Falling Idols

The Dripping Of Sundered Wineskins

I. Media vita in morte sumus

It’s said that William Blake spent nearly all of his life experiencing visitations by angels, or what he took to be angels, but my first time came when I was only seven, and I’d never heard of William Blake and was unaware that anything miraculous was happening. It may have been that my young age kept me from seeing her as anything other than entirely natural, much as I took for granted the checkpoints and the everpresent British soldiers who tried in vain to enforce peace in the Belfast of my childhood.

Or, more likely, I was in shock from the bomb blast.

It was years before I understood what was known as, with wry understatement, the Troubles: the politics and the hatreds between Protestants and Catholics, amongst Catholics ourselves, loyalists and republicans. As I later came to understand that day, the pub that had been targeted was regarded by the Provo I.R.A. as a nest of opposition, lovers of queen and crown. To those who planted the bomb that should have killed me, a few more dead fellow Irish were but part of the cumulative price of independence. Funny, that.

Belfast is working-class to its core, and made mostly of bricks. They rained from the blast erupting within the pub across the street from where two friends and I were walking home from school, late and chastised for some forgotten mischief we’d gotten up to. I knew the gray calm of an early autumn day, then fire and a roar, and suddenly I stood alone. One moment my friends had been walking one on either side of me, and in the next had disappeared.

“Don’t look at them,” she said, in a gentle voice not of the Emerald Isle, the first of two things I fully recall her telling me, even if I don’t know where she’d come from. It was only later, from the odd translucence of her otherwise light brown skin, that I realized she was unlike any woman I’d ever seen. “Don’t look.”

But look I did, and I remember the feel of her hand atop my head, although not to turn me from the sight. Lighter, it was, as if even she were rendered powerless by my schoolboy’s curiosity. Well, now you’ve done it, her touch seemed to be telling me. Now you’ve sprung the lid on the last of that innocence.

They both lay where they’d been flung, behind me, cut down by bricks propelled with the velocity of cannonballs. Nothing have I seen since that’s looked any deader, with more tragic suddenness, and there I stood between them, untouched but for a scratch across my bare knee that trickled blood down my hairless shin.

I felt so cold my teeth chattered, and thought she then told me I must’ve been spared for a reason. It’s always made sense that she would. It’s what angels say. And whatever reason she had, in the midst of an afternoon’s chaos, for stooping to kiss away that blood from my knee, I felt sure it must’ve been a good one.

“Oh yes,” I think she said, her lips soft at my knee, as if something there had confirmed her suspicions that in my survival there lay design.

Even today I can’t say that the mysterious touch of her mouth didn’t inspire my first true erection, if stubby and immature.

She looked up, smiling at me with my young blood bright upon her mouth. She nodded once toward the smoking rubble of the pub, once at the pitiful bodies of my lads, then said the other thing I clearly recall: “Never forget — this is the kind of work you can expect from people who have God on their side.”

When I told my mother about her that night, how the smiling woman had come to me, I left out the part about her kissing away my blood. It had been one of those moments that children know instinctively to separate from the rest, and keep secret, for to share it would change the whole world. I saw no harm in sharing what she’d said to me, though. But when I did, my mother shook me by the shoulders as if I’d done something wrong.

“You mustn’t ever speak of it again, Patrick Kieran Malone,” she told me. Hearing my full name used meant no room for argument. “Talk like that sounds like something from your Uncle Brendan, and a wonder it is he’s not been struck by lightning.”

The comparison shocked me. The way she normally spoke of her brother, Brendan was, if not the devil himself, at least one of his most trusted servants. I protested. I was only repeating what the angel-lady said.

“Hush! Word of such a thing gets round, they’ll be showing up one day to drag us off and sink us to the bottom of a bog, don’t you know.”

Of course I wondered who she meant, and why they would feel so strongly about the matter, but as I think about it now I don’t believe she even fully knew herself. She knew only that she had one more reason to be afraid of something at which she couldn’t hit back.

There are all kinds of tyranny employed around us. Bombs are but the loudest.

*

To those things that shape us and decide the paths we take, there is no true beginning, not even with our birth, for many are in motion long before we draw our first breath. Ireland’s monastic tradition predates even the Dark Ages, when the saint I was named for returned to the island where he’d once been a slave, to win it for Christianity. While that tradition is now but a sliver of what it used to be, when thriving monasteries housed hundreds of monks and friars, on the day I joined the Franciscan order my whole life felt directed toward the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience.

For as long as I could recall, the mysteries of our Catholic faith had sparked my imagination, from the solemn liturgy of the priests, to the surviving architecture of our misty past, to the relics that had drawn veneration from centuries of believers. Ever thankful for my survival, my parents exposed me to as much of our faith as they could. They took me to visit the Purgatory of St. Patrick, and to his retreat on Cruachan Aigli in County Mayo. Down in County Kerry we undertook pilgrimages to Mount Brandon, and to the shrine of the Blessed Virgin in Kilmalkedar. I touched Celtic crosses that had been standing for a millennium, the weathered stone hard and sacred beneath my fingers.

Most mysterious of all to me was the 300-year-old head of the newly-canonized Saint Oliver Plunkett, staring from the splendor of his reliquary in Saint Peter’s Church in Drogheda. Blackened skin stretched over his bald skull like leather. His upper lip had shriveled back from his teeth to give him the start of a smile, and I could stare at him in full expectation that those dry lips would continue to move, to whisper some message for me alone.

It held no terrors for me, that severed head of his. I’d seen the dead before, and a damn sight fresher than old Oliver was.

Of the ethereal woman who came and went unnoticed on that day death had come so close, for years I hoped she might show herself again so I could put to her the questions I was old enough now to ask, and felt a deep ache that she did not. The mind reevaluates what’s never validated, giving it the fuzzy edges of a dream, and as I grew taller, older, there were days I almost convinced myself that that was all she’d been; that I’d hallucinated a beautiful, compassionate adult because she was what I needed at the moment, since so many others around me were busy killing each other.

But on those nights I dreamt of her, I knew better. I could never have invented anything so radiant out of thin air. Every few months, a dream so crystalline would unfold inside me it felt as if she were in the same room, watching. Angel, phantom, whatever she was, she was as responsible as anything for my joining the Franciscans of Greyfriars Abbey in Kilkenny, for she had done so much to open my eyes to the things of the spirit, and inspire my hunger to let them fill me.

“Does it hurt to become a saint?” I asked the first time I set eyes on those sunken leathery sockets of Oliver’s.

“Some of them were hurt staying well true to the will of the Lord,” my mother answered. “But on that day they were made saints they felt only joy, because they’d already been in Heaven a long, long time, in the company of their angels.”

“Then that’s what I want to be,” I declared.

She smiled at such impudence, waiting until later to tell me that no saint had ever aspired to such, as the first thing they’d given up was ambition for themselves. Sainthood was something that happened later, usually decided by people who’d never known them in the flesh.

While I didn’t claim to understand why it had to be that way, I tried to put vanity behind me like the childish thing it was … and remember I was still alive for a reason that would be revealed in God’s own time.

II. Corpus antichristi

The greatest irony about what drove me from the Order of St. Francis is that it was nothing that hadn’t been experienced by the very founder himself, nearly 800 years before.

The first time it happened to me was a Sunday morning in the abbey chapel, near the close of Mass. The Host had been venerated and the brothers and I knelt along the railing before the altar as Abbot O’Riordan worked his way down the row of us.

“The body of Christ,” he would say, then rest a wafer upon a waiting tongue, while in our mouths the miracle would happen again and again — the bread become the actual flesh of our Lord, and the wine His Saviour’s blood. “The body of Christ.”

Awaiting my turn, I often contemplated the crucifix hanging on the wall before us: life-size, a plaster Christ painted in the vivid colours of His suffering and passion. His dark eyes gazed heavenward, while from His brow and nail wounds blood streamed in the other direction. Every rib stood out clearly as He seemed to labor in agony for each breath.

“The body of Christ,” said the abbot, before me now.

Only when I drew my hands from the railing to cup them beneath my chin, to catch the Host should it fall by accident, did I notice my own blood flowing from each wrist, where a nail might have been driven by a Roman executioner. Beneath my grey robe, my feet felt suddenly warm and wet.

And when the Host slipped from Abbot O’Riordan’s fingers, it fell all the way to the hard floor, with no hands there to catch it and spare it from defilement. There it chipped into crumbling fragments of proxy flesh, to mingle with drops of blood that were entirely real.

*

There was no pattern to the stigmata’s recurrence after the first time, just a gradual worsening of physical signs. Initially, blood only seeped like sweat through unbroken skin, but later the wounds themselves manifested in my flesh, deeper on each occasion, layer by layer — for scarcely a minute to begin with, until at last they lingered for as long as two hours before sealing up again.

I was examined over several months by a hierarchy of church representatives, all of them seeking a simple explanation, and I soon realized this was what they were hoping to find. The length and sharpness of my fingernails were checked repeatedly, and my routines became of intense fascination as they sought to discover some habit that might inflict deep blisters which would on occasion burst and bleed.

But Greyfriars was no reclusive monastery far from the modern world, where medieval-minded monks were turned out each sunrise to till the fields. In the quiet neighbourhoods of Kilkenny I taught Latin in the parochial school adjacent to the friary. The closest I came to fieldwork was teaching the declensions of agricola.

At least until the day I bled in class, and was removed from active staff.

For a faith founded on the resurrection of the dead, and sustained by centuries of miracles accepted as historically real as wars and plagues, the Church of my era I found to be reluctant to admit to the possibility of modern miracles. Worse, I began to feel I’d become more of an embarrassment than anything, a smudge of unfortunate dust that may have been only dust, but that they weren’t yet willing to say was not divine, and therefore dust that they above all wished they might sweep aside so they wouldn’t have to debate what more to do with it.

