I flagellate on Tuesdays and Fridays.
The schedule is important.
The schedule is the load-bearing structure that keeps the rest of the building standing. The schedule does not hide things, unlike the walls and roof, which are built to conceal a man doing things inside.
It’s about discipline.
The flagellation is about discipline.
The prayers, matins, lauds, prime, terce, sext, none, vespers, compline, the canonical hours, are about discipline.
The fasting on Wednesdays, the cold water, the hair shirt I wore for the first three years before the skin beneath it became a permanent landscape of welts that no longer served the purpose of reminding me of my flesh, all of it is discipline.
I am a disciplined man.
A priest who has served this parish for fourteen years, who hears confessions, administers the sacraments, visits the sick, buries the dead, and delivers sermons that the village has described as righteous.
Sermons that the blacksmith’s wife describes as terrifying in a way that made me feel clean.
Terrifying.
Clean.
I flagellate on Tuesdays and Fridays, and the blood runs down my back in channels created from the welts and scars that form a topography mapping fourteen years of discipline.
Eleven before, three since.
Three since the thing in the cellar.
The first sin was the choice to I carry her home.
Many sins that theology would identify followed, ordered by severity: harboring a creature of unknown origin, failure to report to ecclesiastical authority, and then, the most transgressive, carnal congress with a non-human entity.
But the first sin was carrying her home.
The carrying was the sin; it was the choice. Everything after was a consequence.
I walked into the forest, beyond the parish and the village to seek divine guidance within the green and the quiet. To look within the forest and speak with God within the cold November nature.
Instead, I knelt in the leaves and put my arms beneath a creature whose blood was warm on his robe and whose weight was less than expected.
She weighs approximately seven stone.
The bone structure suggests avian or cervid adaptation.
The reduced mass may facilitate sustained flight, though no wing structures were apparent.
I spoke of her in clinical observation. She was a creature that I had never seen before whose blood soaked through my shirt, her head against my shoulder and her antlers grazing my jaw with each step, the tines tracing a line from my ear to my chin.
It was the first place she touched, unconsciously, the geometry of her skull drawing itself across my face as I carried her home.
She was unconscious.
Or she was pretending.
Demons dissemble.
Demons counterfeit vulnerability.
Demons may present an appearance of injury as a stratagem to exploit the faithful’s compassion.
The blood was warm against my chest.
I walked faster.
The cellar held potatoes, turnips, and three barrels of the parish’s communion wine. It held the smell of earth and fermentation, mingling with the damp that creeps into underground stone.
No one ever intended it for a wounded creature of unknown origin.
I laid her on the on the bare stone floor, noting the contrast of the warm brown skin against the grey flags. Her spots were visible in the candlelight.
The wound needed tending.
Before I was a priest, I was a farmer’s son. I know wounds; the gash across the ewe’s flank from the wire fence, the puncture in the horse’s hoof, the torn skin of a body that has encountered something sharp and is now under the care of the man who carried her out of the woods.
I cleaned the wound with water and the communion wine, the only wine available.
I recorded the theological parallel of cleaning a demon’s wound with consecrated wine in my ledger, and I will avoid re-examining it here since the re-examination creates a pit with no bottom.
The wound was across her ribs. The left side. To clean it, I needed to…
I needed to examine her body.
She was naked in the leaves when I found her and carried her. A fact that I now had to confront and contend with. I believe I wrote that ‘I recovered the unclothed creature, which is consistent with…’
I never completed that sentence.
I had not seen a woman’s body.
Not in fourteen years of priesthood.
Not as the farmer’s son during my youth, filled with awkwardness and desire, my appetite consuming everything but rarely satisfied.
I had seen woodcuts and the anatomical illustrations in the medical texts kept in monastery library for educational purposes.
I had seen the marble saints in the cathedral’s side chapels, the curves and planes of the female form rendered in stone to direct the viewer’s attention upward, toward heaven, away from the body itself.
Her body directed attention towards it.
Towards the skin and spots, white on brown, the dappled pattern distributed across her ribs, her belly, the curve of her hip, the pattern dense in some places and sparse in others, the distribution facilitating the camouflage of a creature that was invisible in a specific landscape.
This root cellar was not the landscape, and she was not invisible.
I was looking at her body.
I was looking at her body with consecrated wine on my fingers and a wound under my hand. The tallow candle threw shadows that made the spots move; the light’s inconstancy animating the pattern shifting on her skin the way light shifts on a forest floor.
The shifting was alive.
I cleaned the wound. I wrapped it with linen torn from my own bloodied shirt. My hands touched her ribs, and the ribs moved.
I touched that naked body of a creature who was breathing, the unconscious (or dissembling) body expanding and contracting in the rhythm of a thing that was alive.
Conducting a standard wound assessment consistent with pastoral veterinary care.
My hands were shaking.
