saw that night, or the previous day, or at any other time at all. The cracked slabs of the sidewalk passed under his heavy feet with hardly any sound at all (priests just have a way of being quiet that is unsettling sometimes, don’t you think?), the smell of burned out ashes filling his lungs more and more heavily as he neared the black church. Was the building itself a burned out husk, he wondered? Was that not stone, but charred wood that he saw from now fifty yards distant? He wouldn’t have been surprised.
Finally, he arrived at the bottom of the steps that led up to the twin black oak doors that would open on the church’s main vestibule. Craning his neck, Father Sternin peered up at the mammoth front of the black church, his eyes scanning for some sign of what denomination this particular holy house belonged to. Yet he found nothing to indicate who this building belonged to. With a shudder that started in his very bones, he realized that there wasn’t even a cross atop the building. Yet he knew this was a church of some sort. How, he didn’t know.
He didn’t want to go in anymore. His field of vision had begun to blur again, and that awful shade sprang up in his eyes, misting everything in shades akin to cigarette smoke. He knelt down on the sidewalk fronting the steps up to that edifice, seeking aid from God. He received no feeling of peace or forgiveness as he had on so many other occasions.
He’d moved into the hotel on the church’s dollar the day after driving past the old theater. He had been granted a brief ‘resting period’. According to the men above him on the ladder, he was simply experiencing something rather routine for priests whose flock didn’t shift in size or shape for quite some time, or who lost a member to tragedy. “When you see the same faces every day for five years or so without a single newcomer or someone in desperate need of being brought back to the church, it can be disheartening,” one of them had told him in confidence. “It can be even harder when God calls a member of his flock home. Sometimes, we all need a break.”
His break thus far had been for six weeks totaled. Father Sternin felt something cold under his palms, and broke free of his mind’s eye to see that he had arrived at the solid black oak doors. They didn’t feel wooden to his hands. They felt like some cold, slimy metal material, and he pulled his hands away as if they had been burned. “What is this place,” he asked aloud. A deathly chill had descended down upon him, and when he turned around on the spot, he saw that a fog had clouded and obscured his view of the street. He heard that gravel-scraping-concrete voice once again.
Our Father, who may be in Heaven, forgotten be thy name, it mocked.
Facing the doors once again, Father Sternin braced himself, and reached for the handle on the right door. As his fingers brushed against it, he felt a depthless chill, and the pain he had felt in the morgue in his stomach pulled at him once again as he yanked the door open. It made not a single sound, but the scent of burned out ashes slammed into his nostrils with such force that he did not look inside, but closed his eyes against the tears that sprang instantly forth.
Evil, he thought as he gazed into the darkness behind his eyes, this place is pure evil! He put his arms up defensively over his face, and peered between his forearms. At first glance, the interior appeared to be no different than the inside of his own church. The pews appeared to be the same material and pattern as those of his own parish. The red carpeting with the gold trim dividing the chamber into three rows of pews was the same, right down to the way it seemed to have been freed of some of its color.
Except that wasn’t quite right, he thought. He moved his arms back down to his sides, and saw that the carpeting in here wasn’t red at all, but a shade of blue he associated with computer screens. Computer screens, and Darin’s Theater House. His head bent, eyes locked on the carpeting under his feet, Michael Sternin moved slowly into the main chamber of the strange church in downtown Amelia. He shuffled down the aisle, his thoughts drifting back and forth, trying to think of how he would deal with whatever ultimate phantasm awaited him. Yet nothing could prepare him for what he saw when finally he did look up from the front of the foremost row of pews.
In the church he had been serving Mass out of for five years, the stained glass windows had depicted angels. The pictures of them in the windows had shown them granting mercies, protecting men and women and children from demons gallantly. They had all had a common look of serenity upon their glass faces. These, however, seemed somehow more likely, the pictures in these stained glass windows. They showed not angels, but some sort of harpies, tearing human beings asunder, engaging in arcane magic, and committing various forms of sodomy on one another as well as several slain angels.
But all of these windows, and the now overpowering odor of burnt out ashes, were as mere background compared to that which his eyes finally fell upon directly in front of him, only twenty feet away.
Against the back wall of the church, between the choir risers, stood an enormous, inverted crucifix, upon which was staked a wooden Christ figure. His hair was composed of hissing, leering serpents, Gorgon’s hair, and his eyes, goggling out of his wickedly sneering face, shone with contempt and lunacy. His teeth were cracked and warped, with his canines stretched out longer than any other tooth in his mouth. The crown of thorns around his head were in fact not thorns, but a length of coiled barbed wire.
The wound in his side, from the legendary Lance of Longinus, had dribbled blood down his torso (rendered wonderfully with a dark wooden lacquer). In addition, part of his intestines had looped out and hung limply across the wooden Christ figure’s chest. Maggots had been carved into the wound, crawling out eternally around the wound in his side.
There were two more insults crafted into this perversion that Michael could see before things really, really started getting strange on him. Firstly, the stakes used to pin the Christ figure to the cross didn’t appear to be the metal stakes that had been used by the Romans. Rather, they appeared to be some sort of fangs from the mouth of an enormous and likely mythological beast. Secondly and lastly, the Christ figure upon this crucifix had another wound, on his left leg. It appeared to be some sort of bite wound.
