Father Pietro stepped hurriedly through the evening gloom. Throughout the day he had trudged through his ministerial duties with a somber mien, nodding and grunting perfunctorily through confession after confession, barely registering the contrite voices beyond the screen. His mind admittedly had been elsewhere of late.

Pietro's daughter Lina had fallen ill over the past week, and none of the town's physicians summoned to her aid had been able to divine the cause of her sickness. She had barely gotten out of bed in days, and her few brief moments of wakefulness had been less than lucid. Her behavior was becoming increasingly bizarre, as if the product of a mind demented by advanced age. Yesterday morning he had entered her room bringing her morning meal, and had been delighted to find her awake and seated by her bedroom window. He had approached her quietly, setting the plate gently down on her bed, and placed his hand tenderly on her shoulder. To his shock, Lina recoiled sharply, spinning around to regard him with haunted eyes lacking any hint of recognition. It had taken several minutes of firm restraint and reassurance before the screaming finally subsided - before she could finally recall who he was. Of course, the event had left him cold with dread. He was unsure which development he found more terrifying - that his eldest daughter might be dying amidst the flower of her youth, or that she might be gripped firmly by madness should death be somehow cheated of its prize.

He hated that he had not remained at her side throughout the day. That had been his intention, but his younger daughter Bianca had insisted that he return to his parish to find ways to occupy his mind. Ever wise and prudent, she reminded him that Lina wasn't the only member of his spiritual family that needed his support and guidance. So Father Pietro dutifully fulfilled his charge, spending the majority of the afternoon in the confessional booth, listening to and dispensing advice to his parishioners on their infidelities, prevarications, and overall iniquities. He apologetically recused himself from delivering the evening mass, chastising himself silently for elevating his personal concerns over his ecclesiastical obligations. Nonetheless, he slipped quietly out of the church and hastened into the darkening street.

Father Pietro arrived at his residence to find the entire edifice ensconced in darkness, as if no one were home. He was always accustomed to finding a lighted lamp in the foyer, which his daughters diligently lit each evening to welcome his return. Tonight however, he stepped through his front door into uninterrupted shadow. He placed his hand on the blown glass cover of the lamp to find it completely cool, though full of oil. He called out Bianca's name. No response. Reaching into the foyer bureau, he produced a box of matches, igniting one to light the lamp. "Bianca!" he called again, to be met only by the rattling of the night breeze against the window panes. Pietro felt a tingle of apprehension dance gingerly up his spine. His daughter Bianca was a mature, responsible girl - never one to abandon her duties, especially where family was concerned. As he stepped through the living room and into the kitchen he found the place clean and unperturbed, but vacant. The slightly acrid scent of burnt gravy issued from a pot which was boiling over on the wood stove. He dipped a bowl in a tub of water kept by the sink and doused the over-worked flame. Pietro's apprehension bloomed into an icy dread, a sensation he was becoming increasingly accustomed to.

He then heard a peculiar sound: a harsh scraping noise, as if something in the upstairs bedroom was scratching against the wooden floorboard. He made to call out to his daughter again, and then stopped himself, suddenly concerned that an intruder might be lurking on the premises. Retrieving a carving knife from the kitchen drawer, he steeled his nerve and prepared to confront the interloper who had brought peril into his home. Stepping cautiously up the narrow wooden stairway, he winced as each of the aging planks announced his ascension in crescendo. There would be no element of surprise here, Father Pietro realized. As he arrived at the upstairs landing, he heard that scraping noise again, this time clearly coming from behind the closed door to the bedroom where Lina lay infirm. As a devoutly religious man from a young age, he had never been accustomed to violence, and he realized that his lifelong pacifism was about to be sorely tested against an intruder who clearly wished his family harm. Holding the lamp before him like a talisman against evil, he said a quick prayer to gather his courage. Father Pietro then drew a deep, heavy breath and burst through the bedroom door.

The father was hit by a blast of freezing cold air as he pushed into the room. The bedroom was entirely dark, the ambient light of the moonlit sky completely obscured by the heavy curtains which were drawn against the closed window. The inexplicable chill bit at his skin, in sharp contrast to the moderate coolness of the clear spring evening outside. He cast the lamplight about the large room, expecting a sudden assault from the darkness. Yet no assault came, save for his own rapid pulse assailing his eardrums. He peered at the far side of the room, where the form of his daughter lay prone beneath the covers. He rushed over to her bed, pulling down the covers to peer into the girl's face. The gentle mist the formed as her breath rapidly condensed in the frigid air revealed the girl's steady, if labored, breathing. "She lives!" his heart almost chirped, filling him with a buoyant warmth that did much to thwart the fear that clutched at his breast. But what of Bianca?

