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

“Then why do you need so many beads?” Inés deftly wound the cord around her tiny wrist, turning the rosary into a bulky bracelet.

He had no answer. Sebastian simply shook his head silently, hiding his eyes.

“You’re a philosopher, Inés.”

“No,” the girl instantly grew serious. “I’m just hungry. Give me some bread.”

At the next table, Luis guffawed richly as he dealt the cards. “Holy water, Father Sebastian, doesn’t just wash away sins — it sharpens the tongue. You won’t outrun that little nuisance on a crooked mare.”

“The important thing is that you can’t fool her,” the priest replied.

He broke off a thick heel from yesterday’s loaf, already hardened, and handed it to the child. Inés sank her teeth into the crust with a death grip, crunching, and closed her eyes blissfully. As if she were chewing not a cheap stale crumb, but a ripe fruit of paradise that had fallen from heaven straight into her hands.

“Did you go out on the boat with your father today?” he asked, watching her swift jaws.

“Yes,” Inés nodded, swallowing a chunk. “We hauled in three fish. One huge one, and two tiny ones. Mum squealed that the little ones should be let go because it’s a shame. And Dad said, since they’re already dead in the nets, it’s too late for pity — we have to eat them.”

“Logical,” Sebastian remarked.

“Dad was just hungry,” Inés cut in, licking the crumbs from her palm. “When your belly’s empty, the pity-mechanism doesn’t work.”

Manolo choked on his wine, dissolving into a dry, barking cough.

“Now that’s philosophy,” the old man wheezed, wiping his lips with the back of his horny, salt-soaked hand. “They couldn’t have wrung that out of me even at the end of my life. And she just said it. Five years old, just think of it.”

“Children see what we’ve forgotten how to notice,” Sebastian said quietly, setting his cup on the table. “They don’t need to dissect the world to understand its essence. It’s enough just to look.”

Meanwhile, Inés had managed to smear her face in breadcrumbs. On her pale cheek was a dark greasy streak — a trace of olive oil. She spun in place, rhythmically striking the stone flags with the soles of her wooden shoes: clack-clack-clack-clack. The sound resembled tap-dancing. The little girl was beating out that dry, feverish rhythm as if transmitting music that only she could hear.

Sebastian listened to that knocking, and in the back of his neck he felt the remaining warmth leaving the air. Wood on stone. Clack-clack-clack-clack. The sound was counting down the seconds to an explosion. Like stealthy footsteps in the darkness, when the pursuer himself is not yet visible, but you already feel his approach on your skin.

“Father Sebastian, why’d you freeze?” Luis looked up from the cards, examining his motionless face. “A fly fall in your coffee?”

“No,” Sebastian shook his head, shaking off the stupor. “Just… thought I saw something.”

He turned the cup over, drinking the cooled grounds in one gulp. The bitter residue burned his throat.

“Inés,” he called, rising from the bench. “Come on, I’ll walk you home. It’s late. It’ll be dark soon.”

“Are you afraid of the dark?” the girl squinted slyly, tilting her head.

“I’m not afraid of the dark,” Sebastian buttoned his cassock. “But I am afraid your mother will kill me if you get lost in the port.”

“Mum doesn’t kill anyone,” Inés laughed brightly, spinning on her heel. “She doesn’t even cut up the fish. Dad does that. He has a big knife.”

“Then let’s just go.” Sebastian held out his hand to her.

She ignored his palm, gripping his index finger tightly. In the gathering evening fog, they looked strange: the tall, bony figure of the priest in rough black vestments and the little girl in the gray cotton dress, holding onto him as if he were the only unshakable support on this shore.

The fisherman’s house stood on the very edge, at the water’s edge. The whitewashed walls turned pink at sunset, absorbing the sun’s farewell rays. In the cramped yard, rough fishing gear hung on lines along with faded T-shirts. In the corner, in a rickety wooden cage, a rooster stood motionless. The bird had refused food for a second day, gazing at the yard with a weary, almost human contempt.

Sebastian walked Inés to the gate but did not go inside.

“I’ll stop by tomorrow,” he said, placing his hand on her shoulder. “Tell your father we need to discuss repairing the church roof.”

“I’ll tell him,” Inés nodded. “Will you bring bread tomorrow?”

“Bread?”

