Where the Devil Says Goodnight

by K. A. Merikan

  This might have been the single saddest thing anyone had ever told Adam in person, and he leaned forward, giving Emil’s hand a gentle squeeze. Despite the heat of the day, for once he longed for more of Emil’s warmth. “Whatever happens, you’ll have a friend in me. But it’s wrong to profit from people’s naïveté.”

  Emil put his glass away and turned Adam’s hand in his. There were calluses on his palms, but their touch wouldn’t stop resonating throughout Adam’s body. “I’ll stop. Just for you. But you have to let me read your fortune. Free of charge.”

  Adam exhaled. His eyes locked on Emil’s. In the dusky light, they had the depth of a primeval forest that opened up to him in invitation. He forgot that his body existed beyond Emil’s touch. “You’re kidding. I’m a priest.”

  “It’s just a bit of fun,” Emil said, his charming smile back in place. The words sounded exactly like what the devil would have said to entice a man to get up to no good. But Adam wasn’t pulling away and just let Emil hold his hand as the birds outside sung cheerful hymns, as if they were welcoming their king.

  “Oh,” Adam whispered, staring at the empty eyes of the skull tattooed on Emil’s arm.

  Emil had promised to stop after this one last time. And wasn’t that what Adam was sent to accomplish here?

  Long fingers ran over the lines in Adam’s palm. “I see a very strong fertility line, a confirmation of your male prowess.”

  Adam rolled his eyes at that silliness. “Really? What else do you see in my future?” He took a deep breath when Emil’s forefinger trailed all the way to his wrist, leaving behind a line of fire.

  But he didn’t move, his muscles lax, as if Emil’s body heat rendered them useless. They were so close a kiss would have been only a heartbeat away. A sin away. But he couldn’t pull back, hypnotized by the steady movement of Emil’s hand and the scent that would lull Adam to sleep tonight.

  “A tall brunet?” Adam asked, trying to joke about it, even if the suggestion was inappropriate.

  Emil grinned, his touch still testing Adam’s virtue. “Yes! How did you know? Tall, handsome…” Emil’s expression faltered, the smile gone in favor of slack lips. Before Adam could have asked was this was about, Emil’s thumb pressed on the inner side of Adam’s wrist, as if feeling his pulse. “No, it’s not a man. A goat.”

  Adam laughed. “Are you saying Leia wants to be my bride?”

  Emil shook his head. “This goat walks on its hind legs. Follows you wherever you go.”

  Dread danced down Adam’s spine like a single drop of ice cold water. This wasn’t funny anymore. He recalled the sound of hoofs, which followed him when he first arrived in Dybukowo. He tried to pull his hand away, but Emil dug his nail into Adam’s wrist so hard Adam twisted, yelping as fear clutched at his flesh. The smoke on Emil’s right arm seemed to swirl, penetrating the skulls tattooed there too. This wasn’t possible.

  Emil met his gaze, his eyes bright, as if the forest in his eyes were on fire. “I know you’ve never been hungrier in your life, but on the night of the Forefathers’ Eve you will feast on four meats. Pork, venison, even wolf and fox! Don’t hold back, you’re finally back home. Here, all is yours, and you are king.” Emil made a clicking sound with his tongue, and it imitated the dreaded sound of clopping hooves, knocking Adam out of his stupor

  Adam ripped his hand out of the hard grasp, and as he stood, frantic with the need to get away, he gave the table a hard shove with his hip, sending the empty glasses to the floor. His chair fell over, but before he could have ran outside, Emil looked up with a startled expression.

  “What happened to you?” he asked, pointing to Adam’s sore wrist. Emil’s nails must have torn a bit of skin, because blood was slowly pouring around the uneven cut.

  Adam stared at him with heat boiling over in his skull. “What is wrong with you? It happens every fucking time. I give you a chance, and you act like a psycho!”

  Even the hurt in Emil’s eyes couldn’t make Adam go back on his words.

  Emil licked his lips, his shoulders curling as if he wanted to appear smaller. “I— I’m sorry. Okay, I shouldn’t have suggested a handsome man. I get it, you’re not gay. I was just playing around. My last fortune telling after all.”

