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

The difference between a healing silence and a dead vacuum he would learn much later. And he would understand: all those years, he had been feeding himself pure deception.

Inés was born at the end of October. The sea raged; waves smashed against the rocky shore with a deafening roar. The ocean seemed determined to wipe the fishing village off the face of the earth. A driving rain lashed for three days without pause. Streets were flooded to the ankles. The parish old women whispered ominously among themselves: giving birth in such foul weather was a bad sign. Heaven was mourning the newborn’s fate in advance.

Sebastian learned of the onset of labor at dawn. A neighbor ran to the church, a man’s raincoat over her shoulders and a leaky umbrella held above her head. Soaked to the bone, the woman explained breathlessly: the mother had been in labor for twelve hours, the midwife had given up. Neither mother nor child had a chance of surviving.

“Go, Father Sebastian, for the love of all that’s holy,” the neighbor begged. “She called for you. She insists your prayer will reach the Lord faster.”

Sebastian ignored his cassock. He threw on a jacket, stuffed a travel crucifix into his pocket, and dashed outside. The rain blinded him instantly. His feet slipped on the sodden clay. He fell three times in the dark, bloodying his knee, but stubbornly ran on.

Inside the hut smelled of blood, acrid sweat, and primal terror. That smell seeps into rooms where life battles death to the death for the right to remain. The mother lay flat on a mattress. Pale, strands of wet hair stuck to her face. Beside her, the local midwife bustled — a squat woman who had delivered hundreds of infants. Now her face was twisted with fear.

“It’s not coming,” she grunted instead of a greeting. “The baby is stuck. I’ve tried everything.”

Sebastian stepped to the bed and took the woman’s wrist. The skin burned. The fever was too fierce for a woman rapidly losing strength.

“I’m here,” Sebastian squeezed her fingers. “You’re not alone.”

“Father,” the woman breathed barely audibly, “death doesn’t frighten me. I’m terrified that she will die before being born.”

“She will be born,” he pronounced, masking his inner panic. “You will manage. God is merciful.”

“God,” a pale, bitter smile appeared on the mother’s lips. Sebastian felt uneasy. “He’s already buried my first two. Why on earth would he spare a third?”

He had no answer. Silently, Sebastian took out the metal crucifix, laid it on the woman’s heaving belly, and began to pray. All the Latin formulas from seminary flew out of his head. The prayer was born in his solar plexus — a dull, furious language of a man who realized his absolute helplessness before eternity.

“Lord,” he rasped, “leave this child alone. Don’t touch this woman. They’ve cried all their tears. The parish won’t survive another death. I won’t survive it.”

Tears ran down his face, mixing with the rain on his skin. He stopped being ashamed of weakness.

Inés cried out an hour later. The infant’s scream was so piercing that the flimsy walls of the hut seemed to shudder. The midwife crossed herself frantically and laughed at the same time. She lifted the bloody bundle above the bed:

“A girl! Alive! Just like you, you fool!”

The mother sobbed. Sebastian stood in the corner, wiping tears from his cheeks and gazing at the miracle that had defied the laws of nature. The prayer had reached its destination. It had cost much blood, but heaven had answered.

A seditious, dark thought seared his consciousness, but Sebastian hurriedly silenced himself. On such a day, celebrating life’s triumph should be done without doubt.

Inés was brought for baptism on the third day. The mother had barely recovered from the difficult birth. She moved slowly, leaning her palm against stone projections in the walls. Each step cost her enormous physical effort. She was driven forward by a panic fear: without holy water, the child would not last long. Behind her already stood two small headstones. The first infant had died of a sudden fever at three months — fell silent in his sleep and stopped breathing. The second had been stillborn; they had only managed to name him posthumously. Each subsequent pregnancy became for her a mute, furious war with heaven. A silent plea to leave her at least one living soul.

Sebastian remembered Inés’s father by his hands. They were the canonical hands of a hereditary fisherman. The skin was permanently saturated with salt. Sea salt had burrowed so deep into the pores that neither soap nor concentrated lye could wash it out. Under his nails was a black, age-old rim — the result of round-the-clock work with wet nets and lead sinkers. Calluses crisscrossed with twine covered his palms in a thick, horny layer. Holding his newborn daughter, those gigantic hands trembled finely. The man was ruled by wild fear. He was afraid of scratching her porcelain flesh with his rough fingers, afraid of squeezing too hard and breaking the fragile bones. Afraid that the girl would instantly evaporate like a cooling dawn dream.

