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

The old man abruptly stopped. His gaze fixed on the mended hem of the black cassock, then slid to the silver crucifix, and Manolo swallowed the end of his sentence.

“Find myself what?” Sebastian raised his eyes to him. There was no challenge in the question. Only a burned-out, boundless weariness pulsed in it. Such emptiness would fill this poor port to the brim, the bottom of the sea, and the icy void between dead stars.

“Alright, forget it,” the old man muttered, turning away. “You’re a grown man, you’ll figure it out without parish advice.”

Luis finished his beer and set the heavy clay mug down on the oilcloth with a dull, bone-like thud. He leaned back on the rickety chair, reaching into his jacket pocket for tobacco. He pulled out a crumpled pouch, shook dry crumbs onto a scrap of newspaper, and lazily began to roll a cigarette. His thick, red tongue slid wetly along the edge of the cigarette paper. That brief, rustling sound struck Sebastian as frighteningly similar to the rustle of decayed flesh that had lain too long in the damp earth of Levante.

“So what about that girl from Madrid?” Luis struck a match, lighting up. Foul gray smoke poured from the roll-up. “The one the gendarmes caught at San Isidro cemetery.”

“Not a ‘girl,’ a university student,” Manolo corrected authoritatively. “Nineteen, decent family. It says she willingly went to the graveyard at night with those… devil-worshippers.”

“What difference does it make?” Luis exhaled a stream of smoke through his nostrils. “Instead of studying textbooks, they wander around crypts out of boredom. That’s your progress for you, your post-Franco freedom.”

“The Civil Guard reports claim she was on heroin,” the old man added. “Sounds plausible. Shot up some crap in a den, her mind finally slipped, and she imagined Satan was having conversations with her.”

“With her?” Luis repeated, flicking ash onto the floor.

“With her. With that student.”

“Right, right,” Luis sneered mockingly. “The devil in hell has nothing better to do than listen to the ravings of every drugged-up fool.”

Both fishermen laughed together, a full, satisfied laugh. Sebastian listened to that rolling port laughter, and his jaw cramped with the insane urge to scream. She hadn’t been shooting heroin in alleyways. She wasn’t a crazy fool. The nineteen-year-old student was just an ordinary person who had come face to face with the genuine, not-from-books Darkness. She had met it — and lost instantly, because in this well-fed, indifferent world, no one had taught her how to survive a fight with something that has no human face.

Sebastian remained silent. He fixed his gaze on the edge of the table, clearly understanding: these two men were absolutely right in their blindness. Their armor was cynicism. Their main defense was the stubborn habit of ignoring everything that couldn’t be touched with calloused fingers. They noisily mocked the newspaper horrors from Madrid only because otherwise, they would have to admit the obvious: the world around is not solid, reliable ground, but a thin, crispy crust of ice under which the Darkness seethes.

“What do you think, Father Sebastian?” Luis unexpectedly turned his whole body toward him. “You’re our only expert on holy matters. Do you believe all this Satanic heresy or not?”

Sebastian slowly raised his eyelids. He forced himself to look at Luis — at his greasy, oil-shiny chin, at his small, swollen-from-chronic-port-lack-of-sleep eyes. Then he shifted his gaze to Manolo. The old man had frozen, stopped picking his teeth with the sharp splinter, and stared expectantly at the priest. Sebastian remembered that these people were his direct flock. He was obliged to give them an answer. Some consolation, a dry, hopeful phrase capable of returning them to their habitual, well-fed ignorance.

“I don’t know,” he forced out. “I don’t read the newspapers.”

“That’s right,” Luis approved, noisily exhaling smoke. “Otherwise they’ve stirred up psychosis across Catalonia. Soon the gendarmes will probably forbid sticking your nose out of the house after dark.”

The fisherman forced a laugh, but it died too quickly. Sebastian noticed how Luis’s eyelid twitched convulsively — a small, treacherous nervous tic that betrays a man who says one thing aloud but feels something entirely different on his skin. But Sebastian did not latch onto that detail. He had no strength left. The emptiness was so deep that it seemed his bones inside the cassock would now turn to dry sand and pour out through the frayed hem onto the dirt floor, mixing with the dirt and stale breadcrumbs.

A glass of water had been sitting in front of him for an hour. The water had long since warmed under the midday sun, becoming unpleasantly warm, almost hot. He reached out trembling fingers, touched the glass, and brought it to his lips. But he could not take a sip — his throat instantly seized with a dry spasm, as if someone invisible inside was squeezing his throat with icy fingers. The water physically would not go down. Sebastian put the glass back on the oilcloth with a clink. His hand continued to tremble finely, shamefully — the way an elderly person’s limbs tremble when they know the end is near and there will be no salvation.

His thoughts stubbornly threw him back into the suffocating night half-darkness. Sebastian again saw himself kneeling by Inés’s mattress. He hypnotized her pale, frozen face and wide-open eyes. Those eyes held no fear, no pain, no childish hope. Only a primordial emptiness reigned there. The same dead abyss that Sebastian himself felt inside every night when he prayed until bloody sweat in the empty church and received in return only a ringing, icy vacuum.

“The hardest thing is returning from hell to a place where people continue to play cards, drink sour wine, and joke about taxes,” he thought.

He closed his eyes. In the darkness beneath his lids, Inés appeared — not the string-straight doll with empty eye sockets, but the girl from five years ago, laughing in his hands over the copper basin. Memory instantly supplied the smells: breast milk, baby sweat, and something elusively sweet, like hope. That stuffy aroma lodged somewhere deep in his nasopharynx; Sebastian barely held back a convulsive exhalation — that tactile memory cut at his ribs, because that Inés no longer existed. The Creator had left her only her physical shell. From within, she was being eaten away by Darkness.

He opened his eyes. Luis and Manolo had completely erased him from their space. The fishermen were hoarsely cursing the Madrid government for raising diesel fuel duties on boats again. On the windowsill, the speaker wheezed, switching from the pop rhythm to a slow, mournful ballad. A husky female voice sang of a girl waiting on the rocky shore for her sailor. He had long since sunk, but she kept hypnotizing the dead horizon with her gaze.

Sebastian smiled bitterly. There it was — the purest, most merciless image of faith. You stand on the cliff for years, breaking your nails on the crucifix, while the one you call out to has long since stopped breathing. You simply refuse to admit it. Or you know the truth but stubbornly keep standing, unable to function any other way.