  There hadn’t been a cloud in the sky when Adam had come here, so the rumble of thunder made him flinch. He didn’t know whether Emil really didn’t remember what he’d said or was just playing dumb, but this visit was over, regardless.

  “Keep your word,” he said, backing away until he hit the door. “I need to go.”

  Emil rose and approached Adam with hands in his pockets. “Take the shortcut. Looks like it’s gonna rain. Strange.”

  As if Adam’s heart wasn’t rattling enough already. He barely choked out a goodbye and ran.

  He burst out of the house to harsh wind that tried to force him back into Emil’s home, but he sped up, dedicating all his strength to trudging on. He broke into a jog as soon as he left Emil’s property behind, straight toward the heavy layers of clouds that turned the day into evening, despite it being still early.

  He tried to convince himself that Emil had tried to prank him, like he had before, but Adam’s heart knew. It knew something wasn’t quite right. Lightning tore through the sky ahead, beyond the church that appeared so small in the face of the angry sky. He tried to tell himself the rhythmic thud behind him was thunder, but his heart wouldn’t be fooled.

  It was hoof beats.

  He sped up without looking back.

  Chapter 8 - Adam

  Adam picked up the bowl Mrs. Janina had hidden behind the besom and tossed its contents into the trash. The stuffed magpie, which had been moved to the tool shed, went there as well. The world spun around Adam as he stormed through the parsonage on a frantic search for items that were pagan in nature. There was a thin line between folklore and idolatry, and Adam had looked the other way far too long.

  There were two more of those damn offerings of fresh produce cut up as if they’d been lovingly prepared for a child. Such blasphemy, and on church grounds at that!

  Each window was like a portal to hell, so he obscured them all with curtains, expecting to hear that insistent clomping again. His mind kept telling him that Emil had freaked him out, that the hoof beats following him all the way to the parsonage must have been an auditory hallucination, brought upon by a suggestive atmosphere and too much advocaat, but his heart disagreed, and he found himself walking around the empty building with holy water and blessing each dark room.

  He wished the pastor wasn’t away for the evening. His down-to-earth attitude would have helped Adam regain his composure, but the quiet walls offered no comfort, and he didn’t feel any less lost or confused by the time he put the holy water back into the cupboard.

  Shame crept under his skin when he realized he’d used a religious rite to deal with what surely was just an anxiety attack. For so many years, Adam had struggled with desires he didn’t dare speak of, but Emil had seen right through him and used that knowledge to unsettle Adam’s spiritual equilibrium as if it were a game.

  But as immoral as Emil’s behavior was, responsibility still lay in Adam’s choices, and he kept failing in his conviction of staying chaste in body and mind. What force had compelled him to participate in a divination, even if it was done for fun? He must have been out of his mind to agree to something that invited unseen powers into this world, something so much worse than the painful need for Emil’s flesh that Adam had wrestled with since he first came to Dybukowo.

  Shadows followed him with invisible eyes, and he cursed his decision not to install Internet at his own cost. If he only had social media to scroll through, he could so easily switch off from the outside world and forget Emil’s grip. Forget how the day had turned into night within the span of just five minutes.

  He couldn’t bear reading right now, and in a moment of absolute weakness, he left his bedroom and stormed to the rooms at the front of the house, wanting nothing more than to
hear his Mom’s voice. He picked up the handset of the only working telephone on the premises and rested his hand on the cool side table, soothed by the steady beep in his ear. Adam used to know his home number by heart, but years of relying on the contact list in his cell phone had muddled his memory. As a consequence, he accidentally called a perfect stranger first, but as he started typing in the number he believed to be correct, the signal died.

  Adam froze, his gaze meeting that of Jesus, who watched him from a picture on the wall. Adam’s head pulsed, as if his blood vessels were about to burst from shame, but when all lights went out, he dropped the handset as if it were a piece of hot iron.

  Each piece of furniture was a creeping monster about to get him, and he frantically backed into the wall. His heart froze when a door opened somewhere in the house, but before he could have stopped breathing altogether, Mrs. Janina’s voice became the beacon of normality in a world of demons disguised as everyday items.