The mother stood pale, with a hunted, utterly lifeless gaze. Her face bore the specific weariness of people who have been burnt too often by false hope. She did not smile. The woman hypnotized her daughter with her eyes, as if the girl were the last match in a wet box. The match after whose extinguishing would come final, eternal darkness.

She looked at Sebastian as her supreme intercessor. In her understanding, the young priest was the last instance. The advocate obliged to persuade the merciless judge upstairs to annul the death sentence.

“What have you named her?” Sebastian asked, though the parishioners had already informed him of the name the day before.

“Inés,” the mother breathed. Her voice sounded muffled — the way people speak when they are panically afraid of attracting the attention of the one from whom it is wiser to hide. “After her grandmother. She lived to be a hundred and faded not from frailty. She simply decided it was time. I ask heaven for the same for my daughter: that she feel no fear of death, nor run toward it.”

“A strong name,” Sebastian nodded. “She will have a long life.”

The font stood by the window, where a pale, diffused light entered. In that dim light, the darkened bronze shimmered with the deep gold of ancient patina. The metal smoldered from within, like embers under a layer of gray ash. The day before, Sebastian had personally scrubbed the basin with river sand and coarse salt, striving for an even matte sheen. He desperately wanted to make the sacrament beautiful. The Creator is indifferent to earthly tinsel. Sebastian did it for the frightened mother. He dreamed of giving her a celebration, of driving from her memory a ritual dictated by animal fear for her child’s life.

The water felt pleasantly cool. The church’s stone masonry accumulated coastal dampness year-round. But the second Sebastian dipped his hand into the font, his fingers were stung by pure ice. The water cut to the bone. The specific, paralyzing cold of mountain springs in deep winter, which instantly numbs the wrists.

He reflexively pulled his hand back. A slight, convulsive tremor of his fingers went almost unnoticed by the parents standing nearby. But Sebastian himself registered the glitch. And went cold inside.

“What’s wrong with me?” a short pulse beat in his head. “Nerves. Chronic lack of sleep, endless roof repairs. I need to stop fixating on my own fatigue.”

He lowered his hand again. This time, the font met him with its usual, moderately cool October water. The delusion vanished.

A slanting sunbeam pierced the fly-blown, cobwebbed, bubbled glass. The windows hadn’t been washed since the parish’s founding. The light slid along the bronze rim, making the metal flare up. The sharp flash ricocheted straight into Sebastian’s eyes. Blindingly. Painfully. As if a sewing needle had been driven into his pupil with a swing.

He squeezed his eyes shut. Under his lids, violet and dirty-orange circles immediately spun, like a rainbow gasoline film in a puddle. Sebastian shook his head, shaking off the haze.

“Father Sebastian?” his mother called, noticing his hesitation. “Are you unwell?”

“Nothing,” he forced a habitual smile, smoothing his face. “Everything is fine. Just the sun blinded me.”

Sebastian scooped up the holy water with a silver ladle and approached Inés in the midwife’s arms. The girl slept a deep, serene sleep. Infants are in absolute peace, unaware of the cruelty of the world that has met them.

“Ego te baptizo in nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti,” the ancient Latin words sounded confidently and clearly beneath the vaults of the old, storm-blown parish. Sebastian sang this prayer. He poured into it all his love, hope, and primordial faith.

Drops of water touched Inés’s forehead. The girl instantly opened her eyes. Huge, dark, they shone with frightening adult attention. The baby hypnotized Sebastian, as if fixing his face permanently in her memory.

“Look at that, she’s not crying,” the midwife marveled quietly. “Usually the parishioners go deaf from the screaming.”

“She feels safe,” Sebastian carefully took the bundle.

“The hardest part of serving is seeing in a child’s clean eyes the shadow of future adult suffering already taking root.”

The heavy thought seared his consciousness, but he locked it inside as usual. A baptismal celebration demanded pastoral calm.

