"Penitence" by Amy ´Insom´ Downum

   Halloween just happened to fall on a Sunday this year, a fact that twisted my wit to its bitter end. My wife suggested I center the sermon around the historical basis of the holiday, but try as I might I could not seem to fit God on the same page as witches and goblins. She told me I was wearing the preacher’s stereotype quite nicely, to which I hocked a magazine from the mail at her.

   Rifling through the credit card solicitations and the doctor’s bills, I noticed a handsome parchment envelope. My wife hovering over my shoulder, I opened it to find a printed invitation to a ball on Halloween night. I declared I wasn’t interested, and my wife confiscated the note.

   Two nights later (we may blame my wife for this) I was driving through the moonlit countryside with the invitation upside down on the dashboard to guide my way. The ball was for charity, she insisted, and I, being a man of the cloth, had an obligation to drop in my ten cents. I cannot describe my loathing for Halloween, nor much easier my loathing for galas and balls and other ostentatious events of glamour and alcohol-induced stupidity. It was with grave reluctance that I stepped on the gas and found myself coasting through the scattered shadows of interlocked boughs thrown into contrast by the milky moon above. I took a left at a rusted gate frame and pulled into a circle drive that looped around a massive marble fountain.

   There was nothing quite as opulent as this manor. Cars were already parked beneath the branches of a eucalyptus some distance off, and the valet stepped nimbly from the wan light soaking across the yard to take my keys. I stepped closer to the mammoth structure and noted a fat, squat man hobbling towards me. The Fat Friar, my friend Tom, came to greet me.

   “Magnificent,” he slurred. He tilted a glass of sherry in his hand towards the house. “You should see the inside…” I allowed myself to be swept up the front lawn and into the foyer, where grandeur was bathed in candlelight.

   It was certainly decorated for the occasion: candles hung in brackets and chandeliers, copiously cobwebbed, to set the mood; crystal platters teemed with themed treats; morbid music pooled out from a stereo hidden in the corner. Guests milled about, costumed and masked, dining and drinking. I noticed the liquor table to the side and allowed myself an inward sigh. No doubt booze would loosen the pockets of the charitable…

   Tom poured me a glass of wine and I took it gingerly, but didn’t drink. My friend had an insatiable love for the bottle, and tonight as no exception. As we made idle chatter, he downed two glasses of sherry, a shot of whiskey and half a bottle of Shiraz. Across the room I recognized Judith Plinth, a young missionary disguised tonight as a succubus. Her costume was blackmail-worthy. I reminded myself that I had a wife.

   Tom prattled on. I raised my glass to sniff the bouquet and recoiled slightly. I had never smelled a sour Shiraz. My glass abandoned, I inched towards the hors d’ouerves and rescued a gummy worm from a vat of chocolate pudding. The conversation lulled and spiked and I leaned against the wall, growing impatient.

   “Where is our host?” I asked my friend. The Fat Friar tightened his sash and sucked down another fourth of whiskey.

   “Haven’t seen a host yet,” he replied idly. I chewed my lip, remembering the invitation.

   “Come to think of it,” I said, “who is our host? The invitation didn’t say.” Tom again appeared disinterested.

   “Some big-shot, I don’t know. Judging by this house he’s, like….the king of Sears or something.”

   I scowled. What kind of a host shows up late for his own soirée? As the words ghosted my mind, the candles hissed and died. The front doors hushed closed. The guests around me startled as a light bled through from beneath a door at the top of the sweeping grand staircase.

   “Welcome to my winter palace.” The voice came from where the light had not yet scoured shadow. The doors above opened and from the light swept a cloaked figure. He flourished his cloak, gliding down the stairs with an accompaniment of silence. Then, the guests began to applaud.

   “And a happy Hallow’s Eve, ladies and gentlemen.” The figure stopped at the last step, threw his cloak back and opened his arms as if expecting a group hug. He had a flair for vanity, and it left my first impression wanting. He was flanked in the shadows by two similarly cloaked figures. I watched them but briefly before our host tugged on my attention span once more.

   “Tonight is a special occasion.” More applause. Someone swallowed a mouthful of wine loudly. “I have given money, I have given donations and checks. I have given blood and raised funds and organizations. I have even raised Hell.” The guests chuckled and our host bowed graciously. I snorted softly into my shoulder and Tom stepped on my foot.

   “Be polite.”

