Borderlands 5 Read online

  Oh, Jesus, Jesus… (Yeah, now you pray. Now, you better believe you pray, just like the assholes you’ve preached against, pray only when you’re in trouble.)

  He prayed, he prayed hard. He went into the hall—there was a footstep on the stair, that creaker just below the landing, oh, shit.

  He ran down to his room and grabbed the phone. He hurt, he was aware of it, his dick hurt like it had been worked in some kind of a steel damn tube for hours. They had used a flashlight tube filled with gauze at the seminary. “Boys, you’re going to do it. Keep it private and give your failings to God.”

  “Check it out.”

  “What? Who is that?”

  Nobody there. Strange voice, a little too soft, a little too hard—a childish, soft voice with a rasp in it. If an animal could talk, maybe that’s how it would sound.

  He grabbed the phone, a lifeline in a storm, jammed at the buttons. “911, what is your emergency?”

  “This is Father Robert Strickland, St. Mary Martyr. We have an intruder in our rectory.”

  “Saint Mary Martyr, 153 Oak Avenue?”

  “That’s the church. Rectory, 157 Oak.”

  “One Five Seven Oak Avenue?”

  A long, rattling cough echoed through the dark. It was an immense sound. “Hurry! Good Christ, hurry!”

  “The police are on their way.”

  He hung up the phone. What the hell had this been? He’d been lured away from the rectory, that was obvious, so whoever this was could get in without being detected. But what had happened at the school?

  He was caked with drying blood, his shirt ripped open and his guts aching like he’d been rubbed raw inside. He was on fire, he wanted to scream, but what was worse was that something had been broken open inside him. Something that he had kept tightly locked up for years had been ripped open and the guts of it had fallen out, and those guts were all the joys and the pleasures he’d given up on behalf of the little piece of bread.

  Another cough, and then a scraping sound. That voice again: “Help me, Father.”

  What? That sounded like a kid. Little kid with a voice full of—God, was it age? It was the voice of an ancient child.

  He was going to say something. Reply. Yes, he was. His throat felt as if it contained an out of control blowtorch, but he opened his mouth. He spoke. “We can help each other.”

  A shadow appeared in the doorway. It reached up. It turned on the light.

  Standing there was a boy. He was about four feet tall, maybe eleven or a smallish twelve. He wore white shorts and a white t-shirt. His skin was almost as white. On his face there was the suggestion of a smile, the lips partly opened, the teeth just visible behind them. He had one of those ambiguous boy’s faces, lovely and soft and yet full of the harder presence of the coming man.

  “Father, I need to pee.” What?

  “Where did you come from?”

  The boy smiled, a little anger in it, a little confusion. Then he came into the room, marched past Bob and entered the bathroom. An instant later, there was the sound of a powerful stream going into the toilet.

  Bob stared at the closed door. He felt drained, his body ached, he wanted to sleep. But he had to deal with this situation. There was a child in his rectory in the middle of the night. Once, it wouldn’t have meant anything. He’d have called the family or, if there was no family, put the kid up for the night and taken him downtown to Catholic Welfare Services in the morning.

  You put a kid up now, you’re a kidnapper, a pederast, you’re going to be questioned by the police, and so is the kid. Did he put his hands on your body, son? Where on your body? Here, point on this doll where he put his hands. Did he have you open your zipper?

  “Have we got any more of that cake?”

  “What cake?”

  “The Entenmann’s chocolate cake Mrs. McCorkle left in the fridge. Hello?” When he smiled, his face looked like something out of the middle ages, some painting of a Satyr. The teeth glistened. “What? Have you had some kind of a stroke? Hello, Bob, it’s me. It’s Bobby.” As the child came closer, Bob backed away. “Get out,” he stammered. “Go home. You have to go home.”

  “Oh, yeah, like she’d let me in at this hour. You got some kind of a problem, Father? ’Cause you look weird.” He reached up and put his cold, wet palms on Bob’s cheeks and pushed his lips together. Then he giggled. “Father Fishie!” He patted his cheeks and strolled away. Suddenly he whirled around. “You know I’m scared to go to the frigging kitchen alone! Now, come on! Damn you.”

