Long After Midnight

The toast was drunk and all departed; the Rabbi and the Ministers down the hill to their holy places, leaving the Priests to stand a last moment at their door looking out at Mars, this strange world, and a cold wind blowing.

Midnight came and then one and two, and at three in the cold deep morning of Mars, Father Niven stirred. Candles flickered in soft whispers. Leaves fluttered against his window.

Suddenly he sat up in bed, half-startled by a dream of mobcries and pursuits. He listened.

Far away, below, he heard the shutting of an outside door.

Throwing on a robe, Father Niven went down the dim rectory stairs and through the church where a dozen candles here or there kept their own pools of light.

He made the rounds of all the doors, thinking: Silly, why lock churches? What is there to steal? But still he prowled the sleeping night …

… and found the front door of the church unlocked, and softly being pushed in by the wind.

Shivering, he shut the door.

Soft running footsteps.

He spun about.

The church lay empty. The candle flames leaned now this way, now that in their shrines. There was only the ancient smell of wax and incense burning, stuffs left over from all the marketplaces of time and history; other suns, and other noons.

In the midst of glancing at the crucifix above the main altar, he froze.

There was a sound of a single drop of water falling in the night.

Slowly he turned to look at the baptistery in the back of the church.

There were no candles there, yet—

A pale light shone from that small recess where stood the baptismal font.

“Bishop Kelly?” he called, softly.

Walking slowly up the aisle, he grew very cold, and stopped because—

Another drop of water had fallen, hit, dissolved away.

It was like a faucet dripping somewhere. But there were no faucets. Only the baptismal font itself, into which, drop by drop, a slow liquid was falling, with three heartbeats between each sound.

At some secret level, Father Niven’s heart told itself something and raced, then slowed and almost stopped. He broke into a wild perspiration. He found himself unable to move, but move he must, one foot after the other, until he reached the arched doorway of the baptistery.

There was indeed a pale light within the darkness of the small place.

No, not a light. A shape. A figure.

The figure stood behind and beyond the baptismal font. The sound of falling water had stopped.

His tongue locked in his mouth, his eyes flexed wide in a kind of madness, Father Niven felt himself struck blind. Then vision returned, and he dared cry out:

“Who!”

A single word, which echoed back from all around the church, which made candle flames flutter in reverberation, which stirred the dust of incense, which frightened his own heart with its swift return in saying: Who!

The only light within the baptistery came from the pale garments of the figure that stood there facing him. And this light was enough to show him an incredible thing.

As Father Niven watched, the figure moved. It put a pale hand out upon the baptistery air.

The hand hung there as if not wanting to, a separate thing from the Ghost beyond, as if it were seized and pulled forward, resisting, by Father Niven’s dreadful and fascinated stare to reveal what lay in the center of its open white palm.

There was fixed a jagged hole, a cincture from which, slowly, one by one, blood was dripping, falling away down and slowly down, into the baptismal font.

The drops of blood struck the holy water, colored it, and dissolved in slow ripples.

The hand remained for a stunned moment there before the Priest’s now-blind, now-seeing eyes.

As if struck a terrible blow, the Priest collapsed to his knees with an outgasped cry, half of despair, half of revelation, one hand over his eyes, the other fending off the vision.

“No, no, no, no, no, no, no, it can’t!”

It was as if some dreadful physician of dentistry had come upon him without narcotic and with one seizure entire-extracted his soul, bloodied raw, out of his body. He felt himself prized, his life yanked forth, and the roots, O God, were … deep!

“No, no, no, no!”

But, yes.

Between the lacings of his fingers, he looked again.

And the Man was there.

And the dreadful bleeding palm quivered dripping upon the baptistery air.

“Enough!”

The palm pulled back, vanished. The Ghost stood waiting.

And the face of the Spirit was good and familiar. Those strange beautiful deep and incisive eyes were as he knew they always must be. There was the gentleness of the mouth, and the paleness framed by the flowing locks of hair and beard. The Man was robed in the simplicity of garments worn upon the shores and in the wilderness near Galilee.

The Priest, by a great effort of will, prevented his tears from spilling over, stopped up his agony of surprise, doubt, shock, these clumsy things which rioted within and threatened to break forth. He trembled.

And then saw that the Figure, the Spirit, the Man, the Ghost, Whatever, was trembling, too.

No, thought the Priest, He can’t be! Afraid? Afraid of … me?

And now the Spirit shook itself with an immense agony not unlike his own, like a mirror image of his own concussion, gaped wide its mouth, shut up its own eyes, and mourned:

“Oh, please, let me go.”

At this the young Priest opened his eyes wider and gasped. He thought: But you’re free. No one keeps you here!

And in that instant: “Yes!” cried the Vision. “You keep me! Please! Avert your gaze! The more you look the more I become this! I am not what I seem!”

But, thought the Priest, I did not speak! My lips did not move! How does this Ghost know my mind?

“I know all you think,” said the Vision, trembling, pale, pulling back in baptistery gloom. “Every sentence, every word. I did not mean to come. I ventured into town. Suddenly I was many things to many people. I ran. They followed. I escaped here. The door was open. I entered. And then and then—oh, and then was trapped.”

No, thought the Priest.

“Yes,” mourned the Ghost. “By you.”

Slowly now, groaning under an even more terrible weight of revelation, the Priest grasped the edge of the font and pulled himself, swaying, to his feet. At last he dared force the question out:

“You are not… what you seem?”

“I am not,” said the other. “Forgive me.”

I, thought the Priest, shall go mad.

“Do not,” said the Ghost, “or I shall go down to madness with you.”

“I can’t give you up, oh, dear God, now that you’re here, after all these years, all my dreams, don’t you see, it’s asking too much. Two thousand years, a whole race of people have waited for your return! And I, I am the one who meets you, sees you—”

“You meet only your own dream. You see only your own need. Behind all this—” the figure touched its own robes and breast, “I am another thing.”

“What must I do!” the Priest burst out, looking now at the heavens, now at the Ghost which shuddered at his cry. “What?”

“Avert your gaze. In that moment I will be out the door and gone.”

“Just—just like that?”

“Please,” said the Man.

The Priest drew a series of breaths, shivering.

“Oh, if this moment could last for just an hour.”

“Would you kill me?”

“No!”

“If you keep me, force me into this shape some little while longer, my death will be on your hands.”

The Priest bit his knuckles, and felt a convulsion of sorrow rack his bones.

“You—you are a Martian, then?”

“No more. No less.”

“And I have done this to you with my thoughts?”

“You did not mean. When you came downstairs, your old dream seized and made me over. My palms still bleed from the wounds you gave out of your secret mind.”

The Priest shook his head, dazed.

“Just a moment more … wait …”

He gazed steadily, hungrily, at the darkness where the Ghost stood out of the light. That face was beautiful. And, oh, those hands were loving and beyond all description.

The Priest nodded, a sadness in him now as if he had within the hour come back from the true Calvary. And the hour was gone. And the coals strewn dying on the sand near Galilee.

“If—if I let you go—”

“You must, oh you must!”

“If I let you go, will you promise—”

“What?”

“Will you promise to come back?”

“Come back?” cried the figure in the darkness.

“Once a year, that’s all I ask, come back once a year, here to this place, this font, at the same time of night—”

“Come back … ?”

“Promise! Oh, I must know this moment again. You don’t know how important it is! Promise, or I won’t let you go!”

“I—”

“Say it! Swear it!”

“I promise,” said the pale Ghost in the dark. “I swear.”

“Thank you, oh thanks.”

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