He looked as sad as any man I had ever seen. “I’d never tell you how to conduct yourself tomorrow, or how to answer their questions. But God gave us a mind, Patrick … and the ability to anticipate the consequences of our actions. All I ask is that you go do that for me, and for the sake of the Church.”
After the abbot sent me from his office, I paused in the cool empty hall, and stood before a painting that hung on the wall. I’d admired, even envied, it ever since first coming to the abbey.
It showed the martyrdom of Saint Ignatius, having been brought from Antioch to Rome, to be tossed to the beasts in the Coliseum. Left hand on his heart, the right outstretched in glory, as if he were making a grand speech of his suffering, his transcendent old eyes looked wide to the heavens. Supposedly he’d been eaten by two lions, but the beasts set upon him in the painting more resembled savage dogs, although no dogs I’d ever seen, with piglike snouts and eyes human in their cunning. The paws of the one tearing into his shoulder were spread wide like clawed hands. Often I wondered if they weren’t subtly intended to portray demons, instead. But whatever they were, Ignatius had looked forward to meeting them. They were his transport to a Heaven he couldn’t wait to get to.
“You were lucky,” I whispered. “When you knew what tomorrow was bringing, they hadn’t given you any choice in the matter.”
*
I ate nothing for the rest of the day, nor that night, hoping that a fast would clear my mind. Long after Compline, the rest of the brothers asleep in their cells, I remained on my knees before the altar rail in the chapel. The only eyes on me were those of the cruciform Christ hanging on the wall. The only light was cast from the rack of votive candles to my left, filling the sanctuary with a soft glow and warm, peaceful shadows.
For hours I prayed for a resolution between my conflicting loyalties — to the mission of the Church, as well as the purpose of whatever had chosen to work through me. I couldn’t see why these two aims had to exclude one another.
In the chapel’s hush, I heard the soft plink of drops as they began falling to the floor nearby. Distracted, I checked both wrists but found them dry. Probably some leak sprung in the roof, I told myself. I pushed it from my ears, and from my heart tried to push the pique I felt over that reflex to check for my own blood in the first place, that this ordeal had done such a thing to me.
I prayed for the ugliness rising in me to recede like muddied waters. There should be no place within me for anger, I believed, but felt it more and more as the hours passed. Part of me raged toward Abbot O’Riordan and the others like him, so concerned with the status quo that they preferred to turn a blind eye on anything in their midst that threatened to disrupt their lives of routine.
The dripping sound seemed to become more insistent, as if the flow had increased — or perhaps my growing annoyance with it, I reasoned, was only making it appear louder.
There was more at work here than blood and transitory wounds, yet they all behaved as if what was happening through me happened mindlessly, devoid of purpose. Yet there had to be a logic behind it, and therefore a reason … else why should it occur at all?
The dripping grew heavier still, like the thick spatter of rainwater on the ground beneath the clogged gutters of a house. It killed the last of my prayer on my lips. When the chapel’s broken hush was ripped by a scream that resounded from the chilly stone, at first I wasn’t sure it hadn’t come from me.
But no — I hadn’t the lungs for any cry as terrible as this.
I stood at the railing, faced the back of the chapel to see who might’ve walked in on me, but no one was there. The door hung motionless. From the shadows I heard the wet sound of something tearing, and a rustle, then a moist heavy thud, like that of an animal carcass collapsing to the killing floor, except with it came a grunt that sounded unmistakably human.
When I turned round front again, to see if someone might have come through unnoticed from the sacristy, it took several moments for what I noticed to penetrate the layers of disbelief.
The cross on the wall hung empty, no Christ nailed to it now. Blood ran darkly gleaming down the stones from the foot of the cross and from both sides, and from each of these points jutted a crooked spike shellacked with coagulating gore.
From the deep shadows behind the altar there issued a rasp of breath, and a groan of agony. In none of it did I hear any hint of meekness — these were not the sounds of a man who’d gone willingly to his cross. And when from his concealment he began to rise, I started to back my trembling way down the aisle.
By the time I reached the rear of the chapel, he was standing in shadow, little of him to see in the flickering votives but for wet reflections of flame. He doubled halfway over, quaking in pain beyond imagining, as he began to lurch out from behind the altar.
My first impulse was to retreat all the way to my room — yet what if this truly was meant for me to see? I chose to seclude myself in the flimsy shelter of the confessional — remaining, but giving this apparition every chance to vanish. I drew the curtain behind me as I sat pressed against the far wall and hoped to be spared this sight, hoped that it was no more than a waking dream brought on by one night’s hunger and six months of stress.
But closer it came, and even when I could not see it, I heard it. Down the aisle it moved, harsh breath growing more ragged as it neared me, each shuffling footstep louder than the one before, a meaty wet slap of torn flesh on stone.
The Christ seemed to linger outside the confessional, then I heard the rattling of the door to the priest’s booth. On the other side of that thin wall the Christ settled heavily upon the seat, bringing with him a stifling reek of blood and sweat.
I pushed the curtain back again and in the dim light thrown by the votives looked down at my wrists, unbloodied, then at the partition separating me from this Christ who’d ripped free of his cross. The panel between us scraped open. Through the screen I saw the outline of his head, misshapen with its wrapping of the crown of thorns. Fingers next — they clawed at the screen, then battered away until it buckled and fell out. The hand looked mangled beyond repair, and he held it up so I could see the damage it would never have sustained had that life-size crucifix been accurately rendered.
“Do you understand now?” he asked, in Latin.
“I’m … not sure,” I whispered, but suspected that I did. If sculptors couldn’t get anatomical details right, how much easier might it have been for scribes to propagate other fallacies?
The Christ’s head tilted forward to fill the tiny window. I was spared the worst of his burning and pain-mad gaze, his eyes veiled by the hair straggling blood-caked from beneath the thorns.