   “Have another glass of wine, Tom,” I muttered. The Fat Friar scowled and turned his round face back to our cloaked host. In the wan light that passed over his face, I noticed Tom’s eyes were glazed and foggy. I bit my lip, then leaned forward.

   “What is tonight’s charitable donation going to? You haven’t said.” My voice sounded oddly magnified in the suddenly silent foyer.

   “My dear friend…” The host’s voice had, like mine, changed abruptly. It came as a silken hiss, soft and smooth and yet unmistakably agitated. “Do my theatrics bore you…?” I swallowed. He raised his voice and again it was vainly boisterous. “Friends, tonight we are not donating money. Your checkbooks may rest in peace.” My jaw tightened. I had wasted my time driving out here, wasted my time trying to squeeze into my jester’s outfit. I moved from the wall towards the front doors and then his voice came again.

   “We will be giving a much more prized commodity. Something that, after tonight, you will have no more use for…” I stilled as the door before me slipped open once more. Our host swept forward, a deranged messiah leading his drunken witnesses out onto the lawn. I hung back but from the shadows his guards emerged and ushered me along behind the Fat Friar. Judith Plinth stood beside me. Her eyes were frosted and as empty as her glass. My chest fluttered. I told myself not to overreact, but in the next few moments I found it impossible.

   “You have heard of the traditional Halloween games, I assume.” Our host was strolling casually, carelessly, towards a pair of winged iron gates at the far end of the front courtyard. I shuffled along in the crowd, moving between the guests towards Tom. As I reached him, the gates swung forward. “Bobbing for apples, haunted houses and hay rides…in the spirit of charity, I have devised my own game…”

   I peered over Tom’s balding head and beyond the gates lay enormous hedges, easily twenty feet tall. “It’s a maze…”

   Our host drew his hooded eyes from the gates and lay them upon me with such burning intensity that I shifted further behind Tom’s bulk. His voice dropped again, became the serpentine hiss I had heard earlier. “I trusted you would drink, my friend, and you have disappointed me…”

   “I am a man of God, and I honor His will of sobriety.” Retribution came so fiercely that I wished I had not spoken.

   “It is my will you will honor tonight! Before you is no maze, lamb, and no game. Tonight’s is no ball for earthly charity! Tonight the flock of God has fallen prey to the Devil’s wolves, and tonight you will sacrifice yourselves to him! I hope your sins have been confessed, preacher, for in Hell there is no blessed reprieve!”

   The shadows came. They pressed us forward, slavering at our heels like hounds on a fox. Our host was no longer cloaked and theatrical. He stood at the gates of Hell, both the shadow and the light of hellfire. I clawed backwards through the crowd, convinced of either my own psychosis or of some practical joke poorly conceived. Approached by ravenous shadows, I turned until finally the presence of our unmasked host brought me through the iron gates. His eyes burned as the gates fused between us, molten and glowing as if freshly smelt. In my head I tried to calm myself, and in my head his words intruded: “And you, my holy friend…I will delight in the eternal punishment of your sins…”

   The guests panicked. Inside myself, so did I. Here I came to the most abhorrent dilemma in my life. My soul belonged to God. And though I believed in His divinity, in His presence and love, now faced with a horror of Satan I found myself doubting my own experience. Could I believe in one and not the other?

   The guests fled into the waiting shadows of the maze. I caught sight of the Fat Friar’s burlap costume tails flitting down the left path, and so I followed. But not a moment had I stepped from the glow of the molten gate than the shadows overpowered me, and I strayed from reality into the Devil’s game.

   I lost sight of Tom. I lost him completely to the darkness, and to the darkness I lost myself. My feet stumbled in blindness. Every sound magnified, I heard my own breathing as the panting of wolves. I was alone. The guests had scattered and melted away before my eyes. My mind spun in circles: wine, our host, Tom, sacrifice, maze. I blundered on, taking every left turn I came to until I fell through shadow into torchlight.

   Judith Plinth stood with her back to me across the narrow clearing. Elation, short-lived, made me call to her. When she turned, I balked, and my heart beat a violent tattoo against my throat.

   Her eyes were glassy, controlled by powers beyond my own reckoning, and burning with such lust I did not immediately distinguish it from hatred. I recoiled as she advanced, as provocative as the succubus she impersonated. Her fingers reached for me, curled into the fabric at my elbow, and hauled me towards her waiting body. I felt her breath, rancid with poisoned wine, and pushed her from me.