Father Sternin crossed himself, and felt the cold sweat that had broken out on his brow, arming it away as he stared at the abomination before him. The temperature inside the church itself dropped a few degrees, a subtle change, but not one that went unnoticed. If anything could have sobered him up tonight, he thought, this would be it!
The eyes blinked on the Christ figure.
“Saints preserve us,” Sternin shrieked in a womanly bellow, scuttling backward and landing hard on one of the foremost pews, panting. His chest felt like a troll might have decided to sit on him a while, pass the time waiting for Billy Goat Gruff. A high pitched hissing filled the air, and Father Michael Sternin watched in macabre wonder as the serpents upon the Christ figure’s head writhed about, peering at him venomously.
“Hey there, Mike,” the wooden Christ said, its voice like gravel scraping concrete, the voice that had beckoned to him from the street. “How’s it hanging, friend?”
“You’re no friend of mine, devil,” Father Sternin retorted hotly, his breath still wheezing in and out of his lungs. He rose unsteadily from the pew, and turned away from the crucifix. The doors outside stood only about a hundred feet away, and if he ran, he might be able to make it out without hearing anything more from the blasphemy behind him.
But after taking only two steps back toward the exit, he saw something on the doors which raised his heart up into his throat. The doors had been covered in dozens of blue steel chains, complete with various armor plated padlocks. He spun on his heels to face the Christ figure, and he saw that it grinned lasciviously at him. Its beard waggled slightly as it shook its head at him, and its eyes swirled in opposite directions for a moment, finally coming to rest locked on his face.
“What’s the matter, Mike? I thought you and I were buddies,” rasped the Christ figure. “Besides, you owe me a little of your attention and time. You have, after all, consumed my flesh and drank my blood,” he said, smiling toothily.
“They’re rituals, devil, and they are not of your host, rest assured,” Father Sternin growled, approaching the crucifix and stopping a mere ten feet away. The maggots, he saw, were in full motion, writhing away inside of the figure’s Most Unholy Guts. “I have taken of the Holy Host, not of a blasphemy such as yourself!” Father Sternin, usually a quiet, humble man of the cloth, did not consider himself in any way brave, heroic. Yet here he stood, certainly within striking distance of a demonic entity, and he felt fear, oh yes. But there was something else burning in his chest, in his heart.
He felt righteous fury. “I suppose you think that makes you better than me,” said the Christ figure.
“I will fear no evil,” Father Sternin said, crossing the air between himself and the abomination. Though he felt better for having done it, the creature itself didn’t so much as flinch. The Christ figure upon the inverted cross just smiled knowingly, and tut-tutted out of the corner of his mouth.
“You said it yourself, Mike. It’s just a ritual. Crackers and wine.”
“SILENCE DEMON,” Father Sternin brayed, his mind racing, his heart beating a rapid staccato in his breast. He clutched the sides of his head, trying to banish the memory images of that blue aura around the theater, that stench in the morgue.
“Touch a nerve, did I,” asked the blasphemy upon the wall. Father Sternin glared balefully at the Christ figure, and backed away a step as tears of blood ran up out of its eyes, leaving crimson streaks on its forehead. With a small spatter, they fell to the floor, where they hissed and smoked like acid. “I figured I might have. Do you have any sins to confess, my child? After all, what better opportunity to cleanse your soul than right now?”
“I’ll say nothing of the sort to you, devil,” Father Sternin said, his voice weak, seeming to come from a hundred miles away. “Now I demand that you let me leave this place!”
“You can leave anytime you like,” replied the Christ figure. “You just need the key to those locks,” it said, indicating the double doors behind Father Sternin with a pair of its head serpents.
“Where is it?”
“Oh, I’d love to tell you, really I would, but I can’t,” cooed the Christ figure, revealing its fangs once again. “I’m not allowed.” Father Sternin let his gaze drop to the floor then, for to stare too long at the blasphemy would surely break not just his spirit, but his mind. Where would the key be kept, he wondered. Where? He believed he had it then, and he approached the Christ figure once more.
On the floor, not two feet away from the dangling hair of the creature upon the wall, sat a black metal box. Likely it was the donations receptacle, and Father Sternin had a good idea that the key would be kept within. He knelt down before it, and unconsciously reached up toward his neck to rub the white Roman collar he had worn for six years.
He hadn’t worn it in weeks, and his fingers closed only upon the ribbed collar of the black sweater he wore under his long duster.
it’s just a trinket, fellah. Won’t do me much good where I’m goin’.
Who had that man been, he thought as his hands hovered an inch above the black box. He had met the gentleman while doing a one-year tour of various churches in Western New York. The man had looked almost like an old Western cowboy, but he hadn’t worn the six-shooters of the day. Michael had met the man while walking the streets of Buffalo, and had seen the man wearing some sort of symbol on a necklace around his throat, some arcane symbol. Something Pagan, he had thought, and offered the man a cross necklace, one of many spare he’d given out during that year-long tour.