The weight of the infant was imperceptible. A tiny living soul locked in a fragile frame of thin bones and hot blood. But in that weightlessness was concentrated the whole world: the superstitious fear of the mother, the mute prayer of the exhausted father, and the deaf hope of the poor parish that Inés would remain on earth longer than her dead brothers.

Sebastian held her with the utmost care. His labor-crippled, cracked-by-salt-and-sand fingers barely touched the thin flannel diaper. Beneath the fabric, a tiny heart beat desperately and fast.

“Inés,” he whispered barely audibly into her face. “Now you are under protection.”

That October day, he did not doubt the power of his words. Sebastian sacredly believed that the drops of holy water had built an invisible, impregnable fortress around the child, capable of repelling any illness, accident, or human malice. God had accepted his furious, tear-soaked prayer by the mother’s bedside. Heaven had given the green light.

He believed this without looking back.

People cling to the crucifix solely out of terror of reality. They desperately need someone to promise to stop their personal hell. Sebastian looked at the exhausted mother, on whose lips a timid smile appeared for the first time in a long while.

He had taken on the role of the one who guaranteed that salvation. And he himself unconditionally believed his own promises.

After the baptism came a meal. The table was set in poor fisher style: boiled cod with potatoes, stale bread, olives, and young wine. Inés’s father had saved that bottle for a special occasion. They drank from clay mugs covered in cracks and crudely glued with resin. The sourish taste of the young wine compensated for the shabbiness of the vessels. The room filled with laughter. The locals vied with each other admiring Inés’s beauty, prophesied her father’s stubborn temperament, and hoped the coming year would bring a better catch.

Sebastian sat at the head of the table. He genuinely felt part of this home. He had been invited to share in the joy without perfunctory politeness. His presence made the celebration real.

“Father Sebastian,” the fisherman raised his mug. “To our daughter. And to you. You pulled her back from the other side.”

“It is God’s will,” Sebastian replied.

“You were the instrument of that will,” the man insisted stubbornly. “You did not back down from the fever. You prayed until dawn. You stayed with us.”

Sebastian opened his mouth to object but said nothing. He silently absorbed the gratitude. In that second, in the depths of his consciousness, something alien stirred. Barely perceptible, dark, lying in wait until its hour.

“Holiness demands daily sacrifices, but the first to burn on this altar are pity and reason.”

He hurriedly drowned the thought with a gulp of wine. Smoothed his face and forced himself to smile again.

Late that night, Sebastian locked himself in his cell. A tiny confined space: whitewashed walls, a wooden cot with a straw-stuffed mattress, and a simple crucifix above the headboard. On the desk lay papers, liturgical books, and an empty mug. The Spartan life completely suited him. He needed no extra comforts.

3

Levante Coast, five years later. Summer.

The air of Levante smelled of a thunderstorm, but we stubbornly kept pretending it was just an ordinary evening fog. The sun was dipping behind the rocky horizon, throwing out slanting, dying rays. The sea’s surface had lost its blue, taking on a heavy, mercurial density. The water looked like dead molten metal poured in an even layer into the bay. At the very edge of the sky, clouds advanced — bluish-black with ragged crimson edges. A massive bruise on the heavens warned of a catastrophe no one spoke of aloud.

The village was draining the last drops of familiar bustle from the departing day. Down by the pier, men tightened knots on rotten rigging, lazily cursing petty debts for last night’s drink. The fishermen’s boots were caked with dried scales and gray slimy mud. Wooden crates of the morning’s catch were moved with a crash. The air was saturated with salt, rotting algae, and guts. Fat gulls circled the masts, their sharp, metallic cries piercing the ears — the birds haggled fiercely with the port over every discarded sardine head.

Sebastian sat motionless at a corner table on the tavern’s terrace. Above him, an old, dying fig tree spread its gnarled branches, blocking the last of the daylight. The wooden sign reading “The Weary Sailor” had long since peeled in the scorching sun. The blue anchor painted on it had lost its shape over time, now resembling a giant meat hook for butchering carcasses. Under the thatched awning, which rustled dryly at the slightest draft, three tables were crowded. The cheap red-checked oilcloth felt sticky under the fingers from spilled cheap sherry and olive oil. The locals didn’t notice the dirt. The people of Levante had unlearned disgust altogether. Complaints were considered an impermissible luxury here — a privilege of those whose roofs didn’t leak, whose pantries held a ham, and whose sons hadn’t stayed to feed the fish after last autumn’s storm.