   “Don’t be afraid,” she whispered. The hairs at the base of my skull prickled. “Indulge. The end is coming…”

   “Puppet of Asmodeus!” I cried. She advanced and I flung her backwards where her form toppled a brazier on a pedestal. Fire lit the ground beneath our feet, spread as if liquid and roiled up, lashing and hot. Judith writhed. Flames swallowed her body. Her shrieks sent me running, through the fires of purity and into the waiting shadows.

   I ran until the smoke dispersed. I found myself once again in darkness, in a long corridor of hedge wall. Judith’s screams rang still in my ears, agonizing sounds that reminded me of in whom I had placed my trust. My fingers found the cross around my neck and I held onto it as I walked further into the Devil’s playground.

   At the end of a long corridor I saw a light. Not a light as if from a lamp or a candle, but a light as if reflected from some shiny surface. I will admit to my intrigue, to perhaps some form of primitive greed, but I approached the light as if it were venomous. There in a recess of bush was heaped a mound of gold and silver and stones, red and green and blue winking from a self-generated glow. Not a second passed when Tom appeared from the blackness, his eyes reflecting the glow mine had turned away from.

   “Tom!” I shouted. My friend ignored me. He threw himself upon the riches and wallowed like a sow in mud. He began to stuff doubloons into his pockets, and when that failed to suffice he ripped off his burlap robe and began shoveling great armloads of gold and silver onto it.

   “Tom!” I bellowed again. He looked up, wild-eyed and distracted. “Tom, leave it! Don’t touch it, Tom!” He had sunk in up to his knees before he noticed me, and then his reaction was violent.

   “I saw it first! I saw it! It’s mine!”

   “No, Tom! It isn’t real! Stop, Tom, please!” I moved forward to drag my friend away from his obsession but he swung at me and caught my lip. Crimson spattered over gold. Tom spun back to his robe heaped with gold and began to lift the corners in an attempt to heave his haul off the ground. I made another dive for him. On the slippery shale of coin and jewels I felt my feet leave me and the Friar and I tumbled into the mountains of poisonous wealth.

   “Let go of me!” Tom’s shrieks came high-pitched and hysterical. I saw in his eyes the greed I felt creeping into my heart, too. “You want it for yourself! I saw it first!” He grabbed a large platinum cup and swung it at my head. I caught his fist and wrested the cup from his grasp, casting it far away across the metallic dunes. “I want to die rich!”

   “There is no happiness in wealth, Tom!” I panted. He was calming, his fat body heaving with breath. “And wealth will not buy your passage through the gates of Saint Peter.” I stood, and on shaking legs I helped my friend to his. I watched him regain his breath, shaking with the effort. “Come on.” I turned back to the maze and took a step from the piles of gold and silver. The coins seemed to stick to my legs and feet, as if aware that I was leaving them forever. Tom shuddered, and then he too stepped out of greed. But as I met the darkness once again I saw from the corner of my eye a handful of galleons slip into Tom’s pocket.

   The hedges pressed us from all sides. They had ceased to be branches and leaves and had instead twisted into gnarls and thorns the size of daggers. I feared we were wandering in circles, and when a familiar glow crept from the darkness that fear was confirmed. Afraid that Tom might once again fall to covetousness I pushed him back and stepped forward alone. The mountains of riches greeted me with the same warm, inviting glow. But floating in the middle of that glorious promise of wealth was the body of a man – dressed as a vampire – whose mouth was overflowing with jewels and coins.

   I felt Tom approach my shoulder and he too saw the atrocity. I heard his breath leave him in a whimper and out of kindness I did not turn to witness his upset. I found a spot at the toe of my shoe and stared at it until Tom spoke.

   “That could have been me…”

   “In all likelihood.” I turned away from the gold and lay a hand on my friend’s shoulder, guiding him back into the maze. He would not look at me, and naively I believed I understood his reaction.

   “I forgive you.”

   “You would have stolen it from me,” he husked at last. I hid my surprise as best I could, and studied the side of his face in the dark as he continued. “You were envious…I saw it…”

   “I have never been jealous of greed, Tom. Nor of wealth or fame.” I looked at him now, and clasped his shoulder. “I admire your courage, Tom. It isn’t easy to turn down such an offer…”

   We walked in silence for time unimaginable. There was no light. The sky overhead was blotted out, as if a canvas of black had been stretched across the stars and the moon. It had grown intolerably cold. I in my thin polyester costume and Tom without his robes shivered and shook. At times I thought I heard screams or shouts in the distant corners of the maze. At times, I doubted my own sanity. I grasped the cross at my neck and soldiered on.

