Chapter Two – Hope’s Shadow
Hope’s Shadow
Chapter Two
“We are here today to talk about Him.” Blasphemy to speak of that creature with any form of reverence.
“He came here just a few months ago. And now we wonder, was He our salvation, or the destroyer of our souls?” His voice echoed back at him and he shivered at the tone it returned. Wearily, he leaned into the podium.
“He was evil. Evil came to our planet and swept away our morality, our spiritual ness, our humanity.” Father Paul Deuce looked out upon his congregation. There wasn’t one. The entire church was empty. His lambs had dwindled down to nothing over the last few weeks. No one saw a need for God anymore.
How could he blame them? There was no more death.
He had not heard from the delegation in a month – they wouldn’t even return his calls. His parishioners were merely shadows on the street that would give him a nod in passing but not stop for conversation. They too felt a different calling now that eternity was before them. Most religions had started to entropy quickly. Father Paul – just Paul, now – wondered where God had gone.
Science was the new religion. He had started that movement when he called for mankind to reach for the stars before their planet suffered from the burden of immortals that could still produce offspring. Everyone scanned the headlines for the latest breakthrough in high-speed travel, surfed the ‘Net for the latest rumors of technologies emerging all over the world.
He stepped off the pulpit and began snuffing out candles.
What would he do now? Paul had worked most of his life in the church with a firm grip on his faith, but now he wasn’t sure where he stood. He still believed in God, of course, but he had always enjoyed bringing people to God. Who would go now? Why would they go? In profound silence he locked the church doors and headed home. It was the first time he had ever locked those doors.
A few steps away from the church he realized he may never return to this building to unlock it. He faltered for a moment but then continued on his way. The Archdiocese would be of no help, they hadn’t even attempted to contact him since everyone was spared from Death, and Heaven. His congregation had been a small plot of souls in a rundown neighborhood on the bad side of town. They would not be missed.
It wasn’t a far walk to his small home with barred windows downstairs and a rickety metal balcony that loomed above the sidewalk. Paul didn’t even pay attention to all the kids running on the streets, their skateboard wheels ticking on the cement blocks, the bicycle tire rubber peeling off the hot tar. There had been an anxious anarchy since K’Chul-Kan had left, and the children ran the most wild with their new freedoms.
One or two of the children said hello to Paul as he passed and he nodded in return, but his thoughts were looking out to the future. Where would he go now? What was there left for him to do?
In the not so recent past he would have meditated in prayer looking for the answer, but it seemed a little silly now; only because whatever the answer was, it didn’t matter. If he was inspired to feed the hungry and clothe the needy, why bother? They could not starve to death, could not freeze to death. Of course, his common sense told him that he could at least ease their pain, but it was only a temporary pain now. Everyone had forever.
He rattled through his deadbolt and doorknob locks and gave the sticky door a hearty push. It opened with its usual staccato rhythm as it vibrated on its hinges and he slammed it shut behind him. It was dark in the house. He kept the place in shadow so he wouldn’t be reminded of how small it really was. The dark matched his current mood anyway. He was feeling cynical and aggravated; things that a couple shots of cognac might help, but not completely chase away. These were immortal problems in an immortal world.
He grabbed the bottle from under the counter and a glass from the dusty dish rack and settled down at his small dining table. It was a lonely little table with a solitary chair that faced the living room window looking out upon the street. He lit the candle that some children have given him for Christmas last year and poured three fingers worth of cognac. He reached into his tunic and pulled out the ring of keys for the church. He studied the keys for a moment then tossed them onto the table. They clattered loudly in the quiet house, clanging with an abrupt sound, like the ending of an era.
He had been staring at the keys without touching his drink for over an hour as wax dripped on the table. It was now fully dark outside but he could still hear children outside. The small portion of light the streetlamp provided occasionally drew shadowy figures on the window glass as they passed.
Paul downed the cognac in one swallow, refilling the glass as a slow burn began in the pit of his stomach and crawled up his throat.
He had fallen asleep at the table. The candle was still burning but was lopsided and brighter than usual. The wax had spilled down and enveloped the bottom of his glass, securing it to the table. He couldn’t recall how many glasses he’d had but his head was spinning, the wax was holding the glass as though in admonishment for the amount he had drank already. Paul jerked up with a loud banging on the door. Long, loud banging, – it must have been what originally stirred him, because whoever was banging had run out of patience.