Before the priest cooled a tiny earthenware cup. The black coffee resembled liquid tar. The local proprietor brewed the grounds at dawn, and by evening the drink had turned into a thick, bitter sludge that had to be swallowed with effort. Sebastian sipped the bitterness mechanically. After five years in Levante, his taste buds had dulled, replaced by habit. He had learned not to notice the perpetual draft under the dome of his parish. He was used to the fact that parishioners’ donations couldn’t buy even a dozen decent candles — people paid for communion with dried fish and salted olives. Each year, his personal prayers grew shorter, and the ringing emptiness between phrases — deeper and longer.

At the next table, playing cards flew onto the oilcloth with a crack. The old, greasy deck with bent, frayed corners passed from hand to hand with such fury that the men seemed to be playing for the right to live, not for pathetic, worn pesetas. Stocky Luis, whose face smallpox had turned into something like lunar crust, dealt with a special Gypsy flair. His muscular arms, covered in blue prison tattoos from his time on trading barges, flashed in the half-darkness like two gray wings.

“Three points,” Luis threw a king and queen onto the sticky oilcloth. He took a deep drag on his roll-up. A suffocating stream of contraband tobacco, bought around the corner from the port, billowed from the gray paper. “Pay up the pesetas, cabrones.”

“Hold your horses,” Manolo cut him off. The old man squinted; his wrinkled face resembled the hollow bark of an ancient pine. “Your queen looks more like a port porn star than royalty. I’ll see your winnings when the wind changes.”

The conversation at the table instantly turned into a furious roar about football. Valencia had lost miserably to Barcelona, and this defeat was discussed more loudly by the local rabble than the extortionate prices of middlemen for a kilo of fresh sardines. Luis slammed his fist on the table. The cut-glass tumblers jumped. Dark red liquid spilled over the edge, instantly filling the network of fine cracks in the plastic tablecloth.

“The ref was bought!” Luis rasped, spittle flying. “He was bought in the locker room, before the first whistle!”

“What’s the whistle got to do with it?” Manolo spat copiously on the tavern’s dirt floor. “The forwards could barely drag their feet. I saw the broadcast in Madrid myself. They’ve got boiled macaroni instead of muscles.”

Sebastian sipped the cooling coffee sludge and caught himself feeling a strange peace. This everyday, down-to-earth noise, without a drop of theological strain, healed him. Here there was no God, no devil, no eternal questions without answers. Ordinary men arguing to the death about things that weren’t worth a broken penny. In that simplicity lay a special, animal wisdom. He was only beginning to recognize it now, when his former faith no longer warmed him from within, and the heavy cassock sat on his thin shoulders like a stranger’s stolen coat.

People cling to the crucifix solely out of terror of reality. But sometimes, with equal success, they cling to football, greasy cards, or the price of a bucket of fish. A sports score had ultimate, final clarity. Unlike prayer, where you scream into the void until you bleed, never knowing whether someone picked up the phone at the other end or whether the line has been cut forever.

Sebastian lazily pulled toward him a scrap of a morning newspaper someone had left behind. The paper was crumpled, stained with brown coffee rings and greasy fingerprints. He glanced at the headlines. The Madrid chronicle’s typefaces screamed about vandalism at the Poblenou cemetery in Barcelona. Unknown persons had overturned heavy marble slabs, drawn pentagrams in soot on the walls of family chapels, and torn gilded crucifixes from the graves of old prelates. The municipal police dryly reported: the incident did not resemble an ordinary drunken prank. The investigation was pursuing the possibility of a ritual cult.

Lower down, at the very bottom of the page, a short paragraph about missing teenagers lurked. Sixteen, seventeen, and nineteen years old. They had left a nightclub in the Gràcia district and vanished into the darkness. Families demanded the Civil Guard be deployed; inspectors routinely threw up their hands. The text occupied just a few lines, without details or photographs. Such facts were rapidly becoming routine. Reporters no longer put these disappearances on the front pages, pushing human grief to the depths of the crime blotter — closer to bicycle thefts and knife fights in port bordellos.

