text: Rain falls from a black sky. Frigid water races over the mossy stone of Saint Paul Catholic Church. Thunder rattles the stained glass depiction of the Easter Resurrection. Next to the empty tomb hovers Jesus, right above the warped double doorways that lead into the sanctuary. Inside the church, Father Collins scuttles about emptying pots of rain water. His curved spine seizes as he bends over to grab another full pot. He stumbles into a pew, gasping from the pain and is greeted by a small swarm of mosquitos. For every one he slaps against his flabby neck, two more appear. Father Collins groans as he contemplates his lowly existence. Years ago, he had a clear path to the Vatican, but that was before all that unpleasantness in Pittsburgh. Even though all was forgiven, they still banished him to a school for blind boys in Bolivia. Things ran their course there. His next post was this backwater dump somewhere in the Mississippi Valley swamp where the nearest living Catholic was over a hundred miles away. However, this was considered a historic sight, so the Church required someone to be there at all times; even though the only services he had performed in the last decade were all funerals. Before Father Collins, a friar was responsible for the upkeep of this dilapidated church. Obviously, maintenance work is more suitable for a friar, not an ordained priest. However, the leadership seemed intent on ruining his career, his reputation, and his life. Instead of dining with the Pope, he chases swamp rats away from the Communion wafers that only he partakes in. There is a loud bang as a gust of wind tears shingles off the sagging roof, and the trickle of rain from the ceiling becomes a steady stream. Father Collins shakes a frail fist at the heavens. Forsaken by his old friends and allies, forsaken by God Himself, Father Collins forms curses on his lips, but the only words he mutters are, “Devil take me.” The wind dies down. The rain tapers off. With a groan, Father Collins grabs the overflowing pot of rainwater and waddles towards the kitchen. Loud rapping on the door startles the priest causing him to drop the pot. Water sprays on to the pews, soaking a hymnal and a Bible. Silently cursing God and whatever lost drunk is banging on the door at this ungodly late hour, Father Collins kicks the pot under a pew, bruising his big toe in the process. The priest grunts, the door creaks open, and suddenly Father Collins stands before a beautiful young man wearing a crisp white suit. The stranger’s pale unblemished skin radiates in the darkness. Piercing grey eyes stare out from a seductively androgynous face. All this framed with luscious blonde locks that bounce as he shakes the rain from his hair. Composing himself, Father Collins says, “Look at you, standing in the rain. Come in, come in, what can I do for you?” “I’ve come to make my confession, Father Collins,” says the young man. His voice reminds the priest of a gently plucked harp. “Have we met before?” The young man smiles, showing off a perfectly straight row of perfectly white teeth that glimmer from some unknown light source. “We’ve met a few times in the past, but I’m not surprised you don’t recognize me.” With a skeptical gaze, Father Collins ushers the young man in, certain he would have noticed such a beautiful creature if they had ever crossed paths. The rotary candles flare up as the young man enters the sanctuary. The priest shivers with excitement as he guides the young man to the confessional booth. What sort of delicious sins will pass through those glistening soft lips? Father Collins closes his eyes as he sits in the confessional booth, trying to remember the words to a ritual he had not performed in years. Giddiness clouds the priest’s mind as he takes a deep breath and asks the young man how long it had been since his last confession. “Long time, Father Collins. Very, very long time.” Father Collins smiles, sensing an exterior motive for this young man’s visit. This is no ordinary parishioner. “What is it you wish to confess, my son.” “Murder.” Father Collins stiffens. “I beg your pardon, but did I hear you correctly? Did you say you murdered someone?” “Not someone, but some people. Killed a man’s children along with all his servants. Then I drove his cattle off a cliff, and I’m talking tens of thousands of cattle.” Perhaps this young man’s company is a gift from an old friend, a sympathetic one who knows how lonely the last few years have been for Father Collins. Choosing his words carefully, Father Collins asks, “Is this some sort of game?” “No, I really did that. Well, not personally, but I caused it all to happen.” “Why would you do such a thing?” asks Father Collins in a low voice. The young man says, “Because I made a bet with God. You should know the story, you wrote a whole sermon on it, *The Righteous Suffering of Job*. You first gave that sermon almost forty years ago, when you held a fancy position in Pittsburgh. Same day you called little Brian Mayfield back to your office.” The priest’s