And the man had refused it. But that didn’t matter, he thought, grasping the box and lifting the lid. His hearing was not affected by the memory, however, and he knew to leap back the moment he lifted the lid, wanting to strike himself for being foolish enough to think the key would be so easy to find. As he leaped away, a black scorpion lashed at the air where his hands had been with its stinger, crawling up over the lip of the box and scurrying away under the pews.
“Nothing behind door number one,” mocked the Christ figure, cackling like a loon, its voice echoing in the church. “Maybe you ought to ask my mother. She’s right over there,” the Christ figure said, pointing with one of his staked hands toward the right side of the church. Father Sternin turned his attention that way, and saw a bronze sculpture of the Virgin Mary, but not as he knew it.
This particular horror was not like the sculptures he’d seen in his days. It was unmistakably her calm, knowing and merciful face, but she held an imp of some kind to her breast, giving it suck upon a breast that appeared deflated and spent. Father Sternin felt the gorge rising in his throat, and gave in, throwing up explosively on the floor, splashing his feet with sour smelling bile. The Christ figure laughed once again.
“Not feeling all too well, Mike? Got a stomach cramp, buddy?” I’ve run crazy, he thought, his eyes locked on the puddle he’d left on the floor, mostly booze, bile, and half of the sandwich he’d eaten before heading out for a walk. None of this is really happening, I’m in some padded cell in a psychiatric hospital, it isn’t real!
“Ah, but it is,” mocked the Christ figure from his place on the wall, seeming to read the preacher’s thoughts. “It’s all too real, my boy. Now look upon your savior, priest! I command you!” Unwillingly, Father Sternin looked up at the Christ figure upon the inverted cross, and he saw something gleaming in the wound upon its leg. “Finally found it, haven’t you?”
Sticking out of the wound was the head of a key.
“You can’t be serious,” Michael managed to croak, a line of spittle still streaming down off of his chin. He looked around for a ladder, but saw nothing to stand upon that would let him reach the key.
“I’d help you reach it, but as you can see, I’m stuck as I am, preacher,” the Christ figure said, at which the snakes upon his head hissed, a bestial laughter of a sort. “You could climb up my front, though, that might do the trick. Maybe help a fellow out and get this binding cloth off my crotch. It’s starting to chafe,” he bellowed, laughing once again. The preacher backed away from the Christ figure, kneeling in the aisle between the pews. He bowed his head, clutching his hands together before him.
“Lord God, Heavenly Host, I pray to you in this, my darkest hour,” he rasped. “Give me strength, oh Lord, help me to do your will. I do not wish to succumb to this beast and its machinations, Lord! Give me your guidance, God!” He felt once again a rush of warmth and comfort in his heart, and did not resist when his head was turned toward the back of the church.
Father Sternin looked back into the pews, and saw something halfway back that glinted like metal. He dashed back to the head of that pew, and spotted a long spear wrapped around the shaft with an orange sash. He grasped the weapon, and a sudden sensation of power rushed through his arms. Holding the spear aloft, he approached the Christ figure, a grin on his face.
“Ah, well, that’ll work too,” mused the abomination, the smile obliterated from its countenance. Father Sternin jabbed the tip of the spear up toward the bite wound in the figure’s leg, and it struck true, dislodging the key, which fell with a clatter to the floor in a clump of maggots and tiny spiders. The Christ figure screamed in agony as white light spilled over its body from the tip of the spear. The key fell to the floor with a clang, and Father Sternin set the spear reverently down on the front pew nearest the demon. He knew the abomination was not slain, not yet, but that didn’t seem, to him at least, to be the point. He collected the key, unafraid of the snakes that snapped and hissed mere inches from his face.
The scorpion came back out from under the pews, skittering up to Father Sternin as he stood up. He looked down upon the hateful creature, and smiled beatifically at it. The arachnid leaped back, hustling away. He turned around, and walked back to the church’s doors.
As he fumbled with the blue metallic locks, Father Sternin could feel sudden heat, and heard the whoosh of flames far behind him. He turned to look, and found cobalt blue flames had erupted in the foremost pews closest to the perverted Christ figure. It was smiling once again, its eyes wild and shining. “Come back any time, Mike,” it called merrily. “The next time won’t go your way!”
The lock fell away, and there was nothing for a long time for Father Sternin but darkness. When his mind cleared, he found himself standing on the sidewalk under the colicky glare of an arc sodium lamp. Of the black stone church, he found no sign as he peered around. The warmth he had felt when seeking that last bit of aid from his Host had not disappeared with the black church, and he smiled the smile of the truly righteous.
One week later, he was back to serving Mass. Yet in the weeks and months that followed, the memories of that evening would return, bringing with them the keen sense that no matter how strong his faith, the madness that he had survived that night was not gone; it was Amelia. He had not defeated it, but merely avoided falling victim to it.
For now.
Ladies and gentlemen, it is my hope that you’re enjoying these tales as we make our way along in the spooky season, and that you pause to deeply scrutinize the shadows around you…
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