I believe what unsettled them most was that the wounds opened on my wrists, an anatomical verisimilitude shared by no stigmatic I’d ever heard of. Centuries of art and sculpture have depicted a crucifixion that never would’ve taken place, not with any self-respecting Roman soldier on the scene with a hammer and a fistful of nails. Say what you will of the Romans, they were no incompetents when it came to killing. They knew better than to nail some poor bugger up by his palms; the bones are too small. Nailing through the wrists was the only way to support the weight of the body and keep it on the cross without its tearing loose. But old images, fixed in the head and worn round the neck, are hard to die, although I should think they’d give anyone a handy means for weeding the miraculous from the merely hysterical: If Jesus were to go to all the trouble of manifesting through the flesh of another, you’d think He’d at least want to get the facts straight.

This, more than anything, was what seemed to keep my priestly examiners from comfortably dismissing the whole matter. It’d been going on for nearly half a year before I was told, finally, that I was to be examined the next day by a tribunal arriving from Rome.

“I would ask you to spend the hours between now and then in prayer and fasting,” Abbot O’Riordan told me. We were alone in his office and the door that he almost never closed was shut tight.

“All due respect, Father,” I said, “I’ve been praying for a bit more insight ever since this started.”

“Not for insight, that’s not what I’m asking of you, but for how you’ll answer their questions tomorrow. What you send back to Rome with them … that’s what you need concern yourself with now.”

“I thought all I’d send them back with was the simple truth about what’s been happening.”

“Do you even know what’s happening to you, Patrick? Can you tell me the cause of it? There’s been no getting to the bottom of it for six months, and you don’t know how I prayed for an end to it before it got this far.”

He lowered his head to his hands for a moment, as if he’d said too much. Then, with those hands folded loosely together on his desk, he avoided my eyes and looked about the austere room.

“The Church,” he said in a slow hush, “is built on a solid foundation of miracles from the past. But it’s my belief — and I’m not alone in this — that the past is where they should stay. What’s in the past remains fixed and constant. There’s no reason to doubt it, no need to demand from it any greater explanation. There’s no need to question it … only to believe in it. There it is and there it remains for all time, and it need never, ever, change … because it’s safely protected by time.”

I stepped closer to him, aghast. “What threat could I pose to any of that?”

“Have you not yet understood why we’ve tried to keep this as quiet as we can? Spontaneous healings at shrines and apparitions of Mary are one thing. But give the laity another human being they see miracles in, and it opens up an entirely new channel for their faith. You don’t want it any more than I do … because they’ll want more from you. They will. No pun intended, Brother Patrick, they’ll bleed you dry, and in the end you can only disappoint them because you can’t possibly give them as much as they’ll want from you. And then they’ll doubt, because disappointment can lead to cracks in the foundation of their faith. Cracks that might never appear if we but leave well enough alone.”

He looked as sad as any man I had ever seen. “I’d never tell you how to conduct yourself tomorrow, or how to answer their questions. But God gave us a mind, Patrick … and the ability to anticipate the consequences of our actions. All I ask is that you go do that for me, and for the sake of the Church.”

After the abbot sent me from his office, I paused in the cool empty hall, and stood before a painting that hung on the wall. I’d admired, even envied, it ever since first coming to the abbey.

It showed the martyrdom of Saint Ignatius, having been brought from Antioch to Rome, to be tossed to the beasts in the Coliseum. Left hand on his heart, the right outstretched in glory, as if he were making a grand speech of his suffering, his transcendent old eyes looked wide to the heavens. Supposedly he’d been eaten by two lions, but the beasts set upon him in the painting more resembled savage dogs, although no dogs I’d ever seen, with piglike snouts and eyes human in their cunning. The paws of the one tearing into his shoulder were spread wide like clawed hands. Often I wondered if they weren’t subtly intended to portray demons, instead. But whatever they were, Ignatius had looked forward to meeting them. They were his transport to a Heaven he couldn’t wait to get to.

“You were lucky,” I whispered. “When you knew what tomorrow was bringing, they hadn’t given you any choice in the matter.”

*

I ate nothing for the rest of the day, nor that night, hoping that a fast would clear my mind. Long after Compline, the rest of the brothers asleep in their cells, I remained on my knees before the altar rail in the chapel. The only eyes on me were those of the cruciform Christ hanging on the wall. The only light was cast from the rack of votive candles to my left, filling the sanctuary with a soft glow and warm, peaceful shadows.

For hours I prayed for a resolution between my conflicting loyalties — to the mission of the Church, as well as the purpose of whatever had chosen to work through me. I couldn’t see why these two aims had to exclude one another.

In the chapel’s hush, I heard the soft plink of drops as they began falling to the floor nearby. Distracted, I checked both wrists but found them dry. Probably some leak sprung in the roof, I told myself. I pushed it from my ears, and from my heart tried to push the pique I felt over that reflex to check for my own blood in the first place, that this ordeal had done such a thing to me.

I prayed for the ugliness rising in me to recede like muddied waters. There should be no place within me for anger, I believed, but felt it more and more as the hours passed. Part of me raged toward Abbot O’Riordan and the others like him, so concerned with the status quo that they preferred to turn a blind eye on anything in their midst that threatened to disrupt their lives of routine.

The dripping sound seemed to become more insistent, as if the flow had increased — or perhaps my growing annoyance with it, I reasoned, was only making it appear louder.

There was more at work here than blood and transitory wounds, yet they all behaved as if what was happening through me happened mindlessly, devoid of purpose. Yet there had to be a logic behind it, and therefore a reason … else why should it occur at all?

The dripping grew heavier still, like the thick spatter of rainwater on the ground beneath the clogged gutters of a house. It killed the last of my prayer on my lips. When the chapel’s broken hush was ripped by a scream that resounded from the chilly stone, at first I wasn’t sure it hadn’t come from me.

But no — I hadn’t the lungs for any cry as terrible as this.

I stood at the railing, faced the back of the chapel to see who might’ve walked in on me, but no one was there. The door hung motionless. From the shadows I heard the wet sound of something tearing, and a rustle, then a moist heavy thud, like that of an animal carcass collapsing to the killing floor, except with it came a grunt that sounded unmistakably human.

When I turned round front again, to see if someone might have come through unnoticed from the sacristy, it took several moments for what I noticed to penetrate the layers of disbelief.

The cross on the wall hung empty, no Christ nailed to it now. Blood ran darkly gleaming down the stones from the foot of the cross and from both sides, and from each of these points jutted a crooked spike shellacked with coagulating gore.

From the deep shadows behind the altar there issued a rasp of breath, and a groan of agony. In none of it did I hear any hint of meekness — these were not the sounds of a man who’d gone willingly to his cross. And when from his concealment he began to rise, I started to back my trembling way down the aisle.

By the time I reached the rear of the chapel, he was standing in shadow, little of him to see in the flickering votives but for wet reflections of flame. He doubled halfway over, quaking in pain beyond imagining, as he began to lurch out from behind the altar.

My first impulse was to retreat all the way to my room — yet what if this truly was meant for me to see? I chose to seclude myself in the flimsy shelter of the confessional — remaining, but giving this apparition every chance to vanish. I drew the curtain behind me as I sat pressed against the far wall and hoped to be spared this sight, hoped that it was no more than a waking dream brought on by one night’s hunger and six months of stress.

But closer it came, and even when I could not see it, I heard it. Down the aisle it moved, harsh breath growing more ragged as it neared me, each shuffling footstep louder than the one before, a meaty wet slap of torn flesh on stone.

The Christ seemed to linger outside the confessional, then I heard the rattling of the door to the priest’s booth. On the other side of that thin wall the Christ settled heavily upon the seat, bringing with him a stifling reek of blood and sweat.

I pushed the curtain back again and in the dim light thrown by the votives looked down at my wrists, unbloodied, then at the partition separating me from this Christ who’d ripped free of his cross. The panel between us scraped open. Through the screen I saw the outline of his head, misshapen with its wrapping of the crown of thorns. Fingers next — they clawed at the screen, then battered away until it buckled and fell out. The hand looked mangled beyond repair, and he held it up so I could see the damage it would never have sustained had that life-size crucifix been accurately rendered.

“Do you understand now?” he asked, in Latin.

“I’m … not sure,” I whispered, but suspected that I did. If sculptors couldn’t get anatomical details right, how much easier might it have been for scribes to propagate other fallacies?

The Christ’s head tilted forward to fill the tiny window. I was spared the worst of his burning and pain-mad gaze, his eyes veiled by the hair straggling blood-caked from beneath the thorns.

“Save me,” he begged, again in Latin. “Save me from that impotent, slaughtered lamb they have made of me.”

“You mean … you never died?”

“Everyone dies. Everyone and everything,” he said. “But there is no salvation in anyone’s death but your own … and sometimes not even then.”

“What … what of your being the Son of God, then?”

“There are many gods. There are many sons conceived by rape.” For a moment he was still, almost contemplative. Then he reached through the opening with a filthy arm, torn hand clamping upon my wrist. “The things I’ve seen, the secrets he keeps … if babies were born remembering these things, they would tear apart their mothers trying to return to the womb.”

His hand felt hot and wet, the splintered bones as sharp as nails, gouging deep scratches where before my flesh had opened of its own accord. He held fast as our blood mingled.

“Demon est Deus inversus,” he said, a phrase born of ancient heresy, yet coming now from the one I’d thought to be my Saviour.

He released me then, his arm withdrawing like a serpent back to its lair. A moment later I heard him abandon the confessional, and hurriedly I drew my curtain again, so I wouldn’t have to see him passing before me, lacerated and limping.

The footsteps receded into the chapel silence. For a moment I thought it might be safe to leave, but what I heard next persuaded me to remain until morning light had driven away every shadow:

The pounding of hammers.

*

When I came awake a few hours later and left the booth, the dawn showed no blood upon the walls, nor sticky footprints along the aisle. But I don’t think I was expecting any, really.

Later on in the day, I told the tribunal from Rome that I’d been causing the stigmata myself, and showed them the fresh wounds on my wrist as evidence. The matter was officially closed. Abbot O’Riordan seemed greatly relieved, and only mildly distressed when I informed him that I planned to leave Greyfriars.