“Father Paul! Father Paul!”
Paul stumbled to the door and stopped. He recognized the voice now. It was Winnie Potter. Winnifredina Potter had been a regular at his church but he hadn’t seen her in weeks, actually longer than that, she’d stopped coming weeks before the visit of K’Chul-Kan. He pulled on the door, it wrenched free quicker than he was expecting and smacked him in the forehead.
Winnie let out a gasp. “I’m so sorry Father. I didn’t mean to wake you, and now look, you’ve hurt yourself!”
Winnie was a child of the streets, around 15 years old. She had been coming to his Wednesday and Sunday services for a good four months. Most of his congregation had been temporary gatherers that migrated into the neighborhood for a short stay then returned to their nomadic life.
“Come on in, Winnie.” Paul shook off the pain but he could feel blood starting to drool down his forehead.
“Let me grab a towel. What brings you here?”
Winnie was nervously grasping her hands as if trying to wash the worry away. “I’m sorry, Father. I just didn’t know where else to go.”
Paul came back out the kitchen holding the towel to his forehead. “What’s going on? And where have you been?”
“I haven’t been good, Father. I haven’t been good at all.”
Paul offered her his lone seat, but she refused. She couldn’t have sat down if tied to the chair. With a sigh, he sat down resting his elbows on the table, cradling his towel covered head. It was through this sideways glance at Winnie that he did see something new.
“You’re pregnant!”
She started to sob. “That’s not all, Father. I’ve been bad. And I don’t know what to do.”
Father Paul Deuce would have had enormous patience with a child that had strayed from God. But he was no longer a Father. He had lost his own meaning of God, had a throbbing head, and was still quite drunk.
“Winnie!” he barked. “You need to stand still, I can’t follow you around, and my damn head is killing me.”
“And quit calling me Father. I’m Paul now. Just Paul.”
That stopped her. “You’re not a Father any more? Is that why the church is closed? Did they,..Fire you?”
“No, Winnie, I wasn’t fired, but the job left me, ok? They all left me. There is no congregation, there is no more church. There is no more God.”
“No God? What do you mean, Fath- ..Paul?”
He started to think how this was certainly not helping his head any, and then realized that the headache had ebbed away. He pulled back the towel and tentatively tapped his fingertip to his cut. It had stopped bleeding, and was in fact, already scabbing over. With a shrug he dropped the towel on the table.
“Where have you been, Winnie?”
It took her over an hour to tell the sad tale he was familiar with in this area. She had fallen into drugs. She had fallen hard. Even knowing she was pregnant hadn’t stopped her from prostituting herself to get more money for more drugs for her and her new boyfriend. And of course, the new boyfriend had started her on the drug trail that led her to her new habit. It was a nasty cycle that never ended in this neighborhood, except maybe in death. She had known she was pregnant when she started visiting his church, – that was why she had started going, but she had hidden herself under baggy clothes and no one was the wiser.
Now she had woken up after a long crash, no longer feeling the need to get high, and wanting to leave her boyfriend quickly. She thought it a miracle she hadn’t miscarried the baby, and that thought alone had brought her to the church. Upon finding it locked, she ran down to Paul’s house to see what had happened.
She finally sat down on the floor; all her nervous energy had been expended telling the tale.
Paul sat in silence after she’d finished. It was a disturbing enough story, but something had been missing.
“Winnie?”
“Yes, Father?” She quickly looked at the floor as he frowned.
“You never mentioned K’Chul-Kan.”
“What’s that?
Paul’s jaw dropped. Too many thoughts were rushing through his mind. She didn’t know? How many didn’t know? How could they not know? Because they’re junkies. They don’t care what happens in the real world; their world is here and now and doesn’t exist outside the small boxes of the city streets.
“It wasn’t a miracle that your baby’s still alive, Winnie. None of us can die anymore.”
“What the hell are you talking about, Father?” She started rocking back and forth as nervous energy started welling up inside her again.
