Rabid (10 page)

Blood rushed in him, streaming into his dick and weighing it down until the mass rose inside his pants. Her skin was so cold. It would be like screwing an ice sculpture caught fire.

She shook a robe away from its hanger, stepped away, and flipped it around her. “Don’t want those mu shus to get cold,” she said.

“They’ll keep.” He spun her around and kissed her hard. It would be an easy thing to part that robe and her legs and crush her between his dick and the wall.

She would scream, maybe bite.

When he broke away for air, Leila said, “Yeah, the mu shus will keep.”

She grabbed one of his wrists, spun him, and the floor rushed up at him.

He caught himself on his hands and knees. Weight on his back forced him to the ground. His arm wrenched behind his back. She bit him lightly on the ear.

His shoulder hurt but didn’t tear, as long as he didn’t move. “Careful, I’m not young.”

“You should be careful what you start. Sit up.” Her voice was raspy in his ear. She didn’t let go of his arm, still twisted behind him. Her weight left his back. Conroy sat back on his heels, kneeling. She said, “Unbutton your shirt.”

He unbuttoned his shirt with his free hand. Leila might rip it off if he didn’t, and explaining missing buttons might be difficult.

Leila’s grip on his arm loosened and he tried to get away so he could twist her hands behind her, but she pressed his fist into his shoulder blades. His back bowed. She yanked his shirt down over his shoulders to his elbows so he couldn’t move his arms and tied it into makeshift bonds. His dick was so stiff it ached.

Her hands slid in his waistband and he sucked in his belly to reduce the flab. She opened his pants.

He said, “This isn’t what I was thinking.”

“You were thinking about it rough.”

“Yeah,” he admitted. She stepped back from him and Conroy stumbled forward. His hands were still knotted in his shirt. He couldn’t catch himself. His arms pulled him backward, and he steadied. The shirt loosened, and one arm was free. He turned on his knees.

She pushed him backward. Still off balance from pitching forward and shuffling on his knees, he tipped, and she jumped on him.

He struggled but she was strong, so he fell back. One hand was still wrapped in his shirt, and she grabbed that one and his bare hand and forced them above his head. She held them there with one hand and pushed his underwear down. Elastic cupped his balls.

The air polymerized into ice.

She grappled in her robe pocket and found a foil envelope, tore the packet, and slapped the purple, corrugated condom on his dick.

She pressed herself onto him, around him, and he bucked as she fucked him. The hardwood floor bruised his vertebrae. Above him, she was a long, pale arc of flesh from his dick to his hands, holding him down, pressing at both ends, soaring between. When he had grabbed her, he thought he could have her like that, but Leila turned it around on him again. She was a ball of twisted detonator cord, and he never knew which cut wire was going to blast her apart.

Idiot priest. Why did Conroy do this?

