What do you do when neither cross nor crescent can bar the door? There are such things as come by day or by night, and those that can bear the bright sun may be far more dangerous. So today’s piece is an early moment in a series of tales vaguely called Revenance, which concerns a threat which is not easily stopped, contained or thwarted. No traditional vampires, no siring, romance or classic vulnerabilities. Just those who have been Returned…
Southwark
“What are you?”
Hoarse, defiant. Father Martin raised his cross, kissed the silver and thrust it out before him as if he were holding a flaming torch. His companions held back, clutched their rosaries and prayer books, waiting…
The church of St. James, Southwark. November 1798. My first exorcism.
I had been found in a London slum the week before, crouched over a woman’s body. She had been dying of tuberculosis, though it was not called by so tidy a name back then. Even at that point in my revenance I could scent disease and distortion within those around me. She was a wasted creature in a filthy room, and drawing out her life had been a shameful experience, but that had not stopped me. I ached for something that I could not find.
When Father Andrew walked into the house, I had finished with her and was searching for anything of value. My clothes were rags, and drew attention even in the slums.
“Keep back.” I let the distorted body slide to the floor. For some reason the slim arms were intact, but the hands had withered at my touch, and were now little more than two grey claws, clutching the unwholesome air.
The priest had a Catholic mission in Southwark. I’d seen him around here before, though I hadn’t expected him to be in the area so early in the day. He was in his sixties, tall, neither frail nor strong in appearance. There was horror in his face at that moment, but also intelligence.
“Did you want to do this, my son?”
He seemed to think me another unfortunate starveling, driven so low that I would rob the dying. There was nothing to show that I’d killed the woman. I shuddered, edged back into the corner of the room. The floorboards were close to giving way with rot; the walls were covered in crumbling plaster.
“I… I don’t know,” I said. “No, not this…”
There was no fear in him as he knelt over the woman’s body. He closed her eyes, and with perfect patience went through the rituals of his faith. At any moment I could have snapped his neck. Instead I listened to the Latin pouring out of him, steady and confident, and for a moment I had hope. When he was done, I plucked at his sleeve.
“Help me.”
I had no way to speak of what I was. He saw only a desperate man whom he believed in need of redemption. I have often thought since how extraordinary Father Andrew was, especially in those times of hypocrisy and easy condemnation.
St. James’s, Father Andrew’s parish church, had two priests. I was presented to his junior, a slight young man with a withered arm, as a case for charity. Father Peter was dubious, but had only recently been ordained and was too junior to Father Andrew to complain. He watched me constantly, though, and read something more than poverty in my face.
“You have sin inside you,” he would whisper as we passed in the corridors of the parochial house. “Your soul in is peril.”
And I was willing to believe him. I believed him so much that when he introduced me to the visiting Father Martin, I tried hard to listen. Father Martin was held to be very learned, I was told. I had no idea of what my faith might once have been before the grave, but the Catholic practices were entirely unfamiliar to me. I knew what Latin was, and a little of what it meant, but only at a distance. Book-learning, it seemed, not faith. This confirmed the fathers’ belief that I had some troublesome background. An educated atheist – or worse, in their eyes, a Methodist.
Father Peter found his own answer in the parochial house kitchen a few days later, when I was peeling potatoes. The housekeeper was at market, and I had been pressed into doing something useful. The understanding was that I might stay there a week, sleeping in an empty servants’ attic, and then be found a place in a mission hostel.
“This is how we pare a man’s soul,” he said, sipping his tea. “We scrub, and we peel back the sins he has gathered round him, until something clean is found.”
I stared at the potato in my fingers. It was rotten under the skin, a brown-flecked mass. I tossed it aside, and in taking up the next one, the knife slipped and sliced open the back of my left hand.
A little pain. No blood.
The young priest caught my wrist, held my hand up to the gaslight. The open wound, two inches long, was already starting to close.
“Holy Mary protect us in the hour of our need…”
Father Martin was there within the hour, drawn from his preaching by a message. When Father Andrew returned from the slums, they took him into the library before he could speak to me. The three of them were in there for almost an hour.
“A medical phenomenon,” said the old priest uneasily when he emerged. I let him examine my hand, the gash only a pale line now. “A circulatory problem, perhaps, constriction of the vessels to the extremities…”
Father Martin, austere and hard-eyed, shook his head.
“Peter has been watching him. He is unnatural. Did you know that he regurgitates his food, when you are occupied elsewhere?”
“Those who have been starved for some time… it can be difficult for their digestions to…”
“Every meal. It has been seen.” Martin and Peter shared a look which frightened me.