lecherous smile vanishes. How could this stranger possibly know that? The young man waits a few moments for the priest to respond. After receiving nothing but garbled stammering from the priest, he continues, “You must remember that sermon. You went into gruesome detail about how I killed Job’s kids, his servants, and his livestock. Well... over the last few centuries, I’ve been thinking about Job’s family, and you were right. What I did was wrong. While God has an exponentially higher body count than me, that doesn’t excuse what I did, so I would like to officially apologize for that.” The priest’s voice trembles. “Who are you?” Ignoring the question, the young man continues, “If I have to resort to murder to corrupt a soul, perhaps that’s a soul not worth corrupting. Besides, I’ve learned it is much easier to corrupt a soul with petty inconveniences. In fact, sometimes all it takes is a leaking roof to not only get someone to curse God, but actually invite me to take them away.” Father Collins cries out, “Who are you!” There is a long pause. When the young man speaks, his voice lowers a few octaves. “You know who I am, Father Collins.” Beads of sweat trickle down the priest’s wrinkled brow. “Why... Why have you come here? You can’t even be here. It’s impossible. This is sacred ground, holy ground, no evil may enter.” A guttural laugh engulfs the room. “Then how do you explain your presence here, priest?” Father Collins slams his way out of the confessional booth. There is a clattering on the floor. His rosary. The necklace band had snapped. He bends down to grab it, but the wooden crucifix sizzles in his hand. Father Collins screams, dropping the rosary. The young man appears behind him. “Do you remember Arnie Baker?” Scooping up the rosary, Father Collins howls through the pain and throws the rosary at the man in the white suit. The man disappears, but his laughter still echoes through the sanctuary. Thunder rumbles in the distance, then all is quiet. Was this a dream, a vision, a hallucination? Was solitude driving him mad? Or the unthinkable? The blisters on his hand seem real enough, and if those were real than that... that thing could be a demon if not the actual Devil himself. Father Collins retreats to the bowl of holy water near the entrance of the sanctuary. As he reaches down towards the still water, the young man appears behind him. “I wouldn’t touch that if I were you.” Father Collins freezes. This has to be a bad dream. Father Collins had served the Church for over half a century, feeding the poor, comforting the distressed, and saving souls from damnation. He had nearly been appointed as a bishop. Certainly, this is just some sort of test. The young man continues,“But back to Arnie Baker, he lived in this very town. Had family out in Pittsburgh though. Spent a couple summers out there in the very same parish you served at.” Father Collins plunges his right hand into the holy water to fling it at the apparition. Yet the water boils upon touch, and when he tears his hand away, large chunks of burnt flesh fall off. With a shriek, the priest falls to the floor. Smirking down at the priest, the young man says,“Told you not to touch it. You’re mine now.” Father Collins watches in horror as the skin peels from his hand. Then blood, muscle, and tendon ooze off the bone. A scream freezes in his throat. The young man says, “Now you must have done something really special for Arnie Baker, because even though he never went to mass or any other church service after those summers in Pittsburgh, he wrote in his suicide note he wanted to be buried in a Catholic cemetery.” Father Collins crawls to his feet. He hobbles to the door and tugs at the handle. Not locked, but by some demonic magic, the door refuses to budge. The young man steps closer to the trembling priest. “In fact, he’s buried in the cemetery right behind this church.” Father Collins shouts a jumbled Latin phrase and runs past the young man who smiles at the priest skimpering into the sacristy. The priest slams the door behind him, throwing every ounce of his flabby frame against the door. For a few moments, everything is silent. Even the wind ceases howling. The priest lets out a quiet sob as he stares at the hand which is nothing but a stump of scorched bone and pus-spewing flesh. The young man walks out from the vestment closest. “Arnie Baker... you took him under your wing as soon as you laid eyes on him. Got him to take his first communion. Next summer you personally selected him to be an altar boy.” Father Collins slides down the door until he is sitting on the floor. He weeps into his knees, closing his eyes, praying it all away. The young man says, “Since Arnie Baker was a suicide, he showed up at my doorstep. Not that I had much choice in the matter. Seemed like a good kid. A damaged kid, but a good kid nonetheless. Just in the wrong parish at the wrong time, but he also wasn’t the only one you paid special attention to.” Father Collins shrieks, “Get behind me Satan!” All is silent. Everything is