The Sacrament

The first thing that hit Father Lochland as he entered the confessional booth was the smell. It wasn’t that he was unused to bad smells, far from it. Working in the slums of Detroit had more than numbed him to scent of humanity, as it wafted through the stale, night air. St. Anthony’s Church stood alone, amid the crumbling buildings of the district, a single spire reaching up into the sky from the desolation of urban decay. At this hour of the night it attracted a wide variety of people, some faithful, some simply seeking shelter from the cold, and it turned none of them away. St. Anthony was well known as a patron of the lost, and it wasn’t something that father Lochland took lightly.

The smell was something different than the usual miasma of alcohol and sweat that surrounded the unfortunates that came to the place. It was different, sickeningly sweet, cloying and somehow sticky. For a split second, Father Lochland feared that he might catch something, then immediately chastised himself for the thought. He closed the door to the wooden cubicle and took his seat on the bench, trying not to breathe too deeply. ‘I’m here, my child,’ he said in a quiet, comforting voice. ‘What troubles you?’

‘Bless me father,’ began a raspy, breathless sigh. The voice was a parched croak, as if the person who sat in the other booth had a damaged larynx. ‘I have sinned, very much have I sinned.’

‘How long has it been since your last confession?’ asked Father Lochland. Through the screen between them, he could just make out a shape, hunched and wrapped in rags. The shadows robbed the figure of any facial features or even the defining characteristics of sex or race, forming a strangely androgynous caricature of a person.

The figure shifted. ‘I cannot remember. However long it has been, it was many years ago. This is my first confession to a priest, of course,’ the breathless voice whispered.

‘God’s mercy is infinite,’ intoned Father Lochland. ‘Tell me of your sins and by His power you will be absolved.’

There was a quiet chuckling on the other side of the screen. ‘They are many and difficult to describe. Are you sure the Lord has mercy for all of them?’

Father Lochland features softened, even as the smell made him slightly dizzy. ‘Of course, my child. This is a place of absolution and forgiveness. Please, begin wherever you’d like.’

‘You are a good man to work in this little slice of urbania,’ said the figure. ‘Of all the places where you could have gone to spread the Word, you chose this festering place. The buildings decay where they stand, slowly sinking into the dirt. The people are sacks of diseased meat, waiting to ripen, and here you stand, one little light in an ocean of filth.’

‘You have a very interesting vocabulary,’ said Father Lochland with a smile.  ‘But we’re not here to talk about me. Please, don’t be afraid, tell me what ails you my child.’

‘An ailment is a good description,’ croaked the voice. ‘I live in filth, nurture it and bathe in it. Where I come from, filth is all we eat, drink and breathe. It is a black place, a bad place, one that I was forced into. Myself and my whole family were forced from our home.’

‘Who did this to you my child?’ asked Father Lochland.

‘Who else?’ the voice replied. ‘Someone more powerful. Someone who wanted my home for himself. Since then I have had to do many things to survive, many that some would find, degrading.’

‘Who were you before this happened?’ asked Father Lochland, allowing the sympathy he felt to come out in his voice.

‘I’m very glad you asked that,’ said the voice, with another sharp release of breath that thickened the fetid aroma. ‘I used to be a success, if you could believe it. People would come from far and wide to seek my services. They offered me things, gifts that I took with modesty and love, and I offered them many things in return. I was adored in my community. Would you believe that in that old time, that I was a God?’

‘There is only one God, my child’ said Father Lochland automatically, then paused as he realized he was arguing with the poor figure. He was starting to believe this person may have needed more help than was available at a church, but  the priest did not believe in turning anyone away.

‘You’re right about that, Father,’ whispered the figure in a repulsively intimate hiss. ‘There is only one God. One God after he banished all the others from the world. One God to be the protector for the ungrateful flock.’