  Bob followed him. In the gloom of the long back corridor, his blond head looked like a lantern. Who was he? Where had he come from? Had he been at the school? Had he…done that?

  Oh, God, no. But he could have. Look at him, he acted like he owned the place. How did he know about Mrs. McCorkle? How did he know about the cake in the fridge? Dear God, how had this person who had never been in his life before suddenly appeared in it like this?

  Something terrible had happened at the school, something that had somehow restitched the world, put it back together in a new way. Who had been in there?

  Bob had no sexual interest in children, least of all in boys. Conceivably, he could have been attracted to a girl mature beyond her years, but that was just nature. A boy, no, never. Especially not that one with his gangly, pre-adolescent limbs and the hardness that was coiled in his vulnerable little boy’s eyes. That was a kid who would tell anybody anything, a destroyer.

  “You have to leave. Where’s your home? What’s your phone number?”

  “It got disconnected.”

  “You still have to leave. We have no accommodations for you here.”

  The boy appeared indifferent to this. He opened the refrigerator, leaned into the yellow light. “I do believe we’ve eaten the whole thing. Shitabrick. We ate it all at supper.”

  “I didn’t…eat the cake. I dislike those cakes, she knows that.” The boy turned around. “Well, I certainly didn’t eat an entire cake, not after all that roast beef we stuffed our faces with.”

  “You—you weren’t here. You didn’t eat here. You’ve just appeared!”

  The boy put his hands on his hips. “You crazy horn, stop tooting your crazy song. I got enough trouble without you going nuts on me.”

  “What trouble do you have, son?”

  “First off, don’t you ‘son’ me, son. I got a mother won’t stop drinkin’ and the socials wanna foster me an I got no place to go and, good sire, I have not a penny farthing.” He opened his arms. “But I have enough love to fill the whole world.”

  “Who are you?”

  “Oh, manny man, this is so nuts. I am me, Bobby, Roberto, BobbyPot, as I was known in the springtime.”

  He came close and put his arms around Bob and hugged him. Bob looked down at the cowlick that swirled in his hair. The child’s arms were strong and he hugged hard, and he pressed his cheek against Bob’s chest. Bob could not help but feel compassion toward him, and he said, “How can I help you, son?”

  “Our candle went out, for one thing.”

  “What candle?”

  “Oh, you know, when you were in there laughing it up, the candle went out. The mouse noticed.”

  What in hell?

  The boy released him. “Do I have to show you?”

  What would this lead to? Bob was fascinated. “Please do.”

  He marched off toward the side door. Bob followed him. On the way to the church, Bobby murmured a kind of litany, “I died, oops, I just died again, whoa, I got burned, I died, died again, got drowned, got starved, got shot, oops, oops…”

  “What’s that all about?”

  “Bobby radio. News to myself. What’s happenin’ to me all around the world all the time. Bobby radio. Would you kiss me?” He held up his hand like a little prince. “Prove your respect,” he said.

  Bob took the child’s hand and held it, but he had no intention of kissing any part of this youngster or any desire to. He unlocked the church. “I want this thing
kept open, boy! What if somebody wants to come in here and talk to my dad?”

  Talk to his ‘dad,’ indeed, the blasphemous wretch. Who ever heard of a twelve year old with a Jesus fixation? Poor little abandoned crazy fella.

  “All right, now, what’s wrong in here, young man?”

  “What’s wrong is in the ding-dong sanctuary, Bobus.”

  As the boy marched through the sacristy Bob hurried along behind, he felt, like a prissy old woman. When he straightened his shoulders and concentrated on striding, laughter pealed ahead of him, and it was so bright and so delightful that he laughed, too.

  “See,” Bobby said, pointing at the sacral candle, which was out. “You’ve been in here.”

  “I live here.” He pointed at the tabernacle. “Son, you mustn’t blaspheme.”

  “Okay.”

  “You obviously don’t live in the tabernacle.” He shrugged. “So anyway, light it.”

  Bob no longer smoked, so he had to get matches from the sacristy. He took them from the small box beside the tapers where they were kept, and returned. As he did so, he turned on a couple of the sanctuary lights. It took him a moment to realize what he was seeing—a small, dark animal standing there. Its head snapped toward him, he saw yellow, vulpine eyes—and then he saw Bobby.