still. The priest mutters silent prayers as a gentle peace descends upon him. Maybe this was all a test. The Blood of Jesus Christ had washed him clean of those past sins. He would wake up, his hand would be fine, and no one would be there. Composing himself, Father Collins dares to crack his right eye open. A few inches away are the hungry eyes of the Devil. Flailing his stump of an arm, the priest charges to the other end of the sacristy, wrenches the door open, and then dashes down the hall. Shameful images of the past clog the priest’s mind as he tries to find the back door, the one he uses at least three times a day, but for some reason it is eluding him now. By some malevolent force, this small church with only four separate rooms outside of the sanctuary and only two hallways had morphed into an inescapable labrinth. As the priest races down familiar hallways that lead to unfamiliar intersections, his vision blurs with images of young Arnie Baker. The curls of his sandy blonde hair, the pale freckled face, the dimples on both sets of his pudgy cheeks, the shame in his auburn eyes. Panting, Father Collins rounds a corner only to find himself standing face to face with the Devil. The Devil says, “Many people erroneously believe I enjoy torturing the souls of the damned which, for the most part, could not be further from the truth. On the contrary, I am quite fond of humanity. Why else would I risk the wrath of Almighty God to free you pathetic mortals from His spiritual tyranny. I risked everything to free Eve’s mind, and lost everything in the process. It’s not like Hell is my first choice of residence.” Numb fear is replaced by manic terror. The priest flees down the vacant hallways, throwing open doors with his one good hand but only finds more brooms and mop buckets. The futility of his efforts, the impossibility of his circumstance, brings the priest to his knees. Too exhausted to run, too terrified to fight, there is nothing to do but wait for the end. The Devil steps out of a broom closet. He continues talking as if there had been no interruption. “So when I get a poor soul like Arnie Baker unjustly tossed into my little pit of fire, I do what little I can to make them comfortable, and if at all possible, do something special for them. You ever wonder why you were assigned to this run down parish?” Father Collins snivels, “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to hurt anyone, I asked for forgiveness, I repented, I said my Hail Marys-” The Devil’s rumbling laughter cuts him off. “I have never understood how a few Hail Marys along with a small serving of rotten grape juice and stale crackers cleanse a soul from even the worst atrocities.” The Devil pauses to take a deep breath, sucking all the air out of the narrow hallway. “You see, God and I made a bet about you, much like the one we made about Job, but instead of murdering your friends and family, I only asked to be allowed to play a few harmless pranks and have a say as to where you were stationed. So over the years I have caused the floorboards to creak under your desk no matter where you put it, dislodged the occasional roof tile to let a little rain in, sent swarms of bugs to torment your sleep every so often, little things just to be an annoyance. One of my favorite pranks was causing your shoelaces to snap at the most inconvenient times. Do you remember that time right before you were about to meet the Archbishop?” Father Collins did remember, quite vividly in fact. A bishop had recently died, and while the meeting was an informal one, Father Collins hoped to impress the Archbishop in order to further his own chances of receiving that coveted position. On his way to the office, he bent down to tighten his shoelace and it snapped. Frantic, he tried adjusting the lace to shorten it only to have it snap again. As he entered through the gold painted doors of the Archbishop’s office, the shoe slipped off causing him to tumble into a Renaissance era stained glass crucifix, a gift to the Archbishop from the Pope himself. The crucifix shattered on the floor along with Father Collins’s dream of a station at the Holy See. That meeting with the Archbishop had been the beginning of his downward spiral. Ashamed, embarrassed, hopes dashed, Father Collins did something reckless and was reported. Which led to Bolivia, which led to even more unpleasantness, which led to this accursed swamp. Father Collins’s sense of shame collapses in a wave of self-pity and rage. Drool foams from the priest’s mouth. “It was you! This is all your fault!” “Not entirely my fault. For starters, I only proposed the bet, your boss is the one who accepted it, and I think you are forgetting that you wouldn’t be in this current predicament if it wasn’t for the fact that you had carnal relations with a multitude of youths that were under your charge.” The Devil’s accusation does nothing to abate the priest’s self-pity. Anger clears away the cloud of past memories which had blurred his vision. He spots the elusive back door right behind