A Shade of Ash on the Sticharion. Father Sebastian's Last Case

A Shade of Ash on the Sticharion. Father Sebastian's Last Case

Глава

Author’s Foreword

Months of studying sealed documents from Spain’s “Satanic panic” of the 1980s have blurred the line between holiness and sin. Hidden inside criminal case files, demonologists’ reports, and the dry intelligence protocols of Madrid and Barcelona lies the reverse side of faith — the one the Vatican has ordered kept silent. For centuries, the Church knew about the corruption within its own ranks, yet preferred to keep the Inquisition’s archives under lock and key while churches burned on the streets.

In 1987, madness swept across Spain. On Madrid’s black market, a single consecrated host from the Almudena Cathedral was valued at a thousand euros. Defrocked priests celebrated Mass using LSD and cocaine, while police raids turned up overturned crucifixes and empty tabernacles. At the same time, Cardinal Ratzinger was signing strict circulars, trying to rein in the chaos and forbidding laypeople from reading exorcisms. Bureaucracy tried to strangle living horror.

This book grew out of documented crimes, stolen relics, and the confessions of people who walked through hell. The most terrifying thing is silence. The absolute, deafening silence that remains after the most desperate prayers. A person breaks precisely at that moment. They are willing to endure any pain as long as they believe someone is listening. But when heaven remains silent in response to a cry for help, the last human thing inside them dies.

Father Sebastian is the real face of this tragedy. He had dozens of names in police records and parish registers across Levante. He walked a path the Church would call absolute damnation. Sebastian simply grew tired of wearing holiness like heavy armor that digs into open wounds. He chose the Darkness not out of a thirst for power, but because the Darkness turned out to be the only interlocutor willing to listen.

Archives can be sealed. The ash on the sticharion cannot be hidden.

PART ONE

Before the Line

1

Barcelona in June 1987 smelled of orange peel, roasted almonds, and cheap tobacco. By noon, the sun had turned La Rambla into a scorching frying pan. Tourists in bright T-shirts fanned themselves with metro maps and drank ice-cold sangría. Young guys on skateboards rattled past the fountains. Against their backdrop, old women in black looked like scorched shadows, gliding along stone walls to escape the heat. Life was throbbing. The city refused to sleep even during the siesta, when metal store shutters crashed down, locking the world inside for four hours.

In this Barcelona, everything was for sale: from counterfeit watches to fresh oysters, from silk to heroin. Deals were pushed in alleyways behind the record store on Carrer de la Canuda. Used syringes crunched under the soles of those hurrying to Barceloneta beach. The drug epidemic of the eighties had sunk into the city as deeply as the sun and the Saharan dust storms gathering off the coast. On such days, the sky turned a dirty yellow.

Doña Elena and her son lived on the third floor of an old building on Carrer Hospital, a stone’s throw from La Boqueria market. The windows faced a cramped inner courtyard where neighbors hung laundry and yelled at each other around the clock in four languages. The apartment smelled of fried cod and mothballs. Doña Elena maniacally scrubbed every corner. She could not abide filth — neither physical nor moral.

Carlos had just turned sixteen. He wore a black T-shirt with crudely cut-off sleeves, jeans with a heavy wallet chain, and army boots. The walls of his room were plastered with posters of bands his mother called “Satanic noise.” Doña Elena could not distinguish heavy metal from thrash. To her, any heavy guitar riff was a direct summons to the devil, and the lyrics were incantations.

“Did you hear what happened in Santa Coloma de Gramenet?” she shouted from the kitchen, frying fish in a pan.

Carlos said nothing. He sat on the floor, his back against the bed, idly twirling an audio cassette between his fingers. On the plastic, a black marker had scrawled a title his mother could not have pronounced without sin.

“I’m talking to you!” Elena’s voice rose to a shriek.

“I hear you,” he tossed back without moving.

“They broke into the Sacred Heart church. Stole the Blessed Sacrament. Again. The fourth time this month across the province. Freedom doesn’t just smell of flowers, Carlos. It smells of smoke. When people are allowed to believe in anything, the first thing they choose is their own darkest fears. And you keep listening to that howl from your speakers.”