  “Hey, Fath,” the boy said, and this time when he smiled his teeth gleamed like pearls behind his damp, heart-shaped lips, and the thought crept into Bob’s mind that children could be devastatingly sensual. Then he thought, ‘I have just seen this child’s soul, and this is a very dangerous child.’

  “Oops, I went in a sewer, oops, my brain got blowed out, uh-oh, that’s hot…” He shook his head. “I die about sixty times a second nowadays.” He stamped his foot. “Honestly!”

  “You die when other children die?”

  “I die when anybody dies, and I am very busy dying all the time. Especially with the ones who pray-ay-ay, I die inside them like a heart or some damn thing. I’m always, like, stopping. Like the brakes’re something.”

  Bob struck the match and lit the sacral candle.

  “Mm, that’s nice. That makes it warm in my bedroom. I share, you know. I share with all the cold kids all over the whole world. That’s why my daddy wants the candles, so the children will be warm.”

  As he spoke, he walked toward the altar.

  “You should have kissed me when you could,” he said, “but you were afraid of yourself. You’re going to miss that kiss.” And with a flip of his hand, the hand he had raised for kissing, he disappeared right before Bob’s eyes. Or rather, he walked into the altar and was gone.

  Bob heard somebody cry out, realized that it was he himself, then rushed toward the altar. Fumbling frantically, he unlocked the tabernacle and reached into the dark space with shaking hands. He closed his fingers around the neck of the chalice he had so carelessly thrust in after mass this morning and drew it out of the tabernacle. His hands were almost out of control. His inner voice was babbling so fast he could hardly understand himself. ‘Miracle,’ it was saying, ‘miracle, miracle,’ and there was within him something that was going to turn into madness of the kind that you did not recover from.

  The thought of the infantile whining and posturing he’d done at this altar a few hours ago made the acid of revulsion boil up into his throat. He was a damn priest, it was in his blood, what had he been thinking? The old ladies he so detested—he saw them now as extraordinarily noble souls. He saw their lives as they had been, the follies they were balancing with the rosaries of age.

  He drew the lid off the chalice, and remembered how bitter he had felt at giving his life to a little piece of bread. In that instant, a cloud dropped down from above, surrounding him, actually weighing on him like a sheet of iron, crushing him to the floor, to a kneeling crouch with the chalice cradled beneath his chest. The weight was like a great boot on his neck and the chalice began to buckle, the bowl of it twisting toward the floor.

  The host—He must not touch the floor, not who was dying all the time with everybody, not somebody that brave, that sacred. He could not reach into the chalice, it was breaking beneath his weight. Forcing his face downward, thrusting with his chin until his mouth and nose were inside the bowl, he gobbled the hosts like a dog.

  The weight left so abruptly that he lurched upward, then slipped and fell back. He lay staring upward into gold gleams from the ornate ceiling and the glaring balls of the sanctuary lights. ‘He’s so old,’ he thought, ‘and yet he’s still a child.’

  He wondered if Bobby would have been there anyway, even if the hosts had not been consecrated, and what did it mean now that he had eaten them, that he had taken the body and blood within him?

  He soon found out what it meant. He was not at all sure what had just happened to him. He’d taken psychology and family counseling courses, and he knew something about psychosis and hallucination. In thinking the thing out, it became clear that there would be one piece of hard evidence that would tell him whether or not this whole, bizarre chain of events had any basis in reality at all.

  This was his Caller ID. He went back to the rectory, entered the mahogany foyer and went directly into his office. The small plastic box sat beside the telephone. When he approached it, the screen showed only the date and time. But they were correct. It was working. He pressed the review button. And there it was: a call from the school, just as he remembered it. But the time—it read 4:53 PM, not closer to ten, as it should have. He pressed the button again. There was the call from Bill Crawford about how to use Quickbooks. The readout said 4:19. But hadn’t Bill called more like two? Or no—God, when was it? He wasn’t certain.