“I’m not sure how to tell you this, but a few months ago, we were invaded. I know, I know, just let me finish. There was a giant alien, his name was K’Chul-Kan, and he pretty much looked like us but a lot bigger. Lots bigger. He told all of the news channels they had two days to set up a broadcast he wanted to make to everyone in the world. He wanted every single person to hear what he had to say. He told us that he was going to make us immortal. And, well, he did. Some kinds of spores were sprinkled out all over the planet and overnight we became immortal. Nothing can kill us. You can cut off your arm and in a few days a new one grows back.”
Winnie’s jaw was slack. Paul waited for it all to catch up to her.
“So, why did he do that?”
Paul shrugged. “I don’t know if we’ll ever really know. He said he wanted to give us the galaxy as our playground. In return he took three of our people with him to travel the stars. I guess the stars are governed in some way and we were probably some kind of trophy for him to show off. I don’t know. But since then all of the scientists and such have been going crazy trying to invent ways to fly in space, because K’Chul-Kan also said that we can still have babies. So in a generation or so, we’ll have outgrown the planet. Guess we’re kind of like a disease now, we just keep spreading.”
“You don’t sound happy about it, Father. Is that why no one comes to the church anymore?”
“Yep. Why worry about Heaven and Hell, we’re no longer invited. The Pearly Gates are now shut.”
“Oh don’t say that, Father. God is still out there.”
“Of course he is, Winnie. God can walk the streets now as a free man. No one needs to worship him anymore. I’m just worried that if no one has faith anymore how civil will they feel they need to be to their fellow man. There’s no need to turn the other cheek when that bruised cheek will be healed tomorrow.”
Paul continued to brood in the darkness while Winnie soaked in everything. He gave the glass on the table a halfhearted tug but the wax held it firmly. Winnie cleared her throat to finally speak again.
“I thought I’d gone crazy. We had a weird night where everyone doubled up in pain, we thought it was withdrawal but couldn’t understand why. We were all pretty messed up already. Was that when we became, you know, immortal?”
Paul could only nod. He remembered well the pain. It was as though his blood had been invaded, his soul cut apart, when his cells had been permanently altered. Everyone had known excruciating pain that night. So that’s how junkies felt when they couldn’t get a fix? No wonder they looked so desperately for their next hit.
“You know, I thought I’d gone crazy after that.” Winnie’s look was vacant; she was traveling a road of thought. “It was a night or two after that, Jenny had her baby. We all thought it’d be stillborn, she’d been crackin’ hard for weeks.”
Winnie seemed to shrink into herself. Paul held his breath in expectation. He was afraid to speak and stop her story.
“She had the baby. It looked all blue and dead, but then it started kicking and crying. Scared us all. Scared Jenny worse. She had hoped it wasn’t alive.” Winnie was gnawing ragged strips around her fingernails.
“We knew she didn’t want it, because she tried to smother it right then with a blanket. We could only stand and watch, it was so unreal. It finally stopped squirming. Jenny was crying, we were all crying and shouting. We didn’t know what to do. We had just seen someone kill her own baby. The only thing we could think to do was to get even higher and act like it never happened. So we did. We all did, even Jenny, with a dead baby on her lap.”
“We were stoned and soaring until morning. Until we heard Jenny screaming. She was screaming like she’d lost her mind. And I guess really, we all sort of did. Her baby was on her lap kicking and stretching.”
“What did you guys do?”
“Do? We didn’t do anything. We sat there and stared at this baby monster that wouldn’t die. Maybe we had hallucinated last night. Maybe we were hallucinating right then. We never really knew for sure. A lot of the guys around just sort of flipped out and left. None of us were making any sense, we were just blubbering junkies.”
Winnie had been snuffling as she spoke, but now her breath came out in sobs as she tried to continue.
“But it just got worse. It was hateful and mean. Jenny was screwed up. Man, was she screwed up.”
“What do you mean, Winnie?” Involuntarily, Paul’s fingers were clutching the table’s edge.
“The baby wouldn’t die, Father. No matter how many times she tried, it wouldn’t stay dead.”
How many times? Oh God! “Winnie, what did she do to that baby?”