Sebastian pushed the newspaper scrap away with disgust and sucked in the last of the coffee grounds. The brew behaved predictably — it brought pure bitterness. In this hole, absolutely everything was bitter: the drinks, the morning news, his own thoughts. The newspapermen were clearly inflating the scale of the tragedy for penny profits. Circulation required regular feeding on fresh blood. The ordinary citizen had to be kept constantly on a leash of fear, so that he would buy the latest issue, enjoy the illusion of being informed, and faithfully feed his inner demons.

The Satanic panic on the streets is just a mirror. The mob saw its own hidden desires there and got frightened. No one will voluntarily admit the obvious: the Darkness they frantically search for in the corners of other people’s lives has long since taken up residence in their own bedrooms.

On the fly-blown windowsill, right next to a pot with the dry skeleton of a geranium, an old transistor radio wheezed. The device was all crackle and interference. Through the white noise came the monotonous, sleepy drone of the announcer: in the capital, the police had set up a cordon around a burned-down church supply shop; the bishopric of Levante had expressed official concern over the wave of vandalism; the Minister of the Interior once again called on the nation not to give in to hysteria. The official’s speech was lost in the tobacco smoke. Not a single person on the terrace turned their head toward the window. Luis and Manolo continued their self-forgotten shouting about the bought referee. State radio was for them as much free acoustic furniture as the surf or the port birds.

Sebastian latched onto their deafness: “What if these louts are right? What if all this noise subsides as soon as the wind changes direction? What if the Creator really does keep His hand on the pulse, and we’ve simply been blinded by momentary fuss?”

At the very bottom of his consciousness, a worm stirred. It did not show itself, but Sebastian physically felt that slithering, blind movement beneath his ribs. The way you feel a foreign presence in a completely dark, locked room. You don’t yet see the guest’s face, but you know in the back of your neck: you are no longer alone.

And then, through the transistor’s wheezing and the fishermen’s drunken swearing, a dry, rhythmic knocking cut through. The wooden soles of children’s shoes pounded furiously on the terrace’s stone flags.

“Father Sebastian! Father Sebastian!”

Inés burst under the thatched awning like a gust of squall wind. At five years old, the girl possessed such nuclear energy that she could single-handedly dispel the eternal gloom of this impoverished, faded coast. She wore a cotton dress. Once the fabric had been white, but now it was covered in gray street dust and sticky yellow stains from ripe oranges, which Inés consumed by the kilo. Her jet-black hair stuck out in stiff cowlicks in all directions. The girl manically despised combs, preferring to race through the port’s back alleys like a disheveled fury. The local old women regularly shook their heads behind her, croaking under their breaths: “That girl’s not growing up right, not right at all.”

She flew headlong into his table, clinging with a death grip to the sticky edge of the oilcloth and hung on the wooden edge, swinging her skinny legs.

“What’s all the shouting for?” Sebastian quickly moved the earthenware cup out of the way, saving what was left of his coffee grounds from her clumsy lunge. “The adults are resting, Inés.”

“I’m not an adult,” the girl flashed her jet-black eyes defiantly. “I’m allowed to make noise.”

“Convenient position,” Sebastian couldn’t help but smile.

Inés lightning-fast snatched the old wooden rosary from his fingers. The worn beads had been restrung on new tough thread three times already. The mechanical fingering of those pieces of wood had long become an obsessive habit — his fingers slid over the wood whenever his thoughts began to scatter chaotically.

“Give those back,” he ordered without malice, holding out his hand. “They’re not a toy.”

“What are they?” Inés began twirling the rosary in front of her nose like a cheap port rattle.

“A tool for counting prayers.”

“Why count them?”

“So there are many of them,” Sebastian tried to get away with a simple formulation.

“And when there are a lot, does God hear better?”

Sebastian froze. The child’s short question caught him in the gut like a heavy brass knuckle. A five-year-old girl had involuntarily articulated the formula that gray Vatican theologians had been hammering at for centuries in their cathedral exams.

“He hears every one,” he said dully after a long pause. “Even if it’s the only one.”