Doña Elena spoke as if the raiders were dividing their spoils right in her living room. She clicked off the stove, dried her hands on a kitchen towel, and stepped into her son’s room.

Carlos did not look up.

“So what do you think about it?” Elena leaned her shoulder against the doorframe.

“I don’t think anything.”

“Those creatures — they’re thieves and devil-worshippers, Carlos. Your bands sing their anthems. Sorcery oozes from every chord, every shriek of that… that…”

She waved a hand dismissively toward the cassette deck.

“Stop it, Mom.”

Carlos sighed, tossed the cassette onto the linoleum, and stood up. In the cramped room with its curtained windows, he looked enormous. The teenager towered a head above his mother, his figure threatening, but Elena felt no fear for herself. She was terrified for his soul.

“I receive communion every Sunday,” her voice dropped to a whisper. “For seven years I’ve been lighting candles for your health. Seven years, Carlos! And you just spit on my prayers.”

“I don’t spit.”

“You don’t attend Mass.”

“I don’t go because I don’t see God in church.”

The words hung in the stuffy air. Doña Elena froze as if struck.

“How dare you?” she whispered. “Churches are being robbed, priests threatened with death, the world is sliding into the abyss. Now more than ever, we need to cling to the altar with our teeth.”

“The world is going mad because faith has become a convenient screen,” Carlos spoke in a whisper now too, but it was a dull, heavy fury. “Hell doesn’t begin underground. It begins in kitchens where loving people stop translating their pain for each other.”

The boy walked to the stereo, yanked out the cassette, shoved it into his back pocket, and headed for the door.

“Where are you going?” Elena did not turn around.

“For air.”

“Carlos.”

He stopped in the doorway, his hand gripping the old handle.

“I love you,” his mother said quietly. “I don’t want to watch you burn in hell.”

“At least in hell there’s music, Mom.”

The door slammed with a heavy thud.

The street noise hit his face like a heatwave. Everything blended: the hoarse shouts of barkers from La Boqueria, the wail of a siren from the port, the clack of flamenco castanets from an open second-floor window, and the rattle of old motorcycles. Carlos put on his headphones and pressed play. The heavy guitar screech and machine-gun drums instantly cut off the outside world.

He barreled forward, weaving between tourists and fruit carts. Crowds huddled at every newsstand, greedily scanning the black headlines of the morning papers. El País and La Vanguardia vied in bloodthirstiness: “Satanic Panic in Catalonia,” “Cultists Strike Parishes Again,” “Bishopric Demands Military Patrols.”

Vendors shouted, mixing news with prices:

“Tomatoes from Almería! Fifty pesetas! Did you read what those degenerates are doing? They desecrated shrines in Girona! Take some peppers, señora, fresh peppers!”

Old women on the steps of Sant Agustí church crossed themselves fervently, staring at a new flyer pasted directly over a crucifix: “They are coming for your children. Check their rooms.” Men in bars banged glasses on counters, arguing about politics and the devil to the accompaniment of television news. The black-and-white announcer droned on about mysterious rituals in the cemeteries of Levante.

Carlos turned sharply into the depths of the Raval quarter. Here the street noise grew sticky, suffocating, smelling of overfried olive oil and rotten fish. On the marble steps of a peeling doorway sat a young Gypsy woman with an infant. She dragged on cheap Ducados, staring into nowhere with empty eyes. At her feet lay cigarette butts and a broken bottle of fortified wine. At the end of the alley, two young men in rumpled tracksuits quickly passed a cellophane packet of heroin to a third. Carlos slipped past. Withdrawal and syringes — not his story.

He emerged into a dead, hemmed-in square. In the center rose an old church, surrounded by wooden scaffolding and shrouded in faded green netting. Restoration had dragged on for years. The workmen had long since gone to siesta, leaving trowels and empty beer cans right by the entrance. The heavy oak door stood slightly ajar.

Carlos pulled the headphones from his neck. The silence of the square hit him harder than the roar of rock music. He pushed the door and stepped over the threshold.

