by Jon Skovron
He flicks holy water on Jael’s face and it breaks her concentration. The image of her mother begins to slip away.
“Along with every satanic power of the enemy,” says the Mons. “Every specter from Hell, and all your fell companions, in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ!”
Jael tries to bring the memory back, but the harder she fights to hold on, the faster it fades away, until finally, she only has a dim recollection of it.
“Hearken, therefore, and tremble in fear, Satan!” yells the Mons. “You enemy of faith, you foe of the human race, you begetter of death, you robber of life, you corruptor of justice, you root of all evil and vice!”
It dawns on Jael that the Mons is talking about her mother.
“Seducer of men! Betrayer of nations! Instigator of envy!”
“Stop,” Jael says quietly. A wind begins to pick up in the room. Loose papers flutter around the room like startled birds.
“Font of avarice! Fomenter of discord! Author of pain and sorrow!”
“Stop it now,” she says a little louder. The room temperature drops below freezing. A sheen of frost coats everything.
“Depart, seducer!” shouts the Mons, gazing at her with grim determination. “Full of lies and cunning, foe of virtue, persecutor of the innocent!”
“I said stop it!” Jael rips her arms free from the leather straps and stands up.
“Give place, abominable creature,” yells the Mons as he backs away. There is fear in his eyes, but it is dim compared to his hatred. “Give way, you monster!”
“SHUT UP!” Jael screams so loud that the windowpane cracks. She lunges forward and grabs the Mons by his robes with one hand and hauls him in until their faces are only inches apart.
“Depart, impious one, accursed one,” yells the Mons, his spit hitting her face. “Depart with all your deceits! The Lord God commands you!”
“Nobody commands me,” says Jael in a voice she barely recognizes as her own. She holds him with one hand. Her other hand rises in a fist. “Not the devil, and not God.” The fist bursts into flames and she thinks it would be so easy just to shove this jet of fire right down his throat.
“Be gone, seducer!” he shrieks.
It would be so easy . . .
Jets of water spray down from the ceiling. The fireball in her hand must have set them off. But the temperature in the room is so low that the spray turns to hissing sleet. She takes a deep breath as the ice crystals pound on her head and back.
Then she lets her fire go, lets her anger go.
“Do you actually believe you’re doing God’s work?” she asks.
“I am a servant of God!” he whimpers.
“The only one you serve is your own ego,” she says. “I see it in your soul. But you don’t have to take my word for it.”
She looks deeply into his eyes. He wails and tries to pull away with a desperate energy. She grabs his face with her free hand and forces him to look into her eyes, where he sees the reflection of his own eyes. Together, they look down into the murky depths of his soul.
She riffles through his memories like a bloodhound. She can almost smell the stink of corruption on his soul. But where does it live? What is its root? Then she sees an image of a dead little boy, and she steps into a memory of Peru.
She can feel the heat from the sun, hear the screams of the dying, and smell the patches of blood that streak the stone paved streets of Iquitos. She looks through the eyes of young Father Francis Locke as he kneels down in the street and tries to bind the stump of a little boy’s arm. It was hacked off by one of the Shining Path guerrillas with a machete. The guerrillas have vanished into the forests, as they usually do, leaving many dead, and many more soon to die. This boy probably won’t live.
Father Locke knows it. The boy knows it. Yet Father Locke continues to bind the bleeding stump because there’s nothing else he can do. He has only been a missionary here for one year, but he can hardly remember any other life. There is only this.
Gathering the flock up again after the communist rebels have wreaked their havoc.
“Father, Father!” A young woman appears next to him. He thinks of her as a woman, anyway, but to Jael she looks like a girl. “We found one! We have him!”
He nods, then finishes the tourniquet for the boy. He lays his hand on the boy’s forehead and quickly gives him last rights.
Then he stands up and motions for the woman/girl to lead him.
They walk through narrow, winding streets to a small open market area. A large crowd shouts and curses at someone crumpled on the ground. It’s a member of the Shining Path, covered in dirt and blood, but still alive.
The crowd wants to know what they should do. Everyone else is dead, they say. The police captain. The governor. Father Locke is in charge now. They want to kill the rebel. And they want absolution.
The rebel, who looks about thirteen to Jael, struggles weakly on the ground. One leg bleeds profusely from a machete gash, and one arm lays useless, ripped up by a gunshot wound.
“Please, Father, I beg you,” says the rebel boy. “Give me protection in the name of the most merciful Jesus Christ.”
Father Locke stares at the man/boy for a long time. He seems deaf to the shouts and protests of the people who surround him.
His thoughts make no sense to Jael. Something about a temple made of gold with rivers of blood flowing down its sides. Finally, Father Locke lifts up his hand for silence.
“Tie a tourniquet around his leg and arm so he doesn’t bleed to death.”
“Oh, thank you, thank you, Father!”
“You ask for the mercy of Jesus Christ. And yet, as a communist, you don’t believe in God.”
“I do, Father! I’m baptized! Before the liberation army took me, I went to Mass every Sunday!”
“Even worse, you received God’s grace, and you threw it away for a fickle promise of power.”