“Well, yes. Today you came with bread. Will you bring some tomorrow?”

He smiled softly.

“I’ll bring some. Definitely with bread.”

“Good.” The girl turned sharply and ran toward the porch, slamming the door behind her.

Sebastian lingered by the fence, listening to the muffled sounds from inside: the soft, anxious voice of the mother and the hoarse, weary mutter of the father. Then he turned and walked toward his parish.

The air grew dense, palpable. A thick fog crept in from the sea. In that whitish veil, the rare lights of the village seemed ghostly, flickering, ready at any moment to go out and leave the coast in absolute darkness. Sebastian quickened his pace, but the dusk gathered faster. Darkness enveloped him at the very threshold of the church, as he fumbled for the keys in his cassock pocket.

Inside, he lit only a single candle. The lone flame flickered, as if frightened of its own presence in the vast empty nave. Outside, the ocean rumbled dully, and from somewhere deep in the village came the rare, mournful barking of a dog.

Sebastian knelt before the solea. The phrases of prayer would not come to mind. He simply sat on the icy slabs, his shoulder blades against the stone wall, hypnotized by the candle flame.

He lost count of the minutes, dissolved in that stupor. Time seemed to have leaked out of the building. And suddenly, the silence was torn apart by a knock. Rhythmic, dry, echoing not in his ears but beneath his ribs, right in his heart.

Clack-clack-clack-clack.

Sebastian lunged upward. His breath caught; his pulse hammered wildly in his throat. He rushed to the door and heaved the heavy oak panel open.

On the threshold stood Inés’s father. The fisherman’s skin had turned gray as cooling ash, and in his eyes was frozen a wild, primal terror — the terror of a child who has witnessed something unforgivable. The man smelled of salt, damp, and sharp human fear.

“Father Sebastian,” he exhaled, and that strained, broken sound barely resembled his former voice. “Quickly. Come with me. Something… something terrible is happening to her.”

Sebastian did not waste seconds on questions. He just grasped the collar of his cassock tighter — it turned out he had not taken it off since returning — and dashed outside. He ran through the blind coastal darkness, stumbling blindly over roadside boulders. His feet felt no blows; his mind refused to register the night chill and fear. The priest was driven solely by blind inertia: his running speed now equaled the salvation of the child he had once personally washed in holy water and whose safety he had promised before heaven.

The door of the hut had been torn from its hinges and propped from the inside with a rusty boathook. The room smelled of sweat-soaked wool, vinegar, and a suffocating, metallic odor of fresh blood — Inés’s mother had scratched her own cheeks to the flesh. She sat on the earthen floor by the threshold, hugging her knees, banging the back of her head rhythmically against the doorframe. With each blow, her gray headscarf slipped down her shoulders. In the corner, squeezed between a chest and the wall, stood her older daughter. The twelve-year-old had bitten her lower lip so hard that a dark trickle had already covered her chin and was dripping onto her shirt collar.

Sebastian stepped to the mattress and forced himself to look.

Inés was not merely lying. Her small body was arched backward, supported only by the back of her head and her heels. Her five-year-old ribs were drawn so tight that every cartilage showed through the cotton of her dress. The fingers of her left hand were unnaturally twisted outward; her nails dug into her palm with a dry crack. From the girl’s open mouth came a frequent, wheezing rattle — air struggled through her clenched teeth, pushing flakes of grayish foam onto her chin. Her eyelids were rolled upward, exposing the whites and a network of burst red vessels.

Sebastian dropped to his knees, nearly shattering his kneecaps on the bare floor. He reached out and pressed his fingers to her forehead. The child’s skin did not just burn — it vibrated with the frantic pulse beneath her temples. Sebastian felt as if he had touched a red-hot iron sheet on a kitchen stove. The heat instantly sweated his own palms.

“Inés,” he grabbed her left wrist, trying to straighten the twisted fingers. “Inés, look at me. It’s me. I brought bread.”

The girl’s bones did not yield. Sebastian pulled harder, but the fragile child’s hand felt cast, iron, filled with an unbearable, alien weight. And the child’s palm was icy. That cold instantly penetrated his skin, rose up his forearm, and pricked him under the heart. Just as five years earlier, the icy cold at the bottom of the copper font had made him snatch back his hand. Now that ice lived inside Inés.

