The GoD Gig
By: Justin Lee
Tags: Halloween, Short Story, Fiction, Culture, Horror

Arc Digital presents original horror fiction for Halloween.

Last December, a friend offered me some freelance copywriting work, which I gladly accepted. He had been contracted by a couple of film producers to run a promotional campaign for their indie horror flick, Gates of Darkness (hereafter, GoD). They had secured distribution through ITN Films, which specializes in the sort of direct-to-video action and horror movies that occupy cult-actors like Steven Seagal and Lance Henrickson in their senescence. With titles like Kicking Zombie Ass for Jesus, Jurassic Bark, and their pièce de résistance of wordplay A Psycho’s Path, you know these guys don’t have a pretentious bone in their bodies. They’re in it for the pure joy of schlock. ITN was thus a natural fit for my clients’ film.

I referred to my clients as “producers,” but they’re really just money-men, which I mean as a compliment. The actual producers made an unholy mess of the production and squandered the budget before finishing. My clients were left with incomplete footage and one hell of a fiscal migraine. After shooting a few new scenes, they paid a new editor to salvage the film and he worked a small miracle: the end product is damn near coherent, contains gripping images, and has enough unintentional humor to ameliorate the schlock-lust of b-movie buffs. Hardly any budget remained for marketing, which is how they found themselves outsourcing work to lowball hacks like me.

This isn’t my first rodeo. I’ve worked for a couple major creative firms here in LA, even helmed promos for several film projects, some you’ll have heard of. But I ran afoul of some dangerous people in the industry — by which I mean I ran afoul of a coven of feminists with zero sense of humor. They whisper-networked me onto what I’ll call the “Shitty Media Men List 2.0,” which, unlike its predecessor, is encrypted. (If you’re unfamiliar with its first incarnation, God bless you.) As a result, my girlfriend of three years walked out, I got fired, and now no respectable agency will hire me. Even freelance work is difficult to snag. When you find yourself in circumstances such as these, there is no ball so low you won’t catch it.

Now, it’s not impossible to market a niche film without a budget. I managed to create a very modest buzz about GoD on a dozen or so b-movie fansites and precisely two respectable horror sites. I owe these minor successes to the fact that the film starred a few recognizable names: Tobin Bell, Adrienne Barbeau, and Alisha Boe (she’s the best thing about every scene she’s in, and she’s in most of them, despite going uncredited).

Even though I was given a screener in December, I didn’t get around to watching GoD until mid-January. I could carpet-bomb horror forums from sockpuppet accounts without having seen it, but I needed those same sockpuppets to astroturf user reviews to RottenTomatoes, IMDB, Metacritic, and a host of other sites. So I watched the film, took notes, and watched it again.

The story concerns Stephen Tade, a token teenage outcast whose black eyeliner and occult-themed piercings and jewelry seem calculated both to attract bullies and antagonize the priests and nuns who oversee his education. He hates his mom for remarrying after his father walked out on the family, and he hates his twin sister for getting along with their new step-father and step-sister. The plot thickens once Stephen begins to suspect that his father never abandoned them, but had been disappeared by evil forces within the Catholic church. As he unearths suppressed memories of sexual abuse and blasphemous violence, he is possessed by a demon seeking vengeance on the priest who preyed on Stephen as child. In the film’s climax, a good priest exorcises the demon, but not before the bad priest is dropped through a portal into hell. The film closes with Stephen reconciled to his family and the church.

GoD is no masterpiece of the macabre. Neither is it the worst movie I’ve ever seen. That distinction goes to Filthy McNasty and its sequels. Or maybe Re-Penetrator or The XXXorcist and the whole genre of horror parody porn. What I mean to say is that there’s no bottom to bad where film is concerned, but if there were, GoD would be nowhere near it. It’s just your standard teenage-angst-is-really-demonic-possession-and-some-priests-are-rapey family drama. In other words, it might have been forgettable.

Except it wasn’t. At all.