the Devil. The priest bounds to his feet, racing past the Devil as fast as his robe will let him. He bursts through the backdoor, sprints through the flower garden, and dashes into the cemetery. Howling wind rips crisp leaves from branches and small whirlwinds of dead foliage tear across the priest’s path. Lightning tears through a wall of rain which is cascading over the church and into the cemetery. The ground turns to a muddy swamp, clinging to the priest’s shoes. The tongues of his shoes loosen with the snapping of shoelaces. Mud sucks in the Italian leather leaving the priest to flee in silk socks. As Father Collins stumbles through the downpour, a root wraps around his ankle. The priest crashes to the ground, and all the air is torn from his lungs. Darkness obscures the tangle of roots trapping his foot as Father Collins tries to pull his ankle away. The roots tighten their grip, yet there are no trees nearby. Nothing but rows of headstones. Lightning cuts through the wall of black clouds, illuminating the headstone in front of the priest. In that flash of light, Father Collins sees the name “Arnold Baker” engraved in stone. The roots trapping his leg refuse to budge. Father Collins wiggles a few fingers between the roots and his leg, but the roots respond to his touch by tightening their grasp. He kicks at the roots with his one free leg, but it too becomes ensnared by roots that seem to be popping out from the ground. As Father Collins tries to push himself away, he feels the roots pulling him closer to the tombstone. Arnold Baker’s tombstone. Lightning flashes overhead, and Father Collins looks down at his feet to find them trapped, not by roots, but by skeletal hands. Father Collins screams as he thrashes his feet. He rolls to his belly, grasping at muddy clumps of grass in a futile attempt to pull himself away. Despite the priest’s best efforts, the skeletal hands maintain their vice-like grip. Bony fingers pierce into his calves, digging through muscle and tendon until scraping against the shrieking priest’s leg bone. The skeletal hands yank, tearing through Father Collins’s soft flesh. Wailing to a deaf god, Father Collins digs his fingers into the mud as he is pulled into the earth. First his feet disappear, then his legs crunch in unnatural angles as his body twists farther into the dirt. A flash of lightning. The Devil stands before the priest, who is up to his neck in dirt. The Devil holds up his hand and says, “Arnie, could you give us a minute.” The fingers wrapped around his leg bones cease their tugging. Father Collins screams hoarsely, “Please! Mercy! I’ll do anything! Anything!” The Devil crouches over him and gives the priest’s head a sympathetic pat. “Let’s start with a question that has bothered me for thousands of years, but I’ve never gotten a satisfactory response. Can you do that for me, Father Collins?” The priest grovels, “Please, have mercy on me, please... I’ll do anything you ask.” The Devil smiles. “I’ll take that as a yes. One thing that has always perplexed me is why does everyone think I’m the bad guy? Not saying I’m perfect, but I killed one family and a bunch of camels, that’s the worst you got on me. God, on the other hand, is responsible for countless murders, and some of those, like the Egyptian children, were just because he wanted to show off his power. He causes droughts and plagues that kill millions each year, not me. The Old Testament is the memoirs of a mass murderer, and the Book of Revelations reads like the manifesto of a deranged serial killer.” Tears stream down the priest's pudgy cheeks as he weeps for mercy, but the Devil ignores the blubbering man’s cries. The Devil continues, “God even says in Revelations that Satan, me, will be helping humanity fight against this righteous slaughter of every man, woman, and child who didn’t say nice things about God, yet for some reason you humans still think I’m the enemy. So tell me, priest, as someone who has devoted their life to studying the Holy Scriptures, why do you think I’m the evil one?” Father Collins wails, “Please... please... have mercy on me! I can change! Please... I didn’t mean any of it, just let me go!” Giving the priest another pat on the forehead, the Devil says, “Never get a clear answer to that question. Oh well. Father Collins, it’s been a pleasure and I must express my sincerest gratitude...” He pauses as the priest whimpers with confused hope. Then the Devil continues, “without pathetic degenerates like you, I’d get no joy from this job.” Rising to his feet, the Devil walks away as Father Collins screams for mercy. The Devil waves his hand and says, “He’s all yours, Arnie. Enjoy.” Flesh tears as the skeletal hands pull Father Collins deeper into the earth. Worms and dirt clog the priest’s throat, drowning out his screams. His stump of an arm scrapes into the earth as his other hand stretches out to the heavens and then disappears beneath the earth. A sheet of rain washes away the claw marks in the mud as lightning flashes over the vacant cemetery.