   The path before us split suddenly. A left fork and a right presented us with two identical black holes. Tom, breathing rapid puffs of breath into the air, jerked mechanically down the right path. I hesitated, watching him disappear further and further into the shadows. I found my voice and forced it past my lips. “Tom, I don’t think that’s the right way.”

   He didn’t answer. “Tom?” I took a step forward. My senses screamed for the left passageway. “Tom! Stop!”

   “You were right once and you think you’re right always? I’m going this way. You go yours.” He disappeared and I was left standing in the darkness by myself. Then, shattering the deafening silence of the maze, there echoed a scream to curdle blood. I released my misgivings and hurtled forward, pelting through the darkness until I stumbled upon a scene of carnal evil even my eyes could not fathom.

   Tom lay upon the ground in a pool of crimson that had stemmed from a massive rip in his gut. The moon was present here, and filled his empty eye sockets with wan light. Blood dribbled down his chin and puddled beneath his head. Two holes were ripped bloody on either side of his face. My world seemed suspended in horror. I fell to my knees at his side and searched frantically for a pulse. Beneath my fingers, no skin stirred.

   Truly panicked for the first time since being thrust into this nightmare, I spun to search the clearing for the murderer. I became aware, slowly, of my surroundings. I was standing in a massive graveyard. Headstones and archaic marble angels rose from the dewy grass as far as my eyes could see. Shadows crept, flaunting the moonlight between the graves. Movement seemed nonexistent, until from behind a mausoleum some yards off, something began to stir.

   I found my feet and backed away, swallowing my tongue and in my fear feeling my eyes begin to water. I searched frantically for a way out, but where across the yard there might’ve been an exit, iron gates loomed high. My vision blurred as my heart raced, and what now slinked towards me was unclear. As it neared I saw that it was not one, but five.

   The moonlight lit them from the inside out. Skeletal demons scrambled towards me, and I fled until my back hit against an archangel jutting life-sized from the soil. As they advanced I could discern from the moonlight their terrible deeds.

   The nearest had clasped to its skull in either clawed hand one of Tom’s ears, ripped clean from his carcass. Its partner rolled blood-shot eyes up to leer at me, and I recognized the brown irises at once. Behind them a third waggled a freshly cut tongue from between pointed teeth. My stomach lurched as a fourth demon sprang closer, for in its emaciated ribcage bled the heart of my fallen friend.

   I felt the blade of the angelic statue press into my back. I knew then what I wanted to do, and damned if I wasted my energy on a deadly sin. I grabbed the sword from between the angel’s hands and swung at the nearest demon. An ear flew. The demons scattered. I charged and caught one through the chest, and skewered Tom’s heart in the process. Blood exploded onto the grass, and I slipped and slid in my attack on the remaining demons. They bounded through gravestones, teasing me mercilessly. A flash of tongue caught my eye and I swung. The blade sang through the air, crunched against bone, and another demon fell. Brown eyes winked at me from between the stones. I swung relentlessly, panting and snarling as if an animal myself. The desire for revenge took me. I was perverted with rage. When the eyeballs rolled across the grass I turned in a single motion to shatter the bones of the earless demon. And then my eyes glowed red upon the final, fifth, demon.

   With the blade of the archangel in my hands I flew forward. As still as stone the thing remained, watching me with eye sockets void of malice, of hate, of eyeballs. I halted. There was no blood on the hands of this creature. He wore no flesh of my friend as a trophy. He had not taken part. He was not guilty. My perversion ended. I felt suddenly exhausted. The sword became too heavy, and I let it fall into the grass.

   The fifth demon nodded his head. Had I been thinking clearly, I might have lost my mind: a demon nodding. But he had. It was nigh upon imperceptible, but it was a nod and it was benevolent. I found myself shaking from head to toe. The demon turned from me, bounded over the corpses of its fellows, and slipped into the shadow of the iron gate.

   On rubber legs I followed. It touched the hinges of the gate and they melted away. The panels fell back into the corridor beyond, landing with two separate dulled crashes on the ground. I realized as my hand wrapped instinctively on the cross at my neck that I had passed the test. The demon disappeared, and so did I. Darkness came for me once again.