Because the whole rest of his life, he craved this.

~~~~~

Dante had finished cleaning the bookshelves when a knock rattled his door. He squatted, never simple in an ankle-length cassock but he was so accustomed to wearing it that only a Roman-collared shirt felt undressed, and swept together obscene magazines and stuffed them in a box. “Yes?”

Mrs. Sloan came in. She clutched a scrap of paper in her hand. “You might start with these kids.”

Dante took the list. Four of them, he already had contacted. Three new names, though.

If Dante ever saw that bastard Nicolai, if Dante was ever within reach of his haggard, lizard throat—but he stopped. Wrath was one of the seven deadly sins. God’s justice was more important than Dante’s own sense of outrage. He rubbed his eyes, which throbbed and ached all the time.

Mrs. Sloan was beside him, and her hand fluttered near his arm. “You’ve been cleaning the library,” she said.

“It was filthy.”

“The service should clean in here.” She looked at the shelves and boxes.

His temple pounded. “Nicolai told them not to.”

“Why would he—?” 

“I have found things.” He shouldn’t tell her. “Books, pictures, videotapes, computer disks.” Any information he told her might infiltrate the parish’s common knowledge.

Nicolai had owned a digital video camera. Dante watched the video clips to identify the children, if you can call it “watching” to view a monitor with your head turned almost away, your hand clasped over your mouth the whole time, glancing back only when absolutely necessary to identify another child when a pause in the sound signaled a new clip.

In one video clip, Nicolai stood and chanted the Eucharistic prayer while a dark-haired, black-eyed boy not older than twelve fellated him. The priest’s chanting kept time with the rhythm of his balls hitting the boy’s sharp chin. The sacrilegious suggestion that Nicolai was transubstantiating his dick into the body of God was nearly as sickening as the abuse, but nothing on Earth was as sickening as the sexual abuse of a child.

Afterward, the boy stood, but no expression rippled on his face. Not fear, not horror, not revulsion. The constant trauma had numbed him.

Dante said, “I cannot fathom. I cannot bear to think.”

Horror widened her caramel eyes. She sat down in her chair as if her knees had given out. “There were things in the library, in the
church
?”

Dante was so weak that he had inflicted his pain and rage on this woman. He covered his face. His hands smelled like ink and dust.

In another video, Nicolai and a different boy had masturbated each other, lying on the floor on a green sleeping bag. Afterward, the boy made another appointment with Nicolai for the next week, and Nicolai noted it on his desk calendar. Dante found the sleeping bag stuffed behind the desk, photographed it, notated it in his evidence log, stuffed it into a trash bag, and then scrubbed his hands hard with institutional, gritty soap.

“Nicolai was very—”
evil, demented, psychopathic
, “efficient.”

She demanded, “Why did you send him to Italy? The bishops said that there would be tribunals and that they wouldn’t transfer child molesters around anymore.”

Dante leaned back. He shouldn’t have said anything, but it was a relief to tell her. He wanted to tell her everything, but he would not breach his confidentiality with the children, and he could not discuss the monasteries in the Italian Alps.

It was too much of a relief to talk to her. He was isolated here in the benighted New World and separated from the Jesuit community and the Vatican and his fellow priests and even his sister and her family.

He said, “There are no tribunals. I am here to find the truth, and to counsel the children.”

She frowned. “But you’re not a lawyer. You’re a psychiatrist.”

Dante had rationalized this on the plane while trying to sleep, and at night while trying to sleep. “In the 1800s, the coroner was not a doctor but a lawyer, who looked for
legal
evidence of murder.” It was also a relief to not discuss Nicolai and the abused children. “Now, forensic scientists examine dead bodies to determine if the person was murdered. In our tribunals, doctors look for mental illness, and priests look for evil. Perhaps a
magistrate
is a better comparison, an inquiring judge.”

Her brows were still bowed down, troubled. “And they’re just transferred?”

“No. They stay in Italia. They repent. They commend their souls to God.”

At this, she shook off her dismay. “Some sins are so grievous that they can’t be forgiven.” Her words were measured. “I think they’re going to Hell, a real Hell, forever.”

“Perhaps so.” Dante pulled his black hair back from his eyes again. His head still ached. “I hope so. I cannot sleep, with knowing what he has done. I cannot eat, I am so sick with knowing it.”

Perhaps prompted, Mrs. Sloan smoothed her own hair back to where it was caught in a twist. She was leaning forward, hands open, brows lifted, and a smile opened her lips. “Father, how about a home-cooked meal tonight?”

“I—”
should scrub the library clean, should mail these boxes of offal to Roma, should call parents, should read about the pathology of child molesters, should observe the rest of those horrifying computer CDs and figure out who that little girl is, should pray for my own soul that rages in the midst of such horror,
“will be finished counseling at six, Mrs. Sloan.”

Mrs. Sloan smiled. “Call me Bev. Supper at seven, then.” She left.

Dante stood, brushed off his cassock, and glanced in his date book: Joseph Helbrun and his parents at four o’clock, then another child and her parents, then Vespers, his reward for surviving that long, at six o’clock.

Dante had volunteered for this job, though he hated it. He had shut his lab, sublet his house to a visiting professor, and given over his exorcist job within the Vatican to others. Hunting pedophiles was more important than his home, his work, friends, family, everything. Pedophiles hiding within the priesthood must be hunted down and stopped, by whatever means he could command.

Dante, a man who battled demons and won, would destroy them all.

~~~~~

Joseph sat in a pew outside the library and kicked the pew in front of him. Stupid word: pew. Pee-ew.

Christine’s mom Mrs. Sloan left the library. Father Dante was still in there. Christine’s mother had probably been doing dirty things with Father Dante in there.

Father Dante opened the door and saw Joseph waiting, swinging his legs, tapping on a drum set of hymnals, being noisy, being bad. Father Dante was wearing a black dress like a woman, which hid his legs and his crotch and his bulge and his dick and his balls. A tremor, something between hate and fear, wracked him at the sight of a man in a Roman collar looking out of the library, waiting for him.

Joseph started putting away the hymnals.

Father Dante called over to him, “Is your mother here yet?”

Joseph looked around, even though he knew he was all alone. “No.”

Father pointed past his own shoulder, back into the library. “I have just a few things to do. Could you look at your homework out here for a few minutes, until she is here?”

Joseph, still holding a heavy hymnal, nodded.

Father disappeared back inside the library.

It was a trick. The priest was trying to trick him into not being afraid, and then the priest would show him dirty movies and do dirty things.

And it would be all Joseph’s fault. Father Nicolai had made Joseph swear on the Bible that he would never tell anyone about how he made Father Nicolai sin. 

It was a terrible thing to make a priest sin. He was going to Hell because he could never confess it.

~~~~~

Leila’s bare legs slithered under the silk of her robe, and she pinched a morsel of chicken with chopsticks.

Conroy sat across the Biedermeyer table from her, shirtless.

Her body was comfortably ragged from fucking him, but her legs were still unsteady because Conroy had grabbed her and she had fought him. No one grabbed Leila and fucked her.