Contrition
Faith can be found anywhere—you just have to look.
by Damir Salkovic
At the rearmost pew, he knelt and shone the light under the long bench. Nothing. Yet the dusty cobwebs stirred, as if with the passage of something unseen.
Father Breslin straightened up with a wince. The wounds gouged into his back and arms had scabbed over, but the surrounding flesh was still tender, chafed under the rough touch of his vestments. Deep this time, deeper than he was accustomed to.
His flock was growing hungrier.
He scanned the near-empty pews with weary resignation. Only the old and the desperate were left, abandoned by their loved ones, eking out an existence on fixed incomes in this dying neighborhood. They came seeking absolution for small, pathetic sins, never knowing that their priest had stopped believing in forgiveness long ago.
It had been different once. Twenty-seven years ago, when Father Breslin first arrived at St. Bartholomew's, he'd genuinely wanted to shepherd these lost souls. He'd organized food drives, counseled the addicted, and buried murdered children with tears in his eyes. He'd believed, truly believed, that grace could touch even this forsaken place.
Then came the night Mrs. Kowalski confessed to poisoning her husband. The next morning, she'd died peacefully in her sleep – and something had crawled out of her cooling corpse. A clump of blood and tissue, tearing free from her insides with a wet sound, trailing watery lymph. Eyeless and mouthless, but animated by the priest’s newfound power. Something made of her guilt and shame, given form and hunger.
Father Breslin should have been horrified. Both by the crawling horror and by his own succumbing to blasphemy. Instead, he'd felt a terrible recognition, as if he'd always known this truth was waiting beneath the skin of the world. The force inside him had beckoned to the old woman’s sin, and it had obeyed his summons.
That first creature had been small, weak. It died within hours. Father Breslin had learned to coax them out properly, to sustain them. Each extracted sin fed his growing collection, and in return, they fed on him. It was symbiosis, he told himself. A kind of twisted ecology of the soul.
Confession nights were his harvest.
He slipped the flashlight into his pocket and made his way to the confessional. His feet felt like lead. The coming hour stretched ahead of him—not with the tedium he once felt, but with anticipation that sickened him. This was what he'd become: a farmer of human darkness.
He paused with his hand on the door and narrowed his eyes. Someone was standing by the entrance. A tall, broad-shouldered figure in a long overcoat. Its face was hidden by shadow, but Father Breslin felt he was being watched.
The build didn't match any of his regulars. Before he could take a second look, the figure melted into the darkness between pillars.
Father Breslin's hand moved unconsciously to his pocket, where the withered talon rested against his palm. The relic had belonged to his predecessor, Father Mallory – found clutched in the old priest's dead fingers along with a journal written in Latin and inked in what might have been blood. The journal had explained everything: the true purpose of confession, buried beneath layers of dusty dogma and purposeless rite. It held an older knowledge of the hunger that lived in men's secrets, the ancient compact that kept certain truths bound.
One by one, the penitents filed into the cramped space. One by one, they left, never knowing what had been drawn from them in whispered darkness. Mrs. Darrow’senvy manifested as a jade-colored spider that spun webs of resentment. She would need new dentures, but for her, the extraction process had been mostly painful. Young Tommy Ricci had been less fortunate. His lies became a pale eel that slithered between truth and fiction: getting them out had necessitated the removal of most of the boy’s tongue. Each creature joined the others in the sacristy, a living catalog of human weakness.
The doors closed behind the last parishioner, but Father Breslin knew he wasn't alone. Footsteps echoed on stone, curtains whispered, wood creaked under weight.
He opened his eyes and saw a dark silhouette beyond the mesh.
“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.”
The voice was calm, cultured. Familiar. Father Breslin recognized the man now: Vincent Morrison, who owned the car dealerships on Fifth Street. A pillar of the community who attended Christmas Mass with his wife and daughter, dropping generous checks in the collection plate.
“It has been a very long time since my last confession.”
Father Breslin waited. Something small scurried across the floor of the booth, tiny claws clicked on worn wood.
“Every day, I watch this neighborhood rot,” Morrison continued. “The filth spreading like cancer. You try not to let it touch you, but it crawls inside anyway. Into your eyes, your thoughts. The anger is too much to bear.”
“Anger is natural,” Father Breslin said. “But we must not let it consume us.”
“Too late for that.” Morrison's laugh was dry as autumn leaves. “Father, I've done terrible things. Three times now, I've taken that anger.” He paused. “The girls who were found by the tracks. That was me.”
Father Breslin's pulse quickened. He leaned closer to the partition, feeling for the talon in his pocket. This would be a magnificent extraction – he could sense the evil radiating from Morrison like heat from a furnace.
“I thought God would stop me,” Morrison continued. “Strike me down for what I was becoming. But nothing happened. So I realized He's not listening. Never was.”
“The Lord-”
“-has gone AWOL.” Something metallic gleamed in Morrison's clasped hands. “I brought this tonight to test that theory one more time. If there's really someone up there watching, He'll stop me from murdering His priest in His own house.”
The gun was a sleek automatic pistol aimed through the mesh. Father Breslin’s breath caught, but not from fear. The darkness coiled inside Morrison was enormous, fed by years of hidden rage and fresh blood. When extracted, it would birth something magnificent.
“You're going to sit very still, Father,” Morrison said. “Because I want to savor this moment. The moment I prove there's nothing sacred left in this world.”
Father Breslin withdrew the talon from his pocket, doing his best to conceal the movement. Could he be fast enough? It felt like madness, but sanity had long ago fled this place.