Horror movies rarely disrupt my sleep. I consider myself an imaginative person, but I rarely remember my dreams. It’s something I’ve always been uneasy about, afraid it’s evidence of a diseased psyche. But since I saw GoD, I can’t stop dreaming.

That first night I woke up so drenched in sweat I worried I’d pissed myself. During the film’s exorcism scene, the camera zooms on two weeping faces that Stephen has drawn on a bedroom wall. They’re distorted by a ripple effect, but they’re clearly meant to be the faces of suffering children. My dream contained no narrative whatsoever, just those damned eyes staring me down.

Gates of Darkness (2020)

The dream spooked me so badly, in part, because the film simply hadn’t. For several minutes after I woke up, I could still see those faces hanging in my room like a mist. I’ve dreamed of GoD every night since. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

I began to hear voices. Well, to be precise, I felt voices. They would buzz against the back of my neck as if in high frequency Morse code. And I can feel the meaning of their “words.” The buzzing in my neck becomes a buzzing in my brain. At the same time I’m aware of an unpleasant odor, somewhat like oily skin.

In the film, it turns out, Stephen’s grandfather is the arch-pedophile, a deacon who rapes choir boys and manipulates them into joining the priesthood. Grandpa is played by the actor John Savage, best known as the guy from The Deer Hunter who gets cuckolded after losing his legs in Nam. He spends half the film floating around as a lecherous ghost; whenever he speaks, his voice is filtered by a cheesy echo effect. The buzzing I feel, it’s like someone is feeding that effect into my skin. And that odor, well, it’s how I imagine Grandpa Pedophile must smell. It’s like that greasy motherfucker is humming into my neck.

Left: Robert DeNiro pushes a legless John Savage in The Deer Hunter (1978). Right: Grandpa attempts to force-feed Stephen the Sacrament in Gates of Darkness (2020).

This went on for weeks. I found myself growing inexplicably hostile to religious people, especially Catholics on Twitter. In some cases I became downright vicious, sending actual priests gruesome photos of aborted fetuses along with the question “How young is too young, Padre?”

I’ve always been dismissive about religion. But this was way out of character for me, especially because I did it under my real name. To date, I’ve been blocked by exactly 37 priests, one bishop, and one bishop’s secretary.

It didn’t become clear what was happening to me until I chanced upon a priest in real life. I was in Little Tokyo, where I had just finished a lunch meeting with a potential client. I saw the priest, who was all frocked-out, walking on the sidewalk with a dandyish air about him in spite of his late middle-age, as if he were a Victorian gentleman off to some soirée. What will never leave my memory is the odor he gave off. It was quite similar to the skin-oil smell that accompanied the buzzing, but much more pungent. As I passed him and caught a whiff, my neck pulsed like it had been zapped by a taser. I stopped in my tracks, turned, and followed him.

He was less dandyish seen from the back. Short, balding, and slope-shouldered, he struck a rather miserable figure. I followed him for about a block. Just as he turned a corner, I placed the smell: cum. The guy smelled like cum and, beneath that bright, abusive scent, something like iron.

“You’re following me,” he said as I rounded the corner. He was smiling, more with his eyes than with his mouth.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

I grasped for some plausible story but could think of nothing. The smell of cum and iron — of blood, I realized — was overwhelming, as was the buzzing. My skull hummed like a hive of bees.

“Looking for someone to take your confession?” he asked. His eyes flitted for one instant to my crotch.

I can’t explain why I glanced at his crotch in return, but when I did so, it was like someone had struck the bee-hive with a rake. At once I saw those weeping faces from the film. It was as if they had emerged from the darkness of his frock to plead for rescue.

I turned and began to walk away.

A moment later his hand was on my shoulder.

“Friend,” he said. “I meant no disrespect.”

I shrugged him off and kept walking. I couldn’t speak. As he had touched me, that smell filled my nostrils. Until that moment I hadn’t known a smell could be vivid, could conjure a precise image of the odiferous thing itself. I saw in my mind’s eye a flayed man, all raw muscle and ragged cartilage, dripping head-to-foot with cum and smiling like an exhibitionist. It was all I could do not to retch.