The prior night could have been a dream, and I might’ve found it easy to convince myself, as I’d nearly done with that spectral comforter who’d at least been substantial enough to kiss the blood from my knee. What evidence to the contrary did I have, except for some deep scratches on my wrist that I could’ve made myself?

None, but for unshakable conviction … and the other thing.

It went unnoticed until my last day with the order, as alone I stood in the chapel gazing silently up at the lurid crucifix and its Christ frozen in suffering like an ancient fly trapped in the amber of another epoch. The change in it was so subtle I doubted anyone else would even notice, and if they did, they’d merely dismiss their memories of how it had looked as being mistaken.

Surely, they’d tell themselves, their Saviour had been nailed up there through the wrists all along.

III. Excommunio sanctorum

After the pinched faces and ectomorphic frames of most of my Franciscan brothers, the robust lumpiness of my Uncle Brendan came as a welcome change. He drove me away from Greyfriars with a ruddy scowl for the abbey, and only when we were rolling west through that green and treeless countryside did he break into a relieved grin and slap his big hard hand upon my leg.

“So. Which vow should we have you breaking first?” he asked.

Penniless, I’d turned to Uncle Brendan for help in making my new life. By renouncing the order in disillusion, I had become a shame to my devout family in Belfast. As they’d regarded Brendan the same for as long as I could recall, it was inevitable that two such black sheep as ourselves throw in together. I’d long realized he was hardly the devil my mother — his older sister — had painted him to be, for refusing to set foot in a church since before I was born, and scoffing at nothing less than the Holy See itself.

“Some choose to face the world with a rosary in their hands, and some get more out of holding a well-pulled pint of stout,” he said. “Not that one excludes the other, but at some point you do need to decide which is more fundamentally truthful.”

I lived with him in Killaloe, northeast of Limerick, where at the southern tip of Lough Derg he rented out boats to tourists and wandering lovers. I helped him most days at the docks, on others motoring down to Limerick to earn a little extra money tutoring Latin. In this way I slowly opened up to a wider world.

Early evenings, we’d often find ourselves in one of Brendan’s favourite pubs. Great pub country, Ireland, and Brendan had a great many favourites. Poor man’s universities, he called them, and we’d further our educations at tables near fires that crackled as warm and welcoming as any hearth in any home.

Guinness for Brendan, always, and in the beginning, shandies for me. I was little accustomed to drinking and inclined to start slow. But they relaxed me, and this I needed, often feeling that I still didn’t belong outside cloistered walls. I would look at all these people who knew how to live their days without each hour predetermined as to how they’d pass it, and I’d wonder how they managed, if they knew how courageous they were. I’d listen to them laugh and would feel they had no more than to look at me to see that I was only pretending to be one of them.

More to the heart, I began to regret all the years I’d never truly known my uncle, letting others form my opinion of him for me. When I told him this one night, I was glad to learn he didn’t hold it against me, as he waved my guilt aside like a pesky fly.

“You’ve a great many relatives, but I daresay not a one of them could understand how you’d be feeling now any better than I can,” he said. “After all … I’m the one who once left seminary.”

Astounding news, this. I’d never been told; had assumed Uncle Brendan to have been an incorrigible heathen from the very start. “Father Brendan, it almost was?” I exclaimed, laughing.

“Oh, aye,” he said, mischief in his eyes. “I was going to win souls back from the devil himself, until I began to really listen to those claiming to be out of his clutches already, and started wondering what he could ever want with them in the first place. Not a very bright or ambitious devil, you ask me.”

“You left seminary because of … who, the priests?”

“Oh, the whole buggery lot of them. Them, and that I woke up one day to realize that all I’d been studying for years? I didn’t believe a word of it. Now, love and compassion, aye, they’ve their virtues … but a message that basic doesn’t need any act of divine intervention.” He winked. “Not as dramatic as your experiences with those collared old pisspots, but you’re not the only one to give in to a crisis of faith.”

He knew of the stigmata, I’d freely told him of that. Of the rest, that awful Christ come down off the wall, I’d been silent.

“But we’re in good company, we are.” He toasted his stout to companions unseen. “Hardly the Church’s finest hour, not a thing they’re any too proud of, you understand, but last century, I think it was, the pope decides he’s a bit fagged of hearing the Bible attacked on educated terms. Science, history. If the Church fathers didn’t have the wee-est clue what they lived on was round, and orbited the sun, then why in hell assume they knew what they were talking about when it comes to eternity? Or, fifteen hundred years after he’s dead, you still had minds like Saint Augustine’s setting down doctrine. Augustine had said it was impossible that anyone could be living on the other side of the world, because the Bible didn’t list any such descendants of Adam. So the pope, under that big post-hole digging hat, the pope decides he’s heard quite enough of this shite, from these smart-arse intellectuals, so he decides to establish his own elite corps of priests who can argue their faith on the same terms … scientific, historical, like that.

“Except the more they studied, tried to arm themselves, the more these buggers quit the priesthood altogether.” Brendan gulped a hearty swallow of stout and wiped the foam from his mouth with the back of his hand. “Game called on account of brains.”

“You’re a hostile man, Uncle Brendan,” I joked, setting no accusation by it. In truth, I admired the courage it took to make no secret of such opinions in a mostly Catholic country.

“Aye. Ignorance brings out the worst in me, it’s true, and the Church has never been much bothered by facts getting in the way of the dazzle. Like a magic show, it is … the grandest magic show anyone’s ever put on, and the fools who pay their money or their souls are plenty keen on letting themselves be fooled.” He shook his head. “Like with the relics. Never mind all the saints’ bones that actually came from animals — the Vatican won’t even keep its own records sensible. What are they up to now, more than a hundred and fifty nails from the crucifixion? Used that many, why, they’d still be taking him down off the cross to this day. What else…? Ah — nine breasts of Saint Eulalia. Twenty-eight fingers and thumbs of Saint Dominic. Ten heads of John the Baptist. Ten! You show me where in the gospels it says anything about John the Baptist being a fucking Hydra, and I’ll still not believe it, but at least I’ll admire their bloody audacity in trying to pull that one off too.”

Quite in my cups by now, I lamented how sad it was that faith and reason were so often at odds with one another. What a joke it would be on the whole planetary lot of us if it turned out that whatever made us in its own image had then filled the books with the most improbable bollocks imaginable, and put incompetents in charge of keeping them, just to make it that much harder on us and weed out everyone but the truest of true believers.

“Who’s to say it hasn’t happened that very way?” my uncle said. The seriousness with which he was taking this surprised me, even unsettled me. “But what you’ve got then? It’s no god of love and mercy. What you’ve got then … it’s a master who wants slaves.”

“Uncle Brendan,” I said, “I was only joking.”

“I know you were. But even jesters can speak the truth. They just do it by accident.”

“Forget all the dogma, then,” I said. “You don’t even believe in something so basic as a god of love?”

“I believe in love itself, oh, aye. But, now, love could just as easily be our own invention, couldn’t it? Took a few billion years of bloody harsh survival of the fittest before we’d dragged ourselves out of the mud far enough where we could even think of love. So why should we take for granted that something out there loves us any more than we love ourselves? I’ll tell you why: Any other alternative is too horrible for most people to contemplate.”

I remembered the way my mother reacted when I told her what the blood-kissing angel had said on that day of the bomb. This is the kind of work you can expect from people who have God on their side. I’d not made it up, only repeated it, but my mother hadn’t wanted to hear another word. Hadn’t wanted to know any more about that woman who’d comforted me as my friends lay dead. It hurt me now much more than it had then. How rigid our fears can make us; how tightly they can close our minds. I wondered aloud why the uncomplicated faith that ran like a virus through the generations of our family hadn’t been enough for Brendan and me.

“Wondered that myself, I have,” he admitted. “Who knows? But I like to think it might be our Celtic blood. That it’s purer in us, somehow, than it is in the rest of the family … and the blood remembers. Greatest mystics that ever were, the Celts. So you and I … could be we’re like those stones they left behind.”

“How’s that — the standing stones?”

“Aye, those’re the ones,” Brendan said, and I thought of them settled into green meadows like giant grey eggs, inscribed with the primitive ogham alphabet. “Already been around for centuries, they had, by the time the bloody Christians overrun the island and go carving their crosses into the stones to convert them … like they’re trying to suck all the power out of the stones and turn them into something they were never intended to be. But the stones remember, still, and so do we, I think, you and I. Because our blood remembers too.”

The blood remembers. I liked the sound of that.

And if blood could only talk, what stories might it tell?

*

The stigmata still came, the flow of blood awe-inspiring to me, still, but there was something shameful about it now, as if leaving the Franciscans had made me unworthy. Worse, it terrified me now more than ever, for I exhibited the wounds of a Christ who had denied himself. They came like violent summons from something beyond me, indifferent to what I did or didn’t believe in.

They knew no propriety, no decorum. One night, soon after I’d confessed to my uncle that I’d never been with a woman, he paid for me to enjoy the company of one who certainly didn’t live in the area, and then he stepped discreetly from the house to share a drink with a neighbour. They’d scarcely tipped their glasses before she ran from the house and demanded he take her back to Limerick. Brendan first came in to see what had upset her so, and found me sitting on the bed with my wounds freshly opened.

“Oh suffering Christ,” he said, weary and beaten. “Ordinarily it’s the woman who bleeds the first time.”

For days I felt stung by the humiliation, and the loneliness of what I was, and tried to pull the world as tight around me as it had been at the friary. Once a cloister, now a boat. I’d leave the docks early in the morning, rowing out onto Lough Derg until I could see nothing of what I’d left behind, and there I’d drift for hours. Chilled by misty rains or cold Atlantic winds, I didn’t care how cruelly the elements conspired against my comfort. The dark, peaty waters lapped inches away like a liquid grave.

I often dwelt upon Saint Francis, whose life I’d once vowed to emulate. He too had suffered stigmata, had beheld visions of Jesus. Francesco, repair my falling house, his Jesus had commanded him, or so he’d believed, and so he’d stolen many of his father’s belongings to sell for the money it would take to get him started. Repair my falling house. Whose Jesus was more true? Mine appeared to want from me nothing less than that I tear it down.