Inside was half-darkness and a draft. The stone slabs held the night’s chill. The stagnant air felt thick, heavy, like water in a deep, abandoned baptismal font. Carlos took three steps forward and stopped. Before the altar, his back to the exit, stood a motionless priest.

The man looked young — thirty at most. His black cassock narrowed his shoulders, turning his figure into an elongated, almost ghostly silhouette. He did not turn at the sound of footsteps. He simply stood, palms pressed to the stone balustrade of the solea, staring into the emptiness above the throne.

“After midday, entry is strictly forbidden,” the priest said into the void, not turning his head.

“I didn’t know,” Carlos shifted his weight. “The door was open.”

“The doors are always open. That’s still no reason to come inside.”

Silence fell. Dense, even. In it, one could stand for hours, simply breathing the smell of old wax and damp plaster. Carlos walked down the aisle and sat on a creaking wooden pew.

“Do you believe God hears?” the teenager asked, surprising himself.

The priest slowly turned. He had cold gray eyes that looked not at the speaker but through him — into his own deep darkness. Sharp, predatory features. There was no iconographic softness in this man, none of that condescending, cloying weariness with which parish pastors usually listened to chance congregants.

“You ask if God hears?” He moved down the solea. The soles of his shoes made no sound on the stone. “God always hears, Carlos. The question is different: does He answer?”

The boy flinched. He distinctly remembered not telling the stranger his name.

“And what do you think? Does He answer?”

The priest stopped a couple of meters from the pew. His gaze pinned the teenager to the wood.

“I think the most terrible thing for a priest is to fall silent himself. God has been silent for centuries, but He has the right. We do not.”

Carlos froze. He had expected banal homilies about love, forgiveness, and suffering called trials. This man in a cassock spoke only of silence.

“And have you fallen silent?” the boy asked.

The priest sat down on the pew beside him. Placed his pale hands on his knees. He ignored Carlos’s presence, staring at the altar where candles were dying. Hot wax slowly dripped down the bronze holders, congealing into transparent blobs.

“Faith slips away unnoticed, like water cooling in a font. At some point you touch the altar and feel only a cold cobblestone. An ordinary stone. And you realize that stones don’t save.”

“Then why are you here?” Carlos’s voice trembled with hidden hope. The boy desperately sought an adult who could prove that his own rebellion was not in vain.

“Because of a vow,” the priest cut in. “Because of a promise made before the altar, the bishop, and the dead. Words remain the only support when faith has been burned to ash. You don’t hold them — they hold you. Like an iron collar. The cassock weighs too much when there’s no heart beneath it. It becomes a shroud for a still-living man. You wear it because without this cloth you are nobody. Just a liar who broke his promise. And that is worse than being dead while alive.”

Carlos stood up abruptly. Words stuck in his throat. Inside him, relief at being understood fought with raw terror. The pillar he had thought unshakable was wobbling before his eyes.

“I have to go.”

“Go,” Sebastian gave a barely perceptible nod. “And don’t put your headphones on again until you’ve left the alley. Try to hear the city. Life pulses in it. There is less life in any music.”

Carlos said nothing. He pushed the heavy door, and the Madrid sun instantly struck his eyes, making him blink. The player stayed in his pocket. The boy stood at the threshold, absorbing the street cries, car horns, footsteps, and laughter of strangers — all that vast, sinful, living chaos.

In the dimness of the church, the priest remained alone. He was looking at the altar again. His lips moved soundlessly. Sebastian was not praying. He mechanically ground out phrases that had once held meaning for him. Now they had become empty sound as lifeless as the church locked up for siesta, as his own cooled heart.

A prayer in an empty church always returns to you. The deaf walls simply echolocate your own solitude.

Sebastian knew this in advance. And still he kept moving his lips. A total stop frightened him more than endless lingering in this hollow void.

Becoming a monster after losing faith is easy. The real price of the choice is something else: you become a monster while remembering, every minute, what it was like to believe. You pass by a crucifix every day, feeling on your skin the dead gaze of the God you betrayed. Sebastian had made that choice. He had made it long ago. He simply still lacked the courage to confess it aloud.