That night I dreamed of the priest — I’ll call him Father M. I dreamt of his sins, his many, many sins. I’ll spare you the details, which are the same as those of a thousand other cases.

Night after night I dreamt of Father M. I never saw the faces of his victims. They always wore masks resembling the weeping faces from GoD. I can’t say exactly when I began to believe the dreams were true, but when I finally searched through the websites of every parish in Los Angeles County until I found the bastard, I did so not in order to believe but because I already did.

Turns out he was quite the parish-hopper. A little digging turned up a group of Catholic mommy bloggers who had a whisper network of their own. They’d been after his ass for years to no avail. A few of the crimes they described matched what I’d seen in my dreams; but I had seen much more.

Since I was a teenager I’ve prided myself on being a skeptic. Not an atheist. Not an agnostic. But a skeptic. There’s nothing in this world — institution, ideology, religion, or “established fact” — I don’t have the urge to see through. Imagine my surprise when I discovered I was clairvoyant.

Clairvoyance is a shitty superpower. At least my version is. I can see only one type of thing, and it’s fucking gross.

It’s also frightening. Not the knowing itself, but what it does to me. I can’t express how much I wanted to kill that son of bitch. Partly that’s because I’m not sure how much that desire was genuinely mine. Certainly some of it. But the intensity! I could suddenly daydream again, but I only cared to think about what I was going to do to the guy.

The obsession got worse. I would lose track of time imagining every sensuous detail of what I would do when I caught Father M. It had, of course, become “when,” not “if.” And the details were gnarly. Franz Kafka once wrote a story about an execution machine (“the harrow”) that inscribed a man’s crimes into his flesh, circling his torso again and again, needling a little deeper into his flesh each time, until the body was shredded to ribbons. I developed an entire catalogue of such tortures for him. As I envisioned them, Grandpa would blow raspberries on the nape of my neck. Obscenely, I enjoyed the sensation.

I began stalking Father M.

After about two weeks, I knew all his favorite haunts, and his frequent patronage of a certain unsavory establishment in West Hollywood confirmed that his vows meant nothing to him. As I followed him, the buzzing would intensify, and I felt powerfully the urge to simply beat him to death in the street. I almost lost control on two occasions. It was every bit as difficult as walking oneself back from the brink of orgasm.

A chance encounter kept me from murdering him the final time I saw him in public. It was late February and panic about the coronavirus was beginning to set in. As if in defiance of the coming storm, Father M. met with a handful of other priests for lunch smack in the middle of Chinatown. They ate within a little fenced patio as I watched them from inside a coffee shop across the street. They were all quite jovial — with the exception of one priest, a robust man with a magnificent red beard who looked to be in his late-forties. Once, I caught him looking at Father M. as if he wanted to wring his neck.

I couldn’t discern any odors from that distance, but that buzzing was building all the same. When they finished their meal, I put on my aviators and walked outside. My plan was to follow M. to his parsonage and kill him.

As I approached my car, I discovered I had parked next to the red-bearded priest. We happened to reach our doors at the same time and he glanced my way and said, “Lovely afternoon.”

“Indeed,” I said. Then, I’m not sure why, I asked, “Where do you minister?”

“You Catholic?”

“Just curious.”

He then shared his name — I’ll call him Father C. — and the name of his church. We chatted for a few minutes. I said I’d check out his parish, and he told me to visit soon because the diocese was likely to cancel services in the coming weeks. Then he ducked into his car and drove away.

As I settled into the driver’s seat, I realized two things. The first was that I had lost track of Father M. The second was that I hadn’t felt any animosity for Father C., nor had I smelled even a whiff of cum. Instead, he had smelled like a freshly polished brass instrument, a trombone, or perhaps a French horn.