But always, my reflections would turn to that which to me was most real: she who had come on the day of the bomb. Who had smiled reassuringly at me with my blood on her lips, then never seen fit to visit again. A poor guardian she’d made, abandoning me. Since I’d been a child kneeling beside my bed at night, I had prayed to every evolving concept of God I’d held. I’d prayed to Saviour and Virgin and more saints than I could recall, and now, adrift on the dark rippling lake, I added her to those canonical ranks, praying that she come to my aid once more, to show me what was wanted of me.

“You loved me once,” I called to her, into the wind. “Did I lose that too, along with all the blood?”

But the wind said nothing, nor the waters, nor the hills, nor the skies whence I imagined that she’d come. They were as silent as dead gods who’d never risen again.

In the nights that followed these restless days, I learned to drink at the elbow of a master. No more shandies for me — the foamy black stout now became the water of life. Women, too, lost much of their mystery, thanks to a couple of encounters, the greater part of which I managed to remember.

And when I couldn’t stand it any longer, I broke down and told my uncle the secrets that had been eating away at me — the one for only a few weeks, the other since I was seven. It surprised me to see it was the latter that seemed to affect him most. Brendan grew deathly quiet as he listened to the story of that day, his fleshy, ruddy cheeks going pale. He was very keen on my recounting exactly how she’d looked — black hair shimmering nearly to her waist, her skin a translucent brown, not like that of any native I’d ever seen, not even those called the Black Irish.

“It’s true, they really do exist,” Brendan murmured after I’d finished, then turned away, face strained between envy and dread, with no clear victor. “Goddamn you boy,” he finally said. “You’ve no idea what’s been dogging your life, have you?”

Apparently I did not.

He sought out the clock, then in sullen silence appeared to think things over for a while. When at last he moved again, it was to snatch up his automobile keys and nod toward the door. Of the envy and dread upon his face, the latter had clearly won out.

IV. De contemptu mundi

“Somebody once said — I’ve forgot who — said you can take away a man’s gods … but only to give him others in return.”

Uncle Brendan told me this on our late-night drive, southwest through the countryside, past hedgerows and farms, along desolate lanes that may well have been better traveled after midnight. A corner rounded by day could have put us square in the middle of a flock of sheep nagged along by nipping dogs.

Or maybe we traveled by the meager luster of a slivered moon because, of those things that Brendan wished to tell me, he didn’t wish to do so by the light of day, or bulb, or fire.

“Wasn’t until after I’d left seminary that I understood what that really meant. You don’t walk away from a thing you’d thought you believed your whole life through without the loss of it leaving a hole in you, hungering to be filled. You’ve still a need to believe in something … it’s just a question of what.”

Sometimes he talked, sometimes he fell silent, collecting his remembrances of days long gone.

“I tried some things, Patrick. Things I’d rather not discuss in detail. Tried some things, and saw others … heard still other things beyond those. You can’t always trust your own senses, much less the things that get whispered about by people you can’t be sure haven’t themselves gone daft before you’ve ever met them. But some things…

“That woman you saw? One of three, she is, if she’s who I think she was. There’s some say they’ve always been here, long as there’s been an Ireland, and long before that. All the legends that got born on this island, they’re not all about little people. There’s some say that from the earliest times, the Celts knew of them, and worshipped them because the Celts knew that the most powerful goddesses were three-in-one.”

We’d driven as far down as the Dingle Peninsula, one of the desolate and beautiful spits of coastal land that reached out like fingers to test the cold Atlantic waters. The land rolled with low peaks, and waves pounded sea cliffs to churn up mists that trapped the dawn’s light in spectral iridescence, and the countryside was littered with ancient rock — standing stones and the beehive-shaped huts that had housed early Christian monks. Here hermits found the desolation they’d craved, thinking they’d come to know God better.

“There’s some say,” Uncle Brendan went on, “they were still around after Saint Patrick came. That sometimes, in the night, when the winds were blowing and the waves were wearing down the cliffs, a pious hermit might hear them outside his hut. Come to tempt him, they had. Calling in to him. All night, it might go on, and that horny bugger inside, all alone in the world, sunk to his knees in prayer, trying not to imagine how they’d look, how they’d feel. No reason they couldn’t’ve come on in as they pleased — it was just their sport to break him down.”

“Why?” I asked. “To prove they were more powerful than his god was?”

“Aye, now that could be. More powerful … or at least there. Then again, some say that, by the time the Sisters of the Trinity finally got to their business on those who gave in, all the hours of fear … flavoured the monks better.”

“Flavoured? Their blood, you mean?”

“All of them. It’s said each consumes a different part of a man. One, the blood. One, the flesh. And one, the sperm. It’s said that when they’ve not fed for a good long time? There’s nothing of a man left but his bones, cracked open and sucked dry.”

I couldn’t reconcile such savagery with the tenderness I’d been shown — the sweetness of her face, the gentle sadness in her eyes as she looked upon us, two dead boys and the other changed for life. Only when she’d tasted my blood had anything like terrible wisdom surfaced in her eyes.

The sun had breached the horizon behind us when Uncle Brendan stopped the car. There was nothing human or animal to be seen in any direction, and we ourselves were insignificant in this rugged and lovely desolation. We crossed meadows on foot, until the road was lost to sight. Ahead, in the distance, a solitary standing stone listed at a slight tilt. It drew my uncle on with quickened steps. When we reached it, he touched it with a reverence I’d never thought resided in him, for anything, fingers skimming the shallow cuts of the ogham writing that rimmed it, archlike.

“It’s theirs. The Sisters’. Engraved to honour them.” Then he grinned. “See anything missing?”

I looked for chunks eroded or hammered away, but the stone appeared complete. I shook my head, mystified.

“No crosses cut in later by the Christians. It wouldn’t take the chisel. Tried to smash the rock, they did, but it wore down their sledges instead. Tried to drag it to the sea, and the ropes snapped. So the legend goes, anyway. Like trying to pull God’s own tooth. Or the devil’s. If there’s a difference.” He shut his eyes, and the wind from the west swirled his graying hair. When he spoke again his voice was shaking. “Killed a boy here once. When I was young. Trying to call them up. I’d heard sometimes they’d answer the call of blood. Maybe I should’ve used my own instead. Maybe they’d’ve paid some mind to that.”

On the wind I could hear the pounding of the ocean, and as I tried to imagine my generous and profane uncle a murderer, it felt as if those distant waves had all along been eroding everything I thought I knew. I asked Brendan what he’d wanted with the Sisters.

“They didn’t take the name of the Trinity just because there happens to be three of them. Couldn’t tell you what it is, but it’s said there’s some tie to that other trinity you and I thought we were born to serve. Patrick, I … I wanted to know what they know. And there’s some say when they put their teeth to a man, the pleasure’s worth it. So what’s a few years sacrificed, to learning what’s been covered up by centuries of lies?”

“But what if,” I asked, “all they’d have to tell you is just another set of lies?”

“Then might be the pleasure makes up for that, too.” He took a step toward me and I flinched, as if he had a knife or garrote as he would’ve had for that boy whose blood hadn’t been enough. Brendan raised his empty hands, then looked at mine.

At my wrists.

“Maybe you’ve the chance I never had. Maybe they’ve a use for you they never had for me.”

And in the new morning, he left me there alone. I sat against the old pagan stone after I heard the faraway sound of his car.

The stone remembers, he’d once told me, and so do we.

Demon est Deus inversus, I’d been told by another. Save me from that impotent, slaughtered lamb they have made of me.

On this rock will I build my church, some scribe had written, putting words in the latter’s mouth.

The blood remembers.

Three days later my flesh remembered how to bleed.

And the stone how to drink.

*

Regardless of their orbits, planets are born, then mature and die, upon a single axis, and so the stone and those it honoured had always been to me, even before I knew it. Now that I was here, I circled the stone but wouldn’t leave it, couldn’t, because, as in space, there was nothing beyond but cold dark emptiness.

They came while I slept — the fourth morning, maybe the fifth. They were there with the dawn, and who knows how many hours before that, slender and solid against the morning mists, watching as I rolled upright in my dew-soaked blanket. When I rubbed my eyes and blinked, they didn’t vanish. Part of me feared they would. Part of me feared they wouldn’t.

As I leaned back against the stone, she came forward and went to her knees beside me, looking not a day older than she had more than twenty years before. Her light brown skin was still smoothly translucent. Her gaze was tender at first, and though it didn’t change of itself, it grew more unnerving when she did not blink — like being regarded by the consummate patience of a serpent.

She leaned in, the tip of her nose cool at my throat as she sniffed deeply. Her lips were warm against mine; their soft press set mine to trembling. Her breath was sweet, and the edge of one sharp tooth bit down to open a tiny cut on my lip. She sucked at it as if it were a split berry, and I thought without fear that next I would die. But she only raised my hands to nuzzle the pale inner wrists, their blue tracery of veins, then pushed them gently back to my lap, and I understood that she must’ve known all along what I was, what I was to become.

“It’s nice to look into your eyes again,” she said, as if but a week had passed since she’d done so, “and not closed in sleep.”

Since coming to the stone I’d imagined and rehearsed this moment countless times, and she’d never said this. Never dressed in black and grays, pants and a thick sweater, clothes I might’ve seen on any city street and not thought twice about. She’d never glanced back at the other two, who stood eyeing each other with impatience, while the taller of them idly scraped something from the bottom of her shoe. She’d never simply stood up and taken me by the hand, pulled me to my feet, to leave me surprised at how much smaller she looked now that I’d grown to adulthood.

“He stinks,” said the taller Sister. From the feral arrogance in her face, I took her to be the flesh-eater. “I can smell him from here.”

“You’ve smelt worse,” said the third. “Eaten it, too.”

As I’d rehearsed this they’d never bickered, and my erstwhile angel — Maia, the others called her — had never led me away from the stone like a bewildered child.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“Back down to the road. Then back home to Dublin,” Maia said.