“It wasn’t just her, Father! It was all of us! Oh God! We all tried to quiet that baby! And it would go quiet. But not for long. Oh God, not for long. I can still hear it crying. And every time it would cry, one of us would quiet that thing down.”
“Winnie. Winnie, listen to me. Look at me. What did she do with that baby?”
“Father, it’s still there. Jenny thinks it’s some curse of hers and she won’t get rid of it. She just keeps shutting it up.”
Paul was up and on fire. “Where is this, Winnie?”
“It’s the condemned Quantro building on Third Street. Are you going to call the police?”
“No.” Amazingly enough, Paul had not even thought of involving the police in this madness. The police, always slow to respond in this neighborhood anyways, were nearly extinct recently. He got up and went to his small bedroom upstairs, leaving Winnie alone in the front room, sobbing quietly on the floor.
Paul came back out with a baseball bat in one hand and a bundle of blankets in the other. “You stay here. I’ll be back.”
“Wait. You’re not going over there are you? They’ll kill you.” She stopped herself. “Alright, I know, they can’t. But you know what I mean.” Winnie rose awkwardly from the floor, holding her back to help lift the baby she was carrying.
“Stay here.”
“And I thought I was crazy.”
“You? I’ve been preaching to empty pews for weeks.”
The door slammed into its latches, rattling the front windows.
Paul let his anger fume while he walked the six blocks to the deteriorating building. An innocent baby. They’ve been repeatedly murdering an innocent baby. He had no plan as to what he’d do when he got there, but he knew that hate and anger would be good allies to bring along. He couldn’t even find it within himself to give a little prayer as he walked along facing who knew what. Praying was an old habit of soothing himself, and that was not what he needed right now. He did not want to be placated by God.
But God did not always placate you did it? As he turned onto Third Street he found his thoughts also turning a corner. The avenging angels of God, did they not carry the vengeance of God in their breast? Did not Gabriel and Michael fight for God? Was he not now fighting for God? No, he scoffed; he was going to fight for a baby.
The Quantro building had been shut down for years. It was a large four-story building built for dot-commers with fanciful technical wishes and cubicle worlds. The bottom dropped out and they left hurriedly, leaving a skeleton of a building that was inhabited by junkies and prostitutes and pimps. It had become a cliché. The whole neighborhood downtown had become a cliché over the last few years as companies and jobs pulled out of the city and the drifters and junkies immigrated to the dark alleys.
Paul stood on the sidewalk in front of the white office building that had seemed to yellow from abuse and poison. A couple guardian dope-heads were leaning by the doorway and eyed Paul suspiciously. He suddenly thought of how he must look to them. He was standing outside their building with a baseball bat in hand; he had to look like trouble brewing.
What Paul didn’t realize is that he was also still wearing his cassock and collar, so what the guards were seeing was a very determined priest with piercing blue eyes that were glowing with intensity, carrying a very large bat. And they would let him in without a problem. Paul started for the entrance and they moved aside with a nod.
So getting in wasn’t a problem it would seem. But where would he find this Jenny? An even worse thought struck him; what if there are more babies like this? He chastised himself for acting naïve. Of course there would be more of them. Maybe not in this building, but elsewhere, maybe everywhere, there would be babies like this. Well, he thought, this is where it starts.
No electricity ran through these abandoned buildings, so random candles and reflected streetlamps clumsily lit the way. It was haphazard traveling anyway through the filthy hallways. The walls were silvered glass that invited in whatever scant light was available.
Paul entered the main lobby where live trees had once been planted but since had been tortured, torched and singed into skeletal remains. Not many junkies inhabited this large room; they favored the darker more remote recesses to crash with a buzz and be left alone. The elevators had been pried open and the mirrors inside shattered. He found the doorway to the stairs in a far corner. The door had been removed from its hinges.
Even the stairways were encased in glass. It must have been reinforced glass to withstand the abuses of occasionally rampaging crack-heads, angel-dusters and pimps. The stairway hid many abusers in its deep shadows, and Paul overstepped quite a few bodies. He watched for strung out women cradling babies but saw none. What he saw were wastes of life, lives that would not end. It was even more depressing knowing that no matter how hard these people tried to kill themselves they would still wake up in the morning without a thing changed, and try it all over again.