I half-expected to dream of Father C. that night. But I didn’t. I had the usual violent, sexual dreams of M. intercut with GoD scenes. In the morning, it occurred to me that perhaps Father C. was someone I could speak to about my troubles. If I didn’t speak to someone soon, I knew the desire to spill the abuser’s blood would become unbearable.

I found the church’s number and called. By a stroke of luck, Father C. was available that very afternoon.

We met in the church’s nave and he led me to his office in the adjoining building. I was grateful for this; something about being in the actual church raised my hackles. The office was small but well appointed. With the door closed, that smell of brass seemed to ring in the air.

(I’m afraid I must be vague about the setting and certain details of our conversation, for reasons that will become apparent below. Likewise, while I may have fibbed about his beard, he was nonetheless physically distinctive.)

“So,” he said, “what’s this urgent concern you wish to discuss?”

My neck did not buzz, nor was it silent. I felt a kind of prickling sensation, as of heightened awareness. I rubbed my nose with the back of my hand and discovered, to my astonishment, that the same brassy odor was escaping from my own skin. I took this as a sign that a certain kinship existed between myself and Father C., an intuition that proved all too true.

I told him everything. The GoD gig. The dreams. My weeks spent stalking Father M. The confirmations I found online. It all came out in a great rush.

Father C. asked me to elaborate on one of the dreams. I did so and he asked questions, teased out details. Then he leaned back in his chair and massaged his temples.

“I have a complex history with M.,” he said. “What you’ve said about him is disturbing, but not surprising. I’ve known about the allegations since he was transferred to our diocese two years ago. He denies it all, of course. Well, most of it.”

“So you’ve never pursued action against him?”

“I confronted him early on. He admitted to having engaged in a ‘fully legal and consensual impropriety’ many years ago, but claims that that one transgression opened the door for false accusations. He has protectors in the hierarchy, so I dropped it. I made the calculation that I was of more use to Christ’s kingdom in active ministry than by being relegated to some empty church in the middle of nowhere for having crossed the wrong cleric.” He was silent for several moments. “I’m ashamed of it. Deeply, deeply ashamed.”

Taken aback by his candor, I asked why he was willing to unburden himself to a stranger, why he took my claims about dreams seriously.

“I’m not credulous, if that’s what you mean,” he said. “I’ve been ministering for nearly twenty years and I’ve seen enough to know that such things aren’t impossible. They’re always to be tested, of course. But your story checks out in a way it seems you’re not even aware of.”

He explained that one of my dreams fit an allegation against Father M. that hadn’t yet made the papers or blogs. It was a recent abuse case and may well be the one that does him in.

“This desire of yours, this bloodlust. Is it controllable? Can you wait on the sidelines and let the authorities take care of this?”

“I believe so,” I lied. The thought of letting it go caused me physical pain.

“This film, Gates of Darkness,” he said, “why do you think it had such an affect on y — ”

Father C. stood abruptly, his face pinched in alarm.

“What the hell was that?” he cried.

“What was what?” I said, startled less by his alarm than by the bright buzzing that had exploded in my neck.

“There was an old man standing behind you. I saw him plain as day. He was bending forward, like he was about to kiss your head.”

“I suppose that must be Grandpa,” I said, stunned. Until that moment I had thought of Grandpa and his raspberries merely as a metaphor.

“Jesus Christ,” said Father C. “He looked just like that cripple from Deer Hunter.”

“He is that cripple from Deer Hunter.”

Father C. asked to pray for me, to read Scripture over me. He wanted to see if it might provoke Grandpa. I told him the idea made me uncomfortable and that I didn’t go in for religion, but that he should feel free to pray all he wants once I leave. If God was as much of a mensch as the Church claimed, he should be able to work remotely.

Before I left we exchanged contact info and I promised to send Father C. a screener of GoD so he could evaluate whether there was anything particularly demonic about the film.

Turns out there was, or so he claimed.

About a week later, Father C. emailed me to share that, after watching the film, he had begun having bizarre dreams as well. He was trying to remain objective, noting that our conversation could have primed him to have this experience. Nevertheless, he was taking it all quite seriously.

