Chapter 50: The Disease Within

I can’t wait until that next Wolverine comic comes out, Father Erabus idly thought as he finished consuming the blood and body of Christ and carried the sacred vessels back into the priests’ private alcove behind the rectory. Wonder if he’ll take out Sabretooth this time or if I’ll have to wait for the next arc. He lowered the vessels to the small table and slumped into a chair inside the sacristy, tired. It had been a long day overseeing the preparations for the visit of the Bishop, and just last week, one of the Sisters had found his latest Spiderman issue that he’d hastily stuffed in a closet with the vestments when he realized he was still carrying it in his hand, like a dumbass, throughout the church grounds, totally lost in thought. He’d just finished reading what was, perhaps, the greatest fight scene in the history of all fight scenes and had been replaying the Spiderman-Deadpool duel in his head, delighting in the wordplay, mentally squealing with glee at the nonstop zingers, completely oblivious to the fact he was carrying the rolled-up comic around in his hand like an oversized cigar on hallowed ground for all the world to see.

God preserve me, Father Erabus thought, on a wash of guilt. He took a cloth and began polishing the sacred chalice, trying hard to concentrate on the devotion of the act. Just yesterday, he had locked himself in the confessional and binged five issues of Spawn. Spawn! In the confessional.

He had several times considered telling the leadership of his…discrepancies…but he knew it would only make things worse. They would find out he routinely held Dungeons & Dragons sessions with the altar-boys, geeking out with them over the latest Warhammer miniatures, take that to mean he was screwing them—because, in this hyper-sensitive, abuse-conscious modern environment where every priest was a criminal until proven otherwise, why else would an ordained priest be hanging out with a bunch of adolescents behind closed doors—relocate him, divest him of his surreptitious collections, probably enroll him in a couple hundred years of counselling…

It was the one thing he hadn’t been able to give up, upon taking up the Cloth—he still fanboyed the goriest, most gruesome battles like the best of them, and the last time there was a comic convention in Anchorage, he had driven there in a Darth Vader costume with three matching Storm Troopers—Travis and two other altar-boys—strapped into his back seat. Their mothers thought they were all headed to clean brass at the church. It definitely wouldn’t look good.

“Enjoy your wine and crackers?” a voice said from the entry to the sacristy.

Father Erabus hesitated with the cloth. “Um…hello.” The middle-height, slender, clean-shaven man standing in the entry wore black jeans, a black T-shirt, and black cowboy boots, carrying a black cattleman’s hat under his arm despite the closest farms were forty miles away in Palmer. Both the boots and the hat were trimmed with delicate silver scrollwork that, while it stood out upon close inspection, had always faded into the background before now. What was more interesting, the silver inlay of the boots denoted beautiful crops and fields, definitely the pride and joy of a former rancher. The hat, too, was decorated with lovingly-embroidered deserts and sun. It had to be custom work, each piece probably worth more than the chalice in Father Erabus’s hand.

Unfortunately, the man who carried them was a face he saw in his congregation regularly, usually distracting him from prayers or Communion with some sort of faint, unplaceable smirk. Often, Father Erabus had caught himself wondering if the guy was a serial murderer, surveying his flock for prospective victims.

But, since none of his flock had disappeared and there hadn’t been frantic screams of a serial killer in the Anchorage Daily News, Father Erabus had kept those thoughts to himself as the man continued to come and go. Besides, the guy had the tawny skin and ebony hair of a someone with Arab ancestry and he didn’t want to end up on the front page of some Washington Post report as a bigot and a racist.

As the cowboy walked into the room with him and traced a work-roughened finger down the tabletop, Father Erabus cleared his throat uncomfortably. “Is there something I can help you with, my son?”

The man looked up with a smile. His teeth, startlingly, were stained a sickly yellow, clashing with the clean and vibrant clothing he wore. “I want to be a priest.”

He must be into chew. Father Erabus relaxed, almost thinking for a definitely-racist moment that the man was about to pull out a blood-soaked Q’uran, declare holy war, and cut off his head. “Oh,” he said, blushing embarrassedly at the thought. “Well. There are steps you can take.”

The cowboy continued to casually survey the room around them. “Like what?”

“Well, generally, potential clergy start much younger. How old are you, exactly?” He couldn’t place the cowboy’s age, but he knew it would probably disqualify him. Despite the full head of dark hair and casual cattleman style, he seemed…ancient.

“Old enough to know not to displease the gods.” The man smiled again, as if what he had said made total sense inside the sacred grounds of a Catholic Church. Then, obviously thinking nothing of it, he picked up the Communion-plate that caught the sacred body of Christ and, looking it over, said, “Why…would age disqualify me?”

Father Erabus wasn’t stupid. He knew the guy was acting really, really weird. He was also a coward—part of why he had joined the clergy and not the Marine Corps—and regardless of how many Spiderman novels he had read, he still couldn’t bring himself to tell the stranger to get his hands off the sacred tray. “It might,” he whispered.

The man smiled at him over the sacred vessel. “Somehow I doubt that.” He went back to scanning his surroundings, seemingly finding it all very amusing. “Priests are like doctors, teachers, and therapists… Such reach across society, such clout. So many options.”

Acutely uncomfortable, Father Erabus swallowed. “My son, I’m going to have to ask you to return to the—”

The man put the Communion-plate down a little too hard, chuckling. “I am not your son.”

Like a good Catholic, Father Erabus frowned and opened his mouth to argue.

“So is it just comics?” the Middle Eastern man asked, as he continued to take in the sparse surroundings of the room. “Or do you have other…interests…as well?”

Automatically thinking of his carefully-hidden porn collection, Father Erabus immediately stiffened.

The man stopped examining the hung vestments against the wall and twisted alertly to face him, a smile on his face. “Ah. Pornography.” He cocked his head. “A little on the light side, but with practice…”

Father Erabus lunged to his feet, despite himself. “Please have mercy,” he whispered, his heart hammering like thunder in his ears. “I’ll get better, I swear.”

The man’s brown eyes widened. “Better?” he laughed. “I don’t want you to get better. I want you to spread.” He said it as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.

…spread? That was…weird. Spread what?

“See,” the man said, idly running his finger along the gold-embroidered cloth covering the table, “I’ve tried plagues and famine, but you short-lived vermin somehow continue to thrive. Adapt and overcome seems to be your species’ motto.” Glancing at the eggshell-white walls of the sacristy, he shrugged. “So I have something much more subtle in mind this time, something I’ve been working on for a very long time, and I believe you and your delicious fetishes can help me while the serpent and the savage distract the world with a war they cannot win.”

“The…Serpent?” Father Erabus licked his lips.

“Oh not that serpent, you addlebrained twat,” the man chuckled. “The real kind.”

“What do you want?” Father Erabus whispered. His mind was running a crazy litany of scenarios through his mind, from a mundane attempt at bribery to the terrifying thought that he was facing an angel of the Lord.

“I told you,” the man said, lowering his cowboy hat to the table. “I want to become a priest.” And then, stepping abruptly forward, he lifted a hand to Father Erabus’s forehead. There was a radiant yellow glow under his palm, like sunlight on sand, and Father Erabus felt his very soul quail at the realization he was dealing with an angel. Good God, an angel—

Then the Middle Eastern man’s smile got that weird look again. “I’m definitely not one of those winged, stuck-up prudes,” he said, with a flash of darkness. “My talents lie…elsewhere.”

And, with those words, Father Erabus’s world exploded in a wash of light and heat so bright it started to burn the insides of his mind, hollowing it out, replacing it with something else…

When Father Erabus awoke on the cold wooden floor of the empty sacristy, the man—angel?—was nowhere to be found. Groaning, he sat up and touched his head. His fingers came back with something black and oily. Tar? He wiped it away with the runner of the nearby table, blinking at the brown-black smear.

An altar boy, the young and impeccably pious Travis Hildebrant, grandson of the oil titan, came inside with a stack of vestiments, pausing when he saw him on the floor. “Father?” he asked. “Are you okay?”

Looking into the boy’s innocent eyes, Father Erabus found himself thinking of how vulnerable the boy was, how often he was alone with him...

Spread…