“You … you drove?”

The flesh-eater, her leather jacket disconcertingly modern, burst into mocking laughter. “Oh Jesus, another goddess hunter,” she sighed. “What was he expecting? We’d take him by the hand and fly into the woods?”

The third one, the sperm-eater by default, slid closer to me in a colorful gypsy swirl of skirts. “Try not to be so baroque,” she said. “It really sets Lilah off, anymore.”

V. Sanguis sanctus

They were not goddesses, but if they’d been around as long as they were supposed to have been, inspiring legends that had driven men like my uncle to murder, then as goddesses they at least must’ve posed. They were beautiful and they were three, and undoubtedly could be both generous and terrible. They could’ve been anything to anyone — goddesses, succubi, temptresses, avengers — and at one time or another probably had been. They might’ve gone through lands and ages, exploiting extant myths of triune women, leaving others in their wake: Egyptian Hathors, Greek Gorgons, Roman Fates, Norse Norns.

And now they lived in Dublin in a gabled stone house that had been standing for centuries, secluded today behind security fences and a vast lawn patrolled by mastiffs — not what I’d expected. But I accepted the fact of them the same way I accepted visions of a blaspheming Christ, and ancient stones that drank stigmatic blood, then sang a summons that only immortal women could hear. All these I accepted as proof that Shakespeare had been right: there was more in Heaven and Earth than I’d ever dreamt of. What I found hardest to believe was that I could have any part to play in it.

They took me in without explaining themselves. I was fed and allowed to bathe, given fresh clothes. Otherwise, the Sisters of the Trinity lived as privileged aristocrats, doing whatever they pleased, whenever it pleased them.

Lilah, the flesh-eater, aloof and most often found in dark leathers, had the least to do with me, and seemed to tolerate me as she might a stray dog taken in that she didn’t care to pet.

The sperm-eater was Salíce, and while she was much less apt to pretend I didn’t exist, most of her attentions took the form of taunts, teasing me with innuendo and glimpses of her body, as if it were something I might see but never experience. After I’d been there a few days, though, she thrust a crystal goblet in my hand. “Fill it,” she demanded, then pursed her lips as my eyes widened. “Well — do what you can.”

I managed in private, to fantasies of Maia.

I’d loved her all my life, I realized — a love for every age and need. I’d first loved her with childish adoration, and then for her divine wisdom. I later loved her extraordinary beauty as I matured into its spell. Loved her as an ideal that no mortal woman could live up to. I’d begun loving her as proof that the merciful God I’d been raised to worship existed, and now, finally, as further evidence that he didn’t.

My devotion was reciprocated, and the time we spent together lovers’ time. But while I shared her bed and body, I tried not to delude myself that it meant the same thing to Maia as it did me. Millions of people may love their dogs, but none regard them as equals. I kept alive the cut on the side of my lip, where she’d bitten me that first morning, the pain tiny and exquisite. But her teeth never returned to the spot, or sought any other.

“Why not?” I asked one bright afternoon. Now I understood why Aztecs had allowed their hearts to be cut out, and islanders went willingly into live volcanoes. “Is there something wrong with my blood?”

“Is that all you think you are to me?” Maia looked at me with such intuitive depth it felt as if she could take in my whole life between eyeblinks. “I can get blood anywhere.”

“I didn’t say you had to take it all.”

“Yours is special. It shouldn’t be wasted.”

When I suggested they must be reserving me for something, she only smiled, with mystery and allure. We were out walking, had gotten far from home by this time of day, Maia showing me some of the mundane, everyday sights of Dublin. Her arm looped in mine, she steered me down a side street, more purpose in her stride now than before. When we were across the street from a brick building that looked like a school, we sat atop a low wall. Before long the doors opened to release a flood of young boys in their uniforms — dark blue short pants and pullover sweaters, with pale blue shirts and red ties. We watched them swarm away, and one in particular she seemed to track, until he was lost from sight.

“I had children once … but they were killed by soldiers,” she said, as if the grief still came unexpectedly sometimes. “Life is cheap enough now but it was even cheaper then. Before I could have any more, things happened to me, and then … I couldn’t. So I just watch strangers, children whose names I never know. I’ll pick one out, pretend he or she is mine, and it goes on like that for a year, maybe two. And then I go to another school and pick out a new one, because I’ve noticed the other’s looking older, and I don’t want to know what becomes of him. Or her. It’s easier to imagine a good future than to deal with the truth, watch all that bright potential start to dim.”

“Then obviously I’m an exception.”

“Exception. Oh, you’re that, all right.” When she touched my leg I could feel the thrilling heat of her. “I was following you that day. Like I always did. I’d first noticed you six, seven months before. Such a pious little thing — it was the most adorable trait. Like little American boys growing up wanting to be cowboys, before they find out the world doesn’t have cattle drives anymore. I wanted to save you from yourself, if I could. And then the bomb almost took care of it for me.”

I’d never once imagined our history predating that day.

“You were standing there between your friends’ bodies. Too shocked to cry. I wish I could tell you I steered the bricks away from you in midair, but something like that’s a bit beyond me. I think I was as surprised as you that you were okay. But I couldn’t walk away without touching you. And then … then I saw your knee.”

Across the street, the flood of schoolboys had been reduced to a trickle: the laggards, the stragglers, the delinquents.

“Sometimes — and it is rare,” Maia went on, “I can taste more than life in someone’s blood. I can taste all the truth of that person. Lilah’s the same way. The blood and the flesh of a special or gifted person are full of images. Take them in and we can learn things they might not even know about themselves.” Her eyes locked on mine, clear and hard. “If you think the rite of Holy Communion is only two thousand years old, you’re a few thousand short.

“When I licked the blood from your knee that day, I knew you were either going to be a saint or a butcher.”

I thought at first she meant working in a meat shop. Then I realized what sort of butcher she meant.

“From one to the other, that’s quite a jump,” I said.

Maia shook her head. “They’re closer than you think. There’s always been a certain type of man, if he can’t save a soul, he’s willing to settle for exterminating it. Your Church has attracted more than its share. And I tasted that potential in you.”

She’d kept track of me ever since, she admitted, always knew where to find me when she felt like watching me sleep. And while it disturbed her to see me hand my life over to the Church, she was patient enough to let it run its course without interfering, knowing all along that it wouldn’t last.

“What made you so sure?”

“You were too raw and open for it to last forever. There’s no faith in anything so strong it can’t be shattered by one moment’s glimpse of something it doesn’t allow for. And I knew someday you were bound to see one of them … and it’d leave its mark on you.”

I looked at my wrists. Maia was right. There, in the flesh, over the veins…

Weeks had passed, yet there was still a mark where that tormented Christ had grabbed me with his handful of shattered bones. Since he’d pierced the skin and his blood had mingled with my own, a transfused message that I was to carry inside until, perhaps, I found someone able to read it.

His commission: Save me from that impotent, slaughtered lamb they have made of me.

With one fingertip, Maia touched the healing split on my lip. “I’ve tasted you before,” she said, “and I’ve tasted you after. So I know the difference, Patrick. He’s in there. You still carry him. We can use that.”

VI. Haereticae pravitatis

I didn’t know what she was waiting for, one day being as good as another to bleed. I was used to it. I wondered how much Maia would require, and if it made a difference to her where it came from, wrists or throat. Wondered if she alone would be involved, or Lilah too, or maybe all three of them, opening me like a heretical gospel written in flesh and blood and semen. It was Lilah I feared most, because if she were involved, I could only be read once.

Still, I never considered running.

They indulged their appetites, neither flaunting them nor hiding them from me. Only Lilah’s necessitated fatality, and as I came to understand their habits, they didn’t always feed together, but when they did it was usually at her instigation. Most often, Lilah or Salíce would disappear for a few hours, some nights both of them, coming home after they’d coaxed some man into joining them. As huntresses, they had an easy time of it.

“After more than two and a half millennia,” Lilah told me one morning, when she was in especially good humour, “I can personally vouch that one thing about men has stayed exactly the same, and always will.” She grinned, relishing the predictability of my gender. “Every one of you thinks you’re virile enough to handle more than one woman at a time … and you’re soooo embarrassingly eager for your chance to prove it.”

I’d never seen the room where the Sisters took them. It was always locked, like the room where Bluebeard kept dead wives. Nor did I see the men themselves; didn’t want to. But on those nights when I knew one would be coming, I’d sit nearby in the dark and listen to his laughter, his ignorance-fueled anticipation. I’d hear the latching of the door. Then it would go on for some time. Often the men grew vocal in their passion, bellowing like love-struck bulls. The Sisters would laugh and squeal. Eventually I’d hear a sudden snap, or worse, a thick ripping. The overwhelmed voice would screech louder still, but I never could discern any clear division between ecstasy and agony, even after their cries degenerated into whimpers and moans that never lasted very long.

The final cracking open of the bones was the worst.

One morning after they’d fed, Salíce found me huddled before the hearth and a blazing fire. I was disheveled from having been up all night, and clutched a blanket around my shoulders because I couldn’t seem to get warm.

“Awww, look, he’s … he’s shivering,” Salíce announced to an otherwise empty room. “He misses home, I’ll bet.”

I wouldn’t answer, wouldn’t turn around to look at her. Maia and Lilah would still be upstairs sleeping it off. Maia wouldn’t let me see her for the next several hours after she’d gorged, but I found that easy to live with.

“Well, he was a noisy one, even by the usual standards, I’ll admit that much.” Behind me, she was coming closer. “Tendons and ligaments like steel bands, Lilah said. What a snap those made.”

I could feel her directly behind me, warmer than the fire, and I jumped when she bent down to snake her arms around me in an unexpected hug. Patronizing, I first thought, but when she kissed me atop the head I wondered if instead she wasn’t trying, in her way, to tell me that she wouldn’t bite.

“Nobody forces you to listen, you know,” she said. “There’re plenty of places in this house where you wouldn’t hear a thing.”

I nodded. Salíce didn’t need to tell me this, though, just as I shouldn’t have had to tell her that listening to them feed was the best way of putting my future in perspective.