In his email, he included a few screengrabs from the film. Certain scenes and images had dominated his dreams, so he rewatched them, even slowed down the play speed. What he found was rather bizarre.

I called him and he walked me through the screengrabs. The first few were from a scene in Stephen’s Catholic high school where a nosey nun looks at one of his drawings, which depicts a child on its knees fellating a demonic priest. The screengrabs show that the emblem behind the priest’s head, a Celtic cross, transforms for the space of a single frame and then returns to normal.

The same emblem appears again near the end of GoD, when the molester priest is transported to Hell, only this time the emblem is much larger. It’s a circle containing a heraldic cross situated above three inverted crosses whose arms terminate in smaller circles.

I rewatched both scenes as we were on the phone together, and at each flash of the emblem the back of my neck burned like it had been touched with a hot poker.

I spoke with Father C. for a while longer. It felt good not to be on my own with this thing. Before we got off the phone, he asked me about my faith background, how this was affecting me spiritually. I let myself open up a bit — not because I wanted to, but because I felt obliged to let him do his shepherd of souls thing. When he brought the conversation to the nature of grace and forgiveness, I listened patiently for about a minute, then decided I’d reached my limit. I begged off and we both agreed to email the other if we discovered anything new.

The following afternoon, I received another email from Father C. It read, in part:

I did some clicking around online, and turns out that emblem is a Goetic sigil from the Lesser Key of Solomon. It represents a particular demon, Haures (sometimes called Flauros). According to these old grimoires, he’s a ‘duke of hell.’ I’ve never put much stock in demonological taxonomies. If Satan is the Father of Lies, why would his minions be honest about their functions? But I could be wrong. Here’s one of the descriptions I found for Haures: “a strong duke, is seen in the form of a terrible strong leopard, in human shape, he shows a terrible countenance, and fiery eyes, he answers truly and fully of things present, past, and to come … he is constrained by divine virtue, and so are all devils or spirits, to burn and destroy all the conjurors adversaries. And if he be commanded, he suffers the conjuror not to be tempted, and he hath twenty legions under him.” That line “to burn and destroy all the conjuror’s adversaries” really jumped out at me. Now, keep in mind this is just wild speculation. But if such a being really could be summoned, what if someone with a score to settle with the Church found a way to set it loose through a film? Someone, say, who had been sexually abused? Back when The Exorcist was released, a bunch of fundamentalists (James Dobson types) were convinced that anyone who watched it would become vulnerable to demonic possession. I’ve always believed such thinking to be superstitious and anti-intellectual. Now I’m starting to reconsider. The experience you described, that buzzing, I think it happened to me today. I haven’t experienced the same urges, but I have been uncharacteristically short-tempered. I wouldn’t say I’m spooked, but I’m not not spooked, either. I’m considering discussing this matter with a colleague. If that proves fruitful, I’ll let you know.

The following day the governor of California placed the entire state on lockdown. We were all to “shelter in place,” as if the coronavirus were a colossal tornado that would eventually pass us over if we kept motionless and quiet for long enough. I imagine “social distancing” has been a hell of a cross to bear for a lot of people. Less so for people like me, the misanthropes and introverts.

Father C. emailed again just under a week later to say that the phenomenon had intensified and that, yes, the urges had manifested and were overwhelming. But he was doing spiritual exercises that helped “tremendously” to suppress them. The disaster that was COVID-19 had prevented him from speaking to his colleague, but they had scheduled a phone conversation for the following day. In the meantime, he said, he had an idea. He recalled the “Satanic backmasking” controversy, in which bands like Styx and The Eagles encoded Satanic messages in their songs that could be heard if played in reverse. Father C. intended to watch GoD in reverse, his hypothesis being that he’d either discover new messages or that it might well neuter the effect of having seen the film in the first place. The latter struck me as wishful thinking, but I wrote back that I hoped it worked and would be eagerly awaiting a report.