I wrapped my cloak around her.
My priest’s cloak, made of heavy wool and lined with sheepskin, was necessary because of the cold cellar and the exposed skin of the subject.
My duty required maintaining the specimen’s core temperature to avert hypothermia during its recovery.
I will keep this creature warm.
I climbed the stairs. I locked the door with the rusted lock that I will replace with fresh iron. I sat in the study. I opened the Summa. I turned to the section on demons.
I read nothing.
The words were in Latin, and I have read Latin since I was twelve.
The words were incomprehensible because my hands were shaking and my shirt was bloody and the blood was not mine and the blood was warm and the warmth was on my skin and my skin was remembering the ribs that moved under my hands.
I flagellated that night.
A Tuesday.
The schedule held.
The blood ran down my back in the channels I had carved.
You are a priest. The thing in the cellar is a thing. You will study it, classify it, and contain it. The containing is the discipline. The discipline is the building. The building will stand.
The building stood.
For approximately six hours.
On the second morning, she woke up.
I heard a body moving on stone. The scrape of the antlers against the wall as she raised her head.
She is awake; she is moving; she is alive.
I descended the stairs.
I had studied the Summa’s chapter on interrogating infernal beings to prepare.
The creature’s speech would reveal its true nature if it could speak.
She was standing.
Not crouching.
Not cowering.
She was standing upright, bipedal, the full height of her visible for the first time. She was taller than I had estimated, five feet and perhaps eight inches, the antlers adding another foot, the total height exceeding six and a half feet. The cellar’s ceiling is seven feet. The tine-tips grazed the beams.
She was still naked.
The cloak I had on the floor behind her was no longer needed since her metabolism had warmed her back up. The fever-heat of the healing wound radiated from her body in a shimmer that was visible in the cellar’s cold air, like a breath made manifest in winter.
She looked at me.
Her eyes were rubies; the facets caught the tallow candle’s light (My discipline would have extinguished the flame, but the discipline had not expected any of this) and the crystalline structure refracted the light into the spectrum of red that began, in this moment, to disassemble the building.
She looked at me and her ears moved from the flatness of fear to a rotation of thirty degrees forward. The furred tips lifted from the skull, the ears orienting towards in assessment.
The creature is determining the threat posed by the approaching entity.
The shift from fear suggests cognitive processing beyond simple stimulus-response.
The ears stayed forward; she was not afraid of me.
Her ruby eyes were locked onto mine.
The body, its completely bare and peculiar structure, became at ease.
Not the collapse of a creature that has surrendered.
The relaxation of an animal that sees a non-threat and provisions just enough tension in the thighs and shoulders to run.
She made a sound.
A short exhalation through the nose, almost a snort, the sound a deer makes when it has determined that something is not a predator.
And then she approached.
Two steps.
Three.
The cellar is small, ten feet by twelve. She approached me with a careful gait and then stopped at a distance of approximately eighteen inches.
She communicated her choice: This close. No closer. I will decide.
She sniffed at me.
Her nose appears human, yet its wider nostrils and flatter bridge suggest an unseen expansion of its olfactory capabilities.
She sniffed me with the thoroughness of a creature for whom smell is a language, the nose moving across my body’s airspace the way a reader’s eyes move across a text.
A tilt of the head.
The fractional tilt.
The processing.
Then she licked my hand.
This was the first time I felt the long tongue. My hand that touched her, that cleaned her wound, was hanging at my side.
She licked it.
One stroke from the knuckle of the index finger to the tip of the thumb. The tongue wrapping the contour of my hand the way the tongue would later wrap the contour of…
The creature’s tongue use matches social grooming seen in primates and canids.
The behavior suggests a bonding mechanism.
The tongue was warm. The tongue was wet. The tongue was soft, the pad of the tongue had the surface of velvet, and the velvet was on my skin…
My cock stirred.
I am writing this because the record is the only penance I have left.
My cock stirred, not to full erection, not to the straining urgency but the first movement, the initial displacement of blood reacted to a tongue on a hand, in a cellar, from a creature I had found in the leaves.
The stirring was the third sin.
The carrying was, I will take.
The covering was I will keep warm.
The stirring was I want.
My hand recoiled violently, like a reflex from intense heat.
I startled her, the ears flattened, the body dropped into a crouch, the spring released, and the creature retreated to the far wall so fast I couldn’t track it.
The creature was against the wall; the antlers braced against the stone, the ruby eyes wide, the non-threat reclassification suddenly in question.
I frightened her.
I had frightened her because she touched me and my body responded and the response was want and the want frightened me and the fear expressed itself as violence and the violence expressed itself as withdrawal and the withdrawal frightened her and the circle was…
The circle was already turning.
I climbed the stairs. I locked the door.
I flagellated until the blood ran past the channels and pooled in the waistband.
The stirring did not stop.