Burning head and dead, stiffened fingers. The girl was torn in two: half of her body burned in fire, half froze in a coffin.

In the child’s dilated, frozen pupils trembled the reflection of the tallow candle. To Sebastian, it seemed he was looking into a well, at the bottom of which black, stagnant water stirred.

He tore open his cassock collar, pulling out the metal crucifix. His fingers slipped on the silver; sweat flooded his eyelids, blurring his sight.

“Pater noster, qui es in caelis…” Latin burst from his throat in a hoarse, frightened bark.

He prayed, almost hammering the words into the child’s face, forcing himself to believe that these phrases still had power. He repeated “adveniat regnum tuum,” gripping the crucifix so hard that the sharp edges of the cross cut through his old construction calluses, and warm blood crept across his palm.

And suddenly, the tap-dance of her ribs stopped. The air in the hut became dense as wool fleece. Everything went deaf. Beyond the open window, where a moment ago the ocean had rolled and the port gulls had cried, an absolute, unnatural silence fell. As if all of Levante had been sealed under a glass bell.

Inés’s jaw closed with a dry click, then slid down again. Her lips began to move, slapping faintly against each other.

And she spoke.

The voice remained childish and clear. But the words coming from that tiny larynx belonged to a seasoned theologian. She chanted Latin without a single stumble, with a terrible, dead speed.

“…Spiritus Sancti, et Filii, et Patris…”

Sebastian stopped breathing. Every sacred word was flying backward, mutilated, turned inside out. The syllables “Sanctificetur nomen tuum” twisted into a vile, serpentine hiss. That childish timbre, grinding the ancient curse, struck Sebastian’s eardrums with such force that his ears rang and violet, oily circles swam before his eyes.

“Stop…” He tried to cover her mouth with his bloody palm, but his hand went numb, refusing to obey. “Inés, stop…”

The girl did not blink. Her empty, glassy eyes stared past his shoulder, straight at the wall.

Behind him came a dull crack — the fisherman had fallen to his knees on the earthen floor, his shoulder blades pressed into the whitewash, and he held his older daughter so tightly against himself that she choked and began to thrash silently in his arms. The mother howled. It was not human weeping — from her mouth came a wild, animal keening, the kind of sound a bitch makes over her crushed puppies.

And the child continued to spew inverted phrases. The canonical text was breaking the space of the hut, and Sebastian physically felt the low ceiling beams beginning to sag slowly, sealing them all in this room like a crate of fishing gear. At that moment, an evil, clear thought seared his brain: he had brought this here himself. Five years ago, he had been a coward, masking the icy shock in the font as ordinary fatigue, so as not to shatter his own well-fed, comfortable peace.

The air of Levante smelled of a thunderstorm, but we stubbornly kept pretending it was just an ordinary evening fog.

Inés fell silent mid-word. Her jaw closed with a short click. The arched spine went limp instantly; her head rolled heavily onto the straw mattress. The girl’s breathing evened out, deep and slow. Her pupils contracted. She was simply sleeping the calm, serene sleep of a healthy child.

Sebastian remained on his knees, his fingers still convulsively gripping her stiffened wrists. He stared at her pale face and understood that he could not remember a single prayer. His head was empty. Because, on his skin between his shoulder blades, right at the back of his neck, he felt someone’s fixed, heavy gaze. In the darkest corner of the room, by the chest of fishing gear, someone was sitting. Sebastian did not see a silhouette, but he physically felt it: this invisible guest was not about to growl or lunge at him. He had simply crossed one leg over the other and was smiling silently, condescendingly, in the darkness. Like a man who had known from the very beginning how this game would end, and was now lazily waiting for the priest to admit his defeat.

4

ARCHIVE: Newspaper La Vanguardia (Barcelona), issue of June 24, 1987.

“Investigative units of the Civil Guard of Catalonia report the detention of three members of an underground group in the port area of Mataró. During a search of an abandoned dock, surgical instruments, traces of cocaine, and sixteen consecrated hosts previously stolen from the parish of Santa Anna were discovered. According to preliminary criminal reports, the value of a single dry host on the black market of Madrid and Barcelona reached a record forty thousand pesetas this June. A representative of the Ministry of the Interior, in an official statement, called on parish priests to strengthen the security of tabernacles and not to succumb to press speculation regarding the ritual nature of these crimes. The investigation insists on the theory of an organized network of drug traffickers using church property to smuggle hallucinogens.”

