12 THE NEW PRIEST

There's a new incumbent on his way to the Presbytery...

Father Samuel Tinder was feeling awful.

The Bishop had dropped his bombshell and as good as given him the sack, a disgruntled Parishioner had launched a brick at his window which had probably been intended to do him mortal harm, and two women had had the temerity to suggest that there might be something wrong with his reasoning.

And so, on his knees in fading daylight, he beseeched his Lord and Master where, divine one, have I gone wrong?

It wasn’t like him yo use phrases like divine one even though he was totally convinced in the existence of a whole army of divine ones. He particularly believed in the angels who served the one and only deity who sat on a golden throne at the very apex of all being.

What did that mean, the apex of all being?

He knew what it meant because, in his head, all life was in one of two pyramids, one reaching eternally upwards with his creator and God at the very apex, and the other, with the same base line but reaching for ever downwards, with Satan at its apex. And the two forces, the great one and the anti-great one, sent their armies into battle against each other.

He’d read enough ancient texts to know that was what was happening, even though some of those texts were only fragmentary as a consequence of hailing from deep in the past, originating from a time that predated just about everything else. But if anyone was going to know the truth, he reasoned, it was going to be the army of souls who lived at the very beginning. They would have seen the remnants of creation in the flesh and even hobnobbed with Adam. What a time that would have been, to be alive.

And it was then that he saw them.

Not one, not two, not even three, but the army of souls. In his living room, trampling on his carpet, sitting on his comfortable chairs, hovering over his empty cocktail cabinet, the one that hitherto had been used for his half bottles of whiskey to live in.

And they swirled around like spirits should, whilst their mouths opened and closed almost silently, yet at the same time hissing the name of his Lord in a thousand tongues. He could hear them! All those tongues, at least a thousand, and the one word in all of them, and that word meant Lord.

And the greatest mischief of them all was the way he could tell with an absolute certainty that some of the amorphous spirits were female. They had to be, with their feminine voices and bosoms. And not just bosoms lurking under a tasteful silken shroud, all white and concealing, but naked bosoms accompanied by huge n*****s. And n*****s like that were designed for one function only, to have infants on them. Females amongst the spirits swirling together in that front room was one thing, but one or two were closer to male figures than they had any right to be if they were from the Heavens, and what were those two doing?

He was outraged.

In his living-room where only innocence and he should tread, there were shapes … cavorting. Actually engaged in the most sinful of sinful acts.

He wept. He couldn’t help it, but tears flooded from him and dropped like hissing, boiling acids running down his face and then dripping like bubbling liquid steam onto the floor where he was kneeling, and the pain everywhere, in his chest, his head, his entire body, was unbelievable.

He rubbed his cheeks, his moistened cheeks, and the acid seemed to burn his hand where it scorched its way through his skin.

“Why are you torturing me, Lord?” he begged, and he knew the answer. It flooded his mind even before the spirits, slowly coalescing into a single huge and omni-powerful individual, replied.

You are coming home, it said, its voice rich and beautiful, for I am your father and want you sitting by my feet, seated on the greenest turves in Paradise, waiting throughout Eternity for the blast of my celestial horn summoning you to walk again through the valley of shadows into the light of Eternity…

A tiny bit of his mind rebelled. But just a tiny bit, and it was easily quashed, yet not before it suggested that what his mind was hearing wasn’t really anywhere but being created inside its malfunctioning neurons and anyway was gobbledegook. But the rebellion didn’t last long. It couldn’t, because the message, the instruction or invitation or whatever it was, was so all-powerful that no doubts could exist within a million miles of it.

“I’m coming, Lord,” he shouted.

And he did just that. He crumpled onto the floor of his living-room where he knelt, melting like a pool of dreams, and lay so suddenly still that the mess of him could only be a pool of death. And in the stillness of a night falling like nights mostly have, it lay motionless and silent.

oo0oo

The sun was bright in its Heavens when Sophia woke up next morning, and the very first thing she did was frown.

It wasn’t that her night had been disturbed by the kind of dreams that occasionally disturb a woman’s sleep but that she remembered the way she and Constance had left Father Samuel Tinder the night before.

The man’s silly, but maybe there’s a good reason for that, she thought as she dressed in shorts and a tee-shirt. The weather promised to provide her with the sort of balmy day when shorts and a tee-shirt would be more than comfortable, and anyway she liked dressing like that.

But, her attire aside, she felt uncomfortable.

After a light breakfast she picked up her lap-top and switched it on. She would breathe some air into her fictitious priest. She would make him irritatingly loveable.

She thought for a moment. She’d already created the man, though he’d only been a shadow hovering in the background of her main character's daily life as a milk-maid. She wasn’t sure that there were milk-maids any more because whenever she saw television footage including dairy farms it was always high-tech and involved hoary men in jeans and sweaters.

But she had a milk-maid, which involved in her creating a small farm run by a woman and her daughter, the farmer himself having been despatched to the hereafter by a tractor in a grizzly misadventure some years before her story began.

And, not far from the farm was a village with a church that had been there almost since the Norman Conquest, and in that church was Father Bream.

She closed her eyes and tried to imagine what he might have looked like, but every time she concentrated an image of Father Samuel Tinder popped into her mind.

It’s no good, she told herself, to put my mind at rest I’ll have to call on him and apologise for something or other…

She wasn’t aware that she had anything to apologise for and in actual fact was perfectly aware that it had been the man who had been offensive, the way he talked about women as if there was something innately awful about them, but she’d think of something. She always did. It was one thing she excelled at.

So she set out for the Presbytery, walking. She might have taken her car, but the walk would do her good and parking was dreadful where she was going. She supposed it was to discourage people from taking their cars when they went to church.

oo0oo

Father Peter Potter was annoyed.

He’d wanted a Parish of his own, but he’d wanted a city one where there were plenty of opportunities to do good work and help people who genuinely needed help, but Brumpton was a small town in the back of nowhere and he was pretty sure he knew exactly what he’d find there. Small town people with small town minds and small town problems. And he’d been told about the incumbent who, according to the Bishop, was either reading too much ancient history or going mad.

“The one can bring on the other,” he had boomed.

So Father Peter Potter wasn’t in the best of moods as he looked around for signs as to where his new ministry might be, and particularly where the Presbytery might be, because it was there that his interests lay. Home and home comforts, they dominated the tiny secular part of his brain which was never quite lost in its sea of faith.

He spotted the woman walking purposefully along and decided she would probably be able to give him better directions than his satellite navigation system, which seemed to be old enough to be aware of only half of the streets on the planet. So he pulled up next to her, and opened his window.

“Excuse me...” His voice was almost melodic. He’d spent quite a long time training it to sound like that.

The woman looked up. “Yes?” she said, and then apparently noticed his collar because she added “father?”

“Is there a Catholic church near here, and near it a home for deluded Priests?” he asked.

He was being jocular. He enjoyed being jocular. It put people at their ease, that and his melodic modulation.

“Yes,” she replied, and she added with a bright smile, “I’m on my way there myself.”

“Then you might as well hop in and direct me?” he said with the sort of smile that proved that high quality toothpaste can be a useful investment.

“That’s kind of you,” she said, “I was going to call on Father Tinder. I’m worried about him.”

“So’s the Bishop,” replied Father Bream, “so which way shall I go?”

© Peter Rogerson 18.01.19