He suddenly heard the sound of something sharp scraping against the floor behind him, as if a pitchfork were being dragged across a wooden surface. He turned around with a start, waving the lamp before him wildly. He barely made out the motion of a large shadowy form before a wayward step caused him to trip over a soft, heavy object which had been splayed out behind him. In his fall, the lamp was loosed from his hand and skittered across the floor. To his alarm the knife also escaped his unsteady grasp, tumbling into the flickering darkness.

"Bianca..." was all he could manage as his gaze fell upon the limp tumble of his daughter's wavy brown hair. She lay in an unmoving heap where she had apparently collapsed near Lina's bed. The light of the lamp wavered and began to flicker erratically as if caught in a swift gale, although no wind blew into the room. Fortunately the glass cover had held through the impact, averting a potentially catastrophic conflagration. Again, the heavy scraping sound dragged closer, apparently caused by something which lurked just outside the field of the lamp's illumination. Realizing that certain peril now loomed petrifyingly close, he resolutely gathered his legs beneath him and sprang over his daughter's body to seize the lamp, which now seemed moments away from extinction. His left hand had gripped the wrought-iron handle when he was suddenly stopped cold, paralyzed with terror.

The appendage resembled nothing he had ever seen on a man or beast. It was slender and spindly, and tipped with long serrated talons that clicked intermittently against the scored floorboards. Its slick skin was the color of charcoal and didn't seem to reflect the light as reject it. The base of that array of splayed blades sprouted upwards into what appeared to be a misshapen ankle, above which swept a leg of seemingly impossible length. Pietro peered fearfully upward into the flickering darkness where he hoped to find a human face, to draw some sense from the madness that tore at the edges of his mind. Suddenly, an ellipse the color of gleaming bone lunged out of the shadows to meet his upturned gaze. It was completely featureless, other than the craggy ridges which ran vertically along its surface like wrinkles pressed into ancient leather. For a moment the two beings regarded one another, unmoving, the human's terror-stricken visage locked upon the other's face-which-was-not-a-face. Somehow Pietro could feel the creature's intense hunger crashing against the shore of his mind in waves.

A torrent of heat cascaded down his legs as his bladder expended itself, as if to aid a prospective escape by ridding the body of excess weight. The warmth drenching his trousers roused the priest from his stupor. His eyes immediately locked onto a long bladed barb that extended from a spiny rope of black muscle, slowly undulating towards his face from the shadow. Pietro then screamed, and the leathery head recoiled slightly. His flailing mind, still unable to fully assemble a coherent thought, instead reacted out of habit born from of decades of parochial service. His right hand clutched unthinkingly at the simple silver cross that dangled around his neck, a gift from his late wife. Still screaming, he extended the cross directly towards the bone-white "face," fully expecting his arm to disappear in a splatter of gore. The silver cross glinted in the failing lamplight; a lonely beacon shining defiantly against the encroaching darkness.

It was the creature's turn to scream. Not audibly, of course, since the creature had no mouth to speak of. This scream exploded like a nova inside Pietro's head, filling his vision with blood and almost seeming to erupt outward from his eardrums. His sanity fled then, leaving what remained of his beleaguered mind to fend for itself with the only weapon it could muster - his faith. Blood streaming from his ears and nose, he began to recite biblical verse at the top of his lungs - his shrill, manic shriek resembling less the catechism of a priest than the ravings of a madman. As the creature retreated, Pietro, now standing and yelling defiantly, began to advance towards it, whose psychic screeches were becoming increasingly frantic. Slowly, he backed the creature into a corner of the room, at the furthest edges of the fading lamplight. The insufficiency of the illumination was beyond Pietro's notice- one of his eyes had already burst from the force of the creature's mental assault; the other could barely open and was rapidly welling with blood. Still, the priest advanced unrelentingly towards his foe, filled to overflowing with the pure righteousness of his Lord, and utter contempt for His enemies.

The creature seemed to crawl halfway up the wall and, letting out a final, defeated screech, disappeared inexplicably into the total darkness of Pietro's shadow. Pietro then collapsed to his knees in relief, bloody tears of joy streaming from his remaining eye. He held the silver cross to his lips and kissed it gratefully, casting praise skyward in deep thankfulness. He then crawled weakly over to his daughter Bianca, who still lay where he had fallen over her body. Pietro brushed the hair away from her motionless face and, placing the silver cross by his side, brought his lips to her cheek. "It's ok my dear," he whispered, weeping. "We have been delivered. God has delivered us..."

In his virtually blind state, he did not notice when the lamp flickered its last and went out. In his deafness, he did not hear the rustle of movement as a large shadowy body heaved out of the now total darkness behind him. But he did feel the frozen barb when it pierced his spine, severing it. As he collapsed onto the ground, bleeding out into the frigid darkness, the last image to haunt his conscious mind was of a pale, leathery ellipse that hovered inches above his face, preparing to take its first sips from Pietro's ebbing soul. Although it lacked any facial features by which to project emotion, its expression, to him, was as clear as day.

It was grinning.


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