Samuel focused his thoughts on his brother. He wondered if this was how his brother lived. This bizarre nocturnal existence of night clubs, alcohol, drugs, and sex. Everyone around him carried a quiet desperation, an insatiable longing—all appetite and lust—so powerful that it pained even him. Suddenly, something moved in his spirit, a whispered alarm that warned him that he was in danger. A scream was forming at the base of his throat even before he started to turn, and two pairs of hands grabbed him from behind and pulled him into a narrow alley between two warehouse buildings.
“What are you doing?” Samuel cried out.
Two men dressed in expensive silk shirts and with hair perfectly coiffed, stinking of hair spray and expensive colognes, seized him and dragged him further into the sunless gloom of the alleyway. Despite their frail, effeminate appearance, he struggled in vain within their tremendous grip. A wave of nausea, like an attack of dizziness, hit him. His mind reeled. Their faces began to warp, melting and reshaping, running like wax, layers of reality peeled back for his inspection; the pretty feminine beauty masked an ugliness that rattled the young priest. He had seen their faces before in the old non-canonical texts he used to read in the church library back when he was first ordained—the ones that described demons and other fallen creatures. Truth be told, part of him considered them a myth, nothing more than fairy tales to terrify children.
Samuel had consulted with deliverance ministries, huddled old men telling what amounted to spiritual ghost stories in hushed voices, as if sharing secrets kept even from themselves, because to give voice to them too loudly would be like dragging a nightmare into waking reality.
“Help! Somebody help me! They’re trying to kill me!” Samuel struggled to break free from the two hell-spawned GQ models. He knew it had to have something to do with Samson. What the hell have you gotten yourself into, my brother?
“Scream all you want, they can’t hear you. They won’t hear you. The sheep have to maintain their illusions.”
Samuel had known why those old men whispered. He knew it was for the same reason he pushed those stories to the back of his mind. There came a point where faith shouldn’t confront, no, be confirmed by, reality. There needed to be a buffer between the spiritual and the physical. He needed the platitudes of “God moves in mysterious ways” and “life is full of mystery” to explain the reality he was comfortable with. He needed the protecting shade of mystery from the reality of demons, of spiritual forces.
He wondered what he must look like to the passers-by, a black priest fighting two metrosexual male fashion models. They couldn’t see the evil and sinful corruption in his two attackers or else their terror would have mirrored his.
“You can’t save him. He’s ours!”
“What do you want with my brother?”
“He has something that belongs to us.”
“What? I’ll pay it back for him!”
“Yes. You’ll pay. And so will he.”
Their fingers squeezed the soft meat of his throat. Samuel saw the delight in their eyes at his slow torture, enjoying the dance of fear in his eyes. The crushing pressure would soon rob him of his voice. The final darkness called to him, but before he gave into its embrace a whisper nudged the desperate bid of an exorcism.
“I bind you in the name of Jesus Christ.”
The creatures paused as if contemplating a joke they didn’t quite get. In every book he’d read, for a true exorcism he had to speak to the possessed person directly. But he didn’t know anything about the two strangers. No ground had been prepared nor was he sure he could depend on any formulas, even for such obviously minor demons. He wasn’t even sure these two were possessed. They might have just been demons disguised as humans. He wasn’t sure what to do and his options were running out. If he didn’t figure something out quick he’d be in Jesus’ loving arms sooner than he ever imagined. In the moments his prayer command bought him, he wondered “What would Jesus do?”
Samuel kicked one of his attackers in the balls.
The creature, all too flesh and blood, released him. Samuel kicked his companion as well. They both curled up into fetal positions, moaning and cursing. Samuel had a moment to wonder if he might be able to exorcise them both with a few more well-placed kicks. Instead, he ran. Abandoned on the sidewalk, spat back into what passed for reality, Samuel wandered through the concrete intestines of the city. The wind sighed a mournful dirge to an intermittent rain, like a woman fighting back her tears. The buildings loomed and canted, reflecting the hypocrisy around them in the metallic sheen of their dark windows. The night lights burned bright, blurring, like the exaggerated makeup of a whore. Women with no modesty offered up their bodies. Teens staggered about, mollified by drugs. The homeless begged for change, chased away from the club doors. Samuel staggered in an out of focus haze, cold biting deep into his heart.
On the verge of collapsing, a renewed vigor washed over him when he spied the dull lights of a sign.
Requiem.
Dropping Samson’s name to the bouncers, Samuel entered with ease though he felt every bit the alien. This wasn’t his world: the drugs, the music, the dancing, the awkwardness of approaching the dance floor. The rest of the night club remained shrouded in darkness, the neon and black light giving the patrons the appearance of glow-in-the-dark zombies. Locked in masks of drugs and tortured beauty, passing off sex as need or a bartered commodity, the clubbers were sad clowns on preening display for one another. They smelled of pot, sweat, and melancholy desperation. A woman with a spider web tattooed on her face ran up and kissed him.
A maroon light flickered and swathed the DJ in flashing crimson shadows as he spun records that blurred into industrial white noise. The effect disoriented Samuel as he lost his equilibrium in a sudden vertigo of sensory overload.
The cloying incense barely covered the body odor. There was an allure to the scene, though his spirit recoiled at the idea. All the designer clothes and high fashion makeup, the couples openly groping each other as they tottered on the edge of the stage, visibly intoxicated. Amidst the madness, a woman wearing a wedding dress with a black sweater and black gloves danced toward him, her arms out in a helicopter twirl. She called to him with a siren’s seductive voice.
“I am entropy, the ending chaos that consumes all.”
It sounded like a line from a Gothic novel he ought to remember but couldn’t, something with angst-ridden vampires contemplating their existence. She grasped his head between her hands, pulling it close to her. Her hot breath steamed across his neck, her tongue caressed him beneath his ear, before tracing a circle into his neck. He felt his manhood swell. She kissed him on the lips before dismissing him.
The crowd thickened, but through it Samuel spied his brother talking to a woman at the rear of the club. Dancers flailed their arms like burning windmills. Samuel pushed his way through the throng, not taking his eyes from the two of them. Two somnambulant wanderers lost in a dream of reality, the reality that began on the other side of the club’s doors.
“Samson!” he called out.
That was when the screams started.
One moment, Samson was taking her right there in the middle of the crowd, her face contorted in approaching ecstasy. The next, Samson’s body rippled as if a tidal wave rushed over his flesh. Hunching over, his body swelled, his muscles engorged; perhaps he even grew taller. The woman’s bliss interrupted, fractured into a rictus of frozen terror and suddenly splayed apart as if split by some unseen scythe. Then Samuel saw the blade, gripped by his brother, blood raining down from a knife in a long liquid red film. It was the tanto knife from the sword rack on Samson’s mantle, the one that sat next to the picture of the two of them.