The sun rose over the coast with the same lazy precision with which, the night before, the Darkness had broken the bones of a five-year-old girl. It crept over the horizon slowly, as if weighing whether it was worth appearing at all in a world where even children’s prayers are turned inside out. The first rays fell on the sea, and the water sparkled — a cold, indifferent gleam that did not warm but only emphasized how deep and dark it was beneath that shimmering surface. Fishing boats swayed at anchor, their masts creaking with that dreary regularity that belongs to old bones being turned in sleep. In the port, movement had already begun: someone moved crates, someone swore, someone spat over the side and crossed himself, looking at the rising sun — out of habit, not faith.

Sebastian had been sitting in the “Weary Sailor” tavern since the fisherman’s house door had closed — probably about four hours ago. He did not remember how he had come here. Did not remember if he had sat down on the chair himself or if someone had placed him there like a doll whose strings had snapped. He sat, gripping the edge of the table, staring at one spot — a stain of red wine that had soaked into the tablecloth perhaps in the last century and now darkened in the middle of the checkered oilcloth like a dried wound.

His cassock was heavy. The night’s sweat had soaked the fabric on his back, and now it cooled his shoulder blades, sticking to his body, reminding him that he had run, stumbling, falling to his knees, getting up and running again — to where Inés lay on the bed, and darkness swam in her empty eyes. The collar had dug into his neck, chafed his skin, and every movement of his head responded with an unpleasant rawness, as if someone were rubbing his neck with sandpaper. He tried to adjust the collar, but his fingers would not obey — they were rough, swollen from how he had gripped the crucifix all night, pressing the metal into his palm until it bled.

On his right palm, at the base of his thumb, a dark, brown scab had formed. He looked at it, and it seemed to him that this scratch resembled a crack in the wall of the old church — through which the wind blows inside, and no one knows how to seal it. Under the table, trying not to attract attention, he began to pick off the scab with his fingernail. The skin peeled off in small flakes, fell to the floor, mixing with dirt and breadcrumbs. The blood flowed again — warm, alive, and it was the only warmth he felt that morning.

Around him, life buzzed. Ordinary, morning, human life that knew nothing and wanted to know nothing of what had happened in the fisherman’s hovel a few hundred meters away. Luis sat at the next table, crunching his teeth into a toasted slice thickly spread with garlic and crushed tomato. The burnt crust crackled under his jaws, crumbled, and olive oil dripped onto his chin, running down his stiff stubble, leaving greasy trails. He chewed broadly, with his mouth open — a habit ingrained from years of working on deck, where the wind blows in your face and you have to swallow fast before the catch and the bread are carried overboard by a storm wave. The sound of his chewing seemed disgusting to Sebastian, too wet, smacking — the way boots are pulled out of coastal mud with a heavy sucking sound.

“Hey, Father Sebastian,” Luis called out, catching his glazed stare. “You’re quiet as a corpse on a slab today. Have a beer, you’ll come back to life.”

“I don’t want any,” Sebastian answered.

His voice came out hoarse, flat, as if his vocal cords were rusted from long disuse.

“Suit yourself,” Luis noisily swallowed from a heavy clay mug. Thick white foam settled on his upper lip, and he licked it off with a broad movement of his tongue, like a well-fed cat. “Beer in this heat is medicine. It gets the blood moving, clears the thoughts. And yours, I see, are murky as swamp sludge.”

“I’m fine,” Sebastian forced the words out, but he himself felt how falsely they echoed off the tavern walls.

Manolo sat opposite Luis, his head low over the table. His face, dried by the sun to the consistency of a baked apple, was frozen. The old man, with manic concentration, picked at his teeth with a sharp wooden splinter. He was digging out the remains of yesterday’s cod as if solving a trigonometric equation on which the survival of the coast depended. The splinter was thin, and he wielded it with surgical precision, periodically sucking in air with a whistle and spitting small crumbs onto the dirt floor.

“Hear what’s going on in the capital?” the old man asked without interrupting his task. “Madrid again. A church torn apart. They didn’t break into the safe, didn’t steal the golden candlesticks. They took the tabernacle. Along with the Blessed Sacrament.”