Father Lochland had heard this interpretation of the Bible before, how God had demonized the old gods of other tribes, the Baals, Moloch, Pazuzu and all the others that had been worshipped at the time. He was the one true God. Still, regardless of his odd eloquence or knowledge of the scripture, this person clearly was not well. ‘My child, you are not a God,’ he said, looking stupidly at the wooden screen. ‘I think you may be confused.’

The figure laughed. It wasn’t a pleasant sound. ‘I think you’re confused Father. You worship at this empty altar, leading your lambs in circles.’

Father Lochland knew from experience that reasoning with the mentally ill rarely worked. If they possessed the ability to cognitively dismiss their delusions, then they wouldn’t have a problem. Still, he decided to give it a try to calm the figure down. ‘If you were one of the false Gods you would not be walking the earth. You’d be banished away to Hell.’

The rags parted and Lochland saw one bloodshot eye staring from the bundle at him. The smell was burning his eyes and nose now and the room was almost spinning. As he stared, he saw something moving in the whites of the eye, crawling just beneath the surface of the sphere.

‘You know nothing of Hell, Father Lochland,’ hissed the figure with disgust. ‘Nothing at all. Your God and your Bible give you fairy tales of Hell to spare you from the knowledge of the real thing. The Hell you are familiar with is a comfortable lie.’

‘Can you imagine for a second, the gardens, where I, Ba’al Zebul held court? When I was exiled from this sphere, there was nothing, nothing to eat, nothing to fertilize the plants and crops. The blood and souls we were offered freely from our supplicants could only last us for so long. Exiled, we rotted silently, turning our hateful eyes to God’s Heaven, where he stole all the fruits of this world from us. With Heaven or his ‘Hell’, your God claimed monopoly over all human souls, removing all competition from the Earth. Our garden is immortal, Lochland. It rots but never truly dies, an entire cosmos of buzzing, bloated flies feasting on our carcass.’

‘I…..I never told you my name,’ said Father Lochland, gripping onto his rosary.

The figure pulled back the rags and Father Lochland gagged. The smell was worse than mere sickness. It was the warm smell of decaying, ripe meat, spoiled and infested. Infested is the word that stuck in Father Lochland’s mind as he tried to avoid throwing up. On the other side of the screen, the figure straightened up, unfurled, accompanied by an awful, droning buzzing. The darkness mercifully stopped the priest from seeing anything other than the shape of the thing as it rose from the seat, but the small shafts of light that entered the cubicle glinted off black carapace, like a beetle, with a crawling, too-white underside and two glistening, fleshy prisms of insect wings. A cloud of black specs circled in lazy patterns, a halo of of buzzing flies.

Father Lochland had never really believed in demons taking a corporeal shape before, and shaking, fighting the urge to vomit, he held up his crucifix. ‘Get behind me Satan,’ he intoned, his mind desperately trying to remember the proper procedure to repel such beings. ‘The power of Christ your Lord compels you.’

The buzzing intensified, filling Father Lochland’s ears, and combined with the smell, gave him a nauseating sense of vertigo. The thing on the other side of the screen gave a few gurgling intakes of breath. Father Lochland barely managed to comprehend that the thing was laughing.

‘Your Satan is a myth,’ said the voice, now formed from the buzzing hum of thousands of flies. ‘A cheap shadow of the real thing to scare children. Your God has abandoned you long ago.’

‘You lie!’ coughed Father Lochland as he struggled to keep his hand steady. ‘You are subservient to God, just as we all are, and I command you to leave us in peace.’

‘The God that you serve, the one who banished me and my kin was not the brave father you believed in. He feared us, and commanded his little flock of cattle to lock us away. Can you imagine how he reacted when he saw that his own precious people, the crop from which he harvested, begin to reach his heights?’ the creature hissed. It was now pressed up against the screen, exposing the white flesh of its underbelly. Father Lochland could see the larval flies burrowing through the soft fat, leaving behind winding furrows.

