with renewed hope in his eyes. Samuel felt the weight of his expectations and wished he had an actual plan to save them.
The front of the church crumbled to dust and the darkness rolled in. Leviathan emerged from the shadows. His presence stole the breath from Samuel’s lungs and burst the capillaries in his eyes, making him weep blood. Standing in the church entrance was a creature like an enormous crocodile with six snake-like heads, each filled with rows of dagger-sharp teeth like the jaws of a shark, and eyes that burned like exploding suns. Its mouths erupted like volcanoes, belching flame and ash and dripping molten lava-like drool onto the church floor, leaving steaming holes wherever it touched.
Samuel remembered the description of Leviathan in the Bible, which fell short of what stood before him now. It raised one of its taloned claws to rend Samson’s flesh into a steaming pile of meat, bone, and viscera. Samson or Jacque or Asmodeus, or whatever being that had control of his brother’s body, simply stood there with an idiot’s grin, arms outstretched in welcome.
“Take me home, Master.”
“Not if there is no bargain to make.” Samuel stepped in front of his brother and shoved him out of the way just as Leviathan’s claws struck.
The creature bellowed, crying out as if it had been the one disemboweled, its voice bringing the rest of the church down around them. Samuel’s body came apart as Leviathan’s claws sliced through his flesh and bone. He smiled as the life fled from him, his last sight the disappointment on the face of Satan and the sorrow in his brother’s eyes as the spirits vacated his flesh. Samuel fell to the floor in pieces, intestines tumbling out across the marble floors in thick oily coils, even his skull laid open to reveal the brain matter beneath.
“Samuel! Oh God! Samuel no!” Samson rushed over to hold his brother, gathering up the broken pieces of his corpse. He cradled his brother’s head in his lap and rocked back and forth, eyes squeezed shut, holding back hot tears. Clinging to the darkness of grief and regret, not giving voice to the pain that ached his soul. If the beast wanted to take him now, it was more than welcome to.
Like an enormous tidal wave of unrepentant fury, it crashed against his brother, its force abated. It slowly withdrew to whatever raging sea of chaos, whatever fearsome place it called home. Not that Samson cared. The sound of a vacuum being filled, the sounds of wet slithering retreat, the cursing howl of an enraged creature as if stabbed in the heart, nothing mattered to him. He clutched his brother, praying perhaps that sheer force of will might stitch him back together and bring him back.
“It’s gone, buddy,” the taxi driver said. “Whatever it was, it’s gone now.”
“Yes. Yes he is.”
His brother had died for him, died to keep Satan from getting the souls Samson had stolen, the souls he’d stolen to save Samuel’s life. None of it made sense. Everything he’d done to save his brother and now Samuel was dead anyway.
“It should have been me, little brother. Why’d you do it? I don’t deserve this. I don’t deserve it. You shouldn’t have done it for me. Not for me. I’m not worthy of this. All those people I killed. I’m not worthy of this.”
He knew what his brother would have said. With the cacophony of restless souls now gone he could hear his brother’s voice in his head as clearly as he had heard theirs.
“Then become worthy of it.”
21
The tabloids speculated wide and far about the fate of Samson. Rumors floated around that he had checked himself into the Crossroads Center for rehab for an undetermined amount of time, desperately in need of mental rest. After all, he was questioned as a “person of interest” in connection to the disappearance of famous photographer Jacque Willet. His name had surfaced in the events surrounding the tragic incident at a night club. Some news rags went so far as to ask if the loss of his brother, a priest, in a senseless accident might have been what pushed Samson over the edge and off the celebrity radar.
None of that mattered to Samson.
Mysterious circumstances. Tragic accidents. Evil could hide in plain sight because everyone would ignore it unless its wake splashed onto them. Like a bad dream they had to rationalize, but Samson didn’t have anything to say. Witnesses couldn’t accept what they saw. The jumbled mess of contradictory statements convinced police of psychedelic drugs being dealt out of Requiem. When asked about what happened that night, Samson stuck to the only refrain he knew for sure.
“I don’t know.”
Samson pulled into a parking lot and sat there. During his times of doubt, the thought of prayer still held the ring of something ridiculous, the superstitious mumblings to an invisible friend. These days, he liked the idea of being still. Of listening.
Samuel was the one for those higher ideas, wrestling with the theological implications of everything. Being caught up in a cosmological battle between good and evil, that was for better men to argue. Men like his brother. In a world of chance and random accidents—when the tumbling of natural selection led to the genetic fall of a man named Samuel and another man named Samson, with the odds of these two men meeting, much less being brothers, being beyond calculation—in such a meaningless world, why was there was still so much beauty and laughter?
“I don’t know.”
Samson walked the hallways, searching for the room number. All his designer clothes were gone now; he shambled along in clothes picked from Salvation Army bins. His hair was wild and unkempt and his eyes dark and heavy. Orderlies scrutinized then turned away from him. Nurses pointed him in the right direction, but with a wary, searching-for-security manner. No matter, Samson ignored them, choosing to focus on what he came to do.
He knew what it was like to be alone.
The room stank of grief and fear. The machines bleeped and chirped, exhaled and inhaled, a cacophony of life-prolonging measures. A black woman’s thin frame barely disturbed the sheets as she slept. Samson closed the door behind them but was overwhelmed by the feeling of not knowing what to do next. Guilt whispered like dry leaves across pavement. How many times had Samuel done this? He had been such a natural at this. Samson stumbled over the bedside chair, catching it but silently cursing himself for making such a racket. The woman stirred.
“Who is this handsome man?” she asked with an accented croak of a voice. She fluttered in and out of a dream state.
“I heard there was a beautiful woman here who I ought to get to know.”
“You look familiar.”
“You knew my brother, Samuel. I’m here to finish what he started.” With that, Samson took her hand.
And listened.
Afterword
Samuel had to die. There was just no other way to end it. See, I don’t believe in God, but Maurice does, very much so. That could have turned this into one long theological debate between an atheist and a faithful Christian rehashing the Evidential Argument from Evil.
Our purpose here was to set up the premises of the argument for you: a pious and devout priest dying of AIDS, a vain hedonistic sinner living a life of fame and prosperity. What we could not do is answer the question for you because our answers would have been different. Very, very different.
I would have said that it is because God is an illusion at best and indifferent or even hostile to man at worst.