“No, Father, I swear! I didn’t have a choice!”
“I know that,” says Father Locke. He turns to the crowd.
“My children, how could God allow such a horror as the Shining Path to come upon us? He is testing us. The pagan sorcery of the Incas has not been eradicated completely. We know this.
In the mountains, they still practice it. Even some of you still practice it in your own small ways. The Devil is subtle and often appears in guises we don’t expect. The darkness of Inca sorcery, fed secretly all these years, has taken shape as an army of cruel militant atheists. The government is fighting a losing battle because they are only using guns and weapons of this mortal plane. But this is a spiritual war, and God expects us to fight.
The stakes are not just our lives, but our eternal souls as well.”
“Amen!” shouts the crowd.
Father Locke looks down at the bleeding rebel. “But as I said, I realize that you were forced into this.”
“Yes!” said the rebel.
“You are controlled by a diabolical power, a demon born from the pagan sorcery of the Incas. But I will free you,” says Father Locke. “I will exorcise the demon!”
“Amen!” shouts the crowd.
Father Locke leads a procession down the street. They fan out behind him, singing hymns as they carry the possessed rebel out of Iquitos to the area of Belen, where Father Locke lives. It’s during the flood season and Belen is under five feet of water. All the tiny huts that people live in are on rafts or stilts.
The procession carefully loads the rebel into a small wooden boat. Then Father Locke, alone, rows him out in the water to his raised hut.
“Please, Father, I’m not possessed!”
“Of course you are. How else could you have committed such atrocities?”
“No, Father! You don’t understand. . . .”
The rebel says more, but Father Locke remembers that an exorcist should never listen to the lies, threats, or bribes that the demon heaps on him.
When they get to Father Locke’s hut, the rebel is too weak to move, so Father Locke
lifts him from the boat and carries him into a corner of his hut. Then, he begins the exorcism. He’s never done one before, but he has the rituals and he’s talked to other priests who have done them. He finds the prayers and activities soothing. He hopes that the rebel also finds some small comfort in them as he battles the demon inside himself.
After a while, the rebel is raving like a madman. Thick yellow pus seeps from his tourniquets and Jael begins to understand what’s really happening here. But this is only a memory and she can only watch.
After another day, the rebel’s arm and leg are purple and decayed in the tropical heat. He has stopped screaming.
Three days later, the rebel dies, and Father Locke takes comfort that at least he saved the boy’s immortal soul.
Word spreads of the miracle. Other rebels are brought to him. Some found, some captured, some claiming not to be rebels at all. They are all bruised, battered, and near death. Father Locke saves them all.
It isn’t until the flood season is over and the waters recede that a passing police officer sees the pile of bodies that has collected under the stilts of Father Locke’s house. . . .
The memories drain away: the heat, the jungle, and the smell of death. Jael, the Mons, Father Ralph, and Britt still stand in the Mons’s office with freezing rain spitting down from the sprinklers and a lashing wind that comes from nowhere.
“You . . . ,” Jael says. “And you call me a monster.”
“Oh, God,” whispers the Mons. “These are tricks! Demon tricks!”
Jael continues to look into his eyes, pulling out the memories that have been buried so deep for so long, so that he can’t hide from them any longer. He struggles and pushes against her as she tunnels down into the soft, raw nerves of his identity, taking that image of the pile of rotted, bloated corpses and shoving it as far down as it will go.
“You are a psycho and a mass murderer,” she says.
A shriek boils up from deep in his gut, “GOD, NO!”
Then his whole body convulses violently with a strength Jael wasn’t prepared for, and he slips from her grasp.
She lunges forward to stop him from falling backward, but her fingertips only graze the wet cloth of his robe.
His head smacks hard into the wet marble floor and he lies still.
The sprinklers shudder off, the fluttering objects drift back to the ground and the temperature in the room returns to normal. Jael stands over the Mons, her hand still outstretched as she looks down at him. She smells blood. A line of red seeps from the point where his head hit the floor. The blood thins and spreads as it mixes with the melting ice crystals. She sees her reflection in a puddle tinged with red and she doesn’t look like some righteous creature of magic. She just looks like a scared little girl.
There is a loud pounding at the door, then the hinges break free from the frame and the door falls forward with a smack.
Father Aaron stands on the other side, breathing hard from exertion. He holds an enormous iron cross in his hands, splinters from the door stuck on the corners. He surveys the room for a moment, then he tosses the cross on the couch and runs to the Mons. He kneels down and checks his breath and pulse.
“Is he . . . ,” whispers Jael. “Is he . . .”
“He’s alive,” says Father Aaron. Then he turns to look at Britt and Father Ralph. They stare back at him like they don’t know him.
“This little adventure of yours is over,” says Father Aaron.
“Don’t speak of this to anyone. Now, go.”
They just stare at him.
“GO!” he barks.
They flinch and run out the door.
“Father,” says Jael. Her voice trembles. “I didn’t mean—”
“You’ve had a hard day,” he says quietly. Almost gently. “Go home to your father.”
“Y-Yes, Father,” she says. She turns to go.
“Miss Thompson,” says Father Aaron.