  He had an idea. He pulled his cellphone out of his pocket and dialed the rectory. As the phone rang, he watched the call come up on the Caller ID. By his watch it was 11:44PM. The reading showed 10:44—an hour earlier. So, the call from Bill would have really been at 3:19, and that sounded about right.

  The problem was that he had taken no call from the school this afternoon, not at three or four or any other time.

  He decided on a course of action: a major drink was what he needed. Christ wouldn’t appear as that lascivious, evil-looking little monster, anyway. And he certainly wouldn’t refer to God the Father as “dad.” Good Lord, what a stupid fantasy it all had been.

  Well, it had passed. He was fine now. He’d been working like the devil on the books. The damn archdiocese had cut its subsidy to pay lawyer bills for Father Richard Jordan, who’d buggered, it seemed, half of the boys in St. Hubertus school, the damned old reprobate. His lunacy was going to cost the Church a cool twenty-five mil, and a lot of that was going to come right out of the Parish Fund. So he had a deficit to deal with, and the local banks were hesitant as hell, understandably. Who wanted to risk having to foreclose on a church? What did you do with it—turn it into a gym? A car dealership?

  He went to the sideboard in the dining room and took out the Johnny Walker Black. This was going to be a serious drink, and he intended to use his best. He poured about four fingers of the golden joy juice into a crystal highball glass that was probably fifty years old. Like everything in this wonderful old rectory, it was the very best. A gift, no doubt, from some wealthy and long-forgotten parishioner.

  He knocked the entire thing back, then poured another, knocked it back. Better. A little. He was still damn well shaking like a jelly and he was in a very strange mood. The thing was, he wanted that kid. He, him. He was aching for the boy. It wasn’t sex, at least, he hoped not. He just wanted to be with him. Bobby. His same name. That little boy had been the most charismatic person he had ever encountered. Dear God, what the kid said was true. He did want to kiss him. He wanted to cherish him, to protect him. Bobby was like the son of all sons, a child who could set the fatherly instincts of even a dry old priest to blazing.

  A little fantasy rustled up: Bobby comes back. It turns out his mother is the disaster he implied. Father talks to her—and she asks if Bobby can stay at the rectory. She asks
. Father Bob doesn’t see why not. So they begin a life together. Bobby excels at St. Mary Martyr. He plays on the baseball team. He loves to fish, which inspires Bob to get his old boat out of the garage and they take fishing trips up to Starlot, the diocesan fishing camp on Lake Binny. Bob gets to watch him grow up, to help him learn, to encourage him when he is struggling, to console him when he is sad, to laugh with him and cry with him over the days of his young life.

  Then he felt something down below, something funny. When he realized that he had a huge erection, cold, awful fear went through him. As the scotch came boiling back up like lava, he raced upstairs to his bathroom. Amid the marble and the gleaming brass, he vomited and vomited and vomited, until he thought he would have a stroke.

  He sank down on the floor, gazing blankly across the tiles. Dear God, what is happening to me? Please God, help me!

  It hadn’t been Christ and it hadn’t been a psychotic break. It had been a damn demon. He’d glimpsed it in its reality—that second when it had looked like an animal, its face covered with black, gleaming fur, its eyes as blank and terrible as an animal’s. But brilliant. Oh, yes, brilliance without the spark of humanity. If there was any better definition of the demonic, he didn’t know what it was.

  At least he’d eaten the hosts. He hadn’t allowed that thing near them, no damn way. And he was not going to become some kind of a pederast and end up on the evening news. He was going to go on being the good priest everybody thought he was, and nobody was ever going to hear or even so much as sense his inner doubts or his loathing for the hierarchy. He would not quit. No.

  So, okay, he wasn’t going to get drunk, at least. The scotch hadn’t had time to enter his bloodstream. He got up from the floor. A glance in the mirror revealed what looked like some sort of a Halloween mask made from his face. The eyes were bulging with terror, the lips were twisted into a grimace, the skin was gray and slack.

  He decided to take a shower. As he undressed, he found that his underwear were sticky. It was vile, just vile. He wadded up the briefs and put them on the drain beside the sink. These could not be seen by his housekeeper, for the love of all that was holy. He realized, also, that his anus hurt. It hurt a good deal, in fact. Reaching back, touching it, he jumped forward.