The upper floors had become odd mazes of cubicle walls transitioned around to the inhabitants’ whims. He followed mazes through the second floor that led to dead ends and prone bodies, some of the people still cognizant enough to yell at a trespasser, but nothing beyond that.
By the time he reached the third floor he had swung his bat threateningly a few times and his patience was about at an end. He had seen more of this lifestyle than he had ever wanted to. He had wandered into the actual life of the junkie where previously they had come to him while he was still sheltered in his church. His hands were cramping from clutching the bat and linens with white knuckles.
The third floor looked more like a fortress, the cubicle walls had been moved to make a structure in the center of the large area with other walls laid on top like a ceiling. He could see a couple sitting near an entranceway into the cubicle house. They looked up at him with anticipation as though he might be a dealer come calling. Once they saw his collar they both looked to the floor and ignored his existence.
Paul wandered into the darkened hall of the house but it took a few minutes for his eyes to adjust. Up ahead was a turn to the left into even worse shadow. He approached the corner and with a heave of his bat, shoved the roof off of the wall structures. There were voices of anger from farther down and to the outside sections of his current walls, where he had disturbed their peace with noise and light.
“Jenny!” he yelled.
Many voices rose in protest.
“Jenny, are you in here?”
From somewhere inside he could hear a faint voice that said, “Jenny, someone’s callin’ for you.”
That was all he needed to hear. With strength built from his frustration and disgust he started knocking down the walls with wide swings of his bat. The whole time he kept calling Jenny’s name over and over. He could hear the cries of someone in pure terror so he aimed his demolition in that direction. A mangy, skeletal man came running out at him but was knocked aside easily enough with the sound of broken kindling.
Past the fallen man Paul could see a woman curled up in a corner. She was watching him with horror through splayed fingers. Her crying came in manic jags and her breath was ragged and broken. Paul stepped up to her but it was the small body beside her that attracted his attention.
The small baby was blue and naked. Its head was cocked as if trying to look back to its mother but its neck was stretched out unnaturally long and twisted. Paul completely ignored Jenny as he gently picked up the baby boy and wrapped his remains in the blanket. When he had finished with the baby he finally set his firm stare on Jenny. She tried to bury herself further into the corner to avoid his gaze.
“Don’t hurt me, Father.” She pleaded.
It was the first time Paul had realized he was still wearing his collar.
Her courage grew when he didn’t reply.
“I didn’t know what to do, Father. This thing just wouldn’t die.”
“No, Jenny. He won’t die.”
She stared at him not understanding.
“Jenny, I won’t let him die. I have come here to take him away.”
He could hear stirring behind him and knew the man was slowly healing and would be back up soon.
“Are there any more children around here, Jenny?”
“No, Father.”
“Good. Because I am taking this baby home and once he is healed and healthy, I am returning here. Jenny, when I return, this place will become Hell. If you stay here you will burn. And I will make sure you burn a very long time.”
“Father! No!” Her scream died off as she tried to bury herself underneath her hands and curl into nothingness.
“Jenny, it will be a baptism by fire. You will all burn. And you will all burn long and slow. But when you awaken from your time in Hell, you will be cured. You will no longer be a junkie. You get this chance to change your life around.”
He regarded the baby swaddled in the blanket.
“But this baby is no longer yours; you have no claim on it. You haven’t earned that right.”
The neighborhood itself changed very little over the months. There were more children in the neighborhood, which was true. But everyone knew that they were the children of Paul. They were polite, intelligent children. They were helpful, hopeful children.
Paul had brought home Jenny’s baby and named him Michael. Winnie had delivered a beautiful baby girl and named her Beatrice. Winnie left soon afterward. Paul never heard from her again. Beatrice stayed.
Paul taught patience and hope to the children. He taught them how to have faith in themselves and how that faith could grow so that they could trust one another, and love one another. He continued to save as many children as he could find needing saved. And he continued to light up the horizon some nights with a cleansing fire.
Paul found what could be a shadow of his faith in God through his work and love for the children. You don’t need to be blinded by an object when its shadow alone proves its existence.
He stood outside his front step and watched the children play. They all laughed and waved at Paul.
He was no longer Father Paul.
No longer just Paul.
Just Father.
