F Wilson - Midnight Mass

That might have been that, but then her five-year-old son Kevin had come home from altar boy practice with a story about a priest making him pull down his pants and touching him. Kevin was never clear on who the priest had been, but Gloria Sullivan was. Obviously it had been Father Cahill—any man who could turn down the heartfelt offer of her love and her body had to be either a queer or worse. And a child molester was worse.

She took it to the police and to the papers.

Joe groaned softly at the memory of how swiftly his life had become hell. But he had been determined to weather the storm, sure that the real culprit eventually would be revealed. He had no proof—still didn't—but if one of the priests at St. Anthony's was a pederast, he knew it wasn't him. That left Father Alberto Palmeri, St. Anthony's fifty-five-year-old pastor.

Before Joe could get to the truth, however, the bishop had stepped in and removed Joe from the parish. Joe left under a cloud that had followed him to the retreat house in the next county and hovered over him till this day. The only place he'd found even brief respite from the impotent anger and bitterness that roiled under his skin and soured his gut every minute of every day was in the bottle—and that was sure as hell a dead end.

So why had he agreed to come back here? To torture himself? Or to get a look at Palmeri and see how low he had sunk?

Maybe that was it. Maybe seeing Palmeri wallowing in his true element would give Joe the impetus to put the whole St. Anthony's incident behind him and rejoin what was left of the human race—which needed all the help it could get.

And maybe it wouldn't.

Getting back on track was a nice thought, but over the past few months Joe had found it increasingly difficult to give much of a damn about anyone or anything.

Except maybe Zev. The old rabbi had stuck by him through the worst of it, defending him to anyone who would listen. But an endorsement from an Orthodox rabbi hadn't meant diddly in St. Anthony's.

Yesterday Zev had biked all the way to Spring Lake to see him. Old Zev was all right.

And he'd been right about the number of undead here too. Lakewood was crawling with the things. Fascinated and repelled, Joe had watched the streets fill with them shortly after sundown.

But what had disturbed him more were the creatures he'd seen before sundown.

The humans. Live ones.

The collaborators. The ones Zev called Vichy.

If there was anything lower, anything that deserved true death more than the undead themselves, it was the still-living humans who worked for them.

A hand touched his shoulder and he jumped. Zev. He was holding something out to him. Joe took it and held it up in the moonlight: a tiny crescent moon dangling from a chain on a ring.

"What's this?"

"An earring. The local Vichy wear them. The earrings identify them to the local nest of undead. They are spared."

"Where'd you get it?"

Zev's face was hidden in the shadows. "The previous owner ... no longer needs it.

"What's that supposed to mean?"

Zev sighed. He sounded embarrassed. "Some group has been killing the local Vichy. I don't know how many they've eliminated, but I came across one in my wanderings. Not such a pleasant task, but I forced myself to relieve the body of its earring. Just in case."

Joe found it hard to imagine the old pre-occupation Zev performing such a grisly task, but these were different times.

"Just in case what?"

"In case I needed to pretend to be one of them."

Joe had to laugh. "I can't see that fooling them for a second."

"Maybe a second is all I'd need. But it will look better on you. Put it on."

"My ear's not pierced."

A gnarled hand moved into the moonlight. Joe saw a long needle clasped between the thumb and index finger. "That I can fix," Zev said.

* * *

"On second thought," Zev whispered as they crouched in the deep shadows on St. Anthony's western flank, "maybe you shouldn't see this."

Puzzled, Joe squinted at him in the darkness.

"You lay a guilt trip on me to get me here, you make a hole in my ear, and now you're having second thoughts?"

"It is horrible like I can't tell you."

Joe thought about that. Certainly there was enough horror in the world outside St. Anthony's. What purpose did it serve to see what was going inside?

Because it used to be my church.

Even though he'd been an associate pastor, never fully in charge, and even though he'd been unceremoniously yanked from the post, St. Anthony's had been his first parish. He was back. He might as well know what they were doing inside.

"Show me."

Zev led him to a pile of rubble under a smashed stained glass window. He pointed up to where faint light flickered from inside.

"Look in there."

"You're not coming?"

"Once was enough, thank you."

Joe climbed as carefully, as quietly as he could, all the while becoming increasingly aware of a growing stench like putrid, rotting meat. It was coming from inside, wafting through the broken window. Steeling himself, he straightened and peered over the sill.

For a moment he felt disoriented, like someone peering out the window of a Brooklyn apartment and seeing the rolling hills of a Kansas farm. This could not be the interior of St. Anthony's.

In the flickering light of dozens of sacramental candles he saw that the walls were bare, stripped of all their ornaments, including the plaques for the Stations of the Cross; the dark wood was scarred and gouged wherever there had been anything remotely resembling a cross. The floor too was mostly bare, the pews ripped from their neat rows and hacked to pieces, their splintered remains piled high at the rear under the choir balcony.

And the giant crucifix that had dominated the space behind the altar— only a portion remained. The cross pieces on each side had been sawed off so that an armless, life-size Christ now hung upside down against the rear wall of the sanctuary.

Joe took in all that in a flash; then his attention gravitated to the unholy congregation that peopled St. Anthony's this night. The collaborators—the Vichy humans—made up the periphery of the group. Some looked like bikers and trailer-park white trash, but others looked like normal, everyday people. What bonded them was the crescent-moon earring dangling from every right earlobe.

But the rest, the group gathered in the sanctuary—Joe felt his hackles rise at the sight of them. They surrounded the altar in a tight knot. He recognized some of them: Mayor Davis, Reverend Dalton, and others, their pale, bestial faces, bereft of the slightest trace of human warmth, compassion, or decency, turned upward. His gorge rose when he saw the object of their rapt attention.

A naked teenage boy—his hands tied behind his back, was suspended over the altar by his ankles. He was sobbing and choking, his eyes wide and vacant with shock, his mind all but gone. The skin had been flayed from his forehead—apparently the Vichy had found an expedient solution to the cross tattoo—and blood ran in a slow stream across his abdomen and chest from his freshly truncated genitals. And beside him, standing atop the altar, a bloody-mouthed creature dressed in a long cassock. Joe recognized the thin shoulders, the graying hair trailing from the balding crown, but was shocked at the crimson vulpine grin he flashed to the things clustered below him.

"Now," said the creature in a lightly accented voice Joe had heard a thousand times from St. Anthony's pulpit.

Father Alberto Palmeri.

From the group a hand reached up with a straight razor and drew it across the boy's throat. As the blood sprang from the vessels and flowed down over his face, those below squeezed and struggled forward like hatchling vultures to catch the falling drops and scarlet trickles in their open mouths.