“You’re worried about the divination? That’s all?” She almost sounded amused. “Forget about Lilah, why don’t you. So she looks at you like a kidney pie. The thing to remember about Lilah is, if it wasn’t for scaring people, she wouldn’t have any fun at all.”

Salíce told me to wait right there, that she really shouldn’t show this to me, but so what. She disappeared into an adjacent room that overlooked the back lawn. It was full of tall windows and sunlight, locked file cabinets and computers. When she came back she handed me a small news clipping.

“It was a bigger story in Italy,” she said, “but I’m assuming you don’t read Italian.”

It was dated the previous week, about a theft from the church of a small village seventy-some kilometers north of Rome. During the night, someone had smashed a spherical crystal reliquary and stolen the relic inside, which wasn’t identified, only described as dating from the earliest years of Church history.

“Our friend Julius had this done. He lives in Capua, with a beautiful castrato boy named Giovanni. He used to throw the best parties, until Vanni deafened him with a pair of nails, so they’re pretty sure he’s dying now … but I think he wanted it that way, because he still loves Vanni after what that little eunuch did.” She rolled her eyes. “They want to grow old together.”

Since I didn’t know who or what she was talking about, I read the article again. It still struck me as an incomplete puzzle. “I don’t understand what this has to do with me, or Maia, or—”

“Don’t you get it? The relic — it’s for the divination. Lilah can’t bother you with those lovely white teeth of hers if she’s got them busy on something else, now, can she?”

Ghouls already; now body thieves? Asked what the relic was, Salíce just laughed and told me to be patient, adding only that if it was genuine it could prove to be quite illuminating. Pour my tainted stigmatic’s blood into the mix, and it might be their best opportunity yet for stealing the secrets of Heaven and Hell.

“I’d’ve thought you already knew them,” I said.

“You think because we’ve lived a long time we hold privileged information?” She shook her head. “There’s some older than we are, and they’re no better off. We’ve all got our ideas, but there’s too much we can never agree on.

“At Julius’s last party, two years ago, we managed to summon down and imprison an Ophanim. We thought we might get some answers out of it. But it was already insane. And wasn’t flesh and blood like Maia and Lilah are used to. So we raped it and sent it back, out of spite, and that was the end of it. We didn’t learn anything that most of us hadn’t already suspected.

“But you,” she said, with a faint smile. “We’re thinking we might learn more from you than even one of Heaven’s inmates. We don’t even have to summon you down — you’re already here. And all you have to do is bleed.”

*

When she learned how much Salíce had told me, Maia wouldn’t speak to her for two days. After it got to be too much to contain, they shouted at each other for half an hour.

“You didn’t have any right!” Maia cried. “I should’ve been the one to tell him those things.”

“Then what you were waiting for?” Salíce asked. “Until he got too old and decrepit to run away from you?”

I listened to them argue as I listened to them feed: out of sight and out of reach.

“The problem with you, Maia, is that there’s still a part of you that refuses to admit you’re not like the rest of them, and never can be again. Aren’t you ever going to accept that? Ever?”

“Because I’m not strictly human anymore, that means I can’t still be humane?” Maia’s voice then turned bitter, accusing. “Of course, you do have to possess that quality before you can slough it off.”

“Inhumane — me? They always thank me when I feed on them. What I take they’re already swimming in to begin with. They can’t wait to give it away. You can’t make any such claim, so don’t you even try.” Salíce groaned with exasperation. “My god, you still think you can fall in love, don’t you? You pick them out when they’re children and you dream about what might’ve been, and on the rare occasion you meet up with one again when he’s grown, you think if you put on enough of a front you’ll both forget what you are.”

“Keep your voice down,” Maia warned.

“You’re afraid he’ll hear something he doesn’t already know? Oh, wake up, he’s got excellent hearing. The only thing he doesn’t know is how you look after a meal. That’s the one thing you can’t pretend away, isn’t it? Not even you’re that naïve. And damn right you are that most of them would have a problem loving you back if they saw how bloated your belly gets with all the blood.”

Whatever Maia said next I didn’t hear. I was too busy facing Lilah when I realized she’d been behind me, watching me eavesdrop.

“It’ll blow over. It always does,” she told me, and nodded in the direction of the argument. “Salíce always has had an attitude of superiority because she never has to get any messier than some little cocksucker bobbing her head beneath a table at Mr. Pussy’s Café.”

“Do you ever resent that?” I asked.

“God, no. But then, I know what really makes Salíce so cocky over it in the first place.” She laughed, long hair uncombed and tangled in her face, as she leaned into mine. “Nobody’s afraid of her. She hates that. Maia and me — they fear us. But nobody fears Salíce.”

“I’m not afraid of Maia, either.”

Lilah loudly clicked her teeth. “But you are of me.” She stared triumphantly through the crumbling of my self-assurance. “Then maybe you’re only half-stupid.”

As she’d predicted, the argument soon blustered away, ending when Maia stormed from the house and cooled down out on the back lawn. Through the windows I watched her, a slight distant figure in somber greys, walking slowly amidst grass and gardens, finally sitting beneath an oak, where she distractedly petted one of the slobbering mastiffs that had the run of the grounds. When I braved the dog and joined her, we sat awhile in that silence that follows the clumsy dropping of another guard from around the heart.

“After that first day, and the bomb,” I said, “why didn’t you come to me again? I’ve always wondered that. I’d’ve followed you anywhere. I’d’ve been anything you wanted.”

“There’s your answer, right there. It’s too easy for someone like us to take whatever we want. Where’s the joy in that? After so long, it’s only gratifying one more appetite.” She watched her hand scruffing the black fur across the dog’s huge head. “It’s important to me that if someone like you comes back … it’s because you do it on your own.”

“Because it’s more real to you then?”

Maia shrugged, stared off into the grey sky. “What is real, anyway?” she asked, and while once I thought I had those answers, now I wasn’t even sure of the questions.

In the black-and-white faith I was raised in, there’d been no room outside of Hell for the likes of the Sisters of the Trinity. And while I realized that they weren’t goddesses, neither were they demons. I no longer believed in demons, at least not the sort the Church had spent centuries exorcising. Where was the need of them, other than keeping the Church in business? One pontiff with a private army could wreak more havoc than any infernal legion.

Because of Salíce, now I understood that the Sisters weren’t the only ones of their kind. When I asked how many of them there were, Maia didn’t know, or wouldn’t say, and I realized with an unexpected poignancy that whatever monstrous acts it was in their nature to commit, they were no worse than what went on between wolves and deer, and that those who committed them were still as lost in their world as the most ignorant of us mortal fools in ours, working and loving and praying and dying over our threescore and ten.

Black-haired and black-eyed, hair tousled in the breeze, Maia turned her unblinking serpent’s gaze on me, so unexpected it was almost alien.

“How much would it take to repulse you?” she said.

At first I didn’t know how to respond, then asked why she’d even want to.

“Because it obviously takes more than eating men alive to do it. You don’t find that interesting about yourself?” She wouldn’t look at me, instead smiled down at the dog. “I’ve made lovers of grown-up children before, and sometimes they’ve run and sometimes they’ve stayed, but do you know who I’ve noticed is most likely to stay? It’s you refugees from Christianity. Now why do you suppose that is?”

I had no idea.

“My guess is it’s because, most of you, you were weaned on the idea of serving up your god on a plate and in a little cup and eating him in a communal meal. Then when you can’t believe in him anymore, and you find us, and see how willing we are to eat others just like you, how we need that … then isn’t a little part of you, deep inside, relieved? Because that means you’re the god. Your ego is still too fragile to see yourself as just food. So you must be God, right…?

“So let me ask you again: How much would it take to repulse you? To sicken those romantic ideals out of you?”

“I don’t want to talk about this anymore, Maia. If you want me to leave, I’ll leave, but have the good grace to ask me rather than talking your way around it.”

“Hear that, Brutus? Doesn’t want to talk about it,” she said to the mastiff. “You know, Patrick, where we get these dogs, they claim the lineage runs directly back to war dogs used by the Roman army. Like barrels, they were … with legs and teeth and fury and spiked leather armor. And you know something, Patrick? That’s no empty claim on the breeders’ part, it’s absolutely true. Do you know how I know this?”

I shook my head.

“They’re extraordinary dogs. With extraordinary bloodlines.”

She hugged the dog, then slammed it over onto its back, and I could only watch appalled as Maia buried her beautiful face in the coarse fur at the mastiff’s bull neck. It yelped once, and those powerful legs kicked and clawed at the air, its body all squirming steel muscle, and yet she held it down with a minimum of struggle. When after several moments Maia tore her face away and let the dog go, it rolled unsteadily to its feet and lurched to a safer spot. Dazed, it looked back at her and whined, then ran off as if in a drunken lope.

She was on me by then, had flipped me back and down before I knew it was happening. She straddled me, her hands gripping my shoulders, then pressed her smeared face to mine and opened her mouth in a violent kiss, let gravity take the blood straight into me. We spit and we spewed, but I couldn’t fight her.

It would’ve been like wrestling an angel.

So I pretended the blood was her own.

When she sat back against the oak, Maia was breathing hard. I was still lying flat and trying not to retch. She wiped her mouth with the back of one hand, and trembled.

“Julius has always hated the dogs,” she murmured. “He hated the Romans, so he hates the dogs. He still blames the Romans for what he became. And he hates the dogs.”

“Became,” I echoed. “None of you were born this way, then?”

“Nobody’s ever born this way,” she said. When I asked what made them all, she told me it was different on the surface in each case, and sometimes that surface was all they knew. When I asked what made her, Maia did not speak for a long time, nor look at me. At last, after we heard the mournful howling of an unseen dog, she said, “If you’re still around late tonight, I’ll tell you.”

VII. Ignominy patris

“We were Assyrian,” she began, in our room filled with silks and dried orchids, “and we were just women. Devalued, and with no formal power. But we still had our ways. You know the Bible, so you know the sorts of men who made Assyria, don’t you?”