“Stupid bastards,” Luis continued moving his jaws without changing rhythm. “What the hell do they want a piece of unleavened dough for? You couldn’t get a cup of cheap sherry for it in the port.”

“The papers say cultists have appeared,” Manolo finally pulled the splinter from his mouth and pointed it at Luis. “Satanists, all sorts. They hold Black Masses in basements. They need consecrated hosts for their rituals. Without them, they can’t summon the devil from the abyss.”

“Pfft,” Luis waved his hand dismissively, nearly knocking over a glass. “The Madrid newspaper boys blow it all out of proportion. They just want to boost circulation and scare the old women. Satanists, devil-worshippers… And where are these Satanists? Have you seen them? I’ve never laid eyes on them.”

“They’re in Madrid, in Barcelona,” Manolo grumbled stubbornly, sticking the splinter back into his teeth. “And here? Here we’re a godforsaken hole. Even the devil would be ashamed to come here. It stinks of fish for three miles around, and one dead sardine for the whole district. Who needs us here with our parishes?”

Manolo laughed, and Luis joined in — loud, rolling laughter, reminiscent of the grinding of large pebbles that the sea noisily rolls along the shore during a storm. Sebastian listened to their dry laughter and felt a dark, almost tangible fury boiling under his ribs. He wanted to overturn the sticky table, grab Luis by the collar of his jacket, and scream into his well-fed, oil-slicked face: “You know nothing! You sit here, eat, drink, crack jokes, while two blocks away a five-year-old girl I baptized is spewing Latin backwards!” But he made no sound. He merely clenched his jaw so hard that the corners of his lips went white, and he fixed his stare on the dirty window.

The glass was cloudy, fly-blown, and covered with streaks from dried night rain. Through that gray film, the sun-drenched port street looked flat, unreal, like a set in a provincial theater whose actors have completely forgotten their lines. The slanting rays pierced the grime, illuminating dusty bands in the air. Sebastian hypnotized the passersby with his gaze. People lazily dragged wicker baskets, hauled wet gear, led children by the hand. They walked their usual paths, unaware that the world around them was already cracking at the seams. That the Darkness was not in Madrid, not on the pages of crime chronicles with their screaming headlines. It had settled here, next door, in a fisherman’s hut by the water’s edge.

The crowd always confuses effect with cause. They search for the devil in junkies’ syringes while he calmly dines in their own homes.

Behind Sebastian, right on the wooden windowsill by the dead flower, a transistor radio wheezed. The tavern keeper had turned it on out of habit, to fill the morning emptiness of the room. From the speaker, through the crackle of static, poured a cheerful, upbeat pop song — one of those summer hits by Mecano that blared from every window. The singer’s voice was cloying, syrupy, like cheap syrup poured generously over spoiled pastries to mask the taste of rotten cream. She carelessly sang about love, beach sand, and how every day turns into a holiday when you’re young and free.

The words seemed utterly empty, but the catchy melody lodged in the memory like a rusty splinter. Sebastian caught himself with horror mechanically playing the tune in his head. He shuddered with physical disgust at himself. How could his mind hum this stupid caramel pop when his ears still rang with the chilling whistle of a child’s voice that had mutilated Latin? How could the human brain switch so easily between primal theological horror and pop garbage, as if flipping a switch on a radio?

Sebastian’s fingers dug into the edge of the table with such force that his knuckles whitened and stretched under the skin. The old wood beneath his palms felt sticky, greasy from hundreds of port hands that had clung to it over the decades. How many people had sat in these chairs before him, how many of them had drunk, eaten, and guffawed, never suspecting that years would pass — and their own children would speak with voices that had never belonged to a human?

“Father Sebastian, why are you so pale?” Luis put down his crust, examining his mask-like face. “You look terrible. Are you unwell?”

“Didn’t sleep well,” Sebastian continued to hypnotize the wine stain.

“Didn’t sleep well,” Manolo snorted. “I poured three bottles of fortified wine down my throat yesterday and slept like a baby. Know why? I don’t fill my head with all that nonsense. You should stop praying to your saints around the clock, live a little like a human being. Have some sherry, ask the owner for fresh fish, find yourself…”