   I stumbled beyond thought and time. My grasp on reality because tenuous and strained. I heard Tom’s voice, at times my wife’s, at others screams I could not place as real or imagined. My hands shook. The gummy worm in my stomach churned and wriggled. I felt nauseated with hunger. The scuffing of my feet over the ground mingled with the frantic pulsing of my heart, together combined into a symphony of hellish discord.

   When at last I thought I might dissolve of hunger, my feet led me from the confines of the hedges and into a spacious hall between them. In a moment of sheer Pavlovian delight, my mouth began to water. Heaped upon banquet tables were towers of delectable treats: stuffed pheasant and roasted pig, roasts with glazes and sauces, tarts and cakes and pies, broth soups and meaty pastas.

   I forgot my mind. I stumbled into the hall and plunged my hand into the stuffed cavity of a goose. As the juices dripped from my chin I noticed that I was not alone. A witch and a troll appeared at the other end of the table, both as ravenous as I. I watched them succumb to madness, shoveling great handfuls of food into their mouths. The witch turned her back on the troll, intent upon treacle tart. As if a spectator at a sporting event, I watched in a horrific dawning of realization as the troll grasped a carving knife from beside a turkey and stuck it deep into the witch’s back.

   I dropped my handful of stuffing, realizing too late the trap I had fallen into. The troll turned towards me, withdrawing the knife with such a jerk that his wig slipped lopsided. The witch hit the ground as the blade sank into my shoulder. I cried out, a sound so foreign to my ears that they failed to recognize it as my own voice, and stumbled backwards.

   Through my terror and pain I caught sight of a vat of gravy. In one frantic jerk I overturned it and bathed my costumed attacker in boiling liquid. He screamed. Steam spewed into the air and he dropped his hold on the knife. I reeled backwards, slid on the grass, and bolted for the safety of the labyrinth of hedges.

   In the darkness I groped my shoulder. Had I been able to see my own injury I am sure I would have fainted. I could feel the sickly warmth of blood creeping down my chest, and the sleek silver blade jutting from my flesh. I grasped the handle. My heart thundered at a violent, frantic pitch, peaking as I gave one hideous pull and ripped the blade from my body. I screamed. I choked. My knees struck the ground and all was velvety black for a long, blissful moment. And then the smell of burnt flesh and gravy met me and roused me to continue on. One hand pressed firmly to the wound in my shoulder I staggered down the corridor and slipped further into the heart of the maze.

   The time passed in agony. Hours, or minutes, crept by as ghosts. I neither noticed them nor cared to. I felt like a rat in an experiment. Each time I turned a corner I cringed to think I might find yet another of the Devil’s tests. From a distance removed, I heard myself murmuring to God in the shadows of death. I heard myself confess things I do not remember doing or saying. When I ran out of confessions the silence filled my mind and allowed sinister thoughts to reproduce.

   I thought of Emily. Oh, my beloved Emily…three months pregnant with our first child…oh, God, Emily. The cross at my neck began to grow heavier. It hung like lead at my throat, dragging me down, suffocating me. I clawed it from my body. I felt then that I had failed God. No, that God had failed me. Anger rose like bile in my throat. Anger at the failure of my shepherd to guide me. Anger at my weakness, at my situation, at my own willingness to give in. I wanted to sit in the shadows and cry. I wanted to curl up and beg the Devil to harvest me. I felt like a vegetable. I hurled the necklace into the darkness. As it left me so too did my anger. I could see Emily’s face again. And I wanted to.

   I crawled through the darkness on hands and knees. Bloodied fingers splayed in the grass, I searched for the necklace. When I closed my hand upon the cross the shadows recoiled. The darkness lifted. I left my sloth behind. Iron gates greeted me, and in the light they melted and shone golden and pearl. I understood my ordeal to be done. As I approached, blinded by the light, a voice halted me. I recognized it, though I had never heard it before.

   “Come now from Darkness and follow me. I am the Light of the world. I am the way - the true and living way. Follow me, and you will not walk in Darkness but will have the Light of life. I am the resurrection and the life. Pass through my gates and leave at them your sins and sorrows. You shall not want here, nor shall your soul be further tested. Rest and be at peace. You are home…”

   And I shouldered the slabs of humility and passed beyond the gates into the Light of God.