I told her I did. A nation of warrior kings ruling warrior subjects, Assyria had been so feared for its savagery that an Old Testament scribe had called it “a land bathed in blood.”

“In Assyria, as in Babylonia,” Maia went on, “each woman was expected, once in her life before she married, to go to the temple of Ishtar and sit on the steps until a man came and dropped a coin in her lap as the price of her favours. So off they’d go and their bodies became divine vessels for a while, and that was how a woman performed her duty to the goddess of love.

“My sisters and I decided to go the temple all on the same day, and the men who came then, they showered us with coins and started to fight each other over who’d end up having us. Lilah loved it, thought it was hilarious. At night, in secret, she led us and other women in worshipping the demoness Lilitu … the one the Israelites took and turned into Adam’s first wife, Lilith, and thought was so horrible because she fucked Adam from the top instead of lying on her back like a proper woman was supposed to. I’m sure you can see the appeal she had to those of us who didn’t feel particularly subservient to men.

“After that first day at the temple, when we saw what kind of power we had over them, we kept going back. Our fame grew, and so did our fortunes, and the rumours of the pleasure we could bring … until we were finally summoned by King Sennacherib. He wanted to restore a rite that was ancient even then, from Sumerian times: the Sacred Marriage. The king embodied a god and a priestess stood in for the goddess — by then, we were held in much higher esteem than mere temple prostitutes — and out of that physical union the gods and goddesses received their pleasures of the flesh.”

Maia uttered a small laugh. “Lilah never believed Sennacherib really meant any of it, said he only wanted some grandiose excuse for an orgy with us. Probably she was right. After that, we became his most favoured concubines, and whatever in Nineveh we wanted, we had. And I … gave birth to twins, a daughter and a son. Of course the king didn’t publicly acknowledge them as his own. That was only for children born of his queen. But I knew whose they were.

“In 701 B.C. Sennacherib invaded the Israelites. He captured forty-six cities before getting to Jerusalem, but by then, the Jewish King Hezekiah had had an underground aqueduct dug to insure the water supply. Sennacherib besieged the city, as he’d already done at Lachish, but by now they were in a position to outwait us almost indefinitely. I know, because we were there. He might leave his queen at home, but Sennacherib wouldn’t dare leave us behind. Not with the addiction he had to our bodies. So we were there for it all. Waiting for weeks under that merciless desert sun, a few arrows flying back and forth, an attempt at building a siege ramp … but mostly each side just waiting for the other to give up.”

Maia seemed to lose herself in the flickering flame of a pillar candle. “Do you remember what supposedly happened to part of our army there?”

I nodded. It was said that an angel from the one true God of Israel came down and in one night slaughtered 185,000 Assyrians.

“Not true, I’m guessing?”

“Do you even have to ask?” she said. “It was closer to four thousand, and it was Sennacherib’s own fault. He was starting to fear he might lose the siege, so he went to the priests, the ones he knew practiced sorcery, and he had them conjure a demon from out of the desert wastes. He’d meant to send it over the city walls and turn it loose on Jerusalem. But the priests lost control of it and it began slaughtering our own soldiers. When they wrote about it later, the Israelites grossly exaggerated the casualties and credited them to the Archangel Michael.” Maia shook her head. “They did a lot of that sort of thing. Nothing but propaganda for their god Yahweh.

“What our priests had created, they finally got some control over, but they couldn’t get rid of it. I call it a demon, but it’s not like you think of demon. There’ve always been spirits, like unshaped clay, waiting to take whatever form someone with enough knowledge or devotion gives it, and that’s what the priests had done. But with the appetite they’d given it, and fed on the blood of four thousand warriors, it’d reached a degree of independence. Finally it consented to banishment, but only on condition of a sacrifice. It … it wanted flesh and blood from Sennacherib’s own lineage. Even then he got the priests to bargain with it. The thing didn’t care if what it received was a legitimate heir to the Assyrian throne. It was the flesh and blood alone that mattered.

“They took my children, Patrick. He sent soldiers into our tent and they took my beautiful babies and they fed them to that thing. It opened up their bellies and spread their insides out on the desert floor, and ate them piece … by … piece.”

Maia was silent for a long time, and I didn’t go to her as I might’ve. I wasn’t made to ease grief some 2700 years strong.

“Hezekiah was horrified by what he’d heard happened, and he eventually paid tribute — he ransomed the city, really — so our army went back home again. Except Sennacherib left us behind, Lilah and Salíce and me. Now that he’d killed my children he couldn’t trust us, so he made a gift of us to Hezekiah, to be his own concubines. Seems even he had heard of us, from spies he’d sent to Assyria.

“Even though we were betrayed by Sennacherib, we still didn’t have any love for the Israelites, or their god. So it was mostly a very antagonistic relationship we had with Hezekiah. But then one night, before he took us, he became very drunk, and we were amazed at what a state of terror he was in over their god. He talked to us, I think, because we were the only ones he could talk to, the only ones who didn’t share his religion.

“He was still haunted by the butchery of my babies. It wasn’t their deaths so much as the … the consumption of them that was so abhorrent to him. And this one night, drunk, with his guard down, he confessed that he couldn’t see any difference between that, and certain things their own god Yahweh had demanded.

“Then he mentioned some text he’d acquired from a Chaldean trader. He wouldn’t tell us what it said, specifically — he was too horrified to do that — but he hinted that it was written in angelic script, and that it couldn’t be burned, and that it had something to do with Yahweh and the blood sacrifice of a child.”

As Maia told me these things, they plucked at old misgivings I’d once chosen to ignore … like all those scriptures that plainly had God demanding that his chosen people lay waste to enemies down to the last innocent baby and ignorant animal.

Might these, too, have fed him, along with faith?

“When Hezekiah finally had us that night, something became very different about him. In spite of how drunk he was, he was inexhaustible. His erection had swollen to twice its usual size, and he kept after us long after it was raw. Hours, it must’ve been, and he still hadn’t released once. I don’t know if it was something in his eyes, or the way his throat ballooned out, as if his flesh couldn’t contain whatever was inside him, but we knew it wasn’t Hezekiah any longer. It was the Sacred Marriage, all over again … except this time, it was their god inside him.

“And when we realized this, Lilah and Salíce and I, that was when he orgasmed. His screaming was like a slaughtered pig’s. You can’t have any idea what that sounded like echoing down the palace corridors and back again. And his seed … it was like venom. He held us down and filled us with it, and there wasn’t any end to it, and it burned us from the inside out…”

When Maia went to the window, pressing her hands to the panes of leaded glass, we both gazed on the risen moon that watched over a land once filled with people who’d had no need of anything from the scorching deserts of Palestine. And I thought how right it was that she and her sisters had come to live amongst the Celts, and wait for that day when some magic in our blood might be turned to their advantage, if only to know the enemy a little better.

“And that was the seed of what we became,” she finished. “The punishment from their god for who we were. What we’d heard. He turned us into their idea of what we’d worshipped at home. Turned us into Liliths. And then he turned us away. Forever.”

VIII. O magnum mysterium

Even before they came to Dublin for the divination, I’d begun collectively thinking of them as the Misbegotten.

They came from as near as across the Irish Sea; as far away as the other side of the world. They came, and they were not all the same. Some drank blood while others ate flesh; then there was Salíce. The one called Julius? Before his castrato deafened him, Maia told me, it was the resonances of extraordinary sounds that kept him young. I’d been told of an aborigine who’d been eating eyes since the British used Australia as a penal colony, claiming it kept his view into the Dreamtime clear. I’d been told of a Paris artist who could be nourished only with spinal fluid. They walked and talked like men and women, but only if you looked none too close. For one who knew better, it was as though the gates of some fabulous and terrible menagerie had been thrown wide, and its inhabitants allowed to overrun creation.

Nobody’s ever born this way, Maia had said, but I saw them as misbegotten all the same, of monstrous second births that had, by chance or perverse design, left them equipped to demand accounting for what they’d all become. And even if in the end they might only shake futile fists at Heaven, I felt sure their voices would carry much farther than the rest of ours.

In a way I envied them.

In a way I regretted they hadn’t the power to turn me into one of them.

But to aid their cause, all I had to do was spread wide my arms, fixate my soul upon the Christ, then do what came naturally.

“We’re of two minds on God, Patrick,” she’d explained to me. “But if he really had a son, and there’s even a little bit of him in that son, and if there’s even a little bit of that son now in your blood, and in that single tiny scrap of flesh he left behind, then maybe that’s enough for us to do what men and women have always wanted to do: understand the true nature of God.”

“What tiny scrap of flesh he left behind?” I’d asked.

Having heard stories of their revels and debauches, I’d half-expected them to behave like barbarians as they filled the cellars beneath the house. But they took their places amongst the stones and great oaken beams with grim and solemn faces, and waited with the kind of hungry patience that could only accrue over lifetimes.

When the Sisters came for me I was preparing myself in silent contemplation. The Order of Saint Francis had taught me well in this much, at least. I turned around to find they’d quietly filled the doorway, and when Maia laid her cheek to my bare back, the other two turned theirs, to give us our moment alone.

“We’re of two minds on God,” she’d explained. “Some fear he might really be the creator of everything. In which case, we have no hope at all. Even if there is some lost paradise that was once promised, we’ll never regain it.”

They led me into the chamber, in the center of eyes and teeth and throats, and naked, I lay down upon the waiting cross.

“But there’s another way it might be,” she’d said, reminding me then of how the Assyrians had made their demon by taking that malleable form and imprinting it with all the traits they desired in it, until they’d fed it to the point of independence, so that it broke away on its own.

They lashed my arms to those of the cross; secured my feet as well. The crown of thorns came last. And when they raised the cross upright, and dropped its foot into the waiting hole, all the old devotions came back to me again, and once more I became as one with Father, with Son, and with Holy Ghost.

Whatever those were.