Darkness never bursts in with a fight. It sits down neatly beside you and silently commiserates with your loss.

In the church, the former deafening silence returned. Sebastian moved to the spot where the boy had sat moments before. The wood of the pew still held the warmth of another person. It cooled under his palms.

Exactly like this, faith left.

Exactly like this, life evaporated.

Everything he had once sworn to serve before this altar grew cold.

2

Barcelona, June 1987. Siesta.

The door did not close behind Carlos immediately. First the old hinges groaned at length — that plaintive sound swelled beneath the dome into something enormous, alive. Then came the dull thud of the oak panel against the stone jamb. The boy’s footsteps receded quickly and angrily — the way a person walks when trying desperately to run from himself, but his legs only carry him away from a place where they refused to understand him. Silence descended.

Church silence weighed tons. It was centuries old, thick, steeped in ancient dust, incense, and millions of unspoken words. Parishioners whispered those words into the darkness, hoping for a connection above. The walls faithfully relayed the signals. But up there, apparently, nobody had been picking up the phone for a long time.

Sebastian remained sitting on the pew. He sat exactly where, a moment ago, the boy had twisted in fury. His legs refused to serve. Getting up and shuffling to the altar, where no one waited for him, made no sense at all. The old oak had darkened with time and thousands of hands that had desperately gripped its edges in moments of extreme despair. The wood still held warmth. The living, human warmth of another body that had just been breathing, raging, and fearing here.

Sebastian slowly ran his palm across the seat. The oak was polished to a mirror shine by others’ elbows, but rough in the crevices. Another’s warmth always fades too quickly. First the pew wood cools, then life evaporates, then the vows you made before the altar. He physically felt this trace of presence melting under his fingers. When the warmth finally vanished, all that remained was pure ice.

The June heat outside was melting Barcelona’s asphalt, but Sebastian’s inner cold obeyed different laws of nature. It never left; it only bided its time.

The sun stood at its zenith. Through the thick stone walls, built in an age when the sea lapped at the very threshold, only a distant city hum penetrated. Barcelona buzzed like a forgotten radio in an empty house. Somewhere out there, market women shouted at La Boqueria, praising their peaches; motorcycles tore the air on Raval’s narrow streets; tourists cursed in harsh Scandinavian dialects. Inside, time had stopped. Sebastian clearly heard the paraffin melting, the wax dripping down the bronze in heavy, lazy tears.

Light entered the church through narrow windows just below the ceiling — Romanesque slits. In the 12th century, they were designed as protection against Saracen arrows; in the 20th, they had become the only defense against the Madrid sun. The rays fell diagonally, illuminating the dust. It hung motionless in the air, like congealed blood. In those slanting strips of light, the dust motes looked like tiny stars that had long since died but stubbornly refused to admit it. Sebastian watched their chaotic drifting. Faith is exactly the same. You naively think it shines on its own, but in reality, you are only reflecting a borrowed light that went out long ago.

On the altar, the remains of candles smoked. The morning Mass had gathered only a few old women in black headscarves. They shuffled here daily. Nobody waited for them at home, but within these walls, before the crucifix, they had the legitimate luxury of not pretending to be alright. They prayed fervently for the health of their grandchildren, for lower gas prices, and for the neighbor to stop sprinkling salt under the threshold against the evil eye. Sebastian mechanically heard their jumbled confessions and nodded along. These women believed a hundred times more strongly than he ever had in his life. In their minds, there were no doubts. They simply asked point-blank, like children who had not yet learned to fear refusal.

He ran his hand over the oak seat again. The foreign warmth had completely evaporated. The wood was as lifeless as the stone floor slabs or the statues of saints staring at him with empty eye sockets.

Sebastian closed his eyelids. They felt heavy as lead — the way it always is after exhausting, sleepless nights spent hypnotizing cracks in the ceiling while a foreign whisper takes root inside you. Meaningless, devoid of obvious malice or purpose. That sound arose only to confirm: you are no longer alone. Someone else has taken up residence inside. Or perhaps Sebastian himself was no longer there, and the free space had been occupied by that monotonous hum.