My benefactor sat down at the kitchen table, placed his hands before him.
“What do you suggest?” he said at last, his voice weaker than usual.
I could hold a blessed cross in my hands. I could recite a psalm, in a stumbling manner, and kiss the bible. A spattering of holy water had no effect. They brought in a doctor, a furtive little man with thick eyebrows who examined me. He pronounced that I had no pulse, no discernible heartbeat, and he began to tremble. Father Martin gave him some coins and sent him away with exhortations to silence, on peril of his soul.
Why did I endure this? Because of Father Andrew. I could smell the honesty of him, the devotion to his mission and salvation. He lived meagrely and gave any coins he could spare to the hostels or directly to the poor. He raised the subject of religion only when required. No-one was patronised, no-one turned aside.
Father Martin, on the other hand, was a Dominican, a Hound of God. He intended that God would find me, whatever it cost. And when He found me, I would be judged, saved, damned – I think that it made no difference to him.
They locked me in the kitchen while they conferred a second time. Had I known, I might have burst from that place with scarcely an effort, ripping the doors out of their frames. But my mind was still clouded as to what I had become.
I waited there, sitting quietly like an animal which does not recognise the slaughter man’s knife. At last I heard them come out into the hall, still arguing. They were using the words monster, demon, freak, making all manner of claims. The key turned outside, and Father Martin strode in.
“Whatever unclean thing you are, or whatever foulness dwells within you,” he said in his hoarse voice, “We will purge you.”
My eyes sought out Father Andrew, standing grave in the corridor. He shook his head, looked away.
“What will you do?” I asked, lost. The Dominican had made it clear before that a priest was to be obeyed.
“We will seek to drive out the taint. You can consent, or be compelled.”
Father Andrew pressed into the doorway.
“The bishop should be–”
“I have a duty to my Order and to God,” snapped Martin. “And the experience that you lack in this area. It must be done now. Letters and permissions are fine for worthy causes, not for this.”
It was a dismissal of the old man.
I do not know if I consented to being led into St James’ that evening. It would be more appropriate to say that I did not resist. My mind was fog and echoes, the words of the priests confusing me. Worse, I had begun to feel that terrible, subconscious urge that had first walked me into the slums. The need which surpassed all others.
I remember the ritual itself only vaguely. There was incense, more holy water, many prayers for my soul… and candlelight, everywhere. They bound me to a chair near the altar. Father Martin took up his vestments, crossing himself and placing a purple stole across his shoulders. The chanting was distant to my ears, though he was no more than five feet away from me…
Crux sacra sit mihi lux
Non draco sit mihi dux
Vade retro satana
Numquam suade mihi vana
He slid in and out of Latin as the other two priests watched, the old man anxious, the young one almost eager for some sign or result. I felt nothing but gnawing hunger. The words meant nothing. They were empty forms, and if Father Martin had hoped that I would writhe and cry out, he was disappointed.
He stepped closer, the cross in his hand engraved with letters which I could not quite read.
“Let the Holy Cross be my light. Fall back, Satan.” he said. “And let the demon within this man name itself!”
“I don’t… know my name. Please, how can I tell you… what I don’t know?” I gasped, turning my head in an appeal to the old man. Father Andrew clutched his bible and refused to meet my gaze.
“Do not turn away, foul spirit!” Father Martin’s hand lashed across my face, and he leaned forward to make the mark of the cross upon my forehead. I stared at his face, and beneath the skin, beneath the cartilage and bone, I saw the roiling essence of life…
I was strangely lucid afterwards. Two grown men, well-fleshed, not the emaciated victims I’d taken in the years before. I could not hide behind confused ideas of mercy-killings, or self-defence. This had been murder.
Father Andrew crouched in the corner of the Lady Chapel, shuddering and muttering prayers. Even with such a need in me, I hadn’t been able to turn on him.
“I… I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
But not sorry enough to forget self-preservation. I pillaged the church of candlesticks, a small silver cross and a thurifer. I walked away, trying not to hear Father Andrew weeping at my back…
I left him alive, because he was a good man. I think. Part of me said that the Dominican had caused this, driving his harsh faith into places where it could not prevail. Another part said otherwise.
I had caused it, and whatever I was, I was beyond anything that the Church could devise.
End
A seventies Revenance story is out now in the anthology Blood, Sweat and Fears (top right), and another one should be coming from Ravenwood Quarterly later this year.
This week: More weird things, plus detectives and the return of Sherlock Holmes – we think…