He called me the next day, so excited that I could discern a tremolo in his voice.

“I have something important to show you,” he said. “Can you come to [name of his church] today?”

“And break quarantine?”

“Wear a damned mask if you need to. Just get over here.”

I was on the road within half-an-hour, paranoid that I’d be pulled over by the cops and interrogated about where I was going. But rumors of random checks were just that, rumors. The streets of LA were eerily quiet and I arrived at Father C.’s church in under twenty minutes.

Finding the adjoining building deserted and locked, I called. A few minutes later, Father C. emerged from a side door of the sanctuary and motioned for me to hurry inside.

“I take it your little experiment worked?”

“In a manner of speaking. Come. I’ll show you.” His face was bright red, as if he had been exercising or doing manual labor.

He led me through the sanctuary to a door within the north transept. He opened it and I followed him down a flight of stairs that groaned beneath our weight.

Father C. was bursting with nervous energy. That clear brassy smell was somehow muted today. There was another odor present, which I couldn’t place. I began to feel a faint tingling in the nape of my neck.

I don’t remember what I expected to find in that basement. A boiler room, perhaps, or a storage space filled with off-season decorations. It turned out to house both the church’s furnace and all the maintenance equipment required to keep the old ship of souls sea-worthy. But none of that mattered. What did was the cloying odor that washed over me when I reached the landing.

The odor was so dense, so sinus-raping in its rancidity, that I fell against the wall and vomited. It was cum, of course, and blood — but worse. It smelled as if someone had been frying gallons of bloody jissom in a massive skillet.

“It’s awful, I know,” said Father C. “But you’ll adjust.”

I wiped the vomit from my chin and stepped more fully into the basement room, doing my best to breathe through my mouth. Then I noticed the bare feet extending from the far side of the furnace, their owner obscured by its bulk.

“I watched that whole film from back to front,” said Father C. “At first it seemed like it was going to be a waste of time. But then I turned up the volume. The voices sounded like countless baby birds chirping. But they were voices. And the longer I listened, the more I understood them.”

He walked to the far side of the room and motioned for me to join him, to observe what was on the other side of the furnace, moving and whimpering, aware that it had company.

“What have you done?” I asked.

“What they told me I had to do. Most of it, anyway. I haven’t been able to finish the job. Every time I come close, I lock up and begin to weep. But they won’t leave me alone until I finish. They keep screaming ‘Justice!’ ‘Justice!’ And that sound. That awful sound. Like I have a head full of wasps.”

My own head had again become a hive of Africanized bees. It was awful indeed. But it was also wonderful. As I stepped into the middle of the room I realized I had a throbbing erection.

Father M. was sitting against the wall beside the furnace, his hands tied to a pipe above him by what looked to be old telephone line. Father C. had bound his wrists so tightly he’d torn skin. Blood ran down his arms and stained a white undershirt. His mouth was gagged with a racket ball, which was held in place by clear shipping tape that had been wrapped several times around his head. Leaning against the wall beside him was a large crucifix of the kind often hung behind the altar in sanctuaries. It was quite old, the skin of its Christ tessellated with cracked paint. The eyes looked upward, as if refusing to acknowledge Father M.’s presence.

Aside from the undershirt, Father M. was naked. He’d been given a thorough working over and was covered in bruises and small cuts. It seemed Father C.’s torturing hadn’t been that ambitious.

But then I noticed something gleam with reflected light between Father M.’s legs.

When I was in high school, one of my history teachers had described to us different methods of medieval torture, everything from thumbscrews to the iron maiden. But the one that really freaked me out was what my teacher had called “glasstration.” A thin glass rod was forced down a man’s urethra as deeply as it could go, and then the torturer struck his penis with a hammer, shattering the rod.

Father C. had apparently learned the same lesson. He had done it with the glass stirring rod of a chemistry set. A claw hammer lay on the concrete floor between M.’s splayed legs. As I picked it up, the buzzing in my head reached a new crescendo.