For a second, its claws caught on the cloth of the robe, and he thought all was lost. Then it came loose with a tug, the ancient bone warm against his palm, almost eager.
“My son,” he said softly, “you're about to learn something about the sacred. Something your victims learned in their final moments.”
The gun wavered slightly. “What are you-”
In the darkness behind the lattice, something rustled. Father Breslin saw the pistol barrel dip imperceptibly, the killer turning to glance at the swaying curtain. It wasn’t much of an opening, but with the gun pointed at him, it was as good a one as he would ever get.
His hand shot out of his pocket, brandishing the symbol nestled in its palm, a small, desiccated claw with five finely articulated fingers, hard and brown like old mahogany. A voice like a song spoke in his head; the air in the cramped space thickened around him, crackled with the release of hidden energies.
Beyond the partition, the man with the gun made a choking, gurgling sound and tried to raise his gun, but his muscles would not obey the command of his brain. The weapon clattered to the floor.
Father Breslin closed his eyes. A dull, insistent pain settled in behind his forehead, pulsed like a vein. Droplets of sweat formed on his brow, and his thin muscles thrummed with strain. He concentrated and felt something move inside his mind. The secret called out to him from its cage of flesh and bone: he could make out its shape now, a darker outline against the redness behind his eyelids. With a supreme effort, his consciousness reached through the partition, grasping the shape, drawing it out.
“No,” Morrison gasped, but his finger couldn't pull the trigger. His muscles locked as something fundamental shifted inside him. Dark fluid spouted from his mouth, beaded up on his exposed skin, soaked through his clothes. Tributaries of bodily juices flowed from his ears and eyes, his spasming organs giving up their sap in agonized spurts.
His hands, already slick and red, lost their grip on the weapon. Blood and saliva cascaded down his chin, joining the cataracts already forming on his torso, spattering down onto the floor. Already the distillation of his sin was congealing, puddles sliding across the floor and melding like quicksilver, chunks of viscous matter joining into a rudimentary form.
Father Breslin blinked and pushed himself up on trembling arms. The man was on his back now, his head rolled to the side, staring wide-eyed at the monstrosity birthed from his flesh, molded from his horror and sweat and guilt. His jaw, unhinged as wide as anatomy allowed, split wider with a pop of bone and connective tissue. His back snapped like a bowstring as his vertebrae were ground to wet, red dust.
It twitched and mewled and made attempts to crawl, its manifold limbs quavering in the slimy afterbirth, snatching at the air. Eyes like amber buttons, dozens of them, rolled inside its misshapen skull. It had a tail like a scorpion and a pair of powerful front claws, but there all semblance to sanity ended: the rest of it was pure nightmare, a twisted agglomeration of parts that flouted every natural law.
See what you’ve made, the priest wanted to say to the dying man. Such beauty, and you, its creator. For the moment, all he could do was heave for air, drawing in breath in long gasps. By the time he could trust his legs to support his weight, the man in the confessional was dead.
Father Breslin carefully lifted the newborn monstrosity, cradling it against his chest as it mewled and writhed. In the sacristy, its numerous siblings waited in their cages. Fed on his blood, sustained by his faith in their current shape. This was his new vow, his literal pound of flesh.
It was an exacting faith and cruel in every aspect. But every divinity had to be propitiated, every religion to be watered with the blood of the wicked, and with the tears of the righteous. What right did Father Breslin have to question the miracle?
Looking down at Morrison's corpse, the priest felt something that might once have been pity. The man had been right about one thing. There was no benevolent God watching over this place. But there were older things, hungrier things, and they required a different kind of worship.
He would call the police soon, report the heart attack that claimed another parishioner during confession. The gun didn’t fit the story; he’d get rid of it later. First, he had a feeding to attend to. His creatures were stirring, sensing fresh blood, and a good shepherd always tends his flock.
Father Breslin unlocked the sacristy door, humming a half-remembered hymn, and stepped into his true cathedral. A writhing sanctuary of living sins, each one proof that in this fallen world, damnation was the only honest sacrament left to offer.
Halfway down the aisle, the scratching sound returned. It was coming from the confessional. Moving as quietly as he could, he crossed to the booth and pulled the curtain aside. Something stirred by the dead man’s shoe, a thin, pale shape the length of his hand.
Before it could scuttle out, Father Breslin held the claw symbol aloft and uttered a quick incantation. The thing shuddered as if jolted and writhed onto its side, dozens of small legs stiffening.
“There you are.” He bent over and picked up his errant ward. It resembled a centipede with a white, segmented body, topped by a tiny human head. Its face was a shriveled, imbecilic blank. Father Breslin had extracted it from Mrs. Grady, one of his regulars, who had embezzled thousands of dollars from the school district’s petty cash fund over the course of a decade.
He slipped the gun under his robes and went to call the police, walking with a spring in his step, like a much younger man.
Dozens of amber eyes followed his progress from the darkness, and something that had once been human guilt clicked its mandibles in what might have been applause.
I read a piece about the decline of church worship in the United States. Which got me thinking—what brand of spirituality is replacing our familiar ritualized superstitions?
Damir Salkovic is the author of the story collections In Lost Country and Collapse Years, the novels Pareidolia, Blood Ground, Kill Zone, and Always Beside You, and has short stories featured in multiple horror/speculative fiction magazines and anthologies. An auditor by trade and traveler by heart, he does his best writing thirty-plus-thousand feet in the air and in the terminals of far-flung airports. He lives in Virginia with his wife and a dynamic duo of cats. When not writing fiction, he reviews horror movies, discusses books, and shares unsolicited opinions on just about everything on his blog, Darker Realities.