“Some of us wonder if religion hasn’t gotten it backwards,” she’d said. “If what the world now calls God was born in the desert out of the needs of people who had to have something bigger than themselves to worship. So it heard them, and asked for more, and they fed it burnt offerings, and the blood of their enemies, and their devotion, and later on they exported it to the rest of the world. But even before then, it was getting stronger, until after enough centuries had passed, they’d all forgotten where that god of theirs came from and thought it’d always been there, and created them instead … and by then, it was ready to feed on them.”

The Sisters of the Trinity took their places while my weight tugged at the lashes that held me aloft. My every rib stood etched against flesh as I laboured for breath, and now, at long last, the empathy I’d always sought with Christ had come. I was no longer in a Dublin cellar; rather, atop a skull-shaped hill called Golgotha, dying in the hot winds and stinging desert dust.

“Who better to feed on than those who considered themselves his children?” she’d explained. “They’ve always called themselves his chosen people … but chosen for what? You have to wonder. From the time of the Babylonian exile, to the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans, right up to the Holocaust … he’s been eating and drinking them all along, like no other people on earth.”

Salíce stood before me, below, and slowly, reverently, took me into her mouth. Minutes passed, as I writhed upon the cross between the agony of breaths, until it happened anew — the flesh of my wrists splitting layer by layer, the blood freed at last in a gush of transcendence and ecstasy. It trickled first along my arms toward my ribcage, then began to flow heavier, drizzling down into Maia’s wide and waiting mouth. So that none would be wasted, bowls were set beneath my other wrist and my feet.

I turned my eyes toward the heavens, wide and seeing so very clearly now, like those of the martyr I’d once dreamt of being: Saint Ignatius, in that painting hanging in Greyfriars Abbey. I’d so admired it, always wondering if I could show his sort of courage when the teeth of the carnivores began to close. Perhaps, now, I’d equaled him, even bettered him. Or maybe I’d fallen short by the depth and breadth of the darkest abyss.

There was no truth but this: I was not the father’s son I’d once been.

“What tiny scrap of flesh he left behind?” I’d asked.

“Don’t forget, he was circumcised. In the temple, when he was eight weeks old. The Holy Foreskin — that’s what you papists call it,” she’d said, with a teasing shake of her head. “You people and your morbid relics.”

When I looked down the bloody length of my body, I could see that tiny dark scrap in Lilah’s fingers, stolen from its crystal reliquary north of Rome. Still soft and pliable, it was, neither rotted nor gone leathery. Incorruptible.

But flesh is flesh, and beliefs something else altogether.

“Save me from that impotent, slaughtered lamb they have made of me,” he’d asked, and while I’d never known for sure what impact I might have, perhaps the truth alone would be enough.

The truth, they’d insisted he said, will set you free.

Then again, doubt works miracles too.

Lilah lifted her hand, and touched the foreskin to my flesh, to wet it with my blood, then it disappeared between her teeth.

And in the convulsive rapture of fluids and tissue, in that moment that makes us one with gods, I gave them all they’d asked for, all they needed, all I had to give.

It was explosive.

The greatest revelations usually are.

IX. Descendo ad patrem meum

“You can take away a man’s gods, but only to give him others in return.”

It was Carl Jung said that. My uncle had only borrowed it.

I nearly bled to death on that night of the divination, the stigmata persistent and reaching for the very core of me. In the weeks that followed, as the Sisters nursed me back to health like a faithful dog they couldn’t bear to have put to sleep, I often fondled an old pewter crucifix while my thoughts turned to the subject of fear.

Fear the Lord thy God, we were taught since childhood in my family, and how we quaked. How we trembled. How we fell daily to our knees and supplicated for continued mercy.

I’d long ceased to fear. Fear is for children, no matter what their age. But when fear is no more, that’s still not the end of it, because beyond fear lies despair, and so far, I don’t know if there’s any end to despair at all.

Once I was well enough to get about again, to stand without dizziness, to walk and run without weakness pitching me toward the nearest chair, I decided I could no longer spend my life with the Sisters of the Trinity. They, and the rest of the Misbegotten, were so much more than I could ever be. Their eyes saw more, their ears heard more, and with their tongues they tasted it, and their feet had walked it, and their minds comprehended it, and they had lived the histories that others only analyzed, and wrongly…

And still they were not gods. They’d have been the first to admit it.

To see them day by day was too hideous a reminder that I was nowhere near their equal … and worse, that I’d never really gotten past that deeply instilled need to believe, but had now been left with only the Void.

“So what did you learn from it?” I’d asked the Sisters, soon as I could, from my bed; asked more than once. They’d look at one another and smile, with something like sadness and pity and even embarrassment for my sake; but for their own sake, with maybe just the tiniest ray of hope. Or maybe I saw that only because I wanted to. And then they’d tell me to rest, just rest, their 2700 years to my thirty-one like quantum mechanics to a dog.

On my own for the first time in my life, I hiked my homeland like a student tourist, my old possessions sharing backpack space with something I thought of as belonging to a newer Patrick Kieran Malone. The knife was large, with a contoured Kraton haft, and a huge killing blade of carbon steel and a sawtoothed upper edge.

I walked an Ireland different from that of the times of the Troubles, when a bomb had left me standing on a new road. Up north there were no more bombs going off, nor bullets flying, the I.R.A. having decided to lay down its arms — for the time being, at least — and I saw that most everyone was caught up in a cautious optimism that people with differing ideas of the same god really could live together after all.

I wondered if, somewhere, in his jealousness, he missed the smoke and blood of those earlier days. But time was on his side. The old blood lusts never die, they just lie dormant.

Saw a bumper sticker while on my way back up to Belfast. Nuke Gay Whales for Christ, it said.

Had to come from America.

“So what did you learn?” I’d asked the Sisters, refusing to give up, and finally Maia sat down on the bed where the marrow in my bones frantically churned out new red blood cells.

“How can I tell you this so you understand it?” she said, and thought awhile. “What’s God really like? Imagine an arrogant and greedy and demented child on a beach, building castles in the sand … only to kick them over out of boredom, leaving what’s left for the waves. Which of course begs one more question:

“Where did the sand come from?”

In Belfast I returned to the church I’d grown up in, and as I entered the sanctuary that quiet afternoon, it smelt the same as it always had, old and sweet with wax and incense. It took me back twenty years, more, the shock of it overwhelming and unexpected. Smells can do that to you. It was here where my family gave thanks for my life being spared on that day of the bomb, where they lit candles for the souls of my friends who’d been killed.

I genuflected before the altar, out of old reflex.

Or maybe it was disguise.

The priest didn’t recognize me at first, but then it had been awhile, a decade of monasticism and nearly another year of heresy in between. Such things leave their mark on a man, and even his blood knows the difference. The priest had already heard that I’d left the order; clasped my hands warmly just the same; would be at least sixty now. He told me how deeply my leaving the Franciscans had hurt my mother, dashing so many of her expectations for me.

“Can’t help that, Father,” I said. “Wasn’t my idea … but I’ve learnt a brand new doctrine. I just count myself lucky that I learnt it while I’m still a relatively young man.”

I could see that he was puzzled. And I remembered a childhood friend who’d told me, when we were altar boys, how the Father had put his hands on him, and where. I’d not believed him. Nobody had. Everybody knew that God loves little children.

“Gospel of Matthew,” I said. “Remember what Jesus had to say about new doctrines? Comparing them to wine?” The priest nodded, back on familiar ground. “Said you can’t go pouring new wine into old wineskins. It’ll just burst them, and what’ve you got then? Spilt wine and a wineskin that won’t hold anything else.”

From my backpack I took the sleek, dark knife, and when I unsheathed it, the blade seemed to keep on coming.

“Some days,” I confessed, “I do wish that fucking bomb had done me in too.”

*

I don’t know why I killed the priest. Don’t know why I did such a thorough bloody job of it. Or why I killed twelve more in the coming weeks, or how I managed to get away with it for as long as I did. Blessed, I suppose, in my own way.

With that sacrificial blade I opened them, throats and chests and bellies, opened them lengthwise or crossways, and out of each poured their stale old wine. And then I’d have to sit awhile and gaze upon their burst skins, and reflect upon the way they weren’t good for anything else now. This was my main comfort. But I could never get them all.

That, too, was my despair.

So I imagined those beyond my blade, Catholic and Protestant alike, shepherding those even more desperate than I to believe, telling them about an impotent, slaughtered lamb whose history and words had been agreed on by committees. And in his captive name, the eager converts would rise from their watery baptismal graves to go forth and seek to propagate the species.

Over those weeks, I was not a particularly beloved figure in Ireland. Knew it couldn’t be much longer before I was caught. And when at last I grew too tired, too sick at heart to continue, only then did I return to the one place, the one people, that would have me, and they took me in as one of their own.

I knew better, though.

No matter how much blood I’d drunk, it hadn’t made me one of them.

“Hide me,” I asked those voracious and beautiful Sisters of the Trinity. “Hide me where they’ll never find me. Hide me where they never can.”

Of course, they said. Of course we will.

But Maia wept.

X. Consummatum est

And thus finishes this testament of a boy who wanted only to grow up and be a saint.

There are many who’d say he couldn’t have fallen any farther short of such a lofty goal. After all, there are saints, and there are butchers, and they believe they know the difference.

But a few — a growing few, perhaps — would say that he achieved his dream all the same. But this depends on your idea of paradise.

“Think of it this way,” Lilah tells me. “You struck some of the first blows in a coming war. Oh, you’ll be venerated, I don’t have any doubt about that. I’ve seen it before.”

And now, at the end of all ambition, where too ends the flesh and the blood and the seed of life, I can’t help but thinking of my old hero, obsolete though he may be: Saint Ignatius, on his way to the lions in Rome. Would that he’d had such beautiful mouths to welcome him as I’ll soon have.

Take me into you, Maia. Take me in, my angel, my deliverer, and I will be with you always … until the end of your world.

Caress then, these beasts, that they may be my tomb, Ignatius wrote in a final letter, and let nothing be left of my body. Thus my funeral will be a burden to none.

As for me, I’ll not mind leaving bones, and I hope they keep them around, gnawed and clean, true relics for the inspiration of disciples yet to come.