The fall into memory happened without cinematic special effects. Memory has no soundtrack. But it always has sharp smells, acute physical pain, and the paralyzing terror of realizing you are back where you swore never to return.

Levante Coast, several years earlier

The smell of salted fish hit his nostrils before the image emerged. A mixture of scales, rotting algae, and the cheapest incense from the local market — a poor Byzantine parish had no money for better. Mixed in with it was the heavy breath of the coastal sea. The water stagnated in the rocky coves, thoroughly soaking old, abandoned fishing nets with silt.

The parish stood on a cliff, above a poor fishing village. The broken asphalt vanished entirely three kilometers before the central square. Poor houses clung to one another like drunk sailors struggling to keep their balance after a savage storm. The walls of some buildings were thickly whitewashed, blinding in the midday sun. Others stood as dirty gray boxes with peeling stucco, revealing wild stone beneath. On clotheslines stretched between balconies, faded laundry flapped in the wind — sheets and baby undershirts like the flags of defeated garrisons.

The church was genuinely old. Time had gnawed at its walls with its teeth. Rough masonry stones, narrow window-embrasures, and a bell tower that had lost its bells during the civil war — stolen and melted down for ammunition. In place of bronze, a piece of railroad rail dangled from a rusty chain. They struck it with an iron rod to summon the faithful to Mass. The sound was dull, short, like hitting an empty bucket. The parishioners did not complain. They were used to absolutely everything.

Inside, there was an unventilated smell of damp. The stone breathed moisture. Even in the forty-degree summer heat, a peculiar cold lingered beneath the dome, quickly slipping under clothes and sticking to the skin. The old frescoes had faded into pale stains. Dampness had disfigured the faces of the saints, making them look leprous. The paint had flaked off, leaving only large, sorrowful eyes of the Virgin and the apostles. They watched Sebastian’s every step relentlessly.

He was young then, barely past twenty-seven. Sebastian had come to Levante by assignment, like a surgeon to a front-line hospital. He soberly understood that no one expected miracles here, but he genuinely believed that his service could change something. The black cassock hung on his thin frame like a sack, billowing in the windlessness. But he wore that piece of cloth with pride. Sebastian considered his cassock personal armor against a cruel and filthy world.

Later would come the realization: the cassock protects the world from him, not him from the world. But that would happen much later.

Sebastian repaired the church’s rotting roof himself. The parish was mired in poverty; hiring roofers was madness. He climbed shaky, creaking scaffolding with a heavy hammer and an armful of fresh planks. Below, frightened old women crossed themselves fervently, lamenting, “Ay, holy father, you’ll fall and break yourself.” Sebastian stubbornly drove nails into the rot, snarling through his teeth when the hammer hit his fingers. The calluses on his palms grew in layers, like geological strata. The skin cracked, bled, dried in the salt wind, and split again. He did not complain. He saw in this pain an honest price for the right to be called a servant of the Lord.

His hands grew coarse. A permanent black border of construction grime lodged under his nails. When touching the Blessed Sacrament or raising the chalice of wine, Sebastian was panicky afraid of his flock’s disgusted looks. He thought people would see those dirty fingers and turn away. But the parishioners remained silent. In those labor-crippled palms pulsed more living love than in the pampered hands of urban prelates who had never held anything heavier than a gilded breviary.

In the evenings, when the village windows went dark and only the monotonous roar of the surf remained outside, Sebastian prayed. He completely abandoned rote reading out of obligation. He simply knelt on the bare floor of his cell, pressed his shoulder blades to the icy stone wall, and spoke to God directly. Point-blank. As to a father whom one is permitted to confront with grievance, complain of helplessness, or silently demand advice.

“Lord,” he whispered into the darkness, “these poor souls bring their last pesetas to the altar. They go hungry themselves, yet buy penny candles for your image. People cling to the crucifix solely out of terror of reality. They desperately need someone to promise to stop their personal hell. Help them, Lord. I don’t have enough hands for all.”

In those days, Sebastian sensed a foreign presence. God showed no signs and gave no voice. It simply became easier. As if a sack of river sand had been lifted from his shoulders. He sincerely took that peace as a divine answer.