I meant to say something as I turned and looked at Father C., but as our eyes met, a new odor filled my nose. It wasn’t cum, or polished brass, or even blood. It was the smell of steel and tears. It was the smell of sadness after battle. But not any sadness — it was a shameful grief. What I smelled was cowardice.

The look of surprise on Father C.’s face as I struck him with the hammer’s broadside was, I’ve come to believe, also a look of relief. He fell to the floor, eyes rolled back, blood trickling from his temple. Unconscious but alive.

There are no words to describe the righteous euphoria I felt. The buzzing became a single high tone, like the sound of expensive crystal played by nimble fingers. The room became cavernous and that tone rang clear into a darkness that was becoming steadily less dark.

Faces emerged from the darkness which at first reminded me of the tearful, pleading faces in GoD. But then their features became crisply individuated, human and terrible. I understood immediately that they were the countless victims of clerical trifling. They were mostly young boys, though a few girls intermixed with them, all wearing white choir robes that had been sullied by gray water. From somewhere deep in the interminable darkness came a menacing feline growl.

And then I saw it, the great leopard winding its way through the endless crowd of children, nuzzling them with the tenderness of a house cat. It growled again and a small group of boys stepped forward from the throng and approached Father M. I recognized them from my dreams of the priest’s crimes, even though I had never seen their faces. They jabbed accusing fingers at his humiliated form.

Father M. squealed through the homemade ball-gag.

“He really made a mess of you, didn’t he?” I asked.

Father M. groaned. I don’t know whether he could see the children, or hear the leopard. But I suspect he could sense the the weight of their presence. When he looked at me, his eyes were pleading. Hopeful even. I am confident that as I bent towards him, he believed he was being rescued.

I am more than a little ashamed to say that I ejaculated when I brought the hammer down and shattered the glass rod.

After finishing the work Father M. couldn’t, I drove home, showered, and lied down naked in bed, eyes closed but wide awake. The euphoria lasted for hours. It was a full day before the shame and sorrow over what I’d done began to settle in. When it did, it was crippling. I didn’t eat for three days.

I had hoped the dreams would stop now that I’d gone through with it. But no. Every time I sleep I still see the same damned scenes from that miserable film. Grandpa Pedophile keeps blowing raspberries against my neck. My hands tingle with the remembered weight of that hammer.

The Archdiocese of Los Angeles has suspended all activity amidst the greater lockdown. They aren’t even allowing the “drive-up confessions” being implemented elsewhere. Assuming Father C. keeps his mouth shut, it could be weeks before Father M.’s absence is noticed. By then I’ll be far from California. I don’t know where I’m going. But I have an idea of what I’ll be compelled to do when I get there.

This is a confession, yes. But it’s also a warning.

Some readers will be tempted to seek the film out after reading this, thinking it’s all just a gag. Or worse, perhaps some will hope it’s true, that GoD will work the same change in them it has worked in me. Don’t risk it. Perhaps nothing will happen to you. Or perhaps your life will be destroyed like mine, like Father C.’s. This is not fiction. This is as real as the lives I’ve taken — and may yet take.

While everyone else loses sleep over the daily tally of COVID-19 deaths, I lie awake at night thinking about what might happen if my own very different virus infects too many others. A world sans-pedophiles would be great. But who’s to say that Haures and his twenty legions — assuming Father C.’s theory is correct — will be satisfied killing only those priests who have abused their office? What if that’s only the beginning? After all, the thing inside me leapt at the chance to kill Father C. once it smelled his weakness, and it was all I could do to resist. The church hierarchy is filled with good men who through incuriosity, inaction or coercion became complicit in abuse. What if they too are swept away in a flood of vengeance?

I try to imagine a world in which there is no Catholicism. All those hospitals, orphanages, soup kitchens, parochial schools, universities, refugee resettlement campaigns, hospices, shelters for the homeless and for abused women, communities of care for the disabled … vanished. I try to imagine a world without all that charity, all that love, and it breaks my heart.