Jael stops.
“See you in school tomorrow,” he says. “Right?”
“If you think that would be—”
“I do. I’ll handle this. That’s why I’m here.”
It is a long, slow, dark walk home in the rain. School must have let out hours ago, but she can’t bring herself to rush. The sound of the Mons’s screams still echo in her ears and she can still smell the blood. She feels raw all over, and she has no idea if she just won or lost or if winning or losing even means anything anymore.
When she nears the house, she sees someone huddled under the awning on the front step.
“Dad?”
His head jerks up. Then he runs out into the rain and sweeps her up in a fierce hug.
“Aaron called and told me that you missed your afternoon classes,” he mumbles into the top of her head. “Then you didn’t come home. I thought . . .” He lifts his head and looks at her, squinting as the rain pounds on his face. Jael has never seen him this frantic before. This openly concerned.
“I’m okay, Dad,” she says, although she’s not really sure if she is.
He pulls her into the house, pats her down with a towel, and takes off her shoes. She can’t help but wonder, who has replaced her father with this kind, nurturing human being?
“Let’s get you dry and fed. Are you hungry? Thirsty? Tired?
What happened?”
“I’m not really sure what happened,” she says. “The Mons locked me in his office and he tried to do an exorcism. And I . . .
I think I might have screwed him up. Permanently.”
“What did you do?”
“I showed him what his soul looks like.”
“Oh,” says Paul. He’s quiet for a moment as he looks at the damp towel in his hands. Then he tosses the towel on a doorknob and says, “So, are you hungry?”
“That’s all you have to say about it?”
He looks at her with a strange calmness. “What is there to say? Are you asking me if you did the right thing? Well, if he was so self-deluded that the truth drove him mad, then perhaps it was exactly what he deserved. On the other hand, who can truly say that they know their own soul? I can’t. I don’t think you can.
Perhaps we all delude ourselves. Perhaps we all deserve that fate. Or perhaps no one does.” He looks at her. “Is that what you wanted to hear?”
“Yeah,” says Jael. “Sort of.”
Yep, it’s definitely still her father.
“Great. So, food?”
“Yes, please,” she says.
Apparently squash is on sale, because the fridge is packed with it. Jael sits down and has a feast with pumpkin squash, acorn squash, butternut squash, and spaghetti squash. The next hour is devoted to peeling skins and eating pulp, seeds, and all. In between bites, she tells her father the details and he listens intently without comment. After she’s finished with the story, she quietly eats her squash for a little while. Then she says, “Dad, I don’t understand how all that stuff with the Mons happened.”
“I’ve never done missionary work like that,” says her father,
“but I’ve heard that it can be very hard to stay out of local politics.” He looks at her for a second. “But that’s not what you mean.”
“No,” she says. “I want to know how a crazy mass murderer can become my high school religion teacher.”
“Perhaps the locals really did see him as a holy man,” says her father. “Perhaps the police were too frightened of the Church in Peru to bring charges against him. Perhaps the Church simply wouldn’t listen. You have to remember, every time a priest is convicted of a crime, especially one that seems rooted in the traditions of the Church, the power of the Vatican slips slightly.”
“So they could have just covered it up?”
“Possibly,” says her father.
“The Church hid a murderer?”
“More likely, those who made the decision simply chose not to learn the details.”
“Details? I wouldn’t call those details.”
“I agree that sometimes it
’s a terrible practice.”
“Sometimes? Please, when is it not terrible?”
“When it saves your life,” he says.
“What?”
“After that incident with Amon and the Baron, I followed Poujean’s advice and asked the Church to shelter us. How else do you think I could have gotten jobs all over the world on nearly a yearly basis? I contact the local bishop, tell him we need to move. He contacts the cardinal, and it goes up the chain until someone in the Vatican finds me a new teaching post.”
“But they don’t know what I am, right? Not for sure.”
“Father Aaron does.”
“What? For how long?”
“As long as we’ve lived here. He receives my confession once a month.”
“Jesus, Dad, that’s probably something you should have told me.”
“Probably,” he says.
Jael is about to say something more, but she stops herself.
She just criticized her father, swore at him even, and he agreed.
No excuses, no denials. He just agreed. So she decides to let it go at that.
“Okay, but it’s not like he’s telling the pope or anything.”
Her eyes narrow. “Right?”
“Jael, do you really think, as cautious as the Church is, that they would offer sanctuary to a creature as potentially powerful as you without keeping a close watch? Father Aaron isn’t just some parish priest. He’s a high ranking member of the Vatican with an extensive background in military intelligence.”
“Father Aaron is an undercover spy?”
“Not exactly. It is true that no one else at Mercy is aware of what he really is. But a spy wouldn’t let the people he’s spying on know who he truly is, and he’s never made it a secret to me.
He’s actually been quite helpful in keeping me informed of Church politics that might affect us. You could even say he’s our advocate at the Vatican. In fact, he’s one of the main reasons we’ve stayed here this long. No other Church contact has been this supportive, and that counts for quite a lot.”
“So . . . okay, what does the Church want from us? From me?”
His eyes grow distant and he shakes his head.