  “What’s this racket? Is that you, Father Adam?” she asked. It was the first time Adam appreciated the clip-clop of her well-used slippers.

  He managed to compose himself by the time her slender silhouette passed through the door. “The lights went off,” he said, baffled to find out she’d been home this entire time. He hadn’t entered her bedroom out of respect, but maybe he should have knocked after all.

  Mrs. Janina stared at him and switched on a small flashlight, which cast a circle of white glow on the wooden floor. “You never get power failures in Warsaw? I showed you where the candles are on your first day here, Father.”

  She was the evil step-mother he never had, but right now he wished he could spend the night listening to her numerous complaints.

  “Yes… of course you have. I’m sorry. Where’s the electric box?”

  She walked across the room and pulled out a white candle from the old wooden cabinet and handed it to Adam in her usual no-nonsense way. “It’s outside. We’ll just deal with it tomorrow. With this weather, I suspect pressing buttons won’t help much. It’s probably the cables. This happens almost every time we have heavy storms, and there will be many throughout the summer. We will have to wait for the technicians to fix it tomorrow. But don’t worry, we have a generator for the fridge and freezer.”

  Adam wanted to stop her, because defrosting food was the last thing he cared about now, but words got stuck in his throat, so he watched her pad back into the corridor and then listened to her door shutting while he stood still in the middle of the living room with the candle as his only friend.

  The sense of panic had subsided at least, but that did not mean Adam was fine. Far from it, actually, but if he wanted light, he needed to put the candle to use. Of all nights, did this power outage have to happen when he was so emotionally unstable?

  The featureless face of a pregnant nun smiled at him from the darkest corners of his imagination, and as he lit a match and used it to start the candle, he feared he’d find her staring at him from the end of the corridor.

  But all he got was a bit of brightness and longer shadows. He wouldn’t find peace without atonement.

  And he knew just the thing to chase his demons back to where they belonged.

  Unease clung to him when he walked to his room, eyes pinned to where the light was the brightest. The pastor didn’t know about his secret, and Adam needed to keep it that way. Self-flagellation, so widespread in the past, was now frowned upon—in the Polish Church anyway—and he wanted to avoid questions about the nature of sin he wished to atone for so badly.

  But for Adam, it wasn’t about penance. He hurt himself, because it was the best way to stop his mind from wandering off, the best way to chase away thoughts of attractive male bodies. And while it worked like conversion therapy was supposed to, the scourge needed to always be on hand, because no matter how hard Adam slammed the tails against his flesh, the sinful need was always there, lying dormant like a snake creeping in the tree and ready to descend when its victim was at his most vulnerable.

  But tonight, the focus on pain would take his mind off fear.

  The whip burned his hand as he ran out of the parsonage, soaking his feet in the puddles while his brain did its best to convince him that there was no clomping to be heard through the roaring storm. He knew it was impossible, but as he reached the door at the back of the church and fumbled with the keys, instinct still warned him of the danger lurking somewhere in the shadows and ready to strike.

  Relief turned his muscles into foam the moment he burst into the building and shut it behind him. The church was perfectly still—a place of sanctuary—but it still took several heartbeats for him to compose himself enough to let go of the door handle.

  Here, he had many candles, and he could light them all to chase away the obsessive feeling of doom that settled in his chest and wouldn’t leave. Back in Emil’s home, holding lust at bay had been his only worry, but he’d lost his cool, let Emil touch him, and watched his beautiful naked body instead of making his presence known right away. Sins of thought were one thing, sins of the flesh—quite another, and in the moment when Emil had held his hand and pretended to read his future, spiritual panic took over.

  Now he was bearing the consequences.

  Adam walked from behind the altar and faced the high-ceilinged room, which looked back at him with its dusky window-eyes. It had expectations, but once Adam pulled off his wet T-shirt, he was ready to offer himself to God once again.

  But the Lord remained silent and watched Adam scramble like the tiniest bug under a microscope. He knew that Adam had sinned with Emil countless times, even if just in his mind. He knew Adam would never confess his sexuality to a priest who could in any way identify him. And maybe he also knew what Adam feared deep in his heart—that he was not fit for the priesthood.

  The cassock marked him as a shepherd of souls, but how could he instruct others if his own self-control slipped so easily?

  He made his way across the altar, lighting every candle in sight. And once the church was lit up with a soft glow, he was ready to face the shadows in places the illumination couldn’t reach. This was a church. Adam would be safe here, both from physical threats and those lurking in his mind.

  He gave a deep exhale, staring at the central painting, at Jesus on the cross, and his hand loosened on the scourge, releasing the beaded strings while the wooden handle remained in Adam’s hand. He stood in silence while the weather outside warred against logic, but when the wind tossed raindrops at the glass, Adam remained calm. He was no longer afraid.

  The moment Emil appeared in his mind again, wearing wet briefs that left little to the imagination, Adam didn’t hesitate and swung the scourge, released from his sin only when the beads hit his bare back.

  All he ever wanted was to be good. To fulfill expectations and make his family proud, so why was he so mercilessly taunted by emotions he wasn’t supposed to experience? Why couldn’t he have loved women? He could have gotten married then, had a family, lived in God’s grace. But if he couldn’t channel his energy into serving the Lord, what place was left for him within the Church? What was he supposed to do?

  A sob tore out of his throat as he smacked the whip harder against his back. The pain came from within, always growing, pulsing like a cancer Adam couldn’t remove, but the physical agony allowed its release, reducing the pressure Adam had to live with day to day. Breathless, he counted each strike, closing his eyes as the continuous ache took away his fantasies of Emil, his scent, and the imagined flavor Adam associated with him—fresh like the sweetest strawberries yet also somewhat meaty, strong.

  “What can I do?” he uttered in a broken whisper as his knees gave way, and he stumbled to the wooden floor, trying to catch his breath while his flesh adjusted to all the new bruises. How many strokes had it been? He’d stopped counting at twenty.

  He’d brought this suffering upon himself. Every day. He jogged past Emil’s home with the purpose of seeing him, even if in passing. Every day when he fell asleep
, Emil’s dark hair covering both their faces was the last thing he thought of. Since he’d arrived in Dybukowo, there hadn’t been an hour when he didn’t desire Emil. And when he didn’t think about him, Emil came to him in dreams.

  It wasn’t normal.

  None of his previous infatuations had been anything close to the obsessive way Emil occupied Adam’s mind. It was unnatural. Infernal in nature.

  Adam struck his back again and again as he pondered Emil’s past, the crows that murdered Mrs. Zofia, and today’s divination. What if there was a grain of truth to the gossip about Emil, but Adam had been too blinded by his own adoration of the man to notice the devil lurking in the shadows?

  Adam believed in God. Believed in the devil. Was it really so improbable that Emil used dark magic to lure men?

  “You need to listen to my voice,” someone said so faintly Adam spun around, dropping the scourge from the shock when warm breath tickled his ear. But he was alone.

  Or was he?

  His bruised skin pulsed as if it had been scratched by hundreds of sharp claws, and the ache spread all over his body, pulling at muscles and pushing his head into a spin. Adam glanced at the painting of Jesus. Was he dreaming? “My Lord?”

  The picture didn’t move, but the voice he’d heard earlier whispered with the slightest lisp. “I know a way to rid you of this burden,” it purred, echoing as if it was a choir of several different whispers

  Adam’s throat tightened, and he pressed his forehead to the cool floor as the tightening in his insides turned into agony. “Please. I can’t live like this anymore. Please, help me. Save me.”

  “You shouldn’t hurt your body for what it craves. I will help.”

  A slither made Adam’s skin crawl, and when he glanced at the wooden statues of Adam and Eve, something seemed amiss. He couldn’t pinpoint what, but when his gaze met the red crystal eyes of the snake, gravity grabbed him with such power he could not lift a finger. Instead of creeping behind leaves, like it had been, the beast had its whole head out, still as motionless as wood should be, even if Adam could have sworn the sculpture looked different when he’d last seen it.