Where the Devil Says Goodnight (Folk Lore 1)

“What’s this racket? Is that you, Father Adam?” she asked. It was the first time Adam appreciated the clip-clop of her well-used slippers.

He managed to compose himself by the time her slender silhouette passed through the door. “The lights went off,” he said, baffled to find out she’d been home this entire time. He hadn’t entered her bedroom out of respect, but maybe he should have knocked after all.

Mrs. Janina stared at him and switched on a small flashlight, which cast a circle of white glow on the wooden floor. “You never get power failures in Warsaw? I showed you where the candles are on your first day here, Father.”

She was the evil step-mother he never had, but right now he wished he could spend the night listening to her numerous complaints.

“Yes… of course you have. I’m sorry. Where’s the electric box?”

She walked across the room and pulled out a white candle from the old wooden cabinet and handed it to Adam in her usual no-nonsense way. “It’s outside. We’ll just deal with it tomorrow. With this weather, I suspect pressing buttons won’t help much. It’s probably the cables. This happens almost every time we have heavy storms, and there will be many throughout the summer. We will have to wait for the technicians to fix it tomorrow. But don’t worry, we have a generator for the fridge and freezer.”

Adam wanted to stop her, because defrosting food was the last thing he cared about now, but words got stuck in his throat, so he watched her pad back into the corridor and then listened to her door shutting while he stood still in the middle of the living room with the candle as his only friend.

The sense of panic had subsided at least, but that did not mean Adam was fine. Far from it, actually, but if he wanted light, he needed to put the candle to use. Of all nights, did this power outage have to happen when he was so emotionally unstable?

The featureless face of a pregnant nun smiled at him from the darkest corners of his imagination, and as he lit a match and used it to start the candle, he feared he’d find her staring at him from the end of the corridor.

But all he got was a bit of brightness and longer shadows. He wouldn’t find peace without atonement.

And he knew just the thing to chase his demons back to where they belonged.

Unease clung to him when he walked to his room, eyes pinned to where the light was the brightest. The pastor didn’t know about his secret, and Adam needed to keep it that way. Self-flagellation, so widespread in the past, was now frowned upon—in the Polish Church anyway—and he wanted to avoid questions about the nature of sin he wished to atone for so badly.

But for Adam, it wasn’t about penance. He hurt himself, because it was the best way to stop his mind from wandering off, the best way to chase away thoughts of attractive male bodies. And while it worked like conversion therapy was supposed to, the scourge needed to always be on hand, because no matter how hard Adam slammed the tails against his flesh, the sinful need was always there, lying dormant like a snake creeping in the tree and ready to descend when its victim was at his most vulnerable.

But tonight, the focus on pain would take his mind off fear.

The whip burned his hand as he ran out of the parsonage, soaking his feet in the puddles while his brain did its best to convince him that there was no clomping to be heard through the roaring storm. He knew it was impossible, but as he reached the door at the back of the church and fumbled with the keys, instinct still warned him of the danger lurking somewhere in the shadows and ready to strike.

Relief turned his muscles into foam the moment he burst into the building and shut it behind him. The church was perfectly still—a place of sanctuary—but it still took several heartbeats for him to compose himself enough to let go of the door handle.

Here, he had many candles, and he could light them all to chase away the obsessive feeling of doom that settled in his chest and wouldn’t leave. Back in Emil’s home, holding lust at bay had been his only worry, but he’d lost his cool, let Emil touch him, and watched his beautiful naked body instead of making his presence known right away. Sins of thought were one thing, sins of the flesh—quite another, and in the moment when Emil had held his hand and pretended to read his future, spiritual panic took over.

Now he was bearing the consequences.

Adam walked from behind the altar and faced the high-ceilinged room, which looked back at him with its dusky window-eyes. It had expectations, but once Adam pulled off his wet T-shirt, he was ready to offer himself to God once again.