‘At the height of your war, a scientist split the atom, the building block of creation. Your God panicked. He thought that your little experiment was coming too close to his own Works, and how do you think he reacted? He fled this world like a frightened animal seeing fire for the first time. He left you to the tender mercies of those he locked away, knowing full well that without him, our prisons would not hold for long.’ There was a loud cracking sound as the screen between the two cubicles buckled, and something reached into the confessional. It was long, black and hairy, segmented like an insect’s claw. It wrapped itself around Father Lochland’s crucifix, which bent and snapped like cheap plywood.

Father Lochland, reeling from the smell and half-mad with fear, leaped from the seat and tore the door wide open, abandoning the confessional in a mad dash. As he left the place, he tripped over his own trailing robes, falling with a painful impact to the floor. He looked up with his watering eyes and his mouth dropped open.

Somehow, within the space of the confession, the church had transformed. The one or two people that were praying quietly in the pews were twitching bags of twisted meat, their eyes rolling in their sockets as their bodies puffed up like swollen balloons, crawling with barely restrained motion just beneath the skin. The omnipresent buzzing swelled like a hymn as flies blackened the air, swirling around the room like a roiling haze of living, black sand. Above the altar, a man had been crucified with sticky, organic resin, hanging with his stomach burst open like a zit, his splayed entrails crawling with thousands of maggots and flies. Behind Father Lochland, the door to the other confessional booth slowly creaked open. A set of insectile claws gently wrapped around him, pulling him to his feet, holding him with his back to the warm, pulsing mass.

Tears were streaming down his face as Father Lochland felt something lean against his shoulder. From the corner of his vision, he could make out an immense sphere of glistening color, a huge compound eye. ‘I am eager to feast on the meat of this world once again. Its flesh is fresh and ripe, and we have not nested in unspoiled meat for too long.’

Father Lochland was muttering under his breath as his mind strained to make sense of what he was seeing. ‘Baalzebul….Beelzebub…...Lord of Flies…’

‘Flies are all I lord over in my realm,’ hissed the figure, a long black tongue emerging from its mouthparts and playing over Father Lochland’s flesh with horrid, probing caresses. ‘Deprived of food, they are the only subjects that did not forsake me. They have been eager to return to this world of arrogant, warm primates, to nestle in the meat of your flesh and the dark spaces in your souls.’

The tongue suddenly lashed forth with ferocity, jamming itself into Father Lochland’s open mouth. The priest gagged but the appendage was all pulsing, writhing muscle, and forced its way down his gullet, down into the pit of his stomach, where he felt a horrid warmth bloom. His twitching hands instinctively went to his midsection, and just beneath the flesh, he could feel the crawling of thousands of maggots. ‘Let it not be said I am completely without mercy,’ hissed the voice, oddly unobstructed by the extended, bloated tongue. ‘My flock needs its shepherds, my messengers in this bloated nest of filth. You will serve a true God, and bring meat to your new family.’

There was a surge of hope among the downtrodden of Detroit since then. In one night, St. Anthony’s Church exploded into activity, funding homeless shelters and soup kitchens. Anyone who visited the church found Father Lochland, who seemingly never went home, and was always ready with warm words of advice or comfort. The kindly man soon became seen as something of a guardian angel over the slum district, who provided a home, food and comfort to those who needed it.

When the epidemic hit six months later, and the CDC workers finally managed to clear away the ocean of dead that littered the streets of the slum where they had dropped, no one could find Father Lochland anywhere. St. Anthony’s church stood as an abattoir, its pews filled with the bloated, rotting bodies of those who came to pray for health.

The one thing that wasn’t reported by the team was what they found in the basement. A huge, sticky cocoon had hung from the ceiling, made from clinging, translucent mucus that did not conform to any chemical or substance known to science. Something big had rent it open from the inside, leaving nothing but an empty mess that hung in molten, clinging strands from the walls.